"C Q", or, In the Wireless House/Chapter 5
V
In which Micky overhears a midnight conversation and prevents the commission of a crime.
THE night was a glorious calm, so clear that it almost gave the illusion of day. A huge yellow moon rode full astern, and in its weltering swath of light the wake of the ship whirled and writhed, lashing itself to foam against the rollers, then dropping out of sight momentarily in the hollows, until, still revolving in grotesque circles, it twisted itself into an endless white rope that trailed over the sea and lost itself on the edge of the horizon.
On such nights as this Micky rarely turned in at all, preferring to sit atop the deck-house, watching the great ship surge through the rollers that lifted her stern high up until the rail touched the rim of the moon and, after holding her for a moment, plunged her down with a dizzying rush until the water roared in a maelstrom behind her. The gulls had vanished. Not a light showed on the gray expanse of the silvery, heaving sea. Four hundred feet forward on the bridge, an ulstered officer paced to and fro. Every window and port-hole was dark, except a yellow circle in the after deck-house, where some of the crew slept and whence came the mournful tinkle of a mandolin. Even the throb of the propeller seemed to be stilled, save when for a brief instant the stern rose to the apex of the angle which it described and the steamer trembled in her sleep. The air was as soft as in the tropics. In the silence it seemed as though a whisper could be heard the length of the ship, although the nigh was full of soft murmurs, the lapping and rush of the water along the side, the strain of ropes, and the seething of the waves.
He must have fallen asleep as he lay propped against the wireless house, for the moon was high overhead when the creak of shoes on the deck below and the soft closing of a door brought him tensely to himself. Dreams of English castles, green lawns, and purple afternoon shadows, of white-dressed girls and a big St. Bernard dog, dissolved into a glittering sea of golden mist out of which two voices broke in startling sibilants:
“What are you doing on this boat?” It was Mrs. Trevelyan speaking.
The man, her companion, gave a nervous laugh.
“Why not?” he answered, affecting a lightness that seemed strangely artificial at that place and hour.
"Don’t fence, Cosmo!” she retorted almost sharply. “Why not, indeed? You—in a shabby suit in the second cabin—with a beard!” She laughed in that clinquant laugh of hers that rivaled in clearness the light on the edges of the distant waves. “In a beard!” she repeated.
There was silence for a moment before the man replied. He seemed to be waiting. Then—
“Have you heard nothing?” he asked in dull tones.
“Heard? I? What do you mean?”
Again the silence.
“I hardly thought it possible that you had not, but, since you don’t knew, there is nothing to tell.” He spoke with infinite depression.
“How mysterious you are!” she cried, striving to throw a careless jocularity into her words. “You speak like the villain, or rather the misunderstood hero, in a melodrama. My dear fellow! What is it all about? Can’t you see how I ’m simply dying to share your secret with you, whatever it is? We’re old friends. You ’ve made hopeless love to me a hundred times. I leave you engaged to be married to Evelyn Farquhar, one of the loveliest girls in all England, tearing around from house-party to house-party—and now, right in the midst of the hunting season, when you ought to be full of brandy-and-soda and tucked up sound asleep in your little bed at Parsley Croft, you bob up, looking like a half-baked sociologist, in the second cabin of my steamer! I won’t have it! What have you done? Have you done anything, old sport? Cosmo dear, out with it. You can trust me!” Her voice was tenderly coaxing.
The man drew back from her. Micky had turned cold and his heart suddenly felt like lead. Oh, Evelyn Farquhar!
“No—No, Lily! Don't ask me. I know it looks like a rum go. It is a rum ’un. You ’ll know soon enough, doubtless. Just cut me out, will you? How ’s Trevelyan? I see that swine Ashurst is on board.”
“You never liked him, did you?”
“Like him! It ’s beasts of his sort that make England a by-word! Why do you have him around?”
“If you were traveling first cabin I would n’t. But I ’m lonely, Cosmo. Don’t you see I want to be friends with you? You used to like me a little bit. I ’ll meet you here every night after everybody else has gone to bed.”
“Don’t, Lily!” he groaned. “Can’t you see I ’m all cut up? Forget me—just as I ’m trying to forget England! Suppose some officer saw you here with me now at three o’clock in the morning! It would make nice ship gossip, would n’t it? Hurry back to your stateroom. It was crazy of you to come and knock at my door.”
“Oh, very well,” she answered abruptly. “I ’ve tried my best to be nice to you. I don’t suppose it would do even my reputation any good to be seen at night around with second-class passengers. You ’re too cold a proposition to bother with. You can paddle your own canoe, and I ’ll paddle mine, even if I have to carry Ashurst in it along with me!"
