Five Passengers from Lisbon, page 8
“I know that, Colonel.”
For an odd, fleeting instant their punctiliousness seemed too polite and too formal. Then Marcia caught the fractional grin they exchanged. Ranking officers probably conceded certain privileges to each other. Captain Svendsen rubbed his forehead impatiently again. He said: “If anybody had been there, Colonel Morgan, could he have heard you coming along the deck from that direction?”
“I suppose so, sir. Or he could have seen me. I was silhouetted, I imagine, against the lighted portion of the deck. The fog made everything rather hazy.”
“But you didn’t actually hear or see anybody escape?”
“No, Captain. It’s as I said: I only thought somebody had slipped and been hurt. Then I realized it was Miss Colfax and helped her inside. Major Strong took care of her and I went to find Messac. Major Strong joined me and we got Messac to his cabin.”
“In all that time did you see anybody else on deck?”
“Nobody.”
Captain Svendsen turned back to Marcia, his blue eyes very bright and blue in his broad, weathered face. “If anybody attacked you, Miss Colfax, it seems to me that almost certainly it was one of the people who were in the lifeboat with you. As I say, it is simply not possible to check on the exact whereabouts at all times of everybody on the ship. Nevertheless, I cannot believe that any of the medical staff, any of the nurses, any of the ship’s complement, any patient could be involved in this. The trouble began when we brought the Lerida passengers aboard. I am convinced that one of them is responsible for it. You insist someone actually tried to murder you. So which one of the Lerida passengers was it?”
The light in the room seemed suddenly unbearable and too green. The cabinets and walls and instruments glittered too brightly. Marcia’s thoughts touched them all—Gili, Daisy Belle, Luther Cates, Mickey, two unknown seamen. None of them could conceivably have wished to murder her.
Yet murder had been done in the wildly pitching lifeboat, in the darkness and confusion, during that battle for life. Again she thought as the Captain obviously thought, that they had brought murder with them, an unseen and dreadful companion upon that ship.
But murder cannot exist alone, as an intangible, untetherable presence; it must have physical form.
She said slowly: “None of them could have done it. None of them...”
“Castiogne was murdered,” said the Captain, watching her.
“But there is no motive for anybody to wish to murder me. There is no one...”
“Yet you say it happened.”
“Yes, it happened.” She felt drained of strength, as if even her thoughts could not function reasonably and clearly. Josh Morgan put out his cigarette with a sudden gesture. He said: “By the way, Colonel, I suppose you took a look at Miss Colfax. If she was struck...”
Colonel Wells looked up quickly. “An excellent suggestion,” he said, and got up and came to Marcia. “If you don’t mind,” he said kindly and tipped her head back, turning her so the light from the green-shaded lamp fell strongly upon her. Again she was aware of the tensity of the silence in the shining little room and of the faraway vibration of engines. The motion of the ship was slower and yet heavy. Josh Morgan had taken a quick step or two nearer and was looking too, carefully, down into her face. Colonel Wells touched her chin and temples lightly. “Does that hurt? Did you strike your head here—here...”
She could remember only that swift knowledge of motion somewhere near her, and then a crash and roar as if of water, and blackness. “I don’t know. I don’t know....No, it doesn’t hurt.”
His sensitive, professional hands explored deftly, pushing back her hair, tilting her head again so he could observe her throat. The nurse’s coat that had been loaned her lay across the end of the cot, its scarlet lining bold and gay. The doctor pushed the crisp collar of the nurse’s uniform back from her throat and looked for a long moment. Finally, he said: “It’s hard to tell. Were you wearing a coat?”
“Yes.”
“Does this hurt—or this...?” Again his deft fingers moved delicately over her.
“No—no...”
“The sedative would have dulled any pain. The coat would have protected the flesh.”
Captain Svendsen said rather gruffly: “Well...”Josh Morgan turned abruptly away. Colonel Wells, a queer, thoughtful look on his thin face, gently replaced the uniform and turned to Captain Svendsen. She could not see his face. He said: “I think Miss Colfax might take another sedative. Will you see to it, Lieutenant?” He glanced at the nurse, who nodded, her face as still and unreadable as the wall. “And the nurse will see her to her cabin. I’ll just go along with you to the bridge, if you don’t mind, Captain. I know you’re anxious to get back....”
