Captain MacWhirr looked up at the wheelhouse clock. Screwed to the bulkhead, it had a white face on which the black hands appeared to stand quite still. It was half-past one in the morning.

‘Another day,’ he muttered to himself.

The second mate heard him, and lifting his head as one grieving amongst ruins, ‘You won’t see it break,’ he exclaimed. His wrists and his knees could be seen to shake violently. ‘No, by God! You won’t…’

He took his face again between his fists.

The body of the helmsman had moved slightly, but his head didn’t budge on his neck—like a stone head fixed to look one way from a column. During a roll that all but took his booted legs from under him, and in the very stagger to save himself, Captain MacWhirr said austerely, ‘Don’t you pay any attention to what that man says.’ And then, with an indefinable change of tone, very grave, he added, ‘He isn’t on duty.’

The sailor said nothing.

The hurricane boomed, shaking the little place, which seemed air-tight; and the light of the binnacle flickered all the time.

‘You haven’t been relieved,’ Captain MacWhirr went on, looking down. ‘I want you to stick to the helm, though, as long as you can. You’ve got the hang of her. Another man coming here might make a mess of it. Wouldn’t do. No child’s play. And the hands are probably busy with a job down below… Think you can?’

The steering gear leaped into an abrupt short clatter, stopped smouldering like an ember; and the still man, with a motionless gaze, burst out, as if all the passion in him had gone into his lips: ‘By Heavens, sir! I can steer for ever if nobody talks to me.’

‘Oh! aye! All right…’ The Captain lifted his eyes for the first time to the man, ‘… Hackett.’

And he seemed to dismiss this matter from his mind. He stooped to the engine-room speaking-tube, blew in, and bent his head. Mr Rout below answered, and at once Captain MacWhirr put his lips to the mouthpiece.

With the uproar of the gale around him he applied alternately his lips and his ear, and the engineer’s voice mounted to him, harsh and as if out of the heat of an engagement. One of the stokers was disabled, the others had given in, the second engineer and the donkeyman were firing-up. The third engineer was standing by the steam-valve. The engines were being tended by hand. How was it above?

‘Bad enough. It mostly rests with you,’ said Captain MacWhirr. Was the mate down there yet? No? Well, he would be presently. Would Mr Rout let him talk through the speaking-tube?—through the deck speaking-tube, because he—the Captain—was going out again on the bridge directly. There was some trouble amongst the Chinamen. They were fighting, it seemed. Couldn’t allow fighting anyhow…

Mr Rout had gone away, and Captain MacWhirr could feel against his ear the pulsation of the engines, like the beat of the ship’s heart. Mr Rout’s voice down there shouted something distantly. The ship pitched headlong, the pulsation leaped with a hissing tumult, and stopped dead. Captain MacWhirr’s face was impassive, and his eyes were fixed aimlessly on the crouching shape of the second mate. Again Mr Rout’s voice cried out in the depths, and the pulsating beats recommenced, with slow strokes—growing swifter.

Mr Rout had returned to the tube. ‘It don’t matter much what they do,’ he said hastily; and then, with irritation, ‘She takes these dives as if she never meant to come up again.’