These instantaneous thoughts were yet in their essence heavy and slow, partaking of the nature of the man.  He extended his hand to put back the matchbox in its corner of the shelf.  There were always matches there—­by his order.  The steward had his instructions impressed upon him long before.  “A box . . . just there, see?  Not so very full . . . where I can put my hand on it, steward.  Might want a light in a hurry.  Can’t tell on board ship what you might want in a hurry.  Mind, now.”

And of course on his side he would be careful to put it back in its place scrupulously.  He did so now, but before he removed his hand it occurred to him that perhaps he would never have occasion to use that box any more.  The vividness of the thought checked him and for an infinitesimal fraction of a second his fingers closed again on the small object as though it had been the symbol of all these little habits that chain us to the weary round of life.  He released it at last, and letting himself fall on the settee, listened for the first sounds of returning wind.

Not yet.  He heard only the wash of water, the heavy splashes, the dull shocks of the confused seas boarding his ship from all sides.  She would never have a chance to clear her decks.

But the quietude of the air was startlingly tense and unsafe, like a slender hair holding a sword suspended over his head.  By this awful pause the storm penetrated the defences of the man and unsealed his lips.  He spoke out in the solitude and the pitch darkness of the cabin, as if addressing another being awakened within his breast.

“I shouldn’t like to lose her,” he said half aloud.

He sat unseen, apart from the sea, from his ship, isolated, as if withdrawn from the very current of his own existence, where such freaks as talking to himself surely had no place.  His palms reposed on his knees, he bowed his short neck and puffed heavily, surrendering to a strange sensation of weariness he was not enlightened enough to recognize for the fatigue of mental stress.

From where he sat he could reach the door of a washstand locker.  There should have been a towel there.  There was.  Good. . . .  He took it out, wiped his face, and afterwards went on rubbing his wet head.  He towelled himself with energy in the dark, and then remained motionless with the towel on his knees.  A moment passed, of a stillness so profound that no one could have guessed there was a man sitting in that cabin.  Then a murmur arose.

“She may come out of it yet.”

When Captain MacWhirr came out on deck, which he did brusquely, as though he had suddenly become conscious of having stayed away too long, the calm had lasted already more than fifteen minutes—­long enough to make itself intolerable even to his imagination.  Jukes, motionless on the forepart of the bridge, began to speak at once.  His voice, blank and forced as though he were talking through hard-set teeth, seemed to flow away on all sides into the darkness, deepening again upon the sea.