Josh Morgan said rather suddenly: “I’ll turn in, too, I think, sir. Do you mind if I stroll along with Miss Colfax and the Lieutenant?” Captain Svendsen got heavily to his feet and picked up his oilskins. “We’ll have some coffee sent up,” he said. “I’ve got to stay on the bridge the rest of the night. I’ve not run into a fog like this since the summer of 1936. After you, Colonel...”
But the Colonel carefully waited for the Captain to precede him out of the dispensary. This was his department, his courteous and formal manner seemed to say. The ship’s administration was the Captain’s. The young nurse said pleasantly: “Here’s another pill, Miss Colfax. You might take it now. I’ll get some water.”
Colonel Wells glanced back from the doorway. “Good night, Miss Colfax. Try to sleep. If you need anything, Lieutenant Hale will be glad to help you.”
He disappeared behind the Captain. The nurse—Lieutenant Hale—turned on a faucet across the room. Josh Morgan waited without speaking as the nurse came back and held the glass and another small white pill toward Marcia. She took both automatically.
“Thank you.” She handed the glass back to the nurse. There were no mirrors in the room. She said to Josh Morgan: ‘There are marks on my throat.”
Josh Morgan glanced at the nurse, who quickly said: “Now, now, Miss Colfax, don’t try to talk. We want you to get some rest.”
Marcia got up unsteadily, as the ship rolled, so Josh, who was nearest, put out his good arm to support her. She said, looking up into his face: “Tell me...”
Lieutenant Hale, her uniform rustling crisply, bent to pick up the redlined coat and went to the door and turned the latch on the lock. Josh Morgan said: “What do you know about that affair last night?”
“That...”
“The murder of Alfred Castiogne.”
“I know nothing of it....”
“You see, if you do know something, something that might be evidence against the murderer, somebody might try pretty damned hard to push you into the sea.”
Again the deep vibration of engines, chugging slowly along through fog and heavy, hidden seas, seemed to fill the small room. Lieutenant Hale, her face disapproving yet intent, tried the latch to be sure the lock was turned. Josh Morgan was so close that she could see the bright dark pupils of his eyes, the few scattered gray hairs in the vigorous black over his temples. He said slowly: “You could have hurt yourself, accidentally, so as to make a red mark there. Or hands could have...”
Lieutenant Hale said rather sharply: “I beg your pardon, Colonel. My orders are to see Miss Colfax to her cabin.”
“You are quite right, I’m sure, Lieutenant. We’ll go at once. Would you be kind enough to pick up my cap? I’ll help Miss Colfax.”
His brown cap with its leather strap lay on the examining table. The nurse took it up, waited for them to go into the hall, straightened the blanket over the cot, turned out the light and followed them, closing the door and trying it to be sure she had locked it.
All that took a few seconds. They were perhaps ten paces ahead of her along the narrow, lighted passageway when she emerged. Josh Morgan, holding Marcia steadily with his left arm, said in a low voice which the nurse could not possibly have heard: “There’s a queer contagion about murder. Perhaps it is terror of being discovered; perhaps it’s—something else. The man last night was murdered. You were in the lifeboat when he was killed. Captain Svendsen and Colonel Wells are very able men. They’ll do things their own way. We’ll know about it after they’ve acted. That’s the army and that’s sea discipline. But if somebody tried to kill you tonight...”
He stopped, and they could hear the click of the latch behind them as the nurse tried it. Her light footsteps came along behind them. Josh Morgan said: “Don’t take any chances. If anybody tried to kill you tonight he’ll try again.”
Nothing that had happened since the storm began seemed real; perhaps nothing that happened since the war began seemed real. Yet all of it had happened. If the murderous attack upon her in the darkness and fog was connected with the tiny, sinister lifeboat from the Lerida and its occupants, then what about Mickey?
