CHAPTER VIII.

THE WAVE AND THE DARKNESS.

Man overboard!

What of it? The ship does not stop. The wind is blowing, and this dark ship has a course which she must keep. She goes right on.

The man disappears, then appears again. He goes down and again comes up to the surface; he shouts, he holds up his arms, but they do not hear him. The ship, shivering under the storm, has all she can do to take care of herself. The sailors and the passengers can no longer even see the drowning man; his luckless head is only a speck in the vastness of the waves.

His cries of despair sound through the depths. What a phantom that is,--that sail, fast disappearing from view! He gazes after it; his eyes are fixed upon it with frenzy. It is disappearing, it is fading from sight, it is growing smaller and smaller. Only just now he was there; he was one of the crew; he was going and coming on the deck with the rest; he had his share of air and sun; he was a living man. What, then, has happened? He has slipped, he has fallen; it is all over with him.

He is in the huge waves. There is nothing now under his feet but death and sinking. The fearful waves, torn and frayed by the wind, surround him; the swells of the abyss sweep him along; all the crests of the waves are blown about his head; a crowd of waves spit upon him; uncertain gulfs half swallow him; every time he plunges down he catches a glimpse of precipices black as night; frightful, unknown seaweeds seize him, tie his feet, drag him down to them. He feels that he is becoming a part of the abyss, of the foam; the waves throw him from one to another; he tastes the bitterness; the cowardly ocean has given itself up to drowning him; the vastness sports with his agony. All this water seems to be hate.

Still he struggles.

He tries to save himself, to keep himself up; he strikes out, he swims. He, this pitiful force, at once exhausted, is matched against the inexhaustible.

Where is the ship now? Way down there, barely visible in the pale obscurity of the horizon. The squalls hum about him, the wave-crests wash over him. He raises his eyes, and sees only the lividness of the clouds. In his death struggle he takes part in the madness of the sea. He is tortured by this madness. He hears sounds, strange to man, which seem to come from beyond the earth, and from some terrible world outside.

There are birds in the clouds, just as there are angels above human griefs, but what can they do for him? There is one, flying, singing, and hovering, while he has the death-rattle in his throat.

He feels himself buried at the same time by these two Infinites, the ocean and the heavens; the one a tomb, the other a shroud.

Night falls; he has been swimming now for hours; his strength has reached its end; this ship, this far-off thing where there were men, is blotted from his sight; he is alone in the fearful gulf of twilight; he sinks, he braces himself, he writhes, he feels below him the roving monsters of the invisible. He cries aloud.

"There are no longer any men here." "Where is God?"

He calls "Somebody!" "Somebody!" He keeps on calling.

Nothing on the horizon; nothing in heaven.

He implores the waste of waters, the wave, the seaweed, the rock; it is deaf. He supplicates the tempest; the pitiless tempest obeys only the Infinite.

Around him is darkness, mist, solitude, the stormy and unreasoning tumult, the boundless rolling of the wild waters. In him is horror and weariness. Under him the abyss. There is nothing to rest on. He thinks of what will happen to his body in the boundless shades. The infinite cold benumbs him. His hands shrivel; they clutch and find nothing. Winds, clouds, whirlwinds, puffs, useless stars. What is he to do? In despair, he gives up. Worn out as he is, he makes up his mind to die, he abandons himself, he lets himself go, he relaxes himself, and there he is rolling forever into the dismal depths in which he is swallowed up.

Oh, implacable course of human society! What a loss of men and of souls on the way! Ocean into which falls all that the law lets fall. Wicked vanishing of help! Oh, moral death!

The sea is the pitiless social night into which the penal law thrusts its condemned; the sea is boundless wretchedness.

The soul, swept with the stream into this gulf, may be drowned. Who will bring it to life again?