CHAPTER XLI
It was not pleasant to be on deck that night, and the promenaders and gossipers had abandoned it. Spume was shooting inboard. The deck chairs huddled in the nook amidships were empty. One chair left the pack and began a stealthy move toward the ship’s side. The darkness surging past was of immense weight, and at times it seemed to rise above its bounds and to burst. Somewhere forward a loosened wind screen was giving a startling imitation of gunfire. He went to look overside, but it was like staring at fate. Nothing could be seen. His hands had touched the clammy canvas of a life belt in its rack, and as he wiped them with his handkerchief he glanced at the belt. An amusing little object! A fat lot of magic in that hopeful circle of life! He descended to his cabin, and then the noisy world stood still again, muffled and quiet, under the glow-lamps. Yet he did not find it easy to read. At times a mass of water exploded on the forward deck, and then his safe and muffled world trembled. His mind left his book. Amiel’s intimate Journal became foreign, and dropped to the blanket. He listened to sounds that were like the echoes of distant battle, to forlorn and nameless alarms and warnings, to sudden fierce shouting far away in another world, to despairing and dying cries. Well, all of it was in another world, anyhow. Outer night and its sounds had nothing to do with him. Men who knew what to do were doing it. The movements of the ship were like those of a great living creature. In its long leisurely breathing its body rose and fell. The faint tremor of the turbines was of the will which repressed an astonishing vitality and strength. He began reading again....
A lurch of the ship woke him. It was four o’clock. For a moment he wondered whether something had happened in the world beyond him, or whether he had been dreaming. But the big creature was still breathing in a deep and leisurely way. Now and then, though, it growled and shook itself, for the wind seemed worse and the noises more challenging. He turned out the lights; and when next he woke it was because the sun had risen high enough to shine through his port window, and the steward had rattled the teacup when placing the morning tray where he could reach it without leaving his bunk.
“Fine morning, sir,” said the steward.
“A bad night, wasn’t it, steward?”
“Oh, nothing out of the way, sir.”
The jolly passenger, who knew the sea and so was always loud and hearty with the quartermasters, who saw to it that everybody had an interest in the sweepstake for the day’s run, and pulled the ladies’ chairs briskly about for them, and fed the gramophone, met him in the corridor as he was going to the bathroom. The jolly man danced a little greeting in his dressing-gown. “Dirty work last night,” said the dancer, beaming. “Thought that even I might be a bit sick early this morning. Does one good, though, to feel the sea. The old thing actually rolled. Didn’t know she could.”
The breakfast bugle brought the passengers assembling about the head of the saloon companion. There were some jokes about breakfast. The ladies were greeted with mock surprise. They were asked whether they were quite sure they wanted any. It was better to go easy after a wild night. That was the jolly man’s voice, followed by his own laughter, the first to follow his own jokes.
The lady from Hongkong complained at breakfast that her steward had forgotten to close her port window last night. “I had to get up and shut it myself. Quite suddenly the wind was terrible, and do you know, my window was open. I might have got an awful chill. So careless. Now, on the P. & O.—” She had traveled widely, the lady from Hongkong, by all the principal lines, and she would never travel by this one any more, you know. Didn’t the bacon taste the least bit queer? Did he think there was any advantage to be got out of the French exchange? If so, she would leave the ship at Marseilles and stay in the Riviera. Steward, some more bacon, well done! “Somebody told me,” she went on, “that the ship lurched frightfully once last night. I always said it would, if ever it met really bad weather.”
He trusted she would take no harm from the accident of the open window, and found himself speculating, while listening politely but without attention to her complaining voice, whether there was not a more profound difference between some human creatures, say between a man like Amiel and the lady from Hongkong, than there was between himself and one of the lower animals. The passengers at the captain’s table laughed aloud at a joke secret to themselves. The captain was not with them that morning. One of the men there turned and called over to the next table: “I say, Mrs. Taft here says she was just climbing out to shut her window when the ship suddenly rolled last night, and her husband says—”
“Hadn’t you better let him say it?” asked the young botanist from Java.
“There!” exclaimed the lady beside him. “Now we shan’t hear it. It’s too bad of you.”
The sun was warm on the promenade deck. Two children, while a sad ayah watched them, were boisterous with cigarette tins in which rattled a few coins.
The convalescent naval surgeon regarded the noisy children with malignity and exclaimed: “Not because I hate them, but because I’m sure their father has put spurious coins in those boxes, I’d like to chuck ’em both overboard. It doesn’t sound like good money.”
“Surely, Doctor, you can’t mean you’d cast children into the sea for being playful?” said a lady, leaning from her chair toward him with a smile inviting him to say more. But the doctor merely mumbled and went on reading the memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini.
At the after end of the deck the captain, waving his hands backward in good-natured deprecation toward a group of passengers, was making as brief as possible his usual morning round. But he stopped when he met the direct look of the naval officer, bent down with his hands resting on the arms of the surgeon’s chair, and said something which was inaudible. All the reader of Amiel in the next chair could hear was, “Oh, about four. What with that and an S O S call, I had one hour’s sleep last night.” He stroked his nose and walked briskly away.
The reader of Amiel looked seaward. So there had been a call for help! But how impossible it seemed. The very ship appeared to be enjoying that sea. She was playful, rearing a little at times, and throwing dazzling, snow-like clouds. The children jumped and clapped their hands when a flight of spray leaped higher than usual. The very waves were chanting. They were running heavily past, with brilliant crests. Not far from the bows the ghost of a rainbow stood in an invisible mist above the riot of waters; it would fade, yet glow again, an intangible vision that was constant and motionless in that boisterous world, as though it were a symbol of the imperishable virtue of beauty. The radiant clouds moved in the leisure of eternity. On the horizon, under one of them, like a model fixed to the clear rim of the world, was a barque under all sails. He felt that dread and mischance could never persist in the light of that morning. There were no shadows. He had never felt better in his life. All was well. He closed the covers on Amiel’s so often melancholy conclusions, and watched a sailor at work who whistled, while busy about the falls of a davit. Near the sailor was the life-belt rack, where he had stood the night before. But the rack was empty.
He flung his book on his chair, stood and filled his pipe, and went up to the boat deck. The prospect was wider there, and he wanted to see as much of this beautiful world as he could. He paused up there to watch a quartermaster chalking the deck for quoits; there was to be a tournament that afternoon.
“Nasty night, last night, wasn’t it?” he said to the sailor. He meant nothing particular by that. As a fact, he had almost forgotten the night before. But one always talks of the weather to a sailor; and one ought to be polite to these fellows.
“Yes, sir, it was.”
“I could tell that, in my cabin.”
“I expect you could, sir.”
“Wasn’t there an S O S call? I think I heard some one mention it?”
“Very likely. We did stand by.” The sailor stood up, straightened his back, and jerked his thumb seaward. “One of our chaps went overside. Young Bob—but you wouldn’t know him—”
“Went overside? Not drowned?”
“What would you expect, sir, on such a night? The ship put about. The passengers complain of a draught. We got out a boat. Cruised about for an hour. Nothing.” The sailor turned and gazed aft, then bent down again and went on chalking for quoits.