She knew that, with her, it was not an accident; someone had actually been there. Josh Morgan had come barely in time to save her, as perhaps she had approached barely in time to save Mickey. For it could not have been accident with Mickey either. The ugly resemblance was too close—darkness, fog, a slippery deck. A sudden murderous attack, so sudden and so stealthy that for Mickey there was not even the split second of warning that she had had.
She said: “I have to see André. Now...”
The nurse was coming nearer. All around them lay the hushed ship; they neared a bisecting passage. Josh said in a low tone: “Messac was given a stateroom on the deck above your cabin and forward, on the port side—three doors this side of the officers’ lounge.”
7
He left them both at the door of the cabin. Marcia herself would not have been able to find it; the narrow gray passage looked to Marcia exactly like every other. The nurse, however, knew the ship probably as she knew the palm of her hand. She led them along intersecting passages, through doors, across an entrance to a ward, into another passage and another, stopped before one of the closed doors that lined it, and opened the door briskly. The interior of the cabin was dark.
Josh Morgan said briefly: “Sleep well,” took his cap from the nurse and went away.
The nurse put the coat over Marcia’s arm. “Are you sure you’re all right, Miss Colfax? Or shall I stay?”
“No, no. Thank you. You’ve been very good. I’m keeping you from other things.”
“I’m on night watch. So I’ll go along and get my supper before I go back to my ward. Two other nurses are on duty there and two corpsmen. We take turns in going down for supper. If you’re sure there’s nothing I can do for you...”
“No, thank you.”
The nurse smiled briefly, turned away and Marcia entered the cabin.
She closed the door. She’d wait until the nurse was out of sight and then find her way to Mickey’s cabin.
Where were the lights? The other nurse, Lieutenant Stoddard, had said that Gili and Daisy Belle Cates shared the cabin with her. It occurred to her that they must be already in their bunks in the tiny room, and already asleep, for neither of them spoke to her.
It would be better simply to wait for a few minutes, until she was quite sure the nurse had gone and then slip out again without turning on the light and rousing Gili or Daisy Belle or both. She wondered what time it was. Something about the ship, the hushed atmosphere, the quiet empty stretches of corridors and closed doors had given her a sense of lateness. The nurse had spoken of supper. That would be, she supposed, about midnight, as in a hospital.
There was no sound except the distant throb of engines and the rush of water beyond some open port. She waited, her hand on the round knob of the door, listening, because in the darkness one does listen, and counting. In two minutes, when she had counted twice sixty seconds, it would be safe to leave the cabin without being observed by the nurse.
She had reached thirty when an odd thing happened. She had heard no sound except the mingled sounds of a ship at night. Certainly she heard no footstep in the corridor outside, but the handle of the door turned under her fingers.
It turned very quietly and very steadily. Unconsciously her own hand tightened, resisting that pressure. For an instant there was a queer small combat, silent and quiet, one pressure against the other. Then, as suddenly and as silently as it had begun, that stealthy, steady pressure stopped.
She knew when the hand outside relinquished its hold, for the handle gave to her own. Her heart was pounding so heavily that she could near nothing else.
If anybody tried to kill you tonight, he’ll try again. Josh Morgan had said that only a few minutes ago.
But she was safe here, inside the ship with all its lights, with all the nurses and corpsmen and doctors awake and going about their tasks. With Daisy Belle and Gili in the cabin, so she could call them.
Were they in the cabin?
Her fingers still gripped the handle of the door as if frozen. She scrabbled along the wall with her other hand and touched a switch and the cabin sprang into light and nobody was there.
The bunks were made up, flat and neat. Night clothes borrowed from the wards, men’s pajamas and men’s crimson bathrobes, lay across each bunk above the neatly folded blankets.
Where was Gili, then? Where was Daisy Belle Cates? And who had turned that handle so silently and so stealthily, and then, aware of her own resisting hand, had stopped?
If it had been Gili or Daisy Belle she’d have insisted, knocked, called out. Either of the other two women had a right to enter the cabin openly.
