And the Deep Blue Sea

by Charles Williams

  It was a long way from the fo’c’sle of an old Hog Islander to skippering your own Cal 40 in the Acapulco race, but it had been a long time, too, and where did it go, that feeling of being nineteen, or twenty-three, or even thirty-six? You not only didn’t know what had become of it, you weren’t even sure what it was any more and couldn’t remember what it had been when you’d had it. Juice? Drive? Confidence? No, it wasn’t as simple as that; as close as you could come to it was caring. Stoically accepting the fact that within a few days he was going to die was no longer courage; it was merely apathy. The only real regret was that he’d suckered himself into such a hell of a sad way of doing it. He smiled now at the transparency of christening the sloop Shoshone. Did he think the nineteen-year-old Harry Goddard was still out here somewhere, to be searched for and reclaimed?

  The sun reached the meridian. Reflected from the oily surface of the sea, it burned its way even through closed eyelids and felt like flame against his skin. Real thirst began, a foretaste of the agony to come, and he took a swallow of the water, rolling it around his mouth for long seconds before he let it trickle down his throat. A shark appeared from somewhere and circled the raft three or four times as though intrigued by the strange yellow bubble. Goddard watched its dorsal slicing the surface and, more to break the eerie silence than anything else, said to it, “Shove off, you silly bastard. That’s a low-budget routine.” The shark came closer on its next pass, and he took out his knife and opened it, ready to stab if it decided to roll up and take an experimental bite out of the fabric. The shark lost interest and went away. Around two P.M. a light breeze sprang up, riffling and darkening the surface of the sea and lessening the intensity of its glare. It continued until late afternoon, making the heat at least endurable, and died out only with the vast chromatic explosion of sunset. He watched the colors fade in the sudden velvet night of the tropics and wondered how many more he would see. Two? Four? After a while he slept.

  When he awoke, shivering again, he saw from the positions of the constellations overhead that it was after midnight. The sea was still slick and almost flat now, and beyond his feet propped on the rim of the raft a shimmering path of light stretched away toward a waning moon hung low in the eastern sky. He sat up to stretch his cramped muscles, and when he turned he saw the ship, not more than a mile away.

  His first thought was that he must be dreaming. He rubbed both hands across his face, feeling the beard stab his salt-ravaged face, and looked again. It was real. But there was something wrong. When he realized what it was he had to choke down the cry pushing up into his throat. He could see only a stern light. It was going away from him. It had already passed, only minutes ago, while he slept.

  No! How could it? He looked around at the placid unruffled sea. It would have passed within a few hundred yards, and the bow wave would have tossed the raft end over end like a bit of flotsam. There wasn’t even a trace of wake anywhere. He was almost directly astern of the ship, but it hadn’t gone by him. The only answer was that it was lying dead in the water. It had stopped for something, and had swung around as it lost steerageway. Unless, he thought, his mind was already playing him tricks and there wasn’t any ship there at all.

  II

  MADELEINE DARRINGTON LENNOX WAS LYING naked on her bunk in the sweltering darkness of Cabin C when she heard the engine stop and wondered what was wrong with the stupid ship now. She didn’t care particularly except to the extent the stoppage might affect the rendezvous whose anticipation had made it almost impossible for her to lie still since she had switched out the light a half hour ago and begun her nightly wait for Barset to slip down the passageway and into the cabin. It had been her experience that when anything happened to break the routine of a ship, even on the midnight-to-four watch, there were apt to be people abroad in the passageways either seeking information or trying to right the matter, whatever it was, and Barset was too shrewd to run the risk of being seen by one of the deck officers or perhaps the captain himself. Laying the passengers was no part of the steward’s duties, no matter how great his virtuosity in this field, and as he put it with his gift for unprintable vulgarity, Holy Joe would defecate a ring around himself. So he might not come. And if he didn’t, in the state she was in now she’d need three of the capsules to get to sleep.

