“Will she live through this?”

The cry was wrenched out of his breast.  It was as unintentional as the birth of a thought in the head, and he heard nothing of it himself.  It all became extinct at once—­thought, intention, effort—­and of his cry the inaudible vibration added to the tempest waves of the air.

He expected nothing from it.  Nothing at all.  For indeed what answer could be made?  But after a while he heard with amazement the frail and resisting voice in his ear, the dwarf sound, unconquered in the giant tumult.

“She may!”

It was a dull yell, more difficult to seize than a whisper.  And presently the voice returned again, half submerged in the vast crashes, like a ship battling against the waves of an ocean.

“Let’s hope so!” it cried—­small, lonely and unmoved, a stranger to the visions of hope or fear; and it flickered into disconnected words:  “Ship. . . . .  This. . . .  Never--Anyhow . . . for the best.”  Jukes gave it up.

Then, as if it had come suddenly upon the one thing fit to withstand the power of a storm, it seemed to gain force and firmness for the last broken shouts: 

“Keep on hammering . . . builders . . . good men. . . . .  And chance it
. . . engines. . . .  Rout . . . good man.”

Captain MacWhirr removed his arm from Jukes’ shoulders, and thereby ceased to exist for his mate, so dark it was; Jukes, after a tense stiffening of every muscle, would let himself go limp all over.  The gnawing of profound discomfort existed side by side with an incredible disposition to somnolence, as though he had been buffeted and worried into drowsiness.  The wind would get hold of his head and try to shake it off his shoulders; his clothes, full of water, were as heavy as lead, cold and dripping like an armour of melting ice:  he shivered—­it lasted a long time; and with his hands closed hard on his hold, he was letting himself sink slowly into the depths of bodily misery.  His mind became concentrated upon himself in an aimless, idle way, and when something pushed lightly at the back of his knees he nearly, as the saying is, jumped out of his skin.

In the start forward he bumped the back of Captain MacWhirr, who didn’t move; and then a hand gripped his thigh.  A lull had come, a menacing lull of the wind, the holding of a stormy breath—­and he felt himself pawed all over.  It was the boatswain.  Jukes recognized these hands, so thick and enormous that they seemed to belong to some new species of man.

The boatswain had arrived on the bridge, crawling on all fours against the wind, and had found the chief mate’s legs with the top of his head.  Immediately he crouched and began to explore Jukes’ person upwards with prudent, apologetic touches, as became an inferior.