1919

Joe Williams

Twentyfive days at sea on the steamer Argyle, Glasgow, Captain Thompson, loaded with hides, chipping rust, daubing red lead on steel plates that were sizzling hot griddles in the sun, painting the stack from dawn to dark, pitching and rolling in the heavy dirty swell; bedbugs in the bunks in the stinking focastle, slumgullion for grub, with potatoes full of eyes and mouldy beans, cockroaches mashed on the messtable, but a tot of limejuice every day in accordance with the regulations; then sickening rainy heat and Trinidad blue in the mist across the ruddy water.

Going through the Boca it started to rain and the islands heaped with ferny parisgreen foliage went grey under the downpour. By the time they got her warped into the wharf at Port of Spain, everybody was soaked to the skin with rain and sweat. Mr. McGregor, striding up and down in a souwester purple in the face, lost his voice from the heat and had to hiss out his orders in a mean whisper. Then the curtain of the rain lifted, the sun came out and everything steamed. Apart from the heat everybody was sore because there was talk that they were going up to the Pitch Lake to load asphaltum.

Next day nothing happened. The hides in the forward hold stank when they unbattened the hatches. Clothes and bedding, hung out to dry in the torrid glare of sun between showers, was always getting soaked again before they could get it in. While it was raining there was nowhere you could keep dry; the awning over the deck dripped continually.

In the afternoon, Joe’s watch got off, though it wasn’t much use going ashore because nobody had gotten any pay. Joe found himself sitting under a palm tree on a bench in a sort of a park near the waterfront staring at his feet. It began to rain and he ducked under an awning in front of a bar. There were electric fans in the bar; a cool whiff of limes and rum and whiskey in iced drinks wafted out through the open door. Joe was thirsty for a beer but he didn’t have a red cent. The rain hung like a bead curtain at the edge of the awning.

Standing beside him was a youngish man in a white suit and a panama hat, who looked like an American. He glanced at Joe several times, then he caught his eye and smiled, “Are you an Am-m-merican,” he said. He stuttered a little when he talked. “I am that,” said Joe.

There was a pause. Then the man held out his hand. “Welcome to our city,” he said. Joe noticed that he had a slight edge on. The man’s palm was soft when he shook his hand. Joe didn’t like the way his handshake felt. “You live here?” he asked. The man laughed. He had blue eyes and a round poutlipped face that looked friendly. “Hell no… I’m only here for a couple of days on this West India cruise. Much b-b-better have saved my money and stayed home. I wanted to go to Europe but you c-c-can’t on account of the war.” “Yare, that’s all they talk about on the bloody limejuicer I’m on, the war.”

“Why they brought us to this hole I can’t imagine and now there’s something the matter with the boat and we can’t leave for two days.”

“That must be the Monterey.”

“Yes. It’s a terrible boat, nothing on board but women. I’m glad to run into a fellow I can talk to. Seems to be nothing but niggers down here.”

“Looks like they had ’em all colors in Trinidad.”

“Say, this rain isn’t going to stop for a hell of a time. Come in and have a drink with me.”

Joe looked at him suspiciously. “All right,” he said finally, “but I might as well tell you right now I can’t treat you back… I’m flat and those goddam Scotchmen won’t advance us any pay.” “You’re a sailor, aren’t you?” asked the man when they got to the bar. “I work on a boat, if that’s what you mean.”

“What’ll you have… They make a fine Planter’s punch here. Ever tried that?” “I’ll drink a beer… I usually drink beer.” The barkeeper was a broadfaced chink with a heartbroken smile like a very old monkey’s. He put the drinks down before them very gently as if afraid of breaking the glasses. The beer was cold and good in its dripping glass. Joe drank it off. “Say, you don’t know any baseball scores, do you? Last time I saw a paper looked like the Senators had a chance for the pennant.”

The man took off his panama hat and mopped his brow with a handkerchief. He had curly black hair. He kept looking at Joe as if he was making up his mind about something. Finally he said, “Say my name’s… Wa-wa-wa-… Warner Jones.” “They call me Yank on the Argyle… In the navy they called me Slim.”

“So you were in the navy, were you? I thought you looked more like a jackie than a merchant seaman, Slim.”

“That so?”

The man who said his name was Jones ordered two more of the same. Joe was worried. But what the hell, they can’t arrest a guy for a deserter on British soil. “Say, did you say you knew anything about the baseball scores? The leagues must be pretty well underway by now.”

“I got the papers up at the hotel… like to look at them?”

“I sure would.”

The rain stopped. The pavement was already dry when they came out of the bar.

“Say, I’m going to take a ride around this island. Tell me you can see wild monkeys and all sorts of things. Why don’t you come along? I’m bored to death of sightseeing by myself.”

Joe thought a minute. “These clothes ain’t fit….”

“What the hell, this isn’t Fifth Avenue. Come ahead.” The man who said his name was Jones signalled a nicely polished Ford driven by a young chinaman. The chinaman wore glasses and a dark blue suit and looked like a college student; he talked with an English accent. He said he’d drive them round the town and out to the Blue Pool. As they were setting off the man who said his name was Jones said, “Wait a minute,” and ran in the bar and got a flask of Planter’s punch.

He talked a blue streak all the time they were driving out past the British bungalows and brick institution buildings and after that out along the road through rubbery blue woods so dense and steamy it seemed to Joe there must be a glass roof overhead somewhere. He said how he liked adventure and travel and wished he was free to ship on boats and bum around and see the world and that it must be wonderful to depend only on your own sweat and muscle the way Joe was doing. Joe said, “Yare?” But the man who said his name was Jones paid no attention and went right on and said how he had to take care of his mother and that was a great responsibility and sometimes he thought he’d go mad and he’d been to a doctor about it and the doctor had advised him to take a trip, but that the food wasn’t any good on the boat and gave him indigestion and it was all full of old women with daughters they wanted to marry off and it made him nervous having women run after him like that. The worst of it was not having a friend to talk to about whatever he had on his mind when he got lonely. He wished he had a nice good looking fellow who’d been around and wasn’t a softy and knew what life was and could appreciate beauty for a friend, a fellow like Joe in fact. His mother was awfully jealous and didn’t like the idea of his having any intimate friends and would always get sick or try to hold out on his allowance when she found out about his having any friends, because she wanted him to be always tied to her apron strings but he was sick and tired of that and from now on he was going to do what he damn pleased, and she didn’t have to know about everything he did anyway.

He kept giving Joe cigarettes and offering them to the chinaman who said each time, “Thank you very much, sir. I have forgone smoking.” Between them they had finished the flask of punch and the man who said his name was Jones was beginning to edge over towards Joe in the seat, when the chinaman stopped the car at the end of a little path and said, “If you wish to view the Blue Pool you must walk up there almost seven minutes, sir. It is the principal attraction of the island of Trinidad.”

Joe hopped out of the car and went to make water beside a big tree with shaggy red bark. The man who said his name was Jones came up beside him. “Two minds with but a single thought,” he said. Joe said, “Yare,” and went and asked the chinaman where they could see some monkeys.

“The Blue Pool,” said the chinaman, “is one of their favorite re sorts.” He got out of the car and walked around it looking intently with his black beads of eyes into the foliage over their heads. Suddenly he pointed. Something black was behind a shaking bunch of foliage. A screechy giggle came from behind it and three monkeys went off flying from branch to branch with long swinging leaps. In a second they were gone and all you could see was the branches stirring at intervals through the woods where they jumped. One of them had a pinkish baby monkey hanging on in front. Joe was tickled. He’d never seen monkeys really wild like that before. He went off up the path, walking fast so that the man who said his name was Jones had trouble keeping up to him. Joe wanted to see some more monkeys.

After a few minutes’ walk up hill he began to hear a waterfall. Something made him think of Great Falls and Rock Creek and he went all soft inside. There was a pool under a waterfall hemmed in by giant trees. “Dod gast it, I’ve a mind to take me a dip,” he said. “Wouldn’t there be snakes, Slim?” “Snakes won’t bother you, ’less you bother ’em first.”

But when they got right up to the pool they saw that there were people picnicking there, girls in light pink and blue dresses, two or three men in white ducks, grouped under striped umbrellas. Two Hindoo servants were waiting on them, bringing dishes out of a hamper. Across the pool came the chirp-chirp of cultivated English voices. “Shoot, we can’t go swimmin’ here and they won’t be any monkeys either.”

“Suppose we joined them… I might introduce myself and you would be my kid brother. I’ve got a letter to a Colonel Somebody but I felt too blue to present it.”

“What the hell do they want to be fartin’ around here for?” said Joe and started back down the path again. He didn’t see any more monkeys and by the time he’d got back to the car big drops had started to fall.

“That’ll spoil their goddam picnic,” he said, grinning to the man who said his name was Jones when he came up, the sweat running in streams down his face. “My, you’re a fast walker, Slim.” He puffed and patted him on the back. Joe got into the car. “I guess we’re goin’ to get it.” “Sirs,” said the chinaman, “I will return to the city for I perceive that a downpour is imminent.”

By the time they’d gone a half a mile it was raining so hard the chinaman couldn’t see to drive. He ran the car into a small shed on the side of the road. The rain pounding on the tin roof overhead sounded loud as a steamboat letting off steam. The man who said his name was Jones started talking; he had to yell to make himself heard above the rain. “I guess you see some funny sights, Slim, leading the life you lead.”

Joe got out of the car and stood facing the sudden curtain of rain; the spray in his face felt almost cool. The man who said his name was Jones sidled up to him holding out a cigarette. “How did you like it in the navy?”

Joe took the cigarette, lit it and said, “Not so good.”

“I’ve been friends with lots of navy boys… I suppose you liked raising cain on shore leave, didn’t you?” Joe said he didn’t usually have much pay to raise cain with, used to play ball sometimes, that wasn’t so bad. “But, Slim, I thought sailors didn’t care what they did when they got in port.” “I guess some of the boys try to paint the town red, but they don’t usually have enough jack to get very far.” “Maybe you and I can paint the town red in Port of Spain, Slim.” Joe shook his head. “No, I gotta go back on board ship.”

The rain increased till the tin roof roared so Joe couldn’t hear what the man who said his name was Jones was trying to say, then slackened and stopped entirely. “Well, at least you come up to my room in the hotel, Slim, and we’ll have a couple of drinks. Nobody knows me here. I can do anything I like.” “I’d like to see the sports page of that paper from home if you don’t mind.”

