The Man from the Sea Read Free Page A

surrounding them were distinguishable, and for an instant he imagined that they stirred at something in his memory. “You’ll have to wait.” He repeated it briskly. “I’m going across to those other rocks. There are things you’ve rather upset.”
    “So I gather.” The man from the sea was impassive. “But you should get them straight, I think, inside ten minutes. I’ll expect you back then.”
    “I’ll come back when I can.” Cranston stiffened under what seemed a threat.
    “Thank you. I realise I’m not your only pebble on the beach.” The voice was ironic. “But don’t forget me altogether and clear out. It would be disconcerting if I had to follow you like this…back to civilisation.”
    Cranston, without replying, began to climb down to the beach. He did so slowly, since he felt it prudent to keep an eye on the other man still. “Stay just where you are,” he called back.
    “Certainly – for a few minutes.” The torso of the man from the sea slipped down into darkness until only his head and shoulders showed in the moonlight. He had found something to sit on. “But you needn’t, my dear young man, think I’m going to slug you. I value you too highly for that. And doesn’t the mere suspicion make you out a rather fickle fellow? We were like blood-brothers, you know, only five minutes ago.”
    Again Cranston said nothing. But he felt irritated – partly at having his years condescended to, and partly from acknowledging the truth of what the man from the sea had divined. He completed his scramble, and felt his feet on the sand.
    “I wonder why?” The voice of the man from the sea came to him now from above only as a meditative murmur.
    “I wonder…can you be getting away with something too?”
     
    The last throb of the motorboat had faded, and the sea lay dim and empty on either side of the broad bright causeway thrown across it by the moon. When halfway down the beach Cranston swerved and ran for the cliff. The shorts and gym shoes which were all he had set out in on this warm night lay at an easily identified spot; within seconds he had them on and was running to the farthest rocks. “Caryl?” His voice was carefully without anxiety. “Come out…it’s quite all right.”
    She appeared instantly – jumping a small rock-pool in her urgency and tumbling into his arms. “Dicky, Dicky – what is it? I don’t understand. It isn’t Alex?”
    “Of course not. Nothing like that.” He took her in a quick embrace. Her body, slim beneath the slacks and thick sweater into which it was huddled, trembled not with the excitement familiar to him but in simple terror. He felt for her a sudden enormous pity and compassion, holding no proportion either with the degree or occasion of her distress. He held, caressed, soothed her – murmuring all his private endearments, secret names. It was something he had been constrained to do before, and he had skill at it. Out of the force of his solicitude he strained that skill now, exploited it with all the resource of his quick brain. And suddenly the very effort of this produced, without a single premonitory flicker in consciousness, a complete revolution.
    He was so skilful only because it was all – the whole damned thing – happening through his brain. In this infernal theatrical moonlight he was like an actor who has been sunk for a space in his part, but to whom detached consciousness has returned, so that he must simply get through his scene with what deftness rests in him. The very largeness of his emotion of seconds before had spoken of its instability; and all that he now felt was a sharp impatience. That – and the shocked sense of everything being in process of becoming different, as if experience had incontinently, treacherously turned upon him its other face. But for the moment at least he could shut out its new enigmatical lineaments and look only at the practical problem confronting him. “It’s all right,” he whispered, “ –