Root of His Evil (5 page)

“You have a date?”

“No, but there’s a big meeting.”

“Oh, the union.”

“I’m an officer, you know.”

“So you are. All right, I’ll have you back in time.”

So on my way up to the cocktail bar, I hurriedly bought a little sport dress and hat, a bathing suit, slippers and beach robe. Sure enough, next morning at nine o’clock the desk phoned that a Mr. Harris was in the lobby, and I went down wearing my sports outfit and carrying the beach things in a little bag that went with them. I supposed we were to take a train at Grand Central, but he had a car out there, a nice-looking green coupe. It was very pleasant riding along without any train to think about, even if the traffic was so heavy we could barely crawl. It was about eleven o’clock when we reached the shack, which was on a bluff above a little cove, with steps leading down. Well, he called it a shack, but I would have said estate, for it was a very fine place, with luxurious furniture on the veranda, and a big hall inside with a grand piano in it and soft chairs all around. I couldn’t help expressing surprise. “Did you say you just—borrowed this?”

“Belongs to some friends of mine.”

“Do all your friends have such places?”

“I hope not. Some of them actually have taste.”

“It’s very luxurious.”

“And very silly.”

Now all of this was a complete evasion, as you will see, and I put it in to illustrate once more that during this period Grant was never frank with me. Also, he at once changed the subject. “What do you want to do? Swim, sail or eat?”

“Well—can’t we do all three?”

“That’s an idea.”

He took me to what seemed to be a guest bedroom, showed me the bath and anything I might want, and went. I changed into my swimming suit, put on my slippers, and tied a ribbon around my hair. Then I put the bathing cap into the bag, slipped on my beach robe, and went out. I thought I looked very pretty, but I forgot about that when I saw him. He was ready and standing at a table flipping over the pages of a magazine. He had on a pair of faded blue shorts, big canvas shoes, and a little wrinkled duck cap with a white sweater over his arm. But he looked like some statue poured out of copper, and the few things he had on hardly seemed to matter. The deep sunburn was all over him, but that was only part of it. He was big and loose and lumbering, and yet he seemed to be made completely of muscle. The hunch-shouldered look that he had in his clothes came from big bunches of muscle back of his arms, and in fact his whole back spread out like a fan from his hips to his shoulders. His legs tapered down so as to be quite slim at the ankles and altogether he looked like one of the Indians he was always talking about. He turned, smiled and nodded. “Ready?”

“All ready.”

“Come on while we still have a breeze.”

He picked up a wicker basket and started for the veranda. I said: “Is that our lunch? Where did it come from?”

“We brought it with us.”

“I thought I’d have to fix it.”

“It’s fixed.”

I took hold of the handle too, we went out on the veranda, he picked up a paddle that was standing against a post, and we went down the steps of the bluff to the beach. The lunch he put in a little skiff that was pulled upon the sand, then he dragged the skiff to the edge of the water and motioned me into the bow. He gave it a running push and jumped in very neatly. Then he picked up the paddle and paddled out to a sailboat that was moored to a round white block of wood that he called a buoy. He made the skiff fast to a ring in the buoy, and we climbed into the sailboat. It had no bowsprit or any thing, just a mast that went straight up from the bow, with one big triangular sail. He set down the basket, un wound some rope from a cleat, and began to pull up the sail. I helped him, and it took about a minute to get it up, and the boat swung slowly around and the sail began flapping in the wind. It was quite exciting. Then he went to the bow and cast loose, but held onto the short mooring cable that was attached to the buoy. Then he made me come and hold it, first showing me how to hold onto a cleat with the other hand so as not to be pulled over board. Then he went back to the tiller. “All right, I’m going to put her over, and for just one second it’ll slack. When it does, let go.”

He put the tiller over, and the boat gave a lurch and all of a sudden I felt the cable slack. I let go, and when I looked up we were moving away from shore, toward the other side of the cove, with the sail out over the side, but still flapping. I climbed back to the middle of the boat. He kept watching and then he stood up. “Now I’m coming about. She’ll go into the wind, the sail will flap like hell, then slam over, and for God’s sake duck for that boom.”

