Читать книгу List, Ye Landsmen!. A Romance of Incident онлайн

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I turned my head and looked in the direction of the ship. Her people may or may not have known that they had run down a boat. Certainly she had not shifted her helm; she was standing straight on, a leaning shadow with the bit of moon hanging over her mastheads.

In a few moments the fellow that was shouting at some little distance from me fell silent; but whatever his plight might have been, I could not have helped him, for the tide was setting me at the rate of some two or three miles in the hour into the northeast, and, to come at him, he being astern of me as regards the direction of the tide, I should have been obliged to head in the direction whence his voice had proceeded and seek for him; and so, as I say, I could not have helped him.

We had pulled a full mile, and perhaps more than a mile, from the shore when we were run down. The low land of Deal looked five times as far as a mile across the rippling black surface on which I floated. Yet I knew that the distance could not exceed a mile, and I set my face toward the lights of the beach and struck out with my legs; but I moved feebly. I had swallowed plentifully of salt water when I sank, and the brine filled me with weakness, and I was heavy and sick with it. Then, again, my strength had been shrunk by the sudden dreadful shock of the collision and by my having been under water, breathless and bursting, while, as I might take it, the whole length of the ship was passing over me. I knew that I should never reach the land by hanging over an oar and striking out with my legs. The oar was long and heavy; there was no virtue in the kick of my weakened heels to propel the great blade and loom of ash held athwart as I was obliged to hold it. And all this time the tide was setting me away northeast, with an arching trend to the sheerer east, owing to the conformation of the land thereabouts; so that though for some time I kept my face turned upon Deal, languidly, almost lifelessly, moving my legs in the direction of the lights of that town, in reality the stream was striking me into the wider water; and after a bit I was able to calculate—and I have no doubt accurately—that if I abandoned myself to my oar and floated only (and in sober truth that was all I could do, and pretty much all that I had been doing), I should double the North Foreland at about two miles from that point of coast, and strand, a corpse, upon some shoal off Margate or higher up.