Maiden Voyage

SEVEN

It was raining much harder by the time Harry crossed the wooden boards of the landing stage at Liverpool's pierhead, pausing to let a puttering lorry pass in front of him with a load of clanking casks, and then dodging into the doorway of a small office building with a corrugated-iron roof. He turned left once he was inside the building, and walked along the corridor until he reached a small untidy workshop at the end. A fair-haired young nun in a long leather apron was standing at a bench, filing noisily at a length of copper piping. On the wall was a calendar for 1923 with a photograph of Ann Pennington, the Ziegfield girl with the "dimpled knees'.

Harry took off his cap and slapped the rain from it. "Good morning, Dennis," he said loudly.

Dennis stopped filing as if he hadn't been very interested in it anyway, and tossed the rasp onto the workbench with a loud clatter.

You're early, wacker," he said. "Janice kick you out of bed?"

"She's at work. I thought I'd come by here before I went over to Lime Street to see Jim."

Dennis nodded towards the workshop window. "Nice drop of rain, don't you think? Bring me leeks on. Do you fancy a cup of char?"

Harry shook his head. "I was wondering how the loading was going."

Dennis propped his bony bands on his hips. "All right, as far as I know." There was a hint of challenge hi his voice.

"Any suitable automobiles? Anything that's taken your eye?"

"Not especially."

"But there are automobiles here, ready to go on board?"

Dennis was silent for a moment. Then he said, "Some, yes. That's right."

Harry thoughtfully walked around the workbench and went up to the window. Beyond the clutter of low pierhead buildings, flagstaffs, and lamp standards; beyond the jostle of lorries and automobiles and people hurrying backwards and forwards in the showery wind, the outline of the Arcadia rose like a great black and white castle, towering a hundred feet out of the water.

Even from here, it was difficult to grasp the size of her. She was nearly a sixth of a mile long, and when she moved away from Liverpool's landing stage on Tuesday she would be carrying 2,275 passengers and crew. Pennants were already flapping from her masts and from her three huge yellow-painted funnels; and the red ensign furled and unfurled at her stern counter with laconic pride, stirred by the wind, untroubled by the rain.

Harry could see only a part of the Arcadia's hull from where he was standing, but she was the largest luxury liner in the world, from her sharp cruising prow to her shapely overhanging stern. Her oil-fired reciprocating engines, the very latest design, were easily capable of twenty-eight knots. Keys Shipping, of course, hoped that she could go much faster, and take the Blue Riband for the fastest Atlantic crossing from the Mauritania, which had held it since 1907.

As Harry looked at the black-painted liner, and the scores of dockers and officials who clustered around her, he was reminded of the journalist who had said that "if you were followed by a cab coming out of Pennsylvania Station at twenty-five miles per hour, then you would have some conception of the Arcadia at speed."

He said to Dennis, "You've got something on your mind, haven't you? You're backing out."

Dennis shrugged. "It's not so much backing out, Harry. It's not that. It's a question of conscience. I mean, how many people on board that ship are going to be just plain people, like you and me? Working class. You're talking about drowning the very people you're supposed to be saving."

Harry turned away from the window."When did you work all this out?"

"You only have to look at the passenger roster," Dennis insisted. "Three hundred and seventeen first-class, two hundred and fifty second-class, six hundred and fifty steerage. You're going to drown nine hundred of ours just to get at three hundred of theirs? And children, too? It doesn't make sense."

Harry rubbed his eyes, as if he were thinking. "You thought it made sense before."

"I know. But I hadn't worked it out then."

"You've forgotten the ship itself," said Harry. "The ship itself is an embodiment of capitalist exploitation."

"Well, yes. Yes, it is. I've always said that. But the trouble is, our people are going to be on it. I mean, it's our people what are going to be thrashing around in the sea."

Harry said, "There always have to be casualties, in any war. This is a war, Dennis, make no mistake about it."

Dennis untied his apron, and folded it, and laid it over the workbench. "I know you get your accidental casualties," he said. "But this her too cold-blooded for me. Because what's going to happen when she goes down? Same as on the Titanic, I shouldn't wonder. They saved over half of the first-class passengers, on the Titanic, but less than a quarter of the steerage. And then there's the crew, over a thousand of them. A thousand working men. Are you going to risk their lives, too?"

