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.

McPhee had nursed the Breslau's machinery for eight months on an indent he calls honest while the board calls extravagant. When the new timetable advertised sixteen days between ports, he told young Bannister the ship needed bottom stiffening, new bed-plates, cylinder work, and three months in dock, not publicity. Young Steiner sneered about a piano for the chief; Holdock dismissed him before the hall porter. McRimmon, the Blind Deevil of the Black Bird Line, heard the outburst, hired him for the tramp Kite, and quoted bread cast upon the waters. On the Kite, McPhee found good coal, civil indents, and a skipper named Bell who shared his contempt for paint wasted while engines rusted. McRimmon's one folly was refusing to maintain appearances on hulls; his virtue was trusting McPhee's eye on flawed metal.

The Breslau's breakdown confirmed every warning: Calder lifted engines off bed-plates, passengers squealed in the saloon, and a tow bill ran to thousands. Holdock's answer was retrenchment: worse food, worse repairs, worse officers bullied into calling cracks superficial. In dry dock McPhee walks under the Grotkau, the Hoor, and sees the seven-inch crack behind the propeller boss while Bannister repeats the board's word superfeecial. McRimmon pays for champagne at Radley's, gets Bannister and Calder drunk enough to curse their employers, and keeps the Kite in port while clerks rage that the Lammergeyer is being painted instead of chasing South American freights. To outsiders McRimmon looks senile; to McPhee the old man is counting on metal fatigue and human panic.

Sealed orders send the Kite down the Mersey after the Grotkau. Through gales and liner lanes they shadow her, watching a propeller beat that tells McPhee the tail-shaft is dying. When she runs for shelter past the Fastnet, the shaft jars off, red distress lights climb the mast, and rockets summon a mail boat that cannot tow by contract. Bell and McPhee extinguish every lamp, let the liner carry off officers who will swear she was sinking, and wait for daylight. McPhee swims through winter water, boards by the gangway, dries himself in Bannister's cabin, and finds six feet of bilge in the engine-room with Calder's cap floating. He pumps, rigs hawsers, and for eight days eats stores worse than a Cardiff collier would tolerate while Bell howls the Hoor up-Channel past the Eddystone.

Salvage law distinguishes towing men from picking up abandonment, and McRimmon's lawyers know it. The Grotkau's cargo manifest reads like a bankrupt department store: pianos, millinery, iron bridges, and naphtha launches crushed together. Crewmen eager to testify about food join Calder's note on the tail-shaft, and young Steiner meets McPhee at Plymouth with a scowl while McRimmon crows that senile dementia paints ships and wins fortunes. Assessors value the hull above three hundred thousand pounds; McRimmon's third and the crew's shares still leave McPhee with twenty-five thousand. Janet kisses him; they buy curtains and plan gowns; McPhee books a passenger berth, lasts twenty-four hours, and returns to the engineers' mess because a man shaped by thirty-two years of machinery cannot pretend to leisure.

The comic yarn still turns on serious ethics. McPhee lost work for telling truth about schedules; the company lost more for treating engineering as public relations. Someone may have opened a bilge-cock to convince a terrified crew she was foundering, yet Kipling leaves the culprit unnamed because the institutional sin is plain enough: starve men, paint cracks, and the sea will collect. McPhee would pay a hundred pounds to know who flooded the engine-room, but he already knows why his Shekinah mattered. Without refusing the sixteen-day lie he would not have sailed on the Kite, and without the Kite at the right horizon he would not have turned cast bread into the fortune that lets him toast Holdock's damnation in good Madeira while Janet plans a theatre dress west.