  There was no air-conditioning, and the cabin would have been stifling in any event here in the tropics, but it was made worse by the fact she had closed the porthole, as she always did in anticipation of these delights, because it opened onto a deck outside, with no privacy at all if anybody happened to be out there. The door was closed all the way, too, instead of being on the hook, because he could open it and slip in a fraction of a second faster that way rather than having to fumble with the hook. The electric fan mounted on the bulkhead beyond the foot of her bunk was an oscillating type, sweeping an intermittent flow of air across her perspiring body, but there was nothing cooling about it; it was merely in motion. She didn’t mind the heat a great deal, however; it merely excited her, as did the vibration of a ship. Face it, she thought, what doesn’t?

  There was complete silence except for the faint whirring of the fan and now and then a muted clanging sound from somewhere deep in the bowels of the ship. Suppose he didn’t come? How the hell was she going to get through the night like this, sleeping pills or no sleeping pills? Sometimes she could bring herself to orgasm by thinking about it, but she couldn’t always depend on it, and going that far without the final release always left her half crazy. She started twisting on the bunk again, but at that moment the door opened quickly and he was framed in it for an instant against the lighted passageway. It closed, and the darkness was complete again.

  He said nothing. She flicked on the lighter and reached for a cigarette with a show of nonchalance she was aware didn’t fool him any more than it did her. With no more than an amused and condescending glance in her direction, he unbelted and slipped out of the seersucker robe which was the only thing he had on aside from the slippers. The flame cut off, but she could still see him in her mind’s eye, a bony middle-aged man with a sharp face and thinning blond hair combed diagonally back over a bald spot. She’d told him once that he reminded her of a ferret, to which he’d merely laughed and said it took one to know one; ferrets and mink were of the same family.

  He walked over and stood naked beside the bunk, only a pale blur in the darkness. She put out a hand, touching his hip, and slid it diagonally downward. God, who would ever believe it? She took another shaky puff of the cigarette, fighting herself, and asked, with beautifully simulated indifference, “Why are we stopped?”

  “That shaft bearing again,” Barset replied. “So the chief says.”

  “Whatever a shaft bearing is,” she said idly. With another movement of the hand, she murmured, “You’re so accommodating, darling.”

  “Have you decided yet?” he asked. “Whether it’s me or not?”

  “I’m not annoying you, am I, Steward?” She couldn’t resist the “Steward,” even though it was risky. Once he’d merely turned and gone back to his own cabin, leaving her in torment, knowing she would apologize the next day for whatever snotty remark she’d made, that she’d crawl if she had to. But how much of that lordly condescension could you take? “I assure you I’m filled with all the awe to which you’re accustomed, but this is the only way I can express it. Being by nature shy and inarticulate—”

  “Turn it off,” he said.

  We come to bury Caesar, not to praise him, she thought, but didn’t say it. The chances were he’d not only never heard the joke, but hadn’t even heard of Shakespeare. He lay down beside her and slid a hand between her thighs to spread them.

  “And put out that stupid cigarette,” he added.

  She stubbed out the cigarette with a shaky hand, hurriedly, scarcely able to breathe now. The widow, she thought, of a man who was eleventh in his class at the Academy and commanding officer of a cruiser when he retired. Oh! Oh! Oh, God!

  In Ca
bin D, Karen Brooke had been asleep, but she awoke when the engine stopped and the ship’s vibration ceased. She lay for a moment wondering what had happened, but decided it probably wasn’t serious. Her door was on the hook and the porthole open, and she could hear no running footsteps or voices which might indicate an emergency of some kind. She could remember her father telling her when she was a little girl that a ship’s engines stopping at sea, while rare, wasn’t particularly alarming, but if she ever heard them go abruptly from full ahead to full astern to get on deck and away from the bow as fast as she could. No doubt it was just another breakdown in the engine room; there had been two stoppages, one for twelve hours, since their departure from Callao six days ago.

  She had the wind-scoop out the porthole, but now that the ship had come to rest it picked up no air at all and it was suffocatingly hot inside the cabin, even with the whirring of the fan. It would be some relief to take off the cotton pajamas she was wearing, but that would mean drawing the curtains over the porthole. They scrubbed down the deck outside’ very early in the morning, and five feet seven of sleeping nude blonde might cause God knows what havoc among seamen wielding forgotten fire hoses. Even a thirty-four-year-old blonde, she thought; sailors a week at sea were notoriously generous critics.

