He noticed it, and commented to himself on the circumstance: “That’s excitement, I suppose—excitement pure and understandable. Not being a man of stone, I can’t help being thrilled with the majesty of the moment, the sublime vagueness of my knowledge of what will happen when a current flashes through these wires. I’m not a coward. People who write about other men’s feelings when Death is beginning to paw them on the shoulder, write mostly from the imagination; and, so far as I’ve seen, they all do it wrong. I’ve been there; I’ve felt the old man’s bony touch more than once; and so I know. A man isn’t of necessity terrified; phantoms of his past deeds do not invariably flash before him; nor does he always lose his nerve, and move like a cheap automaton. I can’t speak for others; but what I personally have felt has been a dull carelessness for what is going to happen, and a curiosity about what will come afterwards. It seems to me that a thinking man, with the ambition of a mouse, should never fear death, because once dead, he becomes wiser than all the living remnant of the human race. There are men, I know, whom physical danger turns into a helpless mass of palpitating nerves. Shelf, for instance, is one of those. By Jove!”—he smiled grimly—“by Jove! I’d give a finger to have Theodore Shelf in my shoes just now, and force him to couple these wires, and spring the mine with his own fat, white fingers. I believe—yes, I verily believe the experience would turn him honest. Ah, there goes one bell. Time’s up.”
Through a lull in the wind, the tenor clang of the ship’s bell came down to him, and on its heels, more dimly, the look-out’s dissyllabic assurance in the dismal minor key that he was awake, and had nothing to report.
Then Patrick Onslow made connection, and sent through the green-silk covered wires a current direct from the steamer’s dynamo; and on that moment was thrown against the iron roof of the state room as though the infernal machine had exploded beneath his very feet.
The camp-stool was kicked into the air, the wet canvas dodgers shed water in streams, and Captain Owen Kettle fell spread-eagled on the planking of the bridge. From the hatch in the fore-deck before him had sprung a volcano of ruddy flame spurting through vast billows of smoke; the iron plating round it buckled and split; and the whole steamer gave a trembling, frightened leap. Presently, from the black, windy night above, there fell an avalanche of débris which smote the steamer and the water round, like canister-shot from a distant cannonade.
Then came a thumping jar from the engine-room, repeated twice over; and then the engines stopped.
“My God,” thought Kettle, “he’s overshot the mark! If she’s broken down, we’re done for.”
But for all that he did not lose for an instant his presence of mind or instinct of command; but, picking himself up, clapped a stumpy leaden whistle between his lips and blew shrilly.
At first no one answered his summons. From the forecastle, from the stokehold, from aft, came the ship’s company, making by instinct for the high land of the bridge deck; and from his eminence the little captain scowled down upon them and swore. It is not a wholesome sight to see grown men screaming through sheer terror; and the sooner they are dissociated, either by words or blows, from this frame of mind, the more they will be able subsequently to respect themselves. By dint of a vinegar tongue, and suggestive movements towards a pair of implements which bulged his jacket pockets, Kettle drove a gang of five to set the mizzen trysail to keep the steamer head to sea. She was rapidly losing her way, and if she broached-to beam-on with that heavy sea running, the lower decks would be filled with green water continuously, and that, with such a gaping rent where the hatch had been, meant simply a rapid swamping.