James Gould Cozzens - S.S. San Pedro

S.S. SAN PEDRO

By

James Gould Cozzens

BERKLEY PUBLISHING CORP.

145 W. 57th Street New York 19, N. Y.

C OPYRIGHT 1930, 1931 BY J AMES G OULD C OZZENS

For my Mother in memory of Nova Scotia sea captains

S.S. SAN PEDRO

I

J UNE 7, Friday, in the morning, the twin-screw turbine liner San Pedro, seventeen thousand tons, lay at her Hoboken pier. To sail at noon on Brixton & Heath's Brazil-River Plate express service, she bore a million dollars in gold for the banking houses of the Argentine. Lashed on her forward well-deck, wedged in number one and number two upper holds, were automobiles, crated, for Montevideo. She carried two thousand tons of cash registers and baking-powder in tins, of cotton shirts and bath-tubs, of children's toys, agricultural implements, and a sealed consignment of machine-guns for the government of Paraguay. Coal to bring her out and back loaded her down, overflowing into shelter-deck bunkers forward. Between ten o'clock and half past eleven she took on board one hundred and seventy-two passengers.

Aft, they had a boom out. Trunks were assembled by the half-ton in a corded net on the wharf floor. The boom picked them up easily, swung them into the blaze of the sun. They dropped down number six hatch to the baggage-rooms. Leaning on the rail of the light after-bridge, where he could watch from on high, waited Mr. Bradell, the senior second officer. Mr. Bradell's white-and-gold stood out clean on the heat-dulled blue. A seaman, also white-clad, scarlet semaphore flags thrust under his arm, waited with him, though they would not cast off, Miro knew, for almost an hour.

Miro, first quartermaster, was in direct charge on deck. Miro was Brazilian, coffee-colored from the intense sun and his mixture of bloods, Indian and Negro. Clear and cheerful-eyed, his sound white teeth flashing, his head, erect, covered by a mat of strong black curls which sweat had dampened, he was watching paternally over Packy, the big Jamaican Negro at the winch. Packy was dead drunk, unable to speak, but he remained mechanically precise. He and the winch met at an abysmal level of brainless strength. Like the boom on its gooseneck, Packy pivoted blindly on the small hard point of habit. Like the boom, he described invariably the same controlled semicircles;

Miro stayed behind him in case he should fall unconscious. He was the only person who could manage Packy, and managed by Miro, Packy was perfection. The quartermaster told him so from time to time, in the rich chant of the black lingua franca of the islands. It was equivalent to oil in Packy's bearings and Packy was all right.

Confirming this, Miro shot his eyes up to the white skeleton of the after-bridge, thin on the blue; an eloquent glance to Mr. Bradell, who answered it with a slight mute nod. Miro's whistle shrilled out then, the winch gasped and clanked, the shadow of the boom went swiftly over, the empty net collapsed on the wharf floor. Things were tight, smart, going as they should go.

It was, in Miro's idiom, a matter of tela. Integrate with the Spanish sense of tone, texture, woven firmness was the untranslatable value of a plan, a sustained argument underlying a mode of behavior. It was wide enough to include that beautiful gift of the white man, the disciplined cooperation, speed, and precision of people quick and certain about their duties. This abstraction was the last, perfect pleasure, epitomized by Mr. Bradell in attention alert and quiet above, but, in addition, that a man might know he was good flesh as well as blessed spirit, there were the white uniforms against the sky, the sharp stripe of color in the rolled signal-flags, the smell of hot tar, hot metal, hot salt, of steam and oil and warm wet hemp.

Miro blew on his whistle, jubilant. From his pocket he took out a big gold watch covered with engraved scrolls, a piece of a ruby set on top the stem, fastened to a gold fob, and its magnificence testified to him again the rightness of the world. He worked long and saved, he was quick and quiet, he did not do every foolish thing he thought of, and in the end, with his own money, he could buy such a watch. He looked at it now and noted that it was exactly eleven o'clock. The tugs, he saw, were already off the end of the pier, and with the pleasure of going so soon seaward, he put the watch carefully away, happier if possible than he had been. To Packy he began to sing, throaty and soft, "Hail, Mary, full of grace..."

At five minutes past eleven Miro's intelligent eye caught the flicker of the signalman's flags, gay against the serene heavens, answering the navigating bridge. Mr. Bradell turned. He came handily down the ladder, crossing over into the shadows. To Miro he said: "Mr. Fenton will standby here."

The fourth officer was even then descending from the promenade-deck. Mr. Bradell spoke to him a moment before he mounted quickly out of Miro's sight.

Anthony Bradell, passing the smoking-room doors, avoided the approving glances of two girls.

His brown face, at once too thin, too bluntly shaped for any handsomeness, looked none the less like the passenger's idea of a navigating officer. He knew the girls were still watching him as he climbed again to the boat-deck. From the bridge end the quartermaster on duty there hailed him as he came closer. "Captain Clendening in his cabin, Mr. Bradell."

Anthony passed the windows of the wireless-room, saw the first and second operators playing checkers, and raised his hand to the red-headed one. At the passage-door forward he reached in and knocked up the hook which held it ajar. On the captain's door he rapped sharply.

In Captain Clendening's cabin an electric fan vibrated. A tepid shaft of air twitched left to right in a slow arc from the high corner. The captain's radio, muted down, recited intricate directions for some sort of cooking. He must have forgotten to turn it off, not noticing.

Heavy in his white-and-gold, Captain Clendening sat in the swivel chair, back to his desk. He was feeling the terrible waterside heat, Anthony decided, for the captain looked obscurely pale. Wind, tan, years of exposure had given his face a permanent rich color, but this lay now over his cheeks like a surface veneer. Clinging to the sides of his head, his hair, usually a harsh white fur, looked weak and damp. His old blue eyes, always marred by a droop on the left, were unnaturally listless. An early injury to his jawAnthony had heard that it was from a thrown marline-spikemade itself felt more and more as the captain grew older, and most today. His right brow arched up round and steep; the left lay flat. The left corner of the mouth sank in a lump outstanding toward the stubborn chin. Over his mouth, strongly set even in this sag, he grew a short mustache, white, like the fur along his head. He looked at Anthony with an obvious sharp approval.

"Mr. Bradell, our senior second officer," he said, addressing the man on the settee along the wall. "Only sailor on board, God help him. Had his master's papers five years. Just waiting for me to die so the company will have a ship for him." His voice rumbled authentically, but the unwieldy humor was flattened, almost exhausted. It would be impudent, as well as unthinkable, Anthony admitted, to suggest that Mr. Driscoll, the chief officer, be allowed to take the San Pedro out. Fortunately ignorant of his thought, Captain Clendening continued: "Bradell, my friend Doctor Percival wants to look the ship over. You can show him about, I guess. Fenton get aft allright?"

"Yes, sir," said Anthony at once. He was blank with astonishment at the inopportunity of the request and he turned sharply toward this man for whom the captain was willing to upset all reasonable routine.