Junior Engineers were beneath the notice of everyone except the Mexican laborers at the plant. To them we were the visible form of a distant, unknowable paymaster. We were Senor Payroll.
Those Mexicans were great workmen: the aristocrats among them were the stokers, big men who worked Herculean eight-hours shifts in the fierce heat of the retorts. They scooped coal with huge shovels and hurled it with uncanny aim at tiny doors. The coal streamed out from the shovels like black water from a high pressure nozzel, and never missed the narrow opening. The stokers worked stripped to the waist, and there was pride and dignity in them. Few men could do such work, and they were the few.
The Company paid its men only twice a month, on the fifth and on the twentieth. To a Mexican, this was absurd. What man with money will make it last 15 days? If he hoarded money beyond the spending of three days, he was a miser - and when, Senor, did the blood of Spain flow in the veins of misers? Hence it was the custom for our stokers to appear every third or fourth day to draw the money due to them.
There was a certain elasticity in the Company rules, and Larry and I sent the necessary forms to the Main Office and received an "advance" against a man’s pay check. Then, one day, Downtown favored us with a memorandum:
"There have been too many abuses of the advance-against-wages privilege. Hereafter, no advance against wages will be made to any employee except in a case of genuine emergency."
We had no sooner posted the notice when in came stoker Juan Garcia. He asked for an advance. I pointed to the notice. He spelled it through slowly, then said, "what does this mean, this `genuine emergency"?
I explained to him patiently that the Company was kind and sympathetic, but that it was a great nuisance to have to pay wages every few days. If someone was ill or if money was urgently needed for some other good reason, then the Company would make an exception to the rule.
Juan Garcia turned his hat over and over slowly in his big hands. "I do not get my money?"
"Next payday, Juan. On the 20th."
He went out silently and I felt a little ashamed of myself. I looked across the desk at Larry. He avoided my eyes.
In the next hour two other stokers came in, looked at the notice, had it explained and walked solemnly out; then no more came. What we did not know was that Juan Garcia, Pete Mendoza and Francisco Gonzalez had spread the word and that every Mexican in the plant was explaining the order to every other Mexican. "To get the money now, the wife must be sick. There must be medicine for the baby."
The next morning Juan Garcia’s wife was practically dying, Pete Mendonza’s mother would hardly last the day, there was a veritable epidemic among children and, just for variety, there was one sick father. We always suspected that the old man was really sick; no Mexican would otherwise have thought of him. At any rate, nobody paid Larry and me to examine private lives; we made out our forms with an added line describing the "genuine emergency." Our people got paid.
That went on for a week. Then came a new order, curt and to the point: "Hereafter, employees will be paid only on the 5th and the 20th of the month. No exceptions will be made except in the cases of employees leaving the service of the Company."
The notice went up on the board and we explained its significance gravely. "No Juan Garcia, we cannot advance your wages. It is too bad about your wife and your cousins and your aunts, but there is a new rule."
Juan Garcia went out and thought it over. He thought out loud with Mendoza and Gonzalez and Ayala, then, in the morning, he was back. "I am quitting this company for different job. You pay me now?"
We argued that it was a good company and that it loved its employees like children, but in the end we paid off, because Juan Garcia quite. And so did Gonzalez, Mendoza Obregon, Ayala and Ortez, the best stokers, men who could not be replaced.
Larry and I looked at each other; we knew what was coming in about three days. One of our duties was to sit on the hiring line early each morning, engaging transient workers for the handy gangs. Any man was accepted who could walk up and ask for a job without falling down. Never before had we been called upon to hire such skilled virtuosos as stokers for handy gang work, but we were called upon to hire them now.
The day foreman was wringing his hands and asking the Almighty f he was personally supposed to shovel this condemned coal, while there in a stolid, patient line were skilled men -"Garcia, Mendoza and others" waiting to be hired. We hired them, of course. There was nothing else to do.
Every day we had a line of resigning stokers, and another line of stokers seeking work. Our paper work became very complicated. At the Main Office they were jumping up and down. The procession of forms showing Juan Garcia’s resigning and being hired over and over again was too much for them. Sometimes Downtown had Garcia on the payroll twice at the same time when someone down there was slow in entering a resignation. Our phone range early and often.
Tolerantly and patiently we explaining: "There’s nothing we can do if a man wants to quite, and if there are stokers available when the plant needs stokers, we hire them."
Out of chaos, Downtown issued another order. I read it and whistled. Larry looked at it and said, "It is going to be very quiet around here."
The order read: "Hereafter, no employee who resigns may be rehired within a period of 30 days."
Juan Garcia was due for another resignation, and when he came in we showed him the order and explained that standing in line the next day would do him no good if he resigned today. "Thirty days is a long time, Juan."
It was a grave matter and he took time to reflect on it. So did Gonzalez, Mendoza, Ayala and Ortez. Ultimately, however, they were all back - and all resigned.
We did our best to dissuade them and we were sad about the parting. This time it was for keeps and they shook hands with us solemnly. It was very nice knowing us. Larry and I looked at each other when they were gone and we both knew that neither of us had been pulling for Downtown to win this duel. It was a blue day.
In the morning, however, they were all back in line. With the utmost gravity, Juan Garcia informed me that he was a stoker looking for a job.
"No dice, Juan," I said. "Come back in 30 days. I warned you.
His eyes looked straight into mine without a flickers. "There is some mistake, Senor," he said. "I am Manual Hernandez. I work as the stoker in Pueblo, in Santa Fe, in many places."
