The cabin door was opened. Captain Jansen's comfortable bearded face appeared, “Yes, 'm. But he yump for das boat. He gone ofer.”
“Yes'm. But I got das boat mit un grapple.”
We all emerged on the warm night, on the moonlit deck. The women had donned their shawls. This was the situation.
Ram Nad's misshaped and kilted canoe was held fast, and one end lifted from the water by a grappling-iron, at which a sailor was tugging with a rope over the rail. The two black heads of his rowers were just above the water at some distance, moving hastily shoreward, their wakes shining in the moonlight. Ram Nad was nowhere in sight. Susannah stood on deck, the watchman forward sat stiff and motionless--both of them rigid, frozen, mesmerised, wrapped up in his or her inner consciousness like a ball of yarn.
“There!” said Mrs. Ulswater. “He didn't get Susannah. Doctor, we must go away from this place. I don't like it.”
“We can weigh anchor,” I said, “surely, now as well as any time. But, my dear, as to these ossified unfortunates, I don't quite see. I'm no Ph. D. Mahatma, nor yet a brindle cat, hell-broth witch. It's mortifying, but that's my limit. I'm not on to Ram Nad's spoon motion, nor yet his lullaby. Hadn't we better wait and find another magician that knows how to untwist the charm? Because Ram Nad appears to be drowned, and these two, according to my notion, are, as you might say, tied up particularly tight.”
Mrs. Ulswater tried to wake Susannah, but could not. She was indignant. She thought that I treated the subject too lightly, in language I ought to be ashamed of, that there was nothing funny about it. Maybe not. I gave it up. I thought the situation was not without a certain sepulchral but natural gayety.
“Ashamed” I take to be a vertebrate condition. I never could fetch it. It's left out of me. I've got no centre of personality, no angles to my circumference on which to hitch a conviction of sin, never could seem to get hold of that kind of embarrassment. Calling myself a series of conventionally derogatory and ineffective names is the nearest I can come to remorse. But speaking impersonally, no doubt Mrs. Ulswater was right.
At this point Captain Jansen called: “He's yump in! Yes, 'm. He's yump!”