For a few minutes there was silence in the cabin. Then Adrian put his arm around her quickly.
“Never mind,” he said. “We’ll straighten it out.”
“I remember now.” Her voice was an awed whisper. “My pearls. I threw them overboard.”
“Threw them overboard!”
“Then I began looking for you.”
“But I was here in bed.”
“I didn’t believe it; I thought you were with that girl.”
“She collapsed during dinner. I was taking a nap down here.”
Frowning, he rang the bell and asked the steward for luncheon and a bottle of beer.
“Sorry, but we can’t serve any beer to your cabin, sir.”
When he went out Adrian exploded: “This is an outrage. You were simply crazy from that storm and they can’t be so high-handed. I’ll see the captain.”
“Isn’t that awful?” Eva murmured. “The poor man died.”
She turned over and began to sob into her pillow. There was a knock at the door.
“Can I come in?”
The assiduous Mr. Butterworth, surprisingly healthy and immaculate, came into the crazily tipping cabin.
“Well, how’s the mystic?” he demanded of Eva. “Do you remember praying to the elements in the bar last night?”
“I don’t want to remember anything about last night.” They told him about the stewardess, and with the telling the situation lightened; they all laughed together.
“I’m going to get you some beer to have with your luncheon,” Butterworth said. “You ought to get up on deck.”
“Don’t go,” Eva said. “You look so cheerful and nice.”
“Just for ten minutes.”
When he had gone, Adrian rang for two baths.
“The thing is to put on our best clothes and walk proudly three times around the deck,” he said.
“Yes.” After a moment she added abstractedly: “I like that young man. He was awfully nice to me last night when you’d disappeared.”
The bath steward appeared with the information that bathing was too dangerous today. They were in the midst of the wildest hurricane on the North Atlantic in ten years; there were two broken arms this morning from attempts to take baths. An elderly lady had been thrown down a staircase and was not expected to live. Furthermore, they had received the SOS signal from several boats this morning.
“Will we go to help them?”
“They’re all behind us, sir, so we have to leave them to the Mauretania. If we tried to turn in this sea the portholes would be smashed.”
This array of calamities minimized their own troubles. Having eaten a sort of luncheon and drunk the beer provided by Butterworth, they dressed and went on deck.
Despite the fact that it was only possible to progress step by step, holding on to rope or rail, more people were abroad than on the day before. Fear had driven them from their cabins, where the trunks bumped and the waves pounded the portholes and they awaited momentarily the call to the boats. Indeed, as Adrian and Eva stood on the transverse deck above the second class, there was a bugle call, followed by a gathering of stewards and stewardesses on the deck below. But the boat was sound; it had outlasted one of its cargo—Steward James Carton was being buried at sea.
It was very British and sad. There were the rows of stiff, disciplined men and women standing in the driving rain, and there was a shape covered by the flag of the Empire that lived by the sea. The chief purser read the service, a hymn was sung, the body slid off into the hurricane. With Eva’s burst of wild weeping for this humble end, some last string snapped within her. Now she really didn’t care. She responded eagerly when Butterworth suggested that he get some champagne to their cabin. Her mood worried Adrian; she wasn’t used to so much drinking and he wondered what he ought to do. At his suggestion that they sleep instead, she merely laughed, and the bromide the doctor had sent stood untouched on the washstand. Pretending to listen to the insipidities of several Mr. Stacombs, he watched her; to his surprise and discomfort she seemed on intimate and even sentimental terms with Butterworth, and he wondered if this was a form of revenge for his attention to Betsy D’Amido.
The cabin was full of smoke, the voices went on incessantly, the suspension of activity, the waiting for the storm’s end, was getting on his nerves. They had been at sea only four days; it was like a year.
The two Mr. Stacombs left finally, but Butterworth remained. Eva was urging him to go for another bottle of champagne.
“We’ve had enough,” objected Adrian. “We ought to go to bed.”
“I won’t go to bed!” she burst out. “You must be crazy! You play around all you want, and then, when I find somebody I—I like, you want to put me to bed.”
“You’re hysterical.”
“On the contrary, I’ve never been so sane.”
“I think you’d better leave us, Butterworth,” Adrian said. “Eva doesn’t know what she’s saying.”
