I must admit that I watched her with real trepidation. For the first time, I felt a grudging fondness for her and a fear for her safety. Nobody, not even Curk’s daughter, not even Curk, should trust a shark. But at least she had pleased herself and her father and, I hoped, completed the ritual for that dreaded night.

Dreadful night, I should say. It was then that I saw Charlie’s fall or, because of my limited vision, that final part of the fall which he somehow turned into a partial dive.

I knew who had thrown him. I hated the thrower with a hatred which was sheer malevolence and which totally belied the popular notion of dolphins as playful and benign. I hated the thrower as I had hated the shark which had killed my mother. But anger was a wicked luxury unless I put it to work. For Charlie.

Evidently he had been flung, outward and downward, with such force that he would land with a stupefying splash and would excite the sharks to immediate attack. But he was as agile in the air as on the land and he managed to strike the lagoon with arms in front of him and to break the water without a frenzy of splashing. Quickly but quietly he rose to the surface among the slow-moving fins and slowly began to swim for the beach. When the sharks converged behind him, a ridiculous image flashed into my brain: six black pirate sails behind a Spanish treasure ship. Left to themselves, they might have followed him to shore and let him escape out of sheer lethargy or curiosity. Sharks have no sense of beauty but they do have a sense of rhythm, and the gliding body of

Charlie lulled them and soothed them. Hypnotically he swam; hypnotized they followed but did not attack him.

It was then that I felt the compulsion hurled from the cliff, a sheer animal energy which spoke to the sharks on the one level they could understand, that of pure instinct: KILL. For me, it was like being enveloped in the inky cloud of a squid; noxious, suffocating to the mind if not to the lungs.

I put my anger to use. I streaked toward Charlie at thirty knots and reached him ahead of the sharks.

He grasped my fin, he gasped my name, and we set out for my sanctuary like a Triton from the jaws of a whale. I could have attained the beach without difficulty, but once Charlie climbed ashore, the Caribs would doubtless come screaming down from the cliff, and he would have been rescued only to be recaptured while I was trapped by the sharks. Thus, I chose the swamp.

With the additional weight of Charlie, I could not hope to outswim the sharks in a long chase. But they floundered for several seconds before they began their pursuit. They were frightened; the smell of dolphin always disturbs them, and for all they knew I might be one of a herd. They were also bewildered. Curk’s command was penetrating their tiny brains, but where was the man to be killed? Once their nostrils had told them that there was only one dolphin, who had joined his scent to that of the man, I had skirted around them and aimed for the mangrove swamp.

By the time I reached the swamp, they were

dose behind me; their smell was more than offensive, it was horrendous, and I could hear the ominously gentle rippling of water parted by fins.

But the swamp befuddled them. It was not their habitat; its meandering canals baffled then-poor vision. They collided with sudden banks; they tangled themselves in the snaky mangrove roots; they became separated and frightened; and I, after circling, criss-crossing, and losing, I trusted, the last of them, made for the sanctuary.

I nuzzled my way through the concealment of vegetation and revealed the opening in my stone barricade. Then I withdrew and helped, or rather shoved, Charlie through the opening and followed him, restoring the vegetation behind me with my tail and, once I saw him safely on the ledge, lifting the stones in place with my beak to shut the entrance. Charlie handed them to me one at a time from the ledge.

“If you aren’t the cleverest fellow,” he said, patting my head when the last stone was in place. “You’ve saved my life, you know. I thought there was only one Goat Without Horns—or one and a half, counting Jill’s hypothetical baby—but there seem to have been two, and I was the edible one.”

Well, yes, he was the edible one and I had saved his life. But how could a friend do otherwise? I told him so in my best English.

“I keep thinking you’re trying to tell me things,” he said. “But I just can’t understand what you’re saying. Forgive me, old chap. And now I think we deserve a rest, don’t you?” As for me, I felt no fatigue, but a marvelous exhilaration at having rescued my friend and brought him to my house. As for Charlie, he discovered my provisions and decided that he would rather eat than rest. The fish were some I had caught in the lagoon and beheaded with a neat chomp of my jaws. The bananas I had stolen from the Caribs, who had left a succulent bunch too close to a canal and within reach of my versatile snout. English schoolboys, like dolphins, can always eat, even when they have almost been eaten. “I guess we must just stay here for three days and then try to slip through to the passage and meet the boat.”

