224
PARTISAN R!EVIEW
possible gulps. His head was beating and ringing so fiercely that he
could scarcely hear the fragments of his own efforts to dedicate and
to reprove himself but blindly, with the last of his strength, held him–
self down. Then he knew that he had stayed down too long; too deep;
he could not possibly reach the air in time. Good. That's fine.
For
Thee!
he groaned.
No right! Get out!
he shouted silently. But even before
he could command it or fully decide to command it his body was work–
ing for him; his feet braced against a ledge, his knees bent, and he
leapt upward through the brightening water with more strength than he
had realized he had left although the water seemed interminably tall
above him and he knew still that he would never reach the surface in
time and cried out to himself,
I didn't have the nerve!
and,
Anyhow I
tried,
meaning at once that he had tried to stay down too long as
an act of devotion and that he had tried to save himself from the
deadliest of sins, and now could see unreachably above him, mocking
and steep from attainment as stars, that wincing celestial ceiling of
bland silver which set apart water and air and toward this straining,
striving, aspiring, helpless upon God's will and pleasure, his fingers up–
ward stretched like shrieks, raised up and grew his rooted need
in
the
millennial leisures of a tree
(for Thee!
0
for Thee! Thee, Lor.d!)
; and
broke the surface
in
time, head back, gasping, feebly treading water,
watching the streaming bruise-colored clamorous and silent whirling of
the world and taking in air so deeply that his lungs felt as
if
they
were tearing; and soon the world became stable and all of the coloring
and discoloration cleared and stood up strongly through the top of
the woods across the tracks and he could realize that except for the
remote voices of the two boys and the still more remote voice of a
bird the world itself was delicately silent and all the noise was within
his own head and was rapidly dying: all that he saw still twitched
with his pulse and out of the woods, beating like a heart, the sun
stood up.
His teeth still ached at their roots and although he clenched them
to
keep them from chattering his chin trembled like a rabbit's nose and
his breath came out shakily
in
many small pieces as of glass or ice.
From its surface down to about his waist, the water seemed surprisingly
warm, but from waist to knees it was grimly cold, and his stony feet
trod a mortal bleakness of cold and dark to which he was thankfully
sure now that he would never go down again. Yet except for his feet,
which no longer seemed to belong to him, his body still blazed
with
pleasure in its existence, and it was no longer urgent and rigid but
almost sleepy. He slid his slick hands along his ribs and
his
sides and
