deeper than on the
other side of the headland by Bernay-sur-Mer, extended inward for
nearly two miles, and to pull back that distance against the full force
of the storm--only a madman would try it, and no boat would live! The
other way was the only chance--the quarter mile across the narrows.

A quarter mile! He pulled on and on, minute after minute that were as
endless periods of time; and whether he was making progress or losing
it he did not know, only that with each minute his strength was being
taxed to the utmost, until it seemed to be ebbing from him, until his
arms in their sockets caused him brutal pain. And it was all like a
black veil that wrapped itself about him now, blacker than it had ever
been before that night--the loss of that tiny guiding light he had left
upon the beach seemed to make it so, and seemed to try to rob him of
his courage because it was gone. The never-ending roar of buffeting
sea and surf was in his ears until his head rang with the sound--the
waves pounded his boat and tossed it like a chip upon their crests, and
slopped aboard and sloshed at his feet--and they thundered upon the
shore, and upon the headland, and they were mocking at him. The
lightning came again--it lighted up the house upon the bluff and with
bitter dismay he saw that, too, was sweeping seaward--it flickered a
ghostly radiance upon dancing shore shapes--it played upon a tumbling
wall of water, onrushing, towering above his head from where the boat
quivered in the trough far down below. And at sight of this, like a
madman, Jean Laparde pulled then--up--up--up--the crest was curling,
snarling its vengeance before it broke--and then it seethed away in a
great trail of murmuring foam that lapped at the boat's sides and crept
in over the gunwales. And there were many more like that, so many that
they were countless--and they never stopped--and they were stronger
than he--and there was always another--and each was greater than the
one before--and he sobbed at last in utter weakness over the oars.

Marie-Louise, Gaston, the Perigeau, all were living before him in a
daze now--the brain became subordinate to the bodily exhaustion. There
was only a jumbled medley of hell and death and eternal struggle around
him, and a subconsciousness that for him too the end had come--the good
Father Anton would say a requiem mass for him--and Bernay-sur-Mer would
tell its children that Jean would never make any more of the clay
_p