Yes, that was the sensible thing to do. I acquiesced with my usual ungainly nod and pointed to another fish, meaning to suggest that he try it with his seventh banana. He misunderstood— purposely, I fear, since the fish was raw—and passed it to me, along with a banana, which he thoughtfully removed from its skin. The fish was a tasty mullet which I devoured with much relish, though I wanted to lecture him on the nutritional advantages of raw fish and the need for a balanced diet.

“And once on board, I shall lead a party ashore and rescue Elizabeth!” By now he was thoroughly enjoying our adventure. “And take Jill with us by force, if we have to.”

I snorted; I have never been one to hide my emotions.

He came to her defense. “I don’t think she had the least notion what was going to happen. Not to me anyway. Only to herself. Why else did Curk wait until she couldn’t see him when he threw me to the sharks? He knew how horrified she would

be. By now he’s no doubt told her that I fell or jumped in to save her and got myself eaten.”

I looked at him thoughtfully and concluded that for once his trust might be justified. No one who looked and talked like Charlie could fail to turn a young girl’s heart. No, Jill could not have known what her father intended for him. Charlie was a hero unaware of his heroism. Stripped of his English tweeds and his sailor’s garb, dressed in a loin cloth, he had ceased to be English; he had become Rousseau’s Noble Savage (you see, I know my human philosophy as well as my human history) .

While I was admiring Charlie and Charlie was vindicating Jill, we finished my entire stock of provisions down to one last overripe banana and a small, gristly looking fish.

“Gloomer, we have gorged ourselves,” announced Charlie. “Tomorrow we shall have to go foraging among the mangroves. You don’t think the sharks will—?”

The attack was more than sudden, it was instantaneous. My barricade did not so much yield as dissolve. We had been invaded; we were on the verge of being devoured; and the invader and devourer was a huge hammerhead, the ugliest if not quite the crudest of all the sharks. Nature is sometimes deceptive; she has concealed poison in the beautiful, tapering leaves of the oleander, but in the hammerhead, she wrought to reveal the soul. With his cruel flat head like a mallet and his wide-spaced, ogling eyes, he is what he seems: both scavenger and killer.

My first thought was: Charlie, press yourself

against the wall. He can’t get to you on the back of the ledge. My second thought was to join Charlie. Many a dolphin while chasing an elusive fish has dived into a boat or onto a beach. I could breathe on the ledge and remain fairly comfortable until my skin began to dry. My third thought, which coincided with rather than succeeded the second, was that the Great Triton had created sharks in error, or perhaps inherited them from an older Creation, and dolphins were meant to rectify the error or the inheritance. This one looked huge and arrogant, but size might work against him in so small a space. Had not the lumbering galleons of the Spanish Armada reeled before the swift small pinnaces of England?

The shark was surrounded by the debris of the barricade—leaves, bits of mangrove branches, stones—and was still a little confused by his new and constricted surroundings. He had doubtless scented me by now, probably seen me, but not yet attacked me. He was four times my length; his skin was hard and murderously abrasive. The teeth in his flattened head were a multiple horror. I chose to go for his eyes, which were peculiarly vulnerable because they protruded from his head. If I could blind him, he could still scent me. But the pain might drive him from the shell and the loss of one sense would at least limit his maneuverability. I rammed him in the left eye and he recoiled with a suddenness which sent a small wave rolling over the ledge. Charlie, by the way, was leaning over the ledge with a sharp stone which he had rescued from the debris, awaiting his chance.

Now for the other eye. But he was growing warier and more at ease in the narrow confines of our battleground. He made a slow, calculated circuit of the chamber to gauge its shape and size and all the while he thrashed his head and tail to discourage attack. Now, now, I thought, and lunged at his other eye. But I badly misjudged his speed and took a terrific blow from his tail. I found myself bruised and breathless across the chamber from him. If he had caught me then he could have finished with his teeth what his tail had begun. I was not wounded but I was certainly winded.

