His thin hand went over his thin hair. Colet felt stir within him the warmth of a liking for that frail figure. It was insignificant, till its eye met yours. Then you guessed a hidden but constant glim. That man looked as though he had made his humble acceptance, but could not be deceived by the bluff of chance. He met Colet’s eye then, and might have guessed that something had quickened in his junior.
“We are apt to make too much of our importance, Colet, when we don’t like things, or they don’t like us. But, you know, the best we can do is to keep our own doorstep clean. We can always manage that.”
As if to try his faith, his own ship then treated him with indignity. She went over, and Hale, nearer her side, sank low, and was huddled into his chair. Colet overlooked the master from a higher position. Hale wrestled patiently with the arm of his seat to escape from his ungraceful posture.
“That was a big one. They racket things so.”
The cabin itself was quiet. At times it complained a little, but in undertones. It seemed apart, an illuminated hollow where understandable and well-ordered objects were an assurance of continuity, while all without was dark confusion, besieging it, yet unable to do more than move it, never to disorder it. Its lamps burned steadily. Perhaps it was the master who gave it that air of sanity and composure while anarchy was at its walls. Hale, slight and elderly, with his deliberation which was not unlike weariness, was an augury of grey wisdom and the symbol of conscious control amid the welter of huge and heedless powers. Boom and crash, but the old man took no notice. The portrait of a stout matron, her arm round a little girl, regarded them sedately from a bulkhead. No other ornament was in the cabin, except the faded photograph of a sailing ship over the bunk. Colet’s ribs were squeezed, first against one arm of his chair, then the other. That was another distraction; trying to keep still. The deck rose under them, and Colet dizzily wondered how high it intended to go; the grind of the propeller then grew loud in its monody, and even frantic. The cabin trembled. His seat sank under him, and his attention went another way, for the suggestion of empty gulf was sickening, and the propeller moaned in the very deeps. She heaved and tilted. The purser grabbed his escaping papers.
Something avalanched outside, and then continued a noisy career. What was that? Colet again looked at the captain for a sign. There was none. The master sat at his desk, turned from it a little now, scrutinising a document through his uplifted spectacles. His attention was wholly given to that.
Nothing in it. Don’t be a fool. Look after your own doorstep. But a more violent lift, a louder explosion of a breaking sea, would set him calculating, as it began, the probable extent of a movement. How far would this one go? Worse than the last? Sometimes it was. Yet Hale released sheet after sheet, sometimes turning to his desk to make a note; he lit his pipe, and nothing could have been so reassuring as the leisure of its blue smoke. All was well. Colet resumed his clerkship, and half forgot beleaguerment by the unseen in an interval of comparative ease. The seas were lessening?
Certainly. That was only a minor jar; but when Colet would have made the cheerful comment aloud, he saw the captain had lowered his papers, and was listening attentively, as though waiting for another cryptic message from the night, gazing at the foot of the door of his cabin over the top of his glasses. Colet watched him for an interpretation. Hale only relaxed and sighed; and then, seeing that the purser was expectant, he spoke.
“Colet, it occurs to me that somewhere about now makes for me forty years of this. Yes. You see that barque there? She was my first, forty years agone this month. This job, when I’m through, will be my last. I was of half a mind not to take it. I’ve had my share, I think. But that child,” Hale indicated the portrait, “she’s in for her degree now. I thought I ought to make this trip. A little extra for her.”
While he was communing a whispering began in the deck above. It increased to a heavy drumming.
“I thought so,” Hale remarked, his ear cocked. “Rain. But no wind, and this swell. A cyclone in the northeast somewhere.” He added the conclusion indifferently.
There was a knock at the cabin door. A man out of the dark stood there, a barefooted seaman in his dripping oilskins.
“Mr. Sinclair, sir. He wants you on the bridge.”
“Anything wrong, Wilson?”
“I don’t know, sir. The steering-gear, I think, sir.”
“I’m coming.”
Hale assembled his papers deftly, stowed them, and opened a cupboard. He hauled out oilskins and sea-boots. He was buttoning the stiff stuff across his throat, his head thrown back.
“Wait here, Colet,” he said. “I thought I heard an unusual thump just now.”
The captain, Colet imagined, was diminished by that armour for the weather. His face, framed by the sou’wester, looked womanish, as though he were in the wrong clothes. Hale glanced at the barometer, gave it a closer inspection on whatever it was it told him, and stumped out.
Colet waited. He continued his work, pausing now and then to listen for evidence. There were fewer noises. The ship itself appeared to be making no sound. The waters were nearer, or louder. Anyone would think—had the engines stopped? He opened the door and put his head out. The steward was hurriedly balancing his way along the corridor.
“Anything the matter, steward?”
“Mr. Colet, the rudder’s gone.”
XVI
The steward departed,
