“You here?” he muttered, heavily.

The second mate had found his way into the wheelhouse some time before.  He had fixed himself in a corner with his knees up, a fist pressed against each temple; and this attitude suggested rage, sorrow, resignation, surrender, with a sort of concentrated unforgiveness.  He said mournfully and defiantly, “Well, it’s my watch below now:  ain’t it?”

The steam gear clattered, stopped, clattered again; and the helmsman’s eyeballs seemed to project out of a hungry face as if the compass card behind the binnacle glass had been meat.  God knows how long he had been left there to steer, as if forgotten by all his shipmates.  The bells had not been struck; there had been no reliefs; the ship’s routine had gone down wind; but he was trying to keep her head north-north-east.  The rudder might have been gone for all he knew, the fires out, the engines broken down, the ship ready to roll over like a corpse.  He was anxious not to get muddled and lose control of her head, because the compass-card swung far both ways, wriggling on the pivot, and sometimes seemed to whirl right round.  He suffered from mental stress.  He was horribly afraid, also, of the wheelhouse going.  Mountains of water kept on tumbling against it.  When the ship took one of her desperate dives the corners of his lips twitched.

Captain MacWhirr looked up at the wheelhouse clock.  Screwed to the bulk-head, 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.”