As he went shivering on deck Caragh made a wry mouth as his teeth met on the picture, and he imagined the suggestions its discovery would have offered to the woman he was to wed.
He had a hazy recollection afterwards of the close and eager crowd which surrounded him as he fitted the clammy belt of the lifeline about his body and climbed over the taffrail for a dive. It was a crowd warm with enthusiasm and admiration; with little to say, but with that in what it said which might have brought a blush to his whole body. But he heard nothing.
Then as the vessel lurched to starboard he let his body fall forward and shot down into the sea.
Before his head rose above the surface the cold water had changed his indifference to life into a disgust at his own temerity.
The ship heeled over as if about to impale him with her yards. Then he was lifted on the roller, and saw the wreck before him, looking much further off than it had from the deck. He laid his course on a cliff to the south which the captain had given him to steer by, and turned over on his side. His left arm swung high and white out of the blue water, regular and unhurried as though he were bathing, and his head dipped under and was driven clear of the surface with every stroke. With his face thrown back he could see the dark skirting of spectators along the ship's side swinging into and out of the sky.
They were admiring in speech and in silence his courage and cool indifference to the occasion, and the humour of their admiration moved him as he thought of it almost to a laugh.
That he, with his despairs, his self-contempt, his growing disgust at his foolhardiness, should appear to them as a heroic figure appealed to his keen sense of parody. What pretty reading in unconscious irony would the obituary paragraphs of his valour make for the gods of fate.
Yet valour of a sort he had, for it never once occurred to him to feign an inability to go further, though the line he carried was beginning to retard him at every stroke.
The ship he had left was now lost to him in each trough of the waves; he could hear the break of the rollers over the reef, and saw that the tide had already drifted him to windward of the wreck. The roar in front increased as he proceeded, and at last he could see, as he rose, the waves thirty yards beyond him suddenly flatten, flinging up a veil of spray into the air. For a moment he hung irresolute; there, if ever a man might see it, was death visible before him. Then, with a curious sense of obliteration, his mind cleared. It seemed empty of thought or fear as the open sky above him; not a shred even of anticipation floated anywhere within it. He trod water as he gathered a dozen loops of the lifeline in his hand, lest he should be hung up and dragged under by it when flung over the ledge. Then he went forward. A moment later, when the wave that had lifted him suddenly sank and smashed before him into a terrible welter of foam above the reef, his heart sank; but decision was past him. He knew that he was rising on the wave that followed, heard a strange crisp noise above him, and felt the crest dart forward like the head of a snake.
The next instant he was rolled up in the foam and flung onward like a whirling wheel. He lost his senses for a second from sheer giddiness, and found himself fighting for breath and the surface in almost quiet water, with the black sides of the wreck not fifty yards ahead.