They got into the car and rode back to town along roads brimmed with water like canals. The sun came out hot and everything was in a blue steam. It was late afternoon. The streets of the town were crowded; hindoos with turbans, chinks in natty Hart Schaffner and Marx clothes, redfaced white men dressed in white, raggedy shines of all colors.

Joe felt uncomfortable going through the lobby of the hotel in his dungarees, pretty wet at that, and he needed a shave. The man who said his name was Jones put his arm over his shoulders going up the stairs. His room was big with tall narrow shuttered windows and smelt of bay rum. “My, but I’m hot and wet,” he said. “I’m going to take a shower… but first we’d better ring for a couple of gin fizzes…. Don’t you want to take your clothes off and take it easy? His skin’s about as much clothes as a fellow can stand in this weather.” Joe shook his head, “They stink too much,” he said. “Say, have you got them papers?”

The hindoo servant came with the drinks while the man who said his name was Jones was in the bathroom. Joe took the tray. There was something about the expression of the hindoo’s thin mouth and black eyes looking at something behind you in the room that made Joe sore. He wanted to hit the tobaccocolored bastard. The man who said his name was Jones came back looking cool in a silk bathrobe.

“Sit down, Slim, and we’ll have a drink and a chat.” The man ran his fingers gently over his forehead as if it ached and through his curly black hair and settled in an armchair. Joe sat down in a straight chair across the room. “My, I think this heat would be the end of me if I stayed a week in this place. I don’t see how you stand it, doing manual work and everything. You must be pretty tough!”

Joe wanted to ask about the newspapers but the man who said his name was Jones was talking again, saying how he wished he was tough, seeing the world like that, meeting all kinds of fellows, going to all kinds of joints, must see some funny sights, must be funny all these fellows bunking together all these days at sea, rough and tumble, hey? and then nights ashore, raising cain, painting the town red, several fellows with one girl. “If I was living like that, I wouldn’t care what I did, no reputation to lose, no danger of somebody trying to blackmail you, only have to be careful to keep out of jail, hay? Why, Slim, I’d like to go along with you and lead a life like that.” “Yare?” said Joe.

The man who said his name was Jones rang for another drink. When the hindoo servant had gone Joe asked again about the papers. “Honestly, Slim, I looked everywhere for them. They must have been thrown out.” “Well, I guess I’ll be gettin’ aboard my bloody limejuicer.” Joe had his hand on the door. The man who said his name was Jones came running over and took his hand and said, “No, you’re not going. You said you’d go on a party with me. You’re an awful nice boy. You won’t be sorry. You can’t go away like this, now that you’ve got me feeling all sort of chummy and you know amorous. Don’t you ever feel that way, Slim? I’ll do the handsome thing. I’ll give you fifty dollars.” Joe shook his head and pulled his hand away.

He had to give him a shove to get the door open; he ran down the white marble steps and out into the street.

It was about dark; Joe walked along fast. The sweat was pouring off him. He was cussing under his breath as he walked along. He felt rotten and sore and he’d wanted real bad to see some papers from home.

He loafed up and down in a little in the sort of park place where he’d sat that afternoon, then he started down towards the wharves. Might as well turn in. The smell of frying from eating joints reminded him he was hungry. He turned into one before he remembered he didn’t have a cent in his pocket. He followed the sound of a mechanical piano and found himself in the red light district. Standing in the doorways of the little shacks there were nigger wenches of all colors and shapes, halfbreed Chinese and Indian women, a few faded fat German or French women; one little mulatto girl who reached her hand out and touched his shoulder as he passed was damn pretty. He stopped to talk to her, but when he said he was broke, she laughed and said, “Go long from here, Mister No-Money Man… no room here for a No-Money Man.”

When he got back on board he couldn’t find the cook to try and beg a little grub off him so he took a chaw and let it go at that. The focastle was like an oven. He went up on deck with only a pair of overalls on and walked up and down with the watchman who was a pinkfaced youngster from Dover everybody called Tiny. Tiny said he’d heard the old man and Mr. McGregor talking in the cabin about how they’d be off tomorrow to St. Luce to load limes and then ’ome to blighty and would ’e be glad to see the tight little hile an’ get off this bleedin’ crahft, not ’arf. Joe said a hell of a lot of good it’d do him, his home was in Washington, D.C. “I want to get out of the c — g life and get a job that pays something. This way every bastardly tourist with a little jack thinks he can hire you for his punk.” Joe told Tiny about the man who said his name was Jones and he laughed like he’d split. “Fifty dollars, that’s ten quid. I’d a ’ad ’arf a mind to let the toff ’ave a go at me for ten quid.”

The night was absolutely airless. The mosquitoes were beginning to get at Joe’s bare neck and arms. A sweet hot haze came up from the slack water round the wharves blurring the lights down the waterfront. They took a couple of turns without saying anything.

“My eye what did ’e want ye to do, Yank?” said Tiny giggling. “Aw to hell with him,” said Joe. “I’m goin’ to get out of this life. Whatever happens, wherever you are, the seaman gets the’s — y end of the stick. Ain’t that true, Tiny?”

“Not ’arf… ten quid! Why, the bleedin’ toff ought to be ashaymed of hisself. Corruptin’ morals, that’s what ’e’s after. Ought to go to ’is ’otel with a couple of shipmytes and myke him pay blackmyl. There’s many an old toff in Dover payin’ blackmyl for doin’ less ’n ’e did. They comes down on a vacaytion and goes after the bath’ouse boys…. Blackmyl ’im, that’s what I’d do, Yank.”

Joe didn’t say anything. After a while he said, “Jeez, an’ when I was a kid I thought I wanted to go to the tropics.”

“This ain’t tropics, it’s a bleedin’ ’ell ’ole, that’s what it is.”

They took another couple of turns. Joe went and leaned over the side looking down into the greasy blackness. God damn these mosquitoes. When he spat out his plug of tobacco it made a light plunk in the water. He went down into the focastle again, crawled into his bunk and pulled the blanket over his head and lay there sweating. “Darn it, I wanted to see the baseball scores.”

Next day they coaled ship and the day after they had Joe painting the officers’ cabins while the Argyle nosed out through the Boca again between the slimegreen ferny islands, and he was sore because he had A.B. papers and here they were still treating him like an ordinary seaman and he was going to England and didn’t know what he’d do when he’d get there, and his shipmates said they’d likely as not run him into a concentraytion camp; bein’ an alien and landin’ in England without a passport, wat wit’ war on and ’un spies everywhere, an’ all; but the breeze had salt in it now and when he peeked out of the porthole he could see blue ocean instead of the puddlewater off Trinidad and flying fish in hundreds skimming away from the ship’s side.

The harbor at St. Luce’s was clean and landlocked, white houses with red roofs under the coconutpalms. It turned out that it was bananas they were going to load; it took them a day and a half knocking up partitions in the afterhold and scantlings for the bananas to hang from. It was dark by the time they’d come alongside the bananawharf and had rigged the two gangplanks and the little derrick for lowering the bunches into the hold. The wharf was crowded with colored women laughing and shrieking and yelling things at the crew, and big buck niggers standing round doing nothing. The women did the loading. After a while they started coming up one gangplank, each one with a huge green bunch of bananas slung on her head and shoulders; there were old black mammies and pretty young mulatto girls; their faces shone with sweat under the big bunchlights, you could see their swinging breasts hanging down through their ragged clothes, brown flesh through a rip in a sleeve. When each woman got to the top of the gangplank two big buck niggers lifted the bunch tenderly off her shoulders, the foreman gave her a slip of paper and she ran down the other gangplank to the wharf again. Except for the donkeyengine men the deck crew had nothing to do. They stood around uneasy, watching the women, the glitter of white teeth and eyeballs, the heavy breasts, the pumping motion of their thighs. They stood around, looking at the women, scratching themselves, shifting their weight from one foot to the other; not even much smut was passed. It was a black still night, the smell of the bananas and the stench of niggerwoman sweat was hot around them; now and then a little freshness came in a whiff off some cases of limes piled on the wharf.

Joe caught on that Tiny was waving to him to come somewhere. He followed him into the shadow. Tiny put his mouth against his ear, “There’s bleedin’ tarts ’ere, Yank, come along.” They went up the bow and slid down a rope to the wharf. The rope scorched their hands. Tiny spat into his hands and rubbed them together. Joe did the same. Then they ducked into the warehouse. A rat scuttled past their feet. It was a guano warehouse and stank of fertilizer. Outside a little door in the back it was pitch black, sandy underfoot. A little glow from streetlights hit the upper part of the warehouse. There were women’s voices, a little laugh. Tiny had disappeared. Joe had his hand on a woman’s bare shoulder. “But first you must give me a shilling,” said a sweet cockney West India woman’s voice. His voice had gone hoarse. “Sure, cutie, sure I will.”

When his eyes got used to the dark he could see that they weren’t the only ones. There were giggles, hoarse breathing all round them. From the ship came the intermittent whir of the winches, and a mixedup noise of voices from the women loading bananas.

The woman was asking for money. “Come on now, white boy, do like you say.” Tiny was standing beside him buttoning up his pants. “Be back in a jiff, girls.”

“Sure, we left our jack on board the boat.”

They ran back through the warehouse with the girls after them, up the jacobsladder somebody had let down over the side of the ship and landed on deck out of breath and doubled up with laughing. When they looked over the side the women were running up and down the wharf spitting and cursing at them like wildcats. “Cheeryoh, laydies,” Tiny called down to them, taking off his cap. He grabbed Joe’s arm and pulled him along the deck; they stood round a while near the end of the gangplank. “Say, Tiny, yours was old enough to be your grandmother, damned if she wasn’t,” whispered Joe. “Granny me eye, it was the pretty un I ’ad.” “The hell you say… She musta been sixty.” “Wot a bleedin’ wopper… it was the pretty un I ’ad,” said Tiny, walking off sore.

A moon had come up red from behind the fringed hills. The bananabunches the women were carrying up the gangplank made a twisting green snake under the glare of the working lights. Joe suddenly got to feeling disgusted and sleepy. He went down and washed himself carefully with soap and water before crawling into his bunk. He went to sleep listening to the Scotch and British voices of his shipmates, talking about the tarts out back of the wharfhouse, ’ow many they’d ’ad, ’ow many times, ’ow it stacked up with the Argentyne or Durban or Singapore. The loading kept up all night.

