Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Cradle of the Rose
One two three Was it still the echo of the bell or merely the pounding of his arteries? He gazed fixedly at a pink wisp of cloud immediately above his head, miles up there in the blue, and again began to count - the strokes of his own knell, for when that viscid snare went down again, as sooner or later it surely must, he would go down, too; that he never doubted for a second. Forgotten tales of such grim happenings, gleaned in boy hood among the fisher-folk, awoke in his remembrance with the vividness of just-heard speech; and one especially - of a bather who had thus been dragged down in sight of his wife and daughter, to be left by the tide three days later on the ?ats of pen-arze, still wound inextricably in his shroud of sea-twine. He seemed to hear the grizzled nar rator of the story using it to point the universal maxim of the Breton coast, that swimming is a useless accomplish ment at best, and only makes it harder for a man to die. Why not, then, deliberately hasten the end, since it might delay, pitilessly imminent, during many hours?
One two three four he nevertheless mechanically continued to whisper within himself. It must be the bell, after all; and his wavering ideas formed them selves unwittingly into an oft-seen peaceful little picture the old Curé, who twenty-four years before had christened him, walking hurriedly and a little breathlessly up the nar row path through the burial ground to his small lichen grown church, his rusty black soutane brushing the tide of fresh new grass and pink witches-thimble rising about the granite of the tombs, his dim blue eyes a little anxious at the thought that he was late perhaps, neglecting his duties. Duty? Why, it was a duty, too, to hold on to one's life; most certam a duty to endure to the last, without weakness or faltering'
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