I STOOD aft in the engine-room, watching the long line of steel arms busy with the shaft; the sluggish churn of the thudding pistons; the more delicate and eminently more feminine twisting of the two eccentrics. Their motion was that of wrists, slender and womanish, working with precision; but the plunging piston was like the upper arm of a giant, with the flying cross-set for an elbow; and the tapering connecting rod which gripped the crank-pin was wiry and rigid, a tense forearm. On the grating above me a round-faced wiper was at work; and drops of oily water from his mop trickled downward to the corrugated floor-plates, where they hastened backward and forward with the swinging of the steamer.

He leaned on his mop for a moment, and, catching my eye, winked and nodded his head toward Snipe, the sharpnosed oiler of the bottom grate, whose duty drew him close to the evaporator in which I was hammering. I knew precisely what I should see, yet I looked, nevertheless. Snipe, ten feet away, his cadaverous face yellow in the glow of the electric bulbs, was gripping the railing that surrounded the thundering crank, and was vomiting silently into a blackened tin which he held in his greasy left hand. As he swayed with the abrupt tumblings of the ship, the muscles of his lean hand on the rail made ridges under the oily skin; his blue shirt stretched and creased with the bending of his body. Then he raised his head and looked at me with a wink. His left eye was drawn in a perpetual squint, and when he winked his right, he appeared to be standing for a moment with both eyes half-closed, regarding me from behind the shelter of his lashes.

‘Every twenty minutes, regular as a clock,’ he said with the leer which went with him for a grin.

‘ Your first trip? ’ I questioned, stooping with my scaling hammer in my hand to crawl into the feverish interior of the evaporator.

‘No — I’ve been to sea four years altogether; and for the first five days of every trip — it’s this.’ He lifted the tin. ‘Ain’t it a hell of a life for a man to lead? — There’s the cross-set whistlin’.’

He snatched his oil-can from the grating and hurried off to starboard.

‘Why don’t you quit?’ I shouted after him; but the sole reply I received was the glimpse of a second leer, and the sight of his blue-sleeved arm bracing him, while he poured his jet of oil into the cup.

I myself was compelled to grasp the edges of the evaporator with both hands while I groveled in through the minute opening, like a dog entering his kennel. And even then I was tossed against the half-scaled side by a vicious lurch of the steamer. The weather was the kind which puts the nerves of engineers on edge. The ship was grubbing her way through a furrowed sea. With a northeast wind beating her on the shoulders, she was advancing with enough difficulty to make her one day late into San Francisco, but with not quite enough to lend to her tardiness the excuse of a gale. From my heated cylinder I could see Tony, the broad faced, half-Kanaka third, standing with his hand on the lever, ready to throttle her down when she kicked her heels too high out of the water.

The engines had already been cut down to half speed; but with every pitch of the steamer, when the screws broke the surface, they ran free for an instant, and thumped and rattled and racked, so that the monkey wrenches slipped from the holders in the sudden jarring, oilcans upset, and the entire watch cursed as the floor-plates bounced beneath them.

‘No ’Frisco until Thursday,’ Snipe called to me on his way to the ladder.

He had calculated well; for as he put his foot on the first step, the roundfaced wiper pounded eight bells on the triangle. The new watch, which had been standing in wait since the clanging of the warning bell ten minutes before, glided downward; the old passed them in the ascent; and to one standing on the bottom and looking up through the grates, there was a spectacle of inter-weaving blue forms and champing mechanism. I climbed slowly to the after deck, wiping my hands on a towel. As I stepped from the companionway, hungry for a glimpse of the waves which were pounding by with locks of froth streaming out behind them, I saw that Snipe was there before me. He was leaning on the after-rail, watching the crumbling layers of foam as the stern pressed them out. The sea had fallen a trifle, but the rollers still swept by us, capped with a white that glittered in the sombre air. Snipe glanced up at my approach.

‘Look at ’em laugh,’ he said angrily, and spat into the foam. ‘Huh!’

‘Are you feeling better?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I suppose so. I usually do along about the fourth day.’

‘But why don’t you work ashore?’

‘It ain’t so easy to leave the sea — as you might think. I tried it. Last year I spent nine months on the beach lookin’ for a job, but I could n’t make it go. Something always happened, some little thing, but enough to put me out. And finally I came aboard here to satisfy her.’

‘Satisfy whom?’

‘Why, the sea, of course. She likes me, she does — but she don’t treat me square.’ He spat over the rail again. ‘Look at me. Sick five days a trip. Can a man last with that? Look at me.’

I did so. I do not know how long the nickname Snipe had been his. But it seemed to be a good one. His nose, long and almost knifelike, beneath a narrow forehead, overhung the thinlipped, crooked mouth and receding chin, like a beak. The skin was pale, doubly so on account of the two fourhour sweat-baths below; it had grown white like that of an underground plant. And the pores stood open perpetually. Two buttons of his shirt were left unfastened; and one could see his chest below his sagging collar, whiter, if possible, than the skin of his face. His belt, too, was negligently strapped, for two of the loops had been torn away from his jeans. And beneath their oily, stiffened legs, his shoes, like crippled things, chafed gray and soft as mittens from the oil, pitched to the sides on worn-down heels, and yawned with crooked mouths through the irregular network of tattered laces.

