And the Deep Blue Sea

by Charles Williams

  He knew then when he had done this before. It was at the hospital after the highway patrol had got Gerry out of the wreckage of the Porsche and called him at the studio, and he had sat in a small room in Emergency with his whole being concentrated like a laser beam into a single state of wanting, of trying to control with an effort of will something that was out of his hands. When the intern and resident had come out and told him she was dead, he had known he would never want anything again. It was all used up. But apparently there was always a little left somewhere, because this was the same thing again. Either the ship would remain there motionless in the water until he reached it, or it wouldn’t. They couldn’t see him in the darkness, and he had no way to signal it.

  Three hundred yards. Two hundred. He could see the silhouette of the stowed booms now, and one of the lighted portholes winked off momentarily as though somebody had walked in front of it, but it was still too far and too dark to make out any movement on deck or on the bridge. He tried to increase the beat of his scissoring legs, but he was too near complete collapse. He sobbed for breath. Then, almost as clearly as though he were aboard, he heard the ding, ding, pause, ding, ding of four bells from the wheelhouse, repeated a moment later by the lookout on the fo’c’sle head. The lookout reported the running lights. I’ll make it, he thought. Just a few more minutes. Then there was another sound, the ringing of a telephone, and he felt the hackles lift on his neck. Engine room calling the bridge? He kicked ahead.

  It was less than a hundred yards now. Then he heard the sound that struck terror in his heart, the jingle of the engine room telegraph. He tried to shout, but he had no breath. A great boil of water appeared under her counter, and he could hear the massive vibration set up by the engine going full ahead while she was still lying dead in the water. He clawed his way onto the raft and stood on his knees, fighting for breath so he could scream at them. They couldn’t hear him over the vibration. She began to move. He shouted, endlessly now, feeling himself engulfed in madness. She gathered way, beginning to swing to his right to get back on course, and her counter went past. Turbulence from the propeller spread outward, rocking the raft and spinning it around as she drew away from him in the night.

  The captain was on the wing of the bridge along with the first and second mates when Karen Brooke heard the telephone ring in the wheelhouse. The three of them went inside, and in a minute she heard the engine room telegraph. The deck trembled under her feet, and there was a noisy shuddering of the whole midships structure as the ship began to move slowly ahead. Then, strangely, above this sound, she thought she heard a voice crying out somewhere in the night in front of her. She moved back to the railing between the boat davits and looked out into the darkness where the faint path of light from the moon began to come abeam as the ship gathered steerageway and started to turn. She thought she heard the strange cry again. Then she gasped as she saw something flat and dark on the surface of the sea less than a hundred yards away. Extending upward from it was the unmistakable silhouette of a man violently waving his arms. She stood frozen, knowing it was impossible, but with the ship still moving very slowly the figure was caught for several seconds in the path of light and there could be no doubt of what she saw. She wheeled and ran toward the bridge. The second mate was just emerging from the wheelhouse.

  “A man!” she cried out, pointing. “There’s a man out there, on a raft or something.”

  He stared blankly, startled by the suddenness of it, but then turned and looked in the direction she was pointing. She ran out onto the wing of the bridge, her arm still extended. “Right out there! I heard him shout! He was waving!” But the raft was out of the moon path now and lost in the darkness behind it. The captain emerged from the wheelhouse. She whirled to him.

  “Captain! Stop! Back up!” She realized she must sound like an idiot; what was the nautical term?

  “What is it, Mrs. Brooke?” he asked.

  “She says she saw a man on a raft,” the second mate said.

  She saw the exchanged glance. Passengers! The ship was gaining speed, the raft falling farther astern by the minute. She was frantic. Wasn’t there any way she could make them believe it? The captain had reached into a box below the bridge railing and lifted out a pair of binoculars. “Back there!” she cried out again, gesturing. “He was in the path of the moonlight! I heard him shout!”

  The captain searched the area with the glasses. He lowered them and said, in the tone of one indulging a child, “It was probably a piece of dunnage, Mrs. Brooke. Or some weed.”