There was the sound of a door closing quickly. The man did not stir. Then he hurriedly opened it again and whispered hoarsely after her: “Lily!—Lily!”
During this surprising interview Micky had held himself quite motionless, undecided, after the first shock of hearing his lady’s name and indeed he was still debating the matter in his mind when the conversation concluded as unexpectedly as it had begun. Then the man emerged from the shadow of the deck-house and began to pace nervously up and down the deck. His coat collar was still turned up and his felt hat pull down over his eyes, but his hands writhed and twisted in the moonlight like frightened snakes. It was clear that he was under the severest tension, and now and again some word muttered under his collar reached Micky as he sat, the mute, involuntary witness of a soul’s torture.
And then the man began to glance quickly around the deck, as if to make sure that nobody was there. He took off his hat and ran his hands through his curly hair, and the face Micky saw in the moonlight was the face of one in hell. He began to be worried, for he had seen them like that before—when the Lithuanian woman had jumped off the bow, and the crazy Pole had dived over the rail near the Azores the last time across. Cloud walked slowly aft, holding his hat in his hand. He trod as if in his sleep, with his eyes directly astern. Micky slid down the ladder and in his rubber-soled shoes followed on the other side of the after deck-house. If Cloud contemplated suicide, he knew where he meant to do it! He stole silently along, and reached the clear space at the end of the ship before Cloud had emerged on the other side.
There was an old wooden bench there, where people who did not mind the cinders and the motion could sit In the daytime and watch the gulls. Another instant, and the creak of Cloud’s shoes could be heard; another, and the man himself appeared around the corner. He stood in the moonlight, not more than six feet from where Micky was flattened against the star-board side of the deck-house. Only a single twisted, weather-beaten iron rail separated him from the actual stern itself—the edge of the abyss, below which the white foam churned itself into fantastic shapes, now looking like a white patchwork quilt with green squares floating quietly for a moment upon the surface, then parting asunder with a roar a some unseen force sucked it down below into a black hole amid a cataract of spouting waves. There had always been a fascination for Micky in the boiling caldron of blue-green water, and Cloud must have felt it too, for he rested his hands on the rail and gazed steadfastly into its swirling depths. Should a man jump, there was no doubt as to what would occur when he entered that gyrating vortex. Down he would be drawn down, down, in that transparent column of green and white, helpless and immovable in the mighty suction that would whirl him pitilessly round and round, this way and that, until, like a shark shooting towards its victim, would sweep the huge propeller, slicing him in two or beheading him and tossing his dismembered body aside here and there, to spin and dive in its wake until it freed itself from the back current and floated to the surface a mile or more behind, to bob face upward in the moonlight to the surface, where, with the morning sun, the screaming gulls would find and settle on it.
As Cloud stood there, Micky saw it all, and he turned faint with horror. What a deed must rest on the stalwart Englishman’s soul if he could seriously contemplate doing such a thing! What foul iniquity could this man have perpetrated, when, as the woman he called “Lily” had said, he ought to be tucked up in his little bed at Parsley Croft, full of brandy-and-soda? Yet, whatever it was, Micky’s inherited instincts made his muscles stiffen in an automatic resolve that no living temple of God should cast itself thus down—that no creature once of the sunlight, however abased and sullied with crime or vice, should plunge into the oblivion of death to rot in a nameless ocean grave or be gnawed by the slimy denizens of the sea, so long as he could save it. Murderer, betrayer, traitor,—it mattered not; the man himself was no sane judge of his present relation to life. As he stood there he was but a mindless effigy of a man swayed by the winds of destiny.
Thus the two stood. Cloud unconscious of the other’s presence, while a filament of mackerel cirrus drifted between the moon’s path and the ship and made black the pit underneath their feet. Only the surging rush of the waters—throuh which the tinkling of the mandolin came faintly. Only the deserted moon-swept deck. Only the vast, pale star-specked sky. God and the man!
As in his sleep, drawn by some hypnotic power, Cloud slowly removed his ulster and hung it mechanically on the iron rail. Then he laid his felt hat beneath it on the deck. A moment more, and he ducked under and stood upright on the slippery, heaving stern. There was no doubt as to his purpose. He looked down into the abyss, steadied himself, and took a step backward, preparatory to the plunge.
Micky saw the move, and rushed swiftly from his hiding-place. Another instant and he threw himself upon the man from behind, pinning his arms to his sides. On a wet convex surface ten feet square, that heaved and lifted the two swayed and struggled, the one in his resolve to take life, the other in his determination to save it; and all that Micky, in his hysterical excitement, could muster intelligence to utter was a fatuous shriek of:
“O you bally ass! You bally ass!”