She sucked his finger as a baby sucks and the feel of that made him curse with the tears running down into his beard. The size of the baling tin seemed horrible beyond words; he couldn’t get it to her lips. Still he went on, not knowing that it was his finger that was giving her back life; the blessed touch of a human being that had come almost too late.
He was sitting on his heels, and now, casting his great head from side to side, he saw things stacked behind her, tins and a bag and metal things that shone dimly. Putting out his hand he caught a corner of the bag. It was a bread bag, sure enough, and as he pulled it towards him the other things came clattering down almost hitting her, and amongst them, God-sent, a little tin spoon.
He seized it and filled it and brought the tip to her lips and she swallowed the water making movements with her throat muscles as though it were half a cupful. He did this a dozen times and then rested, spoon in hand, watching her. She made a couple of slight movements with her head as if nodding to him and her eyes never left him for a moment, they seemed holding on to life through him. He offered a spoonful of water again, she moved her head slightly as though she had had enough, but her eyes never left him.
He knew. If the whole thing had been carefully explained to him he could not have known better how she was clinging to him, as a child to a mother, as a creature to life. And all the time his rough mind in a tumble of confusion and trouble was trying to think how she came like this, with a bread bag close to her and a river within reach.
A tin cup had come down with the other things, it gave him an idea, and getting a biscuit out of the bag he broke it up, put the pieces in the cup with some water and let them soak. It took a long time and all the while, now and then, he kept talking to her.
“There. Y’aren’t so bad after all—keep up till I get you something more. There’s no use in troubling—you’ll be on your pins soon.”
He would pause to swear at the biscuit for not softening quicker, helping it to crumble with his mighty thumb thrust in the cup. To “get food into her” was his main idea, it didn’t matter about thumbs. He was not without experience of starvation and thirst and what they can do to people, and, as he worked away talking to her, pictures from the past came to him of people he had seen like this, nearly “done in” by the sea.
Then he began to feed her with the noxious pap. He managed to get six spoonfuls “into her” and then he saw she would stand no more; still, that was something, and as he brooded on his heels watching her he saw that she was making a struggle to keep it down, and he knew that if she brought it up she was done for. And all the time she kept holding him with her eyes as though he were helping her in the struggle.
He was. The sight of him gave her just the strength necessary to tide over the danger point; then she lay still and the food, such as it was, began to do its work.
One may say that the stomach thinks; every mood of the mind can touch it and it can influence every mood of the mind.