The returning ship swam swiftly through the dark; the deep, interior breathing of the engines, the singing of wire stays, the huge whispering rush of foam streaming the water-line made up a body of silence upon which the sound of the doctor’s footfalls, coming and going restlessly along the near deck, intruded only a little—a faint and personal disturbance. Charging slowly through the dark, a dozen paces forward, a dozen paces aft, his invisible and tormented face bent forward a little over his breast, he said to himself,—
“What fools! What blind fools we’ve been!”
Sweat stood for an instant on his brow, and was gone in the steady onrush of the wind.
The man lying on the cot in the shelter of the cabin companionway made no sound all the while. He might have been asleep or dead, he remained so quiet; yet he was neither asleep nor dead, for his eyes, large, wasted, and luminous, gazed out unwinking from the little darkness of his shelter into the vaster darkness of the night, where a star burned in slow mutations, now high, now sailing low, over the rail of the ship.
Once he said in a washed and strengthless voice, “That’s a bright star, doctor.”
If the other heard, he gave no sign. He continued charging slowly back and forth, his large dim shoulders hunched over his neck, his hands locked behind him, his teeth showing faintly gray between the fleshy lips which hung open a little to his breathing.
“It’s dark!” he said of a sudden, bringing up before the cot in the companionway. “God, Hallett, how dark it is!” There was something incoherent and mutilated about it, as if the cry had torn the tissues of his throat. “I’m not myself to-night,” he added, with a trace of shame.
Hallett spoke slowly from his pillow.
“It wouldn’t be the subs to-night? You’re not that kind, you know. I’ve seen you in the zone. And we’re well west of them by this, anyhow; and as you say, it’s very dark.”
“It’s not that darkness. Not that!”