He regarded the length and beam of the small boat. It was not more than eighteen feet long—and only the Polar seas could be emptier than this vast southern ocean. The nights would be more easily endured, but the days, one long burning. Still it would not be torrid heat; they were too far south for that. The thought of storm, he kept in the background of his mind. They all did. Roughly estimated, there was food and water enough for them to live without great agony for a week, possibly for a day or two over, but Stackhouse was not a part of this consideration. He could not live a week without an abnormal consumption of water....
Fleury was talking about the stars. They would see Venus before dawn, he said; the great one in their meridian now was Jupiter. “If we had a marine-glass, we would be able to see his moons.... That,” he pointed to the brightest of the fixed stars, a splendid yellow gleam in the east, “that is Canopus, never seen north of the Gulf States at Home. It’s so mighty that our little earth would turn molten in ten seconds if it came as near as our sun.”
Bellair leaned toward him listening. The preacher pointed out the Southern Cross, and Alpha Centauri, almost the nearest of the sun’s neighbours.
Their thoughts groped naturally to such things. In the full realisation of their helplessness, they looked up. The background was a deep fleckless purple. Bellair hadn’t known the great stars of the northern skies, much less these splendid strangers. The brimming closeness of the dark sea harrowed the landsman’s heart of him; and there was something as great or greater than the actual terror of ultimate submerging. It was the fear of the fear; the same that causes men to leap from high places through the very horror of the thought of leaping. The water lapped the clinkered sides of the small boat. He touched it. His flesh took from the coolness something that numbed the pervading alarm; a message which the wet hand sensed, but the brain could not interpret. The presence of the others forward sustained him; Stackhouse in the stern was the downpull; thus Bellair was in the balance.
It was yet far from dawn; certainly no lighter, but Bellair could see better. The woman was looking away. He knew that he would see her so, until the last day of her life—that profile of serene control, that calm, far-seeing gaze.... What gave her this quiet power?... Already the thoughts of the three were intimate matters to all. It seemed very natural now to ask Fleury what gave the woman such strength.
“It’s the sense that all is well, in spite of this physical estrangement from the world,” the preacher said. “Bellair, it’s the sense that nothing matters but the soul. It’s not belief; it’s knowing. She has lost the sense of self. She is through talking. It is finished with her. We talk, because it is not finished in us—but it is being accomplished. We talk because we want that peace; when it comes we will not talk, but live it. It is exactly opposite to desire; you can see that——”
Yes, Bellair could see that. He had but to turn back in his seat to confront Stackhouse wringing his heavy twitching hands and begging for water, begging like a leper, now that a face turned to him—the most frightful picture of the work of desire and the fear of desire, that the world or the underworld could furnish. Less than two hours before he had drunk a quart and wasted a pint in his greed; and behind Bellair was the silent woman and Fleury, thinking of others, full of the good of the world.... In the worldliness that came to him from Stackhouse, the intimacy of the matter they had just talked about seemed startling.
“One can’t help but notice what you get from somewhere—and what the woman has,” Bellair added.
They were in the grey mystery of dawn—alone, for they had drifted, and the sailors in the other boat had begun to row at once. Stackhouse was lifted a little, brought nearer, possibly by the tension, which they all came to know so well—the tension of that grey hour, before the day reveals the sea.