Maiden Voyage

SIXTY-SEVEN

It was well past one o'clock on Friday morning, and the Arcadia was now steaming ahead at full speed, with only a light southwesterly on her port quarter to resist her, and the vibration of her turbines thrilling through everything on board, from the vases of fresh roses on the tables, to the ice-cubes in the cocktails.

Tonight the Arcadia was alive, and thrusting her way through the ocean at nearly twenty-nine knots. Sir Peregrine had left the dinner table and was now commanding the bridge personally. Although he would never have admitted it, not even to Nurse Queensland, he was determined that the Arcadia should win the Blue Riband on her maiden voyage. He wasn't only fighting for the Arcadia, nor for the future of Keys Shipping. He was fighting for himself. Docking in New York in record time was his only hope of retaining his position as commodore of the Keys fleet—if there could be any hope. And, by God, he needed to be commodore. He needed the sea. What would he do without it? Sit in his gloomy Victorian house in Lytham St. Anne's, listening to his housekeeper warbling while she boiled him up a mutton and lentil soup? Pace the corridors afternoon after afternoon, listening to the steady tick of the Viennese clock, and staring back at the sullen dogs which peered at him from all those cracked oil paintings in the hall?

Dream of Maude? No, never. Not dream of Maude. The sea was all that had mercifully kept him from dreaming of Maude every night and every day for all these years. He had been too busy commanding his ships, and too busy entertaining his passengers, to dream of Maude. Maude was a lost love, a letter left unopened on a mantelpiece in some Victorian room, a girl seen from afar in a soft dress and a picture hat, while children played around her with hoops and sticks. Maude was a memory from a time that had disappeared forever behind a slowly closing diaphragm, a time before flappers and automobiles and airplanes and jazz and electric light. A time before anybody knew what "heebie-jeebies" meant and girls had dared to show their ankles.

Maude, Maude. The Arcadia surged forward to the rhythm of Maude. And all the while she did so, with Sir Peregrine standing so proudly and so lopsidedly on the bridge, and with Harry Pakenow gnawing his fingernails in his first-class bedroom, the timing device in the trunk of Mark Beeney's Mannon turned around to twelve o'clock again, and this time the sear was nudged so closely by the moving hands that there was an audible click. The dock was running down, but there was a chance that it would continue to run until twelve o'clock noon on Saturday. So there was at least one chance for the hands to tip the boomerang-shaped sear so that it connected with the trigger and exploded the dynamite. Harry Pakenow could only wait and worry, while everybody else on the Arcadia drank and danced and cooed and copulated, or stared hopelessly out into the night.