‘Why did you come to sea?’ I asked him.

His eyes narrowed scornfully.

‘Why does the wind blow?’ he answered.

‘You shipped young?’

‘Sixteen. I always wanted to, but my father kept me from it. He was an old sailor. But when he died, I just cut loose, borrowed twenty-five from my brother, joined the union, and shipped as wiper aboard the old Isis. She’s still on the rocks up coast a ways, though there ain’t much left of her.’

‘And you’ve stayed with it ever since?’

‘Quit after the first trip. But I could n’t stay ashore. I could n’t. She would n’t let me — so I tried again. They laughed at me, most of ’em; and the first made me work without a stop, moppin’ and wipin’, moppin’ and wipin’ — sick, O God ! and waitin’ for the damn bell to ring. I was glad when she went ashore. After that trip, my brother tried to get me a job in ’Frisco, but it was no good. It was back to the engines for me, this time on a steam schooner with a dinky coffee pot of an engine down below. It was the same story.’

‘Is your brother a sailor?’

‘No, a stevedore. That’s why he lent me the money to go to sea. He’d never been there himself. He’d only seen the crews go ashore when the ships docked, while he was sweatin’ thirty hours with the bales. He thought it was easy. Well, it is easy for most fellows, damned easy — but they ain’t built like me. Most of them can quit if they want to. I’ll tell you about the last time I left the sea. I got a job in a garage fixing engines and mending tires. It was a snap. But the old woman kept pesterin’ me. I’d seem to hear her rumbling in the night like she was breathin’ soft and regular, and I’d lie awake and think of the islands, and the sea when she’s blue and white and smooth. I always thought of her when she was blue and white and smooth. And I’d miss the pitch of the deck when I walked across the room. “You damn fool,” I used to say, “you got a good job; why don’t you stay where you are?” Then I’d pass the docks on my way to work. I always liked to look at the Australia boats. I don’t know why, except that they went through the sea where it was blue and white and smooth. God, how jealous I’d be of the engine crew! I used to spend the noon hour with my feet hangin’ over the edge of the wharf, watchin’ the crust of sticks and straws lap at the steamer’s bowplates. “That bow’s been to Sydney,” I’d say to them, “no wonder you like to touch it. I should like to.” But I could n’t quite. They were always moored too far out.

‘And then I’d always have to go back to the shop and spend long hours in the same place. I hate to stay in the same place. “I’m goin’, damn it, I’m goin’!” I used to say to myself; but I always knew what would happen if I went. She kept draggin’ me and urgin’ me to come, callin’ to me, and grinnin’, every time I looked at her damn shining face, and I thought I loved her, and she got me again. — Yes, she did,’ he added after a moment’s pause. ‘And that’s why I ’m at sea now.’

He grinned at me with his head cocked to one side. I have called the expression a leer, and there could be no better name, for no mirth was in it. Mere bitterness was there — wrath at the whole grinding fabric of things which had placed him where he was, and given him the power to know it. The snarl of a kicked dog sometimes resembles a grin.

‘I’m goin’ to turn in,’ he said; and, shuffling a trifle after the manner of men who have stood much on decks, he walked to the companionway, and turned toward me with a hand on either side of the door, and with one foot raised to enter. His face, splashed with light from the caged bulb on the bulkhead, was still twisted — as if he were remembering a great deal.

For the next two days, Snipe and I conversed but little. He nodded to me, and I to him, when we went to work together at eight in the morning; but apart from the perfunctory, our intercourse was small. He grinned with something approaching real merriment when we did not reach San Francisco until Thursday night; and he appeared to experience a genuine satisfaction at the grumblings of some of the men, when we pierced our way into the darkening channel, just after sundown, too late for the doctor to pass us through quarantine. And so we dropped anchor, and lay in the drizzle off Meiggs’s wharf, strangely still and motionless, with the toy waves lapping the ship’s flanks. And Snipe chuckled when the other oilers stared at the city lights shining tearfully through the mist.

I saw but little of Snipe the following morning, just enough to say goodbye before I went down the gangplank; and since my seafaring was for the time completed, the environment of the water-front, with its blue-jerseyed seamen and striped funnels, became but vivid memory portraits of a past vacation. Snipe, however, was not to pass so easily from my circle of realities. Yet it was fully three months before I saw him again, and when I did meet him, on the lower deck of an Oakland ferryboat, he laughed almost cheerfully, perceiving my surprise at his appearance.

‘I’ve quit,’ he announced triumphantly, twisting his neck within the band of his starched collar; ‘and what’s more — I’m married.’

For a moment I could but exclaim and congratulate: I had never realized that clothes and a few months of healthy living could so improve an ugly man. But at length I mastered my surprise, and questioned him concerning his new condition. He told me of it eagerly, with grins more genuine than the old leers breaking into his sentences.