  She heard a door open and close, and then a murmur of voices, one of them male, just beyond the bulkhead in Cabin D. She winced. Oh, no, not again! Not tonight! You’d think that now with the ship stopped, in this complete silence without the throb of the engine and the vibration to lend at least an illusion of privacy to their lovemaking, they might be a little more discreet.

  She felt trapped, embarrassed, and angry. The first time it happened, the night they sailed from Callao, in her revulsion at being a captive audience to the impassioned grapplings and ecstatic shrieks from beyond the bulkhead, she had buried her head under her pillow and suffered through it. Mrs. Lennox was aware that she occupied Cabin D, so it was obvious she just didn’t realize how sound-transparent that flimsy bulkhead really was. The next day, when she was sure the other woman was in her cabin, she had gone bustling around her own, singing fragments of song, dropping a book, creating other small sounds which should carry the message without being too obvious about it. It had done no good at all. The next night was a repetition of the first, and the following was even worse, with the result that by now she was afraid to make any sound in her cabin at all. Just once, it could be assumed without too much embarrassment on either side that she’d been asleep, but that was impossible now, after nearly a week of it. She wasn’t certain that even Mrs. Lennox herself was aware of some of the things she cried out in her transports, but any recognition between them now that they’d been overheard would be mutually humiliating to the point their one desire would be never to see each other again. Which would be somewhat awkward under the circumstances; the old freighter was a small ship, they were the only women on it, and it was a long way to Manila.

  With the initial moan from the other cabin she sat up wearily and reached for her robe. The only escape was in flight, but she was damned if she’d get dressed again. Belting it around her, she dropped cigarettes and a lighter in the pockets, located her slippers in the darkness, and went out, softly closing the door behind her. Her hair was a mess, and she had on no makeup, but she was too angry to care. The worst of it was that by leaving her cabin she was committed to staying away until she was certain the man, whoever he was, would have left. It would be embarrassing in the extreme to meet him in the passageway coming out of Mrs. Lennox’ cabin at this hour of the morning.

  She’d thought once or twice of asking the steward or captain if she could move to another cabin, but always ran into the unanswerable question of what excuse she could give. Besides, it would have to be a double cabin, and she’d paid only for a single. While there were only four passengers aboard and the Leander had accommodations for twelve in four double cabins and four singles, they were all people traveling alone, so only the doubles were unoccupied.

  Her cabin was the last one aft in the starboard passageway. There was no one in sight. She turned into the thwartships passageway, went on past the entrance to the dining saloon on her left, and stepped out on deck on the port side. This level, referred to in the usual grandiose language of travel brochures as the promenade deck, contained the eight passenger cabins, the steward’s cabin, and the passenger dining and smoking saloons. On the next deck below were the crew’s quarters and messrooms, while the deck officers and engineers occupied the one directly above, along with their messroom and the wireless room. Passengers were encouraged to stay in their own area, except that they were allowed on the boat deck, the uppermost one, as long as they kept clear of the bridge.

  She went around to the ladders at the after end of the midships house and mounted to the boat deck, which was in darkness except for the faint moonlight, since the bridge was at the forward end of it. Between the two wings of the bridge was the wheelhouse, the rest of the structure aft of it containing the chartroom and captain’s quarters. She walked forward and stood leaning against the rail between the davits of the two lifeboats on the starboard side, gazing out at the star-studded night and the dark, unmoving surface of the sea.

  Three bells struck in the wheelhouse, repeated a few seconds later by the lookout on the fo’c’sle head. It was one thirty. The lookout reported the running lights, and was acknowledged by the second officer, whose shadowy figure she could see on the starboard wing of the bridge. For a moment she considered walking forward far enough to ask him why they were stopped, but decided against it. He was a dour and taciturn man she had seen only once or twice since she’d been aboard, and she wasn’t even sure he spoke much English. The chief mate was the only one of the officers she knew, since he sometimes ate in the passengers’ saloon, along with the captain.

