He shouts a question over his shoulder, standing there by the binnacle:
‘What’s she doing, Mister Andrews?’
‘Twenty and three-quarter knots, Sir,’ says the Second Officer, who has been in charge. ‘But the Chief’s raising her revolutions every minute.... She’s nearly on to the twenty-one now.’
‘And even if we lick that we’ll be over five hours reaching her,’ mutters the Master to himself.
Meanwhile the wireless is beating a message of hope across a hundred miles of night and storm and wild waters.
‘Coming! The R.M.S. Cornucopia is proceeding at full speed in your direction. Keep us informed how you are....’
Then follows a brief unofficial statement, a heart-to-heart word between the young men operators of the two ships, across the hundred-mile gulf of black seas:
‘Buck up, old man. We’ll do it yet! We’re simply piling into the storm, like a giddy cliff. She’s doing close on twenty-one, they’ve just told me, against this breeze; and the Chief’s down in the stokeholds himself with a fourteen-inch wrench and a double watch of stokers! Keep all your peckers up. I’ll let you know if we speed-up any more!’
The Operator has been brief and literal, and has rather under-stated the facts. The Leviathan is now hurling all her fifty-thousand-ton length through the great seas at something approaching a twenty-two knot stride; and the speed is rising.
Down in the engine-room and stokeholds, the Chief, minus his overalls, is a coatless demi-god, with life in one hand and a fourteen-inch wrench in the other; not that this wrench is in any way necessary, for the half-naked men stream willing sweat in a silence broken only by the rasp of the big shovels and the clang of the furnace-doors, and the Chief’s voice.