something was missing. It was supposed to go under the barrels, right there, and there was nothing to hold it. The concave end must go against the rounded metal end there at the front of the stock. And you could see it didn’t even fit; it still stuck out at a slight angle. Well, John must have ordered another one to be shipped to them in Papeete. And since the gun couldn’t be assembled without the right piece— There was a little click, and she gasped. The fore end had snapped up into place against the spring tension that held it there.
She stared at it in horror. It was a complete shotgun. It was all there, and it was assembled.
* * *
For the third time in ten minutes Lillian Warriner saw Ingram glance off to the northeast where the squall flickered and rumbled along the rim of the world. She could see no appreciable difference in the squall itself. It was still the same swollen mass of purple, shot through with the fitful play of lightning and trailing its skirts of rain, seemingly no larger or nearer than it had been a quarter of an hour ago—but it was Ingram himself she was watching. She judged by the simple fact that he kept looking at it that he was worried about it, though he said nothing. He continued to bail, the gray eyes expressionless.
Well, it wasn’t likely he’d be running in circles and wringing his hands. And there was nothing they could do about the squall anyway, except get the sail off, and probably he’d send her to wake Bellew. No doubt there was some quixotic male convention against allowing the porcine bastard to drown in his sleep.
She liked Ingram and was conscious of increasing admiration for him, though this of course only added to the burden of her guilt, while at the same time evoking a mild sort of wonder at her willingness to credit her appraisal of anybody any more after having been so conspicuously wrong about Bellew. No, it wasn’t so much that she’d been wrong as that she’d simply had no way of knowing how small even a large yacht could become after a few days at sea. Human beings confined in too small an area were apparently subject to the same laws regarding molecular friction and the generation of heat as gases under compression.
So now not only had they managed to blow themselves up, but the spreading shock wave of disaster had engulfed two other people whose only crime had been the fact they were in the same part of the ocean. The guilt was still hers, and she accepted it, though it seemed a terrible price to pay for the pursuit of an impossible dream, a few minutes of arrant and unforgivable bitchiness, and an accident. There were beckoning avenues of escape: the accident couldn’t have been her fault because she’d been asleep at the time, and she’d been goaded into the bitchiness, but these were sleazy evasions and technicalities for which she had nothing but contempt. They were the type of thing that Hughie— She stopped.
Well, it was true, wasn’t it? And therein, unfortunately, lay her guilt, the real responsibility from which there would never be any escape—the pursuit of the impossible dream, while she knew it was impossible. She’d known it would never work, that temperamentally she was wrong for him and she’d demand too much of him, but she’d managed to ignore the warnings of her mind.
If only, she thought now in her own contained and private agony, she’d left him alone. She was worse than any of them; she’d utterly destroyed him. Because she did love him. She wondered what crimes the human race could have found to commit without those great ennobling causes like freedom, religion, and love.
She glanced up. Ingram had stopped bailing and was preparing to lower the mainsail. She looked out toward the squall still making up in the northeast. “Is it coming nearer?”
“I can’t tell yet what it’s going to do,” he replied. “But there’s no use letting the sails slat any longer.”
“Do you want me to help?”
“No. Better keep pumping. Or just rest for a few minutes.”
She was conscious of numbness in her arms and shoulders, but she shook her head. “No. I’m all right.” She bent to the pump again.
If only she’d left him alone…
* * *
The main and mizzen were tightly furled. Ingram finished lashing the genoa rolled up along the lifeline and looked at his watch. It was 3:50 p.m. The sun, though lower in the west, still beat on them with sullen weight in the sticky and unmoving air that felt as if you were trying to breathe in a vacuum. The day was a squall-breeder if he’d ever seen one. There was no sound except water going overboard from the pump and those other and inexorably increasing tons of it sloshing back and forth inside the hull as
He was conscious now of his own tiredness and of the fact he had eaten nothing since breakfast. But he wasn’t hungry; it was too hot to eat, even if there was anything aboard not ruined by the water. He picked up the binoculars and climbed atop the deckhouse. Very slowly and carefully he searched the horizon all across the southwest, finding nothing but emptiness. When he lowered the glasses he saw Mrs. Warriner’s eyes on him. He shook his head. She nodded, her face as expressionless as his own, and went on pumping.
He stepped back to the ventilating hatch and looked down at the water washing back and forth in the after cabin. It was worse, he thought; even with one of them pumping and one bailing, they were barely keeping up with it. He started to drop the bucket in but turned and glanced back at Mrs. Warriner. She was on the verge of collapse. The hell with it. There was no use letting her kill herself. He tossed the bucket on the deck, then went over and picked up her cigarettes and lighter from the deckhouse.
“Here,” he said. He set one of the cigarettes between her lips and flicked the lighter. “Let me take it for a while.”
She surrendered the pump reluctantly. “But how about yourself? You haven’t had any rest at all. And won’t it gain?”
“It’ll just have to gain. You’re not going to help things by keeling over. And while you’re resting, you could finish telling me what happened—that is, if you feel up to it.”
She sat down on the deck, facing him. “It’s not the pleasantest thing in the world to tell, but since we did this to you, I’d say you had every right to know how we did it.” She took a puff on the cigarette and went on. “To understand why he thinks we tried to murder him, you need a little background and a thumbnail sketch of the characters involved. Hughie, as I’ve told you, was an oversheltered boy who never had a chance to grow up; Mrs. Bellew was a rather plain, very gentle woman with an infinite amount of compassion; Bellew, of course, is a pig; and I’m an arrogant and insufferable bitch.”
Ingram paused in his pumping. “Do you have to do that?”
She wondered herself. She’d always held a dim view of the therapeutic value of catharsis or confession and regarded all breast-beating and cries of mea culpa as being more vulgar exhibitionism than anything else. If you’d bought it, you lived with it as well as you could and with as little fuss as possible. But on the other hand, if you’d wronged another human being, you at least owed him an explanation.
“You wanted to understand, didn’t you?” she asked curtly. “I’ve never been greatly addicted to the use of euphemisms and evasions, and if I thought you were responsible for something I wouldn’t hesitate to tell you. To be any good, it has to work both ways.”
“I know. But aside from the fact I don’t think it’s true—”
“Thank you. You are nice, Mr. Ingram. But you haven’t heard the story.”
“No.” He resumed pumping. “But there’s more to it than his thinking you tried to kill him. Why is he so afraid of water?”
“Because he thinks that’s the
He shook his head. “No. It’s still not that simple.” He told her briefly of Rae’s throwing the whisky bottle overboard and of Warriner’s reaction to watching it sink.
She nodded. “Yes. I know about that part of it.” She was silent for a moment, thinking. “I’m not sure I can explain it myself, except that I think it’s a fear of drowning carried to the point of phobia. You know what acrophobia is, of course?”
“Yes. A morbid fear of heights. But it has nothing to do with water.”
“I know. But in his case I think it does.” She nodded toward the sea around them. “When you look out there you see nothing but the surface. So do I; so does everybody. We realize vaguely that two miles down there’s a bottom, but we never think of it, even if we’re swimming in it—probably even if we’re in trouble in it. It makes no difference whether you drown in seven feet of water, or seven miles; you still drown within a few feet of the
