In her grace, at once exquisite and hardy, she was that perfect type of American girl that makes one wonder if the male is not being sacrificed to it, much as, in the last century, the lower strata in England were sacrificed to produce the governing class.
The two young men, coming out of the water as she went in, had large shoulders and empty faces. She had a smile for them that was no more than they deserved—that must do until she chose one to be the father of her children and gave herself up to destiny. Until then—Henry Marston was glad about her as her arms, like flying fish, clipped the water in a crawl, as her body spread in a swan dive or doubled in a jackknife from the springboard and her head appeared from the depth, jauntily flipping the damp hair away.
The two young men passed near.
“They push water,” Choupette said, “then they go elsewhere and push other water. They pass months in France and they couldn’t tell you the name of the President. They are parasites such as Europe has not known in a hundred years.”
But Henry had stood up abruptly, and now all the people on the beach were suddenly standing up. Something had happened out there in the fifty yards between the deserted raft and the shore. The bright head showed upon the surface; it did not flip water now, but called: “Au secours! Help!” in a feeble and frightened voice.
“Henry!” Choupette cried. “Stop! Henry!”
The beach was almost deserted at noon, but Henry and several others were sprinting toward the sea; the two young Americans heard, turned and sprinted after them. There was a frantic little time with half a dozen bobbing heads in the water. Choupette, still clinging to her parasol, but managing to wring her hands at the same time, ran up and down the beach crying: “Henry! Henry!”
Now there were more helping hands, and then two swelling groups around prostrate figures on the shore. The young fellow who pulled in the girl brought her around in a minute or so, but they had more trouble getting the water out of Henry, who had never learned to swim.
II
“This is the man who didn’t know whether he could swim, because he’d never tried.”
Henry got up from his sun chair, grinning. It was next morning, and the saved girl had just appeared on the beach with her brother. She smiled back at Henry, brightly casual, appreciative rather than grateful.
“At the very least, I owe it to you to teach you how,” she said.
“I’d like it. I decided that in the water yesterday, just before I went down the tenth time.”
“You can trust me. I’ll never again eat chocolate ice cream before going in.”
As she went on into the water, Choupette asked: “How long do you think we’ll stay here? After all, this life wearies one.”
“We’ll stay till I can swim. And the boys too.”
“Very well. I saw a nice bathing suit in two shades of blue for fifty francs that I will buy you this afternoon.”
Feeling a little paunchy and unhealthily white, Henry, holding his sons by the hand, took his body into the water. The breakers leaped at him, staggering him, while the boys yelled with ecstasy; the returning water curled threateningly around his feet as it hurried back to sea. Farther out, he stood waist deep with other intimidated souls, watching the people dive from the raft tower, hoping the girl would come to fulfil her promise, and somewhat embarrassed when she did.
“I’ll start with your eldest. You watch and then try it by yourself.”
He floundered in the water. It went into his nose and started a raw stinging; it blinded him; it lingered afterward in his ears, rattling back and forth like pebbles for hours. The sun discovered him, too, peeling long strips of parchment from his shoulders, blistering his back so that he lay in a feverish agony for several nights. After a week he swam, painfully, pantingly, and not very far. The girl taught him a sort of crawl, for he saw that the breast stroke was an obsolete device that lingered on with the inept and the old. Choupette caught him regarding his tanned face in the mirror with a sort of fascination, and the youngest boy contracted some sort of mild skin infection in the sand that retired him from competition. But one day Henry battled his way desperately to the float and drew himself up on it with his last breath.
“That being settled,” he told the girl, when he could speak, “I can leave St. Jean tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What will you do now?”
“My brother and I are going to Antibes; there’s swimming there all through October. Then Florida.”
“And swim?” he asked with some amusement.
“Why, yes. We’ll swim.”
“Why do you swim?”
“To get clean,” she answered surprisingly.
“Clean from what?”
She frowned. “I don’t know why I said that. But it feels clean in the sea.”
“Americans are too particular about that,” he commented.
