Ralph Peel glanced towards the helmsman, but the helmsman was too preoccupied with the next gathering wall of water to worry about anything but keeping the Arcadia steady.
"With all due respect, sir," said Ralph Peel, "this doesn't make sense. Almost every passenger on board is sick as a dog, sir; and we've got a young lady stuck up a crane. Apart from that, it looks like we've torn away half of the front superstructure, rails and all."
Sir Peregrine swayed slightly, but by some miraculous balancing mechanism within his cochlear duct, he managed to stay upright. Ralph, however, was obliged to grab for the brass rail around the side of the wheelhouse with both hairy hands. There was another canon-like roar of seawater; and when the Arcadia's bows emerged yet again, like a surfacing shark, Ralph could see through the salty window that one of her knightsheads had been torn away.
"Sir Peregrine, this is insane! You're breaking the ship to pieces!"
Sir Peregrine stared at him beadily, and for the first time it occurred to Ralph Peel that the commodore was drunk. Not just drunk, but so overwhelmed by the effects of Haitian rum that he was acting out an existence which, when he sobered up, he would never even remember. He was in a fantasy world of his own, where the ocean raged at captains and their liners like a great grey monster, but could always be tamed; where boatswain's whistles forever blew a high-pitched accolade to the greatest heroes of the sea. His gilded destiny may have been denied to him by Rudyard Philip's miserable and grisly accident, but now he would live it out in the only realm where it could still be lived, within his mind. It was full ahead to New York, full ahead to champagne and cheers, full ahead to a blue riband and a place in English history books: "During the early 1920s, several liner captains made their mark on maritime legend. Perhaps the most illustrious of these was Sir Peregrine Arrowsmith, of Keys Shipping, whose..."
Sir Peregrine staggered and clutched Ralph's sleeve. "We must, uh—we have to make all speed."
"Sir," insisted Ralph, "we have to change course. It's imperative."
"No, no," said Sir Peregrine, tugging at Ralph's sleeve even more fiercely. "Won't hear of it. Can't be done. You make sure we're—well, you know what to do. You're a good man. Excellent Second Officer. Hairy, I suppose. Rather hairy. Not many chaps as hairy as you. But, well, you know what the Bible says about Esau and Isaac. Esau was a hairy chap, wasn't he? But no reason why he shouldn't have been promoted, all in good time."
"Sir Peregrine," said Ralph, quietly but very intently, "we have to steer a different course. We can't go on ramming these forty-footers head on."
Sir Peregrine stood upright and tugged at the knot of his necktie. "You're wrong," he said. "You're wrong. And... you're not only wrong, you're insubordinate. I arrest you. You're confined to your quarters. There now, what do you make of that? Go on, off you go."
"Sir Peregrine—"
"Don't bother me now! I'm busy! You're under arrest and that's all there is to it! Now clear off my bridge before I have you kicked off!"
Ralph hesitated for a moment, breathing as deeply as an organ pump. Then, with the bandy-legged walk of a man who has been negotiating angled decks for most of his life, he crossed the wheelhouse, tugged on his sou'wester, and opened the door. The spray lashed against the veneered woodwork, and the wind blew up a shower of charts.
"You're in trouble now, Commodore!" Ralph shouted. "You're really in trouble now! I'm going straight to Mr. Deacon!"
"Give him my dearest regards!" Sir Peregrine called back. "And shut that damned door!"
Ralph Peel struggled along the gusty deck to Rudyard Philips' quarters, and banged loudly on the door with his fist. Rudyard answered the door almost immediately, but would only open it two or three inches. He looked white and bedraggled, and from inside his cabin there blew a strong smell of cigarette smoke. Ralph hardly ever smoked: he thought it was bad for the performance.
"I've just been up to the bridge!" Ralph shouted. "Sir Peregrine's pissed as a parrot! He won't change course for anything! He's already smashed half the foredeck superstructure, and if this sea gets any worse, he's going to start buckling the plates!"
