Miss Dale’s cabin was not as empty as they had at first glance imagined it to be. “There — you see? Careless,” said the steward reprovingly. He had been particularly fond of Miss Dale with her sad blonde appearance, and her being too timid to ring for servants because, as she said, “she wasn’t used to them.” She had spent all day in a deck-chair, wrapped in rugs, convalescing from a serious illness. Latterly, Lord Graecen had been seen reading to her. “Ah well,” said the steward with a sigh to himself, “Romance, that’s what it was.” The stewardess noticed his sigh and shrugged her shoulders.
The miscellaneous periodicals they gathered up found their way at last into the purser’s hands as he stood on C deck, talking amiably to a friend and spitting into the oily waters of Alexandria harbour. “Thanks,” he said. “I could do with some light reading.” He talked as if he had been wrestling with heavy books of reference all day. The bookshelf above his bunk was crammed with yellow-backs. He took the bundle of papers, put them under his arm, and continued his conversation. He was describing to a friend the tragedy that had overtaken the party in the labyrinth. After having extracted the fullest possible pleasure from this he went and sat in a deck-chair aft, lit a fresh pipe and glanced through the papers. He wondered for a moment which papers had belonged to which passengers — one could hardly imagine these Bystanders belonging to Fearmax. Fearmax had rather awed him. He looked like a minor prophet — a gaunt and vehement character. He had refused to give a séance in the first-class saloon, pleading that he was in poor health. And yet he talked like a volcano in short and crisply-articulated sentences. He wore soft black bow ties with drooping ends — such as were fashionable in Belgravia towards the end of the last century. His face had the charred finely-lined character of the later Rudolf Steiner portraits; under his eyes there were deep smudges of black which seemed violet in the harsh lights of the first-class deck. He walked about the decks for hours with his hands in his pockets, like a monomaniac.
For a short while the purser played drowsily with these fugitive recollections, before dropping off to sleep. He noticed that some of the portraits in the society papers had been decorated with moustaches in pencil and wondered whether Graecen had been guilty of the impropriety. The sun was sinking behind the jumble of masts and hulls and a light wind had sprung up.
At Toulon they had all been ashore, and the Truman couple had arrived back rather drunk in the pinnace. He had seen Miss Dombey sitting opposite them with that suffused and swollen look — that redness of the wattles — which always came over her when she was outraged. Mr. Truman’s hat was over his ear and his arm was round his wife. They were singing “When Irish Eyes are Smiling”, with a care that seemed a little over-scrupulous to the more sober members of the crew who watched them from the rail. Graecen had made some remark to Baird and they had both laughed. It was obvious that Miss Dombey was not enjoying their company. She kept her gaze steadily averted and wondered how these disgusting people had managed to travel first-class. As the boat came in to the Europa’s side she had caught Truman’s eye and, to her horror, after a second’s patient, indulgent, and glassy scrutiny, he had winked at her. “That man,” she hissed to Baird as she came up the gangway. “He’s drunk.”
The purser had liked the Truman couple. He was short and thickset, with a good deal of grey hair and a clipped moustache. His manner was extremely good-natured and he appeared to suffer from no sense of social inferiority whatsoever in travelling first-class: “Money,” he said whenever he had to produce any at the bar. “It means nothing to me. I never had any use for it. Here, take the lot.” He was reputed to have won a fortune on the football pools. Miss Dombey found him infuriating because she could not condescend to him; he was alert, civil, and very faintly mocking.
Mrs. Truman was a good-looking woman but a trifle sluttish of dress. Her rouge was nearly always unevenly put on, her deck-shoes rather grubby. Between her husband and herself there existed a sensible bond of ordinary humour; they were accomplices in the criticism of the world around them; a world which threw up people so irresistibly funny as Miss Dombey or as pleasant as Graecen. They were particularly pleased at any speculations as to how they had managed to acquire their wealth; as a matter of fact they had just fifteen pounds of their savings in hand. Truman had won a competition in a weekly paper which had offered him a choice between a pound a week for life or a holiday cruise. The choice was characteristic of them. “Mother,” he said with a calm good-humour, “the pound a week I can make myself, but a holiday cruise we shall never afford if we don’t go now.”
They were obviously very much in love, and Miss Dombey could not forgive them for their private jokes, the way they whispered into each other’s ears, and walked hand in hand about the wet decks like schoolchildren. The stewardess’s, in qualification of her liking of them with the suggestion that they were perhaps a little eccentric was due to a conversation she overheard one night when they were undressing in their cabin. The door had been left ajar while Truman cleaned his teeth — which he always did with a gusto and uproar quite out of proportion to so elementary an operation. You would have thought that a horse was being curried in its stall. He added to the noise by trying to hum snatches of song as he brushed. One night as the stewardess passed the door she heard this customary performance broken off abruptly and the sound of weeping, subdued and rather unearthly in the corridor which was silent now save for the furry noise of the fans. “There, Elsie,” Truman was saying, “I know things would have been different if it hadn’t died.” After some further conversation she heard Mrs. Truman’s melodious voice, recovering its steadiness, say: “I know it’s silly, but I can’t help feeling I killed it, John.”
Later that evening she heard Truman cursing the narrowness of the cabin: “Making love in these bunks is like making love in a matchbox,” he said with his comical north-country accent, with its flattened vowels.
But perhaps the seal was set upon their eccentricity when one day the stewardess found them sitting naked, side by side on the bunk, playing noughts and crosses. “Come in, dear,” Mrs. Truman had said with pleasant unconcern, and then, seeing her consternation, “John, out of sight with you.” She heard Truman laughing immoderately as he struggled into a shirt. She confided this adventure to the steward, asking him very seriously whether old people like that still made love: it seemed faintly indecent. They were old enough to have children. The steward stifled a smile and said he didn’t know — they were probably eccentric. She was thoroughly satisfied with this proposition. Eccentric, that’s what they were. But they were good-humoured and undemanding, and she had a little wave of pity in her heart as she packed the ill-fitting cheap dresses, the old wire-hair-brush, and the copies of Tit-Bits in the trunk which, according to the metal stamp, had been made by a Mr. Stevens in Peckham Rye.
It was not till some days later, when Graecen’s escape was announced in the Press, that the purser discovered that he was a poet. “England’s Foremost Poet-Peer” said one paper and gave a brief outline of his history, his Scottish title, his M.C. and Mention, and his brilliant batting for the Gentlemen versus Players at Lord’s in 1936. Everyone felt that they wished they had known at the time; he had been so quiet and unobtrusive — so like a middle-aged stockbroker. It is true that he had once been seen sketching in a book, and that he read to Miss Dale once or twice on A deck — but whether it was poetry or not they could not tell. It seemed, however, no less than poetic justice that he should be saved. Later still the purser was to see in The Times the poem of Graecen’s, beginning: “When death like the sundial casts his shadow.” The lines were, he noticed, dated April, 1947, several weeks before the incident of the labyrinth, but they read to him like a premonition — as many, that is to say, as he could understand. He read them over several times, cut them out with a penknife and transferred the cutting from his grubby fingers to his pocket-book for future consideration. And here the circle of speculation closed.