"I felt as if the rest of the world had been stripped of everything of value, regardless of how naked and shabby it might have been left, for no other reason than to make this banquet and ball the most dazzling concentration of human wealth and beauty that there had ever been," wrote Julius Briggs. "So, there was no gold left in South Africa? So, birds of Paradise were struggling to fly without their tail-feathers? So, a thousand civet cats had been tortured for their perfumed oils? So, art galleries had been stripped, leopards slaughtered, whole mountains demolished for their quartz? Who cared? Tonight, on this enchanted ship, we cared only for tonight."
NINETEEN
The beating of the Arcadia's engines might have been loud, and so might the laughter of the passengers and the warbling of the orchestra. But a little more than a mile away, in slanting nun that was now as fine and as drenching as the curtains of wet organza, there was no sound but the sea and the wind and the desolate puttering of an eight-horsepower petrol engine, as a man called Thomas Dennis tried to nurse it through the night.
Thomas Dennis was a scenic photographer from Dundrum Street in Dublin. He was a single man, but this afternoon he had put out to sea in his friend's twenty-one foot fishing ketch Drogheda, and taken with him an eleven-year-old boy named Sean Joyce. Sean was the youngest son of his next-door neighbour in Dundrum Street, a carroty-haired widower whose wife had succumbed two years ago to the effects of fourteen pregnancies, and who fervently and equally believed in the vision of St. Theresa and the joys of home-distilled poteen. Although Thomas Dennis was well-educated and artistic, a favourite among the womenfolk of Dundrum Street but considered a softie by the men; and although young Sean was obtuse and scruffy and illiterate, better at throwing cobbles at the Guarda than he was at his schoolwork, the two of them, Thomas and Sean, had become the best of friends. They rarely talked to each other. Theirs wasn't the kind of friendship that needed talk. But they were out almost every Sunday after Mass, walking the hills of the seashore, or the banks of the Liffey, with Thomas springing on ahead with his tiny spectacles shining, as he peered inquisitively about for scenes that might be suitable for commercial postcards, and Sean stumbling along behind with the tripod and the cape and the heavy No. 1 Conley View Camera.
Today, they had gone out to take views of the Arcadia as she lay at anchor. With luck, Thomas would be able to sell two or three pictures to the Dublin Examiner, or even the Illustrated London News. They had photographed the Arcadia's massive sides from all points of the compass, and then eaten five cheese sandwiches each and shared a pint bottle of Guinness. All of Mr Joyce's children had been brought up on Guinness, it was mother's milk to them, and so Thomas could scarcely object to the boy's thirst for the black porter, even though he was only eleven.
But Thomas had reckoned without the perverse summer currents and the turning tide, and without the Irish efficiency of the petrol engine, which worked "on and off, according', although according to what had never been explained to him. By the time it had grown so violently dark at seven o'clock, they had already drifted and sailed and drifted and floundered four or five miles south-east from Dublin Bay; and it was only now, at twenty after eight, that Thomas Dennis had been able to patch up the fuel-pump line with a piece of rubber cut from his camera bulb, and fix an approximate course towards the Irish shoreline south of Dun Laoghaire.
It was a night of tilting seas and unceasing, impenetrable rain. Sean sat under the Drogheda's makeshift canvas canopy and shivered in his thin sleeveless pullover and his knee-length flannel pants. Thomas, at the tiller, his brown tweed cap as wet and shapeless as a cow flop, his collar turned up, was obliged to keep taking off his spectacles and wiping them dry.
"It's not so far now, Sean," Thomas kept shouting. "I believe I can see the breakers already. You wait and see, we'll be supping hot soup by nine."
When he first glimpsed the lights of the Arcadia, he thought (with a jump in his heart of God-be-praised) that they were the lights of Dun Laoghaire. But then they disappeared behind the shifting grey scenery of the waves for a minute or two, and when they reappeared, they were so much closer that he realised they must be moving towards him, rather than him moving towards them.
He wiped his glasses again, and strained his eyes in the misty rain, and at last he worked out that the lights were moving diagonally towards him on his starboard bow, and then he saw the illuminated funnels and decorated masts that told him he was crossing the path of the Arcadia.
There, Sean! Do you see those lights?"
Sean squinted into the rain, and then nodded. "Is that shore, Mr. Dennis?"
"It's not the shore, my boy, but it's the next best thing. The Arcadia. That's what it is! Can you see her now? She was due to leave her mooring at eight, so she can't have sailed far! And that means we're nearly home and dry! Now look, will you? Isn't that a sight? You won't see a sight like that again!"
Up in the Arcadia's wheelhouse, Dick Charles was glumly wondering what he was going to do about Lady Diana FitzPerry. In the crow's-nest, the look-out, Frederick Cowles, was staring sightlessly at the rain and wondering if his wife had started labour yet. He wouldn't have been able to see the Drogheda even if he had been looking in her direction: the evening was far too misty, and the Drogheda was wallowing in the troughs of the Irish Sea like a wet pig.
Sir Peregrine had been quite right. From a small boat, the Arcadia was as easy to see as Harrods at Christmas. But what he had failed to consider was that if you were floundering around in a small boat, with the wind and the rain blowing steadily on to your port bow, and your eight-horsepower engine coughing and stuttering, and if Harrods were to bear down your port bow at more than eleven knots, accelerating all the time, you would be extremely hard put to get out of the way.
It took Thomas Dennis only three minutes after he first caught sight of the Arcadia in the distance to realise that she might be on a collision course with the Drogheda. During those three minutes, the Arcadia advanced on him by more than three times her total length, or half a mile. There was now less than half a mile of sea between them.
Thomas was gradually clutched by a tight and overwhelming breathlessness, the kind of feeling that he could only think of as sheer dread. He said, out loud, "Mother of God', but when Sean looked up at him he found that he could say nothing else at all. There was nothing he could have said that could possibly have helped. He knew Sean couldn't swim, because he had once tried to persuade the boy to take a dip at the Black Rock baths. Even though both of them were wearing lifejackets, Thomas doubted if a few pieces of crumbly cork and mildewed canvas could save them in a cold choppy sea more than two miles from shore. And there would be very little that cork and canvas could do to protect them from a 53,000-ton express liner that was now bearing down on them so rapidly that even if its captain had seen them, he would have been completely unable either to slow down or to avoid them.