my father — of that I could feel no doubt — lay helplessly outstretched in the mud at my feet. I experienced a sensation of satisfied revenge, and of pity, and repulsion, and horror, more than all ... a double horror, at what I saw, and at what had happened. The wicked criminal feelings of which I have spoken, those uncomprehended impulses of rage rose up in me . . . choked me. 'Aha!' I thought, 'so that is why I am like this . . . that is how my blood shows itself!' I stood beside the corpse, and stared in suspense. Would not those dead eyes move, would not those stiff lips quiver? No! all was still; the very seaweed seemed lifeless where the breakers had flung it; even the gulls had flown; not a broken spar anywhere, not a fragment of wood, nor a bit of rigging. On all sides emptiness . . . only he and I, and in the distance the sounding sea. I looked back; the same emptiness there: a ridge of lifeless downs on the horizon . . . that was all! My heart revolted against leaving this luckless wretch in this solitude, on the briny sand of the seashore, to be devoured by fishes and birds; an inner voice told me I ought to find people, call them, if not to help — what help could there be now! — at least to lift him up, to carry him into some living habitation . . . but an indescribable panic suddenly seized on me. It
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