“Yerce, yerce, no doubt an excellent young man,” agreed the priest mechanically. “But I have reason to believe that his morals are not satisfactory.”
“Good,” said Mrs. Rust.
“I do not think he is really married to that aggressive young woman he calls his wife.”
“Good,” said Mrs. Rust. She did not approve of such irregularities any more than the priest did, but she disapproved of disapprobation.
The priest, being constitutionally incapable of argument, and yet unable to broaden his view, was left wordless. But an interruption mercifully rescued him from the necessity of attempting a reply.
Elizabeth Hammer, Mrs. Rust’s maid, appeared at the companion door. Her eyes were fixed hungrily upon the sea.
There was a race about to be run, and the starter stood ready to say the word. But Elizabeth Hammer brushed past him and walked across the empty strip of deck. She climbed the rail as though she were walking upstairs, and dropped into the sea.
“Hammer,” barked Mrs. Rust hoarsely, as she heard the splash. That word broke the spell. A woman shrieked, and Captain Walters shouted, “Man Overboard.”
The suffragette was not a heroine. What she did was undignified and unconscious. The heroine should remove her coat, hand her watch to a friend, send her love to a few relations, and bound gracefully into the water. The suffragette, fully clothed, tumbled upside down after Elizabeth Hammer. No noble impulse prompted her to do it. She did not know of her intention until she found herself in the water, and then she thought, “What a fool!” She could not swim. The Caribbeania looked as distant as heaven, and as high. She felt as if she had been dead a long time since she saw it last. She paddled with her feet and hands like a dog, her mouth was full of water and of hair. She had never felt so abased in her life, she seemed crushed like a wafer into the sinking surface of the nether pit. For centuries she wrestled with the sea, sometimes for years and years on end a wave tore at her breath. She never thought of Elizabeth Hammer.
“This is absurd,” she thought, when eternity came to an end, and she had time for consecutive thought. She felt sure her eyes were straining out of their sockets, and tried to remember whether she had ever heard of any one going blind through drowning. Then she cried, and remembered that her head must be above water, if she could cry. She knew then that there was some one on her side in the battle. The sea seemed to hold her loosely now, instead of clutching her throat. She had a moment to consider the matter from the Caribbeania’s point of view, and to realise what a pathetic accident had occurred. It dawned upon her that her own hand, wearing her mother’s wedding ring, was just in front of her, holding the cord of a neat white life-buoy. “Caribbeania” painted in black on the life-buoy seemed like a wide mad smile.