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The steamer moved slowly away from the pier at Oak Bluffs; the deck began to throb again as it started the last lap of the sail to Nantucket.

Though most of the passengers had moved to the rail or gone below, John and Ethel Grandin still kept to their chairs against the wall of the closed saloon. When the engines died down, indicating the boat was approaching Martha’s Vineyard, the Haumans had risen to their feet. “We’re going to look,” Billie said, holding her hat with both hands, and Hauman had called back over his shoulder, “We’ll be right back, sir,” as though he thought the Grandins might miss them or even worry. Grandin wanted to go with them; he wanted to see what the island looked like and watch the passengers getting off. But Ethel had made no move. Under the circumstances, he thought it best to stay with her.

After a while he said, “It’s a long time since I’ve seen anyone so polite. I must say I like it.” Then he added, “Isn’t it odd the way he speaks of ‘my daddy’?”

“Yes.”

Taking this for encouragement, he went on. “Not dad or pop, like our kids. And always my daddy.”

But that was all. In a moment he tried again. “Curious that I had forgotten her. But I don’t believe I ever heard the sound of her voice till today. She never recited.”

“She’s a remarkably pretty girl.” Her tone as she uttered these words was as if she had said, She’s thirty-­five if she’s a day.

Good lord, he thought, can she possibly think I’m interested in Miss Cowles—a professor-­and-­student infatuation? But no, that would be too preposterous. Ethel knew better than to believe such a thing; just as he, to do her justice, knew better than to believe she had.

“All right, Ethel.”

“Hm?”

“I said all right. Let’s get it over with.”

As if in preparation for what was to come, she opened her bag and took out a Kleenex. “Well, there isn’t much to say.” Her voice was strained and tight; this was costing almost more effort than she could manage. “Except that I’ve had a lot of time to think of things, this past week.”

“What on earth can you possibly mean by that?”

“Well, that’s all.”

“Now look—” he said; but his heart was sinking fast. “You’re just tired.”

“I certainly am . . .”

He watched her blinking to keep back the tears. There wasn’t, as Ethel had said, much to say; certainly, now, everything had been said. But if he left it at that, he was lost.

“How long do you expect to keep this up?”

“I’m not keeping anything up,” she said.

“How long is this supposed to go on, then?”

“I don’t know . . .”

“Very well! If you won’t tell me what’s on your mind, I can’t do anything about it. I’m no clairvoyant, you know.” There was no answer. “Do you want me to take the next boat back?”

“I don’t care what you do.”

“You can’t mean that,” he said.

“Why can’t I?”

“I’ve called your bluff before and you know what always happens.”

“What happens?”

“You collapse in tears, or come running after me begging me to come back—”

“John, not now! I— Please . . .”

“Why not now? Why wait, why prolong it? I want to know what the trouble is!”

“I— Please, John.” The tears came. “Give me your handkerchief . . .”

“You’ve got your Kleenex.”

His impulse was to get up and go. He had to be by himself, take a walk around the deck, clear his mind. His chest was hot; though his mouth was tight shut, he could hear himself breathing; his hands trembled as he lighted a cigarette. With an effort he waited for the Haumans to return.

They sauntered across the deck after the boat was well underway. Hauman held his wife’s chair while she sat down.

“Mrs. Grandin,” she said, “you’ve been crying.”

“Crying? No. . . . No, I guess it’s just the wind.”

Grandin stood up. “I think I’ll take a look around the boat. Will you excuse me, Ethel?”

“Certainly, John.”

Hauman half rose to his feet. “Shall I come with you, sir?”

“No, thanks.” Walking off, he was aware of the expression on Hauman’s face as he had registered the rebuff and sat back again; uncertain, almost hurt. Perhaps he had been rude. In any case, he couldn’t worry about that now. He had other things to occupy his mind.

If Ethel was trying to drive him away, very well, he would be driven. If she was out to ruin the holiday for them both, he would help in that ruin. He knew who would suffer over it most in the end. He found he did not mind the strain as much as he had thought he would. Quarreling was, in itself, action of a kind, communication, even rapport; it involved them intensely with one another, so that, much as they stood apart, neither one was quite wholly alone—as they were, for example, during the indifferent silent evenings when he read in his study and she read in bed. Now, the long silences were passionate with feeling on both sides. Sooner or later there would be silence of a different kind, and embraces, and bed; and the atmosphere would be cleared.

