Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 24, No. 4. Whole No. 131, October 1954

The Man Who Feared the Water by Margery Sharp

“Different” is perhaps the best word to describe Margery Sharps “The Man Who Feared the Water.” Surely the tone of the story is “different” from the light-hearted comedy you remember in THE NUTMEG TREE and in Miss Sharp’s recent Literary Guild selection, THE GYPSY IN THE PARLOUR. And the locale of the story is “different” — a small island in the Mediterranean where “unhappiness was out of place” And the natives on the island — their means of earning a living is “different,” not to say curious and curdling. And while the chief characters present the eternal triangle — in this instance, a poetic “genius” a dour Scottish newspaperman, and a young woman who “with a little more color... might have been lovely” — the triangle is decidedly “different,” at least in its psychological implications.

“Rent” a white adobe house overlooking Spanish Harbor and the jade-colored bay, hear the natives dancing on the quay to the sound of a concertina — and watch the drama unfold...

It is no use trying to commit suicide in the waters of Spanish Harbor; the islanders swim too well. Toss a sixpence from the jetty, and two or three lithe young ruffians will be tumbling after it before it touches bottom; while at any larger splash, as of a falling body, the whole sleepy quayside wakes to instant life. Once or twice in each season (if the luck is good) some careless or careworn stranger will miss his footing, and then the lucent water boils milk-like with expert rescuers. The first half-dozen or so clutch at his helpless limbs, the rest content themselves with outlying portions of his raiment, and though the stranger may be a strong and resolute swimmer, he has no opportunity of proving it. Within ten seconds he is seized, saved, and haled back to shore, there to be dunned, in several different patois, for extortionate rewards. George Cotterill, who lived on the island, once worked out some very interesting statistics; the least anyone had ever got away with, he said, was about twenty-two shillings at the normal rate of exchange.

In spite of this drawback, however, Spanish Harbor is a pleasant place, and the strangers continue to come. There is no hotel, but all round the bay stand tall old houses of white adobe, houses that turn their backs to the street and their windows to the sea; and these houses the strangers rent. The water in the bay is a clear jade color, very different from the deep true Mediterranean to be seen from the roof-tops; but though many of the English bathe there daily, they all employ in addition a shallow tin pan. What the other inhabitants do is not so certain; quite possibly they just have a sponge-down; but then the islander, as young Foley observed, is not like your Anglo-Saxon.

It was a remark he made frequently, and there was nothing odd in that. But what was exceedingly odd was the fact that, unlike most of his compatriots, Maurice Foley spoke not in sorrow, but in admiration. He admired the islanders’ indolence, their lack of public spirit; he approved beyond measure their extremely individual attitude towards the sanctity of human life, which indeed they seemed to create and to destroy with equal insouciance; he liked their indifference to the suffering of animals. All that, he said, was excellent. It gave him great pleasure, he said, as he looked out over the island in the evening cool, to reflect that not one single inhabitant thereof was thinking about municipal reform.

To reflections such as these, and to very many others, the English on Spanish Island lent first a polite, then a perfunctory ear. They had their own affairs to attend to, and most of the men were over 35. At that age, however agreeable the reminder of one’s own salad days, one does not wish to re-live them. So Cotterill offered no objections, but simply returned to his painting, and the other two artists did likewise. There were always artists at Spanish Harbor, just as there were always one or two couples politely supposed to be on honeymoon. For the colony, though without either a lending library or an English tea-room, had certain compensatory advantages. It was widely tolerant. You took one of the white houses and did as you pleased in it. No one asked questions. In all the island only four persons played bridge. They were originally only three, and the fourth had to be specially imported. On Sunday mornings, when business was slack, Cotterill sometimes played draughts with the waiter at the big café, and at the other café, the little one, where business was slack all the week round, a tall Scot called MacIntyre played chess with the proprietor. For exercise one swam, and at night, on the stone quay, the islanders sometimes danced to the music of a concertina.

