Ruth and I were sitting on a pyramid, where we had brought a picnic lunch, and were watching her children play in the hollows.
“Do people get lost here nowadays?” I asked her.
“The natives never come here,” she answered; “at least, not for fun. They only follow the wagon-track to the coast-guard station on ‘the outside,’ and that is about all the summer people do. It is three miles across the soft sand to the sea, and most people get discouraged and turn back before they reach the further shore. But enough children and strangers have been lost here in recent years to scare away the others! The townspeople say the dunes are haunted, and that at night strange shapes flit across the sand, spirits of those who have never been found. They will not come near the white fields at moonlight, when they are wrapped in mystery. The landmarks are not permanent. Every storm changes them, just as it changes the shoals on ‘the outside.’ The sailors are more afraid of this neck of land than any one else. Do you see how far distant the big steamers keep?” She pointed out to me a thin line of smoke on the horizon. “Hundreds of ships have run aground off here in less than that many years. There are lighthouses at every point now, but the bed of the sea moves constantly. That is why they call this coast the ‘Graveyard of the Cape.’”
“Have there been any wrecks since you have lived here?”
Ruth’s eyes darkened. “A year ago a fleet of fishing-vessels were caught in a sudden tempest and half of them were lost. Eleven men were drowned, all from this town! Star Harbor raises her sons upon the sandy flats of the bay at her doorway, and when they grow old enough they sail away from her, and she knows that one day, sooner or later, they will fail to return. In the meantime the mothers do not bring their boys out here on the dunes to play, as we do our children from the cities. It is too much like dancing on their own graves! They try to forget the dunes are here, and walk up and down the front street of the village.”
“I do not want to forget them,” said I. “They mean something to me, Ruth, something that I have needed for a long time.”
Ruth smiled at me fondly, without replying. We had known each other for a long time.
“It is like the touch of a hand on the heart,” I tried to explain, “or like a song heard outside a window in the dark—or a flaming embroidery on a stucco wall.”
The sun shone down upon the tawny sand, illuminating the dunes with so blinding a radiance that description was futile. The effect of so much heat and light was soothing and restful, and at the same time stimulating. The body drank up enough electricity, through contact with the sand, to renew its youth and send the worn years reeling backward. The children were shouting and sliding down the inside of a crater below us, transposing their winter sports to the summertime, climbing up the opposite slope, only to shoot down again on the seats of their rompers, laughing and crawling up, and repeating the game, in ecstasy of abandonment.
“I would like to do that, too,” said I.