And on through the rooms Stickney shouldered: all in the air here an odour of the sea, and of them that go down to it in ships; pilot, captain, supercargo, purser; abstracts from logs, copies of manifests and clearances, marks and numbers of merchandise, with quantities, shippers, consignees; here peaked caps, and the jaw that chewed once, and paused long, and, lo, it moved anew; Black Books, massive volumes enshrining ancient wrecks; vast newspaper-files in every tongue; records of changes in lightships, lights, buoys, and beacons, from Shanghai to Cape Horn; reports, charts, atlases, globes; the progress of the rebellion in Shantung, and the earthquake last night in Quito; directories, and high-curved reference-books, and storm-maps; every minute the arrival of cipher cablegrams, breathless with the day's Amsterdam exchange on London, or with the quantities of tea in transitu via Suez or Pacific Railway; and the drift of ocean-currents, and the latest position of the Jane Richardson, derelict, and the arrival of the Ladybird at Bahia; and the probabilities of wind-circulation, atmospheric moisture, aberrations of audibility in fog; and in the middle of it the pulse of the sun, the thundering engines and shooting shuttles of this Loom; a tiptop briskness and bustle of action; a scramble of wits; a mêlée to the death; mixed with pea-jackets, and aromas of chewed pigtail, and a rolling in the gait.
Into this roar of life that word Kaiser stole: and it grew to a chorus.
Charles P. Stickney, butting upon a tearing clerk who was holding aloft a bulletin of icebergs and derelicts, tried to stop him: upon which the clerk, who would not be stopped, cried with a back-looking face of passionate haste: “London message just received—no intelligence of Kaiser—”
But he had hardly disappeared, when another man from an inner room rushed, waving something: the Navesink Highlands lookout had wired the Kaiser in sight! And while the Exchange rang with cheers, Stickney, a colour now in his sere cheeks, went boring his way outward.
The lookout had said it—those blue eyes that never failed there on his watch-tower, he knowing the ships that sail the sea as the Cyclops his sheep, in his heart so knowing them all, that as that sea-glass detected a speck on the horizon, those sea-wise nostrils sniffed its name: for between the Mary Jane and the Mary Anne, both off-shore schooners, is all the world of difference: if you would not see it, he knows. And he had wired the Kaiser!—so expectant his outlook: and that day wept like a ruined man.
Swift upon his first wire a second flashed: and one of those craped days of the tragedies of commerce followed, the boding, the loss, flashed everywhere, pervading Europe and America.
The next morning the Exchange, all the exchanges, the Lloyds', the bourses, were crowded from an early hour, but subdued: no news, not a word; but still—there was certainty: for had the Kaiser and her wireless been merely disabled, she would undoubtedly by now have been reported: she had foundered.
Foundered!—in the serenest weather in which ship ever crossed the water....
But at eleven the truth came: for the brig which had lain becalmed near the Boodah at the moment of the tragedy, and now was nearer England, had flashed the news: “many of the Kaiser's passengers mutilated, many drowned”.
Death, then, was in the pottage of Life; the air tainted with specks of blood....