"He is coming to tea."
"To-day?"
"Yes."
"Sorry," said Nancy. "I'd like to see him, but I have promised to drive
Bob Needham to 'Sconset for a swim."
Anthony had made the initial engagement--to play tennis with Mimi Sears,
"Provided, of course, that you have no other plans for me," he had told
Nancy, politely.
She had no plans, nor would she, under the circumstances, have urged
them. That was their code--absolute freedom. "We'll be a lot happier if
we don't tie each other up."
It was to me an amazing attitude. In my young days lovers walked out on
Sunday afternoons to the old cemetery, or on the moor, or along the
beach, and came back at twilight together, and sat together after
supper, holding hands.
I haven't the slightest doubt that Anthony held Nancy's hands, but there
was nothing fixed about the occasions. They had done away with billing
and cooing in the old sense, and what they had substituted seemed to
satisfy them.
Anthony left about three, and I went up to get into something thin and
cool, and to rest a bit before receiving my guest. I heard Nancy at the
telephone making final arrangements with the Drakes. After that I fell
asleep, and knew nothing more until Anita came up to announce that Mr.
Thoresen was down-stairs.
Tea was served in the garden at the back of the house, where there were
some deep wicker chairs, and roses in a riot of bloom.
"This is--enchanting--" said Olaf. He did not sit down at once. He stood
looking about him, at the sun-dial, and the whale's jaw lying bleached
on a granite pedestal, and at the fine old houses rising up around us.
"It is enchanting. Do you know, I have been thinking myself very
fortunate since you spoke to me in church this morning."
After that it was all very easy. He asked and I answered. "You see," he
explained, finally, "I am hungry for anything that tells me about the
sea. Three generations back we were all sailors--my great-grandfather
and his fathers before him in Norway--and far back of that--the
vikings." He drew a long breath. "Then my grandfather came to America.
He settled in the West--in Dakota, and planted grain. He made money, but
he was a thousand miles away from the sea. He starved for it, but he
wanted money, and, as I have said, he made it. And my father made more
money. Then I came. The money took me to school in the East--to
college. My mother died and my father. And now the money is my own. I
bought a yacht, and I have lived on the water. I can't get enough of it.
I think that I am making up for all that my father and my grandfather
denied themselves."
I can't in the least describe to you how he said it. There was a
tenseness, almost a fierceness, in his brilliant blue eyes. Yet he
finished up with a little laugh. "You see," he said, "I am a sort of
Flying Dutchman--sailing the seas eternally, driven not by any sinister
force but by my own delight in it."
"Do you go alone?"
"Oh, I have guests--at times. But I am often my own--good company--"
He stopped and rose. Nancy had appeared in the doorway. She crossed the
porch and came down toward us. She was in her bathing suit and cap, gray
again, with a line of green on the edges, and flung over her shoulders
was a gray cloak. She was on her way to the stables--it was before the
day of motor-cars on the island, those halcyon, heavenly days. The door
was open and her horse harnessed and waiting for her. She could not, of
course, pass us without speaking, and so I presented Olaf.
Anita had brought the tea, and Nancy stayed to eat a slice of thin bread
and butter. "In this air one is always hungry," she said to Olaf, and
smiled at him.
He did not smile back. He was surveying her with a sort of frowning
intensity. She spoke of it afterward, "Does he always stare like that?"
But I think that, in a way, she was pleased.
She drove her own horse, wrapped in her cloak and with an utter
disregard to the informality of her attire. She would, I knew, gather up
the Drakes and Bob Needham, likewise attired in bathing costumes, and
they would all have tea on the other side of the island, naiad-like and
utterly unconcerned. I did not approve of it, but Nancy did not cut her
life to fit my pattern.