THE STRONG ROOM OF THE OCEAN.
Dr. Fabos Fails to Find Joan Fordibras.
The boat’s crew laid to their oars with a hearty will, directly I gave them the word; and we shot over the still waters almost with the speed of a steamer’s launch. It was a new experience for me to find myself afloat upon the Atlantic in a small boat, and I confess, even in such fair weather, not wholly a pleasant one. The long rollers, alternately lifting us to prodigious heights and plunging us as to a very abyss of the ocean, shut in turn both ships from my view and permitted me but a rare glimpse of them as we rose upon the crest of some rolling wave which seemed about to engulf us utterly. I realised, as all seamen realise from time to time, the meaning of man’s victory over the sea and the splendour of it. And excitement carried me without distress where I would have feared to go upon a common day.
I was about to see my little Joan again. Unless this man had lied to me, so much must be beyond question. I should find her on the great ship and take her, at last and finally, from this hive of ruffians into which the accidents of life had cast her from her very childhood. Much as she had suffered, it remained my hope that her own courage and the circumstances of her presence upon the ship had saved her from that nameless evil which might otherwise have been her fate. Imroth had kept the child from harm—that I firmly believed; and Imroth having fled, the terror of his name might still be powerful to save her. Herein lay the supreme consolation as our voyage drew to its end, and every rolling crest showed us more clearly the immense hull, standing up from the water like a very Castle Impregnable. I was the bearer of a message to Joan Fordibras, and she should be the first there to whom the story of succour must be told. There could be no purpose dearer to me or one I embarked upon so gladly.
The sun had been upon the point of setting when I quitted the yacht, and a chill of evening fell with an aftermath of drifting mist as the men drove the long-boat up to the ship. My first impression, for I had never before viewed a big steamer from a small boat on the open sea, was one of a vast towering immensity rising sheer above me as the wall of a fortress or the black precipice of a mountain. The ladder itself, by which I must gain the deck, swung fragile as a thread from a boom amidships—no steam came from the ship’s valves, although the bilge was flowing freely. I could detect no sound of movement or human activity; nothing but the appearance of three or four pale anxious faces at the gangway above allowed me to say that the ship had a crew at all. These men, however, waited for my coming with an expectancy which was almost pathetic, and scarcely had I climbed the ladder than they surrounded me immediately with such piteous entreaty to come to their comrades’ aid that my own imperious question sounded abrupt almost to the point of harshness.
“You have a lady upon this ship—where is she?”
“She has gone, sir.”
“Gone! good God, how can she be gone?”
“We knew what you would ask, and sent down to her cabin a quarter of an hour ago, sir. She was not there. Mr. Colin Ross, him that commands for Mr. Imroth, he says he knows nothing of it. It’s true as heaven, sir—the lady’s come to no harm by us, nor would have done if she had been aboard here twenty years. There wasn’t a man that wouldn’t have given his life for her. We don’t know where she is, sir, and that’s gospel truth.”
Imagine the scene. I stood upon the open deck of the strangest steamer I have yet set foot upon—a steamer so splendidly fitted and furnished, as one glance told me, that no Atlantic liner, whatever company floated her, could have claimed a greater elegance. The bridge above me had the neatness, the shining brass, the white ladders of a man-of-warsman. The guns were polished to the last possibility. Every cabin into which I looked appeared to boast the luxury and equipment of a state saloon on a Cunard or a White Star boat. I perceived an immense dining hall aft, and a companion-way not unsuited to a ten thousand ton steamer. There were boats abundantly, safety rafts—the usual equipment of an ocean-going vessel, and yet, in the strongest contrast, something which differentiated this ship from any other I had ever visited, and placed her at once in a category apart. This was nothing more nor less than a screen of solid steel bars, ten feet high, perhaps, and defended by forbidding spikes, sharp as swords and impossible to fend, a screen cutting the vessel into two clear divisions, and obviously the Jew’s protection against all others who sailed with him. I judged at once that the men lived forward of this screen; Imroth and his chosen company aft. A wicket gate, just large enough to admit the body of a man, permitted communication between the divisions; but the steelwork itself appeared to be carried cunningly over the bulwarks in a manner that must have rendered absolutely the aft cabins secure not only against the seamen collectively, but against any spy among them who had the fancy to watch the Jew in his less suspicious moments.
This wicket-gate, be it said, stood open when I climbed to the main deck, and the men now passed to and fro at their will. The most horrible aspect of the picture did not immediately present itself to my notice. I was some minutes aboard before my eyes discerned the huddled figures of men, some propped in bent attitudes against the bulwarks, some already dead, a few crying horribly in the agony of mutilation. As the scene unfolded itself, the woe of it became more terrible to witness. There were sailors of many nationalities here, chiefly, I perceived, from South European and Mediterranean ports, Turks in their native dress, sturdy Greeks, Tunisians, seamen from Algiers and the Adriatic. Of those who crowded about me unwounded, two were Americans, one a nigger, a third a little Frenchman, who gabbled to the point of delirium. The appeal, however, was common to all.
“Help our friends, doctor—save them for God’s sake. We have no doctor on board. Herr Klei............