VII

As the sun rose higher in the sky and the day grew hotter, conversation diminished. The distance shimmered and danced in the heat waves that rose from the sand. There was an indolence in the air that seemed more sensual than lazy; it acted as a soporific upon them all. The sea pounded not thirty feet away, but unnoticed, forgotten, scarcely part of the scene. People lay about in a kind of unconscious languorous communion, as if the beach were an enormous bed. Some were prone, hugging the sand in luxurious exhaustion; others had fallen into uninhibited attitudes which, paradoxically, they would never have assumed in public had they been fully clothed. Along the hot sand blew the heavy sickish-­sweet odor of sun-­tan oil.

“. . . Those curls of his,” Billie was saying in a whisper, scarcely audible; “I keep telling him he’s got to get a haircut. They do when they’re on duty; it’s a strict rule. But you know what? I think he really likes them. He doesn’t want to have them cut off. Isn’t it the limit? I know that’s it, but he won’t admit it . . .”

If Hauman had heard, he didn’t show it by the slightest move. He was stretched full length, his arms and legs spread wide, giving himself to the sun. The tawny curls trembled lightly in the breeze, his chest rose and fell in a steady slow rhythm. Below the ribs the body sloped sharply to the hollow of his stomach, so that the shorts, so tight when he stood up, lay loosely about his waist. The blue eyes stared into the sky. John Grandin wondered what he was thinking, but he was reluctant to disturb that repose, which seemed, except for the heaving ribs, deathlike. He could not say why he admired him so; it was like one’s feeling for the very young, whom one takes pleasure in merely to look at or watch, without expectation of return, without thought of any exchange at all, intellectual or emotional. . . . But now a different picture presented itself to his mind, called up by what morbid intuition he would never know: a picture of Hauman in battle dress, gaitered, helmeted, strapped about with cartridge belts, a tommy gun grasped in his outstretched hand, lying (as he here lay) on a beach, but sprawled face down, with the first small waves of the incoming tide washing gently around him. . . .

Did the intensity of his emotion reach across to the other? If so, Hauman did his best speedily to reassure him that all would be well. As if they had been at that moment in some secret communication, he turned his head on the sand and regarded Grandin with a grave smile—a smile which his good nature (or vanity or youth or eagerness to please) could not long keep from turning into a broad grin.

Undone, John Grandin felt himself slipping into a peculiar morass of emotion, unprecedented in his experience: sadness, desire for he knew not what, admiration, and a foolish wish that it might be he who was to die instead. . . .