The Daily Worker Newspaper, March 20, 1926, Page 10

‘within the limits of a short story. - the salt breeze, and the absence of his father “HANDS!” A Story in Two Parts. PART ONE. “GET down there and clip those wires, you damned cowards,” “Go to hell! Get a rod and a pinch bar if you want dem wires cut.” “Rusten, what do you mean by this? Are you foreman of this gang, or anr I? Damn you, if we wasn’t out here a hundred miles from nowhere, I’d fire you this minute. Get down that hole, there, and cut those wires!” Two or three men edged a few inches to- ward the cave-ifi beside the conerete forms. Then, observing no movement on the part of their. companions, they turned: instinctively to Rusten. German and Jewish, Irish, Russian, and what-not, the group of workmen awaited the word of a Swede. . But, you ask, what kind of a Swede? | Not one of that gigantic breed which offi- cered ‘the windjammers before the era of tur- ines:and:oil; nor one of that Norse physique which:scatters monstrous logs among the for- ests ‘of the west and playfully pushes them down the rivers to the screech of the saws. No. Quite the contrary was Rusten—the underdog. He was thin in form and feature. His shoulders sloped like a girl’s; and he walked as if his head were pulling up his legs—a slid- ing, shuffling gait—bending his body at a sharp angle at the waist because of an ex- treme injury to his back. Pale blue eyes look- ed unblinkingly thru thick shell-rimmed glass- es, and a peculiar smile—half derisive, half plaintive—seemed stamped upon his counten- ance. The underdog business was not a late phase of the life of Ted Rusten. He had never been avery different sort of canine. As the un- washed, ragged brother of nineteen peasant children, he had been underpup. The tale of why Ted Rusten developed into an underdog and remained such should not be compressed It showla be.told as are the photo-dramas, with frequent close-ups and many throw-backs. To con- dense twenty-four years of a man’s existence —not life—into some five or six thousand words requires a verbal economy almost amounting to muteness. At eleven Ted had decided that home was crowded, and ran away to sea. He enjoyed to feed coal to a steamer furnace a man must éat;-and so, two days later we find Ted din- ing (in his customary style) on board the “Fire Ply,”. New York to Australia. Have you ever taken a long winter cruise? Wasn’t it delightful? How unusual, then, that for this young man there was only one inter- esting sight among the many presented, and that was—the furnace. The traits of Magel- lan he had seen a dozen times; Honolulu, the same. At Manila he took an extra shift for a sick man; at Shanghai, he fainted with the heat. Singapore, Bombay, Alexandria follow- ed ad nauseam. Not until he was fifty-four hours out of Alexandria on the way to Aus- tralia was Ted’s interest removed from his torrid inferno. * Sometimes, in the long, long, long ago, a steamship company would insist wn sailing a {vessel which had been condemned. Ted, with his experience, had observed passively tliat the Fire Fly’ was another ofthe traps upon which he occasionally found himself. It was nothing unusual, and soon he had felt as much at home as an Italian beside Vesuvius. But. this morning, the engines went wrong, with a high sea running and the ship carrying water. “Hm-m-m. What’s next on the program?” thought Ted. Stripped to his waist and bearing on his hip the short revolver which most stokers affected, he squatted on his heels and watched the en- gineers at their labors. Ship routine had taught him what was now happening in all quarters of the vessel. Sailors were putting up can- vas; portly gentlemen and hysterical. women were imploring the officers, for the ship was undoubtedly drifting; and men deeper within the vessel were vaguely wondering how they would act if— Need we picture the events of the next few seconds? They were not especially unusual to Ted Rusten—danger was an old acquaint- ance, The crash pitched him through the door, lightning feet took him to the tilted deck, nd a,ninety-foot wave swept hith into the sea. At this juncture in our story you might re- gard it necessary to delineate the phantasma- goria which fitted thru Ted’s mind—the scenes of his childhood, faces of the past, dreams un- realized and goals postponed. But there is small value in anything but the truth, so why depict the untrue? We could imagine that he clutched a broken spar or a floating trunk. He did neither. Neither did he swim, altho he had learned at the age of four when his brothers threw him into a fiord. We who are not sea- men can only say that Ted allowed his native element—the ocean—to handle him as it wish- ed; and such are the vagaries of fate that this young man who did not especially care whe- ther or not he existed soon found himself rid- ing the top of the wave, with his lungs full of water and his arms full of limp, flaxen-haired mermaid. You are surprised? Well, so was Ted Rus- ten. Since our tale has long been devoid of quotation marks, that criterion of the short- story, we should like to translate into words some of Ted’s initial sensations—sensations, because, you understand, he was too full of water to express himself in words and too busy with water to concern himself with thought. We are told that a sensation is something which we have never before experienced. Certainly Ted had never before had such experiences, so his impressions may safely be called sensations. Let us enumerate some of them in chrono- logical order. Sensation number one: holding a young woman in his arms. Sensation num- ber two: being completely responsible for her life. Sensation number three: noticing at close range the entrancing beauty which that young woman possessed, Now, most sensations result. in emotions. That is why a wave of tenderness swept over mattresses for another hour of repose and Ted Rusten, followed by an overwhelming urge dreams of last night’s companion, Ted was|‘0 