John Woolfolk had said nothing to Halvard of the woman he had seen
swimming in the bay. He was conscious of no particular reason for
remaining silent about her; but the thing had become invested with a
glamour that, he felt, would be destroyed by commonplace discussion.
He had no personal interest in the episode, he was careful to add.
Interests of that sort, serving to connect him with the world, with
society, with women, had totally disappeared from his life. He rolled
and lighted a fresh cigarette, and in the minute orange spurt of the
match his mouth was somber and forbidding.
The unexpected appearance on the glassy water had merely started into
being a slight, fanciful curiosity. The women of that coast did not
commonly swim at dusk in their bays; such simplicity obtained now only
in the reaches of the highest civilization. There were, he knew, no
hunting camps here, and the local inhabitants were mere sodden
squatters. A chart lay in its flat canvas case by the wheel; and, in
the crystal flood of the moon, he easily reaffirmed from it his
knowledge of the yacht's position. Nothing could be close by but
scattered huts and such wreckage as that looming palely above the
oleanders.
Yet a woman had unquestionably appeared swimming from behind the point
of land off the bow of the _Gar_. The women native to the locality,
and the men, too, were fanatical in the avoidance of any unnecessary
exterior application of water. His thoughts moved in a monotonous
circle, while the enveloping radiance constantly increased. It became
as light as a species of unnatural day, where every leaf was clearly
revealed but robbed of all color and familiar meaning.
He grew restless, and rose, making his way forward about the
narrow deck-space outside the cabin. Halvard was seated on a coil
of rope beside the windlass and stood erect as Woolfolk approached.
The sailor was smoking a short pipe, and the bowl made a crimson spark
in his thick, powerful hand. John Woolfolk fingered the wood
surface of the windlass bitts and found it rough and gummy.
Halvard said instinctively:
"I'd better start scraping the mahogany tomorrow, it's getting
white."
Woolfolk nodded. Halvard was a good man. He had the valuable quality
of commonly anticipating spoken desires. He was a Norwegian, out of
the Lofoden Islands, where sailors are surpassingly schooled in the
Arctic seas. Poul Halvard, so far as Woolfolk could discover, was
impervious to cold, to fatigue, to the insidious whispering of mere
flesh. He was a man without temptation, with an untroubled allegiance
to a duty that involved an endless, exacting labor; and for those
reasons he was austere, withdrawn from the community of more fragile
and sympathetic natures. At times his inflexible integrity oppressed
John Woolfolk. Halvard, he thought, was a difficult man to live up
to.
He turned and absently surveyed the land. His restlessness increased.
He felt a strong desire for a larger freedom of space than that
offered by the _Gar_, and it occurred to him that he might go ashore
in the tender. He moved aft with this idea growing to a determination.
In the cabin, on the shelf above the berths built against the sides of
the ketch, he found an old blue flannel coat, with crossed squash
rackets and a monogram embroidered in yellow on the breast pocket.
Slipping it on, he dropped over the stern of the tender.
Halvard came instantly aft, but Woolfolk declined the mutely offered
service. The oars made a silken swish in the still bay as he pulled
away from the yacht. The latter's riding light, swung on the forestay,
hung without a quiver, like a fixed yellow star. He looked once over
his shoulder, and then the bow of the tender ran with a soft shock
upon the beach. Woolfolk bedded the anchor in the sand and then stood
gazing curiously before him.
On his right a thicket of oleanders drenched the air with the perfume
of their heavy poisonous flowering, and behind them a rough clearing
of saw grass swept up to the débris of the fallen portico. To the
left, beyond the black hole of a decaying well, rose the walls of a
second brick building, smaller than the dwelling. A few shreds of
rotten porch clung to its face; and the moonlight, pouring through a
break above, fell in a livid bar across the obscurity of a high single
chamber.
Between the crumbling piles there was the faint trace of a footway,
and Woolfolk advance to where, inside a dilapidated sheltering fence,
he came upon a dark, compact mass of trees and smelled the increasing
sweetness of orange blossoms. He struck the remains of a board path,
and progressed with the cold, waxen leaves of the orange trees
brushing his face. There was, he saw in the grey brightness, ripe
fruit among the branches, and he mechanically picked an orange and
then another. They were small but heavy, and had fine skins.
He tore one open and put a section in his mouth. It was at first
surprisingly bitter, and he involuntarily flung away what remained in
his hand. But after a moment he found that the oranges possessed a
pungency and zestful flavor that he had tasted in no others. Then he
saw, directly before him, a pale, rectangular light which he
recognized as the opened door of a habitation.