A blur of images, again the horrible thrashing, Charlie on the ledge with empty hands, a stone which had somehow struck its mark and lodged in the shark’s one good eye. (Charlie, Charlie, stay on the ledge! You’ve done all you can to help me.)

Charlie was out of stones. He was climbing into the water to replenish his supply and possibly, no, probably, lure the attacker until I had recovered my wind. (Idiot, stay where you are!)

I was forced into a dangerous expedient to regain the shark’s attention. I flicked him insolently with my tail and dove into the second and smaller chamber. He could block my passage back to the air. Remember, I breathe through lungs, instead of gills. He could also attack Charlie. But I counted on his anger to spur him after me, and on his ignorance of how the chambers diminished in size.

There was scarcely room for him in the second chamber. His body full-length stretched from wall to wall. I dipped and rolled and somehow eluded both his teeth and the bruising walls, and dove as if I were entering the third and lowest chamber. Again he followed me. The smell of shark was rank in my lungs; he was like a plague of darkness descending on a happy land. At the last possible second, I somersaulted up from the entrance and over him and watched his enormous momentum carry him into the lowest, smallest chamber of the shell. He could not turn; he could only try to back; and I dove at his tail and caught it between my teeth. He thrashed like a boar in a net, strained away from me, and crammed his wide head into the lowest reach of the shell. His wounded eyes received an additional wounding; and whenever he tried to back, I assaulted his tail with my own by-no-means-negligible teeth and shredded the leathery skin.

In the end, he destroyed himself. It was not my attacks nor Charlie’s stones. It was his own rage. He literally beat himself to death against the hard, unyielding shell, or so I judged from his convulsive agonies. The Great Triton had led me to the one battleground in which I could triumph over such an awesome adversary.

I did not remain to watch his final convulsions. I instinctively hated all sharks, and this shark had threatened my friend, but hatred ceases when the hated one dies without dignity in pain and humiliation.

I broke the surface in the highest chamber, my airhole working furiously, my body aching as if I had just been spewed from Edgar Allan Poe’s maelstrom. I must have looked as if I had lost the fight.

“Gloomer, are you all right, old man?” He spoke from the ledge, amidst a pile of dripping stones.

“Iss.”

“Iss. Yes? Yes! You’re speaking English!”

“Isssss.”

“You have been all along, haven’t you, and I haven’t been understanding. My God, old man, tell me what happened below!”

“Ease daid.”

“Dead, you say? You’ve killed him, Gloomer? You’ve saved my life again!” He surveyed my bruises. “We must get you some healing seaweed. That is, as soon as we can get out of here. And how we shall talk, once I catch onto your English a little better!”

But there were other sharks in the lagoon, and Curk and the Caribs were waiting for Charlie, and I was tired and—

Below us we heard a muffled rumbling, scraping, creaking, as when a sunken vessel, shaken by an earthquake, lumbers toward the surface. The water reddened with blood. Charlie looked at me with consternation.

“You did kill him, didn’t you?”

I remembered an adage taught to me by the Old Bull. “Confidence kills sharks; over-confidence kills dolphins.”

Charlie grasped a stone; I waited with sick expectancy, no longer, I feared, a hero to my hero; tired to the bone, exhausted of strategems; ready to fight but expecting to lose.

“Never mind, we’ll get him this time. But Gloomer. It... isn’t... the... hammerhead.”

It was the mutilated body of Curk.

Chapter Twelve

Charlie and Jill had met in the dining room for their last dinner in the Red House. Tomorrow the schooner would come from Martinique; tomorrow they would depart for England. Was it only a night ago that they had dined, he with apprehension, she with a restless anticipation, to the beat of a Carib drum? To Charlie, tonight should have been a time to rejoice; Curk was dead; the sharks had left the lagoon. The Caribs, bereft of their leader, had departed from the island in their dugout canoes on another lap of their journey to oblivion. But what to him had been a victory had been to Jill a tragedy. She had lost her father; she had lost her adopted people, loved in spite of their degeneracy; and Charlie could not rejoice. He could only try to consolé.

