“We must leave her, Colet. It’s queer you should have brought her to this.”
There lay Kuan-yin. The master glanced round his cabin; at his desk, at the barometer, and last, at his pictures. “That’s all. Time to go.”
One of the two laden boats was waiting for them, close under a boom which had been rigged out, with a man rope.
“Now, my lad, off with you.” Then the master hesitated.
“That greaser who was killed, Colet. I had meant to bear it in mind. I have a little packet of his in my cabin. His people might like it. Another minute.”
“I’ll wait.”
“Get in, get in.”
“No. …”
“The boat, sir.” Hale flung out his arm.
“Come on,” bawled someone from the sea.
The captain paused by the ship’s side to con her. Then he called out seawards:
“Your boat, Collins, keep her away.”
Colet eased off along the beam, and dropped from his hold as the lifeboat rose to him. He scrambled up to see what had become of Hale. There was no sign of him. Gillespie, in the stern of the boat, was angry with alarm.
“There’s no time, there’s no time.” The engineer eagerly half-stood, as they fell away into a hollow, for a better view of that companion door within which the captain had vanished. It was unnaturally high and strangely tilted in a ship whose life seemed poised on a moment of time and the hesitation of a breath. It remained empty.
“Hale,” shouted Gillespie; “Hale.”
They waited. A sea lifted them swiftly and lightly, and Colet turned his head in measuring fear from the door aft to the head of the Altair. Her forecastle deck was isolated, a raft of wreckage flush with the swirls and foam. The seas were pouring solidly across her middle. Her funnel was bowed over the flood, and each dip of it to the declination of the ocean was, to the men in the boat, the prelude to the end. But it was her stern which rose and lowered her head.
“My God, she’s going.”
She gave a hollow rumbling groan, and to the silent awe of the watchers without a pause she went down. Colet saw the shape of the propeller over him and the bright sky through its frame. There was a confusion on the surface of the waters, which melted as a swell heaved over the place. The sea was bare.
XIX
The men in the boat continued to stare at the place where their ship had been as though they still saw her. They remained trance-like without a movement in an apparent refusal to believe their experience. They certainly heard Hale’s voice there just now. The peaceful brightness of the vacant ocean was a mistake.
It was a stupid little noise in the shining immensity which woke Colet from his far absorption with what had gone, and brought him back to notice what new thing had taken its place. Lycett, beside him, was crying, but was trying to hide it. Mr. Collins, in the stern-sheets, had also withdrawn his gaze from the sea. He indicated something to a seaman, who spat on his palms, and made a few slow strokes with his oar. Nothing remained of the past but a spreading defilement of ash and oil.
Sinclair called across to them, and Collins held up a hand in understanding. Both craft set their lugs, and, in company, began to withdraw their occupants into another extension of life. Lycett’s head was averted. He was watching the near water. An area of cinders drifted astern. He watched it go till the water was clear again. He sat looking for more cinders, but the sea continued to be pure, impersonal, and unconcerned. Colet crouched uncomfortably, without changing his position, as if this posture in an open boat were but briefly provisional, and he were waiting for a return to what was necessary and accustomed. The transition from one existence to the next had been so abrupt that he had not fully accepted the change. And big Gillespie crouching on the opposite bench, staring between his legs at the bottom-boards, was vague. It was hardly Gillespie, in that attitude and that place. Colet was still in a ship’s cabin of another time, for the last minute of that room had survived its clock.
“That’s all, Colet. Time to go.” But he had not gone yet.
Through that immediate apparition Colet presently surmised, as in a dissolving view, a threatening incline of blue water above them, at a surprising height above them. It shut out the sky astern. Before he rightly knew it was there he was soaring on it giddily, and his hand, hanging over the side, was immersed. He hastily withdrew his hand, plucking it, the last bit of himself in that enchantment, out of one dangerous dream into the next. He was transferred. From the summit of that swell he looked round upon an ocean he had never seen before. It was a narrower place, but at its centre it was more intimate and overgrown. The water had touched his hand; it was in hurrying flux near to his eyes; and the seas had become steep, and ranged close round above their mast. They were imprisoned by waves. Their complete assurance of the company of the other boat was intermittent.
They thought they heard singing. They really heard it, when their neighbour was on a crest above them; chance fragments of a song blew over from windward. A quick ear in their own boat caught some odd notes and recognised them. That stoker in the bows began to respond in drawling sardonic sentiment, “I—don’t—care—if you—don’t love—me—I—don’t—care—if you go—to—sea.”
Wilson sat near Colet. He was triturating