Harry turned away from the window. "You're getting hysterical about this, Dennis. If everything goes to plan, then nobody need drown. Not one single person, rich or poor."

"I suppose you can guarantee that," said Dennis, crossing his arms in the way that working-men do when they feel defiant.

Harry smiled. "I can't guarantee anything. Dynamite doesn't come with any kind of assurances about what it's going to do. It doesn't have a recommendation on every box, "as used by Bolshevists everywhere'."

"You don't have to make fun of me," Dennis told him.

"I'm not, Dennis. But all that's going to happen here is a concentrated explosion in one of the cargo holds. The Arcadia has plenty of watertight compartments, and it will take her a long while to sink. It took the Titanic over three-and-a-half hours to go down, a torn open for a third of her whole length. Besides, unlike the Titanic, there are quite enough lifeboats for everybody."

Dennis was silent. Harry came up to him and put an arm around his shoulders and gave him a gentle, affectionate punch on the arm. "Listen, Dennis, this it your chance to do something historical. This is your chance to strike a blow against capitalism that people are going to remember for ever. The night the Arcadia sank. Think of it!"

Dennis said reluctantly, "I suppose you're right."

"Right? You know I'm right! I'll tell you how you can be sure that I'm right. You go take a look at those first-class staterooms on the Arcadia, with all their decorated panels and their soft beds and their silk drapes, and then you take a walk through Bootle or Arnfield and look at the way the ordinary people have to live there. That ship was built as a monument to the arrogance of the rich; it's like the wealthy people of this world deliberately taunting the poor. "We've got all of the money, and by God, we're going to waste it right in front of your noses, just to remind you that you have to live on herring and pies and potatoes, while we fill ourselves with caviar and lobster and ripe pheasant'!"

Dennis looked at Harry seriously. He had a slight squint in his pale green eyes, which made him appear slightly retarded. He was a hard-working young Socialist, however, and he never made up his his mind about anything without considering it in detail. At last, with obvious reluctance, he nodded and said, "All right. As long as you're sure that nobody's going to be hurt."

"That's the Dennis I know and love," said Harry. "You've got an automobile?"

"There's one special one I had in mind," said Dennis. "It arrived last night, quite late, so we haven't had time to load it yet. It's a Marmon Big Eight, real posh job. They've got it parked in the warehouse."

"You can get the keys?

"Don't need keys," Dennis told him smugly. "Any automobile lock you ever heard of, I can open it up with a bit of wire."

You're sure about that?"

"Try me."

"I intend to. Do you think we can load the stuff now?"

Dennis sniffed, and looked up at the dock on the workshop wall. "I don't see why not. Give it five minutes. That's when Wally goes off for his lunchtime pint. We'll have the place to ourselves then."

Harry cleared a space on the workbench and hoisted himself up so that he was sitting on the edge of it with his legs swinging. "You know something, Dennis," he said. "I think for the first time in my life I've felt like I'm really fulfilling myself."

"You're not scared?" asked Dennis.

Harry glanced at him through the distorting lenses of his spectacles. Dennis had always wondered how somebody who looked so vulnerable could be such a dedicated fanatic. Harry said, "Of course I'm scared. Aren't you scared? Jesus, Dennis, destiny is always scary."

Dennis said, "Yes," in a way that sounded as if he confronted destiny every morning after breakfast. Then he went to the pegs where his raincoat was hanging, and took a paper packet of sandwiches out of one of the pockets. The sandwiches looked decidedly squashed.

"Cheese butty?" he asked Harry. "Might as well have something to eat while you're waiting. It's Cheshire."

Harry shook his head. He was too agitated to think about chewing and swallowing a cheese sandwich. "How do you know when Wally's gone off for his drink?" he wanted to know.

His mouth crammed with sandwich, Dennis pointed towards the window. "Walks past. Has to."

They waited another five minutes; and then a round-shouldered man in a doth cap passed the window on his routine way to the Queen Victoria public house outside the dock area: little realising that he was acting out the most historically important moment of his whole life. "All right," said Harry, "let's get the stuff out and go."

