‘Did hisself well, didn’t he?’ Bristow said. ‘Lived like a lord while we was living like pigs. That’s equality for you. Is it any wonder there’s Communists?’
‘He had the responsibility.’
‘Give me a cabin like this and I’d take the responsibility.’
‘No you wouldn’t, Johnnie. You’d be scared.’
‘All right‚’ Bristow said. ‘Maybe that’s true enough. And maybe you wouldn’t be so keen on it either.’
‘I don’t say that I would.’
There was a doorway leading into an adjoining room which Keeton guessed was the captain’s sleeping quarters. Feeling even more like a trespasser on private property, he pushed open this door and went inside.
It was not a large room. Along one side of it was the bed and on the opposite side an open porthole. The room was hot and close; it had the confined, distasteful odour of sickness. A beam of sunlight slanted down from the porthole and fell upon the bed, throwing into sharp relief the face of the man lying there. The face was gaunt and grey, with a thin stubble of white beard. It was the face of the Valparaiso’s master, of Captain Peterson.
As Keeton stared in amazement he saw Peterson’s eyes slowly open and gaze at him.
Chapter Five
In the Night
With the approach of night the wind came again, softly at first, then growing ever stronger until it was blowing spray over the Valparaiso’s sloping decks. The ship staggered before the wind, sometimes turning her great blind starboard side to the attack, sometimes the stern and sometimes the bows.
She was lower in the water now and often her port bulwarks dipped under. The tackle still hanging from the davits on that side trailed in the water like the tell-tale rope by which a man might have escaped from prison. The logline, drooping from the taffrail, was knotted and tangled; it no longer rotated, no longer registered the miles of the ship’s voyage. It was as though every yard that the Valparaiso moved forward now were an unofficial yard, made without authority and not entered in the records.
Keeton and Bristow had given the dead men on the poop their burial. They had read no funeral service; they had said no prayer; but they had taken the bodies one by one and had rolled them over the side. Bristow had hung back, but Keeton had cursed and threatened him, and at last he had done his share of the work.
As they dropped one man overboard Bristow said with a wretched attempt at bravado: ‘That blighter owed me a dollar. I’ll never get it now. I hope it don’t lay too heavy on his soul.’
Hagan was the last to go. They lifted him over the taffrail and let him slide down head-first, holding his feet and releasing their grip together. Hagan might have been a diver taking the plunge; he went with scarcely a splash, and they turned away and never saw him again.
They had to leave the dead men in the engine-room because there was no way of getting them out. When Keeton looked down into that jungle of wrecked machinery in the late afternoon he could see that the water had risen perceptibly. It was coming in somewhere and might, for all Keeton knew, be leaking into the holds also. There could be little doubt that the Valparaiso was slowly sinking and it was doubtful whether she would survive the night.
‘If it comes to the worst‚’ Keeton said, ‘and the old girl goes down, we shall have to take a raft.’
Two of the rafts had been destroyed, but there were still two others resting on their cradles; it would be necessary only to knock out a pin to send one or other of these down the slides and into the water. They chose the one on the port side and lashed to it stocks of tinned foods, biscuits and condensed milk, of which there was an abundance in the ship’s stores. They filled water containers and fixed these to the raft also, and hoped they would not need to use it.
‘What hope on a raft?’ Bristow said. ‘All you can do is drift.’
‘Plenty of men have been picked up from rafts.’
‘And there’s a hell of a lot that haven’t.’
‘If the ship goes it’s our only chance. We’ll have to get the Old Man on it too.’
Bristow stared unbelievingly. ‘Him! Where’s the sense in taking him? He’s as good as dead anyway.’
Keeton said stubbornly: ‘We can’t leave him behind.’
‘The others left him, didn’t they? And they had boats.’
‘I don’t care a damn what the others did‚’ Keeton said. ‘If we go, the Old Man goes with us.’
‘You’re crazy‚’ Bristow said; but he did not press the argument.
Keeton knew that Bristow was right in saying that Peterson was almost dead, but he also knew that if he were to leave the captain to drown Peterson’s eyes would haunt him for the rest of his life. Only the eyes moved in Peterson’s body; the rest of him lay like a corpse on the bed. But the eyes were alive and intelligent.
Keeton felt that there was a brain working in this man, that he knew that he had been abandoned by his officers and crew, and would know also if he should be deserted by Keeton and Bristow.
Bristow sneered. ‘Maybe you’re afraid his ghost will haunt you.’
‘Maybe I am‚’ Keeton said.
He talked to Peterson; he told the captain just what had happened to the ship, and the way he and Bristow had been trapped in the magazine.
‘The others must have got away. Two boats are gone. They left us behind. They left you too, sir.’
Peterson made no answer. Keeton could not tell whether he heard or understood. Only the faint sound of breathing and the eyes moving slowly in the gaunt head gave indication that he was still alive.
‘They must have scuttled away like rats. Though in fact, I suppose, the rats are still with us. I don’t know how much longer the ship will last. The engine-room’s flooded. If we get some more bad weather there’s no telling what will happen.’
He wondered why he was talking like this to Peterson; there was no need to tell the captain how perilous was the situation of his ship; for if his brain was working he must know only too well how bad the prospect was. Yet somehow Keeton felt a compulsion to talk to and confide in this man to whom he had spoken scarcely half a dozen words in the course of his duty.
‘If she does start to go‚’ he said, ‘we’ll take you with us on the raft. We won’t leave you.’
It was a bad night. The wind blew strongly and there was more rain. The rain drove against the sides of the accommodation and made a constant drumming sound on the iron-work. There was no electricity in the ship, but Keeton had found an oil lantern amongst the stores, and this he had lighted and hung up in the captain’s cabin. He and Bristow moved in and took up their quarters there.
‘It’s comfortable anyway,’ Bristow said. ‘There’s no telling how long we’ll be able to enjoy it, but it’ll be cosy while it lasts.’
They decided to keep watch by turns, one sleeping on the settee while the other stayed awake, alert to any obvious deterioration in the ship’s condition. They knew that they might have to get away quickly if the worst came, and they had provided themselves with torches so that there would be no difficulty in finding the raft. Peterson was the big problem.
‘If we stop for him‚’ Bristow grumbled, ‘we’ll likely all go down together. It ain’t worth it. He’ll die anyway. Besides, maybe he’d rather go with his ship. That’s the proper drill. We ought to leave him.’