IV

The company is dwindling now, for, as Tommy gulps his drink and orders

two more, it is on the stroke of nine, when the bars close, and folks

are melting group by group into the darkness. Some are bound for home,

some for ‘Eldorado,’ a dusty barn where one watches dreadful

melodramatic films and faints with the heat. The lights are turned still

lower. The few shops which have been open in a stealthy way now shut up

close. The moonlight throws sharp blue-black shadows on the white dust

of the Rue el Nil. The orchestra fades away; chairs are stacked between

the tubs, and reproachful glances are cast upon the dozen or so of us

who still linger in the gloom.

I become aware that Tommy, in his own odd little semi-articulate

fashion, is regarding me as though he had some extraordinary anxiety on

his mind. That is the way his expression strikes me. As though he had

had some tremendous experience and didn’t know what to make of it. I

remember seeing something like it in the face of a youth, religiously

brought up, who was listening for the first time to an atheist

attempting to shake the foundations of his faith. And while I ruminate

upon this unusual portent in Tommy’s physiognomy, he plunges into the

second part of his story. It has its own appeal to those who love and

understand the sea.

For the rest of the day the Polynesian’s course was a series of

intricate convolutions on the face of the Atlantic. As the Third Mate

put it in his lively way, you could have played it on a piano. Owing to

the wireless room having been partially demolished, they were out of

touch with the world, and the commander felt lonely. He even regretted

for a while that he had not retired. Was just going to, when the War

came. He was sixty years old, and had been an easygoing skipper for

twenty years now. This,—and he wiped his moist face with his

handkerchief,—this wasn’t at all what he had bargained for when he had

volunteered to carry on ‘for the duration of the War.’ Men dead and

dying and mutilated, ship torn asunder—He sat on his settee and stared

hard at the head and shoulders of the man at the wheel, adumbrated on

the ground-glass window in front of him. He had turned sick at the sight

down there—

But the Polynesian was still going. Not a bolt, rivet, plate, or rod of

her steering and propelling mechanism had been touched, and she was

galloping northwest by west at thirteen knots. The commander hoped for a

dark night, for in his present perturbed state the idea of being

torpedoed at night was positively horrible. The Brobdingnagian, now, was

hit at midnight and sunk in three minutes with all hands but two. He

wiped his face again. He felt that he wasn’t equal to it.

It was dark. All night it was dark and moonless. All night they galloped

along up-Channel. All night the Old Man walked the bridge, watching the

blackness ahead. At four o’clock the Mate came on watch and the Old Man

felt that he must lie down. He was over sixty years old, remember, and

he had been on his feet for eighteen hours. The Chief Mate, who had been

strangely shy since his outrageous behavior, merely remarked that it

looked as if it might be thick presently, and began to pace to and fro.

What happened,—if anything did happen,—nobody seemed to know; but Tommy,

who came off at four, and was enjoying a pipe, a cup of cocoa, and a

game of patience in his room, was suddenly flung endways against his

wardrobe, and a series of grinding crashes, one of which sent his

porthole glass in a burst of fragments over his bed-place, buckled the

plates of the ship’s side. He remembered that the wardrobe door flew

open as he sprang up, and his derby hat bounced to the floor.

He at once skipped down below, where he found the Second and Chief

trying to carry out a number of rapid contradictory orders from the

telegraph. And as he joined them the telegraph whirled from _Full

astern_ to _Stand by_, and stopped. They stood by. Tommy was told to go

and finish ‘changing over,’ which involves opening and shutting several

mysterious valves. Having achieved this, he took up his station by the

telegraph.

The Chief, clad in a suit of rumpled but elegant

pink-and-saffron-striped pajamas, prowled to and fro in front of the

engines like one of the larger carnivora in front of his cage. The

Second, with the sleeves of his coat rolled up, as if he were a conjuror

and wished to show there was no deception, produced a cigarette from his

ear, a match from an invisible ledge under the log-desk, and then caused

himself to disappear into the stokehold, whistling a tune at one time

very popular in Dublin called ‘Mick McGilligan’s Daughter Mary Ann.’ He

returned in some mysterious fashion, smoking with much enjoyment, and

reporting greaser, firemen, and Tommies all gone up on deck.

And so they waited, those three, and waited, and waited; and the dawn

came up, ineffably tender, and far up above them through the skylights

they saw the stars through the fog turn pale, and still there was no

sign, the telegraph finger pointing, in its mute peremptory way, at

_Stand by_. They were standing by.

And at length it grew to be past endurance. The Chief spoke sharply into

the telephone. Nothing. Suddenly he turned and ordered Tommy to go up

and see what was doing. The Second, coming in from the stokehold,

reported water in the cross-bunker, but the doors were down. So Tommy

went up the long ladders and out on deck and stood stock-still before

the great experience of his life. For they were alone on the ship, those

three. The boats were gone. There was no sound, save the banging of the

empty blocks and the gurgle and slap of the sea against her sides.

