Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway Page B

four
days,” he said. “But not tonight and not tomorrow. Rig now to get some sleep, old man, while the fish is calm and
steady.”
       He held the line tight in his right hand and
then pushed his thigh against his right hand as he leaned all his weight
against the wood of the bow. Then he passed the line a little lower on his
shoulders and braced his left hand on it.
       My right hand can hold it as long as it is braced, he thought If it relaxes in sleep my left hand will
wake me as the line goes out. It is hard on the right hand. But he is used to
punishment Even if I sleep twenty minutes or a half an hour it is good. He lay
forward cramping himself against the line with all of his body, putting all his
weight onto his right band, and he was asleep.
       He did not dream of the lions but instead of
a vast school of porpoises that stretched for eight or ten miles and it was in
the time of their mating and they would leap high into the air and return into
the same hole they had made in the water when they leaped.
       Then he dreamed that he was in the village
on his bed and there was a norther and he was very cold and his right arm was
asleep because his head had rested on it instead of a pillow.
       After that he began to dream of the long
yellow beach and he saw the first of the lions come down onto it in the early
dark and then the other lions came and he rested his chin on the wood of the
bows where the ship lay anchored with the evening off-shore breeze and he
waited to see if there would be more lions and he was happy.
       The moon had been up for a long time but he
slept on and the fish pulled on steadily and the boat moved into the tunnel of
clouds.
       He woke with the jerk of his right fist
coming up against his face and the line burning out through his right hand. He
had no feeling of his left hand but he braked all he
could with his right and the line rushed out. Finally his left hand found the
line and he leaned back against the line and now it burned his back and his
left hand, and his left hand was taking all the strain and cutting badly. He
looked back at the coils of line and they were feeding smoothly. Just then the
fish jumped making a great bursting of the ocean and then a heavy fall. Then he
jumped again and again and the boat was going fast although line was still
racing out and the old man was raising the strain to breaking point and raising
it to breaking point again and again. He had been pulled down tight onto the
bow and his face was in the cut slice of dolphin and he could not move.
       This is what we waited for, he thought. So
now let us take it. Make him pay for the line, he thought. Make him pay for it.
       He could not see the fish’s jumps but only
heard the breaking of the ocean and the heavy splash as he fell. The speed of
the line was cutting his hands badly but he had always known this would happen
and he tried to keep the cutting across the calloused parts and not let the
line slip into the palm nor cut the fingers.
       If the boy was here he would wet the coils
of line, he thought. Yes. If the boy were here. If the boy were here.
       The line went out and out and out but it was
slowing now and he was making the fish earn each inch of it. Now he got his
head up from the wood and out of the slice of fish that his cheek had crushed.
Then he was on his knees and then he rose slowly to his feet. He was ceding
line but more slowly all he time. He worked back to where he could feel with
his foot the coils of line that he could not see. There was plenty of line
still and now the fish had to pull the friction of all that new line through
the water.
       Yes, he thought. And now he has jumped more
than a dozen times and filled the sacks along his back with air and he cannot
go down deep to die where I cannot bring him up. He will start circling soon
and then I must work on him. I wonder what started him so suddenly? Could it have been hunger that made him desperate, or was