Maine

by MARGARET OSBORN

1

SILENT at the tiller, Arnold threaded the boat through the rock pillars, going with the tide. High overhead we could hear the long moan of the foghorn, and the pure ring of Machias Light bell came over the water, sounding as if from nowhere, far off, and near us was the slapping of water against the rock and the screaming of the gulls.

The island loomed high in the fog that lay against it in heavy bands, the dark of the cliffs towering up, and off the shore huge broken columns that rose straight out of the black water, ancient portions of the face of the cliffs half lost, fearful and ruined. The water pulled around them, and where the fog lifted we could see it rolling in and breaking in a wide smoky line against the foot of the cliffs. We could see the deep holes of the caves and against them the gulls turning and dipping. Above them the fog was so thick we could not see where the cliffs ended.

We rounded the point into dead calm, the short sound of the engine echoing secretly back. We went straight along the lee shore, the cliffs seemed gradually to slope down to a steep, long slant of dark stones, and suddenly we came onto the harbor, a little crescent, narrow and deep and full as it could be packed of fishing boats. We came in on high tide, thirty feet. It was flush, beautiful, and very dark. Black Harbor.

We tied up to the dock. Arnold fussed with the gear of the boat, putting her to rights. Lundberg and I hauled up the heavy stuff, our shirts and dungarees wet with fog.

Arnold had sent word to Turner to meet us at the store. We went up there and found a message to let him know when we got in. We telephoned and sat down to wait.

The place was poor. The fishermen sat on the steps of the store or hung around two men pitching horseshoes. One of them spoke to Arnold. They looked at Lundberg and me and looked away, vague and polite. They were curious and hostile. There were no women about, only one girl, very handsome in a coarse way, with a sullen, captive look like something wild. She stood on the steps of the store, the men bantered her and every now and then she’d shout back, in a speech so singsong we could not understand. She also looked at Lundberg and me, sly and savage, taking us in as strangers and as men.

We bought a few provisions and then moved our stuff up onto the road behind the store and soon we saw Turner coming with his horse and wagon. He drew up and Arnold went to meet him. Turner got down from his wagon. He was a little, hard, spare man from the mainland. He was thin and dried out with small burning eyes. Arnold introduced us. His speech was laconic and clipped but he was friendly and welcomed us. I watched the intensity of those eyes set in his dry, beaten face. They looked as if only a little would be needed to start a fire that would consume him.

It was getting late, so we loaded our stuff into the wagon and started off. The dirt road ran along through thick woods of pine and spruce. The thin, furry-looking horse went fast, in a rickety trot with a break in it, and Turner kept slapping the reins on his back so he had no chance to slow down. We had about six miles to go, Turner told us. He talked along to Arnold, looking sideways at Lundberg and me, reminding Arnold where to get water, what had happened during the winter — so many sheep lost, a death in the village, a birth, a quarrel. “Mrs. Turner’ll be glad to see you up to supper,” he said. “We make our dinner at noon.” It was the first time he had mentioned her and I wondered what she’d be like. A little woman, I thought, dried up like him, and burning away too.

The pine woods thinned; we came out of them and crossed a bridge over a stream and were in open pasture on top of the cliff. The smell of salt came rich and heavy from the sea. The fog was thick and we couldn’t see to the edge of the cliffs; there was only the rigid outline of bare, wind-shaped trees that grew along them. We skirted a rough, scrubby piece of land and he drew the horse up. It was dusk. We dragged the stuff out and he leaned over the wheel.

“You’ll be coming along up to supper,” he said, “when you’re fixed.” We thanked him and he drove rattling off into the fog.

We lit a lantern and worked for an hour against the dark, getting the tent up and things in order. All the time we could hear the foghorn sounding very close. When we were through, it was clean dark, and suddenly the flash from the lighthouse fell on us, once — a pause — away — a long pause — then return. The light fell like that across the mist, soft, bathing everything, then away.