One other point must be mentioned. Wherever, between an island and the mainland, a steamer plies daily, the inhabitants of the island will gather on the jetty to watch her come in; but at Spanish Harbor, where the boat calls only twice a week, this is not so. Not a step — such is the strength of their indolence — not a step do the islanders stir. And thus it happened that the first time Cotterill saw the Foleys was not till the Sunday after their arrival, when he and the waiter were sitting over their draughts at one of the café tables. The Foleys approached, wavered, and finally sat down, so that the game had to be suspended and Cotterill was annoyed. Most people at Spanish Harbor would have had the manners to wait...

They were brother and sister, the boy about twenty-two, the girl perhaps five years older. They had the same nose and forehead, the same short upper lip; but the difference in coloring was so startling that no one would have thought of calling them alike. Maurice Foley was almost an albino; his hair, of the palest ash-blond, showed perceptibly lighter than the skin of his temples. Nor was this in any way due to sunburn; on the contrary, his skin, exceptionally fair and smooth, looked as though it would flush easily but tan scarcely at all. His sister was dark. Dark hair, dark eyes, a clear brown complexion. With a little more color, thought Cotterill, she might have been lovely. And as the thought passed through his mind, she reached up and pulled towards her a spray of climbing geranium, so that the dark scarlet petals lay close against her cheek; and Cotterill’s thought was justified. Then her brother spoke, she let the branch spring back, and a moment later their drinks appeared.

It does not take long, on Spanish Island, for the original inhabitants to know all, or all they want to know, about any newcomer. In the course of the next few days it was rapidly established that Miss Foley’s name was Diana, that she and her brother had no other relations, and that they were traveling about Europe (as they had traveled for the last three years) in search of a climate which should at once soothe Maurice’s nerves and stimulate his genius. For Maurice Foley was a poet; he had published two books of verse and a lyric tragedy. No one on Spanish Island had ever heard of them, but he himself said they were good. (The Scotsman MacIntyre, on the other hand, to whom Miss Foley lent the works, said they were bad; but then MacIntyre had been brought up on Burns, with a side-glance towards Shakespeare.) There was also, just to complete the picture, a rumor of an unhappy love affair, but whether Diana’s or Maurice’s nobody seemed to know.

Like all other visitors, the Foleys took a tall white house with a terrace over the bay. In addition to the terrace, it had a garden of orange trees, for it was one of the oldest on the island; and here, with the help of a very old woman called Carmena, Diana Foley set up house. She dusted the big bare rooms, and filled them with flowers; she went daily to the market (the old woman attending) and bought figs and grapes and peculiar-looking fishes. It was charming to see her; she moved down the line of stalls with such grave attention, now pausing to consult with Carmena, now hurrying on after a distant patch of color, and all the while trying to hide her pleasure, to look matronly and severe, so that the stall-holders should not cheat her. They did cheat her, of course, but with a charm almost equal to her own — dropping a spray of pink geranium on the short-weight olives, or gratuitously plucking an aged but still sinewy hen. Miss Foley didn’t care. She had eaten table d’hôte for three years on end, and her fingers itched for a frying pan.

In these mild pleasures Maurice naturally took no part. His life was full already. In the morning he wrote poetry, in the afternoon took his siesta, and at night wandered out to mingle with the islanders. He had, it will be remembered, a very high regard for them; but the sentiment was not reciprocated. The islanders, so far as they admired anything, admired physical beauty, physical strength, and the ability to carry liquor. They liked Cotterill, for example, because he could drink all day and walk straight in the evening. They liked MacIntyre for his diving, and Diana Foley for her elegance. But Maurice Foley had albino hair and boneless limbs; after two glasses of wine he began to chatter like a monkey; and, worst of all, he feared the water. He bathed sometimes, but he could not swim. So the islanders watched him with veiled contemptuous glances, and when he tried to address them feigned either deafness or imbecility.

