In a day or two, of course, I was all right again; a tough old sailor like me isn’t killed off that easily.
But there was a sