CHAPTER II
THE SPARK IN THE GAP
"Are you the operator?" asked a passenger in a black rain-coat, blocking the doorway of the Laminian's wireless-room.
The fog of the night before had given way to a driving rain, like a sulky woman who finally and openly surrenders to tears. New York lay behind the Laminian and her passengers, seeming, under the soft torrent of those tears, a many-towered city of loaf-sugar which dissolved lower and lower into the flat line of the horizon.
The stranger in the doorway repeated his question.
"I'm going to be," came the answer from the coatless figure bent over its mystic apparatus. He had not so much as turned to face his interlocutor.
"Mean it's your first run?" inquired the huge and genial spirit of the doorway. This question, like his first, remained unanswered. So he repeated it in a tone of mild and attained humility.
"I can't be an operator until I've got something to operate on," said the voice from the room. Its barbed curtness of tone no more reached the quick of the newcomer than water could reach a duck's breast.
"Then you're not sending yet?" he amiably persisted, with his shoulder against the doorpost.
"Not till I've tuned up this pile of junk!" was the preoccupied answer of the operator, bent low over his work.
"You don't mean she's off her trolley, our first hour out?" asked the other. His patience seemed infinite. He still stood there, studying the shirt-sleeved figure in the centre of the room.
"I can't make her spark right. And I've got a damp helix and a motor running weak!"
The words were followed by a gasp of exasperation and the rattle of a tool flung to the floor.
The huge-shouldered man in the raincoat made no effort to conceal his disappointment. It was what one deserved, he conceded, for travelling in such a punk-riveted, slush-pitted, coal-eating second-rater!
But he remained up on the bridge-deck. He continued to lean nonchalantly against the dripping rail, peering out from under bushy iron-grey eyebrows drawn close to the flat-bridged nose, unmindful of the rain that beat in from the northeast as the Laminian plowed her way down through the Narrows and the Lower Bay. His red-rimmed, many-wrinkled eyes were still on the horizon, and his massive, russet hand was still clamped on the white awning-stanchion as Sandy Hook was passed and Atlantic Highlands melted down into a vague monotone of rain-swept loneliness.
Beyond the ship's officers, who fretted uncertainly back and forth along the bridge, his figure was the only one on the deserted deck. As the mist shut off the last dull line of Navesink, and the nose of the steamer swung southward, rising and dipping in the long ground-swell of the open Atlantic, the watching man gave vent to an involuntary sigh of relief.
But he still stood there, in the slanting rain, while the deck beneath his feet shook with the purposeful throb of the engines under their "full steam ahead," and the pulsating and ponderous thing of steel, "carrying a bone in her teeth," shouldered her way on through a ghost like world of sea and rain. She seemed, for all her pitted and rust-stained plates, dignified with some new-found sense of mystery, of austere and unknown missions, as she sought out her predestined path through the grey loneliness of her universe. She seemed humanised, endowed with the will of a sentient and reasoning being.
The stranger looked about quickly, as the thick-necked, short-legged captain, in dripping oilskins, leaned over the port bridge-gate and called back along the empty deck:
"You, there!—are you gettin anything?"
There was no answer to his call.
"Aren't you gettin' that ship out there?" he demanded peremptorily, as he flung the raindrops from his cap-brim with a bull-like shake of the head.
He leaned on the wet rail and waited. But still there was no answer to his question. So he repeated it, this time in a bellow. Then came the sound of a chair being pushed back on deck-boards in the wireless-room, and the rattle of a quickly opened shutter.
"I'll have her in five minutes," answered the operator. The shutter closed again, sharply. Captain Yandel, the master of the Laminian, mumbled under his breath, and turned back to the bridge.
The man in the raincoat swung casually about on his heel and studied the operator's station, where the after-deck superstructure rose squat and square as a scow-cabin out of the bleached flooring of the weather-deck. He peered up to where the "T" aerials of phosphor-bronze wire on their ashwood stretchers bridged the two mastheads; he followed the course of those united wires as they led down into the square little station.
Next to this station, on the right, was the ship's lamp-room. In front of it stood the flag-locker. Farther along the deck, he noted, came the chart-room, and then the captain's cabin. In front of that again was the wheel-house and the canvas-strapped bridge.
On this bridge an officer, unsheathing a glass, was peering out to sea. The stranger followed the direction of the pointed glass and made out the ponderously rocking mass of a battleship as she crept up on them through the mist. There was something ominous and authoritative about her, with her sullen turrets and her monotone of colour, as she belched out her black smoke-plumes that hung low on the sky-line.
Then the stranger in the dripping raincoat swung sharply about and looked up at the mast head. As he did so he saw a nervous blue spark appear and disappear at the ends of the taut-strung aerials that cradled back and forth with every dip and plunge of the ship. A muffled crash and clatter of sound echoed out of the closed station; a simultaneous kiss and crackle of broken noise came from the masthead.
It was the wireless operator at last working his key. It was the Hertzian waves, erupting from the mended coils, winging their way with the speed of light out through the loneliness of the rain-fogged afternoon.
Then came a space of silence, interrupted by the sudden appearance of the operator, still in his shirt-sleeves, with his coat held over his head like a hood. He strode forward to the bridge-gate, where he was met by the waiting captain. Together they bent over a sheet from a tinted form-pad. Then the hooded figure hurried back to the station, and the slam of a door punctuated his disappearance from sight.