By noon they’d cleared for Liverpool with the Chief stoking her up to make a fast passage and all hands talking about the blighty. They had bananas as much as they could eat that trip; every day the supercargo was bringing up overripe bunches and hanging them in the galley. Everybody was grousing about the ship not being armed, but the Old Man and Mr. McGregor seemed to take on more about the bananas than about the raiders. They were always peeping down under the canvas cover over the hatch that had been rigged with a ventilator on the peak of it, to see if they were ripening too soon. There was a lot of guying about the blahsted banahnas down in the focastle.

After crossing the tropic they ran into a nasty norther that blew four days, after that the weather was dirty right along. Joe didn’t have much to do after his four hours at the wheel; in the focastle they were all grousing about the ship not being fumigated to kill the bugs and the cockroaches and not being armed and not picking up a convoy. Then word got around that there were German submarines cruising off the Lizard and everybody from the Old Man down got short tempered as hell. They all began picking on Joe on account of America’s not being in the war and he used to have long arguments with Tiny and an old fellow from Glasgow they called Haig. Joe said he didn’t see what the hell business the States had in the war and that almost started a fight.

After they picked up the Scilly Island lights, Sparks said they were in touch with a convoy and would have a destroyer all to themselves up through the Irish Sea that wouldn’t leave them until they were safe in the Mersey. The British had won a big battle at Mons. The Old Man served out a tot of rum all round and everybody was in fine shape except Joe who was worried about what’d happen to him getting into England without a passport. He was chilly all the time on account of not having any warm clothes.

That evening a destroyer loomed suddenly out of the foggy twilight, looking tall as a church above the great wave of white water curling from her bows. It gave them a great scare on the bridge because they thought at first it was a Hun. The destroyer broke out the Union Jack and slowed down to the Argyle’s speed, keeping close and abreast of her. The crew piled out on deck and gave the destroyer three cheers. Some of them wanted to sing God Save the King but the officer on the bridge of the destroyer began bawling out the Old Man through a megaphone asking him why in bloody f — g hell he wasn’t steering a zigzag course and if he didn’t jolly well know that it was prohibited making any kind of bloody f — g noise on a merchantship in wartime.

It was eight bells and the watches were changing and Joe and Tiny began to laugh coming along the deck just at the moment when they met Mr. McGregor stalking by purple in the face. He stopped square in front of Joe and asked him what he found so funny? Joe didn’t answer. Mr. McGregor stared at him hard and began saying in his slow mean voice that he was probably not an American at all but a dirty ’un spy, and told him to report on the next shift in the stokehole. Joe said he’d signed on as an A.B. and they didn’t have any right to work him as a stoker. Mr. McGregor said he’d never struck a man yet in thirty years at sea but if he let another word out he’d damn well knock him down. Joe felt burning hot but he stood still with his fists clenched without saying anything. For several seconds Mr. McGregor just stared at him, red as a turkey gobbler. Two of the watch passed along the deck. “Turn this fellow over to the bosun and put him in irons. He may be a spy…. You go along quiet now or it’ll be worse for you.”

Joe spent that night hunched up in a little cubbyhole that smelt of bilge with his feet in irons. The next morning the bosun let him out and told him fairly kindly to go get cookee to give him some porridge but to keep off the deck. He said they were going to turn him over to the aliens control as soon as they docked in Liverpool.

When he crossed the deck to go to the galley, his ankles still stiff from the irons, he noticed that they were already in the Mersey. It was a ruddy sunlit morning. In every direction there were ships at anchor, stumpylooking black sailboats and patrolboats cutting through the palegreen ruffled water. Overhead the great pall of brown smoke was shot here and there with crisp white steam that caught the sun.

The cook gave him some porridge and a mug of bitter barely warm tea. When he came out of the galley they were further up the river, you could see towns on both sides, the sky was entirely overcast with brown smoke and fog. The Argyle was steaming under one bell.

Joe went below to the focastle and rolled into his bunk. His shipmates all stared at him without speaking and when he spoke to Tiny who was in the bunk below him, he didn’t answer. That made Joe feel worse than anything. He turned his face to the wall, pulled the blanket over his head and went to sleep.

Somebody shaking him woke him up. “Come on, my man,” said a tall English bobby with a blue helmet and varnished chinstrap who had hold of his shoulder. “All right, just a sec,” Joe said. “I’d like to get washed up.” The bobby shook his head. “The quieter and quicker you come the better it’ll be for you.”

Joe pulled his cap over his eyes, took his cigarbox out from under his mattress, and followed the bobby out on deck. The Argyle was already tied up to the wharf. So without saying goodby to anybody or getting paid off, he went down the gangplank with the bobby half a step behind. The bobby had a tight grip on the muscle of his arm. They walked across a flagstoned wharf and out through some big iron gates to where the Black Maria was waiting. A small crowd of loafers, red faces in the fog, black grimy clothes. “Look at the filthy ’un,” one man said. A woman hissed, there were a couple of boos and a catcall and the shiny black doors closed behind him; the car started smoothly and he could feel it speeding through the cobbled streets.

Joe sat hunched up in the dark. He was glad he was alone in there. It gave him a chance to get hold of himself. His hands and feet were cold. He had hard work to keep from shivering. He wished he was dressed decently. All he had on was a shirt and pants spotted with paint and a pair of dirty felt slippers. Suddenly the car stopped, two bobbies told him to get out and he was hustled down a whitewashed corridor into a little room where a police inspector, a tall longfaced Englishman, sat at a yellow varnished table. The inspector jumped to his feet, walked towards Joe with his fists clenched as if he was going to hit him and suddenly said something in what Joe thought must be German. Joe shook his head, it struck him funny somehow and he grinned. “No savvy,” he said.

“What’s in that box?” the inspector, who had sat down at the desk again, suddenly bawled out at the bobbies. “You’d oughter search these buggers before you bring ’em in here.”

One of the bobbies snatched the cigarbox out from under Joe’s arm and opened it, looked relieved when he saw it didn’t have a bomb in it and dumped everything out on the desk. “So you pretend to be an American?” the man yelled at Joe. “Sure I’m an American,” said Joe. “What the hell do you want to come to England in wartime for?” “I didn’t want to come to…” “Shut up,” the man yelled.

Then he motioned to the bobbies to go, and said, “Send in Corporal Eakins.” “Very good, sir,” said the two bobbies respectfully in unison. When they’d gone, he came towards Joe with his fists clenched again. “You might as well make a clean breast of it, my lad…. We have all the necessary information.”

Joe had to keep his teeth clenched to keep them from chattering. He was scared.

“I was on the beach in B.A. you see… had to take the first berth I could get. You don’t think anybody’d ship on a limejuicer if they could help it, do you?” Joe was getting sore; he felt warm again.

The plainclothes man took up a pencil and tapped with it threateningly on the desk. “Impudence won’t help you, my lad… you’d better keep a civil tongue in your head.” Then he began looking over the photographs and stamps and newspaper clippings that had come out of Joe’s cigarbox. Two men in khaki came in. “Strip him and search him,” the man at the desk said without looking up.

Joe looked at the two men without understanding; they had a little the look of hospital orderlies. “Sharp now,” one of them said. “We don’t want to ’ave to use force.” Joe took off his shirt. It made him sore that he was blushing; he was ashamed because he didn’t have any underwear. “All right, breeches next.” Joe stood naked in his slippers while the men in khaki went through his shirt and pants. They found a bunch of clean waste in one pocket, a battered Prince Albert can with a piece of chewing tobacco in it and a small jackknife with a broken blade. One of them was examining the belt and pointed out to the other the place where it had been resewed. He slit it up with a knife and they both looked eagerly inside. Joe grinned, “I used to keep my bills in there,” he said. They kept their faces stiff.

“Open your mouth.” One of them put a heavy hand on Joe’s jaw. “Sergeant, shall we take out the fillin’s? ’E’s got two or three fillin’s in the back of ’is mouth.” The man behind the desk shook his head. One of the men stepped out of the door and came back with an oiled rubber glove on his hand. “Lean hover,” said the other man, putting his hand on Joe’s neck and shoving his head down while the man with the rubber glove felt in his rectum. “Hay, for Chris’ sake,” hissed Joe through his teeth.

“All right, me lad, that’s all for the present,” said the man who held his head, letting go. “Sorry, but we ’ave to do it… part of the regulations.”

The corporal walked up to the desk and stood at attention. “All right, sir… Nothin’ of interest on the prisoner’s person.”

Joe was terribly cold. He couldn’t keep his teeth from chattering.

“Look in his slippers, can’t you?” growled the inspector. Joe didn’t like handing over his slippers because his feet were dirty, but there was nothing he could do. The corporal slashed them to pieces with his penknife. Then both men stood at attention and waited for the inspector to lift his eye. “All right, sir… nothin’ to report. Shall I get the prisoner a blanket, sir? ’E looks chilly.”

The man behind the desk shook his head and beckoned to Joe, “Come over here. Now are you ready to answer truthfully and give us no trouble it won’t be worse than a concentraytion camp for duraytion…. But if you give us trouble I can’t say how serious it mightn’t be. We’re under the Defence of the Realm Act, Don’t forget that…. What’s your name?”

After Joe had told his name, birthplace, father’s and mother’s names, names of ships he’s sailed on, the inspector suddenly shot a question in German at him. Joe shook his head, “Hay, what do you think I know German for?”

“Shut the bugger up…. We know all about him anyway.”

“Shall we give him ’is kit, sir?” asked one of the men timidly.

“He won’t need a kit if he isn’t jolly careful.”

The corporal got a bunch of keys and opened a heavy wooden door on the side of the room. They pushed Joe into a little cell with a bench and no window. The door slammed behind him and Joe was there shivering in the dark. Well, you’re in the pig’s a.h. for fair, Joe Williams, he said aloud. He found he could warm himself by doing exercises and rubbing his arms and legs, but his feet stayed numb.

After a while he heard the key in the lock; the man in khaki threw a blanket into the cell and slammed the door to, without giving him a chance to say anything.

Joe curled up in the blanket on the bench and tried to go to sleep.

He woke in a sudden nightmare fright. It was cold. The watch had been called. He jumped off the bench. It was blind dark. For a second he thought he’d gone blind in the night. Where he was, and everything since they sighted the Scilly Island lights came back. He had a lump of ice in his stomach. He walked up and down from wall to wall of the cell for a while and then rolled up in the blanket again. It was a good clean blanket and smelt of lysol or something like that. He went to sleep.

