The Scarecrow and Other Stories Part 12

"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.

He had seen it all before. He had stood there on the chalk cliffs and watched it all: Watched the shattered broken logs; the swirling sucking water. The sea had held him under its spell; had compelled him to witness its maddened, infuriated stalking of its prey.

Her people were out there. Her Pa and her Will. Why had she told him that? Why had she said if anything ever happened to them she would die?

Why?

He could just make out the stiff sticks of the nets reaching thin and dark from the surface of the gray water against the lighter gray skies; and the boats rowing toward them. The boats with the fishermen. He could see the slender patches of them rising and falling with the waves, going slowly to the nets. He could distinguish the small, dark shadows of the men, rowing. They had pulled him out of the sea in that early morning; he who was something come from the sea, and of the sea; and always belonging to the sea.

To--betray--the--sea--

The waves were racing in to the sh.o.r.e. The thumping, deafening boom of them there at the base of the chalk cliffs below him.

He tried to tear his eyes away from it. It held him as it ever held him.

It kept him there as though he belonged to it. As though it knew he belonged to it; and knew that he knew it. A strange uneasiness arose within him. Even before he was conscious of it, he felt that the sea had sensed it. Its insistent angry pounding threatened him.

She had said that she would die.

Below him the swirling, churning sea.

He turned then and went very slowly down the narrow, winding path that led along the sun bleached chalk cliffs. Through the deep blue dusk of the evening he went, and the gray blotched reach of the flat salt marshes with their dank yellowed gra.s.ses lay all about him; and overhead the cloud spotted, moving gray of the sky, and beneath him the raging sea that called to him; and called.

He never stopped until he came to the weather darkened shanty where she lived.

He paused then at the gate.

A lighted lamp was in one of the windows on the ground floor. The soft glow of it streamed in a long ladder of light out to him in the darkness.

He opened the gate and went haltingly across the yard, and after a moment's hesitation he knocked at the door.

At the far end of the street the sea thudded over the yellow sanded beach; the pale stretch of it coming out of the grayness in a long white line.

She answered his knock.

The light from the lamp swept through the open doorway.

Something in his face terrified her; something that she had never before seen in those blue green eyes, the color of the sea.

"What is it? What's happened?"

He stood there just looking down at her.

"Oh, Mister, tell me; please--what is it?"

Her two hands went up to her throat and caught tightly at her neck.

"There's--a--storm--"

She looked out into the quiet, darkening evening.