The Poseidon Adventure (13 page)

Belle Rosen was sitting up, her husband kneeling with arms protectively about her and she was sobbing uncontrollably.

'Na na! Mamma,' he was comforting. 'Don't take on so. It's all over. You done it.'

'I'm so ashamed,' she wailed. 'I'm so ashamed!'

Ashamed?' Rosen said, 'Ashamed from what? You were great. What you got to be ashamed about?'

'I wet myself,' she went on, 'I couldn't help it. I couldn't look nobody in the face any more. Like a baby I couldn't hold my water. What must anybody think?'

'Nothing, Mamma! Nonsense! So what? Who cares? But you were great! I'm telling you, you were great.' And then looking around almost defiantly at the others, he challenged them, 'She was great, wasn't she? Really great!'

Astonishingly it was the dry as dust, uncommunicative little Martin who gave the response, 'Yeah,' he said, 'that's right. You were really great, Mrs Rosen.'

CHAPTER X

Broadway

Broadway, it developed, was not only the wide, subterranean connecting alley that Acre had described to them, it was as well a warren of storerooms, butcher's shops, poultry refrigerators, bakeries and stockrooms for every kind of comestible. Numerous staircases and alleyways opened off it at intervals.

On a normal visit, one would have encountered store-keepers, masters-at-arms, sailors, bakers with flour-dusted arms, stewards, waiters, men from the paint and carpenter's shops, engineers, wipers, oilers and technicians when the watch in the engine and boiler rooms changed, all going about their business with the minimum of confusion. Only now it was bottom-side up. There had been catastrophe, explosion and sudden death and the survivors amongst the staff were looking for escape.

They knew one another more or less, or could identify by dress, but they did not know the passengers who now intruded into their domain, a strange group led by a huge man in a white, open-necked shirt with a most motley-looking assemblage of women with torn frocks, a girl in a pink négligée and another in bra and panties.

Nor was this group, even when identified as passengers, any concern of the denizens of this area. Their jobs were to serve them unseen, to bake bread, to turn lamb into paper-frilled French chops or garlic-stuffed gigots, to beat up eggs for soufflés and produce whisky, beer and wine in exchange for chits noting receipt of same. From the first throb of the ship's engines after casting off to the final shouts of the dockers seizing ropes and drawing cables to bollards, most of them never so much as saw a passenger or cared. The Reverend Scott and his party were in a land as alien as visited by any Gulliver.

After the solitude of 'D' deck and the strain of the climb, it seemed as though the presence of people inhabiting Broadway would come as something of a relief. Instead it turned out to be more of a nightmare. For as Scott led them astern once more and they moved away from the staircase, the place took on the aspect of purgatory, with people milling about mindlessly. Some of them were drunk, weaving and staggering on the uncertain footing, for the steel conduits here covered the width of the alley; they were larger and contained more valves, turns and pitfalls.

There was one officer amongst them. His face was covered with dried blood from a head wound; the shoulder where his uniform had been ripped away was likewise bleeding. He wore the three stripes of a second engineer on the remaining sleeve. But he had no answers to their questions. His eyes were vacant and when he opened his mouth to try to speak, no sounds were forthcoming. The best that Jane Shelby, Miss Kinsale and Susan could do for him was to sit him down, staunch his bleeding with the napkins they had carried and keep him from his stunned, aimless wandering.

They found momentary contact with two English stewardesses less panicked than the others who, recognizing them, returned for a moment to that British discipline instilled in them on the voyages they had made with the Poseidon when she had been the Atlantis. One of them addressed herself to Jane Shelby saying, 'Oh, madam, ain't it terrible! We don't know what's really happened, or where we are, or how many's been killed. There's an awful lot badly hurt. Are you all right, madam? Is there anything we can do for you?'

Jane felt the pathos. These frightened women so much more needed something done for them than in their state they could ever do for anyone else.

'No, thank you,' Jane Shelby said, 'look after yourselves and your friends.'

The woman was pathetically relieved. She said, 'Yes, madam, that's what we're trying to do. But there ought to be an officer along in a moment. He'll show you how to get to your lifeboat stations. There ought to be lifeboats launched by now.'

