by Paul Gallico
The Commander megaphoned to them angrily, 'You goddam fools, you haven't got a chance! Do you want to get sucked under? Cut loose!'
The man wearing an officer's cap replied, 'Keep your advice to yourself! We know what we're doing. There was a capsized ore carrier last year that floated for forty days. They finally had to sink her with explosives.' He laughed and then said, 'I'll call you as my witness that we were the first to get a line aboard. We've already radioed for two of our big salvage tugs.'
The exchange penetrated to the ears of the survivors. Would their ship have remained thus for forty days and forty nights? Had the whole desperate adventure then been for nothing?
Rogo said, between his teeth, 'Go on, you bitch, sink! I don't like Krauts.'
Already the tremendous effort made by the group and their triumph seemed somehow to have been diminished. All they had suffered had begun to fade into the background as in one way or another they were realizing they would have to get used to the idea of living again. Muller, looking over to Martin, thought he seemed to have shrunk even more in size, almost disappearing into his blanket. He had lost his command and was no longer needed.
And still the Poseidon hung there, looming motionless, tall and solid as a building, the sun reflecting redly from the anti-fouling paint on her bottom.
The lifeboat began to turn in a wide circle. To the survivors, the sights and sounds, the three ships stationed near by, the buzzing of the engines from cutters and launches, the wreckage strewn upon the sea, and above all the implacable wall of the capsized ship, seemed to come to them as though heard and seen under glass. The nerves that brought sight and sound to their brains were not yet fully functioning. They felt themselves floating between two worlds, ready for neither, and for a moment Jane Shelby found herself almost wishing to be back inside the darkness, struggling upwards, reaching for a goal. Here it was achieved and she was neither prepared for it nor glad.
Susan reached out a hand from her blanket to touch her and ask, 'Are you all right, Mother?' And then she added, 'I feel so funny.'
Jane said, 'Yes, I do, too.'
The second lifeboat from the London Tower, which had taken off the survivors from the bow section of the liner, crossed their course as they were completing the circle. It was crowded and their eyes took them in, but did not yet interpret what they saw: lifeboat, crew, survivors from the Poseidon, sailors, several stewards still in their white lackets, women huddled under blankets, all floating upon that glassy sea, not yet ruffled by so much as a breeze. Too incongruous; too unbelievable.
Muller suddenly cried, 'My God!' and Nonnie said, 'What?' in alarm.
No more than a dozen yards separated the two lifeboats. 'It's The Beamer and his girl.' Muller shouted over, 'Hoi, there! Bates! Pamela!'
The Beamer looked up. He was still wearing his dinner-jacket, his shirt open at the neck. The girl was wrapped in a blanket and he had his arm about her. His face was quite red, and as he recognized the others, he broke into a broad grin. Both he and the girl waved. In one of The Beamer's hands was a bottle. The great and potent deity, Bacchus, had looked after his own again.
A sudden rush of tears came to Nonnie's eyes, 'I'm so happy they made it. All the time I've been thinking of them lost down there in the dark, and her staying behind to look after him.'
Miss Kinsale's thin, white arm emerged from her covering after some trouble with her long hair, to wave. She said, 'I do hope he'll take care of that child, after all she's done for him,' and then added in a curiously matter-of-fact-voice, 'But I don't suppose he will.'
Susan cried, 'Oh, but he couldn't leave her now. And didn't you see, he was holding her.'
'. . . and a bottle too,' Miss Kinsale concluded severely. 'He was drunk and so was she. He'll leave her, of course. I know men like him.'
Muller said, 'Actually something much worse is very likely to happen. He'll marry her and on the way back from the Register Office, she'll start to try to reform him.'
Susan thought: How very odd to be sitting here in this boat this way, engaged in such a conversation.
The other lifeboat finished its crossing and made for the liner.
Jane Shelby had already hungrily ransacked it with her eyes as it went by. Now she was aware that her husband's gaze was intent upon the white wake from its stern. He was shaking his head from side to side, unconscious of being observed. 'He wasn't there,' he said. He looked utterly miserable and forlorn.
Jane Shelby felt a pang at her heart and she thought: What are we all doing here? Where have all these ships come from? Who are these people? What have they to do with us? Why have we lost my Robin? How dare we still be living? For what purpose! It's all so meaningless.
And out of this came yet another, but this one was firm and clear. I must repair the damage I have done. To destroy this man and all that is left, is just as senseless as everything that's happened to us all. Somewhere it must stop.
Aloud she said, 'Richard, give me your hand. I need it.' He looked at her in astonishment for a moment, unsure of himself and her and then took the hand she extended.
Jane said, 'We shall be needing one another to grieve together,' and then added, 'I didn't mean any of the things I said down . . . down there,' and she glanced up at the wall of the Poseidon, but already the 'down there' was beginning to dim as something that had been dreamed rather than lived through. 'I was out of my head; out of my mind with grief and worry about Robin. I didn't know what I was saying. It wasn't true, any of it. I was simply lashing out blindly. Dick . . . we've lost our son!'
