The Luck of the Irish. Harold MacGrath

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      He went on deck again and began to explore. By two o'clock he had been everywhere except in the stoke-hole, and he was saving that against some rainy day. He was unobtrusive; and the busy officers he quizzed understood that his interest was purely legitimate, though somewhat inopportune. There was something of the eager boy in William, despite his cynical outlook. The great steel cañon, which went down to the very keel of the ship, fascinated him more than anything else. The chief engineer was Irish; so William told him the history of his life and clung to him as long as he could.

      It is a fine thing to go on a voyage of discovery, for the true pleasures of life are not to be found in recurrences. And to William, what marvelous discoveries were on the threshold, waiting to be unfolded before his eyes! Strange seas, strange lands, strange peoples; and, above all, there was that elephant with the silk-and-spangle cupola or thingumy on his back. There was, as you may readily believe, no corner in his thoughts given over to a longing to see the Roman Forum, or the Greek Parthenon, or Michelangelo, or Rafael, or Tiziano. I may as well confess right here and now and have done with it: William never went into ecstasies over the wonders of antiquity.

      The living things, the quick, not the dead, stirred his interest. It is true that the pyramids stunned him; but this was due to his appreciation ​of the tremendous labor involved in piling those granite blocks one upon the other without the aid of steam-hoists.

      At length he went down into the huge shed where everything was bustle and seeming confusion. Bale after bale and trunk after trunk sailed skyward, to disappear mysteriously into the bowels of the ship. People were hurrying to and fro, and there was much kissing and hand-shaking.

      William suddenly awoke to the dismal fact that he was dreadfully alone. In all his busy years this thought had never before come home to him so keenly. There was not a soul in all the wide world who really cared what became of him, where he went, what he did, or how he died. Burns was all right, and so were the boys over at the engine-house, but they lacked something. He had no regret in leaving them; he would have no real joy in returning to them. He eyed with envy the noisy, excited groups of the happy family (see Cook's folders). These groups were made up of pilgrims coming down from small cities, country towns, farms, West and Middle West. They were making the trip in dozens and double-dozens; and shortly they would build little glass-topped walls around themselves, and woe betide the trespasser, especially if he happened to be a red-headed, lonesome guy named William Grogan.

      He fell back upon his innate philosophy. All his life he had been jogging along on his own. Why worry over this bunch of male and female fossils? He was here to see the world; and if he made any ​friendships these would be by-products purely. After all, old Mother Hanlon would be glad to see him back. And wouldn't the rest of the bunch sit up and take notice when he began to gab-fest! "When I was in Hong-Kong I licked four chinks one night." Think of starting the fire in that offhand manner!

      All at once he remembered why he had gone down into the shed and taken his place by the gang-plank. He wanted to see if that girl came on board alone. He hoped she would. She looked too nice to be mixed up in anything shady. Funny thing, he mused, how you could spot a woman who was off-color. You couldn't give your reasons; there wasn't any way of explaining it; you just knew, that was all. This girl didn't look the part, and that was all there was to it.

      She came into view at length. He sighed relievedly. There was no one with her. Lonesome kind like himself. She walked confidently to the gang-plank, looking neither right nor left. Her face was lighted by subdued eagerness; there was neither anxiety in her eyes nor dissatisfaction on her lips. William dropped in behind her, rather automatically.

      A well-dressed man, a fat suit-case in each hand, crowded past him rudely. William stretched out a detaining hand, none the less powerful because the nails shone pinkly.

      "Say, bo, why the unseemly haste?"

      "Beg pardon!" mumbled the offender, none too politely, as he wrenched himself loose and went on.

      ​"Well, if that guy's with us," thought William, "how we're going to love each other by the time we get to Bombay! For a nickel. … "

      M-m-m-m! boomed the whistle. William ducked instinctively, and hurried on board.

      "Nothing the matter with the old lady's lungs. That was some toot! Well, I guess this is good-by to little New York. See you later!"

      As the ship drew out into the river he stood in the waist, watching the men close the hatches. He chanced to look up toward the promenade-deck. A young woman was in the act of crossing from starboard to port. The first thing that came into his range of vision was a pair of twinkling tan shoes. This range of vision, be it noted, was identical to that he had from his cellar window. His heart gave a great bound. His school-teacher was on board!

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CHAPTER IV

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      WILLIAM was never able to explain with any lucidity why he leaped so abruptly to such a conclusion. He just knew, that was all. He had seen those feet go past his cellar window too many times to have the slightest doubt of their identity.

      He had not seen her face, the railing having cut across that and obscured it. But there was no reason on earth why he shouldn't see the face now, after waiting for three years. So he sprang up the ladder, thrilling in every pulse. There she was, leaning against the port rail, staring westward at the pearly smudge hanging over the receding city. William had never heard of Medusa, nor the shield of Perseus. He was, nevertheless, turned into stone for two consecutive minutes. There is nothing gentle or gradual about disillusion; it is a blow, swift and hurtful. William stood up under it passably well, however.

      Yonder was his school-teacher, without doubt; but she was also the young woman he had sat beside at the movie and whom he had mentally tangled up with runaway wives and all that. Finding his dream slipping from him, he made frantic efforts to catch hold and retain some of it. He simply could not let it go all at once. For ​three years he had endued yonder girl with the attributes which would belong, did such beings exist, to a demi-angel; and thus it was not humanly possible to let so fine a thing go to smash without making a fight for it.

      So he began to mobilize excuses. If she was a runaway wife, then the husband was a brute; if there was a Handsome-Is in the woodpile, then he had been too clever for her; and so on and so forth. He reached around blindly for other straws. She might be the daughter of a rich man, running away to avoid marrying the father's favored suitor. This idea pleased him mightily; it restored his belief in his ability to judge humans, gave him a foothold on earth again.

      Without his appreciating the fact, William had fallen in love with a shadow; and the unexpected appearance of the substance had thrown him off his balance.

      He was perhaps more than normally romantic; probably by this time you have guessed it. Yet, on the other side of the scales, there was good ballast in every-day common sense. But there was in him a something latent, stronger by far than romance or common sense; we call it superstition. Trust the Irishman to have this kink in his cosmos. In William it had been a negligible quantity for a long time, but it cracked its shell at this moment and fluttered forth. This wasn't any ordinary accident, he reasoned; something was meant by it. For three long years he had dreamed about this girl, and there she was, half a ​dozen strides away. So William's superstition cried out that the Lord had put her there not without some definite purpose concerning one William Grogan. How the Lord intended him to act he could not surmise, but he СКАЧАТЬ