Claire Ambler (1928, Doubleday)/Part 1/Chapter 5
THEN he got his head out of the splashing water and one hand upon the side of the canoe, which was not wholly submerged. It gave him a slight support, enough to sustain him when he paddled with his other hand. The three triangles were not to be seen; but he had no need to fear them, nor indeed, to fear anything; for, on such a day, there are more keen eyes along that coast than landsmen at sea suspect. The waters there are like the Sahara, where Arabs and camels appear miraculously from the vacant expanses of sand. Both sea and sand, where the stranger sees nought else, are incredibly peopled.
A beating in Nelson's ears grew louder and more definite; it was the hard voice of a one-cylinder engine in a lobster fisherman's dory—a dory of the colour of the sea, a dory much the colour of its owner. "I see you when you come out the habbuh," he explained, as he helped Nelson to climb aboard. "'My godfrey mighty!' I says. 'Them summuh people do lean to fancy ideers about whut's a good vessel to navigate in.' Had my eye on you and wan't surprised what happened. Didn't reckanize you, Nelson. I wun't spread it on you if you tell me why you done it."
"Didn't have any sense," Nelson muttered, so abject was his mood. "Guess I found out I never did have any."
In this he meant more than the rescuer perceived; he meant that he had risked his life to impress a worthless girl for whom he now felt the sharpest distaste, asking of destiny no greater boon than that he should never see her again. He thought of her with something like horror; and after they had emptied the Peanut and taken it in tow, he was glad to leave the scene of his idiocy and to be heading for the sane and undramatic shore. He wished to be far from the path of the Caliph on her return to the harbour.
That fast and hardy motorboat, however, speeding back with almost the accuracy of a bee over her outward course, passed within fifty yards of the spot now so loathsome to Nelson, and made a troublous discovery. The dory owner and Nelson had fished two of the Peanut's cushions out of the water, but could not find the third, nor the paddle so carelessly misused by Nelson. The Caliph, higher in the air, and with a greater field of vision, found both. It was Claire who saw the green-and-white cushion.
"Something ahead to the left," she said. "It's just under water; but a little of it sticks out. Let's see what it is."
Platter throttled the engine down, then threw out his clutch; the Caliph lost headway and lay heaving beside the water-logged green-and-white cushion against which bobbed and snuggled a yellow paddle. Platter's mouth opened dismally.
"My goodness!" he exclaimed. "Say!"
"What's the matter?"
"They're his. They're Nelson's."
"But you don't—you don't think"
Platter swallowed heavily. "I told him he had no business out here in that canoe. I told him he didn't. I told him he hadn't any sense. I told him"
"Platter! Do you mean he's drowned?"
"No," he said. "But—but—well, it begins to look kind of queer."
"Oh!" she gasped. "How awful! How awful!"
"It begins to look pretty queer," Platter repeated. "It certn'ly does."
They sat staring incredulously over the side of the boat at the bobbing cushion and paddle; and for a long and disturbing minute neither of them spoke again. Then she put a trembling hand upon his arm. "Ought we—ought we to've made him come with us, Platter?"
"That's what everybody'll say, I guess," he answered huskily. He coughed, and his tone became querulous. "You heard me warn him. You can prove I did. You heard me tell him he had no business to be out here in that"
"Platter!" she cried, interrupting him, in sharpest distress. "You mean you think if anything's happened they'll blame us?"
"I guess they will."
"But why? How could people be so terrible? We didn't have a thing to do with it—not a thing! We told him it was dangerous for him to be out here in that canoe; we begged him to get in our boat."
"Yes. I know; but they'll say"
"It's just horrible!" she said, and she began to cry. "We tried to make him come with us, and if something's happened to him it was absolutely his own fault, and if people—if they could be so mean and cruel—if—if" Agitation overcame her; she failed of coherency and could get no further with her meaning.
"Well," Platter said presently, "we don't know. Somebody might 'a' picked him up." But he gulped as he said it; and he added, "Of course it does begin to look kind of queer."
"And they—they'll blame us?"
For reply, he made an ominous motion with his head, not trusting his voice; and with that, Claire's weeping became an audible sobbing. Platter sat silent, still gazing at the cushion and paddle; but after a time this inaction became intolerable to him. He took a boat hook from its fastenings; and with a little difficulty got the paddle and cushion aboard. Then his passenger asked brokenly, "What you—what you doing that for?"
"We got to," he answered. "We got to take 'em to—to his family."
She protested. "I can't! I just can't! Have we got to?"
"Yes," he said doggedly. "We got to." He stared with sombre eyes at the blue coastline; then drawing a long breath, he pushed forward the clutch lever, and slowly advanced the throttle. The Caliph moved forward with the running seas. "I guess if it's true the whole place'll go sour on us," he said. "They'll treat us like a couple o' murderers all summer." Then he added desperately, "Well, whatever they do, we got to stand it."
"I can't!" she sobbed. "I can't! I can't!"
But she knew that Platter spoke the truth. What awaited them on shore must be borne; and in this realization Claire suffered a sharper pain than any she had yet endured in the whole course of her life. For, though she did not know it and felt that she had lived much and at times suffered much, she had never, hitherto, borne anguish at all. She had endured little achings and some mortification while her teeth were being straightened; she had been through difficulties and discouragements at school; she had wept softly at the funeral of a great-uncle when a quartet sang "Lead, Kindly Light"; but, until to-day, the worst thing that had ever happened to her was a light attack of scarlatina. She had contracted it a week after she "came out," just before the Christmas holidays, and she had wailed piteously to her mother that she was "missing everything!" But though she had no suspicion that her life had been a child's bed of roses, giving her no opportunity to learn anything worth knowing, she was wholly unprepared to be blamed for the drowning of a troubled suitor. For she knew well enough that it was on her account that he had come out into the open sea in the Peanut.
In justice, it must be said that if Nelson had been less arrogant when the Caliph offered him help, she might have spared more thought than she did for the pathos of his struggles in the water and for the probable grief of his family. But pathos does not attach itself to the memory of an overbearing person; and so her shocked imagination was fully occupied with miserable prophetic pictures of her own shattered summer. The season's career, so triumphantly begun last night, was already a ruin; she would be coldly looked upon; she would be pointed out with harsh disapproval; and, what was sheerly unendurable, for the next week or two—her mother's sense of good taste might insist upon longer—she could not even go to any of the dances. It was conceivable that the young people of this new place, at the outset so cordial, might "drop" her; and, shuddering, she faced a pariah's tragedy.
"Platter!" she moaned. "I can't go back! Turn the boat around. I can't go back!"
"Got to," he said. "We got to go through it."
At that, overcome by the thought of the bitter injustice awaiting her, Claire again sobbed aloud. Platter, occupied with his own apprehensions of injustice, proved to be unsympathetic.
"Hush up!" he said. "Gosh!"