She must look into the corridor quickly. Already seconds had passed.
Again something Josh Morgan had said caught at her for an instant. “There’s a queer contagion about murder; perhaps it’s terror of being discovered, perhaps something else.”
But there was nothing she knew; nothing that could make her a danger or a threat to anyone. Yet she had not imagined the attack upon her in the shadow on deck. And she had not imagined that slow, furtive pressure on the handle of the door. Suppose someone knew that Gili and Daisy Belle were not there; suppose someone knew that she was alone in that tiny empty cabin.
She realized that thoughts like that alone were dangerous. You could think anything—yes, and fear anything, if you let yourself be conquered by such thoughts and such fears. She took a long breath and opened the door.
The passage was lighted and narrow and perfectly empty. No one moved anywhere along it; no one stepped furtively out of sight into some doorway; there was no sly flicker of motion anywhere.
There were doors all along the passage. She had an impression, although she was not then sure, that the cabin was in a section of the ship reserved for women patients, military or Red Cross workers, and that it adjoined or was in the same section with the nurses’ quarters. In any event the doors were closed and no one was there.
She would go to Mickey.
She dropped the coat on a chair and then, leaving the lights on, closed the door quietly behind her and started along the passage to the right, in the direction of the main, square corridor and the nearest stairs. Up on deck, Josh Morgan had said, on the port side, the third door this side of the officers’ lounge.
The ship seemed very large, after the tiny Portuguese ship, and again, very bewildering with its multiplicity of doors and passages. Any ship is at first confusing; but while passenger ships conform to a certain pattern, a hospital ship has its own pattern and to Marcia that pattern was new and strange. She knew that she was now in the forward portion of the ship, and that when she had entered the ship to find help for Mickey, she had been aft. There were offices here too, but this forward passage seemed to be a lively and frequented portion of the ship. She came out into the lobby, and there were bulletin boards, a divan, a door opening upon a lounge, heavy doors at each side leading to the deck. The offices here were not quite deserted, even at night. From somewhere along a lighted corridor branching likewise from the main corridor, but back along the port side, came the subdued sound of some machine, a typewriter or a teletype, working away in the night.
It was a heartening small sound, indicating the presence of other people.
The Magnolia appeared to be a converted passenger liner. A closed wide desk opposite Marcia was like the desk of the purser; the cabins were exact duplicates of small passenger staterooms; probably most of them had been torn out to make wards; the large salons and lounges would have been easily adaptable as wards. It was now literally a floating hospital.
All hospitals at night have a certain atmosphere, a hush and stillness, indefinable yet almost tangible. It touched her now, so she thought, climbing the stairs, what feet have climbed these stairs, what hands have slid over this railing, what hopes and fears and tangled human destinies have lived for the space of a voyage within these solid bulkheads? Only a hospital ship was different in that the patients were soldiers, men who had gone to war in order to give people like her and Mickey a chance to live in peace and freedom.
She reached the top of the stairs. The port side, Josh Morgan had said, and forward.
She turned, moving very quietly as one does in a hospital at night. There was a faint, clean hospital smell of antiseptics and medicine and soap. Through a distant opening she caught another glimpse of a night-lighted ward. Two corpsmen in white were standing in the light of a doorway near at hand, drinking coffee. Beyond them a nurse put a capped head from a ward office and glanced at her questioningly. She had a field jacket and the chart the small envelope contained in her hand. Marcia turned again, crossed to the left, found a narrow, lighted passage there and went along it.
There were again rows of closed doors, and at the very end of the passage an open doorway and a lighted room beyond showing red lounge chairs and a table stacked with magazines. This then, must be the officers’ lounge, so Mickey’s cabin was very near. She walked on lightly, but Josh Morgan apparently heard her footsteps. He appeared in the doorway of the officers’ lounge, put down a cigarette quickly and came toward her. He’d changed to pajamas and the crimson bathrobe in which she had first seen him; one sleeve of the bathrobe hung empty. “I was waiting for you,” he said. “Messac’s room is here.” He knocked at one of the narrow gray doors.
