When Sheila reached the home of her father and mother she spent her
first few days renewing her kinship with them. They seemed older to her,
but they had not aged as she had. They had been through just one more
season. She had passed through an epoch.
They found her mightily changed. They were proud of her. They could see
that she had taken good care of her body. They knew that she had
succeeded in her art. They wondered what she had done with her soul.
They had reached that thrilling, horribly anxious state of parentage
when the girl child is grown to a woman and when every step is
dangerous. Authority is ended; advice is untranslatable, and the parents
become only spectators at a play whose star they have provided but whose
cast they cannot select.
Sheila was not troubled about these things. Her chief excitement was in
the luxury of having her afternoons to herself and every evening free.
She was like a night-watchman on a vacation. It was wonderful to be her
own mistress from twilight to midnight. She had no make-up to put on
except for the eyes of the sun. There were no footlights. The only need
for attention to her skin was to fight off sunburn and the attacks of
the surf in which she spent hours upon hours.
The business of her neighbors and herself was improvising hilarities:
the sea, the motors, saddle-horses, tennis, golf, watching polo-games,
horse-races, airship-races, all the summer industries of Long Island.
The Kembles had a wide and easy acquaintance with the aristocracy. Roger
and Polly forgot, if the others did not, that they were stage folk. They
enjoyed the elegancies of life and knew how to be familiar without being
vulgar. Sheila inherited their acquaintance and had been bred to their
graces.
Young women and old of social importance made the girl one of their
intimates. Any number of more or less nice young plutocrats offered to
lead her along the primrose path as far as she would go. But she
compelled respect, perhaps with a little extra severity for the sake of
her maligned profession. Before many days she would have to return to
it, but she was in no hurry.
One morning in the sun-flailed surf she grew weary of the jigging crowd
of rope-dancers. Seeing that one of the floats was empty, she swam out
to it. It was more of a journey than she thought, for we judge distances
as walkers, not as swimmers. She climbed aboard with difficulty and
rested, staring out to sea, the boundless sea where big waves came
bowing in, nodding their white feathers.
She heard some one else swimming up, but did not look around. She did
not want to talk to any of the men she had swum away from. She felt the
float tilt as whoever it was sprang from the water and seated himself,
dripping. Then she heard a voice with all the morning in it:
“Good morning!”
“Bret Winfield!” she cried, as she whirled on one hip like a mermaid.
“Sheila Kemble!” he laughed.
“What on earth are you doing here?”
“I’m not on earth; I’m alone in midocean with you.”
“But what brought you? Where did you come from?”
“Home. I just couldn’t stand it.”
“Stand what?”
“Being away from you.”
“Good heavens!”
“It’s been the other place to me.”
“Really?”
“I told Dad I needed a rest; that something was the matter with my mind.
He admitted that, but blamed it to lack of use. Then I ducked. I shipped
my car to New York, and flew down the Motor Parkway to here. Got here
yesterday. Been hanging round, trying to find you alone. Swell chance!
There’s a swarm after you all the time, isn’t there?”
“Is there?”
“Last night I saw you dancing at the hotel with every Tom, Dick, and
Harry. I hoped you’d come out and sit on the piazza so that I could
sandbag the man and carry you off. But you didn’t.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t care to be alone with any of them.”
“Lord bless your sweet soul! Were you thinking of me?”
“Not necessarily.”
“Are you glad to see me?”
“Oh yes. The more the merrier.”
This impudence brought his high hopes down. But they soared again when
she said, with charming inconsistency:
“Dog-on it! here comes somebody!”
A fat man who somewhat resembled the globular figures cartoonists use to
represent the world, wallowed out, splashing like a side-wheel
raft-boat. He tried to climb aboard, but his equator was too wide for
his short arms, and neither Sheila nor Winfield offered to lend him a
hand. He gave up and propelled himself back to shore with the grace of a
bell-buoy.
“Good-by, old flotsam and jetsam,” said Winfield.
Sheila could not but note the difference between the other man and
Winfield. There was every opportunity for observation in both cases.
Each inly acknowledged that the other was perfection physically. Each
wished to be able to observe the other’s soul in equal completeness of
display. But that power was denied them.
It would have served them little to know each other’s souls, since
happiness in love is not a question of individual perfections, but of
their combination and what results from it. Fire and water are excellent
in their place, but brought together, the result is familiar—either the
water changes the flame to sodden ashes, or the flame changes the water
to steam. Both lose their qualities, change unrecognizably.
In any case, Winfield courted Sheila with all the impetuous stubbornness
of his nature. He had no visible rivals to fight, but the affair was not
denied the added charm of danger.
