I nodded numbly, and we started. The only boats in sight were two boats of the newspapers, that had lain in apathy near us. As they saw us start, their skippers started, too. The correspondents on their decks sat in stricken attitudes. Not one was writing. They crouched, huddled together, like men dying from cold. The three boats ran towards shore, side by side. With fixed gaze I followed the one on the right. Suddenly, she also disappeared, and I fell into a wild rage. “You fool, you fool,” I cried, shaking my fists. “Don’t you know a non-combatant?”
The men on the boat to the left rose in an agony of alarm, shouted incoherently, waved handkerchiefs. My fury suddenly became extinct, and I watched them apathetically. It would be their turn next, or ours. I had lost all faith in Tom’s protective schemes. One thing ran back and forth in my brain. “If I had only married Dorothy before I came, she could have worn black. Now, as it was, would she or wouldn’t she?” That was the only thing which distressed me. They say a man awaiting instant death thinks over all his past life. I didn’t, I only worried as to whether Dorothy would or would not wear black.
I looked up wearily. The sea was blank. The other boat had gone. “So you went first,” I said, calmly enough now. “I’ve always wondered what the next world was like. Now, I’m going to know.”
Ceaselessly went the chug, chug of the engine. Back and forth into the shuttle of my thought went the Jersey coast, and the problem of whether or not Dorothy would wear black.
The noise ceased in an instant, and I wondered at it dully. The crew sat heavily in the stern, the skipper holding the wheel. I could see his brown, knotted hands white with the anguished grip with which he clasped its rim. We lay in the long swell of the Channel in utter silence. Of all those thousands, we were left alone, rising and falling on the billows, absolutely without energy and without the slightest desire to act. The motor stopped, we could hoist the main sail from the cage, but we thought of no such thing. For minutes, which seemed like hours, we lay there while I gazed indifferently at the water. A hoarse cry from the skipper aroused me.
“Lookee there!” he shouted. I turned at the command and started. Scarce a hundred yards away was the conning tower of a submarine above the waves. Its top was open and a man’s head, the face masked with huge goggles, faced us. As I gazed with open mouth, the head disappeared, the top closed, and the conning tower sunk beneath the waves. I had seen “the man.”
The sight somehow galvanized me into energy. Now I had seen that the antagonist was a human being, and not a superhuman power, I would fight for my life. I ordered the sail raised through the cage, taking great care not to disturb it, and we started slowly back to Folkestone. Hours later, as we came up towards the harbor, I saw a yacht approaching. On the bridge were three figures. There was the flutter of a white dress beside the man at the wheel. As they came nearer, I saw it was the yacht I had chartered for our hunt in the Channel. The man and the girl on the bridge were Tom and Dorothy. As they came alongside, Tom called.
“What happened?”
I raised my head. “We four are all that are left,” I said sadly.