MY SUNDAY AT HOME
but the lively original, as I watched it foreshortened from above, exceeded all these things. He staggered to the bench, the heavy wooden seat cramped with iron cramps into the enduring stone, and clung there with his left hand. It quivered and shook, as a breakwater-pile quivers to the rush of landward-racing seas; nor was there lacking when he caught his breath, the "scream of a maddened beach dragged down by the tide." His right hand was upon the doctor's collar, so that the two shook to one paroxysm, pendulums vibrating together, while I, apart, shook with them.
It was colossal—immense; but of certain manifestations the English language stops short. French only, the caryatid French of Victor Hugo, would have described it; so I mourned while I laughed, hastily shuffling and discarding inadequate adjectives. The vehemence of the shock spent itself, and the sufferer half fell, half knelt, across the bench. He was calling now upon God and his wife, huskily, as the wounded bull calls upon the unscathed herd to stay. Curiously enough, he used no bad language: that had gone from him with the rest. The doctor exhibited gold. It was taken and retained. So, too, was the grip on the coat-collar.
"If I could stand," boomed the giant, despairingly, "I 'd smash you—you an' your drinks. I 'm dyin'—dyin'—dyin'!"
"That 's what you think," said the doctor. "You 'll find it will do you a lot of good"; and, making a virtue of a somewhat imperative necessity, he added: "I 'll stay by you. If you 'd let go of me a minute I 'd give you something that would settle you."
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