Well, sufficient to the day was the evil thereof—that was one of those safe Bible-texts you seemed to find more and more use for the older you grew. Bible-texts. It was lucky tomorrow was Sunday when slaves of the alarm-clock had peace. Oliver straightened his shoulders unconsciously and turned back to the blank paper. He did love Nancy. He did love Nancy. That was all that counted.
“Oh, felicitous Nancy!
Your letter was—”
VIII
The water was a broken glass of blue, sunstruck waves—there were few swimmers in it where the two friends went in next morning, for the beach proper with its bath-houses and float was nearly a quarter of a mile down. Oliver could see Margaret's red cap bobbing twenty yards out as he tried the water cautiously with curling toes, and, much farther out, a blue cap and the flash of an arm going suddenly under. Mrs. Severance, the friend Louise had brought out for the week-end, he supposed; she swam remarkably for a woman. He swam well enough himself and couldn't give her two yards in the hundred. Ted stood beside him, both tingling a little at the fresh of the salt air. “Wow!” and they plunged.
A mock race followed for twenty yards—then Oliver curved off to duck Margaret, already screaming and paddling at his approach, while Ted kept on.
He swam face deep, catching short breaths under the crook of his arm, burying himself in the live blue running sparkle, every muscle stretched as if he were trying to rub all the staleness that can come to the mind and the restless pricklings that will always worry the body clean from him, like a snake's cast skin, against the wet rough hands of the water. There—it was working—the flesh was compact and separate no longer—he felt it dissolve into the salt push of spray—become one with that long blue body of wave that stretched fluently radiant for miles and miles till it too was no more identity but only sea, receiving the sun, without thought, without limbs, without pain. He sprinted with the last breath he had in him to annihilation in that light lustrous firmament. Then his flung-out hand struck something firm and smooth. With the momentary twinge of a jarred toe, he stopped in the middle of a stroke, grabbed at the firm thing unthinkingly, felt it slip away from him, trod water and came up gasping.
“Oh, I'm horribly sorry!” Gurgle and choke at water gone the wrong way. “Honestly—what a dumb-bell trick! but I didn't see you at all and with the whole Sound to swim in I thought I was safe—”
He rubbed the water out of his eyes. A woman in a blue cap. Pretty, too—not one of the pretty kind that look like drenched paper-dolls in swimming.
“Don't apologize—it's all my fault, really. I should have heard you coming, I suppose, but I was floating and my ears were under water—and this cap! You did scare me a little, though; I didn't know there was anyone else in miles—”