For an odd, fleeting instant their punctiliousness seemed too polite and too formal. Then Marcia caught the fractional grin they exchanged. Ranking officers probably conceded certain privileges to each other. Captain Svendsen rubbed his forehead impatiently again. He said: “If anybody had been there, Colonel Morgan, could he have heard you coming along the deck from that direction?”
“I suppose so, sir. Or he could have seen me. I was silhouetted, I imagine, against the lighted portion of the deck. The fog made everything rather hazy.”
“But you didn’t actually hear or see anybody escape?”
“No, Captain. It’s as I said: I only thought somebody had slipped and been hurt. Then I realized it was Miss Colfax and helped her inside. Major Strong took care of her and I went to find Messac. Major Strong joined me and we got Messac to his cabin.”
“In all that time did you see anybody else on deck?”
“Nobody.”
Captain Svendsen turned back to Marcia, his blue eyes very bright and blue in his broad, weathered face. “If anybody attacked you, Miss Colfax, it seems to me that almost certainly it was one of the people who were in the lifeboat with you. As I say, it is simply not possible to check on the exact whereabouts at all times of everybody on the ship. Nevertheless, I cannot believe that any of the medical staff, any of the nurses, any of the ship’s complement, any patient could be involved in this. The trouble began when we brought the Lerida passengers aboard. I am convinced that one of them is responsible for it. You insist someone actually tried to murder you. So which one of the Lerida passengers was it?”
The light in the room seemed suddenly unbearable and too green. The cabinets and walls and instruments glittered too brightly. Marcia’s thoughts touched them all—Gili, Daisy Belle, Luther Cates, Mickey, two unknown seamen. None of them could conceivably have wished to murder her.
Yet murder had been done in the wildly pitching lifeboat, in the darkness and confusion, during that battle for life. Again she thought as the Captain obviously thought, that they had brought murder with them, an unseen and dreadful companion upon that ship.
But murder cannot exist alone, as an intangible, untetherable presence; it must have physical form.
She said slowly: “None of them could have done it. None of them...”
“Castiogne was murdered,” said the Captain, watching her.
“But there is no motive for anybody to wish to murder me. There is no one...”
“Yet you say it happened.”
“Yes, it happened.” She felt drained of strength, as if even her thoughts could not function reasonably and clearly. Josh Morgan put out his cigarette with a sudden gesture. He said: “By the way, Colonel, I suppose you took a look at Miss Colfax. If she was struck...”
Colonel Wells looked up quickly. “An excellent suggestion,” he said, and got up and came to Marcia. “If you don’t mind,” he said kindly and tipped her head back, turning her so the light from the green-shaded lamp fell strongly upon her. Again she was aware of the tensity of the silence in the shining little room and of the faraway vibration of engines. The motion of the ship was slower and yet heavy. Josh Morgan had taken a quick step or two nearer and was looking too, carefully, down into her face. Colonel Wells touched her chin and temples lightly. “Does that hurt? Did you strike your head here—here...”
She could remember only that swift knowledge of motion somewhere near her, and then a crash and roar as if of water, and blackness. “I don’t know. I don’t know....No, it doesn’t hurt.”
His sensitive, professional hands explored deftly, pushing back her hair, tilting her head again so he could observe her throat. The nurse’s coat that had been loaned her lay across the end of the cot, its scarlet lining bold and gay. The doctor pushed the crisp collar of the nurse’s uniform back from her throat and looked for a long moment. Finally, he said: “It’s hard to tell. Were you wearing a coat?”
“Yes.”
“Does this hurt—or this...?” Again his deft fingers moved delicately over her.
“No—no...”
“The sedative would have dulled any pain. The coat would have protected the flesh.”
Captain Svendsen said rather gruffly: “Well...”Josh Morgan turned abruptly away. Colonel Wells, a queer, thoughtful look on his thin face, gently replaced the uniform and turned to Captain Svendsen. She could not see his face. He said: “I think Miss Colfax might take another sedative. Will you see to it, Lieutenant?” He glanced at the nurse, who nodded, her face as still and unreadable as the wall. “And the nurse will see her to her cabin. I’ll just go along with you to the bridge, if you don’t mind, Captain. I know you’re anxious to get back....”
