‘Terence, you’re a civilian,’ said
Dinah Shadd warningly.
‘So I am—so I am. Is ut likely
I wud forget ut? But he was a gran’ bhoy
all the same, an’ I’m only a mud-tipper
wid a hod on my shoulthers. The whiskey’s
in the heel av your hand, Sorr. Wid your good
lave we’ll dhrink to the Ould Rig’mint—three
fingers—standin’ up!’
And we drank.
[Footnote: 1895]
’Eternal
Father, strong to save,
Whose
arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who
bidst the mighty ocean keep
Its
own appointed limits deep.’
The lady passengers were trying the wheezy old harmonium
in front of the cuddy, because it was Sunday night.
In the patch of darkness near the wheel-grating sat
the Captain, and the end of his cheroot burned like
a head-lamp. There was neither breath nor motion
upon the waters through which the screw was thudding.
They spread, dull silver, under the haze of the moonlight
till they joined the low coast of Malacca away to
the eastward. The voices of the singers at the
harmonium were held down by the awnings, and came
to us with force.
’Oh,
hear us when we cry to Thee,
For
those in peril on the sea.’
It was as though the little congregation were afraid
of the vastness of the sea. But a laugh followed,
and some one said, ’Shall we take it through
again a little quicker?’ Then the Captain told
the story of just such a night, lowering his voice
for fear of disturbing the music and the minds of
the passengers.
’She was the Visigoth,—five
hundred tons, or it may have been six,—in
the coasting trade; one of the best steamers and best
found on the Kutch-Kasauli line. She wasn’t
six years old when the thing happened: on just
such a night as this, with an oily smooth sea, under
brilliant starlight, about a hundred miles from land.
To this day no one knows really what the matter was.
She was so small that she could not have struck even
a log in the water without every soul on board feeling
the jar; and even if she had struck something, it wouldn’t
have made her go down as she did. I was fourth
officer then; we had about seven saloon passengers,
including the Captain’s wife and another woman,
and perhaps five hundred deck-passengers going up the
coast to a shrine, on just such a night as this, when
she was ripping through the level sea at a level nine
knots an hour. The man on the bridge, whoever
it was, saw that she was sinking at the head.
Sinking by the head as she went along. That was
the only warning we got. She began to sink as
she went along. Of course the Captain was told,
and he sent me to wake up the saloon passengers and
tell them to come on deck. ’Sounds a curious
sort of message that to deliver on a dead still night.
The people tumbled up in their dressing-gowns and pyjamas,
and wouldn’t believe me. We were just sinking
as fast as we could, and I had to tell ’em that.
Then the deck-passengers got wind of it, and all Hell
woke up along the decks.
