It was dark. All night it was dark and moonless. All night they galloped along up-Channel. All night the Old Man walked the bridge, watching the blackness ahead. At four o’clock the Mate came on watch and the Old Man felt that he must lie down. He was over sixty years old, remember, and he had been on his feet for eighteen hours. The Chief Mate, who had been strangely shy since his outrageous behavior, merely remarked that it looked as if it might be thick presently, and began to pace to and fro.
What happened,—if anything did happen,—nobody seemed to know; but Tommy, who came off at four, and was enjoying a pipe, a cup of cocoa, and a game of patience in his room, was suddenly flung endways against his wardrobe, and a series of grinding crashes, one of which sent his porthole glass in a burst of fragments over his bed-place, buckled the plates of the ship’s side. He remembered that the wardrobe door flew open as he sprang up, and his derby hat bounced to the floor.
He at once skipped down below, where he found the Second and Chief trying to carry out a number of rapid contradictory orders from the telegraph. And as he joined them the telegraph whirled from Full astern to Stand by, and stopped. They stood by. Tommy was told to go and finish ‘changing over,’ which involves opening and shutting several mysterious valves. Having achieved this, he took up his station by the telegraph.
The Chief, clad in a suit of rumpled but elegant pink-and-saffron-striped pajamas, prowled to and fro in front of the engines like one of the larger carnivora in front of his cage. The Second, with the sleeves of his coat rolled up, as if he were a conjuror and wished to show there was no deception, produced a cigarette from his ear, a match from an invisible ledge under the log-desk, and then caused himself to disappear into the stokehold, whistling a tune at one time very popular in Dublin called ‘Mick McGilligan’s Daughter Mary Ann.’ He returned in some mysterious fashion, smoking with much enjoyment, and reporting greaser, firemen, and Tommies all gone up on deck.
And so they waited, those three, and waited, and waited; and the dawn came up, ineffably tender, and far up above them through the skylights they saw the stars through the fog turn pale, and still there was no sign, the telegraph finger pointing, in its mute peremptory way, at Stand by. They were standing by.
And at length it grew to be past endurance. The Chief spoke sharply into the telephone. Nothing. Suddenly he turned and ordered Tommy to go up and see what was doing. The Second, coming in from the stokehold, reported water in the cross-bunker, but the doors were down. So Tommy went up the long ladders and out on deck and stood stock-still before the great experience of his life. For they were alone on the ship, those three. The boats were gone. There was no sound, save the banging of the empty blocks and the gurgle and slap of the sea against her sides.
For a moment, Tommy said, he ‘had no heart.’ The sheer simplicity of the thing unmanned him, as well it might. He hadn’t words—Gone! Behind the horror lay another horror, and it was the reminiscence of this ultimate apprehension that I saw in his face to-night. And then he threw himself backward (a North Country football trick), turned, and rushed for the ladder. The other two, down below, saw him there, his eyes feverish, his face dark and anxious, his usually low voice harsh and strident, as he prayed them to drop everything and come up quick—come on—and his voice trailed off into huskiness and heavy breathing.
When they came up, which happened immediately, four steps at a time, they found him sprawled against the bulwarks, his chin on his hands, looking as though to fix the scene forever on his brain. And they looked too, and turned faint, for there, far across the darkling sparkle of the sea, were the boats, and on the sky-line a smear of smoke. So they stood, each in a characteristic attitude—Tommy asprawl on the rail, the Second halfway up the bridge-deck ladder, one hand on his hip, the Chief with his hands behind him, his long legs widely planted, his head well forward, scowling. They were as Tommy put it, ‘in a state.’ It wasn’t, you know, the actual danger; it was the carrying away of their faith in the world of living men. Good God! And I imagine the prevailing emotion in their hearts at this moment was instinct in the lad’s query to me—‘What was the use of goin’ back, or making a fight of it, if that was all they thought of us?’ And then the Polynesian recalled them from speculations as to the ultimate probity of the human soul by giving a sudden lunge forward. She was sinking.
For a moment, Tommy says, they were ‘in a state.’ I should imagine they were. They began running round and round the deck, picking up pieces of wood and dropping them in a shamefaced manner. Suddenly the Chief remembered the raft—an unfortunate structure of oil-barrels and hatches. It was on the foredeck, a frowsy incumbrance devised by the Mate in a burst of ingenuity against the fatal day. When the three of them arrived on the foredeck their hopes sank again. A single glance showed the impossibility of lifting it without steam on the winches. They stood round it and deliberated in silence, tying on life-belts which they had picked up on the bridge-deck. The Polynesian gave another lunge, and they climbed on the raft and held tight.
The Polynesian was in her death-throes. She had been cut through below the bridge, and the water was filling the cross-bunker and pressing the air in Number 2 hold up against the hatches. While they sat there waiting, the tarpaulins on the hatch ballooned up and burst like a gunshot, releasing the air improvised within. She plunged again, and the sea poured over her bulwarks and cascaded around them. The raft slid forward against a winch, skinning the Second’s leg against a wheelguard. They held on.