’"I knew nothing about it till I looked up,”
he explained hastily. And that’s possible,
too. You had to listen to him as you would to
a small boy in trouble. He didn’t know.
It had happened somehow. It would never happen
again. He had landed partly on somebody and fallen
across a thwart. He felt as though all his ribs
on his left side must be broken; then he rolled over,
and saw vaguely the ship he had deserted uprising
above him, with the red side-light glowing large in
the rain like a fire on the brow of a hill seen through
a mist. “She seemed higher than a wall;
she loomed like a cliff over the boat . . . I
wished I could die,” he cried. “There
was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into
a well—into an everlasting deep hole.
.
. ."’
’He locked his fingers together and tore them
apart. Nothing could be more true: he had
indeed jumped into an everlasting deep hole. He
had tumbled from a height he could never scale again.
By that time the boat had gone driving forward past
the bows. It was too dark just then for them
to see each other, and, moreover, they were blinded
and half drowned with rain. He told me it was
like being swept by a flood through a cavern.
They turned their backs to the squall; the skipper,
it seems, got an oar over the stern to keep the boat
before it, and for two or three minutes the end of
the world had come through a deluge in a pitchy blackness.
The sea hissed “like twenty thousand kettles.”
That’s his simile, not mine. I fancy there
was not much wind after the first gust; and he himself
had admitted at the inquiry that the sea never got
up that night to any extent. He crouched down
in the bows and stole a furtive glance back.
He saw just one yellow gleam of the mast-head light
high up and blurred like a last star ready to dissolve.
“It terrified me to see it still there,”
he said. That’s what he said. What
terrified him was the thought that the drowning was
not over yet. No doubt he wanted to be done with
that abomination as quickly as possible. Nobody
in the boat made a sound. In the dark she seemed
to fly, but of course she could not have had much
way. Then the shower swept ahead, and the great,
distracting, hissing noise followed the rain into distance
and died out. There was nothing to be heard then
but the slight wash about the boat’s sides.
Somebody’s teeth were chattering violently.
A hand touched his back. A faint voice said,
“You there?” Another cried out shakily,
“She’s gone!” and they all stood
up together to look astern. They saw no lights.
All was black. A thin cold drizzle was driving
into their faces. The boat lurched slightly.
The teeth chattered faster, stopped, and began again
twice before the man could master his shiver sufficiently
to say, “Ju-ju-st in ti-ti-me. . . . Brrrr.”
He recognised the voice of the chief engineer saying
surlily, “I saw her go down. I happened
to turn my head.” The wind had dropped
almost completely.