She sat with moist eyes, gallantly withholding her tears, and she might have been one of those English girls, brave and silent, who sent their sweethearts, brothers, and fathers to die in England’s interminable wars. He was glad that she did not know the full and ghastly circumstances of her father’s death. She only knew that Charlie had come to the Red House in the dead of night, looking like a drowned sailor, and found her with Elizabeth as they sobbed in each other’s arms, for him, not Curk, because they thought that he had drowned in the lagoon.

“Elizabeth, Jill,” he had gasped. “Curk is dead.” He was too weary to delay his shattering news, but at least he could soften it with evasions and omissions. “Gloomer took me to a half-submerged cave in the mangrove swamp, but Curk came after me. We fought on a ledge and he fell into the water. Gloomer killed him to save my life.”

Jill had shrieked and run from the room.

“Dear God, we must hide you,” Elizabeth had cried. “The Caribs will want your scalp.”

“Not any more. They intercepted me on my way here from the swamp. I told them what had happened—there was nothing else I could do—and took them to Curk’s body. I thought they would kill me on the spot, but they seemed to lose all spirit. They didn’t throw spears at Gloomer and they didn’t try to stop me from coming to you. They almost seemed afraid of us. I think they felt as if their god had let them down, and they were disgraced because of him. Disgraced and frightened.”

But that was last night. He had waited for Jill all morning, gone to look for her in the afternoon, and found her in the banyan tree. He had even dared the tarantulas to bring her back with him. She had neither reproached nor questioned him.

She had scarcely spoken to him. Now, at last, she spoke in a firm if wistful voice.

“I saw Curk try to kill you, Charlie. I was just at the edge of the beach when he flung you over the cliff. You see, I had lingered to watch the sharks. They seemed so beautiful and peaceful when I swam with them. I thought they were my friends. Believe me, I didn’t know what he meant to do. When you killed him, you and Gloomer were simply protecting yourselves.”

“You mustn’t think harshly of your father,” Charlie said. He had never grown used to hearing her speak of “Curk” instead of “Father.” “It’s true he tried to sacrifice me. But I honestly believe that he felt he was sending me directly to his god. It was the greatest honor he could pay to an Englishman.”

“I try to think of it that way. You see, I still love him, and I couldn’t if I thought he was only cruel.”

“Cruel isn’t a word for a man like Curk. He didn’t think in terms of good and bad, kind and cruel, but of strength and weakness.”

“I know that, Charlie. And I was getting to be like him, wasn’t I? But I like your way better now. You’re strong and good. When we get to England, will I ever see you? Will you come down from Cambridge to see the girl who dressed like a pirate?”

“As often as I can I”

“I know you will as long as I’m with mother,” she said without reproach. “You do love her, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I must pack now. All the gowns I never wore. I

shall have to wear them in London. Do they still wear wigs at the balls?”

“Only the masquerades.”

“On the voyage home, I will let my hair grow out. It grows fast and I should be presentable in a few months.”

“You’re more than presentable as you are. In a few months you’ll be ravishing. The young men will flock around you like bees around a shower-of-gold tree.”

“Do you know, I’ve never been farther than Martinique.”

“You’ve a lot to see. But then, you’ve seen a lot, too. Right here on Oleandra.”

“I could be content here, I think. I wouldn’t miss the Caribs. Did you see how they turned away from me after Curk was dead? And how they carried their belongings down to the sea and loaded their dugouts and sailed away without even saying goodbye? They had only tolerated me because of Curk.”

“He was their soul.”

“Now they’re soulless. They’ll settle on another island and grow lazier and meaner, and get themselves killed off completely. And I did like them so much! I guess I saw them through Curk’s eyes. As they had once been, in the old days. As they were at the festival, when Curk was praying to Tark. Charlie, will you excuse me? I don’t want you to see me cry again.”

