Bread upon the Waters — The Day's Work

The narrator revisits McPhee, the scarred Chief Engineer of the Breslau whom readers met through Brugglesmith, and finds him celebrating with Janet in a modest house suddenly furnished with new carpets, a piano, and a servant in a cap. Over Madeira and cigars McPhee explains the fortune: twenty-five thousand pounds, won not by inheritance but by professional courage and a chain of consequences set in motion when he defied his owners. The toast is to the eternal damnation of Holdock, Steiner and Chase, the line that sacked him after twenty years for refusing to run the Breslau on an impossible sixteen-day schedule.

Before the money arrived, McPhee was the sort of engineer who threw boots at juniors who woke him for red reflections on bearings, drank water in the saloon while his engines ran, and kept Royal Humane Society medals beside a photograph of Janet. The narrator earned his respect by not pestering him and by writing a florid pamphlet on Holdock's ventilating patent, which McPhee loved and which introduced the writer to Janet's world of doctors' and captains' wives who talk ships and lines the public never hears of. That domestic backdrop makes the new hat-rack and scented notepaper comic: sudden wealth in a twelve-pound house is funny only because the couple still measures pride in engineering terms.

The furnishings of the twelve-pound house told the story. New carpets of a quality that would have alarmed McPhee's engineering budget at any previous point in his career covered floors that had previously been acceptable as floors. The piano stood against the wall that formerly held a rack of technical manuals. A servant in a cap appeared at intervals with refreshments that Janet supervised with the satisfaction of a woman who had waited a long time for a domestic arrangement proportional to the company she kept. McPhee tracked the narrator's eyes around the room and cut off the obvious question with a toast to the damnation of Holdock, Steiner and Chase.

The twenty-five thousand pounds had not come from inheritance, investment, or the kind of luck that arrives without requiring a professional record to deserve it. It had come from a chain of consequences that began with a truthful assessment of a ship's engineering needs, continued through a dismissal that anyone reviewing the facts would have predicted, and arrived, by the route McRimmon called bread cast upon waters, at a winter morning in the North Atlantic where McPhee happened to be in the correct position with a salvage-capable vessel.