In Hazard Read Online Free Page A

stop. It arrived in glass jars, each holding a gallon: so there was plenty.
    Presently she told Dick she had a cat so smart that it first ate cheese and then breathed down the mouseholes—with baited breath—to entice the creatures out. Her eyes were getting very wild: and sometimes, as she lay in Dick’s arm, she shivered. Dick did not try to talk to her much: but he enjoyed her being there. His own head was a little giddy, and the party seemed to advance and recede, and was difficult to listen to. But Sukie, by then, must have drunk quite a pint of the bootleg liquor neat, which is a lot for a girl of sixteen: and in time it took hold of her altogether. She suddenly struggled out of his arms, and sprang to her feet. Her eyes, wider than ever, did not seem to see anybody, even him. She wrenched at her shoulder-straps and a string or two, and in a moment every stitch of clothing she had was gone off her. For a few seconds she stood there, her body stark naked. Dick had never seen anything like it before. Then she fell unconscious on the floor.
    Dick set down his own drink suddenly, a wilder intoxication thumping in his ribs. She had been lovely in her clothes, but she was far more lovely like this, fallen in a posture as supple as a pool; all that white skin; her forlorn little face, with its closed eyes, puckered already in the incipient distress of nausea. Suddenly Dick realised that everyone else had left the room: and as suddenly he realised that he loved this girl more than heaven and earth. With shaking hands he rolled her in the hearth-rug, for fear she should catch cold: made her as comfortable as he could on a sofa; and returned, shaking, to his ship.
    For hours he lay awake, quite unable even to dim the vivid picture in his inward eye of Sukie’s drunken innocence. But at last he fell asleep, her lovely face and her naked body flickering in his dreams. And then presently he was awakened by feeling his heavy lids lifted by thin little fingers, and found himself staring, through the texture of his dream, into large, anxious, luminous eyes, only an inch from his own; eyes that were not Sukie’s. He bashed at the electric light switch in a panic.
    It was Thomas, with his soft fur and his big tail, hopping away on his unnaturally elongated feet, nervously folding and unfolding his ears.
    The next night, the night before their departure for Colon and the Panama Canal, Captain Edwardes gave a party on board, with dancing to a gramophone. The gramophone belonged to Mr. Foster, the Second Mate. The ladies were friends of the Captain’s: relatives of the company’s agent chiefly, or of the shippers. They were picked by the dictates of duty. None of them were young, and none beautiful: and not being aristocratic like Dick’s friends, they behaved with a strict but slightly coarse decorum. Captain Edwardes himself, Mr. Buxton, and Mr. MacDonald, were as happy and as flirtatious as children, and the dance went on till very late—till nearly half past eleven.
    The only officer who did not take part was Mr. Rabb. Mr. Rabb did not belong in the “Archimedes”: he was down as a Supernumerary Officer, not as a numbered mate. He really belonged to the “Descartes”—another of the Sage Line’s fleet of philosophers: and was to be landed at Colon to join her.
    Mr. Rabb was a strict Christian, and did not really approve of dancing under any conditions. But especially he thought it wrong on the part of senior officers with impressionable young juniors in their charge. Apart from the four apprentices, who were still boys, there was Dick Watchett, for instance. To dance with these ladies might well arouse in him those very passions from which a life at sea was intended by God as a refuge. Watchett showed very little outward sign of being inflamed by holding any of these partners in his arms; yet it was against nature that he should in fact not be—who knew that better than Mr.