The Sea Wolf | Page 4

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 an absent
expression, as of deep thought, and I became afraid that if his eyes did
light upon me he would nevertheless not see me. But his eyes did light
upon me, and looked squarely into mine; and he did see me, for he
sprang to the wheel, thrusting the other man aside, and whirled it round
and round, hand over hand, at the same time shouting orders of some
sort. The vessel seemed to go off at a tangent to its former course and
leapt almost instantly from view into the fog.
I felt myself slipping into unconsciousness, and tried with all the power
of my will to fight above the suffocating blankness and darkness that
was rising around me. A little later I heard the stroke of oars, growing

nearer and nearer, and the calls of a man. When he was very near I
heard him crying, in vexed fashion, "Why in hell don't you sing out?"
This meant me, I thought, and then the blankness and darkness rose
over me.
CHAPTER II

I seemed swinging in a mighty rhythm through orbit vastness.
Sparkling points of light spluttered and shot past me. They were stars, I
knew, and flaring comets, that peopled my flight among the suns. As I
reached the limit of my swing and prepared to rush back on the counter
swing, a great gong struck and thundered. For an immeasurable period,
lapped in the rippling of placid centuries, I enjoyed and pondered my
tremendous flight.
But a change came over the face of the dream, for a dream I told myself
it must