Thunder on the Left (1925)/Chapter 8
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.