All the revolutions possible were being supplied, for the safety-valves were lifting with an occasional throaty flutter. Unexpectedly the Second would appear from the tunnel, where he had been feeling the stern gland, and would hover lovingly over the thrust-block, whistling, amid the clangor of four thousand seven hundred horse-power, ‘Love me, and the world is mine.’
Suddenly all was swallowed up, engulfed, in one heart-shattering explosion on deck. It was so tremendous that the Fifth’s head involuntarily darted out from the receivers and he looked sharply at the Chief, who was standing stock-still with his long legs apart, his hands in his coat pockets, staring over his shoulder with stern intentness into vacancy. The telephone bell brayed out a call and the Fifth fitted his head once again to the receiver. ‘Yes, sir!’ he sang out; and then, to the others, ‘We’re gainin’ on her! We’re gainin’ on her!’ Tommy goes on methodically with his dynamo. He is close at hand when wanted, ready, resourceful, devoid of panic. The excitement is on deck, where the shell has struck the house amidships, blowing the galley ranges and bakehouse ovens overboard, killed three men outright, and left two more mere moving horrors on the slaughter-house floor. Another, a scullion, with his hand cut off at the wrist, is running round and round, falling over the wreckage, and pursued by a couple of stewards with bandages and friar’s balsam.
And on that gray dot, now nine thousand five hundred yards astern, there is excitement too, no doubt, for it seems authentic that the Polynesian’s third shot hit the forward gun-mounting, and the list caused by this, heavy things slewing over, the damage to the deck, the rupture of certain vital oil-pipes, and the wounds of the crew, would account for the Polynesian, with her fourteen-point-seven knots, gaining on U 999, supposed to have sixteen knots on the surface.
On the bridge of the Polynesian, too, there is excitement of sorts. The Chief Mate, who has been rushing about, helping the ammunition carriers, then assisting the stewards with their rough surgery, then up on the bridge again, has come up and is prancing up and down, every now and then looking hard at the Old Man, who stares through the telescope at the gray dot.
Something awful had happened. When that shell hit the ship, the Old Man had called out hoarsely, ‘That’s enough—oh, enough—boats!’ and the Chief Mate, to the horror of the young Third Mate, who told Tommy about it, grabbed the Old Man round the waist, whirled him into the chart-room, and slammed the door upon them both. The Third Mate says he saw, through the window, the Chief Mate’s fist half-an-inch from the Old Man’s nose, the Old Man looking at it in gloomy silence, and the Chief Mate’s eyes nearly jumping out of his head as he argued and threatened and implored. ‘... Gainin’ on her,’ was all the Third Mate could hear, and ‘... For God’s sake, sir!’ and such-like strong phrases. So the Third Mate says. And then they came out again, and the Mate telephoned to the engine-room.
IV
The company is dwindling now, for, as Tommy gulps his drink and orders two more, it is on the stroke of nine, when the bars close, and folks are melting group by group into the darkness. Some are bound for home, some for ‘Eldorado,’ a dusty barn where one watches dreadful melodramatic films and faints with the heat. The lights are turned still lower. The few shops which have been open in a stealthy way now shut up close. The moonlight throws sharp blue-black shadows on the white dust of the Rue el Nil. The orchestra fades away; chairs are stacked between the tubs, and reproachful glances are cast upon the dozen or so of us who still linger in the gloom.
I become aware that Tommy, in his own odd little semi-articulate fashion, is regarding me as though he had some extraordinary anxiety on his mind. That is the way his expression strikes me. As though he had had some tremendous experience and didn’t know what to make of it. I remember seeing something like it in the face of a youth, religiously brought up, who was listening for the first time to an atheist attempting to shake the foundations of his faith. And while I ruminate upon this unusual portent in Tommy’s physiognomy, he plunges into the second part of his story. It has its own appeal to those who love and understand the sea.
For the rest of the day the Polynesian’s course was a series of intricate convolutions on the face of the Atlantic. As the Third Mate put it in his lively way, you could have played it on a piano. Owing to the wireless room having been partially demolished, they were out of touch with the world, and the commander felt lonely. He even regretted for a while that he had not retired. Was just going to, when the War came. He was sixty years old, and had been an easygoing skipper for twenty years now. This,—and he wiped his moist face with his handkerchief,—this wasn’t at all what he had bargained for when he had volunteered to carry on ‘for the duration of the War.’ Men dead and dying and mutilated, ship torn asunder—He sat on his settee and stared hard at the head and shoulders of the man at the wheel, adumbrated on the ground-glass window in front of him. He had turned sick at the sight down there—
But the Polynesian was still going. Not a bolt, rivet, plate, or rod of her steering and propelling mechanism had been touched, and she was galloping northwest by west at thirteen knots. The commander hoped for a dark night, for in his present perturbed state the idea of being torpedoed at night was positively horrible. The Brobdingnagian, now, was hit at midnight and sunk in three minutes with all hands but two. He wiped his face again. He felt that he wasn’t equal to it.