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Updated: May 22, 2025
They stood literally ankle-deep in wine-glasses, dessert, and plates. The Mooroo had taken the rocks. There was a rolling crash on the deck overhead, and a confused sound of shouting. "You will stay?" cried Skeen again. "Yes dear." He turned and left her there, alone. On deck he found a crowd. The passengers were being allowed to go to the boats.
"D -n it," reiterated the chief, with his head hidden. They were all down there the whole engineer's staff of the Mooroo in their shirt-sleeves, lying among the bright steel rods busy at their craft working against time for their lives.
But he did not rise from his recumbent position. He was, in fact, lying on his face on a steel- bar grating in his shirt-sleeves his hands black with oil and steel filings. The captain of the Mooroo far up above on the upper platform leant his elbow on the steel banister and reflected for exactly two seconds. He was in the habit of sleeping and thinking very quickly.
Her sails, all black with coal-dust and the smoke of many voyages, had been shaken out. They served to keep the vessel's bluff prow pushing into the gale, but that was all. The Mooroo was drifting drifting.
And the end of the Mooroo was a girl sitting before a driftwood fire in the cottage of the old cure of the Ile de Sein, while at her feet knelt a man with his broken arm bound to his side. And he was stroking her hands softly and repeatedly. He was trying to soothe her and make her understand that she was safe. "Give her time, my son," the old cure said, with his deep, wise smile.
The smaller beacon, low down on the horizon, was that of the Ile de Sein, whose few inhabitants live by what the sea brings them in be it fish or wreckage. There is enough of both. A strong current sets north and east, and it becomes almost a "race" in the narrow channel between the Ile de Sein and the rock-bound mainland. The Mooroo was in this current.
The boats were being pushed out the davits swung round, the tarpaulin covers removed, and the awnings unbent. Life-belts were being collected in the music-room on deck, and the purser had given orders to the stewards to prolong dinner as much as possible. "Let 'em have their dinner first," the captain had said significantly. And all the while the Mooroo was drifting.
From the fact that Evelyn Crafer had failed to do this, Mrs. Judge Barrowby intimated that each might draw an individual inference. While these thoughts were in course of lithography upon the expressive countenance of the lady at the captain's end of the saloon table, strange things were taking place on the deck of the good steamship Mooroo. The entire crew had, in fact, been summoned on deck.
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