Voyage into Violence Read Online Free PDF Page A

guilt.
    â€œOh,” Pam said, “I wonder what we’ve done wrong?” She paused. Her eyes widened. “Do you suppose we’re on the wrong ship?” she asked the others. “Do something, Jerry,” she told Jerry, who looked at Bill Weigand, and Dorian, for alternative suggestions. “Just inside,” Dorian said. “A desk. Says ‘Purser’ on it.”
    Jerry said, “Oh, all right,” and got up and went.
    â€œWhatever in the—” Pam said, and did not finish. She was distracted; Hilda Macklin, who had long been in it, was coming sleek and glistening from the pool. She certainly had been wrong about Miss Macklin, Pam thought again. Why would she hide all that? Her mother, of course. Pam looked at Mrs. Macklin with disapproval. Mrs. Macklin’s black eyes were hidden by her sunglasses; possibly she was asleep.
    A darkly good-looking young man, in swimming trunks—a young man deeply browned, with extremely white teeth in a dark face—got up from a deck chair near the pool and started to walk among the chairs. His path intersected that of Hilda Macklin, bound away from the pool. He was—Pam was almost sure he was—the handsome young man who had (but had he really?) intercepted Hilda briefly, inconclusively, at the cocktail party. Now he was—
    But he was not; it was clear he was not. He stopped to let Hilda pass and now they were close enough to her for Pam to be sure that no sign of recognition passed between them. So—she had been wrong about that, also. It was more a pity than ever, now that Miss Macklin, viewed more fully, could very well do as Juliet. With, of course, a little lipstick. She and the dark young man, whose swimming trunks were white, would make a very nice-looking couple.
    Jerry North reappeared. His face was serious. It took even Pam a moment to realize that the seriousness was too heavily laid on. It was not like Jerry to shake his head dolefully; he should know it was not like him. But he managed a few portentous words. “It seems we’ve made a—” Jerry began, in a voice of moderate gloom. Pam looked at him.
    â€œAll right,” Jerry said. “Captain Cunningham’s compliments, and he would be pleased if we could join him for cocktails in his cabin before lunch. One-ish, the purser said. I said it sounded like a jolly-ish sort of do.”
    â€œYou didn’t,” Dorian said. “I surely hope you didn’t. ‘Jolly-ish,’ indeed.”
    â€œI said we’d be glad to,” Jerry said. “Taking it upon myself.”
    â€œCunningham?” Pam said, and answered her own question. There were information brochures in the cabins; Pam had read hers. “Oh,” she said. “The real captain. Captain Peter Cunningham, RNR.”
    Jerry agreed that it was the real captain.
    â€œYou’ll have to change your shirt,” Pam told him.…
    They had all changed their shirts, or the equivalents, when they went, one-ish, for cocktails with the captain (the real captain) of the Carib Queen . From the level of the sun deck, they went upward in an elevator labeled “Lift” and were released into a small foyer, where the captain’s steward met them. The captain’s steward was a rosy youth, immaculately white as to jacket. He ushered them up a short flight of steel stairs and into the quarters of Captain Peter Cunningham. And Captain Cunningham was as real a captain as anyone could wish.
    He was tall and lean and unassertively British. He had a long, tanned face and steady blue eyes; he was, Pam decided, precisely what Noel Coward had years before had in mind in that Navy picture during which Mr. Coward spent so much time under water. Captain Cunningham welcomed them to the most ship-shape of small sitting rooms. He was gravely cordial; if this mingling with selected passengers—and how, Pam wondered, selected—was in any sense a matter of duty,