“Masses all round us high as the ship.”
Certainly Mrs. Locke had vanished. “I’m very calm,” said Miss Mar to herself, with a certain admiring surprise. And then her self-esteem fell from her with the realization that in the back of her head she knew there could not possibly be any immediate danger, or Cheviot would have made some sign. All the same, her tranquillity did not prevent her from picturing a shipwreck, in which the clearest impression was that of Cheviot saving Mrs. Locke’s life at risk of his own. The lady’s heartfelt acknowledgments and tableau.
On deck, in the gray milky light, a different picture. No Cheviot and no discernible danger. Plenty of broken, moving ice, but nothing like the towering bergs of saloon rumor. Going forward at low pressure the Los Angeles was picking her way among the water-worn shapes that stood dazzling white, each on a pale green base, submerged yet partly visible. Strange sculpture of the sea, that, like a Rodin statue, gained meaning as you gazed. This rough-hewn mass was a crouching polar bear; that a saurian, antediluvian, vast. Some of the ice-cakes, flat, featureless, were mere lonely white rafts drifting from nowhere, bound nowhere; others manned by dwarf snowmen, misshapen, spectral.
Though so unlike report, there was something here expected, hauntingly familiar, like a single surviving impression out of a vanished life. From a long, long distance O’Gorman’s voice recalled her as he came down the deck with Mrs. Locke. “What do you think of this for a change?”
Hildegarde was still looking round for Cheviot, as she answered, “It’s all much flatter and less tremendous than I expected.”
“Three fourths of the ice is under water. I’m afraid you’ll find it quite tremendous enough.”
Here at last was Louis! “What’s going to happen?” Hildegarde hailed him.
He only pulled off his cap for her benefit. It was to O’Gorman he said, half aside, “We’ll have to get out of this.”
While the two men stood there looking gravely out, the ship put her nose into the ice-pack, shivered, and drew back.