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Elisha Cuthbert Photos Books: Martin Eden The Pickwick Papers The Sea Wolf |
were so desirous of
getting back on the steamer. The water was cold--so cold that it
was painful. The pang, as I plunged into it, was as quick and
sharp as that of fire. It bit to the marrow. It was like the grip
of death. I gasped with the anguish and shock of it, filling my
lungs before the life-preserver popped me to the surface. The
taste of the salt was strong in my mouth, and I was strangling with
the acrid stuff in my throat and lungs.
But it was the cold that was most distressing. I felt that I could
survive but a few minutes. People were struggling and floundering
in the water about me. I could hear them crying out to one
another. And I heard, also, the sound of oars. Evidently the
strange steamboat had lowered its boats. As the time went by I
marvelled that I was still alive. I had no sensation whatever in
my lower limbs, while a chilling numbness was wrapping about my
heart and creeping into it. Small waves, with spiteful foaming
crests, continually broke over me and into my mouth, sending me off
into more strangling paroxysms.
The noises grew indistinct, though I heard a final and despairing
chorus of screams in the distance, and knew that the Martinez had
gone down. Later,--how much later I have no knowledge,--I came to
myself with a start of fear. I was alone. I could hear no calls
or cries--only the sound of the waves, made weirdly hollow and
reverberant by the fog. A panic in a crowd, which partakes of a
sort of community of interest, is not so terrible as a panic when
one is by oneself; and such a panic I now suffered. Whither was I
drifting? The red-faced man had said that the tide was ebbing
through the Golden Gate. Was I, then, being carried out to sea?
And the life-preserver in which I floated? Was it not liable to go
to pieces at any moment? I had heard of such things being made of
paper and hollow rushes which quickly became saturated and lost all
buoyancy. And I could not swim a stroke. And I was alone,
floating, apparently, in the midst of a grey primordial vastness.
I confess that a madness seized me, that I shrieked aloud as the
women had shrieked, and beat the water with my numb hands.
How long this lasted I have no conception, for a blankness
intervened, of which I remember no more than one remembers of
troubled and painful sleep. When I aroused, it was as after
centuries of time; and I saw, almost above me and emerging from the
fog, the bow of a vessel, and three triangular sails, each shrewdly
lapping the other and filled with wind. Where the bow cut the
water there was a great foaming and gurgling, and I seemed directly
in its path. I tried to cry out, but was too exhausted. The bow
plunged down, just missing me and sending a swash of water clear
over my head. Then the long, black side of the vessel began
slipping past, so near that I could have touched it with my hands.
I tried to reach it, in a mad resolve to claw into the wood with my
nails, but my arms were heavy and lifeless. Again I strove to call
out, but made no sound.
The stern of the vessel shot by, dropping, as it did so, into a
hollow between the waves; and I caught a glimpse of a man standing
at the wheel, and of another man who seemed to be doing little else
than smoke a cigar. I saw the smoke issuing from his lips as he
slowly turned his head and glanced out over the water in my
direction. It was a careless, unpremeditated glance, one of those
haphazard things men do when they have no immediate call to do
anything in particular, but act because they are alive and must do
something.
But life and death were in that glance. I could see the vessel
being swallowed up in the fog; I saw the back of the man at the
wheel, and the head of the other man turning, slowly turning, as
his gaze struck the water and casually lifted along it toward me.
His face wore The Sea Wolf page 3 The Sea Wolf page 5 |