Read And the Deep Blue Sea for Free Online

need it. Even exhausted, barefoot, naked from the waist up, with water draining off him and his face covered with a week’s stubble of beard, he was an imposing figure and stamped with the competent look of a man who could take care of himself.
    “Good show, Mrs. Brooke.” The two women turned. It was Mr. Egerton, coming down the ladder from the deck above to join them.
    He was the passenger in Cabin G, a lean, erect man in his sixties with a gray moustache and gray hair, against which the black eye patch was undoubtedly dramatic but, to Karen, somehow vaguely theatrical, as though he had set out to contrive the effect. This was unfair, of course, and she realized that part of it was the clipped British accent, the occasional use of military terms, and expressions like that same “good show.” If you were a retired English army officer who had lost an eye somewhere, you could hardly be blamed if this were exactly the way a not very imaginative actor would play the part. He kept to his cabin a good deal of the time and seldom came to breakfast or lunch, so she didn’t know him very well, but he had beautiful manners and was an urbane and interesting dinner companion.
    “The second officer informs me you were the heroine of the affair,” he went on. “Bit of good fortune for the chap that you were up and about, what?”
    Karen caught the swift glance from Madeleine Lennox. The older woman recovered instantly, however, and exclaimed, “Darling, you mean you were the one who saw him? And you didn’t tell me?”
    “It was just an accident,” Karen replied. “I woke up when the engine stopped and went up on the boat deck to look at the stars.” Does that do it, dear? She went on to tell how she sighted the raft at the moment it was in the path of moonlight. Down in the well-deck, Mr. Lind and a seaman were helping the man toward the ladder. “I wish somebody would come up and tell us something .”
    There was a shuddering vibration of the deck then as the Leander engine went full ahead. She began to move. Karen glanced off to starboard where the flare was still burning in the darkness, starting to drift slowly astern now as they went off and left it in the vastness of the Pacific. She shivered, thinking of being out there alone on a raft and seeing the ship moving away.
    Just as she started to turn back, she became aware of the figure standing at the corner of the deckhouse. It was Mr.—what was his name—Krasuscki? No, Krasicki, she corrected herself. He was the passenger in Cabin H, but she had seen him only two or three times because of the illness that had kept him confined nearly ever since their departure from Callao. He was wearing pajamas and a heavy flannel robe, and he did look ill, she thought, with the hollow, almost cadaverous face and the feverish brightness of the eyes. She started to speak to him, but paused, struck by the strangeness of his behavior. Stock still except for a nervous twitching at the corner of his mouth, he was staring past her at Walter Egerton.
    Egerton turned then, and saw him. Krasicki continued to stare into his face with the same unwavering intensity for another two or three seconds, then wheeled and went back around the corner.
    Egerton glanced at Karen, apparently puzzled. “I say, that must be our fellow-passenger. Does seem a spot feverish, doesn’t he?”
    She nodded. It was odd, but entirely possible under the circumstances; they had been aboard the ship for six days now, but this was the first time they had seen each other. But why had Krasicki stared that way? It wasn’t simply ill-mannered, she thought; there’d been a trace of madness in it, or the horror of a man seeing a ghost.

III
    I T WAS CALLED THE hospital but it was only a spare room on the lower deck that had originally housed the gun crew when the Leander was built and put into service toward the end of World War II. It contained four bunks, a washbasin, some metal lockers, and a small desk. Naked and