We went along the path to the lighthouse, taking a lantern. The worn path ran very close along the cliff. There were droppings of sheep on it and rough little stones. The caves were at the foot of these cliffs, Arnold said; Southern Head, he called them. Here the sea pounded day and night and the sheep that sometimes fell down from above were washed into the caves, and turned over and over. Every now and then, in a flash from the lighthouse, we saw the white, naked wind-bent trees. We heard the sea far down below and the foghorn close and heavy.

The path curved along and came to a flat rocky place and in front of us, right on the edge of the cliff, was the lighthouse, low and white, with a round tower. To one side was a small building, some sort of shed and outhouse combined. The flash of the light revolved high over our heads and the horn was shattering and harsh; it made a humming reverberation all around us against the stone. Inside, against the small windows of the main building, we could see the shadow of someone moving.

We went up the path to the door. Turner opened to us. He looked small and dry, standing aside and bidding us enter. We felt awkward going into the warmth, light, and odor of a strange place. We stood a second in the doorway and t hen we saw Mrs. Turner. She was standing by the table, which was laid for supper. There was a lamp on it and the light was thrown up behind her.

She was a huge woman, not fat, but beautifully built and huge. It was surprising that she was young and so big, and she didn’t seem possibly Turner’s wife. She was silent and a little sullenlooking and beautiful. She had heavy black brows and a great knot of hair, and strong breasts and thighs, and there she stood and Turner was introducing us. There was nothing juicy about her. She was Northern. But she wasn’t burning up like Turner, she was smoldering.

2

FROM the beginning Lundberg didn’t take his eyes off her. He has a way with women. He gets them with his cold and passionate desire without an ounce of feeling for them. I’ve never seen one that didn’t try to please him.

Mrs. Turner didn’t speak much; she passed us the food and waited on us. She didn’t even smile at first. When the food was all set out, she came and sat down at the table across from Arnold and Turner, next to Lundberg and me.

Arnold said, “It’s a pleasure to be here and taste your cooking again, Mrs. Turner.” Turner looked across at her with a quick look of pride.

“You’re real welcome, Mr. Arnold,” she answered.

Her voice was high and loud. It had a rasping quality. I thought, “When she’s old that voice will be strong medicine. Now she’s the kind of woman to rouse desire in a man.” I saw Lundberg’s nostrils open when he looked at her. Turner watched her too all the time with that queer burnt look in his eyes. He was a little man and harsh, but not without a sort of power.

We ate in the kitchen. There was a parlor on the other side of the entrance. The whole place was whitewashed; it was very clean, but untidy and littered. There was a musty smell, and the air was a bit close. Plants grew in tins and boxes in the windows. There were a rocker and a sewing machine with the top down and covered with magazines and papers — no books. There was something restless in the place; it would be hard to read there — doing would be better. The roar of the foghorn outside made a trembling in the room, and the light revolving was reflected in the mist against the windows on first one side and then the other. In storms, they said, the sea came up high against the cliffs and made a tremendous sound.

“Seems like it would come in times and get us,” Lottie Turner said.

She cleared supper away. She moved carelessly, noisily, with large gestures. She piled the dishes at the sink, beside a pump painted blue. We sat at the table with Turner, who told us about the lobster traps. We could set at the foot of the cliffs, he said. “Go straight down, if you’ve a mind to.” He went around from the harbor in a boat. “You’ll burn the shells,” he said, looking sidewise at us, and we could have a sheep from him and fishing and shooting, he offered us. He was the game warden.

All this time she moved back and forth, and Lundberg followed her with his eyes. Sometimes she looked at him; she didn’t look at Arnold or me. In the little low, white room, with the light of the oil lamp, she seemed incandescent, moving strongly with her great breasts and thighs.

When supper was cleared away she lit another lamp and came over to the table. Turner got out a game they played — “Sixty-seven,” it was called. It was played with cards, chips, and scores in which one could abet the other. We all drew our chairs up around the table. Again she sat opposite Turner and next to Lundberg and me. The light fell full on her, on her arms and her cheeks. The throat of her plain dress was open. She had a clean, musty odor like the room, with a faint sweetness in it, a bodily sweetness such as an animal would have. She gave it out when she moved.