He woke up again hungry as hell, wanting to make water. He shuffled around the square cell for a long time until he found an enamelled pail under the bench. He used it and felt better. He was glad it had a cover on it. He began wondering how he’d pass the time. He began thinking about Georgetown and good times he’d had with Alec and Janey and the gang that hung around Mulvaney’s pool parlor and making pickups on moonlight trips on the Charles Macalister and went over all the good pitchers he’d ever seen or read about and tried to remember the batting averages of every man on the Washington ballteams.

He’d gotten back to trying to remember his highschool games, inning by inning, when the key was put into the lock. The corporal who’d searched him opened the door and handed him his shirt and pants. “You can wash up if you want to,” he said. “Better clean up smart. Orders is to take you to Captain Cooper-Trahsk.” “Gosh, can’t you get me somethin’ to eat or some water. I’m about starved…. Say, how long have I been in here, anyway?” Joe was blinking in the bright white light that came in from the other room. He pulled on his shirt and pants.

“Come along,” said the corporal. “Can’t ahnswer no question till you’ve seen Captain Cooper-Trahsk.” “But what about my slippers?” “You keep a civil tongue in your mouth and ahnswer all questions you’re harsked and it’ll be all the better for you…. Come along.”

When he followed the corporal down the same corridor he’d come in by all the English tommies stared at his bare feet. In the lavatory there was a shiny brass tap of cold water and a hunk of soap. First Joe took a long drink. He felt giddy and his knees were shaking. The cold water and washing his hands and face and feet made him feel better. The only thing he had to dry himself on was a roller towel already grimy. “Say, I need a shave,” he said. “You’ll ’ave to come along now,” said the corporal sternly. “But I got a Gillette somewheres….”

The corporal gave him an angry stare. They were going in the door of a nicely furnished office with a thick red and brown carpet on the floor. At a mahogany desk sat an elderly man with white hair and a round roastbeef face and lots of insignia on his uniform. “Is that…?” Joe began, but he saw that the corporal after clicking his heels and saluting had frozen into attention.

The elderly man raised his head and looked at them with a fatherly blue eye, “Ah… quite so…” he said. “Bring him up closer, corporal, and let’s have a look at him…. Isn’t he in rather a mess, corporal? You’d better give the poor beggar some shoes and stockings….” “Very good, sir,” said the corporal in a spiteful tone, stiffening to attention again. “At ease, corporal, at ease,” said the elderly man, putting on a pair of eyeglasses and looking at some papers on his desk. “This is… er… Zentner… claim American citizenship, eh?” “The name is Williams, sir.” “Ah, quite so… Joe Williams, seaman….” He fixed his blue eyes confidentially on Joe. “Is that your name, me boy?”

“Yessir.”

“Well, how do you come to be trying to get into England in wartime without passport or other identifying document?”

Joe told about how he had an American A.B. certificate and had been on the beach at B.A…. Buenos Aires. “And why were you… er… in this condition in the Argentine?” “Well, sir, I’d been on the Mallory Line and my ship sailed without me and I’d been painting the town red a little, sir, and the skipper pulled out ahead of schedule so that left me on the beach.”

“Ah… a hot time in the old town tonight… that sort of thing, eh?” The elderly man laughed; then suddenly he puckered up his brows. “Let me see… er… what steamer of the Mallory Line were you travelling on?” “The Patagonia, sir, and I wasn’t travellin’ on her, I was a seaman on board of her.”

The elderly man wrote a long while on a sheet of paper, then he lifted Joe’s cigarbox out of the desk drawer and began looking through the clippings and photographs. He brought out a photograph and turned it out so that Joe could see it. “Quite a pretty girl… is that your best beloved, Williams?” Joe blushed scarlet. “That’s my sister.” “I say she looks like a ripping girl… don’t you think so, corporal?” “Quite so, sir,” said the corporal distantly. “Now, me boy, if you know anything about the activities of German agents in South America… many of them are Americans or impostors masquerading as Americans… it’ll be much better for you to make a clean breast of it.”

“Honestly, sir,” said Joe, “I don’t know a thing about it. I was only in B.A. for a few days.” “Have you any parents living?” “My father’s a pretty sick man…. But I have my mother and sisters in Georgetown.” “Georgetown… Georgetown… let me see… isn’t that in British Guiana?” “It’s part of Washington, D.C.” “Of course… ah, I see you were in the navy….” The elderly man held off the picture of Joe and the two other gobs. Joe’s knees felt so weak he thought he was going to fall down. “No, sir, that was in the naval reserve.”

The elderly man put everything back in the cigarbox. “You can have these now, my boy…. You’d better give him a bit of breakfast and let him have an airing in the yard. He looks a bit weak on his pins, corporal.”

“Very good, sir.” The corporal saluted, and they marched out.

The breakfast was watery oatmeal, stale tea and two slices of bread with margarine on it. After it Joe felt hungrier than before. Still it was good to get out in the air, even if it was drizzling and the flagstones of the small courtyard where they put him were like ice to his bare feet under the thin slime of black mud that was over them.

There was another prisoner in the courtyard, a little fatfaced man in a derby hat and a brown overcoat, who came up to Joe immediately. “Say, are you an American?”

“Sure,” said Joe.

“My name’s Zentner… buyer in restaurant furnishings… from Chicago…. This is the tamnest outrage. Here I come to this tamned country to buy their tamned goods, to spend good American dollars…. Three days ago yet I placed a ten tousand dollar order in Sheffield. And they arrest me for a spy and I been here all night yet and only this morning vill they let me telephone the consulate. It is outrageous and I hafe a passport and visa all they vant. I can sue for this outrage. I shall take it to Vashington. I shall sue the British government for a hundred tousand dollars for defamation of character. Forty years an American citizen and my fader he came not from Chermany but from Poland…. And you, poor boy, I see that you haf no shoes. And they talk about the atrocious Chermans and if this ain’t an atrocity, vat is it?”

Joe was shivering and running round the court at a jogtrot to try to keep warm. Mr. Zentner took off his brown coat and handed it to him.

“Here, kid, you put that coat on.” “But, jeez, it’s too good; that’s damn nice of you.” “In adversity ve must help von anoder.”

“Dod gast it, if this is their spring, I hate to think what their winter’s like…. I’ll give the coat back to you when I go in. Jeez, my feet are cold…. Say, did they search you?” Mr. Zentner rolled up his eyes. “Outrageous,” he spluttered…“Vat indignities to a buyer from a neutral and friendly country. Vait till I tell the ambassador. I shall sue. I shall demand damages.” “Same here,” said Joe, laughing.

The corporal appeared in the door and shouted, “Williams.” Joe gave back the coat and shook Mr. Zentner’s fat hand. “Say, for Gawd’s sake, don’t forget to tell the consul there’s another American here. They’re talkin’ about sendin’ me to a concentration camp for duration.” “Sure, don’t vorry, boy. I’ll get you out,” said Mr. Zentner, puffing out his chest.

This time Joe was taken to a regular cell that had a little light and room to walk around. The corporal gave him a pair of shoes and some wool socks full of holes. He couldn’t get the shoes on but the socks warmed his feet up a little. At noon they handed him a kind of stew that was mostly potatoes with eyes in them and some more bread and margarine.

The third day when the turnkey brought the noonday slum, he brought a brownpaper package that had been opened. In it was a suit of clothes, shirt, flannel underwear, socks and even a necktie.

“There was a chit with it, but it’s against the regulaytions,” said the turnkey. “That outfit’ll make a bloomin’ toff out of you.”

Late that afternoon the turnkey told Joe to come along and he put on the clean collar that was too tight for his neck and the necktie and hitched up the pants that were much too big for him around the waist and followed along corridors and across a court full of tommies into a little office with a sentry at the door and a sergeant at a desk. Sitting on a chair was a busylooking young man with a straw hat on his knees. “’Ere’s your man, sir,” said the sergeant without looking at Joe. “I’ll let you question him.”

The busylooking young man got to his feet and went up to Joe. “Well, you’ve certainly been making me a lot of trouble, but I’ve been over the records in your case and it looks to me as if you were what you represented yourself to be…. What’s your father’s name?”

“Same as mine, Joseph P. Williams…. Say, are you the American consul?”

“I’m from the consulate…. Say, what the hell do you want to come ashore without a passport for? Don’t you think we have anything better to do than to take care of a lot of damn fools that don’t know enough to come in when it rains? Damn it, I was goin’ to play golf this afternoon and here I’ve been here two hours waiting to get you out of the cooler.”

“Jeez, I didn’t come ashore. They come on and got me.”

“That’ll teach you a lesson, I hope…. Next time you have your papers in order.”

“Yessirree… I shu will.”

A half an hour later Joe was out on the street, the cigarbox and his old clothes rolled up in a ball under his arm. It was a sunny afternoon; the redfaced people in dark clothes, longfaced women in crummy hats, the streets full of big buses and the tall trolleycars; everything looked awful funny, until he suddenly remembered it was England and he’d never been there before.

He had to wait a long time in an empty office at the consulate while the busylooking young man made up a lot of papers. He was hungry and kept thinking of beefsteak and frenchfried. At last he was called to the desk and given a paper and told that there was a berth all ready for him on the American steamer Tampa, out of Pensacola, and he’d better go right down to the agents and make sure about it and go on board and if they caught him around Liverpool again it would be the worse for him.

“Say, is there any way I can get anything to eat around here, Mr. Consul?” “What do you think this is, a restaurant?… No, we have no appropriations for any handouts. You ought to be grateful for what we’ve done already.” “They never paid me off on the Argyle and I’m about starved in that jail, that’s all.” “Well, here’s a shilling but that’s absolutely all I can do.” Joe looked at the coin, “Who’s ’at — King George? Well, thank you, Mr. Consul.”

He was walking along the street with the agent’s address in one hand and the shilling in the other. He felt sore and faint and sick in his stomach. He saw Mr. Zentner the other side of the street. He ran across through the jammed up traffic and went up to him with his hand held out.

“I got the clothes, Mr. Zentner, it was damn nice of you to send them.” Mr. Zentner was walking along with a small man in an officer’s uniform. He waved a pudgy hand and said, “Glad to be of service to a fellow citizen,” and walked on.

