Stretched its undulating bar,
Wings aslant along the rim
Of the waves they stooped to skim,
Rock and isle and glistening bay,
Fell the beautiful white day.
Said the Master to the youth:
“We have come in search of truth,
Trying with uncertain key
Door by door of mystery;
We are reaching, through His laws,
To the garment-hem of Cause,
Him, the endless, unbegun,
The Unnameable, the One
Light of all our light the Source,
Life of life, and Force of force.
As with fingers of the blind,
We are groping here to find
What the hieroglyphics mean
Of the Unseen in the seen,
What the Thought which underlies
Nature’s masking and disguise,
What it is that hides beneath
Blight and bloom and birth and death.”
Blight and bloom and birth and death, Nature’s mask — there was no mask, no underlying thought, only life itself. Behind the garment-hem of Cause, the real skirt she’d torn and stained. In place of sapphire seas, the real, gray, salty ocean, ringing the island — not an isle — where she and Daphne had met.
“I’m sorry,” her mother said quietly.
A little black cricket, Henrietta remembered, had leapt into the air that first day at the island, as if presenting itself for the professor’s inspection and delight. “I am too,” she said.
The Particles (1939)
Once he was in the water, it was easier to see what had happened to the ship. The stern already low in the waves, the empty lifeboat davits and twisted rigging and the blackened, shattered wood on the deck, where the exploding hatches had blown deck chairs and people to bits. They’d been at dinner, spoons clicking on soup bowls, cooks poised over pots, Sam Cornelius thrown from his chair as he pushed aside a bit of carrot. Now it was past nine and fully dark. The searchlight picked out bodies floating near the boat, and when the woman crouched behind him gave her life belt to her wailing son, Sam gave her his and then was even more frightened; despite his age — he was thirty-four — he could barely swim.
In the distance a shape, which might have been the guilty submarine, seemed to shift position. The moon disappeared behind a bank of clouds and then it rained, drenching those who weren’t yet soaked; more than eleven hundred people had been on board. When the rain stopped, the moon again lit the boats scattered around the slowly sinking ship. The three of the Athenia’s crew in Sam’s boat took oars, as did the three least wounded — Sam was one — of the four male passengers. The others, just over fifty women and children, bailed with their shoes and their bare hands, scooping out the oily water rising over their shins.
As the two dozen lifeboats separated like specks on an expanding balloon, one pulled toward Sam’s boat to let them know that several ships had responded to the Athenia’s call for help. Soon, in just a few hours, they’d be saved. Those hours passed. Not long after midnight, a faraway gleam, which might have been a periscope caught by the light of the moon, caused two women to shriek. A U-boat, one said, the German submarine that had torpedoed them rising now to shell the lifeboats. But the last beam of the searchlight, just before the emergency dynamo used up its fuel and the Athenia went completely dark, revealed enough to convince Sam and some of the others that this was a rescue ship.
Steadily, Sam and his companions rowed toward the Norwegian tanker Knute Nelson, which, in the light of occasional flares, popped sporadically out of the darkness. A little string of emptied lifeboats tossed in the swell beside the tanker, the boat closest to the stern still packed with people. Some grabbed at rope ladders while the bosun’s chair went up and down, hoisting those not agile enough to climb until, in the grip of a heavy woman who pushed off too vigorously, it overturned and left her suspended upside down. The crew struggled to retrieve her, but before they were done another boat nudged in behind the one still being emptied.
The man rowing next to Sam muttered, “They should stand out, that’s dangerous,” and when Sam drew his anxious gaze away from the faces he was searching, he could see how little space separated the last boat in line from the tanker’s huge propellers. He turned back to his oars. The sea was rough, the boat’s seams were leaking, many of his fellow passengers were wounded or seasick or both, and Sam was working so hard to keep their boat steady that he failed to see exactly what happened a few minutes later. By the time he heard the screams, the broken lifeboat, impaled on one of the propeller blades, was already rising into the air.
“Row!” said the seaman in charge of Sam’s boat. “Row, row, row, row!”
Sam, the tallest but not the strongest of those at the oars (he was out of shape), lost his grip and banged into the man beside him, who shouted at him; then all of them were shouting at each other while women wailed and children cried. Unbearable to think about what must have happened to those drawn into the propeller. The boat sped into the darkness, headed, once the assistant purser spotted it, toward an enormous, brightly lit motor yacht that had appeared from another direction. Before they were close enough to hail her, Sam saw two lifeboats tangle at her stern, one crowding the other under the angled counter — the swell had increased, making everything more difficult — which, after rising unusually high, crashed down on the gunwale of the inner boat and tipped it over. Suddenly, struggling figures, too small to identify, also dotted the water.
That was enough for the seaman in charge; Sam’s boat pulled away until it was clear of everyone. “Let’s wait,” the seaman said, “until sunrise, when we can see more clearly what we’re doing.” The swell grew heavier; dawn finally broke and three British destroyers arrived. The little boy whose mother was wearing Sam’s life belt pointed at them, smiled for the first time since the ship had been hit, and said, “Ring around the rosy!” Sam couldn’t see what the little boy meant, and then he could: two of the ships were racing after each other, herding within an enormous circle the remaining lifeboats, the tanker, the white yacht, and the third destroyer, which was plucking boatloads of survivors from the water. Twice, he thought it was turning their way, but each time it moved toward another, even more crowded boat.
The sky was red and then pink and then blue; Sam’s hands were numb; he hadn’t been able to feel his feet for hours. Once or twice he either fell asleep or passed out. Once, he lifted his head just in time to see an old woman in a lifeboat not far away leap toward a lowered rope ladder and miss, slipping into the narrow space between the boat and the destroyer’s hull; the boat rose on a swell and the space disappeared. He was barely conscious when, in the middle of the morning, a U.S. merchant ship arrived, cleaned out one boat before taking in a crowd transferred from the motor yacht, and then waved over the boat Sam was in.
The injured and frail went up in a bosun’s chair, but Sam, jolted awake by the prospect of safety, scrambled up a rope ladder with the other men. A person reached out for him, grabbed his arm, and heaved him over the side — not a stranger, not a sailor, but someone Sam knew: Duncan Finch. Part of him wanted to jump back in the water. Duncan, here? But there was the ship’s name, City of Flint, mocking him from the smokestack.