She fled from the table and he sat alone in the forlorn, beautiful, beloved room where he had loved a woman and liked a girl, grieved for his mother and rejoiced in his friendship for me,

Gloomer. He sat alone with the spirit of William Morris, with the oaken table and the red sideboard, and the tall, raftered ceiling.

He was lying in bed, his body a confusion of aches from his recent flight, his mind a confusion of thoughts in which the overriding thought was a question. Should he visit Elizabeth in the bedroom where she had secluded herself all day? He did not know if she were grieving for the death of Curk or rejoicing in her liberation; he did not know if she were waiting for him or avoiding him. The usually decisive Charlie felt himself inappropriately cast in the role of Hamlet instead of Childe Roland. Really, he thought, I have no right to intrude unless she sends for me. After all, when she wants someone she’s rarely reticent. On the other hand, she may feel called on to mourn for the sake of appearances, when what she really wants is to, well, to visit with me.

“Master.” It was Telesphorus, taper in hand, hovering in the door and looking as if he would flee should Charlie so much as raise his voice. He was not accustomed to disturbing English gentlemen, in their thoughts or in their sleep.

“Yes, Telesphorus. Have you a message for me?” The boy always looked so thin and woebegone that Charlie felt an urge to sit him down at a table and fatten him with partridges and puddings.

The thin little face brightened in the voluminous folds of his hood. His bare feet projected as usual from his robe, but looked as if they might be withdrawn as quickly as the feelers of a snail.

“The mistress says, will you come to her room, please?”

Charlie was already on his feet and lighting a taper from the one in Telesphorus’ hands. . . .

She had not only retired, she had drawn the curtains around her bed. The room lay in darkness except for Charlie’s taper and a thin mist of moonlight.

“Put out the candle, my dear. I’ve been weeping, I’m afraid. I don’t want you to see my bloodshot eyes.” She squeezed his hand and drew him between the curtains, which fell into place with a silken rustle and closeted them in private night.

“Dearest Charlie, what horrors you’ve seen. And because of me.”

He could scarcely see her in the dim light. She seemed not a woman but a disembodied spirit, and he felt like the knight forsaken on the cold hillside by La Belle Dame Sans Merci. There was not even a scent of frangipani to make her tangible.

Only when he took her in his arms did he feel assured of her presence. “Elizabeth, it’s you who have seen the horrors. For fifteen years. A man like Curk—”

“A man? I know what he was, my dear. You were right to keep the truth from Jill. But I can guess what really happened. How he came after you, and not as a man. And how he died in combat with Gloomer. I’ve suspected the truth for years. There are Carib folktales about such beings. But I told myself they were cruel, stupid myths. How could I live with such a one and know the truth about him?”

“Is it over now; the horror, I mean? Is Jill really

free of him? I don’t mean of loving him—after all, he was her father—but of becoming like him?” Charlie asked.

“She was never in danger herself. Only the males are so afflicted, or honored, in the eyes of the Caribs. That was the reason Curk wanted me to bear him a son. When I failed, he wanted a grandson.”

“And if Jill should marry in England and have a son?”

“She can bear a dozen sons without danger of perpetuating the ... affliction. Only had she been with child—a male child—when she swam with the sharks would there have been a danger. You see, the ritual was more than prayers and torchlight. It was actually meant to be a transformation of the unborn child. I know as much from the folk tales. And because I myself once swam with the sharks, except that I loathed and feared them, while Jill adores them, or did, until they threatened you. That was before I took to my bed. That was why I took to my bed. And because of Curk’s rage when I bore him a daughter. Had I bom him a son—”

“He would have been like Curk?”

“Yes.”

Charlie shook his head. “No one would believe us in England, or even in Martinique. There’s nothing in Darwin’s science to account for such beings. He writes of evolution. This is devolution.”

“Nonetheless, they are very real. There were similar beings in Europe before the Church destroyed them. We called them werewolves. Darwin is right, I think, that men evolved from the beasts, but from many beasts—wolves, bears, sharks—and not just apes. In Curk’s case, we have both the evolving man and the ancestral beast in the same person.”

