“Don’t you get up yet, sir,” cried the boatswain.  “No hurry!”

A sea swept over.  Jukes understood the boatswain to splutter that the bridge ladders were gone.  “I’ll lower you down, sir, by your hands,” he screamed.  He shouted also something about the smoke-stack being as likely to go overboard as not.  Jukes thought it very possible, and imagined the fires out, the ship helpless. . . .  The boatswain by his side kept on yelling.  “What?  What is it?” Jukes cried distressfully; and the other repeated, “What would my old woman say if she saw me now?”

In the alleyway, where a lot of water had got in and splashed in the dark, the men were still as death, till Jukes stumbled against one of them and cursed him savagely for being in the way.  Two or three voices then asked, eager and weak, “Any chance for us, sir?”

“What’s the matter with you fools?” he said brutally.  He felt as though he could throw himself down amongst them and never move any more.  But they seemed cheered; and in the midst of obsequious warnings, “Look out!  Mind that manhole lid, sir,” they lowered him into the bunker.  The boatswain tumbled down after him, and as soon as he had picked himself up he remarked, “She would say, ’Serve you right, you old fool, for going to sea.’”

The boatswain had some means, and made a point of alluding to them frequently.  His wife—­a fat woman—­and two grown-up daughters kept a greengrocer’s shop in the East-end of London.

In the dark, Jukes, unsteady on his legs, listened to a faint thunderous patter.  A deadened screaming went on steadily at his elbow, as it were; and from above the louder tumult of the storm descended upon these near sounds.  His head swam.  To him, too, in that bunker, the motion of the ship seemed novel and menacing, sapping his resolution as though he had never been afloat before.

He had half a mind to scramble out again; but the remembrance of Captain MacWhirr’s voice made this impossible.  His orders were to go and see.  What was the good of it, he wanted to know.  Enraged, he told himself he would see—­of course.  But the boatswain, staggering clumsily, warned him to be careful how he opened that door; there was a blamed fight going on.  And Jukes, as if in great bodily pain, desired irritably to know what the devil they were fighting for.

“Dollars!  Dollars, sir.  All their rotten chests got burst open.  Blamed money skipping all over the place, and they are tumbling after it head over heels—­tearing and biting like anything.  A regular little hell in there.”

Jukes convulsively opened the door.  The short boatswain peered under his arm.