“O Lou!” she cried. “Don’t you think a cheque in the hand is worth two in the f-ush? We start for Zanzibar Monday night. I’ve found you a buyer for the house. Mr. Murch, Mr. Derwall.”
And she handed Lou the cheque.
THE BATHERS
The painter laughed as he splashed into the shallows. A million crabs were idling in the linked gold of the sun, and they scurried away or burrowed frantically into the sand at his irruption among them. He waded on, catching his breath delightedly at the freshness of the rising water. The fancy came to him that he was entering a new world by this downward path: he wondered how the clouds would look from the bottom of the sea—and the stars, and the scudding bragozzi. He glanced back a moment, to the world from which he had fled. The Alps filled the horizon with pale outlines of shadow. Between them and the long spit of the Lido were shining lagoon spaces, out of which the clustered towers seemed to look wistfully over into the unpent sea. With the vividness of mirage he recalled a placid water avenue winding green between its lines of awninged palaces. Then he turned from it all, in sudden hatred of his artificial life, of the restlessness to express. He envied the fisherfolk under their butterfly sails out there where the Adriatic swept bare and blue to the east. There were the true creators! They did not copy those colours to hang on a wall. They made them—to blow in the open sea, to toss unspoiled in the rains of heaven! They did not watch. They lived.
The painter threw himself forward with a great splash, opening wide his arms and ducking his head as if in homage. He laughed as he came up. Blinking and sputtering, he swam lazily to the full extent of his limbs in the joy of finding himself in a new element, rid of the last conventionality of clothes. The content of it filled him. As he moved over green abysses, somehow hanging miraculously as he chose, he seemed to be free from even so dogging a burden as Gravity. And his whole body—not merely hands and face—was alive to poignant sensations, to the freshness and rhythm of the sea.
A long time he drifted in the slow swell, jealous to take in the tingle of sea and sun and sky through every pore. And as he idly floated there a shout suddenly startled him from behind, and a great dash of water half choked him. Then someone began to laugh, but stopped short. When at last he could breathe and see, he found a young man regarding him out of smiling eyes that tried to look grave.
“I beg your pardon,” said the newcomer, who spoke in the slow dialect of the lagoon—so different from the slippery talk of the Venetians. “I thought you were my brother. He is of the dazio here at Alberoni, and I meant to surprise him. I would not have disturbed you if I had known.”
“No matter,” replied the painter. “There is room in the sea for both of us.”
The other laughed, regarding the painter curiously.
The painter returned the gaze as frankly. With the skilled eye of his craft, yet almost as if his fancy were realised and this were the first met of a new race, he noted the clear tanned skin, the set of the neck, the turn of the sinewy arm. He wondered how they would understand each other, forgetting that they had already spoken.