The Man In The Reservoir | Page 3

with her amid those old superstitions? Who, from our own unlegended woods, will evoke their yet undetected, haunting spirits? Who peer with her in prying scrutiny into nature's laws, and challenge the whispers of poetry from the voiceless throat of matter? Who laugh merrily over the stupid guesswork of pedants, that never mingled with the infinitude of nature, through love exhaustless and all-embracing, as we have? Poor girl! she will be companionless.
"Alas! companionless forever-save in the exciting stages of some brisk flirtation. She will live hereafter by feeding other hearts with love's lore she has learned from me, and then, Pygmalion-like, grow fond of the images she has herself endowed with semblance of divinity, until they seem to breathe back the mystery the soul can truly catch from only one.
"How anxious she will be lest the coroner shall have discovered any of her notes in my pocket!
"I felt chilly as this last reflection crossed my mind, partly at thought of the coroner, partly at the idea of Mary being unwillingly compelled to wear mourning for me, in case of such a disclosure of our engagement. It is a provoking thing for a girl of nineteen to have to go into mourning for a deceased lover at the beginning of her second winter in the metropolis.
"The water, though, with my motionless position, must have had something to do with my chilliness. I see, sir, you think that I tell my story with great levity; but indeed, indeed I should grow delirious did I venture to hold steadily to the awfulness of my feelings the greater part of that night. I think, indeed, I must have been most of the time hysterical with horror, for the vibrating emotions I have recapitulated did pass through my brain even as I have detailed them.
"But as I now became calm in thought, I summoned up again some resolution of action.
"I will begin at that corner (said I), and swim around the whole inclosure. I will swim slowly and again feel the sides of the tank with my feet. If die I must, let me perish at least from well-directed though exhausting effort, not sink from mere bootless weariness in sustaining myself till the morning shall bring relief.
"The sides of the place seemed to grow higher as I now kept my watery course beneath them. It was not altogether a dead pull. I had some variety of emotion in making my circuit. When I swam in the shadow, it looked to me more cheerful beyond in the moonlight. When I swam in the moonlight, I had the hope of making some discovery when I should again reach the shadow. I turned several times on my back to rest just where those wavy lines would meet. The stars looked viciously bright to me from the bottom of that well; there was such a company of them; they were so glad in their lustrous revelry; and they had such space to move in! I was alone, sad to despair, in a strange element, prisoned, and a solitary gazer upon their mocking chorus. And yet there was nothing else with which I could hold communion!
"I turned upon my breast and struck out almost frantically once more. The stars were forgotten; the moon, the very world of which I as yet formed a part, my poor Mary herself, were forgotten. I thought only of the strong man there perishing; of me in my lusty manhood, in the sharp vigor of my dawning prime, with faculties illimitable, with senses all alert, battling there with physical obstacles which men like myself had brought together for my undoing. The Eternal could never have willed this thing! I could not and I would not perish thus. And I grew strong in insolence of self-trust; and I laughed aloud as I dashed the sluggish water from side to side.
"Then came an emotion of pity for myself of wild regret; of sorrow, Oh, infinite for a fate so desolate, a doom so dreary, so heart-sickening! You may laugh at the contradiction if you will, sir, but I felt that I could sacrifice my own life on the instant, to redeem another fellow-creature from such a place of horror, from an end so piteous. My soul and my vital spirit seemed in that desperate moment to be separating; while one in parting grieved over the deplorable fate of the other.
"And then I prayed! I prayed, why or wherefore I know not. It was not from fear. It could not have been in hope. The days of miracles are past, and there was no natural law by whose providential interposition I could be saved. I did not pray; it prayed of itself, my soul within me.
"Was the calmness that I now felt torpidity--the torpidity that precedes dissolution to