“He won’t go. I won’t let him go.” She clasped Butterworth’s hand passionately. “He’s the only person that’s been half decent to me.”
“You’d better go, Butterworth,” repeated Adrian.
The young man looked at him uncertainly.
“It seems to me you’re being unjust to your wife,” he ventured.
“My wife isn’t herself.”
“That’s no reason for bullying her.”
Adrian lost his temper. “You get out of here!” he cried.
The two men looked at each other for a moment in silence. Then Butterworth turned to Eva, said, “I’ll be back later,” and left the cabin.
“Eva, you’ve got to pull yourself together,” said Adrian when the door closed.
She didn’t answer, looked at him from sullen, half-closed eyes.
“I’ll order dinner here for us both and then we’ll try to get some sleep.”
“I want to go up and send a wireless.”
“Who to?”
“Some Paris lawyer. I want a divorce.”
In spite of his annoyance, he laughed. “Don’t be silly.”
“Then I want to see the children.”
“Well, go and see them. I’ll order dinner.” He waited for her in the cabin twenty minutes. Then impatiently he opened the door across the corridor; the nurse told him that Mrs. Smith had not been there.
With a sudden prescience of disaster he ran upstairs, glanced in the bar, the salons, even knocked at Butterworth’s door. Then a quick round of the decks, feeling his way through the black spray and rain. A sailor stopped him at a network of ropes.
“Orders are no one goes by, sir. A wave has gone over the wireless room.”
“Have you seen a lady?”
“There was a young lady here—” He stopped and glanced around. “Hello, she’s gone.”
“She went up the stairs!” Adrian said anxiously. “Up to the wireless room!”
The sailor ran up to the boat deck; stumbling and slipping, Adrian followed. As he cleared the protected sides of the companionway, a tremendous body struck the boat a staggering blow and, as she keeled over to an angle of forty-five degrees, he was thrown in a helpless roll down the drenched deck, to bring up dizzy and bruised against a stanchion.
“Eva!” he called. His voice was soundless in the black storm. Against the faint light of the wireless-room window he saw the sailor making his way forward.
“Eva!”
The wind blew him like a sail up against a lifeboat. Then there was another shuddering crash, and high over his head, over the very boat, he saw a gigantic, glittering white wave, and in the split second that it balanced there he became conscious of Eva, standing beside a ventilator twenty feet away. Pushing out from the stanchion, he lunged desperately toward her, just as the wave broke with a smashing roar. For a moment the rushing water was five feet deep, sweeping with enormous force toward the side, and then a human body was washed against him, and frantically he clutched it and was swept with it back toward the rail. He felt his body bump against it, but desperately he held on to his burden; then, as the ship rocked slowly back, the two of them, still joined by his fierce grip, were rolled out exhausted on the wet planks. For a moment he knew no more.
IV
Two days later, as the boat train moved tranquilly south toward Paris, Adrian tried to persuade his children to look out the window at the Norman countryside.
“It’s beautiful,” he assured them. “All the little farms like toys. Why, in heaven’s name, won’t you look?”
“I like the boat better,” said Estelle.
Her parents exchanged an infanticidal glance.
“The boat is still rocking for me,” Eva said with a shiver. “Is it for you?”
“No. Somehow, it all seems a long way off. Even the passengers looked unfamiliar going through the customs.”
“Most of them hadn’t appeared above ground before.”
He hesitated. “By the way, I cashed Butterworth’s check for him.”
“You’re a fool. You’ll never see the money again.”
“He must have needed it pretty badly or he would not have come to me.”
A pale and wan girl, passing along the corridor, recognized them and put her head through the doorway.
“How do you feel?”
“Awful.”
“Me, too,” agreed Miss D’Amido. “I’m vainly hoping my fiance will recognize me at the Gare du Nord. Do you know two waves went over the wireless room ?”
“So we heard,” Adrian answered dryly.
She passed gracefully along the corridor and out of their life.
“The real truth is that none of it happened,” said Adrian after a moment. “It was a nightmare—an incredibly awful nightmare.”
“Then, where are my pearls ?”
“Darling, there are better pearls in Paris. I’ll take the responsibility for those pearls. My real belief is that you saved the boat.”
“Adrian, let’s never get to know anyone else, but just stay together always—just we two.”
Be tucked her arm under his and they sat close. “Who do
