“Can’t you tell me something?” she cried.

For half a minute perhaps Jorgenson made no sound; then:  “For years I have been telling anybody who cared to ask,” he mumbled in his moustache.  “Telling Tom, too.  And Tom knew what he wanted to do.  How’s one to know what you are after?”

She had never expected to hear so many words from that rigid shadow.  Its monotonous mumble was fascinating, its sudden loquacity was shocking.  And in the profound stillness that reigned outside it was as if there had been no one left in the world with her but the phantom of that old adventurer.  He was heard again:  “What I could tell you would be worse than poison.”

Mrs. Travers was not familiar with Jorgenson’s consecrated phrases.  The mechanical voice, the words themselves, his air of abstraction appalled her.  And he hadn’t done yet; she caught some more of his unconcerned mumbling:  “There is nothing I don’t know,” and the absurdity of the statement was also appalling.  Mrs. Travers gasped and with a wild little laugh: 

“Then you know why I called after King Tom last night.”

He glanced away along his shoulder through the door of the deckhouse at the growing brightness of the day.  She did so, too.  It was coming.  It had come!  Another day!  And it seemed to Mrs. Travers a worse calamity than any discovery she had made in her life, than anything she could have imagined to come to her.  The very magnitude of horror steadied her, seemed to calm her agitation as some kinds of fatal drugs do before they kill.  She laid a steady hand on Jorgenson’s sleeve and spoke quietly, distinctly, urgently.

“You were on deck.  What I want to know is whether I was heard?”

“Yes,” said Jorgenson, absently, “I heard you.”  Then, as if roused a little, he added less mechanically:  “The whole ship heard you.”

Mrs. Travers asked herself whether perchance she had not simply screamed.  It had never occurred to her before that perhaps she had.  At the time it seemed to her she had no strength for more than a whisper.  Had she been really so loud?  And the deadly chill, the night that had gone by her had left in her body, vanished from her limbs, passed out of her in a flush.  Her face was turned away from the light, and that fact gave her courage to continue.  Moreover, the man before her was so detached from the shames and prides and schemes of life that he seemed not to count at all, except that somehow or other he managed at times to catch the mere literal sense of the words addressed to him—­and answer them.  And answer them!  Answer unfailingly, impersonally, without any feeling.

“You saw Tom—­King Tom?  Was he there?  I mean just then, at the moment.  There was a light at the gangway.  Was he on deck?”

“No.  In the boat.”

“Already?  Could I have been heard in the boat down there?  You say the whole ship heard me—­and I don’t care.  But could he hear me?”