Ilsa by L'Engle Madeleine;

Author:L'Engle, Madeleine;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

35

The day at the beach was a tremendous success. Werner was as pleased as a child with the house and the water. Ilsa drove the car onto the beach from the main road and he made her drive him up and down the beach, up and down, and then spent hours running in and out of the waves, and collecting shells which he insisted on tying up in his handkerchief to carry back with him. He had obviously never been much out of the city, which made the story of the childhood spent in the mountains of Bavaria questionable, to say the least. As for Paris—I didn’t think he had a French father and an English mother. But that he was a child of love I didn’t doubt for a moment.

It was a freak sort of day, hot and oppressive, but beautiful in that sultry sullen way I have never seen anywhere else—a few hours of dead calm and brilliant sun, then a few hours of tearing wind and solid rain. As the first drops of rain hit the beach they made round dents in the sand, tiny, where the beach was hard, large as a silver dollar on the loose grains of the dunes.

The changes in the day were so complete and so rapid that after we went into the house, when it began to rain, we kept turning toward the windows to watch. One minute the horizon would be curving out to infinity, the way it can do only on the ocean; then everything would close in quickly, with just a brief moment in between when you seemed to be looking from inside a closed dark globe out into the sun. Horizons disappeared completely; nothing was left but grayness, which seemed so close you could touch it, but which still stretched out without end.

As I watched out of a window, then, the idea of space seemed very confusing; there was no space in sight; the gray couldn’t be placed as near or far. Suddenly in a spot I could almost have touched with my hand a moment before, a shrimping boat appeared. There was no ocean beneath it or beyond it—just a boat floating in grayness. Then it melted away, and I wasn’t really sure I had seen it at all. A few minutes later the sun was pouring over the water as if it hadn’t been washed almost out of existence.

Monty had brought his records and phonograph. We were all so full of sea air and broiled mullet, grits, and greens, and a kind of excitement because Werner was something so out of, so alien to, our way of life, and we to his, that we were seized with a kind of childish gaiety and danced by turns with Ilsa until she was breathless. Werner was a magnificent dancer, smooth and intimate as only a Continental can be; when she was dancing with him she seemed as light as the spindrift that flew off the waves and scudded along the sand.

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