It had been one thing to look out of her cabin porthole and watch the heaving waves from the luxurious security of her silken bed; but even the nauseating rolling of the dining saloon had not prepared Catriona for the sheer thunderous drama of what was outside. The huge liner was driving her bows into walls of water that were twenty or thirty feet high, and pitching up columns of spray that seemed to hang above the foredecks for minutes at a time before they collapsed onto the boards with a rattle like gunfire. The wind was almost overwhelming, and Catriona had to gasp for breath as she and Mark clutched and staggered their way back along to the second-class promenade, and to the rail which overlooked promenade deck A.
Edgar was already there, with Second Officer Ralph Peel and Fourth Officer Dick Charles. On the promenade deck below, six or seven of the crew were paying out a reel of line in preparation for an attempt to lasso the overhanging jib of the starboard electric crane.
"What's going on?" shouted Mark. "Where's the girl? I don't see her."
Edgar gripped his shoulder and pointed towards the very apex of the crane's jib. Catriona peered through the slanting spray, and at last caught sight of her. A pale-faced bedraggled figure in pink, clinging to the slippery metal.
"How the hell did she get up there?" asked Mark.
"Search me," said Ralph Peel. "But she was lucky she was spotted at all."
"Can't one of your men climb up the crane and carry her down?"
"In this sea? Not without a line. That's what we're doing now. Trying to throw a line over the jib so that someone can go up there slide the girl down on the rope."
"What's her name?" asked Catriona. "Are her parents on board? How could anyone let her go out in a storm like this?"
RaIph Peel wiped spray from his face with the back of his hand. The wind and the sea were so noisy that they could scarcely hear each other shouting. And all the time the Arcadia was plunging and rolling and bucking her way through the ocean with the ferocity of an untamed mare.
"Her name's Lucille Foster. She's the daughter of Winthrop Foster the Third and Gala Jones. Those two who smashed themselves up in that motor accident in Paris. She's on her way back to America with a guardian, Mrs. Hall; but Mrs. Hall is down in her stateroom flat out from seasickness. So she's not much help."
At last Douglas Fairbanks appeared, wrapped up in shiny black oilskin, with a sou'wester that was two sizes too small for him. "I can't compliment your costume department," he told Catriona. "Now where's this girl?"
"Up there, right at the end of that crane jib," said Ralph Peel. "We're trying to throw a line over the jib and make it fast, so that someone can climb up there and lower her down."
"How did she get way up there in the first place?* Douglas Fairbanks wanted to know.
"That's the same question I asked," said Mark.
"And why, in a storm like this?" added Douglas Fairbanks.
"Have you tried talking to her?" said Catriona.
"We tried, miss," said Ralph Peel. "She didn't answer, though; and I don't even think she can hear us."
"Have you thought of lowering the crane's own hook, instead of trying to throw a line around it?" Douglas Fairbanks wanted to know.
"That was the first thing we thought of, sir. But that's a nasty hook on there, very heavy and we didn't want that swinging around the deck in a Force Tenner. Quite apart from which, it looks like the young girl's got her hand right up in the pulleys. If we tried to operate the crane, we'd probably end up injuring her. Tearing her arm off, or worse."
"I just don't understand how she managed to get up there," Douglas Fairbanks repeated.
"She could have shinned, sir," said Ralph Peel. "It's not impossible, especially for a youngster."
On their tenth or eleventh attempt, the crewmen at last managed to throw their line so that it snaked up over the crane's jib, and swung down to the deck below. One of them immediately snatched at the other end, and made it fast. It was prevented from sliding down the sloping arm of the crane by the protruding pully mechanism, but that was all that held it. It would take a brave man to climb up there in a sixty-mph wind.
"Volunteers?" screamed Ralph Peel, into the gale. Almost immediately, one of the crewmen, a ginger-haired youngster called Stokes, seized hold of the wet rope and began pulling himself up it, monkey-fashion.
"That's it, lad! Keep at it!" shouted Ralph Peel, although it was doubtful if Stokes could hear him. The rope spun around and around, and several times Stokes was forced to cling tight and stay where be was, as the tilting of the Arcadia's deck left him hanging over the side, seventy feet above the threshing ocean. To lose his grip and plunge into a sea like that would mean immediate drowning, or crushing against the side of the ship.
Catriona borrowed Derek Holdsworth's spray-speckled binoculars, and peered at Lucille Foster through the driving wind. The girl appeared to be calm, almost thoughtful, as she clung to the end of the jib. She wasn't even looking down at her would-be rescuers. Instead, with her hair stuck in Pre-Raphaelite waves to her forehead, she was staring at some dark point in the distance. The moment, perhaps, when her father's Hispano-Suiza had collided with the base of that statue. Her mother's last second of life: "Winthrop, what are you doing?"
Stokes was halfway up the rope now, but the wind was gusting worse than ever, and there was no doubt that the seas were growing more calamitous every minute. Although Catriona didn't know it, luncheon in the first-class dining saloon had already been abandoned, and an heroic attempt by the second-class stewards to bring hot beef tea and chicken pies to the second-class passengers had been temporarily called off after a boiling urn had rolled the whole length of the corridor. Down in the lower levels of the ship, among the third-class passengers, there was something of a storm party going on, as seventy or eighty of the hardier beer-drinkers among them clung clung around the bar and did their best to empty it of brown ale. Harry Pakenow was among them, although he was staying on lemonade. Half an hour after lunch, he had been monstrously sick over the side of shelter deck C, sicker than he could ever remember in his whole life. In the third-class recreation room, the upright piano broke loose from the screws that were holding it to the deck and rumbled across the room like a miniature express train, smashing its way clean through the starboard wall, and ending up in the gentlemen's washroom with a resonant Wagnerian bang. In the second-class pantry, the door of a crockery cupboard swung open unnoticed, and on the ship's next roll, two hundred china cups and saucers came gushing off the top two shelves and shattered on the floor.
"What the hell's Sir Peregrine up to," Ralph Peel muttered to himself. "Waves like this, he ought to be taking them aslant."
Now Stokes was waving from his perch halfway up the rope that couldn't cling on any longer, and that he was going to have to come down. He slid jerkily back to the deck, burning his hands as he went; but it had been a courageous try, and his shipmates clapped on the the back as he dropped onto the slippery boards. He gave Ralph Peel the thumbs-up.
The pitching of the Arcadia's bows was so severe that seawater was crashing onto the foredeck and sluicing along her promenades like a seething tidal bore. Most of the passengers, seasick and battered, had returned to their cabins, although Maurice Peace was still running a poker game in the smoking lounge, and Mr. Wilkes and Mr. Kretchmer were sitting side by side in basketwork chairs in the Orchid Lounge, munching their way through sandwiches and fruitcake, which was all their steward had been able to bring them. Neither had yet been seasick, and this was probably because their stomachs were so full that they were incapable of even the slightest regurgitative spasm. In the Grand Lounge, the ship's pianist sat with his tails hanging tidily over his piano stool while he played a saucy little selection from Charles Gulliver's revue The Whirl of the World, currently showing at the London Palladium with Lorna and Toots Pounds.