Gervaise had taken over Oliver's job with the instruments as well as carrying on with his own work of writing up the journal of the Ark and issuing the stores. But there had still been no opportunity to use the sextant and take the altitude of the sun, moon or stars, as day after day, night after night, the dense banks of low cloud remained unbroken overhead.
The general level of their spirits sank as the days dragged by.
Whenever the weather was too rough for Derek to get his morning exercise he became grumpy with everyone except Lavina. She turned on the gramophone so frequently that they were almost tortured by the incessant repetition of her favourite dance tunes. Margery discovered that Sam had never been confirmed and was taking him stage by stage through the catechism.
On July 24th Gervaise called a conference. Over half their edible supplies had been consumed and he suggested that they should make a reduction in their daily rations. They agreed unanimously, but the fact that they had to do so sounded a warning note. Their nerves deteriorated and, under the constant strain of watching for the land which never appeared above the grey horizons, they began to be terse with each other and apt to have high words over trifles. Only Gervaise remained calm and secure in his spiritual fastness, the outcome of a lifetime's study of the great philosophies, and ever ready to restore good feeling between the others with a well chosen word.
Sam, Derek, and Hemmingway took it in turns to look after their mad prisoner. On the day following his capture they brought him up and gave him a very badly needed bath, after which they fitted him out in a suit from one of the bags that Roy had never reached the Ark to claim. He had occasional screaming fits when he would throw himself about, but otherwise gave no trouble, as Gervaise kept him on a low diet and mixed sedatives with his food. With the welding implements, which were among the large collection of such things that had been stored in the Ark, Derek succeeded in forging the ends of a length of chain into two anklets, so that they were able to hobble Fink-Drummond and release him from his other bonds; after which he was able to move freely about his narrow prison but unable to separate his feet more than twelve inches, which rendered him incapable of exerting his full strength in any attack. He made no attempt to escatpe, however, but became increasingly lethargic rather like a wild beast that has been doped, as he remained obdurately silent although on many occasions they tried to persuade him to talk.
In the latter days of July they had several severe hail-storms during which bits of ice as big as pigeon's eggs drummed on the outer sphere of the Ark like bullets, making a deafening but harmless din, and on the first of August they saw their first snow.
For thirty hours the fast-falling flakes blotted out the monotonous seascape, but when the snow ceased on the second day they were overjoyed to see that at long last the clouds had broken, revealing the sun. For over five weeks it had remained hidden by the dense clouds which had accumulated as a result of the deluge.
Gervaise quickly got out Oliver's sextant and took an observation; a very simple matter as it consists only of bringing an image of the sun in a mirror to a point on the sextant's arc where the rim of the image just touches the rim of the sun itself seen through a smoked glass. Hemmingway, meanwhile, stood by to take the time on the chronometers which, although probably inaccurate now from the buffeting the Ark had received, could not be far out as they had never stopped.
The two of them then worked out the easy sum which gave the Ark's latitude, and it proved to be 71° 17' north.
Finding their longitude was a different matter, as neither of them knew more than the rudiments of nautical astronomy, but they hoped that they would be able to do so if they could get observations of some of the stars.
The discovery that they had drifted so far north was extremely perturbing as, following the 70th parallel of north latitude on the map, they saw that it ran from Baffin Land, across the middle of Greenland, past the North Cape, and through the Arctic Ocean to Siberia.
Gervaise and Hemmingway both felt convinced that their calculation had been correct but hoped, as did the whole party, that it had been wrong. Even if they sighted land now it looked as if they would be faced with the grim prospect of fending for themselves in some desolate region of the Arctic.
Yet the weather seemed to confirm the reckoning, as they had more snow and sleet in the days that followed, and when the sun broke through again for a brief period on the 5th of August further observations gave their latitude as 71° 20' N., which established the fact that they were still drifting in a northerly direction.
It was on the 7th of August that Sam, going into the kitchen first thing in the morning to help prepare breakfast, found
Margery lying there motionless, face downwards on the floor.
His first thought was that Fink-Drummond had escaped during the night and was responsible for this new outrage. His second, that she was dead and that he had lost her. Only then did he realise how much her companionship had meant to him through all these desperate weeks.
It was not that he no longer loved Lavina; her grace and beauty still played havoc with his senses, but her youthful vitality, her insistence that they must always be doing something even though they were shut up in the narrow confines of the Ark, and her insatiable craving for amusement had proved a great strain on him lately, in spite of the fact that Derek and Hemmingway occupied a good part of her time.
Sam was a strong man, but from his first youthful struggles in Bradford he had worked himself unmercifully and he was now getting on for fifty. He had been young for his age when he went on his honeymoon with Lavina but the strain of the last seven weeks had told upon him and he now looked, and felt, even older than his years. The holocaust which had swept all his worldly possessions away had revived something primitive in him. Gone was the veneer which had so long overlaid his simple inbred habits. Even his voice had changed, the vowels broadening as he reverted to his childhood tongue.
He wanted a peace and repose that Lavina could never give him, but that Margery could. Lavina's finer qualities, her courage, her independence, her sense of fair play and her real integrity were so masked by her apparent irresponsibility that Sam was only faintly conscious of them, whereas Margery's straightforwardness, thoughtfulness for others and unselfishness had stood out all the more by comparison because she lacked the glamour of her younger sister.
As the mistress of his great house in St. James's Square Lavina could have been unsurpassable, but Margery would have made a real home for her man and her children anywhere; and now that money, position and power had all been swept away from him, Sam knew that he would never miss them in the least if the future held a simple home for him like that which he had known with his mother in Bradford.
While these thoughts raced through his brain, Margery stirred. In an instant he was on his knees beside her and had taken her in his arms. Her eyes opened; his heart began to hammer in his chest. Before he knew what he was doing he was kissing her feverishly and pressing her to him.
'Sam—oh, Sam,' she murmured, leaning her cheek against his. Then, as realisation dawned upon her, she pushed him back, exclaiming. 'Oh, what are you doing? We're mad! You mustn't, Sam!'