We played that game for an hour. Outside, the foghorn roared and the mist against the windows was illumined. The whole thing seemed rounded and strange like a dream.

Lottie Turner had grown less shy. She laughed from time to time with a queer, explosive, schoolgirl’s laughter, harsh like her voice. Those bursts of slightly uncouth laughter did not break her dignity. In her roughness she was more desirable. She leaned a bit away from me and toward Lundberg, who never left her with his eyes. He could not stare directly at her; he glanced down continually at her breast and arm close to him, almost against him.

When the game was over we thanked them, said good night and went home along the path. We were silent, all of us tired. Lundberg whistled softly a little tune over and over, off the key and with no ending.

We slept hard that first night, on our two cots, with some blankets for the third put down on the ground. The last thing I saw was the light turned on the side of the tent: a flash — a pause, away — a long pause, then return.

That next morning the sun shone. By afternoon the fog closed in again. Fog or strong weather was part of the hugeness up there. When the fog broke and there was a calm, free summer day, there seemed suspense in it, like a person holding his breath; it was brilliant, with that hardness of light that neither ripples nor expands, and has beneath it a foundation of darkness.

3

I DON’T know when he became her lover. The beginning was that first night, though, and all the nights after were the same, with a growing intensity between them that shut the rest of us out. There were little things too, after a while. They would touch knee against knee under the table, or their hands would meet passing a dish, and in the game she favored him and helped him to win. I don’t know how much Turner knew; he never made a sign and he never appeared to see anything. He was gone every afternoon on his exacting rounds of the lobster traps, which took him each time clear around the island; and every afternoon, after the first few days, Lundberg was gone too, up to the lighthouse.

That was how it went. From the first she was his. With him she was a creature for his wants and no telling when they might veer somewhere else or when she would tire him with her passion. Perhaps he was her first lover. There was a feeling of life unspent in her, virginal and strong.

The days went along. We did turnabout at cooking, and keeping the tent. We hung our sheep and trapped the lobster that Turner had allowed us. Lundberg and I cut steps in the cliff to go straight down instead of around by the cove. Arnold and I spent the day working at our pictures; every morning Lundberg pounded his typewriter and was gone every afternoon; every evening we all three went up to the lighthouse to supper, to the game of “Sixtyseven,” to Lundberg and Lottie Turner, and Turner looking on. The whole day and all we did came back to that, the five of us sitting in that low, whitewashed room with its musty odor, filled with the dry, laconic burning of Turner, the casual ruthlessness of Lundberg’s desire and the passion of Lottie, which filled the room with an intense vibration. All this while she served the supper and cleared away, and we laughed and talked with Turner of fishing and trapping, of the tides, the village news, and afterwards drew our chairs against the table to play.

Once I saw them. It was afternoon. I’d knocked off from my work and gone up to the lighthouse for water. With the bucket in my hand I was crossing toward the well when they came out of the house. There was fog, they hadn’t seen me, and I stopped, not knowing whether to call out or to be quiet. She stood above him on the step and he turned around to her and with a rough gesture she caught his head against her breast. Then she released him and he went down the steps and along the path to the cliff. She called after him in that strange, harsh voice of hers, holding her hand against her mouth. She looked fine standing on the step. The collar of her dress was wide open. Her hair was disordered; the great knot of it was barely held up in the back, and there was something triumphant about the stand of her whole body. He turned and waved his hand and disappeared into the fog. I waited until she went indoors and filled my bucket at the well.

It was when we’d been there a month that, one afternoon, Lundberg didn’t go to the lighthouse. He came with me to the village to see, he said, the girl I was doing, the strange, coarse girl we’d seen that first afternoon. I’d told him about her. She lived with her mother and five brothers in a long gray-weathered house, very dirty inside; she helped with the nets and was as strong as a man and though only sixteen she was no longer a virgin. The mother was thin and sandy-haired, with enormous ears and startled, stupid eyes.

