Mr. Rout, listening with bowed neck, opened his eyes wide at this.  However, he heard something like the sounds of a scuffle and broken exclamations coming down to him.  He strained his hearing; and all the time Beale, the third engineer, with his arms uplifted, held between the palms of his hands the rim of a little black wheel projecting at the side of a big copper pipe.

He seemed to be poising it above his head, as though it were a correct attitude in some sort of game.

To steady himself, he pressed his shoulder against the white bulkhead, one knee bent, and a sweat-rag tucked in his belt hanging on his hip.  His smooth cheek was begrimed and flushed, and the coal dust on his eyelids, like the black pencilling of a make-up, enhanced the liquid brilliance of the whites, giving to his youthful face something of a feminine, exotic and fascinating aspect.  When the ship pitched he would with hasty movements of his hands screw hard at the little wheel.

“Gone crazy,” began the Captain’s voice suddenly in the tube.  “Rushed at me. . . .  Just now.  Had to knock him down. . . .  This minute.  You heard, Mr. Rout?”

“The devil!” muttered Mr. Rout.  “Look out, Beale!”

His shout rang out like the blast of a warning trumpet, between the iron walls of the engine-room.  Painted white, they rose high into the dusk of the skylight, sloping like a roof; and the whole lofty space resembled the interior of a monument, divided by floors of iron grating, with lights flickering at different levels, and a mass of gloom lingering in the middle, within the columnar stir of machinery under the motionless swelling of the cylinders.  A loud and wild resonance, made up of all the noises of the hurricane, dwelt in the still warmth of the air.  There was in it the smell of hot metal, of oil, and a slight mist of steam.  The blows of the sea seemed to traverse it in an unringing, stunning shock, from side to side.

Gleams, like pale long flames, trembled upon the polish of metal; from the flooring below the enormous crank-heads emerged in their turns with a flash of brass and steel—­going over; while the connecting-rods, big-jointed, like skeleton limbs, seemed to thrust them down and pull them up again with an irresistible precision.  And deep in the half-light other rods dodged deliberately to and fro, crossheads nodded, discs of metal rubbed smoothly against each other, slow and gentle, in a commingling of shadows and gleams.

Sometimes all those powerful and unerring movements would slow down simultaneously, as if they had been the functions of a living organism, stricken suddenly by the blight of languor; and Mr. Rout’s eyes would blaze darker in his long sallow face.  He was fighting this fight in a pair of carpet slippers.  A short shiny jacket barely covered his loins, and his white wrists protruded far out of the tight sleeves, as though the emergency had added to his stature, had lengthened his limbs, augmented his pallor, hollowed his eyes.