Chapter XXXI: Grain

This is "Idaho's" story. He told it to me when I met him coming home early this summer. We were crossing in a worthy old transatlantic which has since gone to the bottom, and Idaho, at his ease in the deserted smoking room, unfolded the adventure. "Idaho, U.S.N.," we called him that aboard, is a very real personage. I think he told me that he was eighteen years old, medium height, solidly built, wholesome looking. The leading characteristic of the young, open countenance is intelligence, an intelligence that has grown of itself behind those clear grey eyes, not a power that has grown from premature contact with the world. Until he joined the Navy, I imagine that Idaho knew little of the world beyond his own magnificent West. I consider him very well educated; he declares that preferring life on his father's ranch to knowledge, he cut high school after the second year. He is a great reader, and likes good, stirring poetry. He is an idealist, and stands by his ideals with a fervour which only youth possesses. And I ought to add that Idaho, in the words of one of his friends, is "one first-class signalman." This is Idaho's story, pieced together from his own recital, and from a handful of his letters.

The crowd aboard the naval tug was so festive that morning, and there was such a lot of scuffling, punching, imitation boxing and jollying generally that Idaho did not see the vessel to which he had been assigned till the tug was close alongside. Then, hearing his name called out, the lad caught up his baggage, and walked on into the open side of a vast, disreputable tramp. The lad later learned that she had been brought from somewhere in the China Sea. The _Sebastopol_, Heaven knows where she originally got the name, was a ship that had served her term in the west, had grown old and out of date, and then been purchased by some Oriental firm. Out there, she had carried on, always seaworthy in an old-fashioned way, always excessively dirty, always a day over due. When the submarine had made ships worth their weight in silver, the _Sebastopol_ must have been almost on the point of giving up the ghost. Presently, the war brought the old ship back to England again. Her return to an English harbour must have resembled the return of a disreputable relative to an anxious family. And in England, in some tremendously busy shipyard, they had patched her up, added a modern electrical equipment and even gone to the length of new boilers. But her engines they had merely tuned up, and as for her ancient hull, that they had dedicated to the mercy of the gods of the sea.

Once aboard, and assigned to his station and watches, the lad had leisure to look over his companions. The _Sebastopol_ carried a crew from Liverpool, and was officered by three Englishmen and a little Welsh third mate. The Captain, a first mate of many years' experience, to whom the war had given the chance of a ship, was in the forties; tall and with a thin, stern mouth under a heavy brown moustache; the first mate was a mere youngster: the second, a middle-aged volunteer, the third, an undersized, excitable Celt with grey eyes and coal black hair touched with snow white above the ears. The Welshman took a liking for Idaho; used to question him in regard to the West, being especially keen to know about "opportunities there after the war." He had a brother in Wales whom he thought might share in a farming venture. Of the captain the lad saw very little; and the first mate was somewhat on his dignity. Practically every man of the crew had been torpedoed at least once, many had been injured, and had scars to exhibit. All had picturesque tales to tell, the gruesomest ones being the favourites. The best narrator was a fireman from London, a man of thirty with a lean chest and grotesquely strong arms; he would sit on the edge of a bunk or a chair and tell of sudden thundering crashes, of the roaring of steam, of bodies lying on the deck over which one tripped as one ran, of water pouring into engine rooms, and of boilers suddenly vomiting masses of white hot coal upon dazed and scalded stokers. It was the melodrama of below the water line. Then for days the narrator would keep silent, troubled by a pain in one of his fragmentary teeth. All the men kept their few belongings tied in a bundle, ready to seize the instant trouble was at hand. The cook complained to Idaho that he had lost a gold watch when the _Lady Esther_ was torpedoed off the coast of France, and advised him paternally to keep his things handy. One of the oilers, a good-natured fellow of twenty-eight or nine, had been a soldier, having been invalided out of the service because of wounds received late in the summer on the Somme. An interesting lot of men for an American boy to be tossed with, particularly for a lad as intelligent and observing as our Idaho. The boy was pleased with his job and worked well. He did not have very much to do. Signalling aboard a convoyed ship, though a frequent business, is not an incessant one. He knew that his work would come at the entrance to the zone. Sometimes he picked up messages intended for others. "_Mt. Ida_, you are out of line," "_Vulcanian_, keep strictly to the prescribed zigzag plan." Now he would see the _Sicilian_ asking for advice; now there would be a kind of telegraphic tiff between two of the vessels of the "Keep further away, hang you" order. Twenty ships running without lights through the ambush of the sea, twenty ships, twenty pledges of life, satisfied hunger ... victory. In other days, one's world at sea was one's ship; a convoy is a kind of solar system of solitary worlds. Hour after hour, the assembled ships straggled across the great loneliness of the sea.

