“The engineers were at it below, trying to get her clear.  They had the donkey going.  In the afternoon we sighted a steamer’s smoke to westward.  She bore down on us.  I never seen anything I liked better than that.  Then the Chief came up, and I saw him talking to the old man.  The old man climbed round to us.  ‘Now, lads,’ he said, ’there’s a Cunarder coming.  But the engineer says he reckons he’s getting her clear of water.  What about it?  Shall I signal the liner, or will you stand by her?’

“We let the Cunarder go.  I watched her out of sight.  We hung around, and just about sunset the Chief came up again.  I heard what he said.  ‘It’s overhauling us fast, sir,’ he said to the old man.  The old man, he stood looking down at the deck.  Nobody said anything for a spell.  Then a fireman shot through a companion on all fours, scrambled to the bulwarks, and looked out.  He began cursing the sun, shaking his fist at it every time it popped over the seas.  It was low down.  It was funny to hear him.  ‘So long, chaps,’ he said, and dropped overside.

“We waited all night.  I couldn’t sleep, what with the noise of the seas running over us, and waiting for something to happen.  It was perishing cold, too.  At sun-up I could see she might pitch under at any time.  She was about awash.  The old man came to me and the steward, and said:  ’Give the men all the gin they’ll drink.  Fill ’em up.’  Some of ’em took it.  I never knew a ship take such a hell of a time to sink as that one.

“I sighted the steamer, right ahead, and we wondered whether the iron under us would wait till she come.  We counted every roller that went over us.  The other steamer was a slow ship all right.  But she came up, and put out her boats.  We had to lower the drunks into them.  I left in the last boat with the old man.  ‘Jim,’ he said, looking at her as we left her, ’she’s got no more than five minutes now.  I just felt her drop.  Something’s given way.’  Before we got to the other ship we saw the Starlight’s propeller in the air.  Right on end.  Yes.  I never seen anything like that—­and then she just went . . .”

The sailor made a grimace at me and nodded.  From the shipwright’s next door the steady, continuous hammering in the dry-dock was heard again, as though it had been waiting, and were now continuing the yarn.

X. Off-Shore

1

For weeks our London days had been handmade with gas and oil.  It was a winter of the kind when the heaven of the capital is a brown obscurity not much above the highest reached by the churches, and a December more years before the War then it would be amusing to count.  There was enough of the sun in that morning to light my way down Mark Lane, across Great Tower Street to Billingsgate.  I was on my way to sea for the first time, but that fortune was as incredible to me as the daylight.  And as to the daylight, the only certainty in it was its antiquity.  It was a gloom that was not only because the year was exhausted, but because darkness was falling at the end of an epoch.  It was not many years before the War, to be a little more precise, though then I was unaware of the reason of the darkness, except common fog.