Claire Ambler (1928, Doubleday)/Part 1/Chapter 6
THE Caliph sped into the harbour entrance and swished through the still water to the floats before the clubhouse, where two attendants, dressed like sailors, roped it in its accustomed berth. Nelson, still thoroughly damp, had just landed from the much slower dory; and he paused upon the veranda steps looking down icily upon the arrival of the Caliph. For a moment neither Platter nor Claire saw him, and as she stepped out upon the float Nelson perceived that she had been crying. Moreover, in the cockpit there lay his paddle and the Peanut's cushion, and he understood what must have been their significance to those who discovered them.
His severity was shaken; he saw that she still wept, and that her thin young shoulders were hunched and bowed. Grief was there; was it for him?
Then she saw him, and her startled eyes grew round; a brightness came upon her face. She rushed to him, running over the swaying floats as fast as she could. She seized both of his hands and pressed them to her breast. "Nelson! Oh, thank heaven! Thank heaven!"
"What for?" he asked gruffly; but he was touched. Nay, he wavered. Once more they seemed to care for the same things; once more she seemed adorable.
In her agitation she spoke exactly what she felt and much too straight from the heart. "What for?" she cried. "Why, we thought you were drowned and everybody in the whole place would blame us for it! Everybody'd 'a' said I was to blame; I know they would!"
The revelation was complete and so was Nelson's disillusionment. He tried to pull his hands from her; but in the happiness of her great relief she held them but the tighter, and then, in his renewed revulsion he forgot to be a gentleman.
"So that's all you were thinking about! It didn't matter a darn thing about my getting drowned and my father and mother and a few things like that!" He used a terrible word. His great-grandfather, under similar circumstances, might have caused a lady to faint by addressing to her the epithet, "heartless coquette." Nelson's generation has less care of its English. "Leggo my hands," he said. "You Prom-Trotter!"
Staggered, she released him; and then slowly, her cheeks burning and her eyes fiery with the endured insult, she went through the clubhouse and walked up the dusty hill-road toward her cottage. "Prom-Trotter!" She had lost him, lost the impetus his competition would give the others, and that could be borne; but the rage she felt—like the anguish that preceded it—was intolerable. Anyone passing her would have thought the hill too steep for her, though she could easily have taken it at a run. She had grown pale, and her breast heaved with her tumultuous breathing.
"He dared!" she panted. "He dared!"
Again tears were hot upon her eyelids; she clenched her small hands, and bit her tremulous lower lip to keep it still. Self-pity and hatred filled her. "I wish he had drowned! I wish those sharks"
In her mind's eye she saw Nelson struggling in the cold salt sea and the three grim fins approaching hungrily. "Eat him!" she imagined herself saying. "Eat him!" This time, she willingly accepted the responsibility; but she got no comfort out of it. She got no comfort out of anything; she was fiery with anger, yet helpless in a keen misery.
Then a strange thing happened to her. As she imagined Nelson in the water she seemed to see his scornful eyes looking at her with all the bitterness that was in them just now when he insulted her. Suddenly, and not knowing how it happened, she realized that Nelson was a person, a being like herself, full of himself as she was full of herself. He was not just some impressions made upon her senses, not just something for her to use; he was as much a person, in fact, as she was. Moreover, in this revelation she understood that he had suffered; that she had been nearly the cause of his death; and that to die meant as much to him as to die would mean to her.
She stopped short, looking up blankly at the warm noon sky above the brow of the hill. "Oh, my goodness!" she whispered. "He was right!"
She was dazed, stricken with her bewilderment and her unhappiness; what had happened to her appeared to her as nothing short of tragic. On the contrary, she should have been full of a new delight; for the thing that had just befallen her on the hillside was of a prophetic beauty; it was the beginning of her life as a being independent of her mechanical self. Out of her rage and pain and the hot pressure of old, old instincts and urges, intelligence was being born.
For the first time in her life, she had just had a thought.