These episodes opened, dramatically, upon the second
night of the voyage from Marseilles.
“My shadow lies upon you”
I suppose I did not awake very readily. Following
the nervous vigilance of the past six months, my tired
nerves, in the enjoyment of this relaxation, were
rapidly recuperating. I no longer feared to awake
to find a knife at my throat, no longer dreaded the
darkness as a foe.
So that the voice may have been calling (indeed, had
been calling) for some time, and of this I had been
hazily conscious before finally I awoke. Then,
ere the new sense of security came to reassure me,
the old sense of impending harm set my heart leaping
nervously. There is always a certain physical
panic attendant upon such awakening in the still of
night, especially in novel surroundings. Now,
I sat up abruptly, clutching at the rail of my berth
and listening.
There was a soft thudding on my cabin door, and a
voice, low and urgent, was crying my name.
Through the open porthole the moonlight streamed into
my room, and save for a remote and soothing throb,
inseparable from the progress of a great steamship,
nothing else disturbed the stillness; I might have
floated lonely upon the bosom of the Mediterranean.
But there was the drumming on the door again, and
the urgent appeal:
“Dr. Petrie! Dr. Petrie!”
I threw off the bedclothes and stepped on to the floor
of the cabin, fumbling hastily for my slippers.
A fear that something was amiss, that some aftermath,
some wraith of the dread Chinaman, was yet to come
to disturb our premature peace, began to haunt me.
I threw open the door.
Upon the gleaming deck, blackly outlined against a
wondrous sky, stood a man who wore a blue greatcoat
over his pyjamas, and whose unstockinged feet were
thrust into red slippers. It was Platts, the
Marconi operator.
“I’m awfully sorry to disturb you, Dr.
Petrie,” he said, “and I was even less
anxious to arouse your neighbor; but somebody seems
to be trying to get a message, presumably urgent,
through to you.”
“To me!” I cried.
“I cannot make it out,” admitted Platts,
running his fingers through disheveled hair, “but
I thought it better to arouse you. Will you come
up?”
I turned without a word, slipped into my dressing-gown,
and with Platts passed aft along the deserted deck.
The sea was as calm as a great lake. Ahead, on
the port bow, an angry flambeau burned redly beneath
the peaceful vault of the heavens. Platts nodded
absently in the direction of the weird flames.
“Stromboli,” he said; “we shall
be nearly through the Straits by breakfast-time.”
We mounted the narrow stair to the Marconi deck.
At the table sat Platts’ assistant with the
Marconi attachment upon his head—an apparatus
which always set me thinking of the electric chair.
