ad heard on Lashnagar from Wullie's lips, of the hot summer
when the witch-woman came and men went mad just before the destruction
came on the village. It was as though the _Oriana_ went on ploughing
through the waters, with the Dog-Star hitched to her masthead inflaming
men's blood. Marcella was in a state of puzzlement. She was puzzled at
herself, puzzled at Louis, puzzled at the people round her. Men went
about barefoot in pyjamas, women in muslin nightdresses all day after
Suez; in the Indian Ocean, one blazing day, they ran into the tail of a
monsoon; the lower decks were swamped and the steerage passengers were
sent on to the upper decks, where Marcella and Louis sat surrounded by
half a dozen forlorn children whose parents had succumbed to the
pitching of the ship and the heat. Great walls of green, unfoaming water
rose sullenly and menacingly higher than the ship, which tossed like a
weightless cork; seas came aboard with an effect of silence; down in
the saloon glasses, crockery and cutlery crashed to the deck with a
momentary fracture of the deadly quiet which seemed all the more silent
afterwards: occasionally a child screamed in fright and was hushed by an
almost voiceless mother, while stewards went about with trays of iced
drinks, slipping to the deck in a dead faint now and again with a
momentary smash that was swallowed to silence immediately. Underneath
the sulky, heaving water lurked death, silent and sharp, from which the
shoals of flying fishes escaped for the moment by soundless, silvery,
aimless poising in the blue air, only to fall back exhausted again into
the green water and the waiting white jaws. Some of the fishes flopped
on board, and were put out of life by the blows of the sailors who dried
and stuffed them and sold them afterwards to the passengers. To Marcella
everything seemed cruel and mad and preying. The passengers were
cruel--to each other and to the stewards; one day, going into the saloon
by chance, she found Knollys leaning over a table looking white and
sick, as he tried to polish spoons and forks.

"Are you ill?" she asked him.

"There's only two of us--including me--that haven't crocked up," he
said; "people don't seem to think it's hot for us, or that we feel fed
up at all. That Mrs. Hetherington seems to think I'm a private sort of
lady's maid to her alone. All these women do--sitting about in deck
chairs calling 'Steward' all day long! In the third class alone there's
six