The Death Ship Read Free

reach home again. The sailor left behind, forgotten by his ship, is of less importance to the life and the safety of the ship than a rusty nail or a steam-pipe with a weak spot. The ship gets along well without him. He might as well jump right from the pier into the water. It wouldn’t do any harm to the ship that was his home, his very existence, his evidence that he had a place in this world to fill. If he should now jump into the sea and be found, nobody would care. All that would be said would be: “A stranger, by appearance a sailor.” Worth less to a ship than a nail.
    Pretty, isn’t it? So I thought. But the depressed feeling that was looming up within me didn’t grip me in full. Before it could get hold of me I knocked it cold.
    Shit the bucket. There are lots of other ships in the world. The oceans are so very big and so full of ships. They have hardly room enough to sail without choking each other. How many ships are there? Surely no less than half a million. One of those half a million seagoing ships, one at least, will need, some time sooner or later, a plain sailor. My turn will come again.
    As for Antwerp, well, it’s a great port. All ships make this port some day or other. What I need is just patience. That’s all. Who would expect that somebody, maybe the skipper himself, would turn up immediately and yell out: “Hey, sailor, what about signing on? Union pay!” I can’t expect anything like that to happen.
    Thinking it all over, well, what’s there to worry about a faithless bucket leaving me flat in Belgium. Like all women do leave you the first time you try it out with another dame. Anyway, I have to hand it to her, she sure had clean quarters and showers and swell grub. No complaints about that. Right now they’re having breakfast. Those guys will eat up all of my bacon, and the eggs too. The coffee will be cold again when I come into the mess. If they leave any coffee at all. Sure the cook has burned the bacon again. He’ll never learn. I wonder who made him a ship’s cook. Perhaps a Chinese laundry man. As for Slim, I see him already going through all my things, picking out everything he likes, before he hands the bag over to the mate. Maybe they won’t even turn in my things to the mate. Those bums. Not a decent sailor among them. Just running around with dames. Using perfume and facial soap. How I hate them! Sailors? Don’t make me laugh. But I’d never have expected this from Slim. Seemed to be a regular guy. You would not have believed Slim’d be that bad; no, sir. You can’t trust anybody any longer. But then he always used to steal my good toilet soap whenever he could lay his hands on it. What can you expect from a fellow who steals your soap when you’re out on deck?
    What’s the use worrying about that bucket? Gone. It’s all right with me. Go to the devil. The ship doesn’t worry me at all. What worries me is something different. I haven’t got a red cent in my pocket. She told me, I mean that pretty girl I was with during the night, protecting her against burglars and kidnappers, well, she told me that her dear mother was sick in the hospital, and that she had no money to buy medicine and the right food for her, and that she might die any minute if she didn’t get the medicine and the food. I didn’t want to be responsible for the death of her mother. So what could I do as a regular red-blooded American except give her all the money I had left over from the gilded house? I have to say this much, though, about that pretty dame: she was grateful to me for having saved her mother from an early death. There is nothing in the whole wide world more satisfying to your heart than making other people happy and always still happier. And to receive the thousand thanks of a pretty girl whose mother you have just saved, that is the very peak of life. Yes, sir.
     

3
    I sat down on a box and followed in my mind the Tuscaloosa steaming her way home. I wished earnestly that she would