live. Live! Live!! iauled by the collar from his park bench and| “God,” was his unuttered exclamation. directed to that haven of so many—“Move| Fate and the waves aided him. Noon found On.” His per, So famous in do-|the stoker and his exhausted charge in a mesticity, he rescued from the gutter; and,|smooth bay a mile or so from a fringe of trees. slighting the quotations of stocks and bonds, |Three o’clock found Ted on his hands and he turned to the joke column—the want ads. knees beside some tinder, while the girl lay on There appeared the invitation of the Red Star |the sand watching his experiment with interest. Com: to take @ winter cruise to the Philip-} “Do you think it will work?” she asked, in pines, and beyond—as a stoker. Now,! the Swedish tongue. and mother. But if you had looked close you would have seen occasionally a double wrinkle between Ted’s eyes—a wrinkle that had no business there in adolescence. After an ex- traordinary round of abuse from some older seaman, a heavy feeling would smother him, @ nameless ache would clutch at his breasi until his eyes had been washed clear by a night of weeping. People in heathendom may have no word corresponding to “love”; Ted had no way of experiencing the emotion represent- ed by it. ‘ At twenty he had sailed all over the world. Fed upon scrofulous food, bunked in smelly, vermin-infested hammocks, abused by his equals, flogged by his superiors, he had hid his sensibilities in a fog of reckless cynicisin. ‘Well, what the hell now?” was-his attitude. Only at infrequent intervals, in the quiet dark- ness of the night, would a ray of light pierce’ that mental mist and trace on his weathered face the rudiments of a plaintive smile. Then, as full consciousness returned, he would re- flect that in nine years no message had ever come from his people; and the damp fog again would envelop -him. The age at which most men assume the duties of citizenship found Ted in New York with an unshaved neck and with his toes out of his shoes, And at an hour when almost all other young men turned over on comfortable By Milford Flood): ‘T know-it will work,” he replied with. a strange dignity, “I always carry these with me, and have used them before.” A faint curl of smoke rose from the tinder. A moment later a fire was crackling, while Ted drew apart the two watch-crystals, spilling the water between them into the sand. Week. followed week; new moons came and went. For the only time in his life Ted’s skil) at little things seemed to be of use. He built a nest in a tree-top for Hilda. He gathered bananas and plantain fruit—for Hilda. Skins torn from animals by his bare hands, were transformed into sack and skirts for her com- fort and protection. And, late one afternoon, his last two shells went unerringly into the brain of a lion to save her life, and his jaws munched snake-root to soothe her painful scratches. That night Ted reached his zenith of happi- ness. When he was bathing a jagged wound on her palm, blue eyes looked up at him, and an arm crept across:his narrow, powerful:should- prey ’ fe hin : “Oh, my dear, my dear. E<I love you=so| much,” So, an hour later, Ted lifted his hands to- ward the friendly stars, breathed deep of the fresh sea breeze, and smiled. Remember—he smiled. Every evening since they were marooned; he had built a large signal fire on the rocky head- land which formed one side of the bay. And as he heaped branches upon tlie crackling flames, and scanned the darkness for a light upon the ocean a double wrinkle would appear between his eyes, growing more pronounced on each succeeding night. Only after the final armload of fagots was placed on. the fire, and the darkness surveyed for the last time, with no ship’s light seen—only then would Ted’s brows relax; and over his face would steal a pleased expression, like that which he always wore in Hilda’s presence. On this night, the wrinkle became a furrow. Even his muscles seemed to, rehel,...“Stop! Oh, please!” whisperea tis tent ath as he broke a dry limb from a tree. “Don’t! Oh, don’t!” moaned both his arms as he rolled a large log into the flames. “Wait! For God’s sake! Don’t look! Go on back!” implored a voice behind his eyes, as he strained them over the water. “Civilization—it gave you nothing; it will take what you have, your life, which is Hilda. Turn away!” And, altho the darkness was not rifted by any sign of a ship, an irre- sistible lassitude swept over him, so that his knees trembled, and his body shivered in the fragrant night air. And as he made his way among the rack and trees back to Hilda, his brows remained knit. So Ted was not surprised, the next morn- ing, when, with his sack of newly-gathered muscles in his hand, he confronted three men | ui: on the low, sandy, beach at the head of the bay. |‘ “Qu’est-ce que vous etes?” queried the tall-| ' est. Ted shook his head. “Quien es usted?” 3 Again Ted signified that he did not under-|_ stand. “Who are you?” asked the man on the right, before the first speaker could shift to another language. There was a pronounced difference between |. the appearance of the young yachtsmen, on the one hand, and of Ted Rusten, on the other. Tall, square-shouldered, almost military in pos- ture and dress, the new arrivals seemed to em- body the best in modern physical and mental |") culture; while Ted in his beard and loin-cloth, bronzed and lithesome, harked back to that dim past when human beings thought less and lived longer. ‘ Ten hours later Hilda was fingering some filmy dresses in the stateroom of the yacht- owner's sister, : “Ah, Hilda, how beautiful you are!” sighed her companion. “One would never believe that you are older than I. If living outside that way would give me your appearance, I would almost rejoice at being ship-wrecked, especial- ly, if there was a man along to take care of me. Who was your good angel, Hilda?” “Ted Rusten, of New York.” Hilda’s eyes were eagerly taking in the lace window cur-| tains brocaded hangings, and Wi SO on di