After he had been gone a little while two men came into the cabin with fuel for the stove. One had a bloodstained bandage round his forehead under his sou'wester. The snow fell in pieces of white crust from the oilskins of the seamen as they reeled with their hands full to the stove. In the instant of their descent the sweep of the black gale followed, and filled the atmosphere with darting needles of stinging cold.
'Is any water coming into the ship?' cried Mrs. Burke.
'No, mum. The well's just been sounded. She's right enough in the hull,' answered the man with a bandage round his head.
'Aren't the decks being swept?'
'Now and again a spray,' answered the same man. 'She's a-jumping of it drily enough. She'll not hurt as she lies providing there's nothen knocking about to run foul of.'
'Is your head badly hurt?'
'Just a little bit of a cut. Nothen to take notice of, thankee,' answered the man, and he knelt down and lighted the fire, the other looking on and around him with a gleaming gaze of curiosity.
The lighting of that fire was a marvellous piece of rich deep colour as I see it now, though I had no thoughts that way, I assure you, as I sat watching the kneeling figure on that frightful night. He was in black oilskins bright with snow; the other in yellow, snowclad likewise, and as the kindling shavings spat out their yellow flames, the two men showed more like some wild startling imagination of a poet done into a grotesque glowing canvas, than a commonplace detail of shipboard life; their faces sharpened and shrank, grinned and grew grim with twenty shadowy expressions, their roaming seeking eyes burned like rubies under the pent-houses of their sea-helmets; add the convulsive motions of the dismasted hull, the ceaseless roar of seas pouring in mountains, the dizzy flight, the sickening fall, the wild play of the lamp, the deep, almost human groanings of the fabric with blows of the surge, like bolts from the sky, shocking to her heart in sounds of rending.
I hoped Mrs. Burke would ask questions of these men as to the safety of the vessel, what would be done, our chances for our lives, and the like, seeing that they were able seamen, mariners of experience with memories perhaps of such things as this too; but she was the captain's wife; so I held my peace and watched the men, clasping myself close in the furs I sat in.
Scarcely was the fire alight when again the cabin was made bitterly raw by an icy-shriek out of the blackness, and three men, one of them the steward, all clad in oilskins and hardly recognisable, descended. A couple bore some galley things, a coffee pot, a saucepan, a gridiron, some drinking mugs, and such matters. One of them said, 'By the captain's orders, ladies,' and put the utensils on the deck near the stove. Another exclaimed, 'We've been told to stop here. We can't get a fire to burn in the galley. The fok'sle's cruel cold.'