His right arm was bad, too. But not so bad as the other unless he thought about it. It had the relief of alternate duty: now it would help in the half-swimming, half-treading movement with which he kept his own and the woman’s head above water; now it would reach out and pluck at the boy and force up his drooping head.
The sea was an irregular relief map of shifting, swelling hills and valleys. It was bitterly, satanically cold, with an oily, all-embracing coldness, and it stretched down beneath Otto to unimaginable depths of cruelty. Overhead was the dark and lowering and inimical sky, with black cloud masses racing across a blacker backcloth which blotted out moon and stars, and upon the rest of the heaving surface of the sea was nothing save these three dark and minute and bobbing specks.
The strange, warm numbness began to spread to Otto’s mind. He ceased to think—and for long intervals now he would not even feel the pain in his arms, yet some inner force kept them and his legs and body at their work. . . .
They were deep in a valley between the tireless, forever advancing hills of water when a voice jerked him back to agonized awareness. It was a faint, far-away voice which he had never heard before, but which came nevertheless from the head against his right shoulder. It said something which Otto did not catch, but the quality of the tone made him increase the action of his legs so that he could use his right hand to make sure that the boy’s grip upon him was not loosening and then to seize the small neck and jerk the head upright, clear of the water.
The voice came again. It was very loud this time, and had that super-normal naturalness and clarity which tells that the speaker is not conscious of speaking. It was a high, enthusiastic voice, and it was telling a story.
“Listen, you chaps!” it said—and went on to gabble so fast that the words did not separate themselves in Otto’s mind, accompanied and enwrapped as they were in a sort of running giggle of excitement.
“. . . and there it was—a German sub!” it said with sudden definition. “Golly! . . .”
Then the next hill swooped down upon them and toyed with them and failed to crush them and swooped them up to its crest, as Otto fought with it, and slid them down into yet another valley which was a dreadful counterpart of all the others.
And the weight upon Otto’s right arm was suddenly heavier.
The wind lessened and the sky grew less black and the swell subsided, gradually, to a near-flat calm. But it was a cold grey dawn—and the look-out man in the crow’s nest of the Admiral Farragut shivered beneath his layers of clothing.
The Admiral Farragut was a tanker, and she flew the U.S. Ensign and also had the flag painted large upon both beams. But in these days one never knew: hence the lookout duty, shared in turn by every one of the crew throughout every hour of every voyage.
The man shivered again, and thrust his hands deeper into his pockets. His gaze swept the level dead-grey surface of the Atlantic in a wide sweeping arc. . . .
His hands came out of his pockets. He stiffened. His eye had been caught by something at the outermost edge of the arc. He stared, first with his naked eye, then through a glass—and after that he shouted. . . .
They could not separate the three until a boat had picked them up and they had been hauled aboard. Otto, as willing hands had caught at him and his burdens, had lost his last, slipping grip upon consciousness, and they had been forced to pry his fingers loose from the life-belt of the child. Also, the Second Officer, who was in charge of the boat, had to cut the woman’s long hair with his sheath-knife. The hair had been divided into two main strands, and these, roughly twisted, had been tied around Otto’s neck so that the unconscious head of the woman had been immovably lashed to him, its chin resting upon his shoulder.
Something forced Otto’s teeth apart and there was a trickling of liquid flame down his throat. He choked and opened his eyes and looked up at the faces of unfamiliar men and shut off sight again. . . .
He waked three hours later and rolled over on his back and thought, ‘Where am I?’
He thought it in German—but before the words came out of his mouth he had regained sufficient control of himself to turn them into inarticulate sound: he did not know why he did this, but merely that he must.
A lean, unshaven face swam into his vision and looked down at him and grinned with a flash of improbably white teeth.
“How’s it goin’, pal?” said a deep, metallic voice.
Memory, though battered and hole-pocked, flooded Otto’s mind. He said, carefully:
“All right. . . . What ship?”
The stubbled face leaned closer. “A’miral Farragut. Tanker—U.S. Merchant Marine.” Then, painstakingly: “United States.”
“Oh . . .” said Otto—and then:
“The . . . the . . .” He was groping for a word. “The child—the boy?”
The long unshaven face moved from side to side as the head was shaken.
“No use t’ fool ya, Bud. . . . The kid didn’t make it.” Idiom was clarified again. “Too bad—but he was dead when we hauled you in.”
The word dead came clearly through the mists. Otto stared up into small eyes which were nearly the same colour as his own. He did not speak.
“Girl’s O.K., though,” said the voice. “All right! . . . She’s sleepin’. . . .”
“Oh . . .” said Otto—and closed his eyes once more. He said, when he opened them again:
“Where is the ship going?”
“The good old U.S., son.” The face had gone, but the voice was still there. “Noo York!”
6 NEW YORK:
First Phase
The sky was light, clear blue and very high up, and a bright sun shone out of it and the air was extraordinarily clear; so clear that a man could see not only a great distance but so sharply as to lend everything a most disturbing unreality. And with this clarity of atmosphere and vision there went an accompanying clarity of sound which enhanced the feeling of fantasy. The steely water of the harbour was illusion, and the faint movement of the Admiral Farragut must be caused by men behind the scenes. Across the celluloid water, and behind the grey quays (which must be of lath and canvas), huge sharp-edged castles of cardboard reared up to impossible heights, and from the direction of their hidden feet came a vast humming, more palpable perhaps than audible, which must be some ingenious device for producing the illusion that the unbelievable backcloth was indeed a great and busy city.
Otto had seen the panoramics first just after dawn, when the Admiral Farragut had come to rest in the harbour. He was fascinated, like a child at a circus, and he stayed by the rail, rapt, even when the launches came. They seemed so much part of the theatrical set piece that he paid them scant attention—until their passengers surged aboard and he found himself surrounded by mummers who engulfed him, trying, he felt, to drag him into the play itself.
He was bewildered—until it slowly dawned upon him that these were reporters and that Nils Jorgensen, through some strange caprice of destiny, was the current American hero. This in itself was again puzzling—and remained so until, much later, he discovered that the wireless operator of the Farragut was a youth of journalistic leanings, whose impassioned descriptions of the rescue had struck New York as the only available human story (and what a story!) about the tragedy of the Vulcania.