Page:The Cannery Boat.pdf/30

20 All the crabcanning boats were old tubs. That workers should perish in the sea was no concern of the directors in the Marunonchi Building.

These ships were like factories rather than merchantmen. The mercantile law did not apply to them. Doddering dyspeptic old hulks which for twenty years had been left moored away, waiting to be scrapped, were now brazenly given a thin coat of paint and then came crawling into Hakodate. Government ships and transports damaged while on service in the Russo-Japanese war, and cast aside as worthless as fish guts, now once more showed their ghostly hulks. The slightest speeding up would burst the pipes. And if when chased by a Russian patrol (and such occasions were many) they made a dash the whole ship would creak and threaten to fall to pieces any minute. They would shake all over like a palsied man.

But such things did not count; everything had to be utilized for the sake of the Empire. The ships were factories but they did not come under the Factory Law. The managing director, an intelligent man, tacked on to this venture the phrase, “for the sake of the Empire,” and soon a secret stream of ill-gotten gold started to flow into his pockets.

Thus meditated the student as he went down the companionway.

At the bottom of the stairs a notice had been pasted. There were many mistakes in spelling and the surface was all lumpy because rice had been used for paste.