The Light Heart (41 page)

Phoebe forced herself to stand quietly at the foot of the stairs, carrying her life-belt and handbag, waiting her turn for a footing on the bottom step, and trying fiercely to control the beating of her heart, which felt as though it had no anchor anywhere but was simply knocking about in her chest like a bird against bars, making her limp and giddy. She heard
someone
call out from above that the ship had found herself and the bulkheads were closed, and the danger was over. People around her smiled wanly and started shaking hands with each other, and a man said Well, that was near enough, and there was a little laughter. But they all stayed where they were, inching up the stairs. Then a quiet voice just behind her said, “There’s a companionway further forward which is much clearer. Will you please come with me?”

It was Mr. Kendrick. Phoebe turned thankfully to follow him, and he spoke beyond her to the other people near the foot of the stairs.

“There’s another way up which will be quicker,” he said as though reasoning with small, frightened children. “Come along with us, and we’ll show you.”

A few detached themselves from the fringes and followed. Most of them simply stood where they were, clinging,
desperately
composed, seeming dazed.

“Take my hand,” said Mr. Kendrick, and Phoebe reached out to him, ashamed of the clammy paw his competent grip closed on. “Never mind the rail, just straddle the angle—that’s it—not far to go—the lights are out up here, but I know the way—”

She noticed that he carried three life-belts dangling from their straps in his free hand. He pulled her up the slanting companionway into the sunshine, and she turned instinctively towards the high side of the ship, towards land. The deck was full of confused, half-frantic people, running, calling, sobbing, or just aimlessly wandering, sometimes two by two. There seemed to be no ship’s officers in sight, to bring order out of the chaos.

“This way,” said Mr. Kendrick, and they half ran, half slid down across the sloping deck to starboard. “The port-side boats can’t be lowered now, they’ve swung too far inboard. Let’s get that life-belt on you, shall we? You get into it like a jacket. That’s it. Now we tie the tapes. Like that. Very
becoming
. Do you want to try for a boat, or would you rather just take a chance?”

“Well, I—wh-what are
you
going to do?” As she spoke, the lifeboat on the davits nearest them suddenly let go by the stern, fouling its ropes, and spilled its screaming occupants into the water. Phoebe flinched and looked away, and felt his shoulder like a rock behind hers. “Let’s stay here,” she gasped. “Hadn’t you better put on one of those belts yourself?”

A woman’s voice cried out again for Harry, and now it held
a note of fear. Kendrick turned quickly, and they saw her coming along the deck towards them, grabbing at things for anchorage along the way, dragging by the hand a small girl child who was whimpering with fright. She had no life-belts.

“Stay here,” said Kendrick, hooking Phoebe to another companionway rail, and went to the woman who had lost Harry and offered her one of his belts. She shook her head, her eyes wandering beyond him.

“No, thank you, my husband has gone down for ours. He’ll find us any minute.”

“But just in case he can’t find you in all this confusion—”

“No, thank you, really.” She staggered away from him, dragging the child, dismissing him almost irritably with an impatient gesture, absorbed in her anxious search.

A very old gentleman, leading a very old lady by the hand, caught timidly at Kendrick’s arm from behind.

“Have you got—extras?” he asked.

“I have, I’ve got two extras,” said Kendrick promptly, and helped the two old people into the life-belts, assuring them that the ship would have been seen from the shore, and reminding them that the distant sails of fishing-smacks had been in sight all morning, and the lighthouse on Kinsale Head was just opposite.

But it was plain to Phoebe as she stood holding to the
companionway
rail that the ship was sinking steadily by the head, until now she realized with horror that a lifeboat filled with people but still on its davits was
floating
beside the outer rail, and no one had cast loose its ropes. If the ship suddenly settled the lifeboat would be dragged down with it. There was one steward fumbling with its bow-ropes, and no one to help him—he seemed to be hacking at them with a pen-knife. A man went past her wearing a life-belt, and his trousers were wet to the knees from the water in the lower passages.

