he cords of his neck stood hard and lean, a dark patch lay in the
hollow of his throat, and his face was still and sunken as in death.

Captain MacWhirr wiped his eyes. The sea that had nearly taken him
overboard had, to his great annoyance, washed his sou'-wester hat off
his bald head. The fluffy, fair hair, soaked and darkened, resembled a
mean skein of cotton threads festooned round his bare skull. His face,
glistening with sea-water, had been made crimson with the wind, with
the sting of sprays. He looked as though he had come off sweating from
before a furnace.

"You here?" he muttered, heavily.

The second mate had found his way into the wheelhouse some time before.
He had fixed himself in a corner with his knees up, a fist pressed
against each temple; and this attitude suggested rage, sorrow,
resignation, surrender, with a sort of concentrated unforgiveness. He
said mournfully and defiantly, "Well, it's my watch below now: ain't
it?"

The steam gear clattered, stopped, clattered again; and the helmsman's
eyeballs seemed to project out of a hungry face as if the compass card
behind the binnacle glass had been meat. God knows how long he had been
left there to steer, as if forgotten by all his shipmates. The bells had
not been struck; there had been no reliefs; the ship's routine had gone
down wind; but he was trying to keep her head north-north-east. The
rudder might have been gone for all he knew, the fires out, the engines
broken down, the ship ready to roll over like a corpse. He was
anxious not to get muddled and lose control of her head, because the
compass-card swung far both ways, wriggling on the pivot, and sometimes
seemed to whirl right round. He suffered from mental stress. He was
horribly afraid, also, of the wheelhouse going. Mountains of water kept
on tumbling against it. When the ship took one of her desperate dives
the corners of his lips twitched.

Captain MacWhirr looked up at the wheelhouse clock. Screwed to the
bulk-head, it had a white face on which the black hands appeared to
stand quite still. It was half-past one in the morning.

"Another day," he muttered to himself.

The second mate heard him, and lifting his head as one grieving amongst
ruins, "You won't see it break," he exclaimed. His wrists and his knees
could be seen to shake violently. "No, by God! You won't. . . ."

He took his face again between his fists.

The body of the helmsman had moved slightly, but his head didn't