The man in the raincoat turned back to the battleship, and stood thoughtfully regarding the bursts of foam on her plunging cutwater and the intermittent shower of spray as she rose and dipped in the cross-swell. Through the engine-room skylight behind him came the call of subterranean voices, the busy clangour of iron scraping on iron, the quick slam of furnace doors, magnified in the open shaft-head to sounds of titanic proportions. As he stood there a deck steward mounted the brass-plated stair way, carrying a tray with coffee-cake and steaming cups of tea.
The man at the rail wheeled about quickly at the unexpected sound of a voice so close behind him. He declined the proffered refreshment briskly and swung back to his earlier position, staring out at the battleship. The steward took up his tray and passed on to the operator's door, where, adroitly balancing on one foot, he tapped on the panel with the other.
The door opened, and this time the white glare of the electric light shone along the wet deck. The man at the rail, twisting his head, without any betraying movement of the body, succeeded in getting a more satisfactory glimpse of the room.
Behind the door swung a curtain of soiled denim, partly withdrawn. Squatting on a canvas camp-chair before his unpainted work-table was the operator. His wireless helmet-receiver, or "set," was clasped over his ears and held close to the bent head by a chaplet of glimmering metal. Against each "receiver" the operator pressed a white handkerchief, to shut away out side noises.
His face was lean, clear-cut, touched with vigour. It was too vital and youthful in texture to be called leathery, though it was sunburnt to what seemed almost a coffee-colour, contrasting strangely with the ruddiness of the open-weathered ship's officers about him. He had, too, a touch of the ascetic in the high brow and the wide cheek-bones, his leanness of jowl giving one the impression of generous reservoirs of energy greedily and continually drained by some ever-adventuring thirst for activity. Though his eyes were impersonally studious and abstracted, there was a redeeming line or two of humour about the mouth. His hands were long and bony and slender, with some thing persistently scholar-like about them, for all their scarred and calloused and sinewed strength. This impression was further borne out by the restless, uncoördinated, and at times, almost wolf-like restlessness of the spare and nervous body as he passed back and forth in the narrow cabin. There seemed something unsubjugated in his long strides, as though he and his great length of limb had not yet grown used to confined places. This sense of an achieved repression was strengthened by the touch of audacity about the wide and clear-seeing eyes as he circled his room or sat sprawlingly before his instruments—of an audacity tempered with intelligence.
He nodded cheerfully enough to the steward, however, at the sight of the coffee-cake and the steaming tea. Then he turned back to his responder. The steward, leaving his tea and cake on the seat of a broken-armed steamer-chair, went on his way, and the deck was again deserted.
"Why aren't you getting the Princeton, there?" Captain Yandel once more demanded from the bridge-gate. It was plain to see his feeling for the new operator was not an over-kindly one.
The new operator showed his head round one corner of the stateroom.
"I'll try again!"
Once more came the hiss and rattle and crackle of the spark, and once more the lean and sun-tanned face appeared round a corner of the stateroom.
"He's busy talking to the navy-yard!"
"To what?"
"To the navy-yard."
"What'd he tell you?"
The new operator hesitated for a moment or two before answering. His singularly quiet eyes were resting on Captain Yandel's nose, for it was a remarkable nose, something between a cardinal and magenta colour, stippled with the brighter hues of countless little broken veins.
"He told me to shut up, and cut out!" he answered at last, editing the irate officer's blasphemy out of the message.
The passenger in the raincoat fell to pacing the open deck. He stopped once or twice, quite casually, to glance in at the wireless apparatus. Then, seeing that the operator had taken off his ear-phones and was leaning back in his canvas chair, giving his open and undivided attention to the tea and coffee-cake, the stranger came to a stop and leaned companionably against the jamb of the open door.
The young man glanced up at the huge figure darkening his cabin. He did so with no outward sign of emotion. He had, apparently, become inured to the wondering eyes of the passengers, and he had his own ends to pursue. So he went on with his coffee-cake in silence.
"Could you take those messages of mine now?" asked the man in the raincoat.
"Any old time now," answered the operator, without so much as a second glance.
"I settle for it with you, don't I?" asked the stranger, drawing out a roll of bills. The formidable dimensions of that roll were lost on the man bending over the teacup.
"Leave your name and cabin number, and pay the purser. They don't seem to trust operators on this floating palace! All I do is stamp the time-check on the message and send it out."
He took the two messages, stamped them, and read them aloud, before pencilling the number of words on a corner of each sheet and stabbing it on his "send" hook. He read, perfunctorily:
Varrel, Sixty Wall Street, New York.
Our man on board Laminian bound Puerto Locombia. Wire Washington. Will have him held by authorities to await instructions. Duffy.
The second message he read off quite as hastily, and with equal nonchalance:
Doctor Bernardo Morales, Mobile.
Advise Charleston wireless to relay Laminian southward bound if shipment of laundry equipment and steel ties left Mobile for Ganley and date of sailing. Michael Duffy.
The stranger waited a moment at the door, as though expecting some further word or movement from the operator.
But the man of the key was already busy over his "tuner." So the stranger in the raincoat turned away, with a look of mild exasperation in his predaceous and puzzled little eyes.