Dan's voice hurled astern before the echoes died.
"All right. Relieve the wheel—and the lookout!"
Virginia, addressing a merry group on the hurricane deck, just below and aft the bridge, paused in the middle of a sentence and listened to the sharp, crisp words. Then she smiled slightly and resumed her discourse.
Dan paced up and down with the mate, taking up the thread of the talk where it had been left the previous watch; but neither was in a talking mood, and they soon fell silent. Presently a girl's rich voice rose to the accompaniment of Oddington's banjo, an instrument but poorly adapted to the motif of the music, which was plaintive, yearning. The deep contralto notes brought full meed of meaning, although the words were German; low, deep, uncertain at first—the ponderings of love, of devotion, of doubt—then swelling loud and full and free at the end; love justified, undying, triumphant, overpowering.
"Könnt' fühlen je das Glück das ich würd nennen mein Hätt' ich nur Dich allein! Hätt' ich nur Dich, nur Dich allein!"
Then suddenly in wild rapture she broke from the German, repeating the refrain in English—
". . . The rapture that would be my own If I had you . . . if I had you . . . you."
Piercing sweet it ended, filled with tenderness. Just you, you, you, going on far across the moon-lit waters into infinity. Dan walked to the lee of the bridge and with hands on the dodger's ridge, leaned forward, peering bard and straight to the rim of the sea.
For every heart there is a song, and for every song a heart; for this earth is not so big that the dreams, the passion of some song-maker, humble or not, may not strike a responsive chord, at the other end of the world, it may be. And this for Dan; this simple love song with its swelling iterations. It awakened sleeping poetry in the heart of the young commander, awakened a tenderness long hidden under the rough exterior of a tumultuous life.
There was no mistaking the identity of the singer, no mistaking those deep, full notes, vibrant, rounded, and so melodious. To whom was she singing? Could a woman sing like that, sing as Miss Howland sang, to no one? Impersonally? Dan turned his face down at the group. The women were muffled in greatcoats, for the soft evening, which had tempted them to the deck, was growing chill, and he could see the dark forms of the men and the red lights of their cigars. Wotherspoon had just finished a comic song, and they were all laughing and applauding.