The Sword and the Net полностью

Otto thought furiously. The woman still clung to his belt, and the boy stood close—but neither made useless sound or movement. The ship moved again underneath them, settling down yet further in another shuddering roll, the angle of her list yet more acute.

The boy was looking at the downward companionway, where there was no wreckage and as yet no flame. Deep lines creased his smooth forehead in a frown of concentrated thought.

Otto said: “Come now. Back. To try there. Quick!” He had made up his mind: there was remote possibility—very remote—that before the ship turned full turtle they could find a clear way to the decks further aft.

He turned and the woman followed, obedient. But the boy put out his sound hand and caught at Otto’s shirt sleeve. He said:

“Those big doors in the side.” He pointed at the clear companionway. “Down lower. I saw them at Southampton. They brought things into the ship through them—and some people.”

Otto stared as the precise, clipped words in the clear voice sank into his mind. The cargo-ports! It was a chance; a better chance, perhaps, than any other. . . .

The Atlantic swelled restlessly, with a thick heavy swell, under the dark sky. The Vulcania's carcass, battered and smoking and shamefully, dreadfully helpless, lolloped crazily to the tune of the sullen water. She was almost directly upon her side now, her port rail nearly awash, and she was more down by the stern than the bow, so that there was not even dignity left to her in death.

Away from her—clear away to port—were four little bobbing specks, all that remained of her boats. Nowhere else was there sign of any other craft. The crowded cargoes of the boats could not see her any longer—the distance was too great and the darkness too dense.

So that none saw the three figures which clambered through the open leaf of the cargo-port in her starboard side which now was uppermost of her bulk, where the decks should have been; none saw the largest figure lift in turn the other two and throw them downwards into the heaving, dark water and then itself plunge after them. . . .

Otto’s lungs were stretched almost to bursting point. But he must keep his head up—and fill the lungs through his nose! He told himself this in time with his kicking legs—“Den . . . mund . . . zuhalten! Den . . . mund . . . zuhalten!”

His body felt numb and heavy—and very curiously considering the frightful coldness of the water, very warm. But his arms were neither hot nor cold—they just hurt him. Hurt him impossibly, unbelievably. His left arm was the worse. It was around the woman, under her shoulders: it kept her head above the water and was perpetually shot through and through with stabbing, cramping pains which would have been more bearable had their occurrence been in definite rhythm and not, as it was, in torturing haphazardness.

His right arm was bad, too. But not so bad as the other unless he thought about it. It had the relief of alternate duty: now it would help in the half-swimming, half-treading movement with which he kept his own and the woman’s head above water; now it would reach out and pluck at the boy and force up his drooping head.

The sea was an irregular relief map of shifting, swelling hills and valleys. It was bitterly, satanically cold, with an oily, all-embracing coldness, and it stretched down beneath Otto to unimaginable depths of cruelty. Overhead was the dark and lowering and inimical sky, with black cloud masses racing across a blacker backcloth which blotted out moon and stars, and upon the rest of the heaving surface of the sea was nothing save these three dark and minute and bobbing specks.

The strange, warm numbness began to spread to Otto’s mind. He ceased to think—and for long intervals now he would not even feel the pain in his arms, yet some inner force kept them and his legs and body at their work. . . .

They were deep in a valley between the tireless, forever advancing hills of water when a voice jerked him back to agonized awareness. It was a faint, far-away voice which he had never heard before, but which came nevertheless from the head against his right shoulder. It said something which Otto did not catch, but the quality of the tone made him increase the action of his legs so that he could use his right hand to make sure that the boy’s grip upon him was not loosening and then to seize the small neck and jerk the head upright, clear of the water.

The voice came again. It was very loud this time, and had that super-normal naturalness and clarity which tells that the speaker is not conscious of speaking. It was a high, enthusiastic voice, and it was telling a story.

“Listen, you chaps!” it said—and went on to gabble so fast that the words did not separate themselves in Otto’s mind, accompanied and enwrapped as they were in a sort of running giggle of excitement.