  From the engine room ventilators behind her issued the faint pulsing sounds of the generator and sanitary pump, but aside from these the ship was caught up in an almost total silence. There wasn’t the whisper of a breeze, and no movement at all. She could be standing on a pier, she thought, or a seawall. She looked down. When the ship was under way at night here in the tropics she loved to watch the glowing sheet of light along its skin, but it was absent now that there was no disturbance of the water, and there were only random pinpoints of phosphorescence winking on and off like fireflies in the darkness. She leaned on the rail and stared moodily out into the night. After a while she heard footsteps coming across the deck behind her, and turned. It was the chief mate.

  Even in the darkness it was impossible to mistake that figure. He must be six feet four, she thought; at any rate he dwarfed everyone else aboard, not only tall but massive of shoulder, with powerful arms and a big, craggy head and wild mop of blond hair that seemed to fly outward as though charged by some endless source of energy within him. In spite of his size, he moved with the casual ease of the perfectly coordinated, and there was in all his mannerisms and in the rattier sardonic, ice-blue eyes a sort of total male confidence that no doubt innumerable women had found attractive. She wondered what he was doing up at this hour, since he didn’t go on watch until four. Maybe he was the man— She wrenched her mind away from this speculation with distaste.

  He saw her between the boats and stopped. “Ready to abandon ship, Mrs. Brooke? Stick around; we can still beat the lifeboats.”

  She smiled. “I was just out admiring the night. I woke up when the engines stopped.”

  “Everybody does. Sudden silence is a noise.”

  “Is it anything serious?”

  “No, just a hot bearing. The galley slaves say we’ll be under way in a half hour or so.”

  She took out a cigarette. “The who?”

  He snapped the lighter for her, and grinned. “Engine room. The first marine engineer was a convict with an oar.”

  He went on toward the bridge, and she resumed her silent contemplation of the night. He was an unusual man in a number of ways, she thought; he w
as obviously well educated, and she knew he spoke fluent French and German in addition to English. She didn’t know what his nationality was. The Leander was under Panamanian registry, but her crew was from everywhere. His name was Eric Lind, so he was probably of Scandinavian descent, as she was herself.

  Then it was her own reaction—or utter lack of it—that she was thinking of. What woman, talking to a devilishly attractive man in the moonlight, even if she had no interest in him at all, would indifferently invite inspection in the revealing, close-up flame of a cigarette lighter when her hair looked like a fright wig and her face like something that had been stored for the winter in a coat of grease? You’re hopeless, she thought.

  The ship loomed large and distinct ahead of him now, and he knew he was within a quarter mile. She was still lying motionless in the water, but had swung around by imperceptible degrees during the past hour until she was broadside to him, and he could see the green glow of her starboard running light as well as the overall silhouette and a few lighted portholes. She was a freighter, with well-decks forward and aft of the big midships house, and whatever her trouble was it must be in the engine room. There was no sign of fire, or activity of any kind on deck.

  Sweat ran into his eyes. There was a sharp pain in his side, making every breath an agony, and his mouth was dry and full of the taste of copper. His hands were on the inflated rim of the raft, pushing it ahead of him as he swam. The dungarees and shirt were inside the raft, and he was naked except for a pair of boxer shorts. Normally, he had no particular fear of sharks, but he knew that what he was doing was tantamount to asking to be cut in two, threshing on the surface at night like something wounded and helpless. Well, if one took his legs off, it would be over in a few minutes at most; that beat the other program, the thirst.

  Between the lash of urgency and the gray sea of fatigue that was engulfing him, he was conscious of random and disconnected thoughts that made him wonder again if he were entirely rational. There was a haunting impression of déjà vu about the whole thing that baffled him, since neither he nor anybody else in maritime history, as far as he knew, had ever been rescued by swimming over to a stationary ship in mid-ocean and asking for a lift. Ahoy aboard the freighter! You going my way? He giggled, and his fright at this was sufficient to clear his mind momentarily.