But Maurice’s sensibility was purely subjective. He continued undismayed, and whenever there was dancing always went down to the bay. He fell in, of course, and was vigorously fished out; but though the profits were inordinate (his sister, in a panic, disbursing nearly five pounds), the islanders were scarcely pleased at all. They disapproved of people who fell in during the dancing; the time for rescues was in the morning, when there was nothing to be interrupted; and they were also repelled by the limp and pallid appearance presented by the rescued. Another person who was not pleased was Cotterill. Miss Foley’s largesse, in its unexampled prodigality, had completely upset his statistics.

“That’s the worst of women,” he pointed out to MacIntyre, “they can never keep their heads. Fifteen and six would have been ample.”

“It would have been a great deal too much,” amended the Scot dourly.

“Next time you talk to her,” Cotterill added, “you might just explain things. Tell her that people are always being rescued, and that it’s not fair to put the price up. She’ll understand: she doesn’t look stupid.” And with this advice Cotterill went his way and had a game of draughts. There was no real reason why he should not have spoken to Miss Foley himself, but such was his ingrained habit of mind — such his lifelong resolution to keep clear of women — that the notion never occurred to him.

But if Cotterill would not speak to the lady, he was soon forced to speak of her; for Ian MacIntyre, the best conversationalist on the island, seemed suddenly to have formed the inexplicable habit of constantly dragging her in. Whatever the subject under discussion, Miss Foley’s name was sure to crop up; and what made it all the easier was the fact that she had traveled so much. If Cotterill mentioned Mozart, MacIntyre referred to Salzburg, and the month the Foleys had spent there. If Cotterill shifted to vodka or psychology, MacIntyre followed up with Warsaw or Vienna. It got monotonous. And to make matters worse, the Scotsman’s temper, usually so reliable, had begun to get very ragged. When Cotterill, for instance, idly remarked that such journeying must be very agreeable, MacIntyre nearly jumped down his throat.

“Agreeable!” he almost shouted. “Agreeable, you call it! A young woman of that age doesn’t want to spend her life trailing about foreign countries! She wants to settle down, in a home of her own.”

“Then why doesn’t she?” asked Cotterill reasonably. “They seem to have plenty of money.”

“Because that unhealthy young cub won’t let her. Because he’s afraid that if she gets other normal interests she’ll cease to bow down and worship. I could wring the little brute’s neck.”

Cotterill looked up in surprise, for his friend was not usually so vehement; and what he saw surprised him still further.

“You’ve got a touch of malaria,” he diagnosed kindly. “I get it still myself. You ought to go to bed—”

The Scotsman picked up a tube of ultramarine — he had found Cotterill at his easel on the cliff above the bay — and threw it into the sea. There was a splash below as an islander jumped after, and Cotterill grinned.

“That’ll cost you more than a new one,” he said amiably.

“I don’t care,” said MacIntyre.

And now Cotterill was seriously alarmed; there was evidently more wrong than he had thought. But before he could ask any questions — or even decide not to ask them — his unfortunate friend had thrown reticence to the winds.

“The fact of the matter is,” said MacIntyre, loudly and desperately, “that I’ve fallen in love.”

Cotterill stared, swore, and stared again.

“With — with Diana Foley?”

“Yes. And I haven’t a dog’s chance.”

For a moment Cotterill sat silent, running a painter’s eye over the man at his side. Tall, thin, sunburned, broken nose and well-shaped head — a better specimen than most, Cotterill decided; and though women in general seemed to prefer dummies, they were also notoriously ready to make the best of a bad job. The conclusion was thus rather favorable than not, and though with some inward misgivings — for his sincerest advice would have been to take flight on the next boat — Cotterill repeated it aloud.

“You’re too modest,” he said encouragingly. “Women fall in love with almost anyone.”

“That’s not the point. As a matter of fact, I know she’s — quite fond of me, now. But there’s also that damned young brother. He stopped her marrying once, for which I suppose I ought to be grateful; and as soon as he realizes what’s happening, he’ll try and stop her again.”

