I hardly knew what else was happening. My heart was heaving like a dead
body on a billow. All that the priest had said was gone. In its place
there was a paralysing despair as if the wheels of life were rolling
over me.
MEMORANDUM BY MARTIN CONRAD
My dear, long-suffering, martyred darling!
It makes my blood boil to see how the very powers of darkness, in the
name of religion, morality, philanthropy and the judgment of God, were
persecuting my poor little woman.
But why speak of myself at all, or interrupt my darling's narrative,
except to say what was happening in my efforts to reach her?
While we were swinging along in our big liner over the heaving bosom of
the Mediterranean the indefinable sense of her danger never left me day
or night.
That old dream of the glacier and the precipice continued to haunt my
sleep, with the difference that, instead of the aurora glistening in my
dear one's eyes, there was now a blizzard behind her.
The miserable thing so tortured me as we approached Malta (where I
expected to receive a reply to the cable I had sent from Port Said to
the house of Daniel O'Neill) that I felt physically weak at the thought
of the joy or sorrow ahead of me.
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