For a moment, Tommy said, he ‘had no heart.’ The sheer simplicity of the

thing unmanned him, as well it might. He hadn’t words—Gone! Behind the

horror lay another horror, and it was the reminiscence of this ultimate

apprehension that I saw in his face to-night. And then he threw himself

backward (a North Country football trick), turned, and rushed for the

ladder. The other two, down below, saw him there, his eyes feverish, his

face dark and anxious, his usually low voice harsh and strident, as he

prayed them to drop everything and come up quick—come on—and his voice

trailed off into huskiness and heavy breathing.

When they came up, which happened immediately, four steps at a time,

they found him sprawled against the bulwarks, his chin on his hands,

looking as though to fix the scene forever on his brain. And they looked

too, and turned faint, for there, far across the darkling sparkle of the

sea, were the boats, and on the sky-line a smear of smoke. So they

stood, each in a characteristic attitude—Tommy asprawl on the rail, the

Second halfway up the bridge-deck ladder, one hand on his hip, the Chief

with his hands behind him, his long legs widely planted, his head well

forward, scowling. They were as Tommy put it, ‘in a state.’ It wasn’t,

you know, the actual danger; it was the carrying away of their faith in

the world of living men. Good God! And I imagine the prevailing emotion

in their hearts at this moment was instinct in the lad’s query to

me—‘What was the use of goin’ back, or making a fight of it, if _that_

was all they thought of us?’ And then the Polynesian recalled them from

speculations as to the ultimate probity of the human soul by giving a

sudden lunge forward. She was sinking.

For a moment, Tommy says, they were ‘in a state.’ I should imagine they

were. They began running round and round the deck, picking up pieces of

wood and dropping them in a shamefaced manner. Suddenly the Chief

remembered the raft—an unfortunate structure of oil-barrels and hatches.

It was on the foredeck, a frowsy incumbrance devised by the Mate in a

burst of ingenuity against the fatal day. When the three of them arrived

on the foredeck their hopes sank again. A single glance showed the

impossibility of lifting it without steam on the winches. They stood

round it and deliberated in silence, tying on life-belts which they had

picked up on the bridge-deck. The Polynesian gave another lunge, and

they climbed on the raft and held tight.

The Polynesian was in her death-throes. She had been cut through below

the bridge, and the water was filling the cross-bunker and pressing the

air in Number 2 hold up against the hatches. While they sat there

waiting, the tarpaulins on the hatch ballooned up and burst like a

gunshot, releasing the air improvised within. She plunged again, and the

sea poured over her bulwarks and cascaded around them. The raft slid

forward against a winch, skinning the Second’s leg against a wheelguard.

They held on.

Now, it is perfectly simple in theory to sit on a raft and allow a ship

to sink under you. The ship sinks, and the raft, retaining its buoyancy,

floats. Quite simple, in theory. In practice, however, many factors tend

to vitiate the simplicity of it. Indeed, it becomes so difficult that

only by the mercy of God could anybody attempt it and survive. The

foredeck of the Polynesian was like the foredeck of most ships,

cluttered up with hatch-combings, winches, ventilator-cowls, steampipes,

masts, derricks, bollards, snatch-blocks, dead-eyes, ladders, and

wire-rope drums. Look forward from the promenade next time you make a

trip, and conceive it. As the Polynesian subsided, she wallowed. Her

centre of gravity was changing every second, and the raft, with its

three serious passengers, was charging to and fro as if it were alive

and trying to escape. It carried away a ventilator, and then, for one

horrible instant, was caught in the standing rigging and canted over. A

rush to starboard released it, and the next moment it was free. Only the

windlass on the forecastlehead was now above water forward.

They saw nothing more of her. Not that she vanished all at once, but the

sucking whirlpools in which the raft was turning over and reeling back

on them kept them fully occupied. And when at last they had coughed up

the seawater and wiped their eyes and looked at each other as they

floated in the gentle swell of a smiling summer sea, she was gone. Only

one thing destroyed their peace and stood up before them like a spectre:

she was lying at the bottom, with her telegraph at _Stand by_. The

deathless sporting spirit of the race was expressed in these words: ‘You

know, if it hadn’t been for _that_, it was a joke, man!’

The moon rides high over Pelusium as we go back to the ship. Tommy and I

will keep the morning watch together for once and talk over old times.

Tomorrow I shall go through the hot white dust of the Rue el Nil and be

paid off in the consul’s office for my two years’ labor. There is a

mail-boat next week, and perhaps I shall board her, passenger-fashion,

and go across the blue Mediterranean, through sunny France, across the

English Channel, where the Polynesian stands by forever, up through

Sussex orchards and over Surrey downs. And perhaps, as I idle away the

autumn in the dim beauty of the Essex fenland, and as we drive in the

pony-cart through the lanes, we shall stop and the children will say,

‘If you stand up, you can see the sea.’

Perhaps. Who knows?

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