'Yes. Was it the ice?'
'Ay. But should it trim us, I hope it will not send us afloat.'
She listened whilst I told her of the huge berg that lay linked to the island by the beach of ice on which the hull rested. Then I talked as cheerfully as I could of making this interior a tight, dry, warm room for her whilst we lay waiting for that help which was bound in some shape of whaler or sealer to come along. She shuddered and looked around her with a face of sudden imploring grief; but I went on, speaking as heartily as I could.
'We'll make this cabin dry and warm,' said I. 'I'll get that water to leeward there baled out. I'll rout the carpet up on deck and see what the breeze will do for the brine in it. They've managed very well over and over again up in the Arctic latitudes for months and months with meaner accommodation and a poorer hold. I'll stock this cabin that things may be handy. There's plenty of oil aboard I hope. There'll be coal to last us in the forepeak; we shall be helped out of this before it's all used up.'
'How long,' she asked, 'are we likely to remain here?'
'It was a saying of Nelson that at sea everything is possible and nothing improbable. It's certain these islands are visited. My intention is, Miss Otway, since we're here, so to provide for ourselves that we may be alive when help comes. Do you see that?'
'Oh yes.'
'Don't be scared, then, because I talk of provisioning and securing ourselves as though we were to be locked up for years.'
Whilst I talked I was at work getting breakfast. The angle of the deck was an abomination and a terrible hindrance, but I made no further trouble of it than my laboured motions expressed. Yet beyond the boiling of the kettle there was nothing to be done in the way of cooking owing to the slant of the stove. The discomfort was incredible. It was like being in a ship poised on her beam ends on the edge of a sea, magically arrested in her downward rush, and hanging fixed, as though capsizing.