“How many of them are there, skipper? Couple of hundred, eh?”
“Less five. If that lunatic, who jumped overboard yesterday morning at bath parade, had gone down it would have made yet another less. We were delayed about twenty minutes or more, and when the boat came up with him the beggar tried all he knew to swim away from it. I was watching him through the glass, expecting every minute to see him risen by a shark, but no. If he’d been a sane man and a useful member of society, something of the kind would have happened; but being of no earthly good to himself or anybody else, it didn’t.”
“Quite so. Two hundred, less five, I think you said. Crowded up too, fore and aft, with passengers. What would happen if we came to sudden and unexpected smash? In the matter of the boats I mean.”
“What sort of croaking vein are you in, Musgrave? Well, in such a case it would be a mortal tight fit, I don’t mind telling you. We fulfil all the requirements of the Board of Trade in the matter of boat carrying, but if we have a couple of hundred damned soldiers crammed on board at the last moment, what are we to do? Why, just drive ahead and trust to luck; and that’s what brings us through far oftener than you landsmen ever dream.”
The talk veered round to other topics, and presently one of the quartermasters came in to report that the weather was thickening into a regular fogbank.
“I’ll go up on the bridge a bit, Musgrave,” said the captain. “It isn’t often we get fogs so near the Line. But the weather has been beastly this voyage, as hot and steamy as I’ve ever known it; and there are a lot of waterspouts about too.”
They bade each other good-night, and already as Roden left the cabin, the more measured throb of the propeller told that the vessel had slowed down to half-speed. Then the hoarse, rasping screech of the foghorn rent the night as the ship drove slowly through the smother, whose steamy folds blotted out the stars. Again and again the voice of the foghorn was lifted, uttering its hideous, vibrating whoop—causing the sleeping passengers below to start up wide awake in confused doubt as to whether the end of the world had come, and a hazy uncertainty as to whether they themselves were just arriving at Waterloo station or at the Judgment Seat. There was one, however, whom the unendurably distracting sound did not awaken; who slept on—heavily, tranquilly, dreamlessly.
Roden, though intending to go below, still remained on deck, held by a kind of fascination, as the ship glided slowly through the silent fleecy smother. Then again the jarring blast of the foghorn rolled out, and—on Heaven! Was it an echo—louder, more appalling than the sound itself? For, as he gazed, there leaped forth something out of the mist. In that rapidly flashing moment of time was photographed upon his brain a massive hull, the loom of a huge funnel, a towering cut-water—a human figure, wild with horror, upon the extremity of the latter. Then came a shock which flung him, bruised, partly stunned, to the deck.
Keeping his presence of mind amid the awful and appalling crash, he managed to save his head from injury; then, before he could rise, came another shock more jarring, more shivering than the first, and with it the blasting screech of escaping steam. He saw a heavy body, flung from the bridge, fall head downwards. He heard the grinding, crunching sound of that cut-water shearing through strong iron plates; the frantic shrieks and yells now arising beneath, which even the deafening demoniacal blast from the steampipe could not drown. Then, his confused senses whirling round, he saw the great hull—the towering cut-water which had crashed into them right amidships, recede and vanish into the mist. The Scythian floated once more alone upon the fog-enshrouded waters, and it needed no abnormal instinct of prescience to tell that very soon she would float no longer.
And now there followed the most indescribable scene of terror and confusion ever witnessed in the annals of ocean tragedy. The saloon passengers, already alarmed and uneasy by the repeated blasts of the foghorn, came pouring up the companion; crowding, crushing past each other in their furious panic. The second-class passengers, too, from the tore part of the ship, tore aft, crying that the water was already flooding their cabins. Each fed the other’s fears; till the decks were alive with what seemed nothing less than a surging crowd of shrieking, fighting maniacs. And then, to complete the chaotic unwieldy horror of the situation, the time-expired men made a rush for the boats, and casting two of them loose before they could be prevented, poured over the side into them with the result of capsizing both.