The beach was a different world. Under the plum-glossed wall of storm
the bay was level, dusky, and still, crumbling in low parallels of
surf. The waves collapsed in short flat crashes. The children flashed
in the warm dull water: they wore three tight little green bathing
suits: their legs so tanned it seemed as though long brown stockings
were snugly drawn above their polished knees. They tumbled with the
soft clumsy grace of young animals and were happy without knowing
it. Janet could swim; Sylvia still used water-wings to buoy her up;
Rose preferred not to go beyond knee-depth and squatted in the curl
of the small breakers. When the backwash scoured the sand from under
her insteps, leaving a hard mound beneath her tickling heels, she
squeaked with ecstatic fright. “The ocean’s pulling me!” she cried, and
squattered to safety. Sylvia, paddling splashily a little farther out,
with a white rubber cap and the bulbous wings behind her shoulders, was
like a lame butterfly that had dropped from the dunes above. She put a
foot down and couldn’t touch bottom. This alarmed her and she hastily
flapped herself shoreward. A wave broke on her nape, shot her sprawling
into the creamy shallows. The wings spilled off, she rolled sideways
and under with legs flying, her nose rubbed along soft ridges of sand.
Her face, emerging, was a comic medallion of anxious surprise. Another
spread of lacy green water slid round her chin. She was relieved to
find herself laughing.
“A wave went right over me and I didn’t mind,” she exclaimed. “I’m a
little laughing girl, and laughing girls are different.”
It was all different. In this width of sky and sea and sand nothing was
reproached. Nounou was off for the afternoon and could not forbid them
to play with the stranger. Farther along the bay were other cottages,
other children; but here they were alone. “Do you see those houses?”
said four-year-old Rose to Martin, pointing to the bungalows that stood
on a bluff, sharp upon naked air. “People live there, with beds and
food.”
Yet they did not even know they were alone. Merely they existed, they
were. They were part of the ocean, which does not think but only
fulfils its laws. Tides curve and bubble in, earth receives them,
earth lets them ebb. Soft shells pulverize, hard shells polish, sand
hills slither, seaweeds dry and blacken: the bay takes the sea in its
great arms and is content: and inland the farmyard dogs, those spotted
moralists, are scandalized by the moon. The moon--chaste herself,
bright persuasion of unchastity in others. For life is all one piece,
of endless pattern. No stitch in the vast fabric can be unravelled
without risking the whole tapestry. It is the garment woven without
seams.
Here was beauty; and they, not knowing it, were part of it unawares.
Here was no thinking, merely the great rhythm of ordered accident,
gulls’ wings white against thunder, the electric circuits of law broken
by the clear crystal of fancy. And the sea, the silly sea, meaningless,
prolific, greatest of lovers, brawling over the cold pumice reefs of
dead volcanoes, groping tenderly up slants of thirsty sand. The sea
that breeds life and the land that breeds thought, destined lovers and
enemies, made to meet and destroy, to mingle and deny, marking earth
with strangeness wherever they embrace. The sea, the bitter sea, that
makes man suspect he is homeless and has no roof but dreams.
Janet, who was big enough to go beyond the low surf and grapple the
White Whale in his own element, liked Mr. Martin because he did not
talk much and understood the game at once. When she harpooned him he
rolled and thrashed in foam, churning with his flukes as a wounded
whale should; and came floating in so they could haul him to land and
cut him up for blubber. This, she explained, is the flensing stage,
marking out a flat area of moist sand. Then they burned the blubber in
a great bonfire, a beacon that glared tawnily in the night, to guide
the relief ship to their perilous coast. Martin found it ticklish to
be flensed, so they lay and made tunnels. The tide was going, the flat
belt of wet beach was like a mirror, reflecting the rich sword-blade
colour of the West.
But Martin was a little puzzled.
“What did you say your names are?” he asked again.
“Janet and Sylvia and Rose,” they said, delighted at his stupidity. For
it is always thrilling to tell people your name: it proves that you too
belong to this important world.
Still, this didn’t account for the other, the fourth one. He had seen
her watching them from the beach, and then she had been playing with
them in the tumbling water. He had thought the children just a little
bit rude not to greet her when she joined them. She was not as brown
as they, so perhaps she was a stranger who had newly arrived. But now,
when that heavy thunder rolled like wagon wheels across a dark bridge
of clouds, and the other three ran off to the bath house to dress, she
was sitting there beside him.
She was older, but he knew her now. Her face was wet; but of course,
for she had been wriggling in the surf like a mermaid. He felt a trifle
angry with her: she had got ahead of him, then. He was opening his
mouth to speak when she asked him exactly the same thing:
“How did _you_ get here?”
He must be careful: if he told her too much she might give him away.
She never could keep a secret.
“I’ve always been here,” he said. “It isn’t fair for you to tag along.
Go home.”
Then he realized it was no use to talk to her like that. Why, she
seemed older than he: she had even begun to get soft and bulgy, like
ladies. But she looked so frightened, he took her hand.
“We can’t both do it,” he said. “They’ll find out. Bunny, you’re not
playing fair.”
“I am, I am!” she cried. “I’m not playing at all. _You_ go away. You’ll
be sorry.”
It was awful to see her look so anxious.
“You used to be a laughing girl,” he said, “and laughing girls are
different. What’s happened to you anyway?”
She gazed at him strangely, with so much love in her face he felt she
must be ill.
“This is no place for you,” he said firmly. “Here among strangers.
You’ll be lonely. _I_ can’t look after you.”
“They aren’t strangers. Oh, please go back before you find out.”
This was all senseless and annoying; yet he was sorry for her too. I
know what’s the matter with her, he thought. He accused her of it.
“No, no!” she said piteously. “No, Martin. Not that. I nearly did, but
not really.”
“I dare say it wasn’t your fault,” he said; and then, remembering a
useful phrase, “You’ll have to excuse me now.” He saw Mr. Granville
approaching down the sandy ravine. “Here’s one of them coming.”
“Tell me,” she said quickly. “Do you like them?”
“Why, yes, they’re nice. They’re a bit queer. They seem to worry about
things.--They like _me_,” he added proudly.
He could see Mr. Granville waving to them to take shelter in the cabin.
The bay was already scarred with the onset of the squall.
“Hurry!” Martin said. “Come on, we’ll wait in the bath house until the
storm’s over.” They ran together, stumbling up the heavy sand, she
lightly, not dragging behind as she usually did. When he reached the
door, pulling it open against the first volley of the rain, it was not
her hand that he held, but a cold smooth shell.