The Man from the Sea Read Free

right, Caryl. I’m coming. But stay where you are. There’s a man here…a stranger.”
    There was silence – stricken silence – and he turned to scramble down the rock. The poor darling. The poor old darling. He was about to call out again when, for the first time, the man from the sea spoke.
    “Where are your clothes?”
    Cranston stopped, startled. From the moment that he had heard the voices in the motorboat he had been taking it for granted that the fugitive was a foreigner. And he had jumped to a conclusion, too, about his class. He must be a common sailor, a steward, somebody of that sort, involved in unknown shady business turned suddenly desperate. It was on the basis of these assumptions that he had felt his unaccountable impulse of solidarity with the man. But now the man turned out to be an Englishman – and an Englishman who might have been at his own school. For Cranston the consequence of this discovery, strangely enough, was an immediate distrust, expressing itself in a quick backward step. Both men were now standing up, and the stranger was in full moonlight down to the waist. Cranston’s recoil completed the movement he had begun to a lower level of the rocks, and he was now looking at the man from the sea as one might look at a picture skied in an old-fashioned gallery. The effect was, in the old exact sense, picturesque. The background was of jagged rock and the empty vault of the night, sparsely pricked out by a few pale stars. Against this the man was posed naked in a symbolism that might have been Leonardo’s: the flesh – enigmatic and evanescent – framed in the immensities of geological and astronomical time. Moreover, in his own figure he sustained the comparison. He was a common man neither in the sense that Cranston had assumed nor in any other.
    “Where are your clothes?” The man from the sea repeated his question impatiently, as if he seldom had to ask for information twice. He was in his early forties – and the fact that he was old enough to be Cranston’s father increased the young man’s new sense of distrust. He experienced a strong instant persuasion that this was the wrong sort of person to come tumbling out of the sea on an obscure wave of melodrama. But there was something more – a further and somehow yet more disconcerting perception to which he was helped by his own very respectable cleverness. He was in the presence not simply of another clever man, far more mature than himself. He was in the presence of a strong capacious intellect.
    “My clothes?” Cranston heard the words jerk out of himself. “They’re no distance away – what I’ve got. I’ve been bathing.”
    “So have I. And we couldn’t have chosen a better night.”
    The joke – if it was meant as that – held for Cranston no reassurance. For the first time there came home to him what the pitch of the fugitive’s desperation must have been. The channel was a long way out. Even from the cliff, steamers following it were hull-down on the horizon. The man had done a terrific swim. And he was next to naked. Clothes were his first necessity. And in the pool of shadow in which he still stood there was probably quite a number of small handy boulders lying about. Cranston realised a sober chance that, when he turned away, the man from the sea would grab one of these and hit him on the head.
    “If you want clothes, we’ll have to do some talking.” Cranston heard himself with surprise – both for the words, which he had not premeditated, and for the tone, which was calm. The discovery that he could command a decent poise before a man who was disclosing himself as formidable brought back to Cranston the start of pleasure which had been his first response on tumbling to the stranger’s plight. “But you’ll have to wait a bit.” The better to assure himself that he really had some grip of the situation, Cranston for the second time looked straight into the stranger’s eyes. This time, the features