Joe went into a fried fish shop and spent sixpence on fried fish and spent the other sixpence on a big mug of beer in a saloon where he’d hoped to find free lunch to fill up on but there wasn’t any free lunch. By the time he’d found his way to the agent’s office it was closed and there he was roaming round the streets in the white misty evening without any place to go. He asked several guys around the wharves if they knew where the Tampa was docked, but nobody did and they talked so funny he could hardly understand what they said anyway.

Then just when the streetlights were going on, and Joe was feeling pretty discouraged, he found himself walking down a side street behind three Americans. He caught up to them and asked them if they knew where the Tampa was. Why the hell shouldn’t they know, weren’t they off’n her and out to see the goddam town and he’d better come along. And if he wasn’t tickled to meet some guys from home after those two months on the limejuicer and being in jail and everything. They went into a bar and drank some whiskey and he told all about the jail and how the damn bobbies had taken him off the Argyle and he’d never gotten his pay nor nutten and they set him up to drinks and one of the guys who was from Norfolk, Virginia, named Will Stirp pulled out a five dollar bill and said to take that and pay him back when he could.

It was like coming home to God’s country running into guys like that and they all had a drink all around; they were four of ’em Americans in this lousy limejuicer town and they each set up a round because they were four of ’em Americans ready to fight the world. Olaf was a Swede but he had his first papers so he counted too and the other feller’s name was Maloney. The hatchetfaced barmaid held back on the change but they got it out of her; she’d only given ’em fifteen shillings instead of twenty for a pound, but they made her give the five shillings back. They went to another fried fish shop; couldn’t seem to get a damn thing to eat in this country except fried fish and then they all had some more drinks and were the four of them Americans feeling pretty good in this lousy limejuicer town. A runner got hold of them because it was closing time on account of the war and there wasn’t a damn thing open and very few streetlights and funny little hats on the streetlights on account of the zeppelins. The runner was a pale ratfaced punk and said he knowed a house where they could ’ave a bit of beer and nice girls and a quiet social time. There was a big lamp with red roses painted on it in the parlor of the house and the girls were skinny and had horseteeth and there were some bloody limejuicers there who were pretty well under way and they were the four of them Americans. The limeys began to pick on Olaf for bein’ a bloody ’un. Olaf said he was a Swede but that he’d sooner be a bloody ’un than a limejuicer at that. Somebody poked somebody else and the first thing Joe knew he was fighting a guy bigger ’n he was and police whistles blew and there was a whole crowd of them piled up in the Black Maria.

Will Stirp kept saying they was the four of them Americans just havin’ a pleasant social time and there was no call for the bobbies to interfere. But they were all dragged up to a desk and committed and all four of ’em Americans locked up in the same cell and the limeys in another cell. The police station was full of drunks yelling and singing. Maloney had a bloody nose. Olaf went to sleep. Joe couldn’t sleep; he kept saying to Will Stirp he was scared they sure would send him to a concentration camp for the duration of the war this time and each time Will Stirp said they were the four of them Americans and wasn’t he a Freeborn American Citizen and there wasn’t a damn thing they could do to ’em. Freedom of the seas, God damn it.

Next morning they were in court and it was funny as hell except that Joe was scared; it was solemn as Quakermeetin’ and the magistrate wore a little wig and they were everyone of ’em fined three and six and costs. It came to about a dollar a head. Darned lucky they still had some jack on them.

And the magistrate in the little wig gave ’em a hell of a talking to about how this was wartime and they had no right being drunk and disorderly on British soil but had ought to be fighting shoulder to shoulder with their brothers, Englishmen of their own blood and to whom the Americans owed everything, even their existence as a great nation, to defend civilization and free institutions and plucky little Belgium against the invading huns who were raping women and sinking peaceful merchantmen.

When the magistrate had finished, the court attendants said, “Hear, hear,” under their breath and they all looked very savage and solemn and turned the American boys loose after they’d paid their fines and the police sergeant had looked at their papers. They held Joe after the others on account of his paper being from the consulate and not having the stamp of the proper police station on it but after a while they let him go with a warning not to come ashore again and that if he did it would be worse for him.

Joe felt relieved when he’d seen the skipper and had been taken on and had rigged up his bunk and gone ashore and gotten his bundle that he’d left with the nice flaxenhaired barmaid at the first pub he’d gone to the night before. At last he was on an American ship. She had an American flag painted on either side of the hull and her name Tampa, Pensacola, Florida, in white letters. There was a colored boy cooking and first thing they had cornmeal mush and karo syrup, and coffee instead of that lousy tea and the food tasted awful good. Joe felt better than any time since he’d left home. The bunks were clean and a fine feeling it was when the Tampa left the dock with her whistle blowing and started easing down the slatecolored stream of the Mersey towards the sea.

Fifteen days to Hampton Roads, with sunny weather and a sea like glass every day up to the last two days and then a stiff northwesterly wind that kicked up considerable chop off the Capes. They landed the few bundles of cotton print goods that made up the cargo at the Union Terminal in Norfolk. It was a big day for Joe when he went ashore with his pay in his pocket to take a look around the town with Will Stirp, who belonged there.

They went to see Will Stirp’s folks and took in a ball game and after that hopped the trolley down to Virginia Beach with some girls Will Stirp knew. One of the girls’ names was Della; and she was very dark and Joe fell for her, kind of. When they were putting on their bathing suits in the bathhouse he asked Will would she…? And Will got sore and said, “Ain’t you got the sense to tell a good girl from a hooker?” And Joe said well, you never could tell nowadays.

They went in swimming and fooled around the beach in their bathing suits and built a fire and toasted marshmallows and then they took the girls home. Della let Joe kiss her when they said good night and he began kinder planning that she’d be his steady girl.

Back in town they didn’t know just what to do. They wanted some drinks and a couple of frails but they were afraid of getting tanked up and spending all their money. They went to a poolroom Will knew and shot some pool and Joe was pretty good and cleaned up the local boys. After that they went and Joe set up a drink but it was closing time and right away they were out on the street again. They couldn’t find any hookers; Will said he knew a house but they soaked you too damn much, and they were just about going home to turn in when they ran into two high yellers who gave ’em the eye. They followed ’em down the street a long way and into a cross street where there weren’t many lights. The girls were hot stuff but they were scared and nervous for fear somebody might see ’em. They found an empty house with a back porch where it was black as pitch and took ’em up there and afterwards they went back and slept at Will Stirp’s folks’ house.

The Tampa had gone into drydock at Newport News for repairs on a started plate. Joe and Will Stirp were paid off and hung round Norfolk all day without knowing what to do with themselves. Saturday afternoons and Sundays, Joe played a little baseball with a scratch team of boys who worked in the Navy Yard, evenings he went out with Della Matthews. She was a stenographer in the First National Bank and used to say she’d never marry a boy who went to sea, you couldn’t trust ’em and that it was a rough kind of a life and didn’t have any advancement in it. Joe said she was right but you were only young once and what the hell things didn’t matter so much anyway. She used to ask him about his folks and why he didn’t go up to Washington to see them especially as his dad was ill. He said the old man could choke for all he cared, he hated him, that was about the size of it. She said she thought he was terrible. That time he was setting her up to a soda after the movies. She looked cute and plump in a fluffy pink dress and her little black eyes all excited and flashing. Joe said not to talk about that stuff, it didn’t matter, but she looked at him awful mean and mad and said she’d like to shake him and that every thing mattered terribly and it was wicked to talk like that and that he was a nice boy and came from nice people and had been nicely raised and ought to be thinking of getting ahead in the world instead of being a bum and a loafer. Joe got sore and said was that so? and left her at her folks’ house without saying another word. He didn’t see her for four or five days after that.

Then he went by where Della worked, and waited for her to come out one evening. He’d been thinking about her more than he wanted to and what she’d said. First, she tried to walk past him but he grinned at her and she couldn’t help smiling back. He was pretty broke by that tome but he took her and bought her a box of candy. They talked about how hot it was and he said they’d go to the ball game next week. He told her how the Tampa was pulling out for Pensacola to load lumber and then across to the other side.

They were waiting for the trolley to go to Virginia Beach, walking up and down fighting the mosquitoes. She looked all upset when he said he was going to the other side. Before Joe knew what he was doing he was saying that he wouldn’t ship on the Tampa again, but that he’d get a job right here in Norfolk.

That night was full moon. They fooled around in their bathing suits a long while on the beach beside a little smudgefire Joe made to keep the mosquitoes off. He was sitting crosslegged and she lay with her head on his knees and all the time he was stroking her hair and leaning over and kissing her; she said how funny his face looked upside down when he kissed her like that. She said they’d get married as soon as he got a steady job and between the two of them they’d amount to something. Ever since she’d graduated from high school at the head of her class she’d felt she ought to work hard and amount to something. “The folks round here are awful no-account, Joe, don’t know they’re alive half the time.”

“D’you know it, Del, you kinda remind me o’ my sister Janey, honest you do. Dod gast it, she’s amounting to something all right…. She’s awful pretty too….”

Della said she hoped she could see her some day and Joe said sure she would and he pulled her to her feet and drew her to him tight and hugged her and kissed her. It was late, and the beach was chilly and lonely under the big moon. Della got atrembling and said she’d have to get her clothes on or she’d catch her death. They had to run not to lose the last car.

The rails twanged as the car lurched through the moonlit pine-barrens full of tambourining dryflies and katydids. Della suddenly crumpled up and began to cry. Joe kept asking her what the matter was but she wouldn’t answer, only cried and cried. It was kind of a relief to leave her at her folks’ house and walk alone through the empty airless streets to the boarding house where he had a room.

All the next week he hoofed it around Norfolk and Portsmouth looking for a job that had a future to it. He even went over to Newport News. Coming back on the ferry, he didn’t have enough jack to pay his fare and had to get the guy who took tickets to let him work his way over sweeping up. The landlady began to ask for next week’s rent. All the jobs Joe applied for needed experience or training or you’d ought to have finished high school and there weren’t many jobs anyway, so in the end he had to go boating again, on a seagoing barge that was waiting for a towboat to take her down east to Rockport with a load of coal.

There were five barges in the tow; it wasn’t such a bad trip, just him and an old man named Gaskin and his boy, a kid of about fifteen whose name was Joe too. The only trouble they had was in a squall off Cape Cod when the tow rope parted, but the towboat captain was right up on his toes and managed to get a new cable on board ’em before they’d straightened out on their anchor.

