The Man from the Sea (2 page)

At least three of the pursuers were talking. Their words came clearly over the water but were completely unintelligible. They were speaking in a foreign language unrelated to any of which Cranston had a smattering. Yet it was clear to him that they were arguing, and with the same caution as before he took another glance round the boulder. The man in the bows was pointing towards the rocks and seemed to be urging a landing. It was about this that there was a dispute. And now, almost at once, the man in the bows prevailed. The boat had not yet entirely lost its momentum, and at a touch on the tiller it turned slowly and glided towards the beach. And Cranston found himself reacting swiftly. His mind took a leap to the backdrop of this obscure drama in the line of cliff overlooking the bay. There were a dozen places where it could be negotiated, and lately he had come to know them well. One of them lay almost directly behind this hiding-place. If the man from the sea could be guided up that at once – and in the moonlight there was no great difficulty – his chances of finally escaping would be good. Cranston had put out a hand to tug gently at the fugitive’s arm when he was arrested by a fresh sound.

“
Dick-ee!
”

It was Caryl calling from the farther rocks. And her voice held nothing of the fright that might have been expected of it. It held only what, heard ten minutes before, would have sent him racing across the sand with a swimming head. Now it did something queer to his stomach instead.

“
Dick-ee…where are you?
”

Cranston heard the man beside him catch his breath. Perhaps it was at the new hazard that this irruption brought into the affair. Perhaps it was an involuntary male response to what Caryl could put into that sort of call. And the young man felt himself deeply flush, so madly incongruous with that summons was the new drama into which he had been caught up. Then he tried to think. It seemed incredible that Caryl should not have heard the motorboat and the voices. But nothing about her was quite incredible; nothing could be quite incredible about a woman so astoundingly – His mind stopped, astonished at itself. The important thing was to get the hang of the new situation, and act. And once more he peered out. The men in the boat had all turned and were gazing at the farther rocks. They had certainly heard that unexpected call, and now there could be little doubt that they were glimpsing the caller. Impatient of delay, Caryl had emerged from hiding. Where they had supposed solitude and their quarry there was suddenly this untoward vision. That they were disconcerted was evident at a glance. And in a flash it came to Cranston that they were no more within the pale of the law than was the man they were hunting. There was a very good chance that they could be stampeded.

And Cranston shouted. “
John…Harry…David! Here’s a boat, chaps! Come along down!
”

He made the rocks ring with it – and was aware that the man from the sea had caught the idea and was lustily shouting too. The success of the stratagem was startling. The engine of the motorboat leapt into life, and the craft first turned in a whirl of foam and then tore out to sea. Within a minute it had vanished.

“
Dick-ee!
”

This time there was no doubt of Caryl’s fright. The note of it touched off in him the strong positive response that had been so singularly lacking a few seconds before. His sense of himself as her lover seemed to slip over his head and slide down his body like a shirt: he was startled at the queer aberration which had presented him with her image as astoundingly stupid. But she did get easily confused and scared. It was rotten luck that having been so generous, so marvellous, she should be caught up in this bewildering assault from the sea. He felt protectiveness rise in him – an easy, obliterating emotion. He rose to his feet and called across the bay – called out in urgent, robust reassurance. “Darling…it’s all right!”

“Dick-ee, come quickly!”

“All 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 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, “ – quite all right. Only something’s happened that rather ditches us for tonight. A man from the sea.”

“A man from the sea?” She was bewildered.

“Escaped from a ship – and swum ashore. That motorboat was after him. It’s gone. But the man’s on my hands still. He’s over there in the other rocks.”

“What sort of a man? What’s it about?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. Smuggling, perhaps. I believe various up-to-date varieties exist.”

“But how stupid!” Her confidence was returning. “He must go away. You must send him away.”

“I don’t know if I can.” He hesitated. “And I want to know about him.”

“But he has nothing to do with
us!
” It came from her as if proving that he had said something strictly nonsensical. “Please, please, Dicky, go and get rid of him… I’ve only a little time. I must be going back.” Her voice had gone husky, and she moved in his arms – with calculation, some new perception told him, so that through the thick wool her skin slid beneath his fingers. “Or can’t we just slip away – into the field above the cliff?”

“I’ve got to find out about him.” He saw that she was surprised as well as puzzled, and it came to him humiliatingly that here was the first indication she had ever received that he had a will of his own. He was prompted to add: “And get him clothes.”

“But he may be a criminal!” Caryl was horrified. “And you would be breaking the law. Dicky – do, do let us clear out.”

Cranston let go of her and stepped back. She was at least tolerably secure again on her own pins. “I don’t know that we could if we would. He’s keeping an eye on us, I suspect. And he’s prepared to make trouble if we don’t toe the line.”

“Make trouble?”

She was scared again – so that instinctively he put out a hand to her once more. “He’s an educated man, and nothing escapes him. He sees that we wouldn’t care for a lot of shouting.”

“Why should we be afraid of it?” Abruptly, as if to enhance his sense of some horrible disintegration, she was spuriously bold – dramatic on a note that was wholly false. “I’d take it – with you, Dicky. I’d take
anything
with you. But I have to think of Sally.”

It was the first time that she had spoken the name in weeks. He said very quietly: “Look –
you
can clear out. That will be the best thing, and at least it will cramp his style. Slip through the rocks to the cliff-path by the groyne. Then double back along the top to your bike and go home. I’ll stay and deal with the chap.”

For a moment he could see her waver. When she spoke it was with a queer desperation. “No. Not unless you go too.”