It was a feeling--no more--but one which
any man will recognize who has outlived a like time of peril on the
sea. We did not hope again, for we were past the effort to hope.
Numb, drenched, our very skins bleached like a washerwoman's hands,
our eyes caked with brine, our limbs so broken with weariness of the
eternal pumping that when our shift was done, where we fell there we
lay, and had to be kicked aside--we had scarcely the spirit to choose
between life and death. Yet all the while we had been fighting for
life like madmen.
Towards the close of the day, too, Roger Wearne had made shift to
crawl on deck and bear a hand. Captain Pomery lay in the huddle of
the forecastle, no man tending him: and old Worthyvale awaited
burial, stretched in the hold upon the ballast.
At whiles, as my fingers cramped themselves around the handle of the
pump, it seemed as though we had been fighting this fight, tholing
this misery, gripping the verge of this precipice for years upon
years, and this nightmare sat heaviest upon me when the third morning
broke and I turned in the sudden blessed sunshine--but we blessed it
not--and saw what age the struggle had written on my father's face.
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