He held her with a wild tenderness. “Don’t talk about him any more. Leave him where he belongs. In the past. In the world’s past.”

She made a faint pretense of pushing him away from her, but quickly yielded to his insistent arms. “Charlie, I am fifty years old. You are nineteen. Here, we can love each other and no one will ridicule us. In England, we would be ridiculous. Like a French couple. One of those aging literary ladies like George Sand with her young lover.”

“Then we’ll stay here. But you don’t look aging, you look blooming! And I can grow a mustache and look at least twenty-five. No one would say a thing except how lucky I was to win such a beautiful bride.”

“My beauty is very important to you, isn’t it, my dear?”

“I love your proud, gallant soul. But I love your beauty too. How can I reach your soul except through your body?”

“Keats said much the same thing to Fanny Brawne, and both of you are right, of course. ‘Why may I not speak of your Beauty, since without that I could never have loved you. I cannot conceive any beginning of such love as I have for you but Beauty.’ ”

Charlie continued the letter without a pause. “ ‘Thee may be a sort of love for which, without the least sneer at it, I have the highest respect and can admit it in others; but it has not the richness, the bloom, the full form, the enchantment of love after my own heart.’ ”

“You knew it, by heart, of course. I knew that you would. It’s impossible for young men to love any other way, and I must confess that your own kind soul would not have stirred me so much if you had looked like Telesphorus’ father instead of your golden self. But blooming or not, I can’t stay on Oleandra with you now. Jill must return to England for an education and eventually a marriage.”

“Can’t I still tutor her on Oleandra? That was the reason you brought me here.”

“It’s a little awkward when mother and daughter are in love with the same young man. And I myself have English yearnings for the opera, the theatre, the ballroom. The Season in London and the Season at Bath. Icicles under the eaves. Daffodils bringing the spring. ‘O to be in England now that April’s there...

“Then I’m going with you, and I promise to pester you until you become my bride!”

“Your bride? Charlie, you’re still a moralist at heart, aren’t you? You want to make me an honest woman. I’m deeply touched. But hearth fires don’t become me. Neither does arguing, my dear. Stay with me tonight. Tomorrow you may change your mind about several things.”

He was awakened by the chirping of sugar birds among the morning glories. He opened the curtains to the bed and walked to the window. The diminutive birds, like winged daffodils, flickered among the blossoms and shook the dew from the petals into miniken showers.

“Elizabeth, wake up! The birds have come back. And you have your daffodils!”

She stirred toward wakefulness. A sunbeam fell on her face. He gasped and she opened her eyes.

“I’m sorry, my dear. I can see that you see. I wish it were otherwise. I wish I were what you loved.”

She was still beautiful as a woman of fifty; she would have challenged a Michelangelo to capture the complexity of character, the variety of experience in the lines of her forehead and the wrinkles around her eyes. She was a woman who had sometimes been bitter and sometimes unfaithful, sometimes happy and usually kind; an unloving wife but a loving if not always wise mother. He was not frightened of her, but he was frightened for her. On this island of dark miracles, shock and grief, he supposed, had aged her in two nights.

She drew him beside her and touched his cheek with moth-light fingers. “Don’t be sad. I wanted you to see me like this. This is the way I am. The beauty you loved was an illusion. You once called me the Lady of the Frangipanis. I am such a lady in a very literal sense. When Curk first came to me— it was my first visit to his island—he brought me a tiny vial of transparent blue elixir like a draught from the sea above a coral reef in the morning sun.”

“ ‘The Spaniards looked for a fountain of youth,’ he said. ‘It was all around them and they never even saw it. It was in the nectar of the flowers they trampled under their boots. Frangipani and shower-of-gold and ... but the rest is my secret. How old do you think I am?’

“ ‘Thirty-five? Forty? There are no guides in your face. Not the least wrinkled. Only your eyes look somehow . . . very old/ I told him.