  “Captain, I’m not an idiot, and I’m not drunk! It was a man! Wouldn’t he show on the radar?”

  “Not on our radar.” It was the chief mate, who had emerged from the wheelhouse. He spoke to the captain. “Maybe she did see something. We’d better take a look.” Before the captain could reply, he stepped past them and lifted a life ring from its brackets on the rear railing of the bridge. It was attached to a canister. He ripped the canister loose from its supports and threw the whole thing over the side. Karen heard it splash in the water below them, and in a moment a torchlike flame appeared, lighting up the surface of the sea as it began to drop astern. The chief mate turned and called out to the helmsman inside the wheelhouse. “Hard left!”

  “Mr. Lind!” the captain said angrily, drowning out the helmsman’s reply. It was obvious even to Karen that Lind had vastly exceeded his authority, since it wasn’t his watch and the captain was on the bridge besides, but the big man was completely at ease.

  He winked at Karen. “Cap, it’ll cost us ten minutes to find out. If there’s nobody there, I’ll buy the company a new life ring, and Mrs. Brooke will give a cocktail party.”

  The ship was already beginning to swing. The captain started to countermand the order, then shrugged and remained silent. Karen sighed with relief as she retreated from the bridge where she had no business. Lind, she thought, was something of a man.

  And with a mocking and reckless sense of humor that could have wrecked it, she added to herself, thinking of the “cocktail party.” Captain Steen was a Baptist, a teetotaler, and a dedicated crusader against alcohol. She crossed to the port side of the boat deck where she could continue to watch the flare after they completed the turn, trying to sort out her reactions to the odd fact that she had probably saved a man’s life. What was that old Chinese belief? That if you saved somebody’s life you had meddled in his destiny and you were responsible for him from then on?

  Goddard saw the flame blossom on the surface of the sea, and collapsed, shaking all over and too weak to do anything for a moment. He saw the ship begin to swing in her hard-over turn, circling to come back through the area, and when he had his breath back he slipped over the side again and began to push the raft toward the circle of light, some two hundred yards away. By the time he came up to it the ship had already reached the limit of her opposite course and was turning toward him again. He stopped in the edge of the illuminated area with the raft between the flare and the oncoming ship so he would be silhouetted against it, and climbed back aboard. He waved, knowing they would have their glasses on the light and would have seen him by now. Lying on his back, he fought his way into the soggy dungarees. He sat up, drank the last of the water in the bottle, and waited.

  The ship came on. While still a quarter mile away they backed down briefly on the engine to take most of the way off her there, before they came abreast, so the wash from the propeller wouldn’t sweep him away from her. The engine stopped, and she began to drift slowly down on him, coming to rest at last not more than fifty yards away. He saw men working on the boat deck, and one of the starboard boats started to swing out in its davits. They didn’t know what kind of shape he might be in, or whether there could be somebody else lying in the bottom of the raft.

  He cupped his hands. “Don’t lower a boat! Just a ladder!”

  A voice came back from the darkness of the bridge. “You sure? How about the accommodation ladder?”

  That would be
stowed, and it would take twenty minutes to break it out and rig it. “Just a pilot ladder,” he shouted back. He took a quick look around to be sure there were no cruising dorsals attracted by the flare, slipped over the side, and began pushing the raft ahead of him. In a minute the beam of a flashlight probed downward from the after well-deck to give him a mark, and just before he reached the ship’s side there was the rattle and bumping of a pilot ladder being dropped over. The lower end of it was in the water under the beam of light. He pushed the raft aside and swam over to it. The end of a line dropped into the sea beside him.

