Suppose it had been Daisy Belle? Suppose it was Gili herself?
Queer to be sleeping in that small, tidy cabin with, possibly, a murderess.
Again the feeling of incredulity overwhelmed her, and this time gave her what she knew might be a false security but, nevertheless, was for the moment security.
But why had Daisy Belle offered a gratuitous, flat lie?
It seemed to Marcia that weeks had passed since the storm had begun, as if she had been on the Magnolia for a long time and as if she had known that deep throb and steady rush of water intimately and familiarly.
Just before she went to sleep, a memory of the night, a small thing, unnoticed at the time, came floating out into her consciousness. When Josh Morgan had found her, there in the fog, he had called her Marcia. "Do you hear me?" he had asked, and held her . . . "Do you hear me, Marcia?"
It was as if he had known her, somewhere, for a long time. It was as if the sense of security in his arms was an old and familiar one, too.
But that, she thought suddenly and sharply, was like disloyalty to Mickey. She loved Mickey; she was to marry Mickey, not Josh Morgan. And not that there was anything at all that required even a denial!
She turned on her side and suddenly fell into a deep sleep. The fog was thicker now. It lay all round the Magnolia. It was an impenetrable yet yielding wall, surrounding her, setting her off from the rest of the world. Quietly the night life of the ship went on. Somewhere a man turned in his bunk and dreamed of home; another lay awake planning and mapping a war-free life; another, in pain, moved restlessly and a nurse observed it and came to lean over the bunk and rub his back.
Up in the chart room Captain Svendsen drank more hot coffee from the thermos beside him, and peered ahead through the window and could see nothing. Beams of light were struck back upon themselves by that thick, black veil. Staring into the fog, he decided to take decisive steps in the morning about the boatload of survivors he'd picked up from the Portuguese vessel. He wasn't sure just what had happened that night on deck; it was his first business to get his ship and his patients safely through that fog and home. But if the passengers from the storm-wrecked Lerida were going to make trouble, he'd stop it if he had to put them all in irons.
He'd better question the two seamen again; he'd better question them all again. In view of what Colonel Wells had told him, he'd have to question practically everybody on the ship.
Then he thought of the body of Alfred Castiogne as he had seen it, with the ugly, gaping knife wound in the back. It was so vivid a picture that it almost seemed to float there, against the fog ahead. Captain Svendsen was not afraid of anything; but he didn't like that picture against the thick, wet night.
9
The fog entered the ship.
It was kept out of the sick wards; lights and warmth and activity kept it at bay. That morning was, so far as the sick wards were concerned, exactly like any other. The nurses in their neat, beige-and-white-striped uniforms—slacks instead of skirts, to facilitate the constant running up and down stairways and perching on the edges of the upper bunks to care for patients there as well as those in the lower tier of bunks— went briskly and quickly about their prescribed routine. Breakfast trays, which hooked neatly onto the sides of the bunks; charts, baths, the doctors' rounds; warmth and jokes and inexhaustible good spirits on the part of the patients. Which was not surprising at all; which was natural and real because these men were soldiers.
But the rest of the ship was at the mercy of the fog.
It crept into the main passageways, it darkened the day, it permeated everything. The decks were gray and slick with moisture. The Magnolia proceeded slowly and very carefully, nursed along through a gray wall which ever yielded and yet ever enclosed. That morning the foghorn began to sound at long intervals. They were not on a heavy shipping lane. The Transportation Corps officer knew the exact location of every ship within miles of them. But a fog like that was a hazard, just the same; visibility was cut down to feet; the raucous blast of the foghorn seemed the only thing able to penetrate that thick gray wall and even it was flung back in diffused multiple echoes upon the ship.
The sound of it woke Marcia.
It was late. Daisy Belle and Gili had already apparently dressed, quietly, and left the cabin. The ports were gray with fog and all the metal latches and bolts had a faintly misted look, as if some invisible presence had breathed upon them.
Marcia's long, heavy sleep, the daylight look of the cabin, the secure feeling of being on an American ship, all of it was like a mantel of commonsense protecting her from things that were not sensible, that were outrageously out of place. By the time she'd had a hot shower with all the fragrant soap she wanted and had dressed in clothes that were faintly damp from fog but incredibly fresh and new and attractive in contrast to the nondescript odds and ends of clothing that she'd taken aboard the Lerida, she was ready to deny everything. If Castiogne were murdered, one of the seamen had done it and, by then perhaps, had confessed, Daisy Belle Cates was no more a Nazi than she was a man-eating tigress. The hand that had silently turned that now faintly blurred doorknob had been merely a hand, somebody mistaking that cabin for another. Gili had been in Mickey's cabin simply because she was Gili and she'd wanted to talk to Mickey and had done so. Why not? Everything, that day, would be straightened out and restored to the normal order of events.
She was even ready to accept Mickey's accident as an accident, and nothing more. And if the attack upon her had been what it seemed, then it was obviously one of the seamen, afraid for some unfathomable reason that she had seen him kill Alfred Castiogne.
One of the nurses had placed a little horde of toilet articles beside Marcia's bunk—a comb, toothbrush and powder, lipstick. She combed her dark hair back to a smooth roll, low on her neck; she put on lipstick. There was a small, feminine satisfaction in the fact that it was a gay soft red; her blue eyes seemed more deeply blue. She caught up the nurse's coat again and the lining almost matched her red, half-smiling lips. Everything was going to be all right.
She went down to breakfast, passing wards and through passages and stopping at the door of what proved to be the nurses' lounge—a large, comfortable room with deeply cushioned chairs and sofas, a piano and card tables and a gay mural of the skyline of New York painted on the walls. A nurse, sitting under an electric hair dryer and reading, looked up pleasantly and directed her to the nurses' mess, one deck down.
This, too, was a large, low-ceilinged pleasant room—white walls, white ceiling and red chairs. The nurses ate at two long tables at one end, the officers at two round tables at the other end, so a mess boy told her. And then he brought her orange juice and pancakes with butter and all the milk and coffee she wanted.
She was finishing when Major Williams, the young officer who had been present when the Captain first interviewed her, came into the room, saw her and came forward. The Captain, he said, would like to see her again. But she must finish her breakfast, he added politely, and he hoped she had had a good rest and was no worse for her experience in the lifeboat.
The sense of well being, of being restored, somehow, to the right world (her world, the little sensible and normal world that Marcia Colfax had known before the war), still held good. She smiled at the young Major and finished her coffee and went with him. They walked through passages that were now beginning to seem familiar, past wards, with their atmosphere of comfort and home, past the equally busy and active transportation offices and eventually to the Captain's quarters.