CHAPTER XXIX

I, too, at midnight, when my watch was over and I had seen Yves descend, returned to my room to try to sleep. After all, the fate of the ship concerned us now no longer, me no more than them. We had done our spell of watching and of work. We might sleep now with that absolute freedom from care which one has at sea when the hours of duty are finished.

In my own room, which was on the bridge, there was no lack of air--on the contrary. Through the broken panes the wind and the furious rain entered freely: the curtains twisted themselves into spirals and mounted to the ceiling with the sound of wings.

Like Yves, I hung up my wet clothes. The water streamed down my chest.

Although my little bed could scarcely be said to be comfortable I fell quickly asleep nevertheless, worn out by fatigue. Rolled, shaken, half thrown out of bed, I felt myself swung from right and from left, and my head bumped against the wood, painfully. I was conscious of all this in my sleep, but I slept on. I slept on and dreamt of Yves. Seeing him fall during the day had left me with a kind of uneasiness, as if some sinister thing had brushed against me in passing.

I dreamt I was lying in a hammock, as formerly during my first years at sea. Yves' hammock was near mine. We were swinging violently and his became unhooked. Beneath us there was a confused movement of something dark which it seemed to me was deep water, and he, Yves, was about to fall into it. I stretched out my hands to save him, but they seemed to have no strength, they were nerveless as in dreams. I tried then to seize him round the body, to knot my hands about his chest, remembering that his mother had entrusted him to me; and I realized with anguish that I could not do it, that I was no longer capable of it; he was going to slip from me and to disappear in all this moving blackness which roared beneath us. . . . And then, what struck me with a horror of fear, was that he did not waken and he was icy cold, with a cold which penetrated me also, to the marrow of my bones; and the canvas of his hammock had become rigid like the sheath of a mummy. . . .

And I felt in my head the real concussions, the real pain of all these shocks, I mixed the real with the imaginary of my dream, as happens in conditions of extreme fatigue, and on this account the sinister vision assumed all the more intensity and life.

Afterwards, I lost consciousness of everything, even of the movement and noise, and then only did my rest begin.

When I awoke it was morning. The first light was of that yellow colour which is peculiar to the sunrise on days of tempest; and the roaring of the wind persisted still.

Yves came and opened my door a little and looked in. He propped himself in the doorway, holding on by one hand, bending his body now this way and now that, according to the needs of the moment, in order to preserve his equilibrium. He had put on again his damp clothes, and was covered with sea salt which was deposited in his hair, in his beard, in the form of a white powder.

He smiled, looking very calm and good-humoured.

"I wanted to see you," he said, "for I dreamt about you a lot in the night. All night long I saw those good Burmese ladies with their long golden nails, you know. They surrounded you with their evil monkeyings, and I could not drive them away. At last they wanted to eat you. Fortunately the réveillé sounded then; I was in a cold sweat when I awoke."

"And I, too, am very glad to see you, my dear Yves, for I have dreamt a lot about you also. Is it as rough as yesterday?"

"Perhaps a little more manageable. And, anyhow, it's day. As long as it's light, you know, it's always easier to work at the masthead. But when it's as black as the devil's pit, as last night, I don't like it at all."

Yves glanced with satisfaction all round my room, arranged by him in anticipation of bad weather. Nothing had budged, thanks to his contrivance. On the floor there was indeed a pool of salt water in which divers things floated; but the objects to which I attached more or less value had remained suspended or fixed, like furniture, to the panels of the walls by bolts or angle-irons. Everything had been corded, tied, secured with an extreme care by means of tarred rope of various thicknesses. Arms and bronzes had been wrapped in articles of clothing in a strange higgledly-piggledly. Japanese masks with long human hair gazed at us through a network of tarred thread; they had the same remote smile, the same tilting of the eyes as the golden-nailed Burmese women who, in Yves' dream, had wanted to eat me. . . .

A bugle-call suddenly, brisk and joyful: the summons to "wash deck!"

The bugle sounded a little thin, a little silvery, in the formidable bellowing of the wind.

To wash the deck when the seas were breaking over it might seem a somewhat senseless operation to people who live on land. But we found nothing very extraordinary in it; it was done every morning, without fail and in all circumstances; it is one of the primordial rules of life at sea. And Yves left me saying, as if it was the most natural thing in the world:

"I must be off to my washing station."

Nevertheless the bugle had sinned by excess of zeal, and sounded without order, at its usual hour; for this morning the deck was not to be washed.

One felt that things were more manageable, as Yves had said; the movements were longer, more regular, more like the rollings of the swell. The sea was less angry, and the deep, heavy-sounding concussions were less frequent.

And then it was day--a vile day, it is true, with a strange livid yellowness, but day nevertheless, less sinister than the night.

Our hour, it seemed, had not yet come, for on the second day following we ran into calm water, in a port in China, at Hong Kong.