sudden
complete comprehension of what had happened behind Tong Pee sent Mr.
Spokesly down the ladder in a panic. "This is no good," he said
anxiously to himself. "No good at all." And he blew his whistle again in
a rage.

But the men on the boat-deck were in no mood to pay attention to
whistles. The ship was going down. Her after deck was under water, for
the second torpedo had hit the engine room and all aft was flooded. The
forward hold was light and was keeping her bows up so that she was
gradually assuming a vertical position. And the men on the boat-deck
were crying "Wah! Wah!" and "Hoi! Hoi!" and stampeding past in a stream
towards the boats. They came up staggering with piles of bedding, with
corded boxes and crates full of white rats. They came up festooned with
mandolins and canaries in cages, with English dictionaries and
back-numbers of the _Police Gazette_. They tore each other from the
boats and stowed their treasures with long wailing cries of "Hoi! Hoi!"
They slipped and slithered away aft in heaps and fought among each other
for invisible personal effects. One of them suddenly showed a flashlight
in the darkness and the others leapt upon him to take it, and it
ricocheted away into the scupper and went out. If one of them by
infinite toil got into the boat the others tore him away with howls of
anguish. And the deck became steeper. The boats, already swung out,
sagged away from the davits and fouled the falls. The sound of
scuttering feet and frantic throats was lost in a number of
extraordinary sounds from below, like skyscrapers collapsing into a
waterfall, as the boilers carried away from their stools and crashed
into the engines, which gave way also, and the whole mass, swirling in
steam like the interior of a molten planet, plunged through the
bulkheads into the empty holds. And then the boats began to fall clear
and some of the struggling beings about them dropped away into the void.
Mr. Spokesly, hanging to the rail beneath the bridge, found himself
sobbing as though his chest would burst. He took off his coat and threw
it at the men who were twined in a knot by the nearest davit. The
_Tanganyika_ was now at a very steep angle. Mr. Spokesly took off his
boots. It flashed through his mind that he was in command. "Oh!" he
thought, "I can't leave her!" And then the thought of the others, down
there, in their cabins, and the loneliness of it up here with these
yellow maniacs, pierced his heart. "I mu