“Then if she knows her own mind,” said Cotterill, whom the subject was beginning to bore, “she’ll walk out and leave him.”

MacIntyre moved impatiently.

“No woman can leave a man who needs her for a man she’s just in love with. And Maurice needs her all right; he lives on her like a parasite. Who else would bother to keep him alive, even?”

“But damn it all,” said Cotterill, “she’s not his mother!”

“Have you heard their story?” asked MacIntyre grimly. “No? Well, you’d better listen. They were left orphans when he was five and Diana ten. He was always sickly, Diana always strong. When the mother was dying she sent for Diana and told her that whatever happened she must look after Maurice. Those things make an impression. Diana promised, of course, and the mother died that same hour. The two children went to some aunt or other, a woman who had run mad on Theosophy and never remembered to order the dinner. If Maurice was to get enough to eat, Diana had to see to it. She did see to it. In a year or two she was running the house. The aunt didn’t mind — she probably never noticed. Maurice was too delicate for school, so there was also a governess; and to save expense Diana didn’t go to school either. When Maurice was fourteen, he nearly died of pleurisy. Diana nursed him through it and literally saved his life. That made an impression, too.”

Cotterill nodded. He was beginning to understand,

“Five years later,” continued MacIntyre, “the Theosophist aunt died, leaving them a good bit of money. Maurice had drifted into writing, and wanted to travel. They went abroad, and they’ve been traveling ever since. Whenever Diana wants to settle down for a little, he throws a fit and says the climate doesn’t suit him. If she wants to settle for good, he’ll probably go paralyzed.”

MacIntyre ceased; and in the silence that followed Cotterill became aware of one outstanding fact. It was this, that until the affair had been settled, in either one way or the other, there would be no peace on the island. The immediate object, therefore, of all sensible persons, must be to bring matters to a head; so without further loss of time, and employing all the eloquence at his command, he began inciting his friend to rashness. Anything, he urged, was better than uncertainty; until the worst was known, no action could be taken to combat it.

“You mean,” said MacIntyre, “that I should go straight down to her this afternoon?”

Cotterill nodded. It seemed an awful thing to counsel, but what could he do?

The day that MacIntyre’s proposal was made known to him, Maurice Foley had a severe fainting fit. He had it on a secluded reach of shore, where his sister found great difficulty in getting help. Almost beside herself with distress, she had to leave him senseless and run half a mile to the nearest habitation. Two islanders came back with her, and when they saw who needed their services were understood to remark that one would have been enough. The younger of the pair then flung Maurice negligently over his shoulder, while the other lay down on the spot and gratefully went to sleep again.

It was a touch of the sun. Or that, at any rate, was Maurice’s version; and as there was no doctor on the island to contradict him, he had his own way. For the next three days he kept himself recumbent and in darkness, while his sister, by the shaded light of a lamp, read extract after extract from his own works. He clung to her pathetically; he was like a little boy again. Her absence gave him a temperature, so that she could rarely leave his side. When her lover called she sent notes by Carmena, not daring to come down in person. Once MacIntyre proved stubborn, and set himself to wait in the cool whitewashed hall. After about twenty minutes a door opened and there were footsteps on the landing; but a voice called suddenly, the footsteps returned, and the door was shut again.

Late on the third evening, however, Cotterill, descending a zigzag path to the shore, saw a man and a woman standing close together. Such sights, on Spanish Island, were so little unexpected that Cotterill did not even hesitate, but continued his steps until he was almost abreast of them. He then saw two things that disconcerted him: first, that the woman was crying, and second, that she was Diana Foley. She had her head on MacIntyre’s shoulder, and as Cotterill turned to go back he heard her sobs suddenly rise to a little desperate wail. She was calling on Ian’s name, as though he was a person already gone from her.