Lundberg watched them all afternoon in the rambling, sagging house. They had a last flare of power, he said, in the midst of the degradation of their ways. He was going to write about it and about the girl. Her name was Pearl Crandall and he stayed talking to her after I’d started for home, sitting on the steps of the house, rolling a cigarette the way he did, turning it quickly in his hands, while she stood running her foot back and forth in the dust and eyeing him and laughing. She’d been mending a net of her brother’s and she had it trailed over her arm and down behind her. Her hair fell into her eyes. She had on a fisherman’s jacket and a short dress. Her feet were bare and very dirty, and her legs were firm and strong with coarse skin on them. I thought, “She has the violence of a Goya.” It was some time before Lundberg caught up with me on the way home.

4

THAT night we were late for supper. Turner was standing in the open doorway, the light streaming out past him.

“We were minded to think you weren’t coming,” he said. “Lottie was fearful her supper would be spoiled.” Lottie was silent and sullen, her brows drawn together. Sitting in the rocker, she pushed it back and forth.

“I was painting,” I said, “down at the village; it’s a good walk back.”

Lundberg went over to the sewing machine, next to Lottie, and picked up a magazine from the pile lying on the top.

“And I went with him, Mrs. Turner,” he said, “and got an idea for a story, and fooling round with it made us late. Forgive us,” he said. “We’re a bad lot.”

His back was turned to us. There was laughter in his voice and a stroking softness. She got up and we went to the table. She looked bewildered, and the tenseness in the air remained.

The next day I was off to the other end of the island. Lundberg didn’t come with me. In the evening Lottie Turner was glowing. She hardly bothered to hide her feelings. In the last flare of Lundberg’s desire, without an overt motion, they seemed to own each other, to be alone in the room. Turner was very dry. He talked little and made mistakes in his game. Finally he got up and left the room, saying he was going to attend to the light. She offered to help him. He waved his hand and went out without answering and was gone some time.

When Turner came back he carried our lantern. He set it absently down on the table. The game was over, and standing above it and looking down, it threw an added light directly up against his face, and it seemed to me that I saw him for the first time: his beaten thinness, his defeat, his burning and his lasting sterile power. He said, “It’s coming on to rain. I figure it will blow up and rain hard. We’re in for a storm.” There was water on his coat and his hair. We said good night, turned up our collars, took our lantern and went out. The heavy drops were beginning to fall.

It rained all night, drumming down above us on the roof of the tent, drumming its sound and texture into our dreams, and all day it rained, and the next day and the next. We stayed inside. Every evening the odor, warmth and glow of the lighthouse room with the storm outside was like a narcotic. I remember those evenings passed in a blur. There was a lull in the tenseness and a sense of remote and shut-in quietness.

Then the storm cleared. The third day the wind dropped, by evening the rain ceased, there was a struggle of light in the west, and the next morning the sun was strong and hot. When, after lunch, I started for the village, Lundberg said he was coming along.

When we got to the Crandall Place, Pearl wasn’t around. Mrs. Crandall was there; Pearl was off up the shore, she said, by the small cove, with the boat. Luke was gone with her. She’d be back come evening, maybe.

The small cove was the only opening there was in the cliffs. It was there with the tide down, a little piece of beach, rock and sandy soil, a hollow hardly bigger than your hand, a resting place in the long line of cliff. We’d come on it going down our steps and half wading, half climbing along the shore. The fishermen used it when the tide was low. When the tide rose there wasn’t an inch of it left.

I stayed waiting for a chance to draw Mrs. Crandall. Lundberg, after sitting around with us, went off along the road. I worked late and then I went down to the village for the post. Turner’s horse was unhitched, tied up to the block. His wagon was there full of stuff. He didn’t seem to be around. He was out with his boat, someone told me. One of the Crandall boys came in as I was leaving. It was Luke. I asked him where his sister was.

“Left her up to the small cove, Mr. Haven,” he said. He grinned. I went out of the store and along the road toward home.

