I
The ketch drifted into the serene inclosure of the bay as silently as
the reflections moving over the mirrorlike surface of the water.
Beyond a low arm of land that hid the sea the western sky was a
single, clear yellow; farther on the left the pale, incalculably old
limbs of cypress, their roots bare, were hung with gathering shadows
as delicate as their own faint foliage. The stillness was emphasized
by the ceaseless murmur of the waves breaking on the far, seaward
bars.
John Woolfolk brought the ketch up where he intended to anchor and
called to the stooping white-clad figure in the bow: "Let go!" There
was an answering splash, a sudden rasp of hawser, the booms swung
idle, and the yacht imperceptibly settled into her berth. The wheel
turned impotently; and, absent-minded, John Woolfolk locked it. He
dropped his long form on a carpet-covered folding chair near by. He
was tired. His sailor, Poul Halvard, moved about with a noiseless and
swift efficiency; he rolled and cased the jib, and then, with a
handful of canvas stops, secured and covered the mainsail and
proceeded aft to the jigger. Unlike Woolfolk, Halvard was short--a
square figure with a smooth, deep-tanned countenance, colorless and
steady, pale blue eyes. His mouth closed so tightly that it appeared
immovable, as if it had been carved from some obdurate material that
opened for the necessities of neither speech nor sustenance.
Tall John Woolfolk was darkly tanned, too, and had a grey gaze,
by turns sharply focused with bright black pupils and blankly
introspective. He was garbed in white flannels, with bare ankles and
sandals, and an old, collarless silk shirt, with sleeves rolled
back on virile arms incongruously tattooed with gauzy green
cicadas.
He stayed motionless while Halvard put the yacht in order for the
night. The day's passage through twisting inland waterways, the hazard
of the tides on shifting flats, the continual concentration on details
at once trivial and highly necessary, had been more wearing than the
cyclone the ketch had weathered off Barbuda the year before. They had
been landbound since dawn; and all day John Woolfolk's instinct had
revolted against the fields and wooded points, turning toward the open
sea.
Halvard disappeared into the cabin; and, soon after, a faint, hot air,
the smell of scorched metal, announced the lighting of the vapor
stove, the preparations for supper. Not a breath stirred the surface
of the bay. The water, as transparently clear as the hardly darkened
air, lay like a great amethyst clasped by its dim corals and the arm
of the land. The glossy foliage that, with the exception of a small
silver beach, choked the shore might have been stamped from metal. It
was, John Woolfolk suddenly thought, amazingly still. The atmosphere,
too, was peculiarly heavy, languorous. It was laden with the scents of
exotic, flowering trees; he recognized the smooth, heavy odor of
oleanders and the clearer sweetness of orange blossoms.
He was idly surprised at the latter; he had not known that orange
groves had been planted and survived in Georgia. Woolfolk gazed more
attentively at the shore, and made out, in back of the luxuriant
tangle, the broad white façade of a dwelling. A pair of marine glasses
lay on the deck at his hand; and, adjusting them, he surveyed the face
of a distinguished ruin. The windows on the stained wall were broken
in--they resembled the empty eyes of the dead; storms had battered
loose the neglected roof, leaving a corner open to sun and rain; he
could see through the foliage lower down great columns fallen about a
sweeping portico.
The house was deserted, he was certain of that--the melancholy
wreckage of a vanished and resplendent time. Its small principality,
flourishing when commerce and communication had gone by water, was one
of the innumerable victims of progress and of the concentration of
effort into huge impersonalities. He thought he could trace other even
more complete ruins, but his interest waned. He laid the glasses back
upon the deck. The choked bubble of boiling water sounded from the
cabin, mingled with the irregular sputter of cooking fat and the
clinking of plates and silver as Halvard set the table. Without, the
light was fading swiftly; the wavering cry of an owl quivered from the
cypress across the water, and the western sky changed from paler
yellow to green. Woolfolk moved abruptly, and, securing a bucket to
the handle of which a short rope had been spliced and finished with an
ornamental Turk's-head, he swung it overboard and brought it up half
full. In the darkness of the bucket the water shone with a faint
phosphorescence. Then from a basin he lathered his hands with a thick,
pinkish paste, washed his face, and started toward the cabin.
He was already in the companionway when, glancing across the still
surface of the bay, he saw a swirl moving into view about a small
point. He thought at first that it was a fish, but the next moment saw
the white, graceful silhouette of an arm. It was a woman swimming.
John Woolfolk could now plainly make out the free, solid mass of her
hair, the naked, smoothly turning shoulder. She was swimming with
deliberate ease, with a long, single overarm stroke; and it was
evident that she had not seen the ketch. Woolfolk stood, his gaze
level with the cabin top, watching her assured progress. She turned
again, moving out from the shore, then suddenly stopped. Now, he
realized, she saw him.
The swimmer hung motionless for a breath; then, with a strong, sinuous
drive, she whirled about and made swiftly for the point of land. She
was visible for a short space, low in the water, her hair wavering in
the clear flood, and then disappeared abruptly behind the point,
leaving behind--a last vanishing trace of her silent passage--a
smooth, subsiding wake on the surface of the bay.
John Woolfolk mechanically descended the three short steps to the
cabin. There had been something extraordinary in the woman's brief
appearance out of the odorous tangle of the shore, with its ruined
habitation. It had caught him unprepared, in a moment of half weary
relaxation, and his imagination responded with a faint question to
which it had been long unaccustomed. But Halvard, in crisp white,
standing behind the steaming supper viands, brought his thoughts again
to the day's familiar routine.
The cabin was divided through its forward half by the centerboard
casing, and against it a swinging table had been elevated, an
immaculate cover laid, and the yacht's china, marked in cobalt with
the name Gar, placed in a polished and formal order. Halvard's service
from the stove to the table was as silent and skillful as his housing
of the sails; he replaced the hot dishes with cold, and provided a
glass bowl of translucent preserved figs.
Supper at an end, Woolfolk rolled a cigarette from shag that resembled
coarse black tea and returned to the deck. Night had fallen on the
shore, but the water still held a pale light; in the east the sky was
filled with an increasing, cold radiance. It was the moon, rising
swiftly above the flat land. The moonlight grew in intensity, casting
inky shadows of the spars and cordage across the deck, making the
light in the cabin a reddish blur by contrast. The icy flood swept
over the land, bringing out with a new emphasis the close, glossy
foliage and broken façade--it appeared unreal, portentous. The odors
of the flowers, of the orange blossoms, uncoiled in heavy, palpable
waves across the water, accompanied by the owl's fluctuating cry. The
sense of imminence increased, of a _genius loci_ unguessed and
troublous, vaguely threatening in the perfumed dark.