Part 33 (1/2)
Whitaker looked fearfully again at the woman. But she was unquestionably competent to care for herself. Proof of this he had in the fact that she had contrived to slip the life-preserver up over her head and discard it altogether. Thus disenc.u.mbered, she had more freedom for the impending struggle.
He glanced over his shoulder. They were on the line of breakers. Behind them a heavy comber was surging in, crested with snow, its concave belly resembling a vast sheet of emerald. In another moment it would be upon them. It was the moment a seasoned swimmer would seize.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Whitaker felt land beneath his feet]
His eye sought the girl's. In hers he read understanding and a.s.sent. Of one mind, they struck out with all their strength. The comber overtook them, clasped them to its bosom, tossed them high upon its great gla.s.sy shoulder. They fought madly to retain that place, and to such purpose that they rode it over a dozen yards before it crashed upon the beach, annihilating itself in a furious welter of creaming waters. Whitaker felt land beneath his feet....
The rest was like the crisis of a nightmare drawn out to the limit of human endurance. Conscious thought ceased: terror and panic and the blind instinct of self-preservation--these alone remained. The undertow tore at Whitaker's legs as with a hundred murderous hands. He fought his way forward a few paces--or yard or two--only to be overwhelmed, ground down into the gravel. He rose through some superhuman effort and lunged on, like a blind, hunted thing.... He came out of it eventually to find himself well up on the beach, out of the reach of the waves. But the very earth seemed to billow about him, and he could hardly keep his feet. A numbing faintness with a painful retching at once a.s.sailed him.
He was but vaguely aware of the woman reeling not far from him, but saved....
Later he found that something of the worst effects had worn away. His scattered wits were reestablis.h.i.+ng intercommunication. The earth was once more pa.s.sably firm beneath him. He was leaning against the careened hulk of a dismantled cat-boat with a gaping rent in its side. At a little distance the woman was sitting in the sands, bosom and shoulders heaving convulsively, damp, matted hair veiling her like a curtain of sunlit seaweed.
He moved with painful effort toward her. She turned up to him her pitiful, writhen face, white as parchment.
”Are you--hurt?” he managed to ask. ”I mean--injured?”
She moved her head from side to side, as if she could not speak for panting.
”I'm--glad,” he said dully. ”You stay--here.... I'll go get help.”
He raised his eyes, peering inland.
Back of the beach the land rose in long, sweeping hillocks, treeless but green. His curiously befogged vision made out a number of shapes that resembled dwellings.
”Go ... get ... help ...” he repeated thickly.
He started off with a brave, staggering rush that carried him a dozen feet inland. Then his knees turned to water, and the blackness of night shut down upon his senses.
XV
DISCLOSURES
Sleep is a potent medicine for the mind; but sometimes the potion is compounded with somewhat too heavy a proportion of dreams and nonsense; when it's apt to play curious tricks with returning consciousness. When Whitaker awoke he was on the sands of Narragansett, and the afternoon was cloudy-warm and bright, so that his eyes were grateful for the shade of a white parasol that a girl he knew was holding over him; and his age was eighteen and his cares they were none; and the girl was saying in a lazy, laughing voice: ”I love my love with a P because he's Perfectly Pulchritudinous and Possesses the Power of Pleasing, and because he Prattles Prettily and his socks are Peculiarly Purple--”
”And,” the man who'd regained his youth put in, ”his name is Peter and he's Positively a Pest....”
But the voice in which he said this was quite out of the picture--less a voice than a croak out of a throat kiln-dry and burning. So he grew suspicious of his senses; and when the parasol was transformed into the shape of a woman wearing a clumsy jacket of soiled covert-cloth over a non-descript garment of weirdly printed calico--then he was sure that something was wrong with him.
Besides, the woman who wasn't a parasol suddenly turned and bent over him an anxious face, exclaiming in accents of consternation: ”O dear! If he's delirious--!”
His voice, when he strove to answer, rustled and rattled rather than enunciated, surprising him so that he barely managed to say: ”What nonsense! I'm just thirsty!” Then the circuit of returning consciousness closed and his lost youth slipped forever from his grasp.
”I thought you would be,” said the woman, calmly; ”so I brought water.
Here....”
She offered a tin vessel to his lips, as he lay supine, spilling a quant.i.ty of its contents on his face and neck and a very little into his mouth, if enough to make him choke and splutter. He sat up suddenly, seized the vessel--a two-quart milk-pail--and buried his face in it, gradually tilting it, while its cool, delicious sweetness irrigated his arid tissues, until every blessed drop was drained. Then, and not till then, he lowered the pail and with sane vision began to renew acquaintance with the world.
He was sitting a trifle out of the shallow imprint of his body in the sands, in the lee of the beached cat-boat he now recalled as one might the features of an incubus. The woman he had rescued sat quite near him.