that seemed in
itself a contradiction.

"I wish I were," he answered. "Listen to that!"

He pointed to my cabin ceiling; it quivered and creaked; and all at once
I was as a deaf man healed.

One gets inured to noise at sea, but to this day it passes me how even I
could have slept an instant in the abnormal din which I now heard raging
above my head. Sea-boots stamped; bare feet pattered; men bawled; women
shrieked; shouts of terror drowned the roar of command.

"Have we long to last?" I asked, as I leaped for my clothes.

"Long enough for you to dress comfortably. Steady, old man! It's only
just been discovered; they may get it under. The panic's the worst part
at present, and we're out of that."

But was Eva Denison? Breathlessly I put the question; his answer was
reassuring. Miss Denison was with her step-father on the poop. "And both
of 'em as cool as cucumbers," added Ready.

They could not have been cooler than this young man, with death at the
bottom of his bright and sunken eyes. He was of the type which is all
muscle and no constitution; athletes one year, dead men the next; but
until this moment the athlete had been to me a mere and incredible
tradition. In the afternoon I had seen his lean knees totter under the
captain's fire. Now, at midnight--the exact time by my watch--it was as
if his shrunken limbs had expanded in his clothes; he seemed hardly to
know his own flushed face, as he caught sight of it in my mirror.

"By Jove!" said he, "this has put me in a fine old fever; but I don't
know when I felt in better fettle. If only they get it under! I've not
looked like this all the voyage."

And he admired himself while I dressed in hot haste: a fine young
fellow; not at all the natural egotist, but cast for death by the
doctors, and keenly incredulous in his bag of skin. It revived one's
confidence to hear him talk. But he forgot himself in an instant, and
gave me a lead through the saloon with a boyish eagerness that made me
actually suspicious as I ran. We were nearing the Line. I recalled the
excesses of my last crossing, and I prepared for some vast hoax at the
last moment. It was only when we plunged upon the crowded quarter-deck,
and my own eyes read lust of life and dread of death in the starting
eyes of others, that such lust and such dread consumed me in my turn, so
that my veins seemed filled with fire and ice.

To be fair to those others, I think that the first wild panic was
subsiding e