“Sharks,” said Lestrange, whose face was covered with perspiration.
He picked up the book he had been reading—it was a volume of Tennyson—and he sat with it on his knees staring at the white sunlit main-deck barred with the white shadows of the standing rigging.
The sea had disclosed to him a vision. Poetry, Philosophy, Beauty, Art, the love and joy of life—was it possible that these should exist in the same world as those?
He glanced at the book upon his knees, and contrasted the beautiful things in it which he remembered with the terrible things he had just seen, the things that were waiting for their food under the keel of the ship.
It was three bells—half-past three in the afternoon—and the ship’s bell had just rung out. The stewardess appeared to take the children below; and as they vanished down the saloon companionway Captain Le Farge came aft, on to the poop, and stood for a moment looking over the sea on the port side, where a bank of fog had suddenly appeared like the spectre of a country.
“The sun has dimmed a bit,” said he; “I can a’most look at it. Glass steady enough—there’s a fog coming up—ever seen a Pacific fog?”
“No, never.”
“Well, you won’t want to see another,” replied the mariner, shading his eyes and fixing them upon the sea-line. The sea-line away to starboard had lost somewhat its distinctness, and over the day an almost imperceptible shade had crept.
The captain suddenly turned from his contemplation of the sea and sky, raised his head and sniffed.
“Something is burning somewhere—smell it? Seems to me like an old mat or summat. It’s that swab of a steward, maybe; if he isn’t breaking glass, he’s upsetting lamps and burning holes in the carpet. Bless my soul, I’d sooner have a dozen Mary Anns an’ their dustpans round the place than one tomfool steward like Jenkins.” He went to the saloon hatch. “Below there!”
“Ay, ay, sir.”
“What are you burning?”
“I an’t burnin’ northen, sir.”
“Tell you, I smell it!”
“There’s northen burnin’ here, sir.”
“Neither is there, it’s all on deck. Something in the galley, maybe—rags, most likely, they’ve thrown on the fire.”
“Captain!” said Lestrange.
“Ay, ay.”
“Come here, please.”
Le Farge climbed on to the poop.
“I don’t know whether it’s my weakness that’s affecting my eyes, but there seems to me something strange about the mainmast.”
The mainmast near where it entered the deck, and for some distance up, seemed in motion—a corkscrew movement most strange to watch from the shelter of the awning.
This apparent movement was caused by a spiral haze of smoke so vague that one could only tell of its existence from the mirage-like tremor of the mast round which it curled.
“My God!” cried Le Farge, as he sprang from the poop and rushed forward.
Lestrange followed him slowly, stopping every moment to clutch the bulwark rail and pant for breath. He heard the shrill birdlike notes of the bosun’s pipe. He saw the hands emerging from the forecastle, like bees out of a hive; he watched them surrounding the main-hatch. He watched the tarpaulin and locking-bars removed. He saw the hatch opened, and a burst of smoke—black, villainous smoke—ascend to the sky, solid as a plume in the windless air.
Lestrange was a man of a highly nervous temperament, and it is just this sort of man who keeps his head in an emergency, whilst your levelheaded, phlegmatic individual loses his balance. His first thought was of the children, his second of the boats.
In the battering off Cape Horn the Northumberland lost several of her boats. There were left the longboat, a quarter-boat, and the dinghy. He heard Le Farge’s voice ordering the hatch to be closed and the pumps manned, so as to flood the hold; and, knowing that he could do nothing on deck, he made as swiftly as he could for the saloon companionway.
Mrs. Stannard was just coming out of the children’s cabin.
“Are the children lying down, Mrs. Stannard?” asked Lestrange, almost breathless from the excitement and exertion of the last few minutes.
The woman glanced at him with frightened eyes. He looked like the very herald of disaster.
“For if they are, and you have undressed them, then you must put their clothes on again. The ship is on fire, Mrs. Stannard.”
“Good God, sir!”
“Listen!” said Lestrange.
From a distance, thin, and dreary as the crying of seagulls on a desolate beach, came the clanking of the pumps.
IV
And Like a Dream Dissolved
Before the woman had time to speak a thunderous step was heard on the companion stairs, and Le Farge broke into the saloon. The man’s face was injected with blood, his eyes were fixed and glassy like the eyes of a drunkard, and the veins stood on his temples like twisted cords.
“Get those children ready!” he shouted, as he rushed into his own cabin. “Get you all ready—boats are being swung out and victualled. H⸺l! where are those papers?”
They heard him furiously searching and collecting things in his cabin—the ship’s papers, accounts, things the master mariner clings to as he clings to his life; and as he searched, and found, and packed, he kept bellowing orders for the children to be got on deck. Half mad he seemed, and half mad he was with the knowledge of the terrible thing that was stowed amidst the cargo.
Up on deck the crew, under the direction of the first mate, were working in an orderly manner, and with a will, utterly unconscious of there being anything beneath their feet but an ordinary cargo on fire. The covers had been stripped from the boats, kegs of water and bags of biscuit placed in them. The dinghy, smallest of the boats and most easily got away, was hanging at the port quarter-boat davits flush with the bulwarks; and Paddy Button was in the act of stowing a keg of water in her, when Le Farge broke on to the deck, followed by the stewardess carrying