The shadows on
the sea slowly deepened. The wind bore coldness with it, and the men
began to shiver.
"Holy smoke!" said one, allowing his voice to express his impious mood,
"if we keep on monkeying out here! If we've got to flounder out here all
night!"
"Oh, we'll never have to stay here all night! Don't you worry. They've
seen us now, and it won't be long before they'll come chasing out after
us."
The shore grew dusky. The man waving a coat blended gradually into this
gloom, and it swallowed in the same manner the omnibus and the group of
people. The spray, when it dashed uproariously over the side, made the
voyagers shrink and swear like men who were being branded.
"I'd like to catch the chump who waved the coat. I feel like soaking him
one, just for luck."
"Why? What did he do?"
"Oh, nothing, but then he seemed so damned cheerful."
In the meantime the oiler rowed, and then the correspondent rowed, and
then the oiler rowed. Grey-faced and bowed forward, they mechanically,
turn by turn, plied the leaden oars. The form of the lighthouse had
vanished from the southern horizon, but finally a pale star appeared,
just lifting from the sea. The streaked saffron in the west passed
before the all-merging darkness, and the sea to the east was black. The
land had vanished, and was expressed only by the low and drear thunder
of the surf.
"If I am going to be drowned--if I am going to be drowned--if I am going
to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea,
was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees? Was I
brought here merely to have my nose dragged away as I was about to
nibble the sacred cheese of life?"
The patient captain, drooped over the water-jar, was sometimes obliged
to speak to the oarsman.
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