The First Lieutenant intimated that he had "got it," and, pulling his sou'wester well down over his ears, passed out: he was none too cheerful at the moment himself. The rain had been beating down in heavy streams since dusk, and the long oily swell that had been with them since leaving harbour had, although it had not wetted their rails, made the steady rolling rather monotonous.
The big tramp steamer might have had a fighting chance if it had not been for the torpedo. It hit fairly abreast her bridge, and two boats at the port-davits broke to splinters above the explosion, while the wireless instruments developed defects that would have taken a week to cure. The Chief Mate never saw the periscope. The explosion, and the sight of a hard white line stretching away to port at right angles to their course, were impressed on his brain simultaneously. It was a few seconds later when he rose shakily to his feet and mechanically set the engine-room telegraphs to "stop." As he did so, the Captain arrived with a rush on the bridge and released him from his post. He hurried below to examine the damage, and to fight, by every means possible to seamanship, the great Atlantic waters that he knew must by then be flooding nearly half the hold-space of the ship. Ships have reached harbour with worse damage than she had received, and she might have added another name to the list of tributes to good seamanship had not the enemy risen astern of them to complete his work. A shell hummed over them, skimming the tilted deck from two thousand yards away. The second shell arrived as the tramp's stern-gun fired, and the steamer quivered to a dull rumbling shock that told of a well-delayed fuse and a raking shot.
The tramp's big propeller threshed along, half out of water, as her Captain rang down for speed with which to dodge and manœuvre; but the vicious shells came steadily home into her, and it was a question only of whether the straining bulkheads forward would go before her stern was blown in. The stern-gun could hardly be depressed enough to get a clear view of its target, and Fritz knew it. The Chief Mate reckoned that it was about the twelfth shell that finished them. Following its explosion, he heard a noise that told him much,—a hissing, rushing sound of air from beneath his feet—the sigh of flooding holds.
There was little time, but they did what they could. The gun's crew, wrestling with a refractory cartridge-box lid, hardly seemed to look up as the tramp sank, carrying them down as so many British seamen have gone down, intent only on the job in hand. In five minutes' time the ocean was clear again save for a half-dozen bobbing heads clustered round a small white upturned boat.
The sea, that from the deck of the tramp had seemed to be only a long gentle swell, now appeared tremendous and threatening. With a cable's length between their smooth crests the big hills came majestically on, giving the numbed survivors glimpses of the empty spaces of the sea at intervals before lowering them back to the broad dark valleys between. For a few minutes the men simply paddled their feet in silence as they clung with unnecessary strength to the life-lines, stem, and stern-posts of the capsized boat; then the Chief Mate called to two of them by name. He gave the white-bearded, semi-conscious figure he supported into their charge and commenced diving, or rather ducking down, under the gunwale. He was blue with cold and weariness before he gained his object—a heavy eighteen-foot ash oar. The other two men came to his assistance, and between them they succeeded in passing the oar-loom across and under the boat, and in working it about until it caught and held at the far side. It took the Chief Mate a ghastly quarter of an hour before he could climb to the swaying keel, but once there he easily hauled the lighter of his assistants up beside him. With the other man steadying the loom in position, they swung their weight back on the painter clove-hitched to the bending blade. Time after time the oar slipped and had to be replaced, and on each failure the cramped workers panted and shivered a while before patiently setting to the task again. As they toiled, the send of the swell worked the boat broadside on, and suddenly as they threw back on the line she came sharply over, throwing them into the sea before they could clutch the rising gunwale with their hands. Followed an hour of heart-breaking baling with caps and hands, and then one by one the six came aboard—the old Captain, who in the face of active work was recovering consciousness, insisting on being at any rate one of the last three to leave the water.
The Chief Mate collapsed at once across the after-thwart. He had been working with the strength of desperation, and the effort had been great. The others knelt or sat on the thwarts, staring around them as they swung periodically on the crests of the waves in hungry desire for the sight of help. One man faced aft and began swearing, cursing the cold, the Germans, the war, and, in a curious twist of recollection, the ship's cook, who had died twenty minutes before, but who had done so suffering under the accusation of having stolen the swearer's sugar ration. The Captain rose, steadying himself by a hand on the gunwale: "Stop that swearing, you," he said; "lay aft here and rummage these lockers. You other hands, muster the gear in the boat and clear away the raffle. Mr Johnson, you and I will bail for an hour; the boat is leaking, and we'll take the first spell. We want warming, I think."
The Chief Mate raised his head from against the thwart—"I can't bale, sir; let the men do it. I'm done."
"Mr Johnson, I'm sixty-five years old and I'm going to bale, and I'm captain of this ship."
The Chief Mate clawed himself up to a kneeling position, and taking a sodden cap from the stern-sheets set feebly to work. As he went on he warmed a little, and the deadly feeling of despair began to leave him. The movements of men about him as they hunted for missing masts and oars roused him at length to an oath at a seaman who lurched against him.