As the rolling and pitching grew worse, Mademoiselle Narron burst out of her stateroom in a state of histrionic fright and made her way whimpering and warbling up to the officer's quarters. The electric lifts were not operating, so she climbed the stairs in her fright-white negligee with all the wide-eyed drama of Lady Macbeth. Outside, on the boat deck, she was instantly drenched by nearly half a hundredweight of cold seawater, but she struggled on to Rudyard Philips' cabin and knocked loudly at the door.
Rudyard, who had been sitting fretfully on his bunk, jumped up and opened the door at once. "Louise!" he said. "My dear Louise, you shouldn't be here! Look at you, you're soaked!"
Mademoiselle Narron collapsed heavily and wetly into Rudyard's arms, obliging him to take three quick steps backwards to keep his balance. He kicked the cabin door shut with his foot, and then he manhandled Mademoiselle Narron as gently as he could manage on to his bunk. When he leaned over to loosen her negligee, however, she seized his face between her hands and pressed him forcefully against her huge slippery bosoms.
"Rudyard! I'm so frightened! We're going to sink!"
Rudyard took hold of her wrists, and firmly released her grip. "Louise, listen to me, we are nor going to sink. That's nonsense! No ocean liner has been sunk by heavy seas in the whole of this century, nor will it be. We can ship thousands of gallons of water before we're at any risk. The Carmania heeled over fifty degrees once, so that her lifeboats were broken to pieces, but she stayed afloat. And so will the Arcadia."
"But I'm so frightened I didn't know what else to do, but come to you."
"You shouldn't be here at all. I'm in enough trouble as it is."
"You're in trouble? What for?"
Rudyard went to his washstand, took out two tumblers, and poured each of them a brandy. "That's all I've got, I'm afraid," he told her, "but it may help to settle your stomach. The truth is, my dear, I'm under arrest. Confined to my quarters until further notice."
"Confined to your quarters? What have you done? How can they arrest you?"
"The captain has the power to arrest anyone he chooses. In this particular case, he chose to arrest me. He says that I'm responsible for an accident we had when we left Irish territorial waters. We ran down a small boat, and killed someone."
"This ship? The Arcadia?
Rudyard nodded. "You wouldn't have noticed. The boat was too small. But I was on the bridge at the time, and so I'm being held responsible."
"That is terrible. You are a good sailor, n'est-ce-pas?"
Rudyard looked down at his drink. "I suppose so. I always used to think so. I'm not much good at anything else."
"How can you say that?" Louise demanded, sitting up on the bed.
Her red hair stuck to her cheeks and her shoulders like fronds of Japanese seaweed. Her pink nipples showed through the thin wet cotton of her negligee, and her cheeks were flushed both with brandy and determination. "How can you say that you are no good at anything else?"
"I'm not much of a Romeo, am I?" Rudyard asked her, without raising his eyes. He couldn't bring himself to use the word "lover". "And I didn't do much of a job when it came to keeping my wife."
"You were at sea. It wasn't your fault your wife left you. What else can you do?"
"Oh, come on now," said Rudyard, bracing himself against the washstand as the Arcadia heeled off to starboard. It was like dropping in a lift, except that your stomach never quite caught up with the rest of you. In a moment or two you would be rising up again, passing your stomach on its way down, and just as your stomach came scrabbling up to meet you, down you would drop yet again. In the next cabin, through the thin partition wall, Rudyard had heard Derek being catastrophically ill, and he didn't feel particularly chipper himself.
Mademoiselle Narron said, "It was my fault, what happened to us him we made love. I expected too much."
"That doesn't make me feel very much better. In any case, don't let's talk about it, if you don't mind."
"But I have been thinking about it so much! You need someone who is going to bring you out. At the moment, everything you do is so tight, so restricted. You never express yourself. Perhaps you are afraid to. Perhaps you think that people will ridicule you if you burst out and do everything that you have always wanted. Look at me, though. All the time I am making such a fool of myself! Pretending to kill myself! Falling all over you like some lady from an opera! But even if people laugh at me, who cares? At least I do what I want. At least I live my life with fullness and with passion. But you? In your mind, you are so reserved! That is why our lovemaking was such a disaster!"
"Oh," said Rudyard, sourly. "I didn't know you thought it was a disaster. Sorry I thought I could satisfy you. Very unprovoked of me, I'm sure."
Louise lurched across the cabin and took his hand. She had lost one of her slippers on the boat deck, and so she limped as well as lurched. But there was an expression of such friendliness and sympathy on her face that she looked almost beatific. Behind her raggedy red hair, a discreet halo should have shone.
"I have been so uncaring to you," she said. "Here I am, accusing you of not giving yourself to me, and I never even thought about giving myself to you. If you do not think it terrible of me, I will show you how to make love in the way that I like to make love. I will show you how to make me cry with pleasure. Please, don't be offended. I am not criticising your virility, only your upbringing, and the way your stuffy English schools have led you to think. What happens in love does not happen inside here," she said, pressing her fingers to his forehead, "it happens outside of you, everywhere," and here she swept her arms in a wide dramatic circle, knocking Rudyard's shaving-mug on to the floor.
Rudyard turned his face away, and took out a cigarette. He tapped it on his thumbnail. "I don't know," he replied, with the cigarette waggling between his lips. "I don't know whether I've got the inclination any more. I've got too much on my mind. Being arrested, well, it's not exactly a joke."
"What better to occupy your mind than making love?" enthused Louise, and reached out for him with both hands. "Through making love, you can forget about everything, and anything."
It instant, however, the Arcadia bucked and tilted so violently that both of them were thrown sideways to the floor. And even though Louise screamed loud and long at the top of her operatic voice, Rudyard heard a deep rending noise, followed by a thunderous crash, and then the steady gushing of hundreds of gallons of seawater as they seethed from the foredeck to the poop deck and cascaded back out into the ocean.
"What's happening?" shrieked Louise. "We're sinking! I know it!"
"It's all right!" Rudyard insisted, snatching for the rail at the side of his bunk to steady himself. "We're just steaming head-on into a series of deep troughs, that's all."
But the Arcadia rose again, and rolled, and then dropped into the next trough like a demolished building. Again there was a tearing of metal and a discordant twanging of snapped wires, and that thirsty sucking seething sound of the sea. God, thought Rudyard, as he clutched Mademoiselle Narron close to him, both of them kneeling on his cabin floor like waifs, if we don't turn aslant to this storm, we are going to founder. Why the hell doesn't Sir Peregrine turn her aslant?