Wild Oranges.
by Joseph Hergesheimer.
I
The ketch drifted into the serene inclosure of the bay as silently as the reflections moving over the mirrorlike surface of the water.
Beyond a low arm of land that hid the sea the western sky was a single, clear yellow; farther on the left the pale, incalculably old limbs of cypress, their roots bare, were hung with gathering shadows as delicate as their own faint foliage. The stillness was emphasized by the ceaseless murmur of the waves breaking on the far, seaward bars.
John Woolfolk brought the ketch up where he intended to anchor and called to the stooping white-clad figure in the bow: "Let go!" There was an answering splash, a sudden rasp of hawser, the booms swung idle, and the yacht imperceptibly settled into her berth. The wheel turned impotently; and, absent-minded, John Woolfolk locked it. He dropped his long form on a carpet-covered folding chair near by. He was tired. His sailor, Poul Halvard, moved about with a noiseless and swift efficiency; he rolled and cased the jib, and then, with a handful of canvas stops, secured and covered the mainsail and proceeded aft to the jigger. Unlike Woolfolk, Halvard was short--a square figure with a smooth, deep-tanned countenance, colorless and steady, pale blue eyes. His mouth closed so tightly that it appeared immovable, as if it had been carved from some obdurate material that opened for the necessities of neither speech nor sustenance.
Tall John Woolfolk was darkly tanned, too, and had a grey gaze, by turns sharply focused with bright black pupils and blankly introspective. He was garbed in white flannels, with bare ankles and sandals, and an old, collarless silk shirt, with sleeves rolled back on virile arms incongruously tattooed with gauzy green cicadas.
He stayed motionless while Halvard put the yacht in order for the night. The day"s pa.s.sage through twisting inland waterways, the hazard of the tides on shifting flats, the continual concentration on details at once trivial and highly necessary, had been more wearing than the cyclone the ketch had weathered off Barbuda the year before. They had been landbound since dawn; and all day John Woolfolk"s instinct had revolted against the fields and wooded points, turning toward the open sea.
Halvard disappeared into the cabin; and, soon after, a faint, hot air, the smell of scorched metal, announced the lighting of the vapor stove, the preparations for supper. Not a breath stirred the surface of the bay. The water, as transparently clear as the hardly darkened air, lay like a great amethyst clasped by its dim corals and the arm of the land. The glossy foliage that, with the exception of a small silver beach, choked the sh.o.r.e might have been stamped from metal. It was, John Woolfolk suddenly thought, amazingly still. The atmosphere, too, was peculiarly heavy, languorous. It was laden with the scents of exotic, flowering trees; he recognized the smooth, heavy odor of oleanders and the clearer sweetness of orange blossoms.
He was idly surprised at the latter; he had not known that orange groves had been planted and survived in Georgia. Woolfolk gazed more attentively at the sh.o.r.e, and made out, in back of the luxuriant tangle, the broad white facade of a dwelling. A pair of marine gla.s.ses lay on the deck at his hand; and, adjusting them, he surveyed the face of a distinguished ruin. The windows on the stained wall were broken in--they resembled the empty eyes of the dead; storms had battered loose the neglected roof, leaving a corner open to sun and rain; he could see through the foliage lower down great columns fallen about a sweeping portico.
The house was deserted, he was certain of that--the melancholy wreckage of a vanished and resplendent time. Its small princ.i.p.ality, flourishing when commerce and communication had gone by water, was one of the innumerable victims of progress and of the concentration of effort into huge impersonalities. He thought he could trace other even more complete ruins, but his interest waned. He laid the gla.s.ses back upon the deck. The choked bubble of boiling water sounded from the cabin, mingled with the irregular sputter of cooking fat and the clinking of plates and silver as Halvard set the table. Without, the light was fading swiftly; the wavering cry of an owl quivered from the cypress across the water, and the western sky changed from paler yellow to green. Woolfolk moved abruptly, and, securing a bucket to the handle of which a short rope had been spliced and finished with an ornamental Turk"s-head, he swung it overboard and brought it up half full. In the darkness of the bucket the water shone with a faint phosph.o.r.escence. Then from a basin he lathered his hands with a thick, pinkish paste, washed his face, and started toward the cabin.
He was already in the companionway when, glancing across the still surface of the bay, he saw a swirl moving into view about a small point. He thought at first that it was a fish, but the next moment saw the white, graceful silhouette of an arm. It was a woman swimming.
