All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [71]
It wasn’t a noise, but instead, a stillness that made me turn suddenly to Adam. He was staring at me. When I met his eyes, his face flushed, and he jerked his eyes off me, as though embarrassed. Then he said, “I’ll race you,” huskily, and ran after her. I ran too, and his feet threw the sand back at me.
Anne was out in the water swimming now. Adam plunged in after her and swam hard and straight, outdistancing me. He was a wonderful swimmer. He hadn’t wanted to swim but now he would swim straight out, hard and fast.
I came up to Anne, and slowed down, and said, “Hello.” She lifted her head high for an instant, with the gracile motion a seal has, and smiled, and curled over forward in a clean surface dive. Her sharp small heels, side by side, flickered for a second above the water, then drew under. I caught up with her, and she did it again. Every time I caught up with her she would lift her head, and smile, and dive again. The fifth time I caught up, she didn’t dive. She rolled over with a light, lounging twist of her body, and floated on her back, looking up at the sky, her arms spread wide. So I turned over, too, and floated, about five or six feet from her, and looked at the sky.
The sky was darker now, with a purplish, greenish cast. The color of a turning grape. But it still looked high, with worlds of air under it. A gull crossed, very high, directly above me. Against the sky it was whiter even than the sail had been. It passed clear across all the sky I could see. I wondered if Anne had seen the gull. When I looked at her, her eyes were closed. Her arms were still spread out wide, and her hair wavered out free on the water from around her head. Her head was far back, her chin lifted. Her face looked very smooth as though she were asleep. As I lay in the water, I could see her profile sharp against the far-off black trees.
All at once, she turned, in the direction away from me, as though I hadn’t been there, and began to swim in. She swam with a slow stroke now that seemed retarded and yet effortless. Her thin arms rose and sank with a languid and bemused and fastidious punctuality, like your own effortless motion in a dream.
Before we got to the beach, the rain had begun, big, spaced, heavy, independent drops that prickled the yet glossy surface of the water. Then it was a driving gust of rain, and the surface of the water was gone.
We rose out of the water and stood on the sand, with the rain whipping our skin, and looked out at Adam, who was coming in. He still had a long way to come. Down the bay beyond him, to the south, the lightening kept forking out of the dark sky, with steady thunder. Now and then Adam seemed, for a moment, to be lost in a driving sheet of rain which would rake over the water. Watching him, Anne stood there with her head bowed forward a little, almost pensively, and her shoulders hunched and her arms crossed over her insignificant breasts, hugging herself as though she were just about to shiver, and her knees tight together and slightly bent.
Adam came in, we gathered up our stuff, put on our sopping sandals, and passed through the pine grove, where the black masses heaved above us and the boughs made a stridor which you caught now and then coming out of the roar. We reached our car and went home. That summer I was seventeen, Adam was about my age, and Anne was four years younger, or about that. That was back before the World War, or rather, we before we got into it.
That was a picnic I never forgot.
I suppose that that day I first saw Anne and Adam as separate individual people, whose ways of acting were special, mysterious, and important. And perhaps, too, that day I first saw myself as a person. But that is not what I am talking about. What happened was this: I got an image in my head that never got out. We see a great many things and can remember a great many things, but that is different. We get very few of the true imagines in our heads of the kind I am talking about, the kind that become more and more vivid for us as if the passage of the years did not obscure their reality but, year by year, drew off another veil to expose a meaning which we had only dimly surmised at first. Very probably the last veil will not be removed, for there are not enough years, but the brightness of the image increases and our conviction increases that the brightness is meaning, or the legend of meaning, and without the image our lives would be nothing except an old piece of film rolled on a spool and thrown into a desk drawer among the unanswered letters.