One blistering day, when all of the populace that could slid off the hot
land into the water like half-baked amphibians, Sheila and Winfield
plunged into the nearest fringe of surf. The beach was like Broadway
when the matinées let out. They swam to the float. It was as crowded as
a seal-rock with sirens, sea-leopards, sea-cows, walruses, dugongs, and
manatees. There was no room for Sheila till an obliging faun gallantly
offered her his seat and dived from the raft more graciously than
gracefully, for he smacked the water flatly in what is known as a
belly-buster or otherwise. He nearly swamped her in his back-wash.
She felt a longing for the outer solitudes and, when she had rested and
breathed a few times, she struck out for the open sea beyond the ropes.
Winfield followed her gaily and they reveled in the life of mer-man and
mer-girl till suddenly she realized that she was tired.
Forgetting where she was, she attempted to stand up. She thrust her feet
down into a void. There is hardly a more hideous sensation, or a more
terrifying, for an inexpert swimmer. She went under with a gasp and came
up choking.
Winfield was just diving into a big wave and did not see her. The same
wave caught Sheila by the back of her head and held her face down, then
swept on, leaving her strangling and smitten into a panic. She struck
out for shore with all awkwardness, as if robbed of experience with the
water.
Winfield turned to her, and sang, “A life on the bounding waves for me.”
An ugly, snarling breaker whelmed her again, and a third found her
unready and cowering before its toppling wall. She called Winfield by
his first name for the first time:
“Bret, I can’t get back.”
He crept to her side with all his speed, and spoke soothing words: “You
poor child! of course you can.”
“I—I’m afraid.”
A massive green billow flung on her a crest like a cartload of
paving-stones, and sent her spinning, bewildered. Winfield just heard
her moan:
“I give up.”
He clutched her sleeve as she drooped under the petty wave that
succeeded. He tried to remember what the books and articles said, but he
had never saved anybody and he was only an ordinary swimmer himself.
He swam on his side, reaching out with one hand and dragging her with
the other. But helplessly he kicked her delicate body and she floated
face downward. He turned on his back and, suddenly remembering the
instructions, put his hands in her armpits and lifted her head above all
but the ripple-froth, propelling himself with his feet alone.
But his progress was dismally slow, and he could not see where he was
going. The laughter of the bathers and their shrieks as the breakers
charged in among them grew fainter. A longshore current was haling them
away from the crowds. The life-savers were busy hoisting a big woman
into their boat and everybody was watching the rescue. Nobody had missed
Sheila. Her own father and mother were whooping like youngsters in the
surf.
Winfield twisted his head and tried to make out his course, but his dim
eyes could not see so far without the glasses he had left at the
boat-house; and the light on the water was blinding.
He was tired and dismayed. He rested for a while, then struck out till
he must rest again. At last he spoke to her: “Sheila.”
“Yes, dear.”
“You’ll have to help me. I can’t see far enough.”
“You poor boy!” she cried. “Tell me what to do.”
“Can you put your hands on my shoulders, and tell me which way to swim?
I’m all turned round.”
He drew her to him, and revolved her and set her hands on his shoulders,
then turned his back to her, and swam with all-fours. She floated out
above him like a mantle, and, holding her head high, directed him. She
was his eyes, and he was her limbs, and thus curiously twinned they
fought their way through the alien element.
The sea seemed to want them for its own. It attacked them with waves
that went over them with the roar of railroad trains. Beneath, the icy
undertow gripped at his feet. His lungs hurt him so that he felt that
death would be a lesser ache than breathing.
Sheila’s weight, for all the lightness the water gave it, threatened to
drown them both. But her words were full of help. In his behalf she put
into her voice more cheer than she found in her heart. The shore seemed
rather to recede than to approach.
Now and then she would call aloud for help, but the salt-water had
weakened her throat and there was always some new sensation ashore.
At length, Winfield could hear the crash of the breakers and at length
Sheila was telling him that they were almost in. Again and again he
stabbed downward for a footing and found none. Eventually, however, he
felt the blessed foundation of the world beneath him and, turning,
caught Sheila about the waist and thrust her forward till she too could
stand.
The beach was bad where they landed and the baffled waters dragged at
their trembling legs like ropes, but they made onward to the dry sand.
They fell down, panting, aghast, and stared at the innocent sea, where
joyous billows came in like young men running with their hands aloft.
Far to their deft the mob shrieked and cavorted. Farther away to their
right the next colony of maniacs cavorted and shrieked.
When breathing was less like swallowing swords they looked at each
other, smiled with sickly lips, and clasped cold, shriveled hands.
“Well,” said Sheila, “you saved my life, didn’t you?”
“No,” he answered; “you saved mine.”
She gave him a pale-blue smile and, as the chill seized her, she spoke,
with teeth knocking together, “We s-saved dea-dea chother.”
“Ye-yes,” he ch-chattered, “so w-we bu-bu-bu-bulong to wea-weachother.”
“All r-r-right-t-t-t.”
That was his proposal and her acceptance. They rose and clasped hands
and ran for the bath-house, while agues of rapture made scroll-work of
their outlines. They had escaped from dying together, but they were not
to escape from living together.