“If it goes on like this, sir, there won’t be many of us left by the morning.”

“No, skipper.  I hope the men will secure themselves like us.  Mr. Lennard had a near thing.  He has a jaw like a walrus, or his teeth must have gone.”

So, in fitful whispers, the grim scraps of talk went on while the blare of the trumpets of the Night was loosened over the sea.

“Look—­over the port-side, there.  It’s beginning.”

Ferrier could make out nothing until the skipper gave him the exact line to look on.  Then he saw a Something that seemed to wallow darkly on a dark tumble of criss-cross seas.

“He’s bottom up, sir.  If we’d been running and gone into him, we should have been at rest soon.”

“How beautifully we are behaving, skipper.  I suppose there’s no chance of our going like that?”

“Not without something hits our rudder.  We seem to have got away from the track now.  While you were below, you see, I got her mainsail in, and that strip of sail has no more pull than a three-cloth jib.  Please God, we may get through.  If anything happens to my mainmast I shall give in—­but it’s a good spar.”

Ferrier’s mind went wandering with a sort of boding fierceness; he framed dramatic pictures of all that was passing in the chaotic ruin of shattered seas that rushed and seethed around.  He had often spoken of the gigantic forces of Nature, but the words had been like algebraic formulae; now he saw the reality, and his rebellious mind was humbled.

“To-morrow, or next day, I shall have to see the misery that this causes.  But why should I talk of misery?  The word implies a complaint.  A hundred smacksmen die to-night.  Pitiful!  But if this hurricane and all the lesser breezes did not blow, then millions would die who live now in healthy air.  If the sea were not lashed up and oxygenated, we should have a stagnant pest-hole like an old rotten fishpond all round the world.  England would be like Sierra Leone, and there would soon be no human race.  Who talks of kindness and goodness in face of a scene like this?  We know nothing.  The hundred fishermen die, and the unpoisoned millions live.  We are shadows; we have not a single right.  If I die to-night, I shall have been spent by an Almighty Power that has used me.  Will He cast me to nothingness after I have fulfilled my purpose?  Never.  There is not a gust of this wind that does not move truly according to eternal law; there can be no injustice, for no one can judge the Judge.  If I suffer the petty pang of Death while a great purpose is being wrought out, I have no more reason to complain than if I were a child sharply pushed out of the way to let a fireengine pass.  The great Purpose is everything, and I am but an instrument—­just as this hurricane is an instrument.  I shall be humble and do the work next my hand, and I will never question God any more.  If a man can reckon his own individuality as anything after seeing this sight, he is a human failure; he is an abortion that should be wiped out.  And now I’ll try to pray.”