"She never told me she could swim," said Mark in amazement. "I mean, not as well as that."
Catriona held his hand, happy that Marcia was still alive, but guilty, too, because of the way she had felt only half an hour before, when she had first learned that Marcia was missing. She couldn't stop the tears that filled her eyes and she had to wipe them with her fingers. Mark noticed, but then he was on the verge of crying, too.
Soon the huge ocean liner was drifting slowly within fifty yards of the spot where Marcia was floundering her way through the sea. None of the passengers could yet be sure that she had seen the ship, because she hadn't looked up from the water or acknowledged their arrival in any way at all. But they cheered frantically, and waved their hats, and several well-meaning men threw down life jackets and deck chairs, until the chief steward managed to persuade them that a blow on the head from a deck chair could succeed in drowning Miss Conroy where the Atlantic Ocean had failed.
The lifeboat was still being winched down when Rudyard Philips did an extraordinary thing. He suddenly tossed aside his cap, loosened his necktie, and unbuttoned his uniform.
"Mr. Philips?" asked Edgar.
But Rudyard didn't reply. Instead, he bent down to take off his shoes, which he kicked back into the wheelhouse. Then he quickly unbuttoned his shirt.
"Mr. Philips, you're not thinking of diving in after her?" said Edgar. "Mr. Philips, that's the most ridiculous—"
It was too late. With a face set as straight as a bust of Liszt, Rudyard climbed the rail, balanced for a moment with his toes right on the edge of the highly varnished wood, and then swallow-dived the entire seventy feet down into the sea.
There was a cry of surprise and delight from everybody on the starboard side of the ship as Rudyard arched gracefully through the air, and then hit the water with a clean splash of spray. It was a perfect dive, like a diagram out of Chums on "How To Swallow-Dive." Everybody clapped as he emerged and started swimming strongly towards Marcia, and even Jack Dempsey cheered.
Rudyard reached Marcia in two or three minutes. The sea was freezing, and she was on the point of total exhaustion. Her sodden clothes, which like Ophelia's robes were "heavy with their drink", were about to drag her under. As Rudyard pulled her head back into the classic life-saving position, she gargled, and cried out, "Sidestroke medal!"
Rudyard told her breathlessly, "Relax," and began propelling both of them backwards towards the ship. The lifeboat had now been launched and, with Ralph Peel at the prow, was being rowed rapidly towards them. The chilly salt waves splashed over Rudyard's face, and he choked and spat to stop himself from swallowing too much brine.
There was more applause as Marcia was lifted dripping from the sea, and held up in Ralph Peel's arms, the rescued maiden. The news photographs of the event, most of the journalists reckoned, would have to be judiciously retouched, since Marcia's negligee, when wet, was almost completely transparent. But what a humdinger of a story! "Beautiful British Debutante Rescued After Mid-Atlantic Plunge." And they would always have a set of uncensored prints for themselves. The man from the Daily News was already hogging the wireless room, his brown leather golf brogue wedged against the door, transmitting his story to New York; while the society correspondent of the New York Daily Graphic was fretting outside on the boat deck, just in front of the lady from the Los Angeles Examiner, Marjorie Driscoll, whose story, headlined "Desperation Dive of Star-Crossed Society Sylph", would earn her the sobriquet of "sob sister of 1924".
But none of these eager newshounds were there to see the real high tragedy of the rescue. None of them saw Rudyard Philips release his hands from the side of the lifeboat, and vanish beneath the surface. In fact, it was two or three minutes before anybody realised he was missing, and by then it was far too late.
Rudyard hadn't known what he was going to do until he saw Marcia Conroy in the water. But then, as if he had been visited by a divine revelation, it had all seemed perfectly clear. Suddenly, he could choose honour instead of ignominy; glory instead of demotion. Marcia was his passenger, she was his personal responsibility, and so as the captain of the Arcadia he was duty bound by all the rules of the sea to save her. That was the way to solve everything: to die in the course of his duty. That was the way to be remembered for ever as the captain of the the ship which he would never be appointed to command. Wouldn't Toy be sorry that she had deserted him for Laurence? And what tears Louise Narron would weep for him! Sir Peregrine, even sir Peregrine in his paralysed dotage, would remember him with fondness and regret; and Ralph Peel would forgive him for taking the old man's side during the storm.
He would be better off drowned. It would be better for himself, and better for everyone who knew him. He felt as if his very existence had been preventing other people from living their lives happily, and so the only answer was to cease to exist. That was why he had tossed aside his cap, unbuttoned his uniform, unlaced his shoes, and dived into the ocean. He hadn't done it to rescue Marcia (although he was obliged to, because she was his alibi), but to breathe in as much briny seawater as he could and let his cold weighted lungs sink him to the bottom of the ocean.
Rudyard's last impressions were of the sea slapping against the side of the lifeboat, of Ralph Peel kneeling forward to lift Marcia out of the water. He could hear cheering, but somehow it seemed strangely distant, like the cheering of a football crowd six or seven streets away. He thought: they're cheering for me. That's the way to die. At sea, under a sunny sky, to the sound of applause. Then he slowly opened his hands so that he sank away from the lifeboat, and allowed himself to drop just below the surface of the waves.
He heard the booming of the ship's turbines, amplified through the water; he heard the metallic tinkling of bubbles. Then he exhaled, every ounce of breath that he could, and breathed in the Atlantic. It was one of the strongest acts of will of his whole life, to inhale seawater, but he did it until his lungs were flooded. He sank down, his brain already dying from oxygen starvation, and he turned as he sank, as if he were flying in slow-motion through the crisscross sunlight of a dream, and then down into darkness, where no living man could go, and where his face took on a greyish pallor because the sunlight could no longer penetrate. He descended through a silvery shoal of herring, and then deeper still, where it was cold beyond imagination, and where the fish took on forms that were only appropriate in nightmares.
In the pocket of his trousers was the wireless message from Toy, which he would take right to the bottom with him.
Louise Narron, on the first-class promenade deck, was the first to realize that Rudyard had disappeared. She cried out, "Ou est Rudyard? Where is Mr. Philips? Mr. Peel! Where is Mr. Philips?"
The sailors in the lifeboat looked all around them, and then at each other. "Not in the boat, sir!" one of them told Ralph Peel. Angrily, Ralph Peel shouted back, "Then where the hell is he? Rudyard! Where the hell has he got to!"
They rowed around the Arcadia for more than a half-hour, while George Welterman stood alone on the foredeck in his red and black striped blazer, watching them with simmering impatience. It was 11:20 now, and unless the Arcadia made at least thirteen miles more progress on her course before twelve noon, he was going to lose his bet. Maurice Peace, who had bet a lower figure than the bridge's estimate, sat in a deckchair eating a banana and meditating on the generosity of fate. He had always wanted a luxury automobile, and a as long as the Arcadia remained stationary, it seemed as if he was going to get one. He hadn't even been obliged to resort to the paraffin-soaked rags in his blue canvas holdall. He handed his empty banana to a passing steward, and tipped the man a pound.