The next moment, almost before Cotterill was in motion again, a skirt brushed his ankles and Miss Foley ran past. For an instant he saw her plainly, her white dress glimmering, her face pale as her dress, and round her head a white ribbon. The ribbon caught his eye. It seemed, in the midst of her distress, such a freak of fancy, so womanish in its frivolity; and then — so fast did his thought run, while all the time she was still transfixed, as it were, in that instant of brushing by — he reflected again, and saw her tying the ribbon not in simple vanity, but because the time was so short. It was what a woman might do on her honeymoon, to surprise her lover with an unexpected beauty; only Diana Foley could not wait. So she had given him at once what he might not have time to discover; and like a lady painted by Lawrence — for so the ribbon revealed her — ran weeping up the path.

Cotterill turned again, for fear of overtaking her, and began once more to descend. Emotion always upset him, and in his instinctive desire to get away from it he forgot about MacIntyre and quickened his pace. But MacIntyre was still there, standing motionless in the shadow, and as Cotterill hurried past, the Scot reached out and held him. It was the gesture of the Ancient Mariner, primitive and compelling.

“You saw her?” said MacIntyre, thickly. “She’s gone back to her brother. She’s got to give him his bromide.”

Cotterill said nothing. From below came the beat of waves, from above the sound of running; then the running died away, and there was only the sea.

“I believe he’s a devil,” said MacIntyre, suddenly. “Do you know what he said to her? He didn’t ask her not to marry me, he’s too damned clever. He asked her to wait until he’s dead. And he’ll die, he says, as quickly as possible...”

And now Spanish Harbor was disturbed. It was unused to having tragedy in its midst, and found the experience unpleasant. The islanders knifed each other, of course, but they were never tragic about it; the dead had peace (as the saying went) and the bereaved had the vendetta. As for the English on the island, it was precisely to escape all unpleasantness that they ever came there; and though such information as they had — the mere broadest outline, as reported by Carmena, of a brother’s objection to his sister’s marriage — was not nearly so unpleasant as the whole entangled truth, it was quite unpleasant enough.

To do them justice, neither MacIntyre nor Diana made any call for public sympathy, or in any way obtruded their sorrows; the harm was done by their mere presence. One sight of Miss Foley’s face, one glimpse of the Scot’s tall figure as he strode restlessly along the shore, was a sufficient reminder that unhappiness existed; and on Spanish Island unhappiness was out of place. It cast a blight. It put people out. Trade, pleasure, even the climate, all lay under the shadow of the unfortunate affair. No one went to the cafés for fear of hearing people talk about it; the big one put out fewer tables, the little one, deprived of MacIntyre’s support, put out none at all. Even the islanders were affected, and whenever they saw either Maurice or MacIntyre or Miss Foley, hastily crooked fingers against the Evil Eye. The earnest desire, in fact, of everyone on Spanish Island, was that the whole trio should at once be shipped back to the mainland, there to work out their destinies in a less confined arena.

This, however, could not be, for Maurice Foley was still too weak to travel, and MacIntyre (to make matters worse) seemed equally immovable. He had never before stayed longer than a month, and was now entering on his fourth week; but instead of packing his bags he bought a further supply of soap. He was going to wire to the Morning Gazette (he told Cotterill) for extension of leave; and such was the prevailing demoralization that for the first time in years Cotterill asked a direct personal question.

“I’m their news editor,” replied MacIntyre. “In another year I’ll probably be editor-in-chief. It’s as good as a seat in the Cabinet.” But he spoke gloomily, almost absently, as though of ashes in the mouth; nor could all Cotterill’s arguments shake his decision. “If I go away now,” MacIntyre kept repeating, “I’ll never see her again. That’s a dead certainty. And as far as I’m concerned, she’s the only woman there is.”

“But as far as the Morning Gazette is concerned,” asked Cotterill tartly, “are you the only news editor?”

The Scotsman considered.

