Ingram opened his mouth to ask what the matter was, but caught Rae’s eyes on him. She shook her head. They both looked seaward and in a moment heard Warriner sit down again. The whole thing hadn’t lasted more than a few seconds. Probably doesn’t know we even saw it, Ingram reflected. But what was it? Terror? Terror of what? For some reason he was thinking of the way Warriner had come aboard, the trancelike stare, the convulsive lunge onto the deck, and the way his fingers had flattened themselves around the handrail.
“Breeze coming!” Rae called out suddenly. “Anybody for Papeete?”
Off to the south the surface of the sea was beginning to darken under the riffles of an advancing cat’s-paw of wind. Ingram sprang on deck and began casting the gaskets off the mainsail. Rae had run forward and was breaking out the jib. Long months of practice had made them a smoothly functioning team, and by the time they could feel the faint movement of air against their faces a cloud of billowing white Orion was mounting against the sky. Rae came aft to take the wheel. The mainsail filled. Saracen began to move, almost imperceptibly at first, and when she had gathered enough way to come about Ingram looked around and nodded. Rae brought the wheel hard over; she came up into the wind, hung for an instant, and fell off on the port tack, toward the southwest and Tahiti.
For a moment he had forgotten Warriner, but when he turned from setting up the mainsheet to trim the jib, he found the other already hauling on it. Warriner threw it on the cleat and straightened. “How about the mizzen?”
Ingram nodded and began taking off the gaskets. “Might as well get everything on her; the breeze might last for a while. But you go ahead and turn in.”
* * *
Warriner smiled. “I think I will, as soon as we get this up.” He seemed to have recovered completely from the horror of a few minutes ago. They hoisted the mizzen and trimmed the sheet. Ingram leaned over to look in the binnacle. “Can we make 235?” he asked Rae.
“Easy,” she replied. “We’re to windward of that now.” She came right a little. “Here we are—230 … 233 … 235.”
Ingram glanced aloft at the strands of ribbon on the shrouds and started the mainsheet a little. Saracen heeled slightly under a puff and began to gather way. He turned to Warriner. “We’re going to have to cast your dinghy adrift. No room to stow it.”
Warriner nodded. “Yes. Of course.”
Ingram loosed the painter from the lifeline stanchion, coiled it, dropped it into the dinghy, and gave the boat a push away from the side. It drifted back and began to fall behind in the wake, riding like a cork over the broad undulations of the swell. Warriner had turned and was staring toward the other yacht, which was off the starboard quarter now that they had come about. The dinghy was a hundred yards astern, growing smaller and looking lost and forlorn in the immensity of the sea.
“Well, if it’s all right with you, I guess I’ll turn in,” he said at last. “If the breeze holds, I can take over tonight.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Rae said. “You’d better rest for a couple of days. There’ll be something for you to eat when you wake up.”
“It’ll be pretty hot down there,” Ingram added, “but if you leave the door open you’ll get a little circulation of air from the ventilator.”
Warriner nodded and went down the ladder. He paused once to turn for a last look at the other boat before his head disappeared below the level of the hatch. When Ingram looked around at Rae, her eyes were misted with tears. He leaned forward and peered down the hatch. Warriner was going through the passage into the forward compartment. He couldn’t hear them if they spoke in normal tones.
He slid back close beside her. “What do you make of it?”
“That thing about the bottle?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. But grief does strange things—grief and complete isolation.”
“But just a sinking bottle—”
“Obviously it wasn’t a bottle he was seeing.” She paused, her eyes fixed moodily on the compass card. Then she went on, “What’s a sea burial like?”
“I’ve never seen one, thank God, but from what I’ve read, you sew the body in canvas and weight it with something. Why?”
“I’m not sure, but …” She gestured helplessly.
“I think I know what you mean,” Ingram said. “But I’m not sure I agree with you.” Wrapped in white Orion, with the water this clear and the boat lying dead in the water above them, the bodies would still be visible a long way down if you wanted to torture yourself by leaning over the side and watching them disappear into the dark down there. “But that’s only morbid. This was worse. Horror—I don’t know what you’d call it.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “I know. But being utterly alone afterward …” Her voice trailed off. The breeze had dropped to a whisper. Saracen ghosted through the bald spot for a few yards, the sails beginning to slat; then it picked up again, only to die out once more in less than fifteen minutes. Saracen rolled heavily, booms aswing. Ingram sheeted them in. He stood up, still disturbed, and annoyed at himself because he didn’t know why, and trained the binoculars on the other yacht. Then, with a gesture of impatience, he made up his mind.
“I’m going aboard her.”
Rae looked up. “Why?”
“I don’t know. There’s something about the whole damned thing I can’t quite swallow; no matter how I turn it, it won’t go down. Look, Rae, anybody who managed to get this far from land in a boat without killing himself must be a sailor, and that’s not the way a sailor abandons one. Just because somebody else comes along going in the same direction—like a hitch-hiker. You’d bring something off, or you’d go back for what you could salvage.”
“You don’t believe she’s sinking?”
“All I know is she’s still afloat.” He continued to study the other yacht. As far as he could tell, there was no change in her trim or amount of freeboard. Well, it didn’t mean anything, actually; it could be hours, or even days, before she went under. He was probably being silly.
“Did he say whether she was insured or not?” she asked.
“He says she’s not.”
“Then it’d be pretty expensive, wouldn’t it, just going off and leaving her in the middle of the ocean?”
He frowned. “Yes, but that’s still not what I mean. If she’s leaking at all, he’d never make port in her alone; she’s too big for singlehanded sailing, to say nothing of being at the pump all the time. He almost has to abandon her, but not the way he did. I keep getting the feeling he doesn’t want anybody to go aboard.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know. Admittedly, it doesn’t make any sense. But look—you’ll notice he didn’t turn in until we were under way. And had cast his dinghy adrift.”
“That was probably just coincidence.”
“Sure. It could be.”
“You’re going to put our dinghy over?” Rae asked.
“No.” He turned, searching for the other one. He could still see it when it crested a swell, several hundred yards astern. “Well pick his up again. No strain, if we get another breeze.”
Saracen had begun to swing around on the swell, to a southerly and then a southeasterly heading. Ingram stood up again with the glasses and could see the water beginning to darken once more to the southward. He looked at his watch. It had been nearly thirty minutes since Warriner had gone below. He slipped down the ladder, crossed to the passage going into the forward compartment, and looked in. Warriner lay on his back, his eyes closed, breathing heavily.