Was there plenty of hot water?
What next?
Something new occurred to her always before she completed the task in hand. At length she went through the house, upstairs and down. Everything, she decided, was as nearly ready for the emergency as it could be. The fires burned brightly in the living rooms and the smell of coffee filled the place. In one of the living rooms four mattresses were ranged on the floor and had been made up with sheets, pillows, and coverlets. In the other the large table had been cleared of books and papers. A cloth covered it and it was heaped high with piles of plates, with hardtack, with some cold meat, with what bread there was, with cups. In the centre stood several pots of coffee. In the kitchen the servant was frying bacon, Keturah slicing it for her. The governess had run upstairs to assure herself that Mermaid, the youngest, had not been wakened by all the bustle, or to quiet her if she had. The two boys were replenishing the fires and between times darting to the windows, now the south and now the west windows. But they could see little or nothing from either.
Mary completed her inspection and stepped to the south window. It was at that instant that the lifeline reached the wreck.
XVII
The line passed close to the mainmast and a stiffened arm reached out and caught it, drew it inboard at the maintop, some thirty feet or so above the wave-washed deck. There followed an interval of minutes—they did not seem like hours but they seemed tragically long—in which the two or three men gathered in the maintop, which is a small semi-circular platform with barely standing room for three, made various movements making fast the line; and having guarded against losing it they began slowly to pull its length in toward them.
The light line for firing carried to them a stouter rope, bent to the end of it, and a block and tackle. Eventually the block reached them and the people on shore prepared for the running out of the breeches buoy.
And all this dark and sightless while the distress of the motionless figures lashed in the mizzen rigging was something palpable, acute, and sensed without the need of a single gesture, a single sign, a moment’s glimpse. How were these unfortunates to avail themselves of the breeches buoy even when it reached the ship? To get to it they would have to unlash themselves, descend, and cross the deck between the mizzenmast and the mainmast and ascend to the maintop. To cross the deck would be impossible. As well try to walk fifty feet on the surface of the Atlantic.
It was not certain, furthermore, that those in the mizzen retained any power of physical movement. They did not shift their positions. Although they had lashed themselves in pairs close together they did not strike each other about the head, shoulders, and body, as they should be doing if they had any vigour left, in the imperative effort to keep from freezing.
Slowly, with a painful slowness, the line was got ready for the running of the breeches buoy. And then it was that Keeper Tom Lupton manifested his intention of being hauled out in the buoy to the vessel.