We had twenty-four hours of this sort of thing, and then it began to get monotonous. The wind dropped little by little, but the sea was nearly as high as ever, and the evening closed down upon us with our wretchedness still supreme, and the waves pervading everything from the cabins to the stoke-hole. We joined Eccles in the engine-room, where, if not dry, we were at least warm, and toasted our steaming clothes before the red glow of the furnaces, while we took exercise by bracing ourselves to avoid being dashed into the heart of the machinery by the great heaves and struggles of the fighting ship. It was a way of passing an evening which came with some originality and freshness to both Gerry and myself, and we stayed there late confabulating over our prospects, and wondering whether our attempt at an interview with our young women would be successful, and what sort of greeting we should receive.
“It’s all very well for you now,” said Gerry despondently, “you’re all right. You’ve got your title and an income, which might be worse by a long way, but where do I come in? I’m as badly off as ever. You’ll have to work your new-found influence pretty vigorously to get me any sort of billet to satisfy my ma-in-law.”
“That sort of thing’ll have to come later,” I answered. “Probably we shan’t get more than an hour with them, if that. Port Lewis isn’t such an enticing sort of place, from what I’ve heard, that the Madagascar’s likely to stay there long. They’ll just coal and that’s about all. But if Denvarre and his brother haven’t settled matters by now—which the Lord forbid!—I think it won’t do us any harm to remind our young women that we’re alive and still taking an interest in them. But with Denvarre for competitor I don’t see that you’re worse off than I am. Don’t let’s brood, though, old chap, but let what will betide. If our chances are gone from us completely, then we’ve got the best possible counter-irritant to depression handy. We can turn back and find our excitement still waiting for us at the foot of that stupendous wall.”
Gerry smiled hopefully, bending forward for a light for his pipe. A dreamy look crossed his face as he swayed apathetically to the roll of the ship, and as he rose and braced himself with his arm around a stanchion I could see that he was musing mistily over the future. I felt a little that way myself, and there was a silence between us for a time, broken only by the regular beat and clang as the great piston rods thrust themselves backwards and forwards, and the eccentrics jolted round clamorously.
Suddenly from the deck above came a hail, and Janson thrust his face, glistening with salt-foam flecks, into the disc of light where the man-hole gave upon the darkness.
“Light on the starboard bow, my lord,” he bellowed, to make himself heard above the jar of the machinery and the shriek of the storm. “The skipper thinks there must be a whaler afire.”
Gerry and I snatched at our oilskins, which we had doffed when we had descended from the sousings of the deck, and climbed the little iron ladder unsteadily. We were still ploughing our way into the trough of the head-sea, we found, when we gained the deck, but the great rollers did not come shooting over the bow and down the slippery planks as they had done an hour or two before. The sea was evidently going down, but was heavy enough yet to make us pity from the bottom of our hearts any poor wretches who had to battle with it in open boats.
Far away, very dimly and intermittently as we rose on the crest of wave after wave, a light flickered now and again away to starboard, shooting up occasionally into brightness as we and the burning craft stood out on the top of a sea together, lost utterly when both of us sank back into the trough between the seas, and evidently drifting towards us rapidly before the force of the northern gale.
I clambered up on to the bridge beside Waller, and bawled into his ear.
“Shall we be able to help,” I questioned stentoriously, “or is it too late?”