Shelby looked at his wife in amazement, moved with emotion and yet simultaneously filled with elation, as much of the self-confidence of which he had been deprived flooded back into him again. Now that she was admitting that she had not meant them, he could not even remember any more the things she had said that had so destroyed him. They did not matter; they were not true; he had been rendered whole again. He reached for her, pulled her close to him and held her. He whispered, 'I'll try to make it up to you somehow.'
Jane covered the inward shudder she could not suppress at the cliché, by moving closer inside her husband's arms.
Susan regarded her mother with admiration and grew a little older.
Despite the tropical sun now climbing into the sky, Muller felt suddenly depressed and chilled. Intuitively, without wholly hearing he had picked up Jane's gesture and everything about him was in rebellion against the wantonness of the taking of the life of a child under circumstances of the utmost cruelty. For the rest of her days this mother must be tortured as to how he had perished and to what extent she herself had been to blame for his loss. How could one both rejoice that the drunken Englishman and the poor, besotted lump of a girl who had attached herself to him were safe and at the same time mourn for the death of Belle Rosen? What was one to think of the futility of the other lives in their party snuffed out? The brave and lunatic Scott; the stuff of which saints were made? The much-sinned-against Linda? And for what great purpose had the Turk Kemal been preserved -- to return to his country and thereafter to find another job -- four hours on and four hours off, tending the lubrication of yet another piece of machinery? And would Rogo be any good thereafter, without his woman to torment him?
And why had he himself survived? For Nonnie whose life and person henceforth had been given over into his hands? And into what category did Nonnie fall? Reward? Punishment? Delight, or a millstone around his neck? For even now as he held her close to him, his thoughts turned to his friends and he asked himself: 'What on earth will they all say?'
Martin's head had emerged like a turtle's from his carapace of blanket and his eyes behind their gold-rimmed spectacles, too, had quested over the rescued in that other lifeboat. He half-feared, half-hoped he would see a figure, or catch a glimpse of thick, burnished hair or a flash from those eyes in which he had so often lost himself. But Mrs Wilma Lewis was not amongst them.
Martin thought to himself: So, I am to be let off scot fr
ee, after all. Saved and maybe even a hero when the papers get the story. And I'm nothing but a rotten little runt who spent his holiday servicing a randy widow. And nobody will ever know; no punishment, no trouble. Adultery on the house.
There was no need even to tell his wife and make her miserable. Mingled with his relief there was still that faint sense of disappointment. Somehow, in some way he ought to have been made to suffer.
Muller turned to the officer and asked, 'Where are we? What ship are you from? Where are you going?'
'Royal Antilles Line, sir. R.M.S. London Tower. Veracruz, Havana, Bermuda and London. We're homeward bound now. We'll soon have you and your friends comfortable. You've been very lucky, if I may say so, sir.'
'Yes, I know,' put in Shelby. 'Have you any idea what happened?'
The young two-striper replied, 'Seaquake, sir. We were well to the north-west of it and didn't even feel the shock. Two other ships in the area are still unreported. They may have gone down with all hands. You were luckier. The Air Force people pitched in after the news of the quake, and one of their radar planes picked you up just after midnight and dropped flares that told them the story. We received a message from the shipping Computer Centre on Governor's Island at two o'clock this morning to proceed to this area to search for survivors, along with the German freighter. The Monroe was only two hundred miles north of you on a recovery exercise for an unmanned space capsule launched from Cape Kennedy. I expect you'll learn about all of it when we get aboard, sir.'
Shelby felt his heart contract. It was as though his son had been speaking, Robin who had known about all such things as moon shots, computer centres and recovery exercises; Robin who had never had his chance to take the pathway to the stars. The stab of pain reminded him that for Jane it must be perpetual. Men simply had different mechanisms for caring about their children. It would be agony when at home he picked up the football with no one to whom to throw it. And he saw himself again on his lawn with the ball spiralling through the air, Robin racing down field and at his call, 'Look up!' turning over his shoulder and pulling it down.
His attention was recaptured by something the officer had mentioned. 'London?' Shelby said. 'But we're Americans, we don't live there.' It was almost as though he had felt all along that at the end of the climb and if he ever broke through the skin of the Poseidon, he would find himself back home in Detroit.
'I suppose some arrangements will be made about that, sir.
Martin said, 'I want to get a message back to my wife in Chicago.'
The officer nodded and said, 'You'll be able to do that, I'm sure.'
Shrouded in his blanket to the crown of his head, Manny Rosen shivered and was heard to say, 'Mamma! Mamma!'
Nonnie wanted to comfort Rosen. She moved and the blanket slipped from her body, revealing the twisted pink breech clout, the strip tied around her breasts and the dead white skin streaked with oil. The engineman of the lifeboat gawped at her and somehow beneath the grime divined her as one of his own. He said, 'Coo, where was you at when it 'appened? A fancy dress ball?'
Nonnie's face suddenly went smaller and her mouth pinched and mean. She turned on him and spat out, 'Nark it!' In her voice Muller heard everything he both feared and loved: her vulgarity, her vulnerability, all the years of struggling and fending for herself and being at the mercy of anyone who wanted to make a joke or a pass.
