That loosed tongues. The boat was full of angry voices. Grant's alone, steady, quiet, but heard above them all, said:
"It's a mistake, then?—Wait a moment!"—he rose and steadied himself in the gentle swell—"I say!—it's a mistake, then, that we're a hundred miles from land?"
"Not much mistake about that," the voice came back.
"Are we to wait while you overhaul the other boats?"
"Why should you wait?"
"You mean to round the others up and give us a tow?"
"Oh, do I?"
Again the commander repeated that action of his, tilting the torch so as to show up the pale oval with the eager eyes.
Newcomb readily owned afterward that the sharp collision of emotions in those minutes during the interview put out of the question any sober thinking or coördination of impressions. All that came later. But in the flux of feeling he knew even at the time that his peculiar loathing of the man wasn't altogether due to the devilish work he had finished, or fear of what was yet to come. Even in the thick of shifting dreads and hates Newcomb knew that moment by moment, ever since the colloquy began in the background of his torn mind, a consciousness was shaping which told him that this man would have cut the parting shorter but for some special stimulation of his contemptuous interest in the lifeboat. And to what could such stimulation be due but to the spectacle (Newcomb admitted its crowning strangeness) of the way in which one person in the boat was taking what most would count a catastrophe to shake the soul.
Did the fact of the absence of hatred in the face of the only woman in the boat account for the something which Newcomb had little expected to find in a German U-boat captain—that slight tendency to attitudinize in the midst of his grim business, to assume the "gallant commander" air, as no man does in exactly the same way for his fellowmen. This ghastly suggestion of flirtatiousness, following hard as it did on the heels of murder, and making its obscure demand over the very grave of the sunken ship, stirred Newcomb to a pitch of fury hardly sane. And how the thought flashed through him—how was Grant taking this girl's mockery of him, mockery of all her protectors, of decency itself? And behold Grant was "taking it"—this thing done on the floor of ocean—as a man may whose head is among the stars. Poor devil! he didn't even see it, didn't even sense what the commander's insolent use of the torch showed in that circumscribed field of intense light—the girl's eyes still wide and curious.