John Woolfolk could now plainly make out the free, solid ma.s.s of her hair, the naked, smoothly turning shoulder. She was swimming with deliberate ease, with a long, single overarm stroke; and it was evident that she had not seen the ketch. Woolfolk stood, his gaze level with the cabin top, watching her a.s.sured progress. She turned again, moving out from the sh.o.r.e, then suddenly stopped. Now, he realized, she saw him.
The swimmer hung motionless for a breath; then, with a strong, sinuous drive, she whirled about and made swiftly for the point of land. She was visible for a short s.p.a.ce, low in the water, her hair wavering in the clear flood, and then disappeared abruptly behind the point, leaving behind--a last vanishing trace of her silent pa.s.sage--a smooth, subsiding wake on the surface of the bay.
John Woolfolk mechanically descended the three short steps to the cabin. There had been something extraordinary in the woman"s brief appearance out of the odorous tangle of the sh.o.r.e, with its ruined habitation. It had caught him unprepared, in a moment of half weary relaxation, and his imagination responded with a faint question to which it had been long unaccustomed. But Halvard, in crisp white, standing behind the steaming supper viands, brought his thoughts again to the day"s familiar routine.
The cabin was divided through its forward half by the centerboard casing, and against it a swinging table had been elevated, an immaculate cover laid, and the yacht"s china, marked in cobalt with the name Gar, placed in a polished and formal order. Halvard"s service from the stove to the table was as silent and skillful as his housing of the sails; he replaced the hot dishes with cold, and provided a gla.s.s bowl of translucent preserved figs.
Supper at an end, Woolfolk rolled a cigarette from s.h.a.g that resembled coa.r.s.e black tea and returned to the deck. Night had fallen on the sh.o.r.e, but the water still held a pale light; in the east the sky was filled with an increasing, cold radiance. It was the moon, rising swiftly above the flat land. The moonlight grew in intensity, casting inky shadows of the spars and cordage across the deck, making the light in the cabin a reddish blur by contrast. The icy flood swept over the land, bringing out with a new emphasis the close, glossy foliage and broken facade--it appeared unreal, portentous. The odors of the flowers, of the orange blossoms, uncoiled in heavy, palpable waves across the water, accompanied by the owl"s fluctuating cry. The sense of imminence increased, of a _genius loci_ unguessed and troublous, vaguely threatening in the perfumed dark.
II
John Woolfolk had said nothing to Halvard of the woman he had seen swimming in the bay. He was conscious of no particular reason for remaining silent about her; but the thing had become invested with a glamour that, he felt, would be destroyed by commonplace discussion.
He had no personal interest in the episode, he was careful to add.
Interests of that sort, serving to connect him with the world, with society, with women, had totally disappeared from his life. He rolled and lighted a fresh cigarette, and in the minute orange spurt of the match his mouth was somber and forbidding.
The unexpected appearance on the gla.s.sy water had merely started into being a slight, fanciful curiosity. The women of that coast did not commonly swim at dusk in their bays; such simplicity obtained now only in the reaches of the highest civilization. There were, he knew, no hunting camps here, and the local inhabitants were mere sodden squatters. A chart lay in its flat canvas case by the wheel; and, in the crystal flood of the moon, he easily reaffirmed from it his knowledge of the yacht"s position. Nothing could be close by but scattered huts and such wreckage as that looming palely above the oleanders.
Yet a woman had unquestionably appeared swimming from behind the point of land off the bow of the _Gar_. The women native to the locality, and the men, too, were fanatical in the avoidance of any unnecessary exterior application of water. His thoughts moved in a monotonous circle, while the enveloping radiance constantly increased. It became as light as a species of unnatural day, where every leaf was clearly revealed but robbed of all color and familiar meaning.
He grew restless, and rose, making his way forward about the narrow deck-s.p.a.ce outside the cabin. Halvard was seated on a coil of rope beside the windla.s.s and stood erect as Woolfolk approached.
The sailor was smoking a short pipe, and the bowl made a crimson spark in his thick, powerful hand. John Woolfolk fingered the wood surface of the windla.s.s bitts and found it rough and gummy.
Halvard said instinctively:
"I"d better start sc.r.a.ping the mahogany tomorrow, it"s getting white."
