But I wasn't frightened, although everybody was awake, and there was a feeling that something might happen. I asked Porter to take me on deck, but he said that no one was allowed, and so we just curled up on chairs and sofas and waited either for the storm to end or for the ship to sink. If you've ever been in a storm at sea, you know the feeling—that the next minute may bring calm and safety, or terror and death.
Porter had tucked a rug around me, and I lay there, looking at the others, wondering whether if an accident happened Delilah would face death as gracefully as she faces everything else. Leila was very white and shivery and clung to her father; it is at such times that she seems such a child.
Aunt Frances was fussy and blamed everybody from the captain down to Aunt Isabelle—as if they could control the warring elements. Surely it is a case of the "ruling passion."
But while I am writing these things, I am putting off, and putting off and putting off the story of what happened after the storm—not because I dread to tell it, but because I don't know quite how to tell it. It involves such intimate things—yet it makes all things clear, it makes everything so beautifully clear, Roger Poole.
It was after the wind died down a bit that I made Porter take me up on deck. The moon was flying through the ragged clouds, and the water was a wild sweep of black and white. It was all quite spectral and terrifying and I shivered. And then Porter said; "Mary, we'd better go down."
And I said, "It wasn't fear that made me shiver, Porter. It was just the thought that living is worse than dying."
He dropped my arm and looked down at me.
"Mary," he said, "what's the matter with you?"
"I don't know," I said. "It is just that my courage is all gone—I can't face things."
"Why not?"