Up in Rockport they unloaded their coal and anchored out in the harbor waiting to be towed to another wharf to load granite blocks for the trip back. One night when Gaskin and his boy had gone ashore and Joe was on watch the second engineer of the tug, a thinfaced guy named Hart came under the stern in a skiff and whispered to Joe did he want some c — t. Joe was stretched out on the house smoking a pipe and thinking about Della. The hills and the harbor and the rocky shore were fading into a warm pink twilight. Hart had a nervous stuttering manner. Joe held off at first but after a while he said, “Bring ’em along.” “Got any cards?” said Hart. “Yare I got a pack.”

Joe went below to clean up the cabin. He’d just kid ’em along, he was thinking. He’d oughtn’t to have a rough time with girls and all that now that he was going to marry Della. He heard the sound of the oars and went out on deck. A fogbank was coming in from the sea. There was Hart and his two girls under the stern. They tripped and giggled and fell hard against him when he helped ’em over the side. They’d brought some liquor and a couple of pounds of hamburger and some crackers. They weren’t much for looks but they were pretty good sorts with big firm arms and shoulders and they sure could drink liquor. Joe’d never seen girls like that before. They were sports all right. They had four quarts of liquor between ’em and drank it in tumblers.

The other two barges were sounding their claxons every two minutes, but Joe forgot all about his. The fog was white like canvas nailed across the cabin ports. They played strip poker but they didn’t get very far with it. Him and Hart changed girls three times that night. The girls were cookoo, they never seemed to have enough, but round twelve the girls were darned decent, they cooked up the hamburger and served up a lunch and ate all old man Gaskin’s bread and butter.

Then Hart passed out and the girls began to get worried about getting home on account of the fog and everything. All of ’em laughing like loons they hauled Hart up on deck and poured a bucket of water on him. That Maine water was so cold that he came to like sixty sore as a pup and wanting to fight Joe. The girls quieted him down and got him into the boat and they went off into the fog singing Tipperary.

Joe was reeling himself. He stuck his head in a bucket of water and cleaned up the cabin and threw the bottles overboard and started working on the claxon regularly. To hell with ’em, he kept saying to himself, he wouldn’t be a plaster saint for anybody. He was feeling fine, he wished he had something more to do than spin that damn claxon.

Old man Gaskin came on board about day. Joe could see he’d gotten wind of something because after that he never would speak to him except to give orders and wouldn’t let his boy speak to him; so that when they’d unloaded the granite blocks in East New York, Joe asked for his pay and said he was through. Old man Gaskin growled out it was a good riddance and that he wouldn’t have no boozin’ and whorin’ on his barge. So there was Joe with fortyfive dollars in his pocket walking through Red Hook looking for a boarding house.

After he’d been a couple of days reading want ads and going around Brooklyn looking for a job he got sick. He went to a sawbones an oldtimer at the boarding house told him about. The doc who was a little kike with a goatee told him it was the gonawria and he’d have to come every afternoon for treatment. He said he’d guarantee to cure him up for fifty dollars, half payable in advance, and that he’d advise him to have a bloodtest taken to see if he had syphilis too and that would cost him fifteen dollars. Joe paid down the twentyfive but said he’d think about the test. He had a treatment and went out onto the street. The doc had told him to be sure to walk as little as possible, but he couldn’t seem to go home to the stinking boardinghouse and wandered aimlessly round the clattering Brooklyn streets. It was a hot afternoon. The sweat was pouring off him as he walked. If you catch it right the first day or two it ain’t so bad, he kept saying to himself. He came out on a bridge under the elevated; must be Brooklyn Bridge.

It was cooler walking across the bridge. Through the spider-webbing of cables, the shipping and the pack of tall buildings were black against the sparkle of the harbor. Joe sat down on a bench at the first pier and stretched his legs out in front of him. Here he’d gone to work and caught a dose. He felt terrible and how was he going to write Del now; and his board to pay, and a job to get and these damn treatments to take. Jesus, he felt lousy.

A kid came by with an evening paper. He bought a Journal and sat with the paper on his lap looking at the headlines: RUSH MORE TROOPS TO MEX BORDER. What the hell could he do? He couldn’t even join the national guard and go to Mexico; they wouldn’t take you if you were sick and even if they did it would be the goddam navy all over again. He sat reading the want ads, the ads about adding to your income with two hours’ agreeable work at home evenings, the ads of Pelmanism and correspondence courses. What the hell could he do? He sat there until it was dark. Then he took a car to Atlantic Avenue and went up four flights to the room where he had a cot under the window and turned in.

That night a big thundersquall came up. There was a lot of thunder and lightning damned close. Joe lay flat on his back watching the lightning so bright it dimmed the streetlights flicker on the ceiling. The springs rattled every time the guy in the other cot turned in his sleep. It began to rain in, but Joe felt so weak and sick it was a long time before he had the gumption to sit up and pull down the window.

In the morning the landlady, who was a big raw-boned Swedish woman with wisps of flaxen hair down over her bony face, started bawling him out about the bed’s being wet. “I can’t help it if it rains, can I?” he grumbled, looking at her big feet. When he caught her eye, it came over him that she was kidding him and they both laughed.

She was a swell woman, her name was Mrs. Olsen and she’d raised six children, three boys who’d grown up and gone to sea, a girl who was a school teacher in St. Paul and a pair of girl twins about seven or eight who were always getting into mischief. “Yust one year more and I send them to Olga in Milwaukee. I know sailormen.” Pop Olsen had been on the beach somewhere in the South Seas for years. “Yust as well he stay there. In Brooklyn he been always in de lockup. Every week cost me money to get him outa yail.”

Joe got to helping her round the house with the cleaning and did odd painting and carpentering jobs for her. After his money ran out she let him stay on and even lent him twentyfive bucks to pay the doctor when he told her about being sick. She slapped him on the back when he thanked her; “Every boy I ever lend money to, he turn out yust one big bum,” she said and laughed. She was a swell woman.

It was nasty sleety winter weather. Mornings Joe sat in the steamy kitchen studying a course in navigation he’d started getting from the Alexander Hamilton Institute. Afternoons he fidgeted in the dingy doctor’s office that smelt of carbolic, waiting for his turn for treatment, looking through frayed copies of the National Geographic for 1909. It was a glum looking bunch waited in there. Nobody ever said anything much to anybody else. A couple of times he met guys on the street he’d talked with a little waiting in there, but they always walked right past him as if they didn’t see him. Evenings he sometimes went over to Manhattan and played checkers at the Seamen’s Institute or hung around the Seaman’s Union getting the dope on ships he might get a berth on when the doc dried him up. It was a bum time except that Mrs. Olsen was darn good to him and he got fonder of her than he’d ever been of his own mother.

The darn kike sawbones tried to hold him up for another twenty-five bucks to complete the cure but Joe said to hell with it and shipped as an A.B. on a brandnew Standard Oil tanker, the Montana, bound light for Tampico and then out east, some of the boys said, to Aden and others said to Bombay. He was sick of the cold and the sleet and the grimy Brooklyn streets and the logarithm tables in the course on navigation he couldn’t get through his head and Mrs. Olsen’s bullying jollying voice; she was beginning to act like she wanted to run his life for him. She was a swell woman but it was about time he got the hell out.

The Montana rounded Sandy Hook in a spiteful lashing snowstorm out of the northwest, but three days later they were in the Gulf Stream south of Hatteras rolling in a long swell with all the crew’s denims and shirts drying on lines rigged from the shrouds. It was good to be on blue water again.

Tampico was a hell of a place; they said that mescal made you crazy if you drank too much of it; there were big dance halls full of greasers dancing with their hats on and with guns on their hips, and bands and mechanical pianos going full tilt in every bar, and fights and drunk Texans from the oilwells. The doors of all the cribhouses were open so that you could see the bed with white pillows and the picture of the Virgin over it and the lamps with fancy shades and the colored paper trimming; the broadfaced brown girls sat out in front in lace slips. But everything was so damned high that they spent up all their jack first thing and had to go back on board before it was hardly midnight. And the mosquitoes got into the focastle and the sandflies about day and it was hot and nobody could sleep.

When the tanks had been pumped full the Montana went out into the Gulf of Mexico into a norther with the decks awash and the spray lashing the bridge. They hadn’t been out two hours before they’d lost a man overboard off the monkeywalk and a boy named Higgins had had his foot smashed lashing the starboard anchor that had broken loose. It made ’em pretty sore down in the focastle that the skipper wouldn’t lower a boat, though the older men said that no boat could have lived in a sea like that. As it was the skipper cruised in a wide curve and took a couple of seas on his beam that like to stove in the steel decks.

Nothing much else happened on that trip except that one night when Joe was at the wheel and the ship was dead quiet except for the irregular rustle of broken water as she ploughed through the long flat seas eastward, he suddenly smelt roses or honeysuckle maybe. The sky was blue as a bowl of curdled milk with a waned scrap of moon bobbing up from time to time. It was honeysuckle, sure enough, and manured garden patches and moist foliage like walking past the open door of a florist’s in winter. It made him feel soft and funny inside like he had a girl standing right beside him on the bridge, like he had Del there with her hair all smelly with some kind of perfume. Funny, the smell of dark, girls’ hair. He took down the binoculars but he couldn’t see anything on the horizon only the curdled scud drifting west in the faint moonlight. He found he was losing his course, good thing the mate hadn’t picked out that moment to look aft at the wake. He got her back to E.N.E. by ½E. When his trick was over and he rolled into his bunk he lay awake a long time thinking of Del. God, he wanted money and a good job and a girl of his own instead of all these damn floosies when you got into port. What he ought to do was go down to Norfolk and settle down and get married.

Next day about noon they sighted the grey sugarloaf of Pico with a band of white clouds just under the peak and Fayal blue and irregular to the north. They passed between the two islands. The sea got very blue; it smelled like the country lanes outside of Washington when there was honeysuckle and laurel blooming in the runs. The bluegreen yellowgreen patchwork fields covered the steep hills like an oldfashioned quilt. That night they raised other islands to the eastward.

Five days of a heavy groundswell and they were in the Straits of Gibraltar. Eight days of dirty sea and chilly driving rain and they were off the Egyptian coast, a warm sunny morning, going into the port of Alexandria under one bell while the band of yellow mist ahead thickened up into masts, wharves, buildings, palmtrees. The streets smelt like a garbage pail, they drank arrack in bars run by Greeks who’d been in America and paid a dollar apiece to see three Jewishlooking girls dance a belly dance naked in a back room. In Alexandria they saw their first camouflaged ships, three British scoutcruisers striped like zebras and a transport all painted up with blue and green watermarkings. When they saw them, all the watch on deck lined up along the rail and laughed like they’d split.