  “Make it fast around yourself,” a voice called down. They were determined to make a stretcher case out of him, he thought, but they might have a case, at that. He was pretty well used up. He treaded water while he passed the line around under his arms and made it fast. Grasping the chains at the ends of the ladder treads, he started up, while the men above took up the slack in his safety line. It was a long way up, and he found he was weaker than he’d thought. Hands grasped his arms and helped him over the bulwark and down on deck. He shook with fatigue while water dripped from his body, vaguely conscious of an excited buzzing of voices from a number of the crew gathered in the well-deck. One of the cargo lights was turned on. Somebody unbent the safety line while two men continued to support him, apparently trying to lead him over to a seat on a hatch cover. He shook his head.

  “I’m all right,” he gasped.

  The blond giant who had hold of his right arm let go, grinned at him, and said, “I guess you are, at that. And I thought I had a patient to practice on.” He indicated the open first-aid kit on the hatch cover. Beside it was a pitcher of water. He poured a glass half full. “Easy does it.”

  Goddard drank it and returned the glass. “I had a little on the raft.”

  The only man present with an officer’s cap stepped forward. “I’m Captain Steen. Are there any others?”

  “No, just me.” Goddard grinned painfully, his sun-and-salt-ravaged face feeling as though it would crack. “I’m glad to meet you, Captain.” He held out his hand. “My name’s Goddard.”

  They shook hands, Captain Steen somewhat stiffly, apparently a man with very little humor. Steen turned to one of the crew, and said, “Tell Mr. VanDoorn he can get under way.”

  Goddard looked at the big man who had helped him aboard and given him the water. Though he was bareheaded and clad only in khaki trousers and a short-sleeved shirt with no insignia of any kind, he wore authority as casually as he did the bedroom slippers and the untamed shock of blond hair. “Mate?” Goddard asked.

  The other nodded. “Lind.” They shook hands, and he asked, “Yacht, I suppose, with that Mickey Mouse life raft?”

  “Yeah,” Goddard replied. “I was single-handing—” He stopped, overcome with another attack of weakness and shaking, and began to sway. Lind and another man caught him before he could fall. They led him toward the ladder to the deck above.

  Karen Brooke had been watching from the corner of the promenade deck as Goddard made his way up the pilot ladder, marveling that a castaway would have the strength to do it. Apparently he hadn’t been aboard the raft very long. Just as they helped him over the bulwark, Mrs. Lennox came out of the passageway on the starboard side and joined her at the rail.

  “Isn’t it exciting?” Mrs. Lennox asked. “A real rescue at sea. Who do you suppose he is?”

  “He must be off a small boat of some kind,” Karen replied. “It was a tiny raft, one of the inflated kind, and I don’t think ships have them.”

  “A yachtsman! And look how tall he is.” The older woman’s interest quickened. “Almost as big as Mr. Lind.”

  Karen was amused, now that it appeared the man was neither ill nor dying of thirst and no longer an object of concern. He had cheated one species of maneater, and now was being marked down by another. Mrs. Lennox had all the healthy interest in men of any normal, red-blooded, fifty-year-old widow, and she went to no great lengths to conceal it. She was still quite attractive, with a trim and sexy figure, smoky gray eyes, and a cascade of ash-blond hair. She was wearing pajamas, slippers, and a nylon robe, but the hair was neatly combed and she had put on makeup.

  Karen gazed musingly down into the well-deck where the man, surrounded by curious crew members, shook hands with the captain and then with Mr. Lind, and wondered if, in accordance with the old Chinese belief, she should try to summon up some feeling of responsibility for him. He really didn’t appear to need it. Even exhausted, barefoot, naked from the waist up, with water draining off him and his face covered with a week’s stubble of beard, he was an imposing figure and stamped with the competent look of a man who could take care of himself.

  “Good show, Mrs. Brooke.” The two women turned. It was Mr. Egerton, coming down the ladder from the deck above to join them.

