He had been Andre Messac on the Portuguese ship; he was still using that name, the name on his passport, and wished her to do so. There was no time to consider the reasons. She said quickly, to show him that she understood: "Yes, Andre, I'll see you when the Captain is finished."
Mickey nodded, giving an almost imperceptible wink. Major Williams cleared his throat and Mickey turned to follow him. The door closed behind them both. Captain Svendsen leaned back in his chair again.
"I don't think you have quite understood the situation, Miss Colfax," he said. "There were only a handful of people in that lifeboat—you and Andre Messac, Gili Duvrey, two seamen, Mr. and Mrs. Luther Cates." He paused and added on the same level tone as if merely checking another fact: "One of you murdered that man. Which one was it?"
3
She heard everything he said; she did not think beyond the incomprehensible fact of murder.
It is one thing to state a truth; it is another thing for the mind to accept it as truth. Or perhaps the mind accepts where understanding rejects. It wasn't possible that during the horror of those hours in the lifeboat another horror had added itself quietly to the night, and that was murder. She rejected it and yet had to accept it as true.
After a moment, Marcia said slowly: "If he was murdered in the lifeboat, if there is no other possible explanation for his death . . ."
The Captain looked ahead, showing a hard, strong profile. After a moment, he said flatly: "He was murdered."
"Well. Then I see, of course, that someone in the boat must have done it. But we were so preoccupied with a struggle for life, all of us, that it is hard for me to believe that anybody could have cared enough—to—to murder anybody." Suddenly murder itself, the fact of murder, became tangible, as if it had a stealthy and furtive and horrible being. Then and there, in that cabin, so she moved uncomfortably, suddenly chilled and cold. Suddenly aware again of the slight motion and creaking of the ship.
But murder, if it had existed, was in the lifeboat, not the hospital ship. The seeds of that murder had been sown on the Portuguese ship. She said suddenly: "The two seamen . . ."
"Did you see either of them kill Alfred Castiogne?"
"No, no . . ."
"Why, then, do you imply that one of them killed a man? It is a grave charge. Miss Colfax."
"I don't know anything of the murder. Captain. It is very difficult for me to believe it; that is, to understand how it could have happened."
The Captain rose abruptly, paced across the cabin and back again and stopped before her, looking down, "That part of it seems fairly obvious," he said, his thick white eyebrows jutting out over his shrewd, sharp blue eyes. "Almost any one of the people in that boat could, I believe, have managed to stab Castiogne without being seen. You were all, as you say, confused, preoccupied, changing places when necessary, each aware mainly of his own danger and his own discomfort. If the murder occurred after you sighted the Magnolia, it is even easier to understand its being done without any of you seeing it, for you were all watching the Magnolia—nothing else. No, how it was done is easy; the question is who did it? Why did you mention the two seamen?"
"Because they knew him; they must have known him. There may have been some—oh, some grudge, some quarrel. The rest of us were passengers only."
"In other words, you are deliberately blaming one or both of these men?"
"No, I didn't say that."
"Listen, Miss Colfax, every one of the passengers in that lifeboat has suggested that solution. It is so unanimous a belief on the part of the five of you that one might be inclined to think that you actually knew of the murder and mutually agreed to blame the seamen."
"No, no, you are wrong. Don't you see. Captain Svendsen, how confusing it is, how terribly shocking and . . . ?"
He interrupted: "How long have you known the Cates couple?"
"I met them in Lisbon for the first time. That is, of course, I'd heard of them. I knew their name; everybody knows that, I suppose. They were always in the papers."
"Where in Lisbon did you meet?"
"At the hotel, while we were waiting to get some sort of passage."
"What about Gili Duvrey? How long have you known her?"
"She was at the hotel, too. I saw her, here and there, in the cocktail lounge or the lobby. Then, when we reached the ship, we—Gili and Mrs. Cates and I—shared a cabin."
"Do you know anything of her other than that?"
"No."
The Captain lighted his pipe again, with slow deliberate puffs, watching her closely with those bright, shrewd blue eyes. Again incredulity caught at Marcia. She tried to see Gili, or Daisy Belle, or Luther, creeping forward in that lurching mad lifeboat, knife in hand, stabbing at the hunched figure of the third officer, but it was a picture which she simply could not summon up in her mind. All her instincts rejected it as completely and finally as if she had tried to fit herself into that fantastic picture. The Captain said suddenly: "Miss Colfax, look at that thumb."
She saw with a start that he was holding out his great fist toward her, the thumb upward, wide and powerful. "There are hundreds of lives under that thumb," he said, "all the time—lives in my care. I am responsible for the ship and every life upon her. I can marry people and bury people. And I can kill people if need be."
He smoked for a moment and said simply: "I am the master of this ship. You and all those people from the lifeboat are now on this ship and under my care. I am particularly responsible because of the load I carry—sick and wounded men who have fought for America. For you, for me. It is my job now to see to them. I had to pick you up last night. I had to circle as I did, in case there were other lifeboats; I found none and continued my course. A short time after I picked you up the doctor who examined the body of Alfred Castiogne reported the murder to me. There are two things I can do; I can put you all under arrest and in confinement until we reach home. Or I can induce you to tell who murdered him. I don't propose to let a murderer run at large on my ship. Do you understand me?"
His honesty, his force of character, something enormously solid and strong in the very way he sat, a thick blue bulk in the chair, and looked at her with those deep-set, steady eyes, compelled respect and a kind of liking. She said: "Yes, I think I do understand. But I . . ."
"You still cannot quite believe this man was murdered. Never mind that now. The point is the Magnolia is not a fast ship; it will be some time before we reach port. For the sake of my ship and of everybody concerned I want to settle this thing now. It is my duty." He said it so simply that it was a mere statement of fact and thus convincing. "Now then"—he tapped the pipe against the ash tray, neatly and precisely— "why did you not return to America before now?"
That had nothing to do with the murder of the third officer of a little Portuguese cargo ship. And he was waiting for a reply. Why hadn't she returned to America sooner? Long ago when the war began?
Her thoughts went swiftly back over those war years that had seemed so long and so ugly, so filled with terror and despair, so tenuous with hope that Mickey would escape and would come to her—as eventually he did. In fact, of course, it was a very brief story, and not unusual.