He found himself a place at the rail, forward. With the racing wind streaming past his ears, all sound of the panting laboring steamer was drowned out behind him; no voices reached him whatever; he heard only the loud churning wash of the prow and the plaintive cries of sea gulls.

He drew her letter from the book in his pocket, the letter which had arrived that morning. What did it say? What could it have said, beyond the few practical details he wouldn’t have thought of? It was a letter from a wife who loved her husband; it said: “John darling, Up early because of the boys. Will they ever sleep late I wonder? Mama isn’t used to it but she’ll learn. Had a note from Hammacher Schlemmer saying they had shipped my package on the 22nd. They must have overlooked it before and only got to it after I wrote them. Which is too bad. I told them very firmly that I needed it. Mama is crocheting me a bedspread for my birthday but I doubt if it will be done in time. Drove into Old Orchard and bought some khaki shorts for the boys with belts that look like cartridge belts only they’re stuffed with wooden pegs. They loved them. Wanted to get myself a giddy beach costume but nothing doing in Old Orchard. Your letter was nice, as always. I read some of it to the boys. They knew I was skipping but I said they wouldn’t understand the omitted parts. Which is true enough. But it was so nice, John darling. Be sure to straighten up. Empty all ash trays, they smell otherwise. The check arrived. Your mail comes in, I find, on the 5:35, so we all three go over. Deposited the check immediately by mail and paid Johnson the insurance. Which pays us up for another year. After the boys finish breakfast they skoot out and we don’t see them again till noon,” and so on.

Like most of her letters, it could safely have been written to any sympathetic friend; it was aloof, discreet, unrevealing. Ethel found it difficult to speak of love; what she felt deeply was left unsaid—he remembered phoning a few days ago, earlier than usual, and after she had recognized his voice, hearing her say (as if to a casual acquaintance): “We’re just sitting down to supper.” It didn’t matter that it was long-­distance, and her husband. Yet, after his first moment of astonishment and exasperation, it didn’t matter that she had spoken that way, either, or wrote the kind of letters she did; he knew she couldn’t have given voice to her feelings in the presence of her parents, and she had an inbred distrust of the written word. It had been like that ever since he had first known her; that’s the way she was; and why should he now want her different from the woman who had attracted him at the beginning—what right had he to expect the impossible, the uncharacteristic? If her letters as a girl in love had been the same during that summer when she had put passion behind her and gone abroad To Decide—(This afternoon went off on another tour, to Stoke Poges church, pronounced Stoke Pógees, where Thomas Grey wrote the elegy. A lovely old church with a hole in the wall back of the altar, a squint hole where lepers watched the services. The yew tree under which he is reputed to have written the elegy is a beautiful but brittle old tree, at least a thousand years old, according to the vicar who was in the church and told us many things. Which revived my faith in the guide, who had already told us the same. Wm Penn’s sons and grandsons are also buried there. Love, Ethel)—if, that is, this was the girl he had loved and these were the kind of letters he had pored over with the irrational excitement of the lover—why should he expect, now, outbursts of love which would never be forthcoming, which were not in her power to produce, the very absence of which, indeed, he loved her for? He knew—he didn’t need to be told—and what were words anyhow? Her noncommittal letter then had shown him so plainly the lonely girl of twenty-four standing in the English churchyard among the tourists, gazing dutifully at the yew tree because she had paid good money to do just that, but daydreaming of the husband with whom, arm in arm, she might someday stand on this very spot again; and later, in the dingy hotel room, taking up the pretentiously crested stationery and resolutely putting all marriage nonsense aside (how could it be else but nonsense since it hadn’t happened yet?) in order faithfully to describe the church, the hole in the altar wall, the vicar, the yew tree, anything but her emotions. So it was still. In the domestic accents of this morning’s letter, which he now folded and put back in the book, love rang from every syllable—at least to the man who had kept the letter because it was written by the woman he knew so well and could never get along without, the woman whom habit or custom sometimes dulled or obscured, the woman who loved him.

His cheeks grew stiff in the cold wind. He turned his back to the rail and held onto his hat. His tie blew out from under his buttoned vest and flapped noisily at his chin.

What made him angriest of all was his own anger. He had not meant to carry it so far. Ethel’s simple statement that she had been “thinking things over” had told him all too plainly what the matter was; and though he would have been a fool to admit he understood, he had been even more of a fool to let temper carry him away. His heart had been touched by her helplessness far more than by her tears, and his pity became anger. The anger itself, he knew, was a kind of defense.

