Captain MacWhirr had gone into the chart-room.  There was no light there; but he could feel the disorder of that place where he used to live tidily.  His armchair was upset.  The books had tumbled out on the floor:  he scrunched a piece of glass under his boot.  He groped for the matches, and found a box on a shelf with a deep ledge.  He struck one, and puckering the corners of his eyes, held out the little flame towards the barometer whose glittering top of glass and metals nodded at him continuously.

It stood very low—­incredibly low, so low that Captain MacWhirr grunted.  The match went out, and hurriedly he extracted another, with thick, stiff fingers.

Again a little flame flared up before the nodding glass and metal of the top.  His eyes looked at it, narrowed with attention, as if expecting an imperceptible sign.  With his grave face he resembled a booted and misshapen pagan burning incense before the oracle of a Joss.  There was no mistake.  It was the lowest reading he had ever seen in his life.

Captain MacWhirr emitted a low whistle.  He forgot himself till the flame diminished to a blue spark, burnt his fingers and vanished.  Perhaps something had gone wrong with the thing!

There was an aneroid glass screwed above the couch.  He turned that way, struck another match, and discovered the white face of the other instrument looking at him from the bulkhead, meaningly, not to be gainsaid, as though the wisdom of men were made unerring by the indifference of matter.  There was no room for doubt now.  Captain MacWhirr pshawed at it, and threw the match down.

The worst was to come, then—­and if the books were right this worst would be very bad.  The experience of the last six hours had enlarged his conception of what heavy weather could be like.  “It’ll be terrific,” he pronounced, mentally.  He had not consciously looked at anything by the light of the matches except at the barometer; and yet somehow he had seen that his water-bottle and the two tumblers had been flung out of their stand.  It seemed to give him a more intimate knowledge of the tossing the ship had gone through.  “I wouldn’t have believed it,” he thought.  And his table had been cleared, too; his rulers, his pencils, the inkstand—­all the things that had their safe appointed places—­they were gone, as if a mischievous hand had plucked them out one by one and flung them on the wet floor.  The hurricane had broken in upon the orderly arrangements of his privacy.  This had never happened before, and the feeling of dismay reached the very seat of his composure.  And the worst was to come yet!  He was glad the trouble in the ’tween-deck had been discovered in time.  If the ship had to go after all, then, at least, she wouldn’t be going to the bottom with a lot of people in her fighting teeth and claw.  That would have been odious.  And in that feeling there was a humane intention and a vague sense of the fitness of things.