"The stuff" was in a wooden chest about three feet by two feet by two feet, bound with cheap lacquered hinges. Stencilled on the top of the chest in black were the words NOT WANTED ON VOYAGE. Dennis dragged it out from under the workbench, and they both stood looking at it for a moment before Harry said, "Come on, then. We haven't got all day."

Outside, the rain clouds had all rolled eastwards towards Runcorn, and the wet planking of the landing stage had been gilded with morning sunlight. Carrying the wooden chest between them, Harry and Dennis walked between the rows of wet iron bollards to the warehouse where passengers" cars were kept before they were swung aboard by cranes and stowed in the liner's holds.

The air was sharp with the smell of brine and fuel-oil, and seagulls sloped and feathered around the tall funnels of the Arcadia, and dived for scraps. The Arcadia was so huge that she was almost impossible to look at. Harry noticed that the dockers and victuallers who crowded the landing-stage hardly ever glanced at the ship at all. In the same way people who live and work in the shadow of high ranges of mountains never stand back and focus on the massive terrain which on them.

Harry was reminded of the newspaper story of the man who had hurried aboard the Titanic so late that he had no time to take a good look at her. He had promised himself that he would take an appreciative stroll alongside her once she was berthed in New York.

Dennis said, "This is it," and pushed open a green-painted door with his shoulder. Inside, the warehouse was silent and gloomy, irradiated by light that was strained the colour of cold tea. There a thirty or forty automobiles parked there, bumper to bumper, all facing towards the large closed gates through which they would eventually be driven out to the ship.

Harry carefully lowered the wooden chest onto the cobbled floor. There were at least ten Rolls-Royces here, in varying shades of cream and mauve and brown. There were Bentleys, Daimler touring cars, and an Angus-Sanderson. The whole warehouse smelled of motoring spirit, wax polish, and leather. It was the heady aroma of the newly mobile rich.

"The car we want is round the other side," said Dennis. They hefted up the chest again, and carried it between the rows of automobiles, trying not to let it bump against the mudguards and headlamps all around them. Blowing up the Arcadia was one thing; blowing up a few cars and themselves as well wasn't what Harry had in mind.

The Marmon was parked on its own. It was long and black, and its chauffeur had buffed it up to a mirrorlike shine. Harry could see himself and Dennis approaching it in the reflection paintwork of the fenders like two dark dwarfs.

"All right, set the stuff down here," whispered Dennis. He looked around over the tops of the cars to make sure that they were alone. In any event they were quite well hidden, because the custom-built coachwork of most of the cars was higher than usual, to accommodate their owners" top hats.

"Just open the trunk and let's get it loaded," Harry whispered back.

Dennis crouched down at the back of the Marmon, fiddling with the lock on the trunk, while Harry kept a lookout.

"I was talking to the chauffeur about this car when he first brung it in," said Dennis. "Do you know how much this car cost? Nearly twelve thousand dollars, fittings included. It's got a gold vanity by Cartier, built-in, and solid silver ice tongs for the bar, and all the fabric inside is handmade French what-jum-acallit, tapestry."

"Just the goddamned automobile to blow up," said Harry. "I thought you'd appreciate it," grimaced Dennis, still wrestling with the lock.

"Can you hurry it up?" Harry told him.

There was a moment when Dennis, teeth gritted, had to force the last lever of the lock. "Don't break it, for God's sake," Harry warned him. But then the lock gave way with a loud click, and the trunk door came down on well-lubricated hinges. Inside, there were two shooting-sticks, a locked binocular case, and a picnic basket which bore the name of Abercrombie & Fitch. Plenty of extra room for a wooden chest packed with thirty sticks of dynamite.

"Right, drag the stuff over here," beckoned Dennis. "I'll pack it right behind the picnic basket, where it's more difficult for anyone to see."

"What about the lock?" asked Harry, as he shuffled over with the case of dynamite. "How do I get back into the trunk when I want to set everything off?"

"I'll fix it so that you can hook it open with a piece of wire," Dennis told him. "Then all you have to do is connect up the leads of the clock with the detonators inside the lid, and you're away." He suddenly looked abashed. "Well when I say away ..."