The crew had a grievance. It was not against their officers, but against his majesty's government, against "a bloody lot of top hats." A recent regulation had forbidden sailors to import food into the United Kingdom, and all the dreams of stocking up "the missus'" larder with American abundance had come to naught. Idaho says that there was an engineer who was particularly fierce. "Don't we risk our lives, I arsk yer," he would say, "bringing stuff to fill their ruddy guts, and now they won't even let us bring in a bit of sugar for ourselves." The rest of the crew would take up the angry refrain; a mention of the food regulations was enough to set the entire crew "grousing" for hours.

And then came trouble, real trouble.

On the fifth day out Idaho, called for his early watch, found the boat wallowing in a heavy sea. The wind was not particularly heavy, but it blew steadily from one point of the compass, and the seas were running dark, wind-flecked, and high. The _Sebastopol_, accustomed to the calm of eastern seas, was pitching and rolling heavily. Presently the cargo began to shift. Now, to have the cargo shift is about the most dangerous thing that can happen to a vessel. One never can tell just when the centre of gravity of the mass will be displaced, and when that contingency occurs, the big iron ship will roll over as casually and as easily as a dog before the fire. It takes courage, plenty of courage, to keep such a ship running, especially if you are down by the boilers or in the engine room. You have to be prepared to find yourself lying in a corner somewhere looking up at a ceiling which, strange to say, has a door in it. The _Sebastopol_ leaned away from the wind like a stricken man crouching before a pitiless enemy; the angle of her smokestack more than anything else betraying the alarming list. In her stricken condition, the ship seemed to become more than ever personal and human. Presently her old plates bulged somewhere and she began to leak.

The vessel carried a cargo of grain, in these days more than ever a cargo epical and symbolic; a holdful of rich grain, grain engendered out of fields vast as the sea, bred by the fruitful fire of the sun, rippled by the passing of winds from the mysterious hills, grain, symbolic of satisfied hunger, ... victory. A cargo of grain, life to those on land, to those on board, danger and the possibility of a violent if romantic death. The crew, too occupied with the emergency to curse the stevedores, ran hither and thither on swift, obscure errands. And the weather grew steadily worse, the leak increasing with the advance of the storm. Down below, meanwhile, a force of men hardly able to keep their balance, buffeted here and there by the motion of the ship, and working in an atmosphere of choking dust, transferred a number of bags from one side to another. Unhappily, the real mischief was due to grain in bins, and with this store little could be done. And always the water in the hold increased in depth.

The pumps, orders had been given to start them directly the leak was noticed. Three minutes later, the machinery and the pipes, fouled with grain, refused to work. They saw bubbles, steam, a trickle of water that presently stopped, and lumps of wet grain that some one might have chewed together, and spat forth again. Idaho did a lot of signalling in code to the guide ship of the convoy. The _Sebastopol_ began to drop behind. An order being given to sleep up on the boat deck so as to be ready to leave at any instant, the men dragged their bedding to whatever shelter they could find. The captain appeared never to take any time off for sleep. Day after day, through heavy seas, under a sky torn and dirty as a rag, the old _Sebastopol_ listing badly and sodden as cold porridge, carried her precious cargo to the waiting and hungry east. Giving up all hope of keeping up with her sisters, she fell behind, now straggling ten, now fifteen miles astern. At length the weather changed; the sea became smooth, blue and sparkling, the sky radiant and clear.

Then the destroyers came. There was a parley, and the other vessels of the convoy zigzagged wildly for a while in order to allow the _Sebastopol_ to catch up. But in spite of all attempts, the old ship fell behind again and was suffered to do so, lest the others, compelled to adopt her slow speed, be seriously handicapped in their race down the gauntlet. Then it was discovered that the leak had gained alarmingly; there was even talk of abandoning the vessel and taking to the boats. A try was made to pump out the boat with an ancient hand engine. The contrivance clogged almost at once. According to Idaho, it was much like trying to pump out a thick bran mash such as they give sick calves. And they were only two days from land. Barely afloat, just crawling, and with the submarine zone ahead of them.... But the gods were kind, and the old boat and the solitary destroyer went down the Channel and across the Irish Sea as safely as clockwork toys across a garden pool. Yet they passed quite a tidy lot of wreckage. Nearer ... nearer all the time, till late one afternoon two big tugs raced to meet them at the mouth of a giant estuary. The _Sebastopol_ was at the end of her tether. Another day, and it would have been a case of taking to the boats.

The tugs hurried her into a waiting dry dock.

Idaho, his papers signed, his bag upon his shoulder, got into a little tender which was to take him over to the harbour landing. Looking up, he saw some of the crew leaning over the rail.... They grinned with friendly, soot-streaked faces, waved their arms.... The _Sebastopol_ was safe, the rich cargo of grain, the life-giving yellow grain was safe.... The tug slid off into the busy, noisy riverway.

And thus came Idaho of the Armed Guard to the Beleaguered Isles.