"Have you told Edgar Deacon?" Rudyard screamed back.
"I'm just going now! But you're the First Officer! Get up there and make sure he doesn't drown the whole damn lot of us!"
"I'm under arrest!" said Rudyard. "Confined to quarters!"
"So am I! But what the hell difference does it make? He's so drunk he doesn't know what he's doing!"
Rudyard bit his lips. "I don't know!" he said, against the wind. "I'm in enough trouble as it is!"
Suddenly the cabin door was tugged wider apart, and Mademoiselle Narron appeared in her wet negligee. Rudyard was shocked. it was strictly contrary to Keys regulations for a ship's officer "to entertain or to harbour a passenger, of either sex, in his personal accommodation". But Ralph Peel didn't even blink, except to shake the spray from his eyelashes. As far as he was concerned, the "no harbouring" regulation had been written solely for the moral guidance of junior officers straight out of college, or to spare the embarrassment of senior officers who were too geriatric to entice anything up to their bunks that could reasonably be described as tasty.
"The captain is drunk?" she asked in horror.
"Very," said Ralph Peel. "We could tap off his breath and use it to run the boilers."
Louise Narron threw her arm around Rudyard and clutched him tight. Rudyard looked helplessly at Ralph, like an explorer who had been mistaken for her long-lost offspring by an affectionate mother orang-utan. "My darling," said Louise, "this is your moment! This is the time when you can show me what a hero you are! We are sinking! You hear what Mr Peel says! You must go up to the bridge and take over the ship! You must!"
"All right," said Rudyard, desperately. "All right, if that's what I have to do! All right!"
He reached for his cap, which was swinging on a hook on the back of the door, and tugged it on to his head.
"My God, you're beautiful!" cried Mademoiselle Narron. "So stoical! But underneath, so full of courage! The English hero!"
Soberly, Rudyard told her, "Louise, you'd better go back to your stateroom. Borrow my coat, it's in the wardrobe there. And take care down the stairs. I'll come down later and tell you what's happened."
"I can't wait here?"
Rudyard shook his head. 'It's better if you go back to your cabin. Call your stewardess and ask her for a hot drink. Something with rum in, to calm you down.'
"Kiss me," she demanded.
Rudyard glanced at Ralph. Ralph was waiting by the door with a wide wet grin on his face. "Go on, kiss her, if it makes her happy," Ralph cajoled him. Rudyard gave her a quick, unsatisfying peck.
Once they were outside on deck, Ralph said, "That's a fair-sized beauty you've got there. Tits like tugboats. You been through it yet?"
"Don't be so damned vulgar," Rudyard snapped. He raised his collar against the wind.
"No offence meant, I'm sure," Ralph told him, and punched him affectionately and knowingly on the upper arm. "Opera singer, isn't she? Plenty of lung power, eh? Whoa-ho-ho-ho whoa-ho-ho!" He gave a coarse imitation of an operatic trill.
"Just go and get Edgar Deacon," Rudyard instructed him. "The sooner the company takes charge of this damned mess the better."
"I'm off," Ralph assured him, and went.
Rudyard was left on the boat deck on his own, the spray rising all around him in clattering white towers, the wind screeching through the rigging in an endless and hair-raising lament. His head was boiling with fear and indecision, but also with an extraordinary compulsion to show Louise Narron that he was worthy of her melodramatic expectations. Because now, quite suddenly, he could understand the key to his failure with Toy; the reason why he had so disastrously disappointed every woman who had ever loved him, and himself as well. He had the looks of a hero. That short, clear-eyed bearing of Captain Scott. He had the uniform of a hero. But when it came to heroic acts, either marine or sexual, he had never known what to do. Nobody at school had ever told him what was required of him, on board or in bed. One of his French masters, staring out of the window at the quad, had said, "When it comes to les jolies mademoiselles... well, it's all a question of panache." Yet it was only now, under chivvying and bludgeoning of Louise Narron, that he thought he understood what panache actually was, and how seriously he had lacked it.