"I'm not going to take any more risks than I have to," Harry told him.

Together they picked up the wooden chest and lifted it onto the open door of the Marmon's trunk. But just as they were sliding it past the picnic basket into the inner recesses of the trunk, they heard a door open on the far side of the warehouse, and the sudden sound of voices. They both crouched down, and froze.

"You can load most of them today, can't you?" said a loud voice that echoed around the vaulted ceiling.

"Well some, Mr Pollard. It depends on the lads."

"What do you mean, it depends on the lads? I was down the Queen Victoria ten minutes since, and most of the so-called lads were propping up the sawdust bar, half stewed. The lads can put their backs into it and get these motors loaded by tomorrow, or else they can find something else to do, like delivering letters, maybe, or digging coal."

"I'll see what I can do. That's all I can say."

"Well, do your best. If Mr Keys were still with us, you'd be doing it, and no mistake. See if you can do it for me."

"All right, Mr Pollard. But I can't promise miracles."

Harry and Dennis waited for almost five minutes after the door had slammed shut again before they dared to move. Then, without exchanging a single word, they pushed the wooden chest deep into the Marmon's trunk, and quietly relocked it.

"I've fixed it so that it's only held shut by one lever," explained Dennis in a hoarse voice. "All you have to do is push a metal strip into the lock, twist it, and it should spring open straightaway."

"What if it doesn't?"

"Then try again."

And what if it still doesn't?"

"If it still doesn't, you can assume that God is on the side of the rich,and enjoy the rest of your trip as per normal."

"You daft bugger."

They crept across the warehouse as quietly as they could. Dennis peeked through the outside door to make sure that nobody was looking their way, and then they both strolled back to the workshop, trying to appear as nonchalant as possible. They were given a suspicious stare by a man in a droopy moustache and a Derby hat who was obviously keeping his eyes open for pilferage, especially now that the Arcadia had been fitted out with her brass firehose rings, but when they turned in to the workshop instead of making for the main gate he lost interest in them.

"If only he knew," hissed Dennis, inclining his head back towards the security man.

"Nobody's going to search the cars now, are they?" asked Harry.

"Why should they?" said Dennis. "There's nothing in that Marmon's trunk that anybody's going to want until they get across the Atlantic. Relax. All you have to do now is creep down to the hold one night, set your clock, and you're done. Well, when I say you're done..."

"You don't think any of the dockers might break into the car before the Arcadia sails?"

Dennis led Harry back into the workshop, and picked up his leather apron.

"Well, there's always a risk of that. Dockers and shipfitters have always believed in their divine right to supplement their wages with just about anything they can lay their hands on. Do you know we had to replace the copper piping in the first-class staterooms three times in some cases? What the fitters do is bang a nail through a likely-looking pipe, and if no water comes out, they rip it out. Then they walk out of the gate with it stuffed down their trouser legs. Most of the pubs around here take copper pipe instead of cash."

Harry picked up his cap. "I guess that's nothing more than social justice. The capitalist robs the working man, and the working man tries to rob the capitalist in return. I just hope that none of the working men decide to take a look inside of that Marmon, that's all."

"They don't usually tamper with the cars, not as a rule."

Harry said, "You don't know whose car it is, do you? It would be real social justice if it was somebody very respectable, and they got blamed for sabotage."

Dennis smiled. "That's part of the fun of this particular car."

"What do you mean? You mean it really does belong to somebody special?"

"Oh, yes. That was part of the reason I chose it. It belongs to Mr Mark Beeney, the fellow who owns American TransAtlantic. He's the biggest rival that Keys Shipping have got. If there's anybody in the whole world who would like to see the Arcadia sink to the bottom of the ocean, it's him."

Harry looked at Dennis for a while, his mouth slanted in amusement. Then he ruffled Dennis" blond hair, and said, "I have to be going, okay? But I think you're a genius. You know that? I think you're a complete genius."

Past the window, as round-shouldered as before, Wally returned from the Queen Victoria to take charge of his automobiles again. "There he goes," said Dennis with a grin. "I hope he gets his name in the newspapers too."