’"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. . . ."’

CHAPTER 10

’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.