Josh Morgan said rather suddenly: “I’ll turn in, too, I think, sir. Do you mind if I stroll along with Miss Colfax and the Lieutenant?” Captain Svendsen got heavily to his feet and picked up his oilskins. “We’ll have some coffee sent up,” he said. “I’ve got to stay on the bridge the rest of the night. I’ve not run into a fog like this since the summer of 1936. After you, Colonel...”
But the Colonel carefully waited for the Captain to precede him out of the dispensary. This was his department, his courteous and formal manner seemed to say. The ship’s administration was the Captain’s. The young nurse said pleasantly: “Here’s another pill, Miss Colfax. You might take it now. I’ll get some water.”
Colonel Wells glanced back from the doorway. “Good night, Miss Colfax. Try to sleep. If you need anything, Lieutenant Hale will be glad to help you.”
He disappeared behind the Captain. The nurse—Lieutenant Hale—turned on a faucet across the room. Josh Morgan waited without speaking as the nurse came back and held the glass and another small white pill toward Marcia. She took both automatically.
“Thank you.” She handed the glass back to the nurse. There were no mirrors in the room. She said to Josh Morgan: ‘There are marks on my throat.”
Josh Morgan glanced at the nurse, who quickly said: “Now, now, Miss Colfax, don’t try to talk. We want you to get some rest.”
Marcia got up unsteadily, as the ship rolled, so Josh, who was nearest, put out his good arm to support her. She said, looking up into his face: “Tell me...”
Lieutenant Hale, her uniform rustling crisply, bent to pick up the redlined coat and went to the door and turned the latch on the lock. Josh Morgan said: “What do you know about that affair last night?”
“That...”
“The murder of Alfred Castiogne.”
“I know nothing of it....”
“You see, if you do know something, something that might be evidence against the murderer, somebody might try pretty damned hard to push you into the sea.”
Again the deep vibration of engines, chugging slowly along through fog and heavy, hidden seas, seemed to fill the small room. Lieutenant Hale, her face disapproving yet intent, tried the latch to be sure the lock was turned. Josh Morgan was so close that she could see the bright dark pupils of his eyes, the few scattered gray hairs in the vigorous black over his temples. He said slowly: “You could have hurt yourself, accidentally, so as to make a red mark there. Or hands could have...”
Lieutenant Hale said rather sharply: “I beg your pardon, Colonel. My orders are to see Miss Colfax to her cabin.”
“You are quite right, I’m sure, Lieutenant. We’ll go at once. Would you be kind enough to pick up my cap? I’ll help Miss Colfax.”
His brown cap with its leather strap lay on the examining table. The nurse took it up, waited for them to go into the hall, straightened the blanket over the cot, turned out the light and followed them, closing the door and trying it to be sure she had locked it.
All that took a few seconds. They were perhaps ten paces ahead of her along the narrow, lighted passageway when she emerged. Josh Morgan, holding Marcia steadily with his left arm, said in a low voice which the nurse could not possibly have heard: “There’s a queer contagion about murder. Perhaps it is terror of being discovered; perhaps it’s—something else. The man last night was murdered. You were in the lifeboat when he was killed. Captain Svendsen and Colonel Wells are very able men. They’ll do things their own way. We’ll know about it after they’ve acted. That’s the army and that’s sea discipline. But if somebody tried to kill you tonight...”
He stopped, and they could hear the click of the latch behind them as the nurse tried it. Her light footsteps came along behind them. Josh Morgan said: “Don’t take any chances. If anybody tried to kill you tonight he’ll try again.”
Nothing that had happened since the storm began seemed real; perhaps nothing that happened since the war began seemed real. Yet all of it had happened. If the murderous attack upon her in the darkness and fog was connected with the tiny, sinister lifeboat from the Lerida and its occupants, then what about Mickey?
