Sean stood up, his hair spiky in the rain. "Look now, she's coming our way, Mr. Dennis!" he cried, in pleasure. "If I call halloo, will they call back? Will they stop for us, Mr. Dennis?"
Thomas opened his mouth in panic, and closed it again. The tiny fishing-boat dipped and pitched in the water, its engine sounding as ineffective as a wasp in a jelly jar. The tiller seemed to be quite useless, no matter how violently Thomas wrenched it over, and he suddenly thought of a nightmare he had once had of tumbling over a bottomless waterfall.
He heard dance music. He thought: Holy Mother, am I to die to the sound of dance music? Then his whole world seemed to be blotted out by the towering black walls of the Arcadia, and by the thunder of her diesels, and by the livid white spray that leaped up from her bows like shrouded ghosts leaping out of their ploughed-up graves. Sean screamed, a high piping scream like a girl, and then the Arcadia burst the Drogheda into tiny splinters, demolishing her as thoroughly as if she had been blown up with gelignite.
Up in the Grand Lounge, at that very instant, Sir Peregrine was kissing the hand of Princess Xenia of Russia. Although the impact of the collision was no greater than that of running through a raft of half-submerged logs, or hitting a large buoy, Sir Peregrine was almost psychically conscious of a tremor that wasn't right, a tremor that ran through the living hull of his ship and tingled his nerve-endings. He lifted his head with an expression of sudden uncertainty.
"Is there anything wrong, Sir Peregrine?" smiled Princess Xenia coquettishly. "Did you chip one of your teeth on my rings?"
There was laughter all around them. The orchestra was striking a up with a Charleston. Sir Peregrine frowned in the direction of the grand staircase, and said, "No, no, of course not. Nothing at all."
Rudyard Philips, a few feet away, caught the questioning look on Sir Peregrine's face, and wondered what Princess Xenia could have said to him to make him appear so distracted. Next to him, slopping champagne out of her glass, a dark-haired girl in a shimmering gold dress was giggling and honking like a goose, and saying, "Isn't that a scream?"
Right below the girl's wafer-thin French-made sandals, right below the dance floor, down beneath the layers of second- and third-class decks, of galleys and engine-rooms, right beneath the riveted steel plates of the hull itself, Thomas Dennis was being dragged bodily down the whole 960-feet of the Arcadia's keel, battered and jolted and already scraped as raw as a side of beef. He was still alive, and still conscious, and most horrifying of all, he knew what was going to happen to him. He had nearly three-quarters of a minute of being bludgeoned against the hull, nearly three-quarters of a minute of tumbling through the chilling turmoil of the seawater which flowed beneath the Arcadia's black and impassive length, nearly three-quarters of a minute of unspeakable pain. Then, he was going to have to go through the liner's screws.
Princess Xenia took a tiny crouton topped with Malossol caviar and smiled at Sir Peregrine archly. The orchestra's vocalist picked up his megaphone, and began to sing, "Carolina, Carolina, at last you're on the map... With a new tune, crazy blue tune, with a peculiar snap..."
Thomas Dennis, martyred with agony, opened his lungs to scream, and flooded them immediately with freezing brine. Stunned, drowning, frightened more than almost anything else of the darkness and the terrible feeling of all that black weight pressing him down into the sea, he tried to tell his soul to let go, let go! let me die before I reach the screws, let me sit with my head resting in the Virgin's lap, let me know peace before I have to face butchery.
There was a quiet knock on the door of Catriona's stateroom. Catriona said, "Alice, there's someone knocking," and at that moment Thomas Dennis" legs were chopped off at the thigh by the whirling blades of the Arcadia's Number Two direct-driven screw. The rest of his mutilated body was burst open and flung seventy feet away by centrifugal force. Nobody was looking over the Arcadia's stern counter at that time, and even if they had been, it probably would have been too dark for them to see the brief stain of red that touched the foam. Thomas Dennis had left a single veal pie in his meat safe at home in Dundrum Street, and that was to have been his supper.
It was one of the Arcadia's pageboys at Catriona's door, with a celluloid box tied around with pink satin ribbon. "It's for you," said Alice, tipping die boy sixpence and bringing the box across the room. "An orchid." She peered at the card, and smiled as she handed it over.
Catriona was almost ready now. She was just trying to decide whether she preferred the silver-and-diamond brooch with the pearls swinging from it like dewdrops, or the pierrot brooch in white gold and white enamel. She said, "Could you bring me another cigarette, please, Alice? I think my nerves are going to get the better of me. I'm so excited?
The orchid, pale violet and still sparkling with moisture, was from Mark Beeney. On the card, he had written, "For the girl of every shipowning millionaire's dreams. Respectfully, Mark."
"I think someone's rather stuck on you, Miss Keys," said Alice. "You know what orchids mean, don't you? Undying passion. If a man gives you an orchid, that's a sign that he's never going to let you go as long as he lives. Not until he gets what he wants, anyway."
Catriona untied the ribbon, and carefully lifted the fragile flower out of its celluloid box. She held it up to her cheek, and made big eyes at herself in the dressing-table mirror. "It's the same colour as my make-up," she said. "It matches exactly. Isn't that perfect?"
Alice was hanging up Catriona's discarded neglige. "Perfect," she agreed, and meant it, particularly since Mark Beeney had given her an envelope with $50 in it to tell him what eye shadow Catriona was going to be wearing that evening.
"Do you really think I ought to wear it?" Catriona asked Alice, pushing aside the stool of her dressing-table and standing up.
"Of course you should wear it," said Alice. "It's a compliment. It doesn't necessarily mean that he's trying to make up to you."
"I don't know," said Catriona, twirling around so that her evening gown spun out around her. "I think I shall leave it in a glass of water. Or perhaps I shan't even do that. Perhaps I shall just let it wilt. After all, if I actually wear it, he's going to think that I'm keen on him."
"Aren't you?" asked Alice, busying herself with Catriona's scattered jars of make-up, and thinking about her fifty dollars.
"Aren't I what?"
"Aren't you keen on him?"
"Well, of course I am. But that isn't the point, is it? I don't want him to think that all he has to do is buy me a diamond and ruby necklace, and send me an orchid in a celluloid box, and I'm his. That wouldn't do at all. No, I think that now is the time for me to be even more remote than ever. I think I shall ignore him all evening. My God, there are thousands of good-looking men on this ship. Well, hundreds. Well, there are some. But he has to fight for me. He has to be a knight in armour. Shining and gallant and ready to die at the drop of a hat."