Suddenly he put the tiller over, the boat began to swing around and the sail set up a terrible flapping. Then without any warning it slammed across the boat, and I saw the boom coming and screamed and ducked. Then the sliding pulley to which it was attached by some ropes slid as far as it would go and caught it, and it filled, and the boat heeled over so far I thought we were going to upset. Then I saw we were pulling out of the cove very rapidly. Then the first swell from the Sound hit us and lifted us, and all sensation of being afraid left me, and I realized that for the first time in my life I was sailing, the way I had read about in books. I clapped my hands, and he laughed. “You like it?”

“I love it.”

W
E SAILED QUITE A
little while, and then he came about, and payed out some of the rope that held the sail, and we began to move again, but we didn’t heel over. “Are we going back?”

“Just keeping in sight of home base.”

“Make it tilt. I like that.”

“We’re running before the wind. We only heel over when we’ve got it across us. And it’s a she.”

“Oh, yes, of course.”

It wasn’t exciting the way it was before, but the water was smooth and green, so it was still quite pleasant. After quite awhile, he said: “Now, how about that lunch?”

“I’ll get it ready.”

“We’ll both get it ready.”

“But you’ll have to steer.”

“Steer what?”

“Why—her.”

“You’re the funniest sailor I ever saw. Haven’t you noticed that for the last fifteen minutes we haven’t had even the sign of a breeze?”

“Oh,
that’s
why the water’s so smooth.”

“Yes, so now’s our chance to eat. She’ll drift, without much help from us.”

So he kept one hand on the tiller, and we opened the lunch, sitting in the shadow of the sail. It was marvelous, with little thin sandwiches, stuffed eggs, and iced tea in thermos bottles. Every sandwich was in a little paper envelope marked: Loudet, Caterer. “Do you always deal with a caterer?”

“Him? Oh, he’s just a Frenchman that puts up lunches.”

“Rather expensive, I imagine.”

“Is he?”

“So I judge. And I know about sandwiches.”

“They’re all right?”

“I’ll say.”

“Then eat ’em.”

So we ate them, and then he lay there with his arm over the tiller and his eyes closed, smoking a cigarette. It was so hot little beads of sweat were dotted all over his upper lip, and not far from us were several other boats, their sails just hanging there as motionless as we were. But the water looked green and cool, and I longed to be in it. I got up, took the bathing cap out of my bag and put it on, then slipped off the beach robe and dived off. It felt so nice down there, and looked so pretty, with the sunlight filtering down, that I began to swim under water, and stayed down until my breath gave out and I had to come up. I looked back to wave at him, and to my surprise I was quite a distance from the boat, and he was standing there, his hand still on the tiller, swearing at me in a way I wouldn’t have believed him capable of. He ordered me back at once, but I took my time, and finally he pulled me over the side. Then he explained that I had done a very dangerous thing in going so far, as a sailboat can’t be maneuvered like a motorboat, and especially requires that one person always remain aboard it. So if anything had happened, and he had had to go overboard after me, a puff of wind might drift the boat away, and there both of us would be, out there in the Sound, two miles from land. I knew he was right, but didn’t feel at all guilty, so I merely made a fresh remark: “And besides, the water is nice.”

He sulked for a time, then unwound a rope and dropped the sail, then took another rope and tied it to a small wooden grating on the bottom of the boat and dropped the grating overboard, so it trailed in the water. “What’s that?”

“That’s our lifeline, so we don’t get separated from our ship.”

“How would we get separated from our ship?”

“Swimming.”

“Are we going to swim?”

“Didn’t you say the water was nice?”

He lifted his foot, put it square in the middle of my chest and pushed me over backwards. When I came up he was in the water beside me. We both laughed and splashed water at each other, but he made me hold onto the lifeline, and wouldn’t let me swim off at all. I didn’t mind. We both held onto the rope and floated side by side, looking up at the sky. Then he went under me and when he came up he floated facing me, so my head was at his feet, and our hands came together under water. I could feel his toes sticking out behind my head, but my toes stuck out near his ear, as he was a great deal taller than I. I moved my toe in front of his face and wobbled it, and he pretended he was going to bite it. So I pulled it away quick, but that pulled me off balance, and when I got straightened out again we floated for a little while, facing each other. Then he gave my hand a little tug, and my toes went past his head and his face began to come nearer and nearer. We hardly moved but our lips met and then he put his hand up to keep me from floating past him, and we lay there, his face against mine, just looking up at the sky. Then a swell lifted us, and to me it was heavenly, but he whipped away from me as though he had been shot. He looked off to the west and then began going up the rope, hand over hand, and he was hardly in the boat before he motioned to me and pulled me in after him. “Get all that stuff in the basket. Hurry up.”

