l. But he was not singing out under the stars, he
was screaming at steel walls down here in the bottom of the ship. And
although he kept speeding up his song the crowd were too drunk to wait
for the chorus, their voices kept tumbling in over his, and soon it was
only a frenzy of sound, a roar with yells rising out of it. The singers
kept pounding each other's backs or waving bottles over their heads. Two
bottles smashed together and brought a still higher burst of glee.

"I'm tired!" Joe shouted. "Let's get out!"

I caught a glimpse of his strained, frowning face. Again it came over me
in a flash, the years he had spent in holes like this, in this hideous,
rotten world of his, while I had lived joyously in mine. And as though
he had read the thought in my disturbed and troubled eyes,

"Let's go up where _you_ belong," he said.

I followed him up and away from his friends. As we climbed ladder after
ladder, fainter and fainter on our ears rose that yelling from below.
Suddenly we came out on deck and slammed an iron door behind us.

And I was where I belonged. I was in dazzling sunshine and keen frosty
Autumn air. I was among gay throngs of people. Dainty women brushed me
by. I felt the softness of their furs, I breathed the fragrant scent of
them and of the flowers that they wore, I saw their fresh immaculate
clothes, I heard the joyous tumult of their talking and their laughing
to the regular crash of the band--all the life of the ship I had known
so well.

And I walked through it all as though in a dream. On the dock I watched
it spellbound--until with handkerchiefs waving and voices calling down
good-bys, that throng of happy travelers moved slowly out into
midstream.

And I knew that deep below all this, down in the bottom of the ship, the
stokers were still singing.

CHAPTER VI

That same day I had an appointment to lunch with the owner of rich
hotels whose story I was writing. And the interview dragged. For the
America he knew was like what I'd seen on the upper decks of the ship
that had sailed a few hours before. And I could not get back my old zest
for it all, I kept thinking of what I had seen underneath. The faces of
individual stokers, some fiery red, some sodden gray, kept bobbing up in
my memory. Angrily trying to keep them down, I went on with my
questions. But I caught the hotel millionaire throwing curious looks at
me now and then.

I went home worried and depressed and shut myself u