Woolfolk nodded. Halvard was a good man. He had the valuable quality of commonly antic.i.p.ating spoken desires. He was a Norwegian, out of the Lofoden Islands, where sailors are surpa.s.singly schooled in the Arctic seas. Poul Halvard, so far as Woolfolk could discover, was impervious to cold, to fatigue, to the insidious whispering of mere flesh. He was a man without temptation, with an untroubled allegiance to a duty that involved an endless, exacting labor; and for those reasons he was austere, withdrawn from the community of more fragile and sympathetic natures. At times his inflexible integrity oppressed John Woolfolk. Halvard, he thought, was a difficult man to live up to.
He turned and absently surveyed the land. His restlessness increased.
He felt a strong desire for a larger freedom of s.p.a.ce than that offered by the _Gar_, and it occurred to him that he might go ash.o.r.e in the tender. He moved aft with this idea growing to a determination.
In the cabin, on the shelf above the berths built against the sides of the ketch, he found an old blue flannel coat, with crossed squash rackets and a monogram embroidered in yellow on the breast pocket.
Slipping it on, he dropped over the stern of the tender.
Halvard came instantly aft, but Woolfolk declined the mutely offered service. The oars made a silken swish in the still bay as he pulled away from the yacht. The latter"s riding light, swung on the forestay, hung without a quiver, like a fixed yellow star. He looked once over his shoulder, and then the bow of the tender ran with a soft shock upon the beach. Woolfolk bedded the anchor in the sand and then stood gazing curiously before him.
On his right a thicket of oleanders drenched the air with the perfume of their heavy poisonous flowering, and behind them a rough clearing of saw gra.s.s swept up to the debris of the fallen portico. To the left, beyond the black hole of a decaying well, rose the walls of a second brick building, smaller than the dwelling. A few shreds of rotten porch clung to its face; and the moonlight, pouring through a break above, fell in a livid bar across the obscurity of a high single chamber.
Between the crumbling piles there was the faint trace of a footway, and Woolfolk advance to where, inside a dilapidated sheltering fence, he came upon a dark, compact ma.s.s of trees and smelled the increasing sweetness of orange blossoms. He struck the remains of a board path, and progressed with the cold, waxen leaves of the orange trees brushing his face. There was, he saw in the grey brightness, ripe fruit among the branches, and he mechanically picked an orange and then another. They were small but heavy, and had fine skins.
He tore one open and put a section in his mouth. It was at first surprisingly bitter, and he involuntarily flung away what remained in his hand. But after a moment he found that the oranges possessed a pungency and zestful flavor that he had tasted in no others. Then he saw, directly before him, a pale, rectangular light which he recognized as the opened door of a habitation.
III
He advanced more slowly, and a low, irregular house detached itself from the tangled growth pressing upon it from all sides. The doorway, dimly lighted by an invisible lamp from within, was now near by; and John Woolfolk saw a shape cross it, so swiftly furtive that it was gone before he realized that a man had vanished into the hall. There was a second stir on the small covered portico, and the slender, white-clad figure of a woman moved uncertainly forward. He stopped just at the moment in which a low, clear voice demanded: "What do you want?"
The question was directly put, and yet the tone held an inexplicably acute apprehension. The woman"s voice bore a delicate, bell-like shiver of fear.
"Nothing," he hastened to a.s.sure her. "When I came ash.o.r.e I thought no one was living here."
"You"re from the white boat that sailed in at sunset?"
"Yes," he replied, "and I am returning immediately."
"It was like magic!" she continued. "Suddenly, without a sound, you were anch.o.r.ed in the bay." Even this quiet statement bore the shadowy alarm. John Woolfolk realized that it had not been caused by his abrupt appearance; the faint accent of dread was fixed in the illusive form before him.
"I have robbed you too," he continued in a lighter tone. "Your oranges are in my pocket."
"You won"t like them," she returned indirectly; "they"ve run wild. We can"t sell them."
"They have a distinct flavor of their own," he a.s.sured her. "I should be glad to have some on the _Gar_."
"All you want."
"My man will get them and pay you."
"Please don"t----" She stopped abruptly, as if a sudden consideration had interrupted a liberal courtesy. When she spoke again the apprehension, Woolfolk thought, had increased to palpable fright. "We would charge you very little," she said finally. "Nicholas attends to that."
Silence fell upon them. She stood with her hand resting lightly against an upright support, coldly revealed by the moon. John Woolfolk saw that, although slight, her body was delicately full, and that her shoulders held a droop which somehow resembled the shadow on her voice. She bore an unmistakable refinement of being, strange in that locality of meager humanity. Her speech totally lacked the unintelligible, loose slurring of the natives.