I fought my way
step by step. Margaret was now quite unconscious, and I lifted her
body step by step, or dragged it several steps at a time, and fell
with it, and back with it, and lost much that had been so hardly
gained. And yet out of it all this I remember: that warm soft body
of hers was the dearest thing in the world--vastly more dear than the
pleasant land I remotely remembered, than all the books and all the
humans I had ever known, than the deck above, with its sweet pure air
softly blowing under the cool starry sky.
As I look back upon it I am aware of one thing: the thought of
leaving her there and saving myself never crossed my mind. The one
place for me was where she was.
Truly, this which I write seems absurd and purple; yet it was not
absurd during those long minutes on the chart-room stairway. One
must taste death for a few centuries of such agony ere he can receive
sanction for purple passages.
And as I fought my screaming flesh, my reeling brain, and climbed
that upward way, I prayed one prayer: that the chart-house doors out
upon the poop might not be shut.
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