He pulled the blanket around her shoulders again with one hand and with the other tilted up her small face and looked into it. The intemperate streak, the shadow of her commonness was still at the corners of her too-small mouth, yet he felt touched again.
Whether it was that her sharp instincts had picked up his emanation, or now that it was all over and promises made under duress of death in her mind were not meant to be kept, she whispered, 'You don't have to marry me, Hubie. And I'd never leave you. I'd stay with you as long as you wanted me to.'
He was being given his freedom, and against every counsel of sanity and intelligence, he struggled against it. She would be content to be his mistress until he cast her off. It was the expedient and sensible thing to do. Every instinct told him so. They would have great fun for a while and then well, the two pieces of their different worlds that they might have tried to paste together would have come unstuck. And yet he did not wish her to have the chance to leave him, to be the first to say, 'Let's call it quits, chum.' Never!
He used again the phrase he had in the bowels of the Poseidon when he had tried to comfort her, 'Hush, Nonnie! It's so impractical when you're travelling.' He felt her tense body relax and was satisfied, and yet the echoes of her class would not die away entirely and holding tightly to his decision and all his desires embodied in her, he heard his inner self querying: 'What am I going to do? What on earth am I going to do with this girl? What will they all say? What will my life be like from now on?'
From within the Poseidon a muffled explosion sounded and there was another bubbling eruption of water in the vicinity of the inclined bow section. An officer's cap stiff with gold braid came up with it. Muller muttered, 'So when they renamed you Poseidon, they offended the god of earthquakes.'
Nonnie asked, 'What did you say, dear?'
Muller conquered the impulse to say, 'You mustn't call me "dear",' and merely replied, 'Nothing, Nonnie. Say goodbye to the ship.'
Nonnie began to cry again and because her cheeks were covered with oil, her tears retained their shape and slid whole, one after the other, down her tiny face. 'And all my chums.'
'I'm afraid so, Nonnie.' She buried her face in the folds of Muller's blanket. He loved her greatly.
CHAPTER XXV
L'Envoi
The cutter from the Monroe drew alongside the lifeboat and reduced its speed until the two craft were sailing parallel to one another, a few yards apart. The Commander called over, 'Is the gentleman who . . .' He hesitated and then added, 'Whose wife . . .'
Rogo shook Rosen gently by the shoulder and said, 'Manny, I think he wants to talk to you.'
Rosen's head emerged from his blanket. He blinked his wet eyes in the bright light, looking around to orient himself.
The Commander said, 'I'm sorry to bring this up in this way, sir. I haven't had the chance to learn your name yet. Your . . . Your wife's body has gone in our other cutter. She's being taken aboard our ship.'
Somehow even with his thinning hair stuck together and standing up from his skull and the vitality and roundness drained from his face, the little man managed to muster the most astonishing amount of dignity. He said, 'My name is Emmanuel Rosen. Please, can I be with her? I would like to be with her. Can't you take me?'
'Yes,' the Commander replied, 'we will. It won't be long now.' Then he asked, 'How many Americans are there amongst you?'
Martin, his leadership relinquished, seemed no longer interested. Muller replied for him, 'Six. Mr and Mrs and Miss Shelby, Mr Martin, Mr Rogo and myself.'
'British?'
Muller said, 'Two. Miss Kinsale here, and . . .' he hesitated for only the briefest moment, 'Miss Parry. Miss Kinsale was a passenger. Miss Parry was on the entertainment staff.'
The Commander asked, 'And the other?'
'He's an oiler from the engine room,' Muller explained. 'He joined our party led by . . .' He stopped, astonished at how completely the Reverend Frank Scott had gone out of his mind. Well, it was too long to go into now, and he concluded, 'He's Turkish. His name's Kemal. He only speaks Turkish, Greek and very few words of English.'
Kemal grinned and waved a hand when he heard his name.
The Commander said, 'He'll be better off for repatriation in London then, I imagine. They can send him home from there.' He raised his voice so as to include the entire group of survivors, 'I have been in communication with the Captain of the London Tower. He will take all British and Europeans. There are some Belgians, Greeks and a French couple along with some more British members of the crew in the other boat. We have had our instructions from Washington. We'll take you American
s aboard the Monroe and put you ashore at Miami, where arrangements will have been made to get you home.'
'Oh dear,' said Miss Kinsale, 'I suppose we shall have to be saying goodbye to one another, then.' She spoke as though it might have been the last day of the voyage, with luggage stacked up all about and farewells being made on the promenade deck. The others were startled. They had not yet thought to the point that they might be separated, that their odd but valiant company would be broken up. The trials they had suffered ought to have linked them together somehow for ever.
But no one knew exactly what to say to her: 'So nice to have known you,' simply would not do. Neither did expression of sympathy at the loss of Scott appear to be in order. As far as outward appearances were concerned, Miss Kinsale seemed either to have recovered from this tragedy, or mastered her emotions. And thinking these thoughts, they were reminded themselves of how strangely and completely the Reverend Dr Frank Scott had been elided from their minds. How could someone who had played such an important part in their survival have so wholly escaped them now that they were saved? He was simply gone, the mystery of him as yet unsolved. Had he ever really existed?