“Very likely. We did stand by.” The sailor stood up, straightened his back, and jerked his thumb seaward. “One of our chaps went overside. Young Bob—but you wouldn’t know him—”
“Went overside? Not drowned?”
“What would you expect, sir, on such a night? The ship put about. The passengers complain of a draught. We got out a boat. Cruised about for an hour. Nothing.” The sailor turned and gazed aft, then bent down again and went on chalking for quoits.
CHAPTER XLII
Something had happened. I switched on the reading lamp at the head of the bunk and looked at my watch. Four in the morning! I could have sworn that the noise which had roused me was the herald of eclipse and overthrow. But had I heard anything? My cabin appeared to be a private seclusion in the hush at the end of time and chance. Had the ship stopped? There was no movement. She might have been in harbor. Yet when I rested against the bulkhead I could hear the many tiny mysterious voices speaking everywhere in the ship: twitters, ticks and tacks, rumbles—a clang, a guggle—a purring and a humming, but all reduced and far. She was going slow. Just as I switched off the light the monstrous sound came again, a long shuddering bellow.
Fog! Well, we were nearing home and it was meet that I should have an early notice that I had come to the end of the islands, the beaches, and the forests. As for islands, I had seen as many as would make an archipelago of myths, islands suitable for all the fables. Only a few days ago I came out on deck at sunrise by chance, and we were steaming by Giardino, and Etna was over us. That was the very hour to pass through the Strait of Messina. We went close to Stromboli, which was vexed with heavy gusts of smoke, and the Lipari Islands were strung out beyond in the Mediterranean weather of the legends. Ah, what a chance man had in that sea, once he had got beyond the worst of his fears and his stone implements! And at least five times in the long story of his life there, after he learned to make bronze, he seemed well on the way to an intellectual light that was equal to the sunshine at his porch. To look at those lambent shores above that plain of malachite was to see the clear invitation to him. How could he remain in darkness? There were the very colors and the radiance to transmute the muddy residue of his mind. Yet each time that he was near to full achievement his house fell on him; perhaps because he met the eye of Jove with arrogance, and perhaps because his pride had made him careless. The sunset of that day when we passed through the Tyrrhenian Sea was like a pæan to the renown of man; and so all we latter-day witnesses of Heaven’s tribute to man’s long effort retired to the saloon, where there was a concert; and an elderly Scotch passenger, to whom probably not a secret of the visible universe is unrevealed, and not many of the secrets of God, sang to us something about the banks of Loch Lomond; or rather, he stated the case for the low road, and for the high, spectacles on the end of his nose, face slightly lifted to keep them there and to get a good sight of his notebook, as though this were evidence and we were in a police court.
There was the siren again! Evidently there was some distance still to go to the everlasting light. It was shuddering and bellowing when the prompt little steward came in with the morning tea just after six. That moment when the tray is put beside you, and the lamp is doused because now you can see by the light of another day, always seemed to me to be of miraculous and pleasant significance, as though not one of us can be forgotten, but in our due time, out of the fog of the vast and impersonal world not us, will come the knock at our door (come in!) just as if, after all our doubting derision, the hairs of the head of each of us really had been numbered.
We ought to have been off Ushant, but from the deck there was no telling where we were. The air was bleak, the decks were wet, and there was no horizon. I climbed to the captain’s bridge—by command, brought by the captain’s messenger; nothing less could induce me to venture there—and the master’s gray parrot, on seeing me, gave his confusing imitation of the bo’sun’s pipe, and then in a gruff voice condemned my eyes because I am a farmer and no sailor. The fog had thinned a little to weatherward, but in the east it lay in banks and gave a vista of many horizons, and all of them false. One looked that way, and got the impression that Europe was mislaid. Yet, no; the master said that during the night he received three cross-bearings by wireless, and that, in spite of my dubiety, we were in soundings and fifty miles south of the Lizard. We should be off Portland in the early afternoon.
There was a rumor, when we were at lunch, that the Start was in sight. But a retired naval surgeon was telling me about Peking at that moment. I am not sure that I listened attentively to the news that England was in view. I did not get up. Then presently it struck me that something had happened of more interest to me even than the nearness of Devon. I mean the fact that I did not get up to see it. This so puzzled me that I attended in but a polite way to the doctor’s further words on China. What had happened?