When he got paid off in New York a month later it made him feel pretty good to go to Mrs. Olsen and pay her back what he owed her. She had another youngster staying with her at the boarding house, a towheaded Swede who didn’t know any English, so she didn’t pay much attention to Joe. He hung around the kitchen a little while and asked her how things were and told her about the bunch on the Montana, then he went over to the Penn Station to see when he could catch a train to Washington. He sat dozing in the smoker of the daycoach half the night thinking of Georgetown and when he’d been a kid at school and the bunch in the poolroom on 4½ Street and trips on the river with Alec and Janey.

It was a bright wintry sunny morning when he piled out at the Union Station. He couldn’t seem to make up his mind to go over to Georgetown to see the folks. He loafed around the Union Station, got a shave and a shine and a cup of coffee, read the Washington Post, counted his money; he still had more’n fifty iron men, quite a roll of lettuce for a guy like him. Then he guessed he’d wait and see Janey first, he’d wait around and maybe he’d catch her coming out from where she worked at noon. He walked around the Capitol Grounds and down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. On the Avenue he saw the same enlistment booth where he’d enlisted for the navy. Kinder gave him the creeps. He went and sat in the winter sunlight in Lafayette Square, looking at the little dressed up kids playing and the nursemaids and the fat starlings hopping round the grass and the statue of Andrew Jackson, until he thought it was time to go catch Janey. His heart was beating so he could hardly see straight. It must have been later than he thought because none of the girls coming out of the elevator was her, though he waited about an hour in the vestibule of the Riggs Building until some lousy dick or other came up to him and asked him what the hell we was loitering around for.

So Joe had to go over to Georgetown after all to find out where Janey was. Mommer was in and his kid sisters and they were all talking about how they were going to have the house remodeled with the ten thousand dollars from the Old Man’s insurance and they wanted him to go up to Oak Hill to see the grave, but Joe said what was the use and got away as soon as he could. They asked all kinds of questions about how he was getting on and he didn’t know what the hell to tell ’em. They told him where Janey lived but they didn’t know when she got out of her office.

He stopped at the Belasco and bought some theatre tickets and then went back to the Riggs Building. He got there just as Janey was stepping out of the elevator. She was nicely dressed and had her chin up with a new little cute independent tilt. He was so glad to see her he was afraid he was going to bawl. Her voice was different. She had a quick chilly way of talking and a kidding manner she’d never had before. He took her to supper and to the theatre and she told him all about how well she was getting on at Dreyfus and Carroll and what interesting people she was getting to know. It made him feel like a bum going around with her.

Then he left her at the apartment she had with a girl friend and took the car back to the station. He settled down and smoked a cigar in the smoker of the daycoach. He felt pretty blue. Next day in New York he looked up a guy he knew and they went out and had a few drinks and found ’em some skirts and the day after that he was sitting on a bench in Union Square with a headache and not a red cent in his jeans. He found the stubs of the tickets to the show at the Belasco theatre he’d taken Janey to and put them carefully in the cigarbox with the other junk.

Next boat he shipped on was the North Star bound for St. Nazaire with a cargo listed as canned goods that everybody knew was shell caps, and bonuses for the crew on account of the danger of going through the zone. She was a crazy whaleback, had been an oreboat on the Great Lakes, leaked so they had to have the pumps going half the time, but Joe liked the bunch and the chow was darn good and old Cap’n Perry was as fine an old seadog as you’d like to see, had been living ashore for a couple of years down at Atlantic Highlands but had come back on account of the big money to try to make a pile for his daughter; she’d get the insurance anyway, Joe heard him tell the mate with a wheezy laugh. They had a smooth winter crossing, the wind behind them all the way right till they were in the Bay of Biscay. It was very cold and the sea was dead calm when they came in sight of the French coast, low and sandy at the mouth of the Loire.

They had the flag up and the ship’s name signal and Sparks was working overtime and they sure were nervous on account of mines until the French patrol boat came out and led the way through the winding channel into the river between the minefields.

When they saw the spires and the long rows of grey houses and the little clustered chimney pots of St. Nazaire in the smoky dusk the boys were going round slapping each other on the back and saying they sure would get cockeyed this night.

But what happened was that they anchored out in the stream and Cap’n Perry and the First Mate went ashore in the dingy and they didn’t dock till two days later on account of there being no room at the wharves. When they did get ashore to take a look at the mademosels and the vin rouge, they all had to show their seaman’s passports when they left the wharf to a redfaced man in a blue uniform trimmed with red who had a tremendous pair of pointed black moustaches. Blackie Flannagan had crouched down behind him and somebody was just going to give him a shove over his back when the Chief yelled at them from across the street, “For Chris’ sake, can’t you c — s see that’s a frog cop? You don’t want to get run in right on the wharf, do you?”

Joe and Flannagan got separated from the others and walked around to look the town over. The streets were paved with cobblestones and awful little and funny and the old women all wore tight white lace caps and everything looked kinder falling down. Even the dogs looked like frog dogs. They ended up in a place marked American Bar but it didn’t look like any bar they’d ever seen in the States. They bought a bottle of cognac for a starter. Flannagan said the town looked like Hoboken, but Joe said it looked kinder like Villefranche where he’d been when he was in the navy. American dollars went pretty far if you knew enough not to let ’em gyp you.

Another American came in to the dump and they got to talking and he said he’d been torpedoed on the Oswego right in the mouth of the Loire river. They gave him some of the cognac and he said how it had been, that Uboat had blowed the poor old Oswego clear outa the water and when smoke cleared away she’d split right in two and closed up like a jackknife. They had another bottle of cognac on that and then the feller took them to a house he said he knew and there they found some more of the bunch drinking beer and dancing around with the girls.

Joe was having a good time parleyvooing with one of the girls, he’d point to something and she’d tell him how to say it in French, when a fight started someway and the frog cops came and the bunch had to run for it. They all got back aboard ship ahead of the cops but they came and stood on the dock and jabbered for about a half an hour until old Cap’n Perry, who’d just gotten back from town in a horsecab, told ’em where to get off.

The trip back was slow but pretty good. They were only a week in Hampton Roads, loaded up with a cargo of steel ingots and explosives, and cleared for Cardiff. It was nervous work. The Cap’n took a northerly course and they got into a lot of fog. Then after a solid week of icy cold weather with a huge following sea they sighted Rockall. Joe was at the wheel. The green hand in the crowsnest yelled out, “Battleship ahead,” and old Cap’n Perry stood on the bridge laughing, looking at the rock through his binoculars.

Next morning they raised the Hebrides to the south. Cap’n Perry was just pointing out the Butt of Lewis to the mate when the lookout in the bow gave a scared hail. It was a submarine all right. You could see first the periscope trailing a white feather of foam, then the dripping conning tower. The submarine had hardly gotten to the surface when she started firing across the North Star’s bows with a small gun that the squareheads manned while decks were still awash. Joe went running aft to run up the flag, although they had the flag painted amidships on either side of the boat. The engineroom bells jingled as Cap’n Perry threw her into full speed astern. The jerries stopped firing and four of them came on board in a collapsible punt. All hands had their life preservers on and some of the men were going below for their duffle when the fritz officer who came aboard shouted in English that they had five minutes to abandon the ship. Cap’n Perry handed over the ship’s papers, the boats were lowered like winking as the blocks were well oiled. Something made Joe run back up to the boat deck and cut the lashings on the liferafts with his jackknife, so he and Cap’n Perry and the ship’s cat were the last to leave the North Star. The jerries had planted bombs in the engine room and were rowing back to the submarine like the devil was after them. The Cap’n’s boat had hardly pushed off when the explosion lammed them a blow on the side of the head. The boat swamped and before they knew what had hit them they were swimming in the icy water among all kinds of planking and junk. Two of the boats were still afloat. The old North Star was sinking quietly with the flag flying and the signalflags blowing out prettily in the light breeze. They must have been half an hour or an hour in the water. After the ship had sunk they managed to get onto the liferafts and the mate’s boat and the Chief’s boat took them in tow. Cap’n Perry called the roll. There wasn’t a soul missing. The submarine had submerged and gone some time ago. The men in the boats started pulling towards shore. Till nightfall the strong tide was carrying them in fast towards the Pentland Firth. In the last dusk they could see the tall headlands of the Orkneys. But when the tide changed they couldn’t make headway against it. The men in the boats and the men in the rafts took turn and turn about at the oars but they couldn’t buck the terrible ebb. Somebody said the tide ran eight knots an hour in there. It was a pretty bad night. With the first dawn they caught sight of a scoutcruiser bearing down on them. Her searchlight glared suddenly in their faces making everything look black again. The Britishers took ’em on board and hustled them down into the engineroom to get warm. A redfaced steward came down with a bucket of steaming tea with rum in it and served it out with a ladle.

The scoutcruiser took ’em into Glasgow, pretty well shaken up by the chop of the Irish Sea, and they all stood around in the drizzle on the dock while Cap’n Perry went to find the American consul. Joe was getting numb in the feet standing still and tried to walk across to the iron gates opposite the wharf house to take a squint down the street, but an elderly man in a uniform poked a bayonet at his belly and he stopped. Joe went back to the crowd and told ’em how they were prisoners there like they were fritzes. Jez, it made ’em sore. Flannagan started telling about how the frogs had arrested him one time for getting into a fight with an orangeman in a bar in Marseilles and had been ready to shoot him because they said the Irish were all pro-German. Joe told about how the limeys had run him in Liverpool. They were all grousing about how the whole business was a lousy deal when Ben Tarbell the mate turned up with an old guy from the consulate and told ’em to come along.

They had to troop half across town through streets black dark for fear of airraids and slimy with rain, to a long tarpaper shack inside a barbedwire enclosure. Ben Tarbell told the boys he was sorry but they’d have to stay there for the present, and that he was trying to get the consul to do something about it and the old man had cabled the owners to try to get ’em some pay. Some girls from the Red Cross brought them grub, mostly bread and marmalade and meatpaste, nothing you could really sink your teeth into, and some thin blankets. They stayed in that damn place for twelve days, playing poker and yarning and reading old newspapers. Evenings sometimes a frousy halfdrunk woman would get past the old guard and peek in the door of the shack and beckon one of the men out into the foggy darkness behind the latrines somewhere. Some of the guys were disgusted and wouldn’t go.