“ ‘I am seventy-four/ he answered. ‘Would you like to look always as you do now? I can’t promise you immortality—you will live perhaps to a hundred. But your skin will maintain the illusion of youth until you die. One drop a day, and time will be your friend.’

“ ‘And what do you ask in return?’

“ ‘I want to make love to an English woman and I want her to bear my child.’

“Thus I was bound to him, Charlie, in spite of his cruelties, and also because I loved him. He could have had me without any gift of youth, but he thought that he had to buy me. He thought of English women as high and proud, a race of conquerers and colonizers who looked upon Caribs, even their kings, as savages who needed to be civilized. Later I could have escaped my desire for him, but not my wish to be desirable. Charlie, I love all beautiful things. A sonnet by Mrs. Browning. A tapestry woven by William Morris. I can’t be wrinkled and old and forgotten. Do you understand?”

“Of course I do,” he faltered, as pity warred with desire. “But old things are usually best.” “Only on a shelf with other old things.”

“But I don’t love you for your face, Elizabeth!” “You love me for my soul? Perhaps. But you have to look through my face to see my soul. You yourself have said as much. I don’t say that you

must love me less now. But differently. Look upon me as one who understood your grief for your mother and almost but not quite managed to fill her place.”

He took her in his arms and she held him with a last wild yearning.

“Goodbye, my dear, goodbye. We shall never meet again like this, but I do love you, Charlie.”

They stood in the rocky enclave facing the sea, where Charlie had landed one month, one love, ago. Charlie, Elizabeth, and Jill; the old man and Telesphorus tethering the donkeys to outcroppings of rock. Except for Telesphorus and his father, who would stay on the island and care for the house, they were going back to England. Charlie was going back to Cambridge. (Oh, my friend, how may I follow you to those icy northern seas? Look in the wake of whatever ship you board, and I will begin the journey to bring you luck, but England is far and her seas are bleak, in spite of the Gulf Stream’s warmth.)

The sailors were rowing manfully and swearing whenever a wave broke across their bow, and no doubt wondering what had happened to those shifty Caribs whose one skill and one duty was coming to meet the schooner.

Charlie was alternately waving encouragement to them and trying to coax Elizabeth to take a seat on a rock which he had brushed clean for her at the cost of ruining his handkerchief, a bright blue square of silk which was now diminished to brown.

“You must sit down and rest,” he urged. “You know how it tires you to ride a burro.”

“I’m too excited to sit.” Brilliant as bougainvillea in a gown of many colors, she was smiling and waving to the men in the boat and looking as if she never went to bed until morning, and not at all when she could dance or play chemin-de-fer. Not only had she partaken generously of her elixir—two drops instead of one—and repaired the ravages of her brief abstinence, she had sent Telesphorus to search Curk’s house, and the staunch little fellow, rooting through the loft, had returned with several precious flagons, a supply for many years, which Elizabeth promptly designated ‘My special wine—nobody else likes it.’

In such a sea, on such a precipitous island, a longboat could not land; she could merely hover and try not to crash. The stalwart if simian rowers, at the expense of three broken oars and uncountable twisted muscles, somehow managed to hold her off the rocks. Their oaths turned to cries of delight when they recognized Elizabeth, the mysterious lady of Frangipanis come to welcome them or rather, to judge by her trunks, come to return with them to Martinique.

Boarding the boat would have been worse than a problem, it would have been an impossibility for Elizabeth had she remained a bedridden invalid. But when a lusty young seaman held out his arms to her, she made the considerable leap across several frothing feet of water to land and linger within his harboring arms. Jill, of course, had no difficulty. With the grace of a flying fish, she jumped and landed to the cheers though not the embraces of the sailors. Once Charlie had followed her (as yet he was lingering on the island), the rowers would deposit them aboard the schooner and then return for their trunks, small ones in view of the traveling conditions, which would somehow be handed or heaved from shore (and hopefully not spilled) by Telesphorus and his father.

The old man was red-eyed and Telesphorus was openly bawling at the loss of their beloved mistress.