There was no use in telling them that the lifeboats, still attached to their davits, would be fifty feet below the waterline and if any had broken loose, or inflatable life-rafts had come to the surface, they would be drifting about aimlessly with at the most perhaps, a surviving sailor or two catapulted from the top deck into the sea, unable to do more than bewilderedly cling to them.

'Yes, I'm sure there will,' Jane said. Her husband marvelled at her control.

The stewardess said, 'We're supposed to go to our posts, but we can't find them,' and then moved away with the others.

Shelby himself had to pull himself together and not succumb to the sickening, almost childlike fear that he was no longer alive; that he was dead and in hell. For the men passed them by as though they were not there, sometimes brushing up against them as if they had been invisible. And indeed, in the gloom it was difficult to distinguish, and had he not been so fearful, he would have noted that there was a considerable diminishing of light from the emergency bulbs.

A group of deckhands and artisans stumbled by. Hubie Muller had continued to try all the languages he knew and now hit upon two Italian artificers and talked with them.

Rogo said, 'Muller's got a hold of a couple of Ities,' and then addressing Hubie directly, 'Find out where the hell they think they're going.'

Scott queried, 'What did they say?'

'There's no use going that way,' Muller said, indicating the stern from whence the group had come, 'one said it's blocked off.
Punto di fermata. Caotico.
I gather it's chaos. One of the boilers blew up; two of the others just ripped loose and fell into the sea. It's the same in the engine room. You can't get through any more. He says the turbines and generators have torn away. He looked in there earlier and it's full of death. They're going to try to get through to the bow.'

Scott was unimpressed. He said, 'Tell them we're still going aft.'

Rogo spoke up angrily, 'Oh, are we? What about asking us? You heard what those guys said it was like. They seem to know what they're doing.' A short while before he had seemed resigned to Scott's leadership but the eerie atmosphere of the gloomy alley and the confusion there had unsettled him again.

Scott said evenly, 'If you want to join them, that's up to you. But, since when did you accept a situation on the say-so of somebody else without investigating?'

Linda cried, 'Don't let him talk you into it, Rogo. I want to go the other way.'

Rogo ordered, 'Aw, shut up for a minute, will you?' His truculence drained from him. He was a hard man but out of his element. He was a big shot in New York -- Mike Rogo. Here he was nobody. . . . He hated Scott for it but he hated himself, too. For he knew that basically the Minister was right: once you were committed to a line of action, you didn't go off half-cocked because of something you heard. To Scott he said, 'Okay, okay, keep your shirt On!'

Scott told Muller, 'Ask them if they want to come with us.'

It precipitated an argument. While it was going on, one man quite suddenly detached himself and came over to Scott's party. He was built like a wrestler; squat, powerfully muscled, semi-bald with a short scrubby moustache, but his dark eyes were strangely mild and gentle. He was clad in a pair of dungaree overalls, shirtless but with the straps fastened over broad shoulders. He had a huge mat of black hair covering his chest.

Ranged alongside Scott who loomed over him, he said, 'Me go you.'

This set off a gesticulating harangue to which the man paid not the slightest attention. Muller queried the Italians further and told Scott, 'He's a Turk, an oiler. He seems to have survived the engine room because they had sent him to get some cokes when it happened. His name is Kemal. He speaks Turkish and Greek but only a few words of English.'

At the mention of his name the man nodded his head vigorously and smiled, showing several gold teeth.

The Italian said to Muller, 'He's crazy! I think you're all crazy! Anyway, what difference does it make? We're all going to die.'

The group turned and moved away. Linda made as if to follow them. Rogo stretched out an arm and hooked two fingers into the waistband of her panties. Had she proceeded, they would have ripped off. She burst into tears, turned and beat upon Rogo's chest with her two fists. He made no resistance and seemed hardly to feel the blows. Eventually she stopped.

The lights were now noticeably dimmer. The ghostly population of Broadway at times surrounded them, at others melted away leaving the alley all but deserted as they searched for a way to escape, popping in and out of the side aisles, most of them unable to adjust to the new situation of their domain turned upside-down. They were bound by their old habits, unable to think clearly or compensate.

Robin Shelby said, 'Mother, I've got to go.'