His wife, it appeared, was a stenographer in the office of the garage in which he had worked. He had known her during the period of work which followed his last relapse to the sea; and the memory of her had remained intact during his months in the engine-room.

‘It was she that persuaded me to leave the sea,’ he explained, ‘when I met her ashore, after a trip. It was the trip you were on. I told her it was no use, but she kept insistin’; and, to make a long story short, I did as she wanted me to. Two weeks later I married her. — I wish you would come out and see us,’ he added. ‘We have a little place at North Beach.’

Since I was free for the time and felt no small interest in this new development of Snipe’s career, I agreed to accompany him at once; and while we were seated on a Union Street car, rumbling through the odors of the market district, he revealed the details of his situation. He had been permitted to return to his job in the garage, with a good prospect of advancement; and he felt confident, he told me, in what seemed a curious vein of boastfulness for so flimsy a man, that his boss had already observed how much more efficient he was than the other workers.

‘And for the time being, until I get on my feet a bit more, Jessie is still typing in the office,’ he finished, as he raised his hand for the conductor to stop the car.

We left the car at Washington Square, and walked north along its green flank.

‘It’s on the third floor,’ announced Snipe, pointing to a frame apartment building which overlooked its fellows on a side street; ‘ the bay window to the left. You see,’ he went on, as we entered, and were climbing the stairs, ‘ it is only four or five blocks from the garage, and we get a good view of the docks from the kitchen window.’

Jessie opened the door, and, smiling at Snipe, with her filmy blue eyes never leaving his face, stood aside for us to enter. She was a small creature, this wife who had stolen a man from the sea, short and meagre, with features round and a trifle flat, and a question ever in her eyes, as though she sought in vain to comprehend the causes of things. When we were introduced, she gave me an embarrassed nod, thrusting both her hands beneath her apron, which was old and stained, and drawing back against the open door, so that she stood constrained, like a shy animal longing to escape. But a few words from Snipe, and a due appreciation of their home from myself, destroyed the tension; and in a few moments she was chatting comfortably, relating a host of petty plans to me, and glancing at Snipe at the close of each sentence for approbation.

‘This is so much nicer for Alfred than that awful boat,’ she prattled on, beaming from one to the other of us; ‘he is so comfortable here, and has a good steady job in the garage. Ain’t a man fortunate to have a steady job, instead of wandering around uncertain?’

And then, after a glance at her smiling husband, she insisted that I inspect her kitchen and enjoy the view from its window. Two of the windows opened on a compact shaft that gave a doubtful light to the interior of the building. Lines of half-dry clothes were stretched between its walls, the damp garments stirring sluggishly in the breeze which descended from above; and the air was pregnant with the odors of olive oil and garlic. Jessie explained volubly about the ‘nice Italian families in the other flats!’ But the third window opened to the north, and from it one could see the blue level of the bay with its rim of hills, the flashing white square of Alcatraz prison, and, near at hand, the concrete surface of Meiggs’s wharf, and the spars of a British bark that lay moored beside it.

‘Loadin’ barley for the Allies,’ Snipe explained to me.

‘Is n’t it nice ?’ asked Jessie when she led the way back to the other room; and when I left, they stood arm in arm at the apartment door, and urged me to visit them again.

But my way for the next few weeks lay far from that neighborhood. Snipe and his wife soon occupied the position in my mind of a score of other acquaintances whom I saw but little; and my remembrance of the pair, as I had last seen them, assumed a permanent air which grew more fixed as the days passed by. But like most impressions of the sort, by which we deal mentally with things we know nothing of, it was at fault.

One morning, as I hurried south along Stockton Street, I heard myself called upon by name, and, glancing up, saw Jessie standing with a sheet of paper in her hand before the door of a garage which I was passing. Her appearance had scarcely altered, but it seemed to me that her eyes looked more perplexed than ever.

‘You have n’t heard, have you?’ she asked, after a quick greeting; and when she saw that I had not —

‘Alfred has gone,’ she said.

’Gone! Not back to the sea?’

‘Yes — on that very English bark you saw when you were in our flat. He went just a week after you were there.’

‘But for how long? What did he say?’

I thought she was going to weep on the spot, her blue eyes were so watery; but she controlled herself and spoke rapidly.

‘ I don’t know! I can’t see why at all. He was so comfortable. He said himself he had never been so comfortable before, But he just went. I noticed he’d keep lookin’ out of the kitchen window at the docks; and I spoke to him about it one day. But he laughed and said it was all right.’ She stopped for a moment and sniffed. ' One day he come home early before me, and when I found him, he was that nervous. He kept walking up and down the room, never saying a word, and every once in a while he’d come to me almost savage — for him — and kiss me, and say he did love me. The next morning he was gone, and the only word he left was a letter telling me the name of the boat and saying not to expect him back. But why did he go? He had a steady job, and plenty to eat, and — Do you think he likes some one better than me?’

Her eyes had the puzzled uncomprehending look so usual with them, this time mingled with tears; and when we separated, I could see that she was trying to understand something that she was wholly unable to conceive.

And as I walked, I could not help thinking of Snipe as I had first known him — sick and wandering.