’Bend to it, you devils!  One! two! three!  Morton, don’t go to sleep, you swine!  Ryan!  Tadvers, you herrin’-gutted, boss-eyed son of a barber’s ape, are you rowin’ or spoonin’ up hot soup?  Pull, men!  Huh!  That’s a clinker!  Huh!  Shift her!  Huh!  May the fiend singe you for a drowsy pack o’ sea-cows!  Pull!’

The men threw every ounce of power into each stroke, the voice of the boatswain blending with their efforts like an intoned benediction, and the treacly sea foamed under the prow into drifted snow which ran merrily in their wake.  For a tense moment the boat hung poised upon a high roller, as if about to be projected into the air, and the man in the prow, electrified, threw out an arm with a dramatic gesture.  The instincts of the ex-whaler triumphed in that moment of excitement.

‘There she blows!’

Instantly Coleman fell into a condition of profound agitation; he poured out a lava-flow of vituperation upon the heads of his men; he cursed them for weaklings and waster and hissed phrases shameful to them and discreditable to their parents.  The crew increased their stroke.  Already the perspiration was streaming from their indurated hides; their wet faces and breasts glistened in the night.  Every now and again the look-out, discovering a black spot where the moon’s rays splashed a smooth-backed wave with silver, uttered an inarticulate cry that struck the men like a spur, and all the time his pointing hand was a finger-post to the steersman.

Meanwhile the object of this chase, a fragile, white-faced girl, had fought with the mammoth waves as with inveterate beasts seeking to stifle her in icy embraces.  A mere atom plunged in their depths as in cavernous and boundless darkness, she had struggled with an ocean the whole of the focus of which were leagued against her, possessed all the time with a foolish and trivial remembrance of child hood, the vision of a little gray kitten, with a weight about its neck, striving to beat its way up through clear waters, sending out tiny bubbles of crystal that danced in mockery of its dying.

On the surface she was swung across seeming great distances, till a strong arm out of the night and the vastness of things seized her, and the tension of the struggle passed from her limbs, leaving a sense of appeasement as sweet as sleep.  She heard a man’s voice directing her, and obeyed without understanding.  Now the sea supported her like a soft and pleasant bed, she had no fear and little consciousness.  A few stern words buzzed in her head like bees—­’Sink your arms!  Don’t try to breathe when we’re under!  Keep your mouth shut!’ They were very absurd:  they could have nothing to do with her; but she had heard them somewhere, and she obeyed.

The man lay well back in the water, with little more than his chin and lips above the surface, his left hand, twisted in the woman’s hair, rested in the nape of her neck, sustaining her with scarcely an effort.  An ocean swimmer from his early boyhood, great waters had no terrors for him, and when he found the drowning girl he knew that all would be well, provided the ship’s boats were successful in their search.