“Same here,” said Billy.
For an instant, both men contemplated the scene with the narrowed, critical gaze of the artist.
The flying-girls were swimming; and swimming with the same grace and strength with which formerly they flew. And as if inevitably they must take on the quality of the element in which they mixed, they looked like mermaids now, just as formerly they had looked like birds. They carried heads and shoulders high out of the water. Webs of sea-spume glittered on the shining hair and on the white flesh. One behind the other, they swam in rhythmic unison. Regularly the long, round, strong-looking right arms reached out of the water, bowed forward, clutched at the wave, and pulled them on. Simultaneously, the left arms reached back, pushed against the wave, and shot them forward. Their feet beat the water to a lather.
They were headed down the beach, hugging the shore. Swim as hard as they could, Honey and Frank managed but to keep up with them. Ralph overtook them only in their brief resting-periods. Further inshore, carried ceaselessly a little forward and then a little back, Julia floated; floated with an unimaginable lightness and yet, somehow, conserved her aspect of a creature cut in marble.
“I have never seen anything so beautiful in any art, ancient or modern,” Billy concluded. “When those strange draperies that they affect get wet, they look like the Elgin marbles.”
“If we should take them to civilization,” was Pete’s answer, “the Elgin marbles would become a joke.”
Billy spoke after a long silence. “It’s been an experience that—if I were—oh, but what’s the use? You can’t describe it. The words haven’t been invented yet. I don’t mean the fact that we’ve discovered members of a lost species—the missing link between bird and man. I mean what’s happened since the capture. It’s left marks on me. I’ll bear them until I die. If we abandoned this island—and them—and went back to the world, I could never be the same person. If I woke up and found it was a dream, I could never be the same person.”
“I know,” Pete said, “I know. I’ve changed, too. We all have. Old Frank is a god. And Honey’s grown so that—. Even Ralph’s a different man. Changed—God, I should say I had. It’s not only given me a new hold on things I thought I’d lost-morality, ethics, religion even—but it’s developed something I have no word for—the fourth dimension of religion, faith.”
“It’s their weakness, I think, and their dependence.” Now it was less that Billy tried to translate Pete’s thought and more that he endeavored to follow his own. “It puts it up to a man so. And their beauty and purity and innocence and simplicity—.” Billy seemed to be ransacking his vocabulary for abstract nouns.
“And that sense you have,” Pete broke in eagerly, “of molding a virgin mind. It gives you a feeling of responsibility that’s fairly terrifying at times. But there’s something else mixed up with it—the instinct of the artist. It’s as though you were trying to paint a picture on human flesh. You know that you’re going to produce beauty.” Pete’s face shone with the look of creative genius. “The production of beauty excuses any method, to my way of thinking.” He spoke half to himself. “God knows,” he added after a pause, “whatever I’ve done and been, I could never do or be again. Sometimes a man knows when he’s reached the zenith of his spiritual development. I’ve reached mine. I think they’re beginning to trust us,” he added after another long interval, in which silently they contemplated the moving composition. Pete’s tone had come back to its everyday accent.