The Chief is young again; young and a King to-night, and the rough days of his youth have surged back over him. He has picked up the wrench unconsciously, and he walks about, twirling it in his fist; and the stokers work the better for the homely sight of it, and the sharp tang of his words, that miss no man of them all.
And the great ship feels the effect. Her giant tread has broken into an everlasting thunder, as her shoulders hurl the seas to port and starboard, in shattered hills of water, that surge to right and left in half-mile drifts of phosphorescent foam, under the roll of her Gargantuan flanks.
The first hour has passed, and there have been two fresh messages from that vessel, flaming far off, lost and alone, out in the wild roar of the waters. There has been an explosion forrard in the burning ship, and the fire has come aft as far as the main bunkers. There has been a panic attempt to lower two more of the boats, and each has been smashed to flinders of wood against the side of the burning ship, as she rolled. Every soul in them has been killed or drowned, and the Operator in the burning ship asks a personal question that has the first touch of real despair in it; and there ensues another little heart-to-heart talk between the two young men:
‘Honest now, do you think you can do it?’
‘Sure,’ says the Operator in the Cornucopia. ‘We’re doing what we’ve never done at sea before in heavy weather. We’re touching within a knot of our “trials” speed—we’re doing twenty-four and a half knots; and we’re doing it against this! Honour bright, old man! I’ll not deceive you at a time like this. I never saw anything like what we’re doing. All the engineers are in the engine-room, and all the officers are on the boat-deck, overhauling the boats and gear. We’ve got those new forty-foot boat derricks, and we can shove a boat into the water with ’em, with the ship rolling half under. The Old Man’s on the bridge; and I guess you’re just going to be saved all right.... You ought to hear us! I tell you, man, she’s just welting the seas to a pulp, and skating along to you on the top of them.’
The Operator is right. The great ship seems alive to-night, along all her shapely eight hundred feet of marvellous, honest, beautiful steel. Her enormous bows take the seas as on a horn, and hurl them roaring into screaming drifts of foam. She is singing a song, fore and aft, and the thunder of her grey steel flanks is stupendous, as she spurns the mutilated seas and the gale and the bleak intolerable miles into her wake.
The second and third hours pass, and part of the fourth, in an intermittent thunder of speed. And the speed has been further increased; for now the Leviathan is laying the miles astern, twenty-nine in each hour; her sides drunken with black water and spume—a dripping, league-conquering, fifty-thousand-ton shape of steel and steam and brains, going like some stupendous Angel of Help across the black Desolation of the night.