“How could anyone be?”
“I mean we’ve got too fastidious even to clean up our messes.”
“I don’t know.”
“But tell me why you—” He stopped himself in surprise. He had been about to ask her to explain a lot of other things—to say what was clean and unclean, what was worth knowing and what was only words—to open up a new gate to life. Looking for a last time into her eyes, full of cool secrets, he realized how much he was going to miss these mornings, without knowing whether it was the girl who interested him or what she represented of his ever-new, ever-changing country.
“All right,” he told Choupette that night. “We’ll leave tomorrow.”
“For Paris?”
“For America.”
“You mean I’m to go too? And the children?”
“Yes.”
“But that’s absurd,” she protested. “Last time it cost more than we spend in six months here. And then there were only three of us. Now that we’ve managed to get ahead at last—”
“That’s just it. I’m tired of getting ahead on your skimping and saving and going without dresses. I’ve got to make more money. American men are incomplete without money.”
“You mean we’ll stay?”
“It’s very possible.”
They looked at each other, and against her will, Choupette understood. For years, by a process of ceaseless adaptation, he had lived her life, substituting for the moral confusion of his own country, the tradition, the wisdom, the sophistication of France. After that matter in Paris, it had seemed the bigger part to understand and to forgive, to cling to the home as something apart from the vagaries of love. Only now, glowing with a good health that he had not experienced for years, did he discover his true reaction. It had released him. For all his sense of loss, he possessed again the masculine self he had handed over to the keeping of a wise little Provencal girl eight years ago.
She struggled on for a moment.
“You’ve got a good position and we really have plenty of money. You know we can live cheaper here.”
“The boys are growing up now, and I’m not sure I want to educate them in France.”
“But that’s all decided,” she wailed. “You admit yourself that education in America is superficial and full of silly fads. Do you want them to be like those two dummies on the beach?”
“Perhaps I was thinking more of myself, Choupette. Men just out of college who brought their letters of credit into the bank eight years ago, travel about with ten-thousand-dollar cars now. I didn’t use to care. I used to tell myself that I had a better place to escape to, just because we knew that lobster armoricaine was really lobster americaine. Perhaps I haven’t that feeling any more.”
She stiffened. “If that’s it——”
“It’s up to you. We’ll make a new start.”
Choupette thought for a moment. “Of course my sister can take over the apartment.”
“Of course.” He waxed enthusiastic. “And there are sure to be things that’ll tickle you—we’ll have a nice car, for instance, and one of those electric ice boxes, and all sorts of funny machines to take the place of servants. It won’t be bad. You’ll learn to play golf and talk about children all day. Then there are the movies.”
Choupette groaned.
“It’s going to be pretty awful at first,” he admitted, “but there are still a few good nigger cooks, and we’ll probably have two bathrooms.”
“I am unable to use more than one at a time.”
“You’ll learn.”
A month afterward, when the beautiful white island floated toward them in the Narrows, Henry’s throat grew constricted with the rest and he wanted to cry out to Choupette and all foreigners, “Now, you see!”
III
Almost three years later, Henry Marston walked out of his office in the Calumet Tobacco Company and along the hall to Judge Waterbury’s suite. His face was older, with a suspicion of grimness, and a slight irrepressible heaviness of body was not concealed by his white linen suit.
“Busy, judge?”
“Come in, Henry.”
“I’m going to the shore tomorrow to swim off this weight. I wanted to talk to you before I go.”
“Children going too?”
“Oh, sure.”
“Choupette’ll go abroad, I suppose.”
“Not this year. I think she’s coming with me, if she doesn’t stay here in Richmond.”
The judge thought: “There isn’t a doubt but that he knows everything.” He waited.
“I wanted to tell you, judge, that I’m resigning the end of September.”
The judge’s chair creaked backward as he brought his feet to the floor.
“You’re quitting, Henry?”
“Not exactly. Walter Ross wants to come home; let me take his place in France.”
“Boy, do you know what we pay Walter Ross?”
“Seven