I stared back at him, remembering the sick wife and the babies without medicine, the mother-in-law in the hospital, the many resignations and the rehiring. I knew that there was a gas plant in Pueblo, and that there was not any in Santa Fe; but who was I to argue with a man about his own name? A stoker is a stoker.
So I hired him. I hired Gonzalez, too, who swore that his name was Carrera, and Ayala, who had shamelessly become Smith.
Three days later, the resigning started.
Within a week our payroll read like a history of Latin America. Everyone was on it: Lopez and Obregon, Villa, Diaz, Batista, Gomez, and even San Martin and Bolivar. Finally Larry and I, growing weary of starting at familiar faces and writing unfamiliar names, went to the Superintendent and told the whole story. He tried not to grin, and said, "Damned nonsense!"
The next day the orders were taken down. We called our most prominent stokers into the office and pointed to the board. No rules any more.
"The next time we hire you hombres," Larry said grimly, "come in under the names you like best, because, that’s the way you are going to stay on the books."
They looked at us and they looked at the board: then for the first time in the long duel, their teeth flashed write. "Si, Senores," They said.
And so it was.
ch would flow across each other the weaker is borne along by the stronger, so there be certain of kin whose paths intersecting, their souls do bear company, the while their bodies go fore-appointed ways, unknowing."
Miss Harford arose, shuddering; the sun had sunk below the horizon, but it was not cold. There was not a breath of wind; there were no clouds in the sky, yet not a star was visible. A hurried tramping sounded on the deck; the captain, summoned from below, joined the first officer, who stood looking at the barometer. "Good God!" I heard him exclaim.
An hour later the form of Janette Harford, invisible in the darkness and spray, was torn from my grasp by the cruel vortex of the sinking ship, and I fainted in the cordage of the floating mast to which I had lashed myself.
It was by lamplight that I awoke. I lay in a berth amid the familiar surroundings of the stateroom of a steamer. On a couch opposite sat a man, half undressed for bed, reading a book. I recognized the face of my friend Gordon Doyle, whom I had met in Liverpool on the day of my embarkation, when he was himself about to sail on the steamer City of Prague, on which he had urged me to accompany him.
After some moments I now spoke his name. He simply said, "Well," and turned a leaf in his book without removing his eyes from the page.
"Doyle," I repeated, "did they save HER?"
He now deigned to look at me and smiled as if amused. He evidently thought me but half awake.
"Her? Whom do you mean?"
"Janette Harford."
His amusement turned to amazement; he stared at me fixedly, saying nothing.
"You will tell me after a while," I continued; "I suppose you will tell me after a while."
A moment later I asked: "What ship is this?"
Doyle stared again. "The steamer City of Prague, bound from Liverpool to New York, three weeks out with a broken shaft. Principal passenger, Mr. Gordon Doyle; ditto lunatic, Mr. William Jarrett. These two distinguished travelers embarked together, but they are about to part, it being the resolute intention of the former to pitch the latter overboard."
I sat bolt upright. "Do you mean to say that I have been for three weeks a passenger on this steamer?"
"Yes, pretty nearly; this is the 3d of July."
"Have I been ill?"
"Right as a trivet all the time, and punctual at your meals."
"My God! Doyle, there is some mystery here; do have the goodness to be serious. Was I not rescued from the wreck of the ship Morrow?"
Doyle changed color, and approaching me, laid his fingers on my wrist. A moment later, "What do you know of Janette Harford?" he asked very calmly.
"First tell me what YOU know of her?"
Mr. Doyle gazed at me for some moments as if thinking what to do, then seating himself again on the couch, said:
"Why should I not? I am engaged to marry Janette Harford, whom I met a year ago in London. Her family, one of the wealthiest in Devonshire, cut up rough about it, and we eloped--are eloping rather, for on the day that you and I walked to the landing stage to go aboard this steamer she and her faithful servant, a negress, passed us, driving to the ship Morrow. She would not consent to go in the same vessel with me, and it had been deemed best that she take a sailing vessel in order to avoid observation and lessen the risk of detection. I am now alarmed lest this cursed breaking of our machinery may detain us so long that the Morrow will get to New York before us, and the poor girl will not know where to go."
I lay still in my berth--so still I hardly breathed. But the subject was evidently not displeasing to Doyle, and after a short pause he resumed:
"By the way, she is only an adopted daughter of the Harfords. Her mother was killed at their place by being thrown from a horse while hunting, and her father, mad with grief, made away with himself the same day. No one ever claimed the child, and after a reasonable time they adopted her. She has grown up in the belief that she is their daughter."
"Doyle, what book are you reading?"
"Oh, it's called 'Denneker's Meditations.' It's a rum lot, Janette gave it to me; she happened to have two copies. Want to see it?"
He tossed me the volume, which opened as it fell. On one of the exposed pages was a marked passage:
"To sundry it is given to be drawn away, and to be apart from the body for a season; for, as concerning rills which would flow across each other the weaker is borne along by the stronger, so there be certain of kin whose paths intersecting, their souls do bear company, the while their bodies go fore-appointed ways, unknowing."
"She had--she has--a singular taste in reading," I managed to say, mastering my agitation.
"Yes. And now perhaps you will have the kindness to explain how you knew her name and that of the ship she sailed in."
"You talked of her in your sleep," I said.
A week later we were towed into the port of New York. But the Morrow was never heard from.
-THE END-
Ambrose Bierce's short story: A psychological shipwreck
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