In Hazard by Richard Hughes

down: and claustrophobia clawed at him till he nearly went mad. He must find some way to banish it. He must compel himself to think hard about something else. At first therefore he tried to think about God: but God slipped about, and was shadowy. His home likewise: that slipped about, and cheated him. There was only one thing brilliant enough to hold his mental eye, during that time of strain: Sukie’s body. He could hold that all right, he found. It was something brightly-lit and solid, among shadows.
    Presently, though, his thinking turned to a queer quirk: for the image of her nakedness began to take hold of his body as well as his mind. He was sad about this, in a way; because he knew that he could not love her as he believed he did, if he could think about her like that. Yet he deliberately continued. For his plight was so desperate: it was worth even spoiling his love, to keep himself sane.
    But at last one of the huge buffets, when the wind unsteadied after mid-night, released the jamming of his door, and he got out. The prolonged effort of imagination had left him weakened: and with an added cause for fear, in that he felt God could hardly favour him now. He went straight from his room to the saloon, without going on deck: and stayed there with the others, till the order came for them all to report on the Bridge.
    Thus his arrival on the Bridge had been his first contact with what the air was really doing now: he had not come to it gradually, as the others had.
    Even then he was all right up to the very last minute, when the Captain gave his orders; he was on the very point of following Mr. Buxton down the companion when that terrific thud, which tore loose the gangway, flung him suddenly on his hands and knees. The next thing happened in a moment: instead of crawling down the companion after the others he found he had, almost without knowing it, crawled into the wheelhouse to hide.
    He certainly did not know that Mr. Rabb had done the same.
    As for Mr. Rabb, he had gone straight there from the Chinese carpenter’s room. He was not really conscious any more. His actions were automatic as a sleep-walker’s, with the unswerving tenacity of purpose of pure instinct—like a shark snapping. He had been like that almost continuously, ever since he first gave in to his fear over the first attempt to mend the hatches.
    Now he crouched down in a corner, his face immobile, his eyes shut: while Thomas, with the absorption of a handicraftsman, his own nocturnal eyes glowing like lamps in the light of the torch, was endeavouring to pick those clamped eye-lids open again in vain.
    Captain Edwardes cuffed the little lemur away, as you would drive a vulture off a dead body. Then he paused a few seconds to conserve his strange new energy, which now must be used to re-inflate these two collapsed figures.
    â€œMr. Rabb,” he roared quietly: “Go aft and secure No. 6 hatch. Mr. Watchett, go forward and secure No. 2 with Mr. Buxton.”
    Mr. Rabb neither spoke nor moved; he did not seem to hear. But Mr. Watchett spoke.
    â€œI can’t, Sir,” he said miserably.
    â€œI don’t give orders that can’t be carried out, boy!” the Captain roared again, just as quietly. “You’ve got the wind-up, just for a moment. It’ll pass. It’ll pass, boy. Look, I’m going to count ten. When I say ten, you’ll be all right. When I say ten, you stand up on your two legs. Diawl! I know you’re all right, or I wouldn’t waste time on you. One, two, three ...”
    As he counted, he kept his torch on the faces of the two of them. Watchett looked at Rabb: and saw for the first time what Fear looks like: its bare aspect. Watchett was deadly afraid of the wind: but fear like Rabb’s, he saw, was something to be more afraid of than any wind. The clutches of the wind were the more tender.
    â€œâ€”Eight, nine ...”
    â€œSecure No. 2 with Mr. Buxton,” he repeated