“Good-bye, my dears,” Elizabeth called. “Keep the house ready for Jill and me, and we’ll come back to you, we promise.” Then, as a seeming afterthought, “And mind you load my ‘special wine’ carefully. Davy Jones doesn’t need it, and neither do the sharks!”

All this time Charlie had lingered on the shore, though by now the sailors were swearing at him like the Caribs on his arrival. He knelt on a rock, leaned over the water, and gave me a parting pat even while foam from the surf splattered his face. He did not know that I intended to follow him to England (hoped to, I should say). He would never have allowed me to attempt so dangerous a trip.

“Gloomer,” he said. “I’m coming back one day. Will you still be in our lagoon?”

“Gnu.” How could I stay in the lagoon and also follow him to England?

“What’s that you say?” he cried.

To ease his mind, I told him my first falsehood. “Iss.”

“Goodbye, old friend. Best friend.” His face was wet and not with the spray. Humans have one advantage over dolphins. We have no tears to ease us out of our sadness and we seem to be smiling even when we are saddest.

I swam under him as he jumped aboard the boat, and frolicked around the boat as it battled toward the schooner. I spun in the air, made those clicking noises which humans suppose to be laughter, and all in all attempted to tease my friend from his melancholy (and forget the tears I could not shed). But he looked at me with a wan, sorrowful smile; not at the island, not at the schooner, not even at the newly radiant Elizabeth, but at me, always at me, and his look was enough to break my heart.

They were almost at the schooner now. The friendly captain was booming a welcome. Seeing Elizabeth among his passengers, he straightened his cap and jacket, smoothed his whiskers, and strode to the gunwale to receive her aboard his ship.

“Elizabeth,” Charlie said. “Can you use a caretaker for the Red House? If you had a dependable one, you would never need to sell it. He would keep it up so well that you would want to come back for sure, at least for a visit now and then.” “Charlie, do you really want to stay?”

“I’m afraid Gloomer will try to follow me all the way to England. He would never be happy in those cold northern waters. Besides, I love the house. You’re coming back. You said so yourself.” “So am I,” said Jill. “After I’ve grown a bosom and learned some wiles from mother.”

“You’re fine as you are.” He gave her a wet, brotherly kiss on the cheek.

“Your kiss says I’m not. But I shall expect a different kind when you see me again.”

“Stay, then, Charlie,” said Elizabeth, oblivious to the rowers, who were more intent on this curious domestic drama than they were on reaching their ship. “I’ll miss you, though, in England. One’s first love is very precious, and I am honored to have been your first. Equally precious is one’s last love, and that is what you are to me.”

He seized her hand and held it against his cheek. “You won’t be lonely in London?”

Charlie, Charlie, I wanted to cry. Do you really think this beautiful, sentimental, and mischievous lady will ever be lonely in London or anywhere else, or want for young men to pay her court? It was well that I said nothing, or that, had I spoken, I would not have been understood. In a way, I was unfair to her. She really believed that Charlie was her last love. Whatever she said, she believed at the time; it was just that she sometimes changed her mind.

He was already removing his clothes. Shoes, middy jacket, and bell-bottom trousers, but not, fortunately, his under garments.

“Forgive me, Elizabeth and Jill. But I can’t swim to shore with all this clutter.”

The rowers had almost stopped rowing.

“What’s the lad doin’?”

“Strippin’ for a swim, I reckon.”

“Before the ladies? Blimey, ’e’s no gentleman. E’s one of us!”

Then he was in the water, waving over his shoulder and calling a last goodbye to his departing friends, and turning to meet and greet me with a radiant, “Hello, Gloomer, I've come back. I told you I would, didn’t I?”

“Isss.”

A big wave almost inundated him. I dove under him and he clasped my dorsal fin and we swam for the island and the passage and our own green lagoon.

“In the range of imaginative literature, Lovecraft created a new form. His work is both lore and legend at their haunting best.” —August Derleth

H.P.Lovecraft

has created from his fiery and complex imagination, a macabre world of terror and decay. A writer of extraordinary skill, his place in American letters is established and unique.

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