“Not a thing could I do or say to help her! I don’t hold it’s any part of a man’s duty to throw dust in the eyes of a plucky girl facing danger; but I did long to be able to ease it a bit for her. And beyond what comfort the mere presence of another human being gave her, I was utterly useless. However, something in her face made me think she’d have been worse off alone, and I resolved to cling on to the last possible moment. But I was very weak and drowsy. I’d have let go and given up if it hadn’t been for her.
“ ‘If it sinks any lower.’ I told her, ‘you must work round to the stern and cling on there, and I’ll swim alongside.’ I knew I shouldn’t swim far; but I thought the thing would serve to keep her head out of the water for another couple of hours, anyway. And then she leaned a little forward and said ‘No!’
“ ‘You must,’ I said. But she went on quite quietly, ‘No. If this boat will only support one—if only one of us is to be saved—then it must be you.’
“I laughed. I was very angry with her—with that small, steady, white face of hers. I said, ‘Don’t talk nonsense, if you please. It’s all quite bad enough without that. You’ll do as you’re told.’ I suppose I was awfully rude to her. . . But she made me listen.
“ ‘That’s all right,’ she said, in her boyish way, ‘when other things are all right. But everything’s upside down now. Nothing is as usual. You know what I mean. And of the two, you must be saved, if there’s a choice. Just because of—of women and children. Just because you’re a man, and can fight, and help to stop—this. Don’t you see? Can’t you see?’
“I talked a lot more—talked like a Dutch Uncle. We argued the rights and wrongs of it for ever so long. It must have been. . . funny. . . we two specks of human beings, talking like that in the middle of the Atlantic! Her arguing was not the least use, of course. She to argue down the deepest instinct in the nature of any decent man of our race—she, that little thing! She was silent at last. I thought I’d convinced her of the sheer, rank, outrageous impossibility of her idea. And all the time I was longing to give in and let go there and then. Only I read in her face—somehow; how does one know things at such times?—that her one fear was just being left alone. She wasn’t afraid of death; but she was afraid of the gray twilight and the empty, empty sea.
“We did not speak for a long time after that. We were too tired. That wild suggestion of hers never crossed my mind again. I was thinking,—chiefly of going ratting with Gherkin, the terrier I left with the Dunstables! I was in a sort of dream, I think. But once I heard her speak, low and clearly. ‘Hold on,’ she said, ‘hold on. Stick it out! It’s your duty. You’re not your own now. You belong to every weak and defenceless thing there is in the world. . .’ I didn’t quite take in what she said, or its meaning; I was too far gone. But I lifted my head—I was resting it against the bulge of the broken canvas keel—and nodded to her, and she nodded back at me. I remembered afterwards that her eyes were starry bright. . . Then I let my head go down again, and shut my eyes a minute. . .”
He turned slowly, so that he faced Guida full. She saw, with an indescribable wrench of pain, that his brown cheeks were glistening wet; and as she saw it, he wiped the tears away, openly, on his knuckles, like a child. His eyes, looking into hers, held the reflection of a great light. And he was miles away; separated from her by measureless emotion, as by time and space.
He said, quite steadily, “I never saw her again.
“When I remember anything more, I was in the vast blaze of a searchlight—an agony of light, it seemed to me, boring through me. Then there were black shapes of men, trying to lift me into a boat. My hands were so clenched and numbed on the gunwale of that canvas thing that they had to cut free the bits I was hanging on to. . . for fear I left the girl in the lurch. And I shouted to them ‘Have you got the lady? Have you got the young lady? Take her first!’ And one of them put his ear down to my mouth, and listened carefully, and then looked at the others. And he said, very gently, ‘There ain’t no young lady, sir. You’re the only one on that boat.’ ”