Janice didn't want anything from Harry but love. He wondered what she would think when she came back from work on Tuesday and found him gone.
SEVEN
It was raining much harder by the time Harry crossed the wooden boards of the landing stage at Liverpool's pierhead, pausing to let a puttering lorry pass in front of him with a load of clanking casks, and then dodging into the doorway of a small office building with a corrugated-iron roof. He turned left once he was inside the building, and walked along the corridor until he reached a small untidy workshop at the end. A fair-haired young nun in a long leather apron was standing at a bench, filing noisily at a length of copper piping. On the wall was a calendar for 1923 with a photograph of Ann Pennington, the Ziegfield girl with the "dimpled knees'.
Harry took off his cap and slapped the rain from it. "Good morning, Dennis," he said loudly.
Dennis stopped filing as if he hadn't been very interested in it anyway, and tossed the rasp onto the workbench with a loud clatter.
You're early, wacker," he said. "Janice kick you out of bed?"
"She's at work. I thought I'd come by here before I went over to Lime Street to see Jim."
Dennis nodded towards the workshop window. "Nice drop of rain, don't you think? Bring me leeks on. Do you fancy a cup of char?"
Harry shook his head. "I was wondering how the loading was going."
Dennis propped his bony bands on his hips. "All right, as far as I know." There was a hint of challenge hi his voice.
"Any suitable automobiles? Anything that's taken your eye?"
"Not especially."
"But there are automobiles here, ready to go on board?"
Dennis was silent for a moment. Then he said, "Some, yes. That's right."
Harry thoughtfully walked around the workbench and went up to the window. Beyond the clutter of low pierhead buildings, flagstaffs, and lamp standards; beyond the jostle of lorries and automobiles and people hurrying backwards and forwards in the showery wind, the outline of the Arcadia rose like a great black and white castle, towering a hundred feet out of the water.
Even from here, it was difficult to grasp the size of her. She was nearly a sixth of a mile long, and when she moved away from Liverpool's landing stage on Tuesday she would be carrying 2,275 passengers and crew. Pennants were already flapping from her masts and from her three huge yellow-painted funnels; and the red ensign furled and unfurled at her stern counter with laconic pride, stirred by the wind, untroubled by the rain.
Harry could see only a part of the Arcadia's hull from where he was standing, but she was the largest luxury liner in the world, from her sharp cruising prow to her shapely overhanging stern. Her oil-fired reciprocating engines, the very latest design, were easily capable of twenty-eight knots. Keys Shipping, of course, hoped that she could go much faster, and take the Blue Riband for the fastest Atlantic crossing from the Mauritania, which had held it since 1907.
As Harry looked at the black-painted liner, and the scores of dockers and officials who clustered around her, he was reminded of the journalist who had said that "if you were followed by a cab coming out of Pennsylvania Station at twenty-five miles per hour, then you would have some conception of the Arcadia at speed."
He said to Dennis, "You've got something on your mind, haven't you? You're backing out."
Dennis shrugged. "It's not so much backing out, Harry. It's not that. It's a question of conscience. I mean, how many people on board that ship are going to be just plain people, like you and me? Working class. You're talking about drowning the very people you're supposed to be saving."
Harry turned away from the window."When did you work all this out?"
"You only have to look at the passenger roster," Dennis insisted. "Three hundred and seventeen first-class, two hundred and fifty second-class, six hundred and fifty steerage. You're going to drown nine hundred of ours just to get at three hundred of theirs? And children, too? It doesn't make sense."
Harry rubbed his eyes, as if he were thinking. "You thought it made sense before."
"I know. But I hadn't worked it out then."
"You've forgotten the ship itself," said Harry. "The ship itself is an embodiment of capitalist exploitation."
"Well, yes. Yes, it is. I've always said that. But the trouble is, our people are going to be on it. I mean, it's our people what are going to be thrashing around in the sea."
Harry said, "There always have to be casualties, in any war. This is a war, Dennis, make no mistake about it."
Dennis untied his apron, and folded it, and laid it over the workbench. "I know you get your accidental casualties," he said. "But this her too cold-blooded for me. Because what's going to happen when she goes down? Same as on the Titanic, I shouldn't wonder. They saved over half of the first-class passengers, on the Titanic, but less than a quarter of the steerage. And then there's the crew, over a thousand of them. A thousand working men. Are you going to risk their lives, too?"
Harry turned away from the window. "You're getting hysterical about this, Dennis. If everything goes to plan, then nobody need drown. Not one single person, rich or poor."
"I suppose you can guarantee that," said Dennis, crossing his arms in the way that working-men do when they feel defiant.
Harry smiled. "I can't guarantee anything. Dynamite doesn't come with any kind of assurances about what it's going to do. It doesn't have a recommendation on every box, "as used by Bolshevists everywhere'."
"You don't have to make fun of me," Dennis told him.
"I'm not, Dennis. But all that's going to happen here is a concentrated explosion in one of the cargo holds. The Arcadia has plenty of watertight compartments, and it will take her a long while to sink. It took the Titanic over three-and-a-half hours to go down, a torn open for a third of her whole length. Besides, unlike the Titanic, there are quite enough lifeboats for everybody."
Dennis was silent. Harry came up to him and put an arm around his shoulders and gave him a gentle, affectionate punch on the arm. "Listen, Dennis, this it your chance to do something historical. This is your chance to strike a blow against capitalism that people are going to remember for ever. The night the Arcadia sank. Think of it!"
Dennis said reluctantly, "I suppose you're right."
"Right? You know I'm right! I'll tell you how you can be sure that I'm right. You go take a look at those first-class staterooms on the Arcadia, with all their decorated panels and their soft beds and their silk drapes, and then you take a walk through Bootle or Arnfield and look at the way the ordinary people have to live there. That ship was built as a monument to the arrogance of the rich; it's like the wealthy people of this world deliberately taunting the poor. "We've got all of the money, and by God, we're going to waste it right in front of your noses, just to remind you that you have to live on herring and pies and potatoes, while we fill ourselves with caviar and lobster and ripe pheasant'!"
Dennis looked at Harry seriously. He had a slight squint in his pale green eyes, which made him appear slightly retarded. He was a hard-working young Socialist, however, and he never made up his his mind about anything without considering it in detail. At last, with obvious reluctance, he nodded and said, "All right. As long as you're sure that nobody's going to be hurt."
"That's the Dennis I know and love," said Harry. "You've got an automobile?"
"There's one special one I had in mind," said Dennis. "It arrived last night, quite late, so we haven't had time to load it yet. It's a Marmon Big Eight, real posh job. They've got it parked in the warehouse."