The Man from the Sea Read Online Free PDF

to him, as a linked and answering discovery, that the man from the sea had lied a great deal. “Let’s stick to what’s on hand, please. We’ve already made one slip.”
    “A slip?” The man from the sea was curious rather than alarmed.
    “Shaving things. You won’t look right in Blair’s classy clothes and a day’s beard. Perhaps–” Cranston stopped. His glance had travelled to the face of the man from the sea. Even by moonlight, it was possible to distinguish it as perfectly smooth.
    “That’s all right.” The man was laughing softly. “I shaved before I jumped.”
    “While your friends were trying to cut your throat?”
    “Precisely.”
    Again they were silent. The throb of the engines was fading. From what sounded almost as far away, a gull called and called again. Intermittently the sea, as if tired of a vain whispering in the ear of night, heaved itself into a larger wave which splashed on the pale beach like the smack of a drowsily amorous hand. A light breeze, faintly chill, was now blowing in from the ocean; it could be felt flowing past them – now fading to a breath and now growing to a small wind that would bend Jamieson’s corn and Neil Clark’s barley, that would rustle in the grasses of the old glebe where Sir Alex Blair’s men might be mowing in the morning. It was strange to Cranston that in the familiar terrain he should suddenly be jostled by so much that was alien and inscrutable. The man from the sea was that. He presented indeed a front that was comprehensible enough – that was as dull as greed and as small as cheating. But behind him – Cranston perfectly knew – was some large hinterland of darkness. And it had been Cranston’s immediate intuition of this that had given him the first sick sense of another vista. The affair with Lady Blair – so bewilderingly exciting and yet so finite as to be measurable in terms of mere minutes and inches – had its incalculable hinterland too. To put it bleakly, he had made a shocking mistake.
    Cranston shivered – and if it was partly at his own train of thought it was nevertheless substantially because of what the breeze was doing to his skin. The night – all this succession of Scottish nights – had been incredible. His limbs had moved in an unreal medium, more balmy than any actual air, as if he had slipped into some travel advertisement in a glossy American magazine. But in the small hours there came an honest northern chill, and it was licking at him now. He had emerged cold from his short wallow in the sea, and nothing had happened at all to warm him up since. At twenty-two, such sensations resolve themselves into simple and immediate impulse. Cranston knew that he wanted to run. He wanted, if possible, to race. Almost theatrically, his world was darkening round him – but nevertheless he wanted the blood to be moving faster in his veins. He looked at the man from the sea.
    He remembered that the man was from the sea. He had been in it for a long time – had in fact been very near never coming out of it. He, far more than Cranston, should be shivering now. But if he even felt the chill he gave no sign of it, and his naked poise was that of an athlete, despite his middle years. “What about a run to warm up?” Cranston asked.
    “That’s quite an idea.” His idiom was Cranston’s own, and as he turned lightly on his toes and glanced down the beach he might have been an undergraduate lazily ready for physical expression. He pointed to the other end of the beach. “There and back?”
    “Yes.” Cranston restrained himself from adding: “And I’ll give you fifteen yards.”
    The man slipped off his belt and dropped it carelessly on the sand. “No point,” he said, “in carrying weight. Will you give the word?”
    “On your marks, get set, go?”
    “Right.”
    For a moment more they parleyed over the form of the thing. They were like two boys from different public schools, rather warily meeting in the holidays and