The late slanting sun glinted on everything. The pine woods smelled strong and clean after the rain. There was no dust.

A little way along I heard wheels and Turner came up to me in his wagon. He stopped and offered me a lift. I said I’d walk. “It’s good tonight after the storm.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes.” He lifted the reins. “I give your friend a row in from the small cove. He and Pearl Crandall. They nigh got caught with the tide. He got kinda wet. He’ll be coming along right smart, I reckon.” He looked at me sidewise, the reins suspended. “It don’t pay folks that don’t know the tide fooling along the cliffs — or folks that don’t belong, making it with the wimmen either.” His voice rasped. He spat over the wheel, pulled the reins, and went on.

I stood in the road and waited for Lundberg. That was where he’d gone and that was what Luke Crandall meant when he grinned. It was true what Turner said. I’d heard it before, but it wasn’t Pearl Crandall I was bothered about, or her mother or her brother Luke.

I went and sat down by the side of the road. The orange light of the sun slanted level through the woods behind me onto the stones and dirt. I was thinking of how Lottie Turner had seemed to me that first night.

When Lundberg came along he was walking fast, his head back. He was wet to the waist. I called out to him. He stopped short.

“Were you waiting for me, Pete?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I saw Turner. He told me you’d be coming along.”

“Turner?” said Lundberg. He made a face. “He caught me out — damn him,” he said. “Suppose he told you. I had to take a lift from him, too. We were well stuck with the tide. God, I’m wet,” he added. “Let’s walk.”

He lit a cigarette and we started off. We walked for a while in silence except for the swishing of Lundbcrg’s wet clothes.

“Listen,” he said suddenly. “The tide was way out when I got there. They were through nearly with the traps and I hung around and the brother went off with the boat. She stayed with me. I thought we’d get up by the steps, climbing along the shore. She said she’d often gone the other way, over the cliffs. It seemed all right, but we stayed too long. We stayed a long time, and Turner caught us.”

I turned my head and looked at Lundberg. He met my eyes. “Sure,” he said, “together—” his face contracted. “The tide was turned and coming in fast. We’d have both known it — only then. But Turner rowed by and coming back he shouted to us to go with him. It was too late. There wasn’t a chance of getting out. That row back to the harbor,” Lundberg said, “God, that cooled me off.”

“Turner is full of knowledge,” I said.

Lundberg laughed shortly. “Pearl Crandall,” he said. “It’s not the first time nor the last with her.”

It’s not Pearl Crandall, I thought, but I didn’t say it. We walked fast and were silent the rest of the way back.

5

WE WERE right on time for supper. The sun had set and it was dusk when we got to the door. No one opened to us; there didn’t seem to be anyone there.

“Funny,” Arnold said. “Don’t they expect us?”

Generally the door was ajar, the lamps lit, and we walked in and they were there ahead of us and supper was laid. We knocked again. Then we heard a noise overhead and then someone coming down the stairs. A pause at the bottom and Turner opened the door. In the half-light he seemed as narrow as a ghost.

“Come in,” he said. There was something gone from his voice and something else in the place of it, a guarded harshness.

We went in. “There’s nothing wrong, is there?” Arnold asked. “You were expecting us, weren’t you?”

“We were expecting you,” Turner answered. “Lottie’ll be down. Come in.”

He lit the lamps, and while he was trimming the wick of the second one Lottie Turner came into the room. She didn’t glance at Lundberg but came straight to me and said very loud, “Well, supper’ll be ready in a minute. Set down, won’t you?”

At supper she waited on us in silence without her usual rough, shy sallies. She set the dishes heavily on the table. She didn’t eat much, and afterwards sat with her elbows on the oilcloth and gave occasional uncouth outbursts of laughter at things we said. They were loud, without coquetry, and they were unsteady. Her brows were drawn together, she didn’t speak to Lundberg, but once when he crossed the room I saw her follow him with her eyes; her mouth trembled and a minute later she burst out laughing again.

