Sixth Stanza: Last line, “slithered”--a difficult word, and yet effective! The whole line is masterly.
Seventh Stanza: The last line is clearly a Shelleyan reminiscence, a trace of my readings aloud of that poet. And yet, if Susannah had plagiarised, it was at least, boldly, frankly.
Eighth and Last Stanza: Note the contrast between the defiant and denunciatory address to the “whales and sharks,” and the pleading gentleness of that petition to the “little fish,” that they receive with comfort and affection those sad and houseless visitants, who had perished not ignobly, not unworthily.
A poem composed by Sadler on the foregoing events:
|THE deck of the _Violetta_ had resumed its ordinary domestic look. True, no Dolores lay on the carpet, no Georgiana pecked and scratched in the scuppers. At some distance apart on his rug, his basket behind him, in deep abstraction, sat Ram Nad.
Ram Nad had absent-mindedness down to a science. He could roll up his eyeballs and go off like a bullet. When not abstracted he usually played jackstraws. What recondite connection there was between him and jackstraws I never made out, but I suspected it was the delicate sleight of hand required, and the practice it gave him, which fastened him to that Occidental game. Certainly I would back him against any jackstraw player--But there never was such a jackstraw player before. The laws of physics were nothing to him. Gravitation in jackstraws he ignored.
Sadler, Susannah, and I were in conversation under the awning, but Mrs. Ulswater sat a long time silent.
“Doctor,” she said at last, “do you think Ram Nad could have Georgiana and Dolores in his basket?”
Susannah started. On me too the idea had a certain volcanic effect.
“Why suppose so?” I said. “Is there evidence? Have you a subtle instinct? Does he look a shade more virtuous than usual? If he does, it would go to prove he has been accumulating sin. But does he? He looks to be precisely as usual. Why suppose they didn't go overboard? Why not adopt my theory and Susannah's of Dolores' pathetic departure?”
Mrs. Ulswater sighed, and was silent for some moments before she went on:
“But if Ram Nad churned them into his basket the way he does with things, after what I've told him, it's flat disobedience, and I won't stand it from a heathen. Georgiana never would go on deck when the wind blew, and they were both in the cabin the night before the water spouts. Of course if I accused him of it, and it wasn't so, he'd be perfectly crushing. He'd be crushing if it _was_ true, for that matter. But somehow I don't see how it could have happened, and I won't have Ram Nad getting the best of me. I wish you'd see if you can find out.”