_ VIII
The water was a broken glass of blue, sunstruck waves--there were few swimmers in it where the two friends went in next morning, for the beach proper with its bath-houses and float was nearly a quarter of a mile down. Oliver could see Margaret's red cap bobbing twenty yards out as he tried the water cautiously with curling toes, and, much farther out, a blue cap and the flash of an arm going suddenly under. Mrs. Severance, the friend Louise had brought out for the week-end, he supposed; she swam remarkably for a woman. He swam well enough himself and couldn't give her two yards in the hundred. Ted stood beside him, both tingling a little at the fresh of the salt air. "Wow!" and they plunged.
A mock race followed for twenty yards--then Oliver curved off to duck Margaret, already screaming and paddling at his approach, while Ted kept on.
He swam face deep, catching short breaths under the crook of his arm, burying himself in the live blue running sparkle, every muscle stretched as if he were trying to rub all the staleness that can come to the mind and the restless pricklings that will always worry the body clean from him, like a snake's cast skin, against the wet rough hands of the water. There--it was working--the flesh was compact and separate no longer--he felt it dissolve into the salt push of spray--become one with that long blue body of wave that stretched fluently radiant for miles and miles till it too was no more identity but only sea, receiving the sun, without thought, without limbs, without pain. He sprinted with the last breath he had in him to annihilation in that light lustrous firmament. Then his flung-out hand struck something firm and smooth. With the momentary twinge of a jarred toe, he stopped in the middle of a stroke, grabbed at the firm thing unthinkingly, felt it slip away from him, trod water and came up gasping.
"Oh, I'm
horribly sorry!" Gurgle and choke at water gone the wrong way. "Honestly--what a dumb-bell trick! but I didn't see you at
all and with the whole Sound to swim in I thought I was safe--"
He rubbed the water out of his eyes. A woman in a blue cap. Pretty, too--not one of the pretty kind that look like drenched paper-dolls in swimming.
"Don't apologize--it's all my fault, really. I should have heard you coming, I suppose, but I was floating and my ears were under water--and this cap! You did scare me a little, though; I didn't know there was anyone else in miles--"
She smiled frankly. Ted got another look at her and decided that pretty was hardly right. Beautiful, perhaps, but you couldn't tell with her hair that way under her cap.
"You're Mr. Billett, aren't you? Louise said last night that her brother was bringing a friend over Sunday. She also said that she'd introduce us--but we seem to have done that."
"Rather. Introduction by drowning. The latest cleverness in Newport circles--see 'Mode.' And you're Mrs. Severance."
"Yes. Nice water."
"Perfect."
A third look--a fairly long one--left Ted still puzzled. Age--thirty? thirty-five? Swims perfectly. On "Mode." Wide eyes, sea-blue, sea-changing. An odd nose that succeeded in being beautiful in spite of itself. A rather full small mouth, not loose with sense nor rigid with things controlled, but a mouth that would suck like a bee at the last and tiniest drop of any physical sweet which the chin and the eyes had once decided to want. The eyes measure, the mouth asks, the cleft chin finds the way. A face neither content, nor easily to be contented--in repose it is neither happy nor unhappy but only matured. Louise's friend--that was funny--Louise had such an ideal simplicity of mind. Well--
"If you float--after a while you don't know quite where you're floating," said Mrs. Severance's voice detachedly.
Ted made no answer but turned over, spreading out his arms. For a few moments they lay like corpses on the blue swelling round of the water looking straight through infinite distance into the thin faint vapor of the sky.
"Yes, I see what you mean."
"We might be clouds, almost, mightn't we?" with a slow following note of laughter.
Ted looked deeper into the sky, half-closing his eyelids. It seemed to take his body from him completely, to leave him nothing but a naked soothed consciousness, rising and falling, a petal on a swinging bough, in the heart of blue quietude like the quiet of an open place in a forest empty with evening.
"Clouds," said Mrs. Severance's voice, turning the word to a sound breathed lightly through the curled and husky gold of a forest-horn.
Through the midst of his sea-drowsiness a queer thought came to Ted. This had happened before, in sleep perhaps, in a book he had read--Oliver's novel, possibly, he thought and smiled. Lying alone on a roof of blue water, and yet not lying alone, for there was that slow warm voice that talked from time to time and came into the mind on tiptoe like the creeping of soft-shoed, hasteless, fire. You stretched your hands to the fire and let it warm you and soon your whole body was warm and pleased and alive. That was when you were alive past measure, when all of you had been made warm as a cat fed after being hungry, and the cat arose from its warmth and went walking on velvet paws, stretching sleek legs, sleek body, slowly and exquisitely under the firelight, heavy with warmth, but ready at the instant signal of the small burning thing in its mind to turn like a black butterfly and dance a slow seeking dance with the shadows of the fire that flickered like leaves in light wind, desirable, impalpable and wavering, never to be quite torn down from the wall and eaten and so possessed. But there was an odd thirsty satisfaction in trying to tear the shadows.
Fantastic. He had not been so fantastic for a long time.
"And tomorrow there's 'Mode.' And fashion-plates.
And Greenwich Villagers," said the voice of Mrs. Severance. He made some reply impatiently, disliking the sound of his own voice--hers fitted with the dream. When had he been this before?
The Morte d'Arthur--the two with a sword between.
He sank deeper, deeper, into the glow of that imagined firelight--the flame was cooler than water to walk through--that time he had almost taken a turning shadow into his hand. The sword between--only here there was no sword. If he reached out his hand he knew just how the hand that he touched would feel, cool and firm, like that flame. Cool and silent.
There must have been something, somewhere, to make him remember....
He remembered.
A minute later Oliver had splashed up to them, shouting "A rescue! A rescue! Guests Drown While Host Looks On Smilingly! What's the matter, Ted, you look as if you wanted to turn into a submarine? Got cramp?" _