She knew that, with her, it was not an accident; someone had actually been there. Josh Morgan had come barely in time to save her, as perhaps she had approached barely in time to save Mickey. For it could not have been accident with Mickey either. The ugly resemblance was too close—darkness, fog, a slippery deck. A sudden murderous attack, so sudden and so stealthy that for Mickey there was not even the split second of warning that she had had.
She said: “I have to see André. Now...”
The nurse was coming nearer. All around them lay the hushed ship; they neared a bisecting passage. Josh said in a low tone: “Messac was given a stateroom on the deck above your cabin and forward, on the port side—three doors this side of the officers’ lounge.”
7
He left them both at the door of the cabin. Marcia herself would not have been able to find it; the narrow gray passage looked to Marcia exactly like every other. The nurse, however, knew the ship probably as she knew the palm of her hand. She led them along intersecting passages, through doors, across an entrance to a ward, into another passage and another, stopped before one of the closed doors that lined it, and opened the door briskly. The interior of the cabin was dark.
Josh Morgan said briefly: “Sleep well,” took his cap from the nurse and went away.
The nurse put the coat over Marcia’s arm. “Are you sure you’re all right, Miss Colfax? Or shall I stay?”
“No, no. Thank you. You’ve been very good. I’m keeping you from other things.”
“I’m on night watch. So I’ll go along and get my supper before I go back to my ward. Two other nurses are on duty there and two corpsmen. We take turns in going down for supper. If you’re sure there’s nothing I can do for you...”
“No, thank you.”
The nurse smiled briefly, turned away and Marcia entered the cabin.
She closed the door. She’d wait until the nurse was out of sight and then find her way to Mickey’s cabin.
Where were the lights? The other nurse, Lieutenant Stoddard, had said that Gili and Daisy Belle Cates shared the cabin with her. It occurred to her that they must be already in their bunks in the tiny room, and already asleep, for neither of them spoke to her.
It would be better simply to wait for a few minutes, until she was quite sure the nurse had gone and then slip out again without turning on the light and rousing Gili or Daisy Belle or both. She wondered what time it was. Something about the ship, the hushed atmosphere, the quiet empty stretches of corridors and closed doors had given her a sense of lateness. The nurse had spoken of supper. That would be, she supposed, about midnight, as in a hospital.
There was no sound except the distant throb of engines and the rush of water beyond some open port. She waited, her hand on the round knob of the door, listening, because in the darkness one does listen, and counting. In two minutes, when she had counted twice sixty seconds, it would be safe to leave the cabin without being observed by the nurse.
She had reached thirty when an odd thing happened. She had heard no sound except the mingled sounds of a ship at night. Certainly she heard no footstep in the corridor outside, but the handle of the door turned under her fingers.
It turned very quietly and very steadily. Unconsciously her own hand tightened, resisting that pressure. For an instant there was a queer small combat, silent and quiet, one pressure against the other. Then, as suddenly and as silently as it had begun, that stealthy, steady pressure stopped.
She knew when the hand outside relinquished its hold, for the handle gave to her own. Her heart was pounding so heavily that she could near nothing else.
If anybody tried to kill you tonight, he’ll try again. Josh Morgan had said that only a few minutes ago.
But she was safe here, inside the ship with all its lights, with all the nurses and corpsmen and doctors awake and going about their tasks. With Daisy Belle and Gili in the cabin, so she could call them.
Were they in the cabin?
Her fingers still gripped the handle of the door as if frozen. She scrabbled along the wall with her other hand and touched a switch and the cabin sprang into light and nobody was there.
The bunks were made up, flat and neat. Night clothes borrowed from the wards, men’s pajamas and men’s crimson bathrobes, lay across each bunk above the neatly folded blankets.
Where was Gili, then? Where was Daisy Belle Cates? And who had turned that handle so silently and so stealthily, and then, aware of her own resisting hand, had stopped?
If it had been Gili or Daisy Belle she’d have insisted, knocked, called out. Either of the other two women had a right to enter the cabin openly.
