The reporters, who had got hold of the captain and one of the survivors, surrounded the pair three and four deep. Their ranks were broken by a distracted woman with a shawl over her head, strained tight round her piteous face.
"Is it here he is, the gentleman who was saved? For the love of God, sir, did ye see Jimmy O'Brian? I'm his mother."
Napier leaned more heavily on his servant.
"We must get out of this," he said. But they couldn't. People who hadn't found their friends were not to be convinced they weren't on board. Again and again denied access to the ship, they pressed through the crowd with cries and questions. They couldn't see the crutch. Napier was knocked and jostled. The old gas-sickness was heavy on him. He took refuge on a sea-chest behind a pile of luggage, and sent Day to keep places in the train. When he lifted his swimming head, struggling still against that tide of nausea rising to choke him, Napier saw that the crowd had thinned now to a few groups of last, despairing lingerers. Even the cries for Jimmy O'Brian had sunk into the same stillness that wrapped the sailor at the bottom of the sea. A little old man in a threadbare coat closely buttoned round a meager body went up to the guard at the foot of the gangway.
"You are quite sure? The passengers are all off?"
"Haven't I told you no end o' times? They're gone, every man Jack of 'em, and we're hoistin' the gangway."
The old man walked forlornly away, his threadbare ulster flapping against his shins.
"Any idea when the other lady will be coming off?" a foreign-sounding voice asked on the other side of the luggage.
"'Other lady'! What other lady?"
Napier, leaning over, saw something shoved into a grimy fist. The Clonmel deck-hand had no need to look at the aid to memory. The faculty of touch had applied the stimulus. "There was another lady," he said; "but she ain't comin' ashore here. Goin' back with us to Ireland."