Part 7 (1/2)
”Don't be vulgar, Brice,” said Louise, and she laughed rather forlornly.
”I don't see how you have the heart to joke, if you think it's so bad as you say.”
”I haven't. I'm joking without any heart.” He stood up. ”Let us go and take a bath.”
She glanced at him with a swift inventory of his f.a.gged looks, and said, ”Indeed, you shall not take a bath this morning. You couldn't react against it. You won't, will you?”
”No, I'll only lie on the sand, if you can pick me out a good warm spot, and watch you.”
”I shall not bathe, either.”
”Well, then, I'll watch the other women.” He put out his hand and took hers.
She felt his touch very cold. ”You are excited I can see. I wish--”
”What? That I was not an intending dramatist?”
”That you didn't have such excitements in your life. They will kill you.”
”They are all that will keep me alive.”
They went down to the beach, and walked back and forth on its curve several times before they dropped in the sand at a discreet distance from several groups of hotel acquaintance. People were coming and going from the line of bath-houses that backed upon the low sand-bank behind them, with its tufts of coa.r.s.e silvery-green gra.s.ses. The Maxwells bowed to some of the ladies who tripped gayly past them in their airy costumes to the surf, or came up from it sobered and s.h.i.+vering. Four or five young fellows, with sun-blackened arms and legs, were pa.s.sing ball near them. A pony-carriage drove by on the wet sand; a horseman on a crop-tailed roan thumped after it at a hard trot. Dogs ran barking vaguely about, and children with wooden shovels screamed at their play.
Far off s.h.i.+mmered the sea, of one pale blue with the sky. The rooks were black at either end of the beach; a line of sail-boats and dories swung across its crescent beyond the bathers, who bobbed up and down in the surf, or showed a head here and there outside of it.
”What a singular spectacle,” said Maxwell. ”The casting off of the conventional in sea-bathing always seems to me like the effect of those dreams where we appear in society insufficiently dressed, and wonder whether we can make it go.”
”Yes, isn't it?” His wife tried to cover all the propositions with one loosely fitting a.s.sent.
”I'm surprised,” Maxwell went on, ”that some realistic wretch hasn't put this sort of thing on the stage. It would be tremendously effective; if he made it realistic enough it would be attacked by the press as improper and would fill the house. Couldn't we work a sea-bathing scene into the 'Second Chapter'? It would make the fortune of the play, and it would give G.o.dolphin a chance to show his n.o.ble frame in something like the majesty of nature. G.o.dolphin would like nothing better. We could have Atland rescue Salome, and G.o.dolphin could flop round among the canvas breakers for ten minutes, and come on for a recall with the heroine, both dripping real water all over the stage.”
”Don't be disgusting, Brice,” said his wife, absently. She had her head half turned from him, watching a lady who had just come out of her bath-house and was pa.s.sing very near them on her way to the water.
Maxwell felt the inattention in his wife's tone and looked up.
The bather returned their joint gaze steadily from eyes that seemed, as Maxwell said, to smoulder under their long lashes, and to question her effect upon them in a way that he was some time finding a phrase for.
He was tormented to make out whether she were a large person or not; without her draperies he could not tell. But she moved with splendid freedom, and her beauty expressed a maturity of experience beyond her years; she looked young, and yet she looked as if she had been taking care of herself a good while. She was certainly very handsome, Louise owned to herself, as the lady quickened her pace, and finally ran down to the water and plunged into a breaker that rolled in at the right moment in uncommon volume.
”Well?” she asked her husband, whose eyes had gone with hers.
”We ought to have clapped.”
”Do you think she is an actress?”
”I don't know. I never saw her before. She seemed to turn the suns.h.i.+ne into lime-light as she pa.s.sed. Why! that's rather pretty, isn't it? And it's a verse. I wonder what it is about these people. The best of them have nothing of the stage in them--at least, the men haven't. I'm not sure, though, that the women haven't. There are lots of women off the stage who are actresses, but they don't seem so. They're personal; this one was impersonal. She didn't seem to regard me as a man; she regarded me as a house. Did you feel that?”
”Yes, that was it, I suppose. But she regarded you more than she did me, I think.”
”Why, of course. You were only a matinee.”