Captain Arendt had only to rise from the planks where he had been flung, to command a bird's-eye view of the disaster. He looked down on the crumpled bows of the other ship, driven twenty feet into his own saloon-deck, and making a trumpet of his hands, shouted across to the other bridge, on which he could see figures moving like agitated black smudges:
"You is cut us half in two. Keep going ahead. Don't back out, vatever you do. Keep the hole plugged until I gets my peoples off."
The other ship seemed to hang as if wedged in the gap she had made, but before the officers of the Wasdale could reach the saloon deck the hideous, rending noise was renewed. The black bows of the stranger wrenched themselves loose, slid clear, and with a sobbing roar the sea rushed in as water falls over a dam. The withdrawn mass ground alongside, tearing woodwork into kindling, and then began to melt softly into the fog. Captain Arendt clambered back to his bridge, shouting as he ran:
"Ship ahoy, you! You have sunk us. Stand by to safe life. Get out mit your boats. Blow your vistle. You pig swine of a ——!"
Without reply the slayer faded like a phantom and was gone. From far down in the Wasdale's hold came a sound which made her captain thrill to feel that discipline had stood its first grim test. Collision doors in bulk-heads were grinding shut with the mutter of far-off thunder.
The electric lights on deck and in the saloons had been snuffed out. The ship was in darkness almost everywhere. From staterooms came screams of women and the wails of little children. The few stewards on watch were first to join the seamen on deck and those who had been flung from their bunks forward by the shock of collision. Into the ruck began to pour firemen and coal-passers from below, already flooded out of their compartments. It was perhaps three minutes before a welter of men began to flow in eddies toward the boats.
Meantime a wonderful thing was being done. The compelling personality of one man rose dominant as if he had been given the strength of ten. Panic was on tiptoe, ready to make an inferno of these decks, when it was routed because a hundred and forty men in the Wasdale had learned by the hard drill of experience that what this man said must be done on the instant. Captain Arendt called for light, and four sailors came running with the globe lamps snatched from the steerage and the wheelhouse. He swung one of these over the hole in the ship's side, and there was no need to wait for the reports of those sent below to make examination. Her bulk-heads could not save her, and she was settling fast.
"The old Wasdale vas not builded for this," he said to the chief officer. "She will sink in one half hour—no longer. We must safe life. Get the men to their stations at the boats, joost like boat-drill we have every woyage. If they don't go, shoot 'em. But they vill go. I knows. Send an officer in charge of some goot men to handle the steerage."
The captain passed his own cabin door three times in the next handful of seconds. It was only a step, only an instant snatched from this priceless flight of time, to save the wallet in the top drawer of the desk. Each time he passed the door the desire to enter pulled him as if strong hands clutched his shoulders, but he went on.