“I am taking it for someone else.”
“Oh! Not your own job?”
“No.”
“You are an uncourageous fellow.”
For a moment John had remained silent. Then he had burst out: “Oh, it’s no good. You don’t know Ordith. You don’t know old Fane-Herbert. The odds are too big.”
Hartington had shrugged his shoulders.
“That’s for you to decide.”
So John waited in the darkness at the flagship’s side. Above him the quarter-deck was gay with red and white bunting, and brilliant with electric lights. John wondered if coachmen and chauffeurs felt as he did. The colour and music were close to him, but he had no part in them. He saw shadows move to and fro on the decorative flags, and wondered if that shadow were Margaret’s, and what she was saying and doing at that instant. Certainly, he reflected, he could not be entering into her thoughts; and yet it seemed strange, almost incredible, that she, of whom he thought so insistently, should occupy her mind with other things—an experiment in a new dance-step, perhaps, or the effect of her dress, or the excellence of supper. This thought, as it were an arm that thrust him back into the darkness from which he desired to issue, quickened his sense of remoteness. He saw all his hopes and desires objectively, as if he looked down from a barred window on to a world he could not enter. There, on the quarter-deck, within a few yards of him, was Margaret; he could not attain to her, he could not make her hear; she was dancing and laughing, eating and drinking, unconscious of his proximity, forgetful of his existence.
He did not see her until the dance ended with an abruptness peculiar to entertainments on board His Majesty’s ships. At once the sea, which through the hours had lapped quietly against the steel plates, was thrashed to foam by the propellers of the waiting steamboats. It happened, as John had scarcely doubted it would happen, that Margaret and her mother went ashore in the Pathshire’s picket-boat. John, who stood where the light fell on him, watched Ordith escort them down the gangway. He saw that Margaret’s eyes were tired, as if she had undergone some strain, but this appearance he attributed to physical weariness. She said nothing to Ordith but a short “Good-night” scarcely audible. Then, as she stepped on to the deck of John’s boat, she looked directly at him where he stood beside the engine-room casing. She looked at and beyond him as if he were not there, and disappeared into the cabin.
He drove the boat angrily, using too much helm, and brought up by the landing-stage, not by slowing and then stopping his engines, but by a sudden stoppage and immediate reversal at full speed. All went well, as if the Devil were directing his judgment. The stem swung inaccurately, the engines stopped, and the boat came to rest with the foam boiling around her. The passengers clambered out with the extraordinary nervous clumsiness of landfolk in boats.