  He was the passenger in Cabin G, a lean, erect man in his sixties with a gray moustache and gray hair, against which the black eye patch was undoubtedly dramatic but, to Karen, somehow vaguely theatrical, as though he had set out to contrive the effect. This was unfair, of course, and she realized that part of it was the clipped British accent, the occasional use of military terms, and expressions like that same “good show.” If you were a retired English army officer who had lost an eye somewhere, you could hardly be blamed if this were exactly the way a not very imaginative actor would play the part. He kept to his cabin a good deal of the time and seldom came to breakfast or lunch, so she didn’t know him very well, but he had beautiful manners and was an urbane and interesting dinner companion.

  “The second officer informs me you were the heroine of the affair,” he went on. “Bit of good fortune for the chap that you were up and about, what?”

  Karen caught the swift glance from Madeleine Lennox. The older woman recovered instantly, however, and exclaimed, “Darling, you mean you were the one who saw him? And you didn’t tell me?”

  “It was just an accident,” Karen replied. “I woke up when the engine stopped and went up on the boat deck to look at the stars.” Does that do it, dear? She went on to tell how she sighted the raft at the moment it was in the path of moonlight. Down in the well-deck, Mr. Lind and a seaman were helping the man toward the ladder. “I wish somebody would come up and tell us something.”

  There was a shuddering vibration of the deck then as the Leander engine went full ahead. She began to move. Karen glanced off to starboard where the flare was still burning in the darkness, starting to drift slowly astern now as they went off and left it in the vastness of the Pacific. She shivered, thinking of being out there alone on a raft and seeing the ship moving away.

  Just as she started to turn back, she became aware of the figure standing at the corner of the deckhouse. It was Mr.—what was his name—Krasuscki? No, Krasicki, she corrected herself. He was the passenger in Cabin H, but she had seen him only two or three times because of the illness that had kept him confined nearly ever since their departure from Callao. He was wearing pajamas and a heavy flannel robe, and he did look ill, she thought, with the hollow, almost cadaverous face and the feverish brightness of the eyes. She started to speak to him, but paused, struck by the strangeness of his behavior. Stock still except for a nervous twitching at the corner of his mouth, he was staring past her at Walter Egerton.

  Egerton turned then, and saw him. Krasicki continued to stare into his face with the same unwavering intensity for another two or three seconds, then wheeled and went back around the corner.

  Egerton glanced at Karen, apparently puzzled. “I say, that must be our fellow-passenger. Does seem a spot feverish, doesn’t he?”

  She nodded. It was odd, but entirely possible under the circumstances; they had been aboard the ship for six days now, but this was the first time they had seen each other. But why had Krasicki stared that way? It wasn’t simply ill-mannered, she thought; there’d been a trace of madness in it, or the horror of a man seeing a ghost.

  III

  IT WAS CALLED THE hospital but it wa
s only a spare room on the lower deck that had originally housed the gun crew when the Leander was built and put into service toward the end of World War II. It contained four bunks, a washbasin, some metal lockers, and a small desk. Naked and still dripping, Goddard was seated on one of the lower bunks toweling himself after the ecstasy of a freshwater shower, knowing that any minute now the reaction would hit him and he’d collapse like a dropped soufflé. Lind had just come back from somewhere, and the passageway outside was still jammed with crew members peering in.

  Word had already spread that he’d been sailing a small boat single-handed across the Pacific, and as they grinned and voiced their congratulations and the cheerful but inevitable opinion of working seamen that anybody who’d sail anything across the ——ing ocean just for the fun of it ought to have his ——ing head examined, they tossed in on the other lower bunk a barrage of spare gear including several pairs of shorts, some slides, a new toothbrush in a plastic tube, toothpaste, cigarettes, matches, and a pair of dungarees. A young Filipino in white trousers and a singlet pushed his way through the jam with a tray containing cold cuts, potato salad, bread, fruit, and a pitcher of milk. He set it on the desk.

  Goddard let the towel drop and began a shaky-fingered attack on the cellophane of one of the packs of cigarettes. Lind held the lighter for him. With the first deep and luxurious inhalation he began to float away and wasn’t sure he’d last as far as the food.

  Lind produced a pint bottle of whiskey from somewhere and twisted off the cap. “Better splice the main brace.”