He’d better return. The Haumans might get ideas in their heads; Billie had already seen too much as it was. There was nothing he could do about it for the present but go back. He would not bring it up again; the next move was Ethel’s. Till that came about, he’d try from now on to forget it and enjoy himself, or at least be nice to the Haumans. It wasn’t their fault that he and Ethel had had a falling out. He remembered Hauman’s look of surprise as if he felt he had been rebuked.

Ethel did not look up when he returned. Hauman sat on the edge of his chair as before; his habit seemed to be to sit only on the edge of chairs. Billie was hanging onto herself in a dozen places, her white skirt blowing free from her grasp, her corsage swinging in the wind. Grandin was reminded of Swann’s Odette, whose idea of country clothes was a taffeta dress.

“You missed it,” she said brightly as he sat down. “Cliff’s chair broke under him and dumped him on the floor.”

Noticing how Hauman blushed, Grandin changed the subject. “This must be quite a change for you, Captain, after Guadalcanal and the hospital.”

“Yes, sir. It is, sir.”

“I suppose you’ve come in actual combat with the Japs?”

“Yes, sir, I have, quite a few times.”

“Are they—well, as hell-­bent on self-­destruction as we read about?”

For a moment, Hauman seemed to be thrown off by the careless phrase—(did he actually regard it as “profane”?)—but he recovered himself. “They don’t give a darn what happens to them, sir, if that’s what you mean. Not a darn. They never let themselves be taken alive, if you understand me.” He gave a laugh so hearty and good natured that Grandin had to think back on what had been said in order to understand; for to him, there seemed no connection whatever between the laugh and its cause. “I suppose you read in the papers that the Marines don’t take many prisoners? Well, that’s more our fault than it is theirs!” He laughed again.

“I often wonder,” Grandin said, “how you fellows stand it.”

“You people back home, sir, you read too many books. Most of the boys don’t mind it any more than a Boy Scout hike.” Pleased that he had at last caught the interest of the man whom he regarded as his wife’s professor, he moved restlessly on the edge of his chair and leaned forward enthusiastically. “Say,” he went on, “you’ve read these stories about how the Japs put up a white flag, sir? Then we advance, thinking the rascals have surrendered. But when we get within range, they shoot us down like— You’ve read stories like that, sir?”

Inwardly, Grandin shuddered. “We have indeed.”

Pleased, the Captain gave a short sharp laugh. “Heck, that’s nothing. We do the same thing ourselves!”

The shudder had been premature. Looking into that boyish smiling face, which spoke so amiably, so cheerfully, of bloodshed, a chill went down Grandin’s spine. Involuntarily he exchanged a glance with Ethel.

Hauman caught the fleeting alarm and hurried on, gleefully, to reassure them. “We have to, sir. If we hadn’t done it, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now. There aren’t any rules out there—can’t be. Why heck, those rascals wouldn’t stop at anything—anything! So we give them as good as we get.” The charming smile seemed all the more disarming for being, under the circumstance, so ill timed. “A lot better too, if you ask me!”

“Cliff and I are going to rent bicycles and really get some exercise,” Billie said, “aren’t we, Cliff?”

“Sure are,” he said, and his smile warmed them all. “Got to work off some of this excess fat I’ve been piling on, lying around for so many months doing nothing.”

Grandin looked at the shoulders and the broad chest: and the fact that the seams of the shirt were strained almost to bursting seemed to have little to do with fat. His whole body looked solid muscle as he strained forward on his chair. He seemed to be unable to give enough of himself to them or to Billie, as if he lived under a kind of apprehension lest they should feel he wasn’t attentive enough or appreciative of their company.

He puzzled about this attitude. It did not necessarily spring from inferiority, he decided. On the contrary, he could see that Hauman had a strong sense of the fitness of things and of himself. It was discipline, perhaps, which had produced the habit of respect for seniors, the immaculate neatness of dress, the soldierly attention, the courtesy, the desire to please and fit in. Training of this kind could well erase all differences of background. He took pride in discipline; it was the ideal of the day, better than breeding or brains. Grandin also wondered whether discipline was responsible for the innocent language with which Hauman expressed himself, or whether his choice of words sprang from a mind so clean it could almost seem inane. There was no telling; his very naturalness gave no clue to his nature. One could only be sure of two things: he loved his father; and though very possibly he did not truly love his wife (since he would never really know or understand her), it was touching to see that one of the genuine delights of his life was that she was called Billie. . . .

