288
PARTISAN REVIEW
long, sea wrack like demons, or the discarded casements of evil spirits
that had been cleansed. Then more wreckage: boots, a clock, torn
fishing nets,
~
demolished wheelhouse, a smashed wheel lying in the
sand.
Nor was it possible to grasp for more than a
mom~nt
that all
this with its feeling of death and destruction and barrenness was
only an appearance, that beneath the flotsam, under the very shells
they crunched, within the trickling overflows of winterbournes tht"v
jumped over, down at the tide margin, existed, just as in the forest,
a stirring and stretching of life, a seething of spring.
When Astrid and Sigurd were almost sheltered by an uprooted
tree on one of these lower billows of beach they noticed that the
clouds had lifted over the sea, though the sky was not blue but still
that intense silver, so that they could see right across the Gulf and
make out, or thought they could, the line of some Gulf Islands. A
lone freighter with upraised derricks shipped seas on the horizon. A
hint of the summit of Mount Hood remained, or it might have been
clouds. They remarked too, in the southeast, on the sloping base of
a hill, a triangle of storm-washed green, as if cut out of the over–
hanging murk there, in which were four pines, five telegraph posts,
and a clearing resembling a cemetery. Behind them the icy mountains
of Canada hid their savage peaks and snowfalls under still more
savage clouds. And they saw that the sea was gray with whitecaps
and currents charging offshore and spray blowing backwards from
the rocks.
But when the full force of the wind caught them, looking from
the shore, it was like gazing into chaos. The wind blew away their
thoughts, their voices, almost their very senses, as they walked, crunch–
ing the shells, laughing and stumbling. Nor could they tell whether
it was spume or rain that smote and stung their faces, whether spin–
drift from the sea or rain from which the sea was born, as now
t !.
-' Uy they were forced to a halt, standing there arm in arm....
And : . was to this shore, through that chaos, by those currents, that
their litth. boat with its innocent message had been brought out of
the past
fm,
'lV
to safety and a home.
But ah, tL! storms they had come through!
