Page:Solo (1924).pdf/119

 seated if grudging faith in their captain's flair for a storm.

Once, at dead of night, when Paul was seated on the hatch amidships listening to Otto's tales of schooldays in Bremen, the old man made a portentous appearance on deck, his pyjamas looming in the moonlight. A moment later the second mate was roused and the watch below turned out. Grumbling and adjusting their sheath knives, the men straggled forth and took to the rigging. Then the moonlight was cut off as when a slide is drawn across a dark-lantern, the vessel shivered, a cold breath crept into pockets of canvas, and soon there was a commotion aloft, a clanking and flapping and knocking of blocks and tackle that reminded Paul of a panic in a stable. The ship heeled over steeply and drove ahead. Paul remembered the open ports in the cabin and flew aft to screw them to. On his return the wind rushed at him. The shrouds hummed like tuning forks and from perches high above the ghostly wall of canvas came faint falsetto yohoings mingled with an affrighting flow of blasphemy, which was drowned in the increasing roar of wind and sea.

Even in the shelter of the main deck, Paul had difficulty in gaining the mate's side to help with the letting out and making fast of lines, and when the situation had been saved and the yards gleamed faintly like the limbs of a dancing skeleton, while human insects groped their way along slack footholds imprisoning ends of rope, the mate stooped and bellowed in his ear, "Clumsy bastards, this squall has put the fear of God into 'em!" Whereupon Paul divined that the same holy emotion had penetrated into the heart of the mate, and he wondered, as he clung to a stanchion for support, whether this "squall" might not compare favourably with the cataclysmal hurricanes that had struck other ships.

Although the poop was out of bounds to anyone but