“I guess we’ll be getting there soon now,” the Captain said. “Have you enjoyed the trip, sir?”

“Very much. Are we there?”

“The island looks about five miles off. We’re just passing some lighthouse.”

“Oh dear,” Billie said, “hadn’t we better go downstairs and get our things?”

“Plenty of time, honey. But still, if the Grandins will excuse us—?”

Anxious to put a better face on his share of the afternoon, Grandin said, “I’m told there’s a very fine beach at Sconset. If you should care to try it, I hope you’ll feel free to use our room to dress in.” He had spoken out of politeness, merely, a politeness which had been generally contagious that afternoon.

And out of no more than this same politeness, Hauman replied as they moved away, “Thank you, sir, we sure will, it’s very kind of you I’m sure. . . .”

Automatically the Grandins turned to watch them go. At the top of the stairway to the lower deck, Captain Hauman looked back for a moment; he sought their glance; and over the heads of many passengers still seated about the promenade deck sent them a smile of farewell, a smile of pure radiance, youth, and health, which left Grandin gazing at the spot for a full moment after the Haumans had gone below.

He turned to his wife. “I’m tired. It may or may not be the sea air,” he added, “but it’s a long time since I’ve felt so old.” Yet old as he felt, he also felt, unaccountably, a curious boyishness, a feeling of being again in his earliest teens.

Ethel, gathering her things together, said nothing.

On the pier, behind a fencelike gate, a mob of people in summer dress waited for the passengers to disembark. They stood silent but with a fixed collective smile and hands tentatively raised to wave at the first sign of a familiar face. It was as if the entire island had turned out to welcome the arrival of some illustrious personage. As the first passengers streamed off the boat, relieving the press on the stairway, Ethel and John Grandin went below.

Inching along toward the gangplank, he looked away from the island and out toward the farther horizon beyond. The sky was a pale white-­green, so remote that it looked like the static backdrop of a stage setting seen through the wrong end of a pair of opera glasses. Gulls flew and cried against the sky but no stir of life could be seen along the horizon. He was reminded of a dream he had had when a child, a beautiful meaningless dream he had never forgotten because of its pictorial beauty, which he had been able to see ever since in his mind’s eye and memory, and which was so much like this distant seascape now. . . . Shoulder to shoulder with ten thousand others he had stood on the top of a cliff rising out of the sea. It was a small rocklike island, high and flat, without beach or shore, rising straight out of the ocean. They stood in silence as if awaiting some portentous event or revelation, packed close together to the very edge of the cliff, their feet half buried in the long dry cliff grasses, while overhead birds wheeled and screamed in the late afternoon air and a cool wind blew in from the sea, across the island, and out to sea again. All around, to the farthest point on the horizon, stretched that remote panorama of white-­green and lemon-­yellow sky, with far-distant thunderheads piled up on the edge of the sea like rocks. . . .

A vast rickety omnibus with a high wide body quaked gently at the entrance to the pier. It was marked SIASCONSET.

Except for the broad back seat, the bus was already filled. They moved to the rear and sat down, and found themselves seated next to the Howards. Mr. Howard introduced the ladies; and then, as the bus began to shudder violently, he rubbed his hands together and said, “This looks like it’s going to be fun!” The bus moved off through the town.

Somewhere, from some tower, a clock struck.

“Eight o’clock, my god,” Mrs. Howard said. “I wonder if we’ll get anything to eat.”

Mr. Howard leaned forward. “Any idea how late they serve dinner at Dune House?”

“The folder said eight-­thirty.”

“Hear that, Mama? We’ll just get in under the wire.”

“Maybe,” she said.

It was getting too dark for them to form any clear impression of Nantucket village; they’d have to wait till another visit, in the daytime—and no doubt they’d be making several trips into town before their holiday was over. As the bus bumbled out upon the rising highway leading to Sconset the night air began to thicken, and not merely with the rapidly descending dark. A white fog moved over the moors; they passed in and out of it as through horizontal layers of transparent veils.

“Look, Bill—fog,” Mrs. Howard said.

“Nice!”

“Nice hell. We didn’t come here to spend our vacation in a fog.”

“Now Mama, maybe it’s only tonight.”

“We hope. I want to see that full moon this week.”

The ride across the island was like a kind of long gently sloping roller-­coaster, up and down sudden little hills and valleys. The straining bus seemed to travel at reckless speed. Finally it rolled down a slope and came to an explosive stop in front of a drugstore. From the front seat, the driver yelled:

“Si-­as-­conset!”