She must look into the corridor quickly. Already seconds had passed.
Again something Josh Morgan had said caught at her for an instant. “There’s a queer contagion about murder; perhaps it’s terror of being discovered, perhaps something else.”
But there was nothing she knew; nothing that could make her a danger or a threat to anyone. Yet she had not imagined the attack upon her in the shadow on deck. And she had not imagined that slow, furtive pressure on the handle of the door. Suppose someone knew that Gili and Daisy Belle were not there; suppose someone knew that she was alone in that tiny empty cabin.
She realized that thoughts like that alone were dangerous. You could think anything—yes, and fear anything, if you let yourself be conquered by such thoughts and such fears. She took a long breath and opened the door.
The passage was lighted and narrow and perfectly empty. No one moved anywhere along it; no one stepped furtively out of sight into some doorway; there was no sly flicker of motion anywhere.
There were doors all along the passage. She had an impression, although she was not then sure, that the cabin was in a section of the ship reserved for women patients, military or Red Cross workers, and that it adjoined or was in the same section with the nurses’ quarters. In any event the doors were closed and no one was there.
She would go to Mickey.
She dropped the coat on a chair and then, leaving the lights on, closed the door quietly behind her and started along the passage to the right, in the direction of the main, square corridor and the nearest stairs. Up on deck, Josh Morgan had said, on the port side, the third door this side of the officers’ lounge.
The ship seemed very large, after the tiny Portuguese ship, and again, very bewildering with its multiplicity of doors and passages. Any ship is at first confusing; but while passenger ships conform to a certain pattern, a hospital ship has its own pattern and to Marcia that pattern was new and strange. She knew that she was now in the forward portion of the ship, and that when she had entered the ship to find help for Mickey, she had been aft. There were offices here too, but this forward passage seemed to be a lively and frequented portion of the ship. She came out into the lobby, and there were bulletin boards, a divan, a door opening upon a lounge, heavy doors at each side leading to the deck. The offices here were not quite deserted, even at night. From somewhere along a lighted corridor branching likewise from the main corridor, but back along the port side, came the subdued sound of some machine, a typewriter or a teletype, working away in the night.
It was a heartening small sound, indicating the presence of other people.
The Magnolia appeared to be a converted passenger liner. A closed wide desk opposite Marcia was like the desk of the purser; the cabins were exact duplicates of small passenger staterooms; probably most of them had been torn out to make wards; the large salons and lounges would have been easily adaptable as wards. It was now literally a floating hospital.
All hospitals at night have a certain atmosphere, a hush and stillness, indefinable yet almost tangible. It touched her now, so she thought, climbing the stairs, what feet have climbed these stairs, what hands have slid over this railing, what hopes and fears and tangled human destinies have lived for the space of a voyage within these solid bulkheads? Only a hospital ship was different in that the patients were soldiers, men who had gone to war in order to give people like her and Mickey a chance to live in peace and freedom.
She reached the top of the stairs. The port side, Josh Morgan had said, and forward.
She turned, moving very quietly as one does in a hospital at night. There was a faint, clean hospital smell of antiseptics and medicine and soap. Through a distant opening she caught another glimpse of a night-lighted ward. Two corpsmen in white were standing in the light of a doorway near at hand, drinking coffee. Beyond them a nurse put a capped head from a ward office and glanced at her questioningly. She had a field jacket and the chart the small envelope contained in her hand. Marcia turned again, crossed to the left, found a narrow, lighted passage there and went along it.
There were again rows of closed doors, and at the very end of the passage an open doorway and a lighted room beyond showing red lounge chairs and a table stacked with magazines. This then, must be the officers’ lounge, so Mickey’s cabin was very near. She walked on lightly, but Josh Morgan apparently heard her footsteps. He appeared in the doorway of the officers’ lounge, put down a cigarette quickly and came toward her. He’d changed to pajamas and the crimson bathrobe in which she had first seen him; one sleeve of the bathrobe hung empty. “I was waiting for you,” he said. “Messac’s room is here.” He knocked at one of the narrow gray doors.
