"Reduce by twenty revolutions."
It was bad luck, but it couldn't be helped.
The wind got up with astonishing swiftness; at one o'clock he gauged it to be Force 6, and at two it was nearer 9 or 10—over fifty miles an hour. He stayed where he was on the bridge, duffel-coated against the vile weather, because that was his job; it was how he earned his pay, not by handing round drinks or preserving a social armistice among the idle rich. He could not have got to sleep anyway, the way that they were moving. . . . Under the sullen sky, there was moon enough to see the white walls of water rushing towards them, and to watch them explode into foam under their bows; moving into the teeth of the gale, the Alcestis laboured and rolled as if she were tired and defeated already, while from outside the bridge-house there was a mounting uproar as the wind screamed and tore at every surface it could reach.
He had to ease their speed every half-hour; by the time dawn came up, they were virtually hove-to, making three or four knots at the most, in a grey waste of furious water which every few minutes broke as high as the boat-deck. Pinned down by the storm, the Alcestis suffered and took the staggering blows, with a heavy, hangdog persistence. Every now and again, like a steeplechaser misjudging a fence, she came down with an almighty, rivet-starting crash which shook the whole hull; while tons of water swept over the foredeck and cascaded down into the well.
He had no choice now; they would have to stay where they were till f;he storm blew itself out. It meant that they would be a day late at Cape Town—maybe two. He smiled wryly, rubbing his stiff, bristly face. At least it would take the edge off all their quarrels, and keep the children quiet.
Kathy had risen early, at about six o'clock; she had found it hopeless, trying to sleep while the whole ship and everything on board was being thrown about so unmercifully, and in the close air below she was feeling seasick. She dressed in slacks, and the thickest sweater she could find, and made her way slowly to the boat-deck; it was a matter of clinging to handrails, walking a few steps, pausing often to get her breath back. As she mounted, the full noise of the storm began to reach her; at the boat-deck level, even inside the armoured glass walls of the sun-room, it greeted her in a frightening crescendo.
The sun-room gave her a view of the whole upper deck, dripping wet, swept by scuds of spray which every few moments were whipped into a hundred small whirlpools by the driving wind. A notice on the door said: "In the interests of safety, access to this deck is temporarily forbidden". Surveying the wild and universal turmoil, she could not quarrel with that. The fresh air revived her; she wedged herself into a deck-chair, and sat down to a grand-stand view of the storm.
She had never before experienced a storm at sea; its strength and fury were unimaginable. Everything within her view was drenched with spray—the funnels, the line of canvas-topped boats, the railings; and the noise seemed to her tremendous, a whole orchestration of tortured notes, from the howl of the wind round the main deck-house to the vicious twanging and plucking of ropes and wires. When a sea hit them, it was like a blow from a murderous fist. From where she sat, she was looking aft, down the whole length of the Alcestis; whenever the ship rolled, and the horizon lurched into view, the entire surface of the sea seemed to be fleeing away from her, torn to ribbons by the wind and flung into a boiling twilight far astern.
She found it awesome—and then, after the accustoming of time, magnificent. The sea was clearly their enemy, but the Alcestis was a match for it; she was riding the storm as if, for all the punishment it meted out, she knew she could outlast it in the end. As Kathy sat there, time was forgotten; only the nearness of danger, the sense of triumph, was real. She would rather have been where she was, alone, than anywhere in the world.
Presently—after an hour, two hours, when it was full daylight, and the outlines of their ordeal grew even clearer—she became aware of a new noise added to the tumult. It was a thudding, a crashing, a rhythmical shock which she could feel through the thin soles of her shoes. She sat forward, uneasy, and presently identified it. Quite close to her, the second boat in the long line of eight swung out of sight, towards the sea, and then came crashing back inboard, with a monstrous shock. It had broken loose from its lashings. She knew enough to realize that if the plunging and swinging continued, the boat would soon be smashed to matchwood. She knew also that its ponderous weight, and the great lift of the sea urging it to and fro, could maim and destroy anyone who tried to secure it.
Even as she watched, appalled by the prospect of destruction, the men came running—four of them, unwieldy in dripping yellow oilskins, led (she had known this would happen) by Tim Mansell.
He, and they, looked tiny as they collected in a group underneath the enormous lifeboat, which first swung free and then crashed against the davits. She almost cried out: "Run away—don't touch it!" as they stood within the shadow of that hideous pendulum, and took stock of what they had to do.
But presently it was a pride and a joy to watch him. He was not a boy any longer, he was a man, he knew what he was doing, even when life could be at stake, when an arm could be torn off, a chest crushed to bloody ruin. He—no, it was they, a brave team of men marshalled by a young lion—worked gradually, perilously, but surely. It took four tries to throw a heavy line over the boat, in the teeth of the wind, and as many more to bring the line inboard again. Tim Mansell himself did that, darting forward within inches of the hurtling keel and hauling in the line as if possessed. When he shouted, his men jumped forward, lending their weight, taking a turn round a stanchion; when the line snapped on the reverse roll, they were all flung off their feet, in a comical heartrending overthrow.
Catlike on the heaving deck, they tried again, with a thicker line; this time it held, while the four of them, straining, sweating, dashing the spray from their faces, made it fast and inched it in. The boat came sullenly under control, and was edged back into its chocks. Gradually the danger passed, while the wind, robbed of its sport, screamed with haphazard fury. It had taken more than an hour to turn crisis into nothing, to shrink a series of desperate chances down to a single log-entry.
Kathy found that for a long time she had been standing up, her body pressed against the glass of the sun-room; she had become so bound up in the struggle that she was exhausted by the end of it. When finally Tim Mansell, surrounded by his men, stood back, hands on hips, to look at their completed handiwork, she felt a deep admiring pride. This was what it was like, to be a man, a sailor. . . . The sea-voyage had never been real until this moment; nor had Tim Mansell ever seemed part of the grown-up world, until in this brief contest, under her very eyes, he had suddenly overtaken and surpassed all that she knew of men.
The four sailors struggled forward again, leaning their squat bodies against the wind, brushing the streaming spray from faces pinched with cold. Last of them all, with a backward glance at the tamed boat, was Tim Mansell—but as he passed the windows of the sun-room he glanced inside, and found her there watching him. She smiled brilliantly as she met his eyes, and then, on an impulse, she clapped her hands together, offering him silent applause for what he had been through, for what he had done. As he saw it, his expression changed again, from competent sternness to a familiar boyish immaturity. But she would never believe the latter again; she had seen the fabric of the man within, and now she was shaken by its power to move her.
He waved in answer, but dismissively, as if to say: "Sorry— busy." She sat on alone, watching the scudding spindthrift, hearing the wind, feeling the Alcestis lift ponderously to the enormous waves. For a hundred reasons, she was nearly in tears; but beneath a marvelling emotion she was deeply content. She could not analyse it; indeed, it did not seem to matter what anything meant. The whole ship, and all sorts of other things, seemed suddenly to have been cleaned by the wind and the sea, and by heroic men who were not daunted by either.