Looking forward towards the bridge, she saw that the sea was now flush with the scuppers of A Deck there, and people clinging to the outer rail were being slowly forced aft by the
lapping water, which gained and gained, so that those in front either let go and floated away or felt their way backward by holding on to those behind them. Phoebe was still being
suffocated
by her own heartbeats, but she felt very calm in spite of that, thanks to Mr. Kendrick, who was in a way taking Bracken’s place and filling her need of masculine strength and presence of mind.

“We’re going down pretty fast,” she murmured when she felt him return to her side.

“Yes, we are. There will be a good deal of suction, you know, as she sinks, so you must try very hard to come back to the surface.”

“H-how long—?”

“Any minute now, I should think. Those open portholes have let her fill very fast below. Take a deep breath when you feel her going, and fight like mad to come up. Your belt will help you. And try to get away from the ship as far as possible because there’ll be a lot of debris. Just don’t get rattled, and you’ll be all right. That thing will keep you afloat for hours.”

“Won’t you please put yours on?”

“
Harry!
” cried the same voice again, with hysteria in it, and the child was crying.

Kendrick interrupted the woman’s aimless progress for the second time, holding out his life-belt.

“Put your arms in this,” he rapped out. “Quick. Do as I say.”

“Oh,
no
—!” Phoebe began, and smothered her protest as the woman obeyed him, passively allowing him to tie the tapes.

“Take the child in your arms,” he said, and shook her to make her hear. “Take hold of the child and hang on to her!”

The woman nodded blankly, and bent over the child.

“But that belt was
yours!
” cried Phoebe.

“Oh, I can swim,” he told her with a confident smile. “I’ve won prizes, swimming. I’ll be all right. Keep your head, now, and don’t forget which way is up! Here we go, I’ll try to find you again in the water—”

Phoebe was watching, suspended in time, while the edge of the clear green water reached for her feet, felt it cold around her ankles, felt it grip her knees—in her ears was a long sobbing moan which was the voice of the dying ship as she went down. Phoebe thought, The funnels—they’ll smash us in the water—And then the world turned icy cold and there was no way to breathe.

Strangling, kicking, choking, she realized that something held her by the arm like a snake, and she was caught in an endless coil of rope which wound itself around her right side, burning her wrist and hand with its drag. She fought it wildly, painfully, and it let go, and she found herself gulping down fresh air again with her face above the surface.

Then something else hit her a grinding blow on the right shoulder and she cried out with the pain, and heard the cry echoed a dozen times as people on all sides of her thrashed and flailed about trying to catch hold of anything that floated, trying to make room for their own ghastly, contorted faces in the thick floating mass of loose debris—planks, chairs, hatch covers, crates, oars, loose boards and wooden railings, which made a sort of giant scum on the quiet sea. Caught in it, people were praying aloud and calling out for lost companions and shouting for boats to pick them up, and inevitably there rose again the high wild wail for Harry.

Vaguely mindful of Kendrick’s parting words, Phoebe tried to push herself away from where she thought the ship had been, but her right side was utterly useless and an agony to bear and she knew there were broken bones somewhere. So she drifted, the life-belt holding her face upwards to the calm sunny sky, and she felt the cold water already numbing her feet, and wondered how soon the fishing-boats would come and begin taking people out of the water, and how many lifeboats had got away from the ship safely, and if there would be room in any of them for people in the water—wondered what had become of Mr. Kendrick, and for a moment entertained the idea of calling to him, but it would sound awfully silly to set
up a howl for “Mr. Kendrick” like a page-boy, and she didn’t know his other name. Besides, she didn’t want to sound like that poor daft soul who had mislaid Harry….

The sun on the water was dazzling, and there was a long, slow swell, and for the first time in her life Phoebe began to feel seasick. But I didn’t have any luncheon, she protested to her insurgent insides, and at once lost what must have been her breakfast. The human sounds were diminishing all round, as she drifted, and the numbness reached her knees, and she couldn’t be sure if she still had her shoes. The life-belt pulled and pressed on her injured shoulder till she almost wished it wasn’t there. And gradually her thoughts got more confused and like a dream when you know you are dreaming but can’t wake yourself up.

