Afterwards, the doctor bore down upon the Billabong party, his face full of determination.
“This won’t do,” he said. “I shall have all the ladies on board developing nerves. You youngsters must come and help me—get Grantham and West and that long New South Wales fellow, and we’ll start some sort of a game in the lounge. The fog is thicker than ever, and the only thing we can do is to make people forget it.”
“Right-oh, doctor!” Wally answered. “It would be easier to forget it, if we weren’t eating it all the time—but we’ll do our best.” So they organised an uproarious game that gathered in every one, even to the mothers and the babies; and by working the piano to its utmost, succeeded in supplanting for a time the incessant shriek of fog-horns. Tea found a ship’s company considerably cheered, and with more appetite.
“It’s wearing, but it pays,” said the doctor, cheerfully. “You’ve all helped me nobly, and next time I have to organise a band of sunbeams, may you all be shining lights in it! There’s a vein of pure idiocy in Wally that I appreciate most highly.”
“I’m overcome,” said Wally, bowing.
“Don’t mention it,” said the doctor, affably. “True merit ought always to be acknowledged. No, I think you’re all dismissed from duty now; the mothers will be thinking of bathing the babies, and most of the others are exhausted—and small wonder. I’m thinking of going to sleep myself; the noise kept me awake last night.”
“Let’s go up on deck,” Norah said. “I’m tired of being shut up, below—and it’s almost as foggy here as anywhere. The ship is full of fog.”
On deck the white curtain seemed more impenetrable than ever. Everything was dripping wet, with an unclean clamminess far worse than honest rain. All round them came the wailing of fog-horns from invisible ships; sometimes the sound came from far off, approached gradually, and then went by them in the mist—unseen. Most of the ships were drifting, no faster than the Perseus; but evidently some captains had kept the engines going, in the hope of steaming slowly out of the fog.
“Beastly dangerous,” John West said. “It would be the easiest thing in the world to pile up a ship on this coast—apart from the chance of collision. It is far too near the shore to take chances. We are not five miles out.”
A siren sounded directly ahead: a long, half-heard note at first, and then a quickly-increasing sound; and suddenly the fog-horn of the Perseus broke out in a wild, continual clamour, incessant and urgent. Passengers rushed up on deck. The other ship was drawing nearer and nearer; so far as sound could testify, she was directly in a line with the Perseus. They heard quick voices on the bridge. From the bow came long shouts of warning.