Most of his crew lay dead in the sunken vessel, and he himself was slowly and painfully succumbing to strangulation. He devoted to a note of apology addressed to his Emperor those hours spent in dying, and expressed the hope that his message might, in future, be of value in the avoidance of similar fatalities. He praised the gallantry of his subordinates.
The letter, read in the Mikado's palace a week later, when the submarine had been raised with its dead, was in the stoic style of the race and severely official. It culminated in a broken sentence.
"It is now 12:30 P. M. My breathing is so difficult and painful—I thought I could blow out gasoline but I am intoxicated with it—Captain Nakano—it is now 12:40 P. M.—I——"
There it ended. It seemed to me that if I could busy myself in faint duplicate, with so human a record of approaching the ferry, I could be in a measure consoled. Then gazing at the Southern Cross, before sleep brought respite, I found myself thinking once more of the elusive lady who had so often escaped my inquisitive glance and whose face I should now never see.
CHAPTER VIII
NATURE INDULGES IN SATIRE
Though I am not giving authorship to this narrative with a view to its general perusal, I am determined so to write it that if other eyes do chance upon it they may read the true records of a man's emotions under those circumstances.
I shall never be able to coax myself into any illusion of heroism in my adventures and I shall set down my most abject terrors in equal and impartial degree with the few occasions in which the instinct of self-preservation enabled me to rise to the need and bluff magnificently.
The case of the submarine commander of Nippon was different. He wished to leave behind him such a message as an Emperor might read, and with exalted devotion to his object, he left it. Still, had some miracle brought his vessel to the surface before the end, who knows but that, in the confessional of his own memory, he might have acknowledged a very delirium of terror? Who knows but that between the period of one unflinching paragraph and the capital of the next, there may have been intervals of wallowing in the trough of physical despair?