She had on a different dress from the one she usually wore, a more elaborate dress, made of cloth instead of print. It was maroon color and smelled of camphor. She must have dragged it out and put it on at the last moment. It didn’t fit her; it marred the nobility of her body and made her look fat. The sleeves were too short and it was fastened somehow close across the neck. The color was unbecoming to her; for the first time she looked plain.

Arnold noticed her dress when she came and sat down next to him after supper was cleared away, and the lamplight fell strong on it. “You look very fine, Mrs. Turner,” he said. His voice filled the awkward silence.

“Oh,” she said dully, “I ain’t fixed out much, Mr. Arnold.” Turner was coming back to the table, the game of “Sixty-seven” in his hand. He stopped, shaking the box of chips up and down.

“Mrs. Turner,” he said, rather loud, “was minded to style herself a little because the company’s going. We always aim to send them off right. Ain’t that true, Lottie?”

The blood ebbed away from her face, leaving the color marked in blotches on the surface of the skin. She gave a laugh which choked off. Turner came to the table and set the game down.

“Going?” said Arnold. “Who? I don’t understand.”

I was sitting next to him. Under the table I put my hand on his knee. Lundberg leaned over and lit a cigarette at the chimney of the lamp.

“We didn’t tell you, Dick,” he said. “Pete and I got a wire from Sweeney this afternoon. We’ve got to be moving tomorrow.” He looked at Turner. “It’s too bad,” he said. “It breaks up everything. I guess, Dick, you’ll have to hold the fort alone.”

“Well, by God,” said Arnold, “you fellows —”

Lottie was silent. I didn’t look at her. I looked at Turner. He had met Lundberg’s look with his burning little eyes and now he was bending down, setting the piles of chips neatly out on the table. “Seems that’s about it,” he said. “We hate to see folks go when they could have stayed, but it looks this time like it was a settled thing.” He sat down and drew his chair up to the table and started dealing the cards.

We were silent. Arnold choked on his surprise. Lottie had turned very white. We played stupidly and Turner called the points in his dry voice with a sort of drag in it. Before the game was ended she got up, saying she must go see to the light.

“Set still,” Turner said. “I’ll go.” but she was already in the corner lighting the lantern, and he didn’t rise.

She came to the table with the lantern in her hand. “I’ll say good night,” she said in a loud voice and held out her hand to each of us. When she touched Lundberg’s, she looked straight over his head, her mouth was drawn in a line and her browns met. She towered there, big and uncouth in her clumsy dress, which seemed hardly able to hold her body. She hesitated and then turned and went out. Turner had not moved. His eyes were fixed on the cards in his hand. He set them down on the table and rose.

“There’ll be fog in again come morning,” he said. “I reckon you’ll want to turn in early, making your start tomorrow.” He spoke to me, ignoring Lundberg.

“Yes,” I said, “we’ll be going along now.”

“Well, I’m damned,” Arnold said. Lundberg had him by the arm and they went out together through the door. I followed. At the door I looked back. Turner was still standing by the table.

“Turner,” I said, “we owe you for the sheep, the boat, and all your trouble, and for the board, too.”

He waved his hand. “I ain’t takin’ narthin’ for it,” he said.

“but —” I said.

“It’d been arranged before this,” he said. “I ain’t takin’ narthin’.”

It was finished. “Good night,” I said, and went along to join the others.

They hadn’t waited and were well ahead of me. I could see their lantern swinging back and forth. The stars were out overhead but they were dim. I remembered Turner had said there would be fog tomorrow. He knew the weather like his hand.

In the tent we said nothing. Lundberg seemed to have fixed it with Arnold. “I’ll take you over in the morning,” he said, his voice angry and restrained.

It was my stint at cooking. I should have to be up early, so I packed my bag and got my paints together after the others had turned in. My blankets were ready on the ground. Long after I was through and wrapped in them, I watched the light turn on the tent: a flash — a pause away — a long pause — then return. It moved in my sleep in a deep unease.