“Speaking from a thorough knowledge o’ London, Scotland, and the Provinces,” he said at last, “I should say I am. I have an exceptionally wide experience, and also what they call flair. Furthermore, I do not lose my head. Your solicitude is kind, Cotterill, but it will not be needed.”

So the message went its way, and for the next seven days the situation remained unaltered. MacIntyre tramped the shore, young Maurice suffered, and Miss Foley shopped no more in the early-morning market. She kept to her terrace, which was indeed one of the pleasantest spots on the island, rising sheer from the water in front, and at the end from the stone quay, so that on nights of dancing one could sit as in a box over the shifting crowd below. Presently Maurice appeared there too, apparently a little recovered, but paler than ever after his confinement in the dark. He had been too ill to shave, and his lip and chin were covered with a thin albino down. The islanders, if he stood above the quay, turned their backs to the wall so as not to have to see him.

Maurice, however, did not notice. He was an injured, therefore a preoccupied, man. For though his sister had voluntarily and finally surrendered all ideas of marriage, the victory was not yet complete. MacIntyre still remained on the island: to drive him away was necessarily the work of Diana, and Diana, on this last vital point, was proving unexpectedly stubborn. She would not order her lover’s departure, she would not even request it, and on the plea that it would be too painful to both, was even refusing to see him. So Maurice walked the terrace in displeasure, looking now over the water, now over the quay, till little by little, as he looked and pondered, a plan began to shape. He was pleased with it from the first, but as things turned out the final, the finishing touch was not of his own devising. It was pure accident, and it was added, about three days later, when Diana slipped on the stair and twisted her left ankle.

They took their coffee that night to the sound of a concertina. The islanders were dancing, and when the islanders danced on the quay anyone on the Foley terrace might well have danced too. But to neither Maurice nor his sister was the music inviting. Diana, indeed, could not even stand, and was lying with her feet up in a long wicker-chair. Carmena had carried it out for her, and was now down in the kitchen making a tea-leaf poultice.

“You needn’t worry, though,” said Diana, moving her swathed foot, “it isn’t your China. I told her I thought Indian would be more propitious.”

With a slow, reflective glance Maurice got up from his chair to lean against the parapet. He chose the angle between the two walls, so that looking down to the left he could see the quay, covered with dancers, and looking down to the right, the waters of the bay. The moment had come, and it tasted sweetly.

“Diana, for the last time, will you send that fellow away?”

For a moment, in her surprise and pain, she showed such distress that he was almost afraid. If she gave the wrong answer, if she yielded too soon, the plan would fall to pieces. That was not what he wanted. He wanted to carry it through to the end, to establish once and for all unquestioned dominion. So with some show of passion, he began to abuse MacIntyre.

“That damned fortune-hunting Scotchman,” he raved, “that damned penny-a-line hack...”

For the first time in their lives Diana looked at him with anger. Then she remembered that he was ill, and controlled herself to speak quietly.

“No,” she said.

There was long, heart-stopping silence. Then without another word Maurice thrust his foot into a crack and pulled himself onto the wall. In other circumstances, and with better health, he might have made a good actor; for by every line of his body, from the flung-back head to the nervous foot, one knew that here was a man who was going to kill himself. Diana knew it, too, and flung herself from her chair in an effort to run towards him. But just as Maurice had worked it out, so the scene unfolded. Her foot crumpled under her, and she fell impotent and tortured in a double agony. Then she began calling, imploring him, promising anything he wished; finally her cries turned to screams as she tried to summon help. Carmena was old and in the kitchen, there was music on the quay, but her terror gave her such strength that Maurice took alarm. If she went on at that rate, he reflected, someone might quite well hear; so with a final glance towards the quay (where there were still plenty of people) he shook back his hair, squared his narrow shoulders, and dropped into the bay.

But as Maurice himself had said, the islander is not like your Anglo Saxon. He has no foolish illusions as to the sanctity of human life. When the dancers saw who had fallen, they were all extremely glad. They had rescued him once before, but this time they let him drown.