They’d been shut up in there so long that when the mate finally came around and told ’em they were going home they didn’t have enough spunk left in ’em to yell. They went across the town packed with traffic and gasflare in the fog again and on board a new 6000 ton freighter, the Vicksburg, that had just unloaded a cargo of cotton. It felt funny being a passenger and being able to lay around all day on the trip home.

Joe was lying out on the hatchcover the first sunny day they’d had when old Cap’n Perry came up to him. Joe got to his feet. Cap’n Perry said he hadn’t had a chance to tell him what he thought of him for having the presence of mind to cut the lashings on those rafts and that half the men on the boat owed their lives to him. He said Joe was a bright boy and ought to start studying how to get out of the focastle and that the American merchant marine was growing every day on account of the war and young fellers like him were just what they needed for officers. “You remind me, boy,” he said, “when we get to Hampton Roads and I’ll see what I can do on the next ship I get. You could get your third mate’s ticket right now with a little time in shore school.” Joe grinned and said he sure would like to. It made him feel good the whole trip. He couldn’t wait to go and see Del and tell her he wasn’t in the focastle any more. Dod gast it, he was tired of being treated like a jailbird all his life.

The Vicksburg docked at Newport News. Hampton Roads was fuller of shipping than Joe had ever seen it. Along the wharves everybody was talking about the Deutschland that had just unloaded a cargo of dyes in Baltimore. When Joe got paid off he wouldn’t even take a drink with his shipmates but hustled down to the ferry station to get the ferry for Norfolk. Jez, the old ferry seemed slow. It was about five o’clock a Saturday afternoon when he got into Norfolk. Walking down the street he was scared she wouldn’t be home yet.

Del was home and seemed glad to see him. She said she had a date that night but he teased her into breaking it off. After all, weren’t they engaged to be married? They went out and had a sundae at an icecream parlor and she told him all about her new job with the Duponts and how she was getting ten more a week and how all the boys she knew and several girls were working in the munition factories and how some of ’em were making fifteen dollars a day and they were buying cars and the boy she’d had a date with that night had a Packard. It took a long time for Joe to get around to tell her about what old Cap’n Perry had said and she was all excited about his having been torpedoed and said why didn’t he go and get a job over at Newport News in the shipyard and make real money, she didn’t like the idea of his being torpedoed every minute, but Joe said he hated to leave the sea now that there was a chance of getting ahead. She asked him how much he’d make as third mate on a freighter and he said a hundred and twentyfive a month but there’d always be bonuses for the zone and there were a lot of new ships being built and he thought the prospects pretty good all around.

Del screwed her face up in a funny way and said she didn’t know how she’d like having a husband who was away from home all the time, but she went into a phone booth and called the other boy up and broke off the date she had with him. They went back to Del’s house and she cooked up a bite of supper. Her folks had gone over to Fortress Monroe to eat with an aunt of hers. It made Joe feel good to see her with an apron on bustling around the kitchen. She let him kiss her a couple of times but when he went up behind her and hugged her and pulled her face back and kissed her, she said not to do that, it made her feel all out of breath. The dark smell of her hair and the feel of her skin that was white like milk against his lips made him feel giddy. It was a relief when they went out on the street in the keen northwest wind again. He bought her a box of Saturday night candies at a drugstore. They went to see a bill of vaudeville and movies at the Colonial. The Belgian war pictures were awful exciting and Del said wasn’t it terrible and Joe started to tell her about what a guy he knew had told him about being in an air raid in London but she didn’t listen.

When he kissed her goodnight in the hall, Joe felt awful hot and pressed her up in the corner by the hatrack and tried to get his hand under her skirt but she said not till they were married and he said with his mouth against hers, when would they get married and she said they’d get married as soon as he got his new job.

Just then they heard the key in the latch just beside them and she pulled him into the parlor and whispered not to say anything about their being engaged just yet. It was Del’s old man and her mother and her two kid sisters and the old man gave Joe a mean look and the kid sisters giggled and Joe went away feeling fussed. It was early yet but Joe felt too het up to sleep so he walked around a little and then went by the Stirps’ house to see if Will was in town. Will was in Baltimore looking for a job, but old Mrs. Stirp said if he didn’t have nowhere to go and wanted to sleep in Will’s bed he was welcome, but he couldn’t sleep for thinking of Del and how smart she was and how she felt in his arms and how the smell of her hair made him feel crazy and how much he wanted her.

First thing he did Monday morning was to go over to Newport News and see Cap’n Perry. The old man was darn nice to him, asked him about his schooling and his folks. When Joe said he was old Cap’n Joe Williams’ son, Cap’n Perry couldn’t do enough for him. Him and Joe’s old man had been on the Albert and Mary Smith together in the old clipper ship days. He said he’d have a berth for Joe as junior officer on the Henry B. Higginbotham as soon as she’d finished repairs and he must go to work at shore school over in Norfolk and get ready to go before the licensing board and get his ticket. He’d coach him up on the fine points himself. When he left the old man said, “Ma boy, if you work like you oughter, bein’ your Dad’s son, an’ this war keeps up, you’ll be master of your own vessel in five years, I’ll guarantee it.”

Joe couldn’t wait to get hold of Del and tell her about it. That night he took her to the movies to see the Four Horsemen. It was darned exciting, they held hands all through and he kept his leg pressed against her plump little leg. Seeing it with her and the war and everything flickering on the screen and the music like in church and her hair against his cheek and being pressed close to her a little sweaty in the warm dark like to went to his head. When the picture was over he felt he’d go crazy if he couldn’t have her right away. She was kinder kidding him along and he got sore and said God damn it, they’d have to get married right away or else he was through. She’d held out on him just about long enough. She began to cry and turned her face up to him all wet with tears and said if he really loved her he wouldn’t talk like that and that that was no way to talk to a lady and he felt awful bad about it. When they got back to her folks’ house, everybody had gone to bed and they went out in the pantry back of the kitchen without turning the light on and she let him love her up. She said honestly she loved him so much she’d let him do anything he wanted only she knew he wouldn’t respect her if she did. She said she was sick of living at home and having her mother keep tabs on her all the time, and she’d tell her folks in the morning about how he’d got a job as a ship’s officer and they had to get married before he left and that he must get him his uniform right away.

When Joe left the house to look around and find a flop, he was walking on air. He hadn’t planned to get married that soon but what the hell, a man had to have a girl of his own. He began doping out what he’d write Janey about it, but he decided she wouldn’t like it and that he’d better not write. He wished Janey wasn’t getting so kind of uppish, but after all she was making a big success of business. When he was skipper of his own ship she’d think it was all great.

Joe was two months ashore that time. He went to shore school every day, lived at the Y.M.C.A. and didn’t take a drink or shoot pool or anything. The pay he had saved up from the two trips on the North Star was just about enough to swing it. Every week or so he went over to Newport News to talk it over with old Cap’n Perry who told him what kind of questions the examining board would ask him and what kind of papers he’d need. Joe was pretty worried about his original A.B. certificate, but he had another now and recommendations from captains of ships he’d been on. What the hell, he’d been at sea four years, it was about time he knew a little about running a ship. He almost worried himself sick over the examination, but when he was actually there standing before the old birds on the board it wasn’t as bad as he thought it ud be. When he actually got the third mate’s license and showed it to Del, they were both of them pretty tickled.

Joe bought his uniform when he got an advance of pay. From then on he was busy all day doing odd jobs round the drydock for old Cap’n Perry who hadn’t gotten a crew together yet. Then in the evenings he worked painting up the little bedroom, kitchenette and bath he’d rented for him and Del to live in when he was ashore. Del’s folks insisted on having a church wedding and Will Stirp, who was making fifteen dollars a day in a shipyard in Baltimore, came down to be best man.

Joe felt awful silly at the wedding and Will Stirp had gotten hold of some whiskey and had a breath like a distillery wagon and a couple of the other boys were drunk and that made Del and her folks awful sore and Del looked like she wanted to crown him all through the service. When it was over Joe found he’d wilted his collar and Del’s old man began pulling a lot of jokes and her sisters giggled so much in their white organdy dresses, he could have choked ’em. They went back to the Matthews’ house and everybody was awful stiff except Will Stirp and his friends who brought in a bottle of whiskey and got old man Matthews cockeyed. Mrs. Matthews ran ’em all out of the house and all the old cats from the Ladies Aid rolled their eyes up and said, “Could you imagine it?” And Joe and Del left in a taxicab a feller he knew drove and everybody threw rice at them and Joe found he had a sign reading Newlywed pinned on the tail of his coat and Del cried and cried and when they got to their apartment Del locked herself in the bathroom and wouldn’t answer when he called and he was afraid she’d fainted.

Joe took off his new blue serge coat and his collar and necktie and walked up and down not knowing what to do. It was six o’clock in the evening. He had to be aboard ship at midnight because they were sailing for France as soon as it was day. He didn’t know what to do. He thought maybe she’d want something to eat so he cooked up some bacon and eggs on the stove. By the time everything was cold and Joe was walking up and down cussing under his breath, Del came out of the bathroom looking all fresh and pink like nothing had happened. She said she couldn’t eat anything but let’s go to a movie…“But, honeybug,” said Joe, “I’ve got to pull out at twelve.” She began to cry again and he flushed and felt awful fussed. She snuggled up to him and said, “We won’t stay for the feature. We’ll come back in time.” He grabbed her and started hugging her but she held him off firmly and said, “Later.”

Joe couldn’t look at the picture. When they got back to the apartment it was ten o’clock. She let him pull off her clothes but she jumped into bed and wrapped the bedclothes around her and whimpered that she was afraid of having a baby, that he must wait till she found out what to do to keep from having a baby. All she let him do was rub up against her through the bedclothes and then suddenly it was ten of twelve and he had to jump into his clothes and run down to the wharf. An old colored man rowed him out to where his ship lay at anchor. It was a sweetsmelling spring night without any moon. He heard honking overhead and tried to squint up his eyes to see the birds passing against the pale stars. “Them’s geese, boss,” said the old colored man in a soft voice. When he climbed onboard everybody started kidding him and declared he looked all wore out. Joe didn’t know what to say so he talked big and kidded back and lied like a fish.