6

IT WAS gray light when I woke. The fog was in. My blankets were wet with it and I could hear the hoarse, long-drawn sound of the foghorn coming across from the tower. I got up slowly and dressed and went outside the tent to wash and start the fire. The water in the barrel was almost gone when I’d done washing, so I took a bucket and went up to t he lighthouse. I walked along the path, looking down at the little stones and sheep droppings I’d seen the first night, and heard the sea way below and felt the jar of the horn as I got nearer.

There was no one about; everything was quiet. I went to the well and filled my bucket. The base of the lighthouse tower looked huge and very white and round. The air was pure and heavy with the smell of salt. There were a few sheep grazing a patch of grass near the shed. The horse was gone, his worn and dirty blanket hanging on the rail. Turner was off early on his rounds.

I started back slowly, my bucket as full as it would hold. The fog had lifted, and thinned in the way it sometimes did, with what seemed a strange and whimsical passion of its own. The light was pale and very beautiful, and it seemed to me that I should never get enough of that strange thrill of loneliness and awe that came from passing so near, so very near, the edge of that high cliff, hearing below the savage, weary movement of the sea. I set the bucket down. This was the last time I should be here or know this place.

Now I had a great desire to lie flat on the ground, and feast on the impelling violence and beauty. The light struck down singly on the cliffs and I could see the dark shine of the water. Lying there I could see its great swell and lift, the line of foam, and the black, wet hollows of the rocks. The hoarse vibrating sound of the lighthouse came, and far off, as on that first day, the sound — pure, remote and haunting — of Machias Light bell that was never still.

I drew in a great breath of the sea and the grass, bitter and lovely, and then I saw her washing, turning over, heavy and terrible at the foot of the cliffs below me: Lottie Turner, washing there, caught — turning and turning on the rocks below — her hand stretched out, her head and the weight of her body very plain in the pale light. I could not get my breath and I lay staring and unbelieving and terribly afraid. She was the shape of death itself; her body looked not tiny, but huge still, down there, turning with a fearful casualness and abandon—her body powerful and alone in the dark red dress against the bitter dark rocks and gleaming water.

I felt my heart pounding and my breath was dry in my throat. We would reach Turner. Something must be done. I got to my feet, stumbling against the water bucket, spilling it over onto the ground. The roar from the lighthouse tower struck me like a voice calling out. Around me the fog was shifting already and was closing in again. I looked down once; the gleam of the water was receding. Through my mind, as I turned, went what Arnold had said — how the creatures falling in fog or storm turned over and over in the sea below, washed into the dark caves by the powerful and restless water. Had she fallen as they, blinded with fog, or was it a storm greater than any they could know?

“Seems like it will come and get us times,” she said, and now she was down there. “Seems times like it will come right in and get us,” laughing in her harsh and ugly voice. I kept hearing that as I went down blindly toward the tent, the brush and brambles tearing at my ankles. I saw the crash and impact of the spray against the lighthouse, but the current that had caught Lottie Turner was more powerful, terrible and casual than the sea. I could see Turner standing by the table, the lamplight on his face, and his little burning eyes. The shattering roar of the lighthouse horn, like a desperate voice, struck me again and again. “Seems like it will come right in and get us.”

I reached the tent and found myself standing, holding the empty bucket in my hand. I’d picked it up and carried it without knowing. It felt insanely light; I set it down. As I did so, Lundberg came out of the tent, rumpled and half awake, the lines of sleep still in his handsome, smiling face.

“Well, Pete, old boy, that was a long, sweet night,” he said, and then, “What’s the matter? You look as if you’d seen a ghost.”

I stared at him. I could not speak. “Its not getting you down, this island, is it, Pete?” he laughed, and then he yawned and stretched with the wide stretch of waking. “God,” he said, “am I telling you, I’ll be as glad as sin to get off it and stand again on hallowed ground.”

And once more he laughed, that strong easy laugh of his, narrowing his eyes and throwing back the beauty of his head. I stood there, and his words seemed to fall down cold between us, and for that instant I could find nothing to shape what I had to say.