Part 12 (1/2)
”You live up here because of the sea, Mister?”
”Yes.”
”You ever feel the sea's something--alive, like you and me?”
”You--feel--that--too?”
”Yes,” she said slowly, ”and I knew you felt it, because the first time I saw you--why--you're somehow--something like the sea.”
His hands clinched at his sides. His breath came in quick rasping gasps.
”I'll get your basket,” he muttered.
He rushed into his one room shanty and caught up the basket nearest to him and went out again to her.
She took the basket from him in silence. She slipped the handle of it on to her arm. Her hands rubbed against each other; the fingers of them twining and intertwining.
”I'll be going now, Mister.”
”Yes.”
”I've got to be getting home before Pa and Will go out to the nets.”
”Good-by, little girl.”
”Good-by, Mister; and--thanks.”
He stood there and watched her go from the back of his stone built shanty down the narrow winding path that lay along the sun bleached chalk cliffs. She went quickly and lightly down the steep incline, her small slender figure in its blue print dress, with the sun bringing out the burnished glints in her golden hair. His eyes strained after her. In a short while he lost her from sight.
He went back to his basket making then.
And as he sat there, his fingers weaving and bending the supple reeds, mechanically working them into shape, he tried to shut out all thought of her; to feel as though she had never come to him; to rivet his attention upon the insistent pounding of the sea that hurled itself again and again at the base of the chalk cliffs; calling and calling to him.
After a while the early deep blue dusk of the twilight came.
He got stiffly to his feet.
The long moving shadows were quivering in fantastic purpled patterns on the ground about him. Great daubs of them clung in the crevices of the chalk cliffs. A mat of shadows crept over the flat salt marshes and through the dank yellowed gra.s.ses. There was a sudden chill in the wind that came to him from off the water. A flock of screeching sea-gulls wildly beating their wings, rose from the cliffs and whirred out toward the open sea, the uncanny piercing sound of their shrieking coming deafeningly back to him.
He stood there staring at the ocean, his head well back; his nostrils dilated; his blue green eyes strangely wide.
Far in the distance against the graying horizon he could see the choppy white capped waves racing over the smooth dark water. Even as he looked the sea began to rise in great swollen billows. The wind too was rising.
He could hear the distant cry of it.
His heart began to thump wildly. He knew what was going to happen; just as he always knew. He could feel what the sea was going to do.
He stood there undecided.
A quick picture came to him of the storm.