'Oh lord!' his father cried, 'Must you?'

Jane said, 'Mustn't one?'

Shelby said, 'Yes, but where?'

'There ought to be one or two for the crew along here,' Muller remarked. 'They'll be marked W.C. But don't forget it'll be reversed.'

Scott said, 'Yes, that's right. And I suggest that if any other of you have similar needs, that you attend to them now. I'm going aft to see what it's like. I don't know how much longer this lighting is going to last. If they should go out, there'll be panic amongst these people here, if it happens all of you press to the side of the alley. Lie down. Cover your heads with your hands and remain exactly where you are. I'll find you, then, by voice.' He turned to the new member of the party and said, 'Come with me.'

The Turk grunted unquestioningly, 'Okay.'

Scott nodded and remarked, 'We're lucky. He'll know the engine room.'

Muller thought to himself: Lucky? Or was it something in Scott's dynamism that had communicated itself to this Turk? What had made this animal desert his own and suddenly decide to come and cast in his lot with them? He was a primitive, a peasant. What had he smelled? Was he marked for living or dying by his decision? Whichever, up to then Scott had been winning all the way.

Jane Shelby said to her son, 'Come on, Robin, we'll look.'

The looking part of it struck Jane Shelby as an absurdity in the face of the catastrophe in which they were involved, where life and death hung in the balance completely out of their control. The sensible thing would have been to have chosen some dark corner and ordered her son to squat. And yet she knew that for all of this she, too, was the victim of that human tendency to go on doing what they had been taught to do or what they were used to doing every day of their lives.

She reflected that even in war, under fire, latrines were built where a man who in every other detail was living like an animal might retire and eliminate in privacy. And so there they were, the two of them, trapped in the corridor of a capsized ship, remaining afloat by the grace of God knows what, searching for a brass plate with 'C' reversed, 'M' on it, the old-fashioned signal for that apparatus known in Victorian days as a water closet.

They were intelligent, thinking people now, familiar with the new architecture of their environment, yet each discovery came nevertheless as a shock and a renewal of that sinking of the stomach and feeling of helpless dismay.

'Oh, Mother!' Robin cried.

They regarded the upside-down urinals, six of them thrust out from the wall, close to the ceiling, like some ridiculous modern sculptural frieze. Similarly there were the toilet bowls emptied of any water, the hinged seats swinging down. The seal of incongruity upon it all was set by the festoons of the paper rolls that hung to the floor in broad ribbons.

'Mommy!' Robin wailed, 'I can't!' and he used the name for her that he had in his younger days, before he had graduated to the more grownup 'Mother'.

It made Jane think of those times too, and she replied, 'Oh come, you're not a baby any more. You must learn to take what comes and adapt yourself. People were using the ground long before anybody ever invented all that nonsense up there on the ceiling. And it was supposed to be much healthier, too.'

'Mother, I can't,' Robin protested. 'Not in there. It's all full of . . .' Others had been there before him.

'Well then, do it out here,' she said. 'It isn't going to make all that difference. But hurry.'

The boy still hung back and through her mind flashed the days and years of his toilet training to pot and seat and all the wonderful blessings of plumbing, and the thought that as a city-bred boy, even on visits to the country, he had probably never once squatted down behind a bush. What a marvelously sanitary world they had created.

'Then you go away, Mother,' he said.

'Oh, Robin!' Jane said, 'If you only knew the number of times I've officiated at this rite.'

'Mother, please!' the boy begged. 'I can't, I couldn't! You said I'm not a baby any more.'

Jane reproached herself. Of course he was not. And it was she who had moulded his habits. 'Oh, all right,' she said.

'And don't hang around,' Robin begged, 'I mean really go away. Is anybody coming?'

Jane looked into the alley but at this time it was almost deserted. She said, 'No. Very well then, hurry, Robin. I'll be with the others.'

Her instincts bade her remain just around the corner but her sense of fair play countered this and she walked up towards their party.

Miss Kinsale came forward to meet her with something on her mind. She said, 'Have -- have you found it? Dr Scott suggested that perhaps . . .'

Jane suppressed a smile and said, 'Yes, I have. But it's not fit for man nor beast. It's all gone topsy-turvy, you know.'