I still didn’t know what was bothering him, but there seemed to be a great deal of activity in the boats that were near us. A man on the nearest one yelled at Grant. “What you going to do?”

“I’m going to run for it.”

“You can’t make it. I’m riding it out.”

“Suit yourself. I’m going to run.”

I was much mystified, and did as I was told, getting all our things in the basket, and yet I noticed that the water, while it was still green and the sun was out, was running long swells. By this time Grant was laboring to get up the sail. Pretty soon it was up and while there didn’t seem to be any wind, it was flapping in a queer sort of way. He came back and put the tiller over, and suddenly we came about. The sail filled with a jerk, and once more we were running before the wind, except that this time we were lifting along with big swells that went past us, and yet carried us along. As we went past the nearest boat they were dropping the sail and running around highly excited. The man again called to Grant. “You can’t make it, you’ll crack, up sure as hell on that shore.”

“All right, so I crack up.”

“Well, will you please tell me what it is?”

“Squall.”

He was very grim, but except for the water I couldn’t see any signs of a squall. Then, however, all of a sudden the sun wasn’t shining any more and almost at once it turned cold as an icebox. Between the time Grant first ran up the sail and the time it turned cold was five or ten minutes, as well as I can remember. We had been about two miles offshore, and now we had covered about half that distance, headed for a point somewhat beyond the mouth of the cove. He put me at the tiller and went to the foot of the mast. “Hold her just as she is.”

I held her and he kept looking back, and I heard him mutter: “Here it comes.” I looked back and there on the water was a long streak almost completely black, and approaching us at a terrifying speed. When I looked again at Grant he was throwing a rope off a cleat, and the sail came piling down on the boom. He leaped back where I was and began hauling at the rope that held the boom. It came in with the sail dragging in the water, and just as it was in and Grant was wrestling the wet sail into the boat, it hit us. It was like a hurricane, with a splatter of big raindrops mixed with it, and the swells that were racing past us suddenly turned foamy white.

“Put her down!”

He pushed the tiller hard over, and we lurched straight for the cove, the wind and swells carrying us along without any sail at all. The mouth of the cove, I would say, was about a hundred yards away, and we covered the distance in almost no time, scudding rapidly past the grass which was flattened down on the water by the wind and looked white, not green, as indeed everything looked queer, for while it was almost dark a peculiar light seemed to be everywhere. As we entered the cove the first lightning flash came, followed almost at once by a clap of thunder. Not far away I could see our buoy, with the little skiff bouncing up and down on the waves. He took the tiller and pointed for the buoy, yet not quite for it. “Hold her that way till I tell you, then put her up,
hard.
Have you got it? I want to overshoot the buoy, then hit it upwind.”

“I’ve got it.”

He went to the bow and lay down with his head hanging over. I headed as he said, and we bore down on the buoy at terrifying speed. When we were almost on it, and yet a little to one side, he called, like a shot: “Put her up!”

I jammed the tiller over hard, and we came lurching around on the buoy, with the swells slamming us sidewise. Then we seemed to hesitate for a moment, but that was enough for him. He made fast, and we whipped around so the boat strained on the mooring cable with a jerk that almost threw me overboard. The wind tore at our faces and the little skiff began slamming and bumping alongside. “Come on!”

He grabbed the basket, we jumped into the skiff, and he cast off. He grabbed up the paddle, and spun us bow on to the shore. It was out of the question to paddle for the foot of the stairs for the wind was driving us about fifty yards farther down, and he didn’t even come back to the stern. He stayed in the bow using the paddle to keep us headed right, and it was only a few seconds before he jumped overboard, grabbed the bow of the skiff and ran it up on the shore with me, the basket, and all right in it. “Out!”