I’m glad Bracken didn’t come with me, she thought,
beginning
lucidly enough. Dinah would be out of her mind with worry, and he is the kind to give away his life-belt too—nobody could swim long in this water—but what a story he would have got if he’d lived through it—there’s nobody to be out of their mind about me, Jeff’s too little, and I don’t belong to anyone—not the way Bracken does—perhaps it’s just as well, in case I’m not picked up at all—am I going to die now, like this?—will Rosalind ever know what happened to me, and that I tried to come?—why don’t I seem to be frightened?—of dying, I mean—it’s the cold—and the way my shoulder hurts—no fight left in me, I reckon—if it didn’t hurt so, I could splash, and make a noise—they’ll think I’m dead—I might just get left here, when the boats come, if I look dead—

But at the first effort to move, to see where she was and what was around her, she sank back sick with pain and lay quiet on the water again, her eyes closed against the sun, her long brown hair floating.

I lost my handbag, fighting off that rope, she thought. A man is so lucky to have pockets—what time was it?—about two, we’d set the clock up again—when will they hear about it, in England—tea time—Virginia will start ringing people up—I
wonder where Archie is—Charles isn’t there to help—one always thinks of Charles—if she rang up the War Office—And the thought she had held back so long, the name she had
forbidden
her mind to utter, would not be denied—it reached her lips in a soft despairing moan as she lost consciousness—
Oliver
….

T
HE
news reached London in the late afternoon, first as a
nerve-crisping
whisper at the Admiralty, then as a low-voiced horror at the War Office—and shortly by some mysterious
underground
route it was carried to the crowd which began to collect at the Cunard office in Cockspur Street, where mute, white-faced clerks had no further information to give.

It came to Oliver from the grim lips of a young subaltern who brought some papers into his office for signature—“I say, they’ve sunk the Lusitania
,
sir—bang off the coast of Ireland she was—how’s that for cheek?”

Oliver shook his head, picked up his pen and paused.

“What about her passengers?”

“Sunk without warning, sir. Frightful loss of life, I should think. Survivors, if there are any, will probably be landed at Queenstown.”

Oliver wrote his name on the top paper with a steady hand, blotted it, and said, “Come back in ten minutes.”

“Thank you, sir.”

When the subaltern had gone, Oliver rang up the house in St. James’s Square, where Virginia was working as a V.A.D. in the wards, and asked if she knew what boat Phoebe was sailing on. Virginia told him.

“Why?” she asked then, when he said nothing more. “What’s the matter? Oliver, are you there?”

And he had to explain.

He hung up on a stunned silence at Virginia’s end, and sat a moment staring at the pen still in his hand. Very slowly then
he traced his name again, and reached for the blotter. Then with a jerk he threw down the pen and started for his
commanding
officer’s room. As he crossed the threshold his
telephone
rang, and he left it ringing, and it was finally answered by somebody from the next room, who made a note on Oliver’s pad that he was to call his sister-in-law, Mrs. Archie Campion, at once.

The General was a compassionate man, for all his red tabs and power in office, and he listened silently with his eyes on Oliver’s drawn face.

“You see, sir, the girl being a sort of relation of mine, quite young, and travelling all alone, I’m asking you for leave to go to Ireland to-night. My brother Archie is in France. I’m the only possible one to go and bring her on to England—in case she’s hurt, that is, or—”

“Last train to Fishguard leaves Paddington about eight,” said the General. “Takes three hours longer by Holyhead. Fishguard is a closed port, though—this is an Admiralty job. Sit down, I’ll see what I can do on the telephone.”

Oliver collapsed thankfully into the nearest chair, while the General spoke tersely to people at the Admiralty. It took a little time and patience, but it was arranged. By seven o’clock Oliver was in possession of his leave and his passes, and had borrowed money for the journey from everybody in sight because the banks had closed.

He rang up Virginia then and reported that he was off to Queenstown at once. Shirking an encounter with Maia in St. James’s Square, he sent out for food and ate it at his desk, while further scraps of information trickled down the telephone. Fishing-boats and trawlers were out in the Channel working against the oncoming darkness, pulling people out of the water. Hundreds were believed lost. Hundreds of bodies might be brought in—women—children—the ship had gone down within twenty minutes after she was hit, no one could think why….