Page:The Plutocrat (1927).pdf/15

 ing decks, the "Duumvir" was not so much a ship as an excellent hotel, just now a hotel miraculously intact, though undergoing the extremities of continuous earthquake, and complaining loudly. Great salons and lounging rooms, empty of human life, but still bright with electric light, tilted up cornerwise, staggered and dipped like the halls of a palace in the nightmare of a sleeper attacked by vertigo. Accompanying these fantasies, painted ceilings and panelled walls protested in every voice known to wrenched wood and racked metal; but, for that matter, the whole inner fabric of the ship had become eloquent, squeaking with a high-pitched rancour sharply audible in spite of thunder and roarings without. And within the passengers' cabins, those little hotel apartments that had seemed so pleasant when the ship was at her dock, there were complaints and disturbances not lacking in a painful kind of harmony with the protests of the ship and the contortions of the elements that beset her.

Throughout the long ranges of staterooms there was anguish; but nowhere in the whole vastness of the "Duumvir" did it become more acute than in the prettily decorated double cabin where ceaselessly lurched to and fro upon his active bed that newly