"Bunyan, I believe."
"Then before we eat, let's go and find Bunyan."
Bunyan had just woken up after six hours" sleep. His tiny cabin smelled of sweat and beer. There was a photograph on the wall of a terraced house in Manchester, and a pin-up of Anna Q. Nilsson. Bunyan sat on the edge of his bunk in large trousers and a stained white undershirt, alternately blinking and sniffing.
"What we need to know is precisely what warning the Irish port authority gave to Sir Peregrine when the Arcadia left Dun Laoghaire," said Edgar, as warmly as he could.
Bunyan sniffed, and blinked. "Well, sir, they said there was small vessels in the vicinity."
"And?"
"And, we had to proceed slowly for at least one mile, sir."
"Are you sure that's what they said?"
Bunyan nodded.
"And so that's what you did?"
"Yes, sir. Sir Peregrine said, slow ahead for one mile, then full ahead."
"Full ahead after one mile, regardless?"
"Not regardless, sir. Full ahead after one mile, should it be safe, sir."
Edgar glanced at Percy Fearson. Then he said to Bunyan, "You'd swear to this in a court of law?"
Bunyan nodded and blinked.
"Very well, then," said Edgar, and left the cabin.
Outside, Percy Fearson said, "What do you think?"
"I don't know what I think," Edgar replied. "Well, I do really. I think he's been nobbled."
"You're serious?"
"It only takes five pounds to change a man's mind, Percy. That, and the promise of promotion in a year or two."
"We've still the wireless officer to talk to," said Percy.
Edgar checked his watch. "All right," he said. "Let's see what that message said for ourselves."
They went up to the telegraph room. The wireless officer who had been on duty the night the Arcadia left Dun Laoghaire was off duty, but the second wireless officer, a nervous young man with a large pimple on the end of his nose, hastily produced the wireless messages for the night in question.
Edgar went through the messages one by one, quickly and coldly. The second wireless officer watched him with a stare as fixed as a parrot. At last Edgar said, "Here it is. Harbourmaster Dun Laoghaire to Arcadia. You may now proceed. We wish you calm sea, a voyage crowned by glorious success, and something illegible about King Neptune. You are advised of the presence of small sightseeing craft, and requested not to make full speed for one mile."
He held the message up to the light. Then, for comparison, he held up the next message, a telegraph from London for Mr. Charles Schwab. He said, "This message was written with a blunt pencil, the next message with a sharp pencil. The message before it was written with a sharp pencil. So why is this message different?"
The second wireless officer looked at Edgar balefully. Then he pushed forward a small glass jar, containing more than a dozen different pencils. "This is our pencil jar, sir. Some of them are sharp and some of them are blunt."
Edgar stared back at him, then collated the messages and replaced them neatly on the desk.
"Penny for 'em," said Percy Fearson, as they went down the companionway to the Orchid Lounge for breakfast.
"I don't know what to think," said Edgar. "It doesn't sound like Philips, handling a ship so recklessly. He's not the type. But, if you say he's been having wife trouble... well, maybe he wanted to try to outshine Sir Peregrine, to bolster his own morale. Chaps do the oddest things when they have wife trouble. Or maybe he just wasn't paying attention."
"The lookout couldn't have seen the Drogheda either. And there's not often the lookout doesn't pay attention."
They walked into the pale mauve Orchid Lounge, where gilded basketwork chairs were arranged beside trellises of silk artificial flowers. A waitress in a mauve pillbox hat topped with a gold tassel showed them to a table in the corner. "Enjoy your breakfast, Mr. Deacon. You too, Mr. Fearson," she said, making big movie-actress eyes at Edgar and coquettishly jiggling the fringes of her skirt as she walked away.
"Have Monty Willowby speak to that girl," Edgar said irritably. "The last thing our cabin-class passengers want is a flirtatious breakfast."
Percy Fearson opened the breakfast menu and studied it with a great show of earnestness. "I don't know whether to have the Belgian waffles or the coddled eggs," he remarked. "Perhaps I ought to have both."
In his sitting-room, Sir Peregrine was pouring out the last of his breakfast. He held the empty rum bottle upside down for almost a minute, waiting for the last hesitant drop to fall into his beaker. Then he sighed and set the bottle back on top of the sideboard. One dead, how many more to go? He knew that he wouldn't be able to resist drinking again, now that he'd started. He had a pounding headache, and breath so strong that pigeons could have perched on it.
Still, for a man of his character, what did a few drinks matter? There were plenty of great men in history who had been fond of the sherbet. He wouldn't be surprised if the King himself didn't gargle once or twice in Napoleon brandy before retiring, or even after rising.
Drink helped a man's vision. It steadied his temper, collected his thoughts and enabled him to see things shipshape and sharp. And those were qualities you couldn't even claim for a woman.
Ah, a woman, he thought. What I could have been with a woman. And for a brief moment, before he lifted his last mug of rum to his lips, he remembered a sweet Edwardian profile, and Lily Langtry curls, and a voice that now spoke from nowhere but his memory.
On the deck below, Catriona slept. She dreamed of dancing and of running down one claustrophobic passageway after another, looking anxiously for Mark. She dreamed that Mark's lips were close to her ear and whispered, "I will love you for money'.
And as the morning passed, the Arcadia began to plunge and toss like a wild pony as she forced her bows into an ocean that was already beginning to grow tumultuous and dark.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Catriona arrived in the Grand Lounge five minutes late for the fashion show. It was not that she actually felt sick: it was just that the cup of tea she had drunk after Alice had awakened her seemed to be tilting from side to side inside her with every roll the Arcadia rolled.
The decks were very lively now, and there was a waiting list of white-faced cabin-class passengers for Dammert treatment, oxygen and atropine, to settle the inner ear. Those who had fox-trotted and fornicated and drunk champagne until dawn were being punished the most severely, victims of what Second Officer Ralph Peel called "Atlantic justice'. The prettiest flappers and the smartest sheiks were now hanging over the basins in their cabins, their eyes like freshly-opened clams and their hair sticking up like Willy and Wally.
The stewards, of course, were courteous and soothing, and brought beef tea and stomach-settlers with expressions on their faces that could only be compared with 15th century Italian saints. When they met each other in the kitchens and the linen-stores, however, they passed on gleeful gossip about the discomfiture of their wealthy and celebrated charges; and the greatest mirth of all was aroused by the vivid description that Jack Dempsey's steward gave of the wonder boxer groaning out loud and promising God that he would never fight again. "Lord, Lord, I'll never t'row anudder punch, never!"
Catriona had never suffered badly from motion-sickness. She had ridden happily and hilariously on every helter-skelter and whirling caterpillar at the seaside fun fairs to which Nigel had taken her. But even so, the sky outside the Grand Lounge was now ominously stormy, and the Arcadia was making her way through the waves with a peculiar sideways dance, since the sea was running from the southwest and her helmsman was steering her on a northwesterly course.