CHAPTER V

VOICES IN THE NIGHT

The boat tackle of the _Gaston de Paris_ was the latest patent arrangement for lowering boats in a hurry; every boat was provisioned, and the water casks left nothing to be desired, there were frequent inspections and boat drills. Yet when the _Gaston de Paris_ foundered only three souls were saved.

The starboard boats, owing to the list, could not be lowered at all; every boat had its canvas cover on, which did not expedite matters. The patent tackle developed defects in practise, and, to crown all, the men panicked owing to the sudden darkness that fell on them like a clap on the extinction of the electric light. The port quarter-boat into which the girl had been flung had two men in her and was lowered away by Prince Selm, the doctor and the first officer; panic had herded the rest of the hands towards the pinnace and forward boats, and the pinnace, over-crowded, was stoved by the sea as soon as she was water-bourne. The other boats never left their davits, they went with the ship when the decks opened and the boilers saluted the night with a column of coloured steam and a clap of thunder that resounded for miles.

The whole tragedy from impact to explosion lasted only seven minutes.

The two men in the boat with the girl had shoved off like demons and taken to the oars as soon as the falls were released. If they had not, being so short-handed for the size of the boat, they would have been stoved; as it was they were nearly wrecked by a balk of timber from the explosion. It missed them by a short two fathoms, drenching them with spray, and then the night shut down pierced by voices, voices of men swimming and crying for help.

The rowers did not know each other. The bow oar shouted to the stern.

"Is that you La.r.s.en?"

"No, Bompard, and you?"

"La Touche--Row--G.o.d! Listen, there's a chap ahead."

The cries ahead ceased, and the boat b.u.mped on something that duddered away under it and sank.

"He's gone, whoever he is," cried Bompard. "No use hunting for him.

Listen, there's more." Voices shrill and voices bubbling came through the blackness from here and from there. The men tried to locate them and rowed now in this direction, now in that--always wrong. Once a voice sudden and shrill and close to the boat cried "A moi," and at the same instant Bompard's oar struck something, but they found nothing, the voice had ceased.

They could see, now, the waves like spectres evolving themselves from the night, a vision touching the very limit of dimness, and now as they entered a mist patch--nothing. The voices to port and starboard were ceasing, one by one--being blotted out. Then silence fell, broken only by the sound of the oars. La Touche shouted and shouted again, but there came no response. Then came Bompard's voice. "Is that hooker gone, too?"

"Curse her, yes. I was the lookout. Sailing without lights."

"This woman seems dead."

"It's the girl. I heard her squeal out as they hove her in. Let her lie.

Well, this is a start."

"A black job, but we're out of it, so far."

"Ay, as far as we've got--as far as we've got. Well, there's no use rowing, there's no sea to hurt her, let her toss."

The oars came in and the fellows slithered from their seats on to the bottom boards. Ballasted so the boat rode easy. They lay like shivering dogs, grumbling and cursing and then, as they lay, the talk went on.

"Mon Dieu! What a thing--but we've grub and water all right."

"Ay, the boats are all right for that."

There was a long silence and then La Touche began in a high complaining voice:

"I was lookout, but it was not my fault, that I swear. I saw nothing till a big three-master broke out of the smother making to cross our bows, no lights shewing, snoring along asleep. Then I shouted. The bridge had seen her too and put the engines full speed ahead. They'd mistaken the distance, thought to clear her. I got aft. Hadn't reached the port alley way when the smash came. It was all the fault of those fools on the bridge."

"Who knows," came Bompard's voice. "Things happen and what is to be must be. Well, they're all gone a hundred fathoms deep and here we are drifting about with a dead woman. I'd sooner have any other cargo if I was given my choice."

"Sure she's dead?"

"Ay, she's dead sure enough by the way she's lying, not a breath in her."

Neither man suggested that she should be cast over. She ballasted the boat, and for Bompard she was something to lean against.

The French mercantile marine is divided into two great cla.s.ses, the northerners and southerners. The man from the north is a Ponantaise, the man from the south a Moco.

Bompard was a Moco, La Touche a Ponantaise. They talked and talked, repeating themselves, cursing the "hooker," the Bridge and the steersman. Once La Touche, grown hysterical, seemed choking against tears.

Then after a while, conversation died out. They had nothing more to talk about. The boat rode easy. There was nothing to do, and these men blunt to life and sea-hardened so that to them all things came in the hour's work, nodded off, La Touche curled up in the bow, Bompard with his grizzled head on the breast of Mademoiselle de Bromsart.

CHAPTER VI

DAWN

The girl was not dead as Bompard imagined, she had been stunned and had pa.s.sed from that condition into the pseudo-sleep that follows profound excitement.

She was awakened by a flick of spray on her face, a touch from the great sea that had claimed her for its own.

Lying as she was she could see nothing but the ribbed sides of the boat, the grey sky above, and a gull with domed wings and down-curved head, poised, as though suspended on the end of a string. It screamed at her, shifted its position, and then pa.s.sed, as though blown away on the wind.

She sat up. Bompard had drawn away from her and was lying curled up on his side. La Touche on his back, forward, shewed nothing but his knees; across the gunnel lay the sea, desolate in the dawn, turbulent, yet hard and mournful as a view of slated roofs after rain.

She had never seen the sea so close before, she had never smelt its heart and the savour of its soul; bitter, fresh, new and ever renewed by the blowing wind.

The whole tragedy of the night was alive in her mind as a picture, but it seemed the picture of what another person had seen. Her past life, her own personality, seemed vague and unconnected with her as the past life and personality of another person. This was reality. Reality new, terrific, pungent as that which the soul may experience on awakening after death.

She knew, as though the desolate sea had told her, that the great yacht was gone and everyone on board of her; yet the fact, perhaps from its very enormity, failed to realize itself fully in her mind. Then, in a flash and horribly clearly, came the picture of her immediate environment on board the _Gaston de Paris_, quite little things and things more important: the silver-plated taps of the bath in the bath-room, adjoining her cabin, the silk curtains of her bunk, the hundred and one trifles that made for comfort and ease. She saw the cabin servants and the face of the chief steward, a fat pale-faced man, a typical _maitre d'hotel_; the dinner of the night before, when the people seemed to her phantoms and the food, table equipage, knives, forks and spoons, realities.

All these things stood forth against the blankness and desolation of the sea, the sea she could touch by dipping her hand over the gunnel, the sea that had stripped her of everything but life and body, the dress and boots she wore and the yellow oilskin coat that covered her. Her hand resting on the gunnel shewed her that she still wore her rings, exquisite rings of emerald, ruby and diamonds, fresh washed with spray.

They held her eyes as her mind, swaying just as the boat swayed to the swell, tried to re-construct yesterday and to feel.

Horror, pity for the fate of the others, the sense of the great disaster that had happened to the _Gaston de Paris_, of these only the latter possessed any vitality in her mind. The feeling of unreality destroyed her grip upon all else.

Her mind was subdued to her own condition. The hard angles of the woodwork against which she leaned and the spray upon her face, the boat and the men in it, the sharp cut wave tops--these were real, with an appalling reality.

It was as though she had never come across a real thing before, and across her mind came a vague, vague recognition of that great truth that real things bruise one, eat at one, try to make one their own, once they manage to break down the barrier of custom that separates the false from the true; that quite common things have a power greater than the power of mind, that only amidst the falsity of civilised life and the stage are the properties subordinate to the persons and emotions of the actors.

At this moment Bompard, suddenly moving in his sleep, roused himself and sat up. His rough, weather beaten face was expressionless for a moment, then his eyes fell on the girl and recognition seemed to come to him.

"Mon Dieu," cried the old fellow as if addressing some unseen person.

"'Tis all true then--" Then, as though remembering something--"but how is mademoiselle alive?"

"I don't know," said the girl, unconscious as to what he was referring to. "I know you, I have seen you often on deck--who is the other man?