The coastguard knew me.
'Come to see the fun, Mrs de Winter?' he said smiling.
'I'm afraid it will be a hard job.
The tugs may shift her, but I doubt it.
She's hard and fast where she is on that ledge.'
'What will they do?' I said.
'They'll send a diver down directly to see if she's broken her back,' he replied.
'There's the fellow there in the red stocking cap.
Like to see through these glasses?'
I took his glasses and looked at the ship.
I could see a group of men staring over her stern.
One of them was pointing at something.
The man in the lifeboat was still shouting through the megaphone.
The harbour-master from Kerrith had joined the group of men in the stern of the stranded ship.
The diver in his stocking cap was sitting in the grey motor boat belonging to the harbour-master.
The pleasure boat was still circling round the ship.
A woman was standing up taking a snapshot.
A group of gulls had settled on the water and were crying foolishly, hoping for scraps.
I gave the glasses back to the coastguard.
'Nothing seems to be happening,' I said.
'They'll send him down directly,' said the coastguard.
'They'll argue a bit first, like all foreigners.
Here come the tugs.'
'They'll never do it,' said Frank.
'Look at the angle she's lying at.
It's much shallower there than I thought.'
"That reef runs out quite a way,' said the coastguard; 'you don't notice it in the ordinary way, going over that piece of water in a small boat.
But a ship with her depth would touch all right.'
'I was down in the first cove by the valley when they fired the rockets,' said Frank. 'I could scarcely see three yards in front of me where I was.
And then the things went off out of the blue.'
I thought how alike people were in a moment of common interest.
Frank was Frith all over again, giving his version of the story, as though it mattered, as though we cared.
I knew that he had gone down to the beach to look for Maxim.
I knew that he had been frightened, as I had been.
And now all this was forgotten and put aside: our conversation down the telephone, our mutual anxiety, his insistence that he must see me.
All because a ship had gone ashore in the fog.
A small boy came running up to us.
'Will the sailors be drowned?' he asked.
'Not them.
They're all right, sonny,' said the coastguard.
"The sea's as flat as the back of my hand.
No one's going to be hurt this time.'
'If it had happened last night we should never have heard them,' said Frank.
'We must have let off more than fifty rockets at our show, beside all the smaller things.'
'We'd have heard all right,' said the coastguard.
'We'd have seen the flash and known the direction.
There's the diver, Mrs de Winter.
See him putting on his helmet?'
'I want to see the diver,' said the small boy.
'There he is,' said Frank, bending and pointing — 'that chap there putting on the helmet.