It was not pleasant to be on deck that night, and the promenaders and
gossipers had abandoned it. Spume was shooting inboard. The deck chairs
huddled in the nook amidships were empty. One chair left the pack and
began a stealthy move toward the ship’s side. The darkness surging past
was of immense weight, and at times it seemed to rise above its bounds
and to burst. Somewhere forward a loosened wind screen was giving a
startling imitation of gunfire. He went to look overside, but it was
like staring at fate. Nothing could be seen. His hands had touched the
clammy canvas of a life belt in its rack, and as he wiped them with his
handkerchief he glanced at the belt. An amusing little object! A fat
lot of magic in that hopeful circle of life! He descended to his cabin,
and then the noisy world stood still again, muffled and quiet, under
the glow-lamps. Yet he did not find it easy to read. At times a mass
of water exploded on the forward deck, and then his safe and muffled
world trembled. His mind left his book. Amiel’s intimate _Journal_
became foreign, and dropped to the blanket. He listened to sounds that
were like the echoes of distant battle, to forlorn and nameless alarms
and warnings, to sudden fierce shouting far away in another world, to
despairing and dying cries. Well, all of it was in another world, anyhow.
Outer night and its sounds had nothing to do with him. Men who knew
what to do were doing it. The movements of the ship were like those of a
great living creature. In its long leisurely breathing its body rose and
fell. The faint tremor of the turbines was of the will which repressed an
astonishing vitality and strength. He began reading again....
A lurch of the ship woke him. It was four o’clock. For a moment he
wondered whether something had happened in the world beyond him, or
whether he had been dreaming. But the big creature was still breathing
in a deep and leisurely way. Now and then, though, it growled and shook
itself, for the wind seemed worse and the noises more challenging. He
turned out the lights; and when next he woke it was because the sun had
risen high enough to shine through his port window, and the steward had
rattled the teacup when placing the morning tray where he could reach it
without leaving his bunk.
“Fine morning, sir,” said the steward.
“A bad night, wasn’t it, steward?”
“Oh, nothing out of the way, sir.”
The jolly passenger, who knew the sea and so was always loud and hearty
with the quartermasters, who saw to it that everybody had an interest in
the sweepstake for the day’s run, and pulled the ladies’ chairs briskly
about for them, and fed the gramophone, met him in the corridor as he
was going to the bathroom. The jolly man danced a little greeting in
his dressing-gown. “Dirty work last night,” said the dancer, beaming.
“Thought that even I might be a bit sick early this morning. Does one
good, though, to feel the sea. The old thing actually rolled. Didn’t know
she could.”
The breakfast bugle brought the passengers assembling about the head of
the saloon companion. There were some jokes about breakfast. The ladies
were greeted with mock surprise. They were asked whether they were quite
sure they wanted any. It was better to go easy after a wild night. That
was the jolly man’s voice, followed by his own laughter, the first to
follow his own jokes.
The lady from Hongkong complained at breakfast that her steward had
forgotten to close her port window last night. “I had to get up and shut
it myself. Quite suddenly the wind was terrible, and do you know, my
window was open. I might have got an awful chill. So careless. Now, on
the P. & O.—” She had traveled widely, the lady from Hongkong, by _all_
the principal lines, and she would never travel by _this_ one any more,
you know. Didn’t the bacon taste the least bit queer? Did he think there
was any advantage to be got out of the French exchange? If so, she would
leave the ship at Marseilles and stay in the Riviera. Steward, some more
bacon, well done! “Somebody told me,” she went on, “that the ship lurched
frightfully once last night. I always said it would, if ever it met
really bad weather.”
He trusted she would take no harm from the accident of the open window,
and found himself speculating, while listening politely but without
attention to her complaining voice, whether there was not a more profound
difference between some human creatures, say between a man like Amiel and
the lady from Hongkong, than there was between himself and one of the
lower animals. The passengers at the captain’s table laughed aloud at a
joke secret to themselves. The captain was not with them that morning.
One of the men there turned and called over to the next table: “I say,
Mrs. Taft here says she was just climbing out to shut her window when the
ship suddenly rolled last night, and her husband says—”
“Hadn’t you better let him say it?” asked the young botanist from Java.
“There!” exclaimed the lady beside him. “Now we shan’t hear it. It’s too
bad of you.”
The sun was warm on the promenade deck. Two children, while a sad _ayah_
watched them, were boisterous with cigarette tins in which rattled a few
coins.
The convalescent naval surgeon regarded the noisy children with malignity
and exclaimed: “Not because I hate them, but because I’m sure their
father has put spurious coins in those boxes, I’d like to chuck ’em both
overboard. It doesn’t sound like good money.”
“Surely, Doctor, you can’t mean you’d cast children into the sea for
being playful?” said a lady, leaning from her chair toward him with a
smile inviting him to say more. But the doctor merely mumbled and went on
reading the memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini.
At the after end of the deck the captain, waving his hands backward in
good-natured deprecation toward a group of passengers, was making as
brief as possible his usual morning round. But he stopped when he met the
direct look of the naval officer, bent down with his hands resting on the
arms of the surgeon’s chair, and said something which was inaudible. All
the reader of Amiel in the next chair could hear was, “Oh, about four.
What with that and an S O S call, I had one hour’s sleep last night.” He
stroked his nose and walked briskly away.
The reader of Amiel looked seaward. So there had been a call for help!
But how impossible it seemed. The very ship appeared to be enjoying that
sea. She was playful, rearing a little at times, and throwing dazzling,
snow-like clouds. The children jumped and clapped their hands when a
flight of spray leaped higher than usual. The very waves were chanting.
They were running heavily past, with brilliant crests. Not far from the
bows the ghost of a rainbow stood in an invisible mist above the riot
of waters; it would fade, yet glow again, an intangible vision that was
constant and motionless in that boisterous world, as though it were a
symbol of the imperishable virtue of beauty. The radiant clouds moved
in the leisure of eternity. On the horizon, under one of them, like a
model fixed to the clear rim of the world, was a barque under all sails.
He felt that dread and mischance could never persist in the light of
that morning. There were no shadows. He had never felt better in his
life. All was well. He closed the covers on Amiel’s so often melancholy
conclusions, and watched a sailor at work who whistled, while busy about
the falls of a davit. Near the sailor was the life-belt rack, where he
had stood the night before. But the rack was empty.
He flung his book on his chair, stood and filled his pipe, and went up
to the boat deck. The prospect was wider there, and he wanted to see as
much of this beautiful world as he could. He paused up there to watch a
quartermaster chalking the deck for quoits; there was to be a tournament
that afternoon.
“Nasty night, last night, wasn’t it?” he said to the sailor. He meant
nothing particular by that. As a fact, he had almost forgotten the night
before. But one always talks of the weather to a sailor; and one ought to
be polite to these fellows.
“Yes, sir, it was.”
“I could tell that, in my cabin.”
“I expect you could, sir.”
“Wasn’t there an S O S call? I think I heard some one mention it?”
“Very likely. We did stand by.” The sailor stood up, straightened his
back, and jerked his thumb seaward. “One of our chaps went overside.
Young Bob—but you wouldn’t know him—”
“Went overside? Not drowned?”
“What would you expect, sir, on such a night? The ship put about. The
passengers complain of a draught. We got out a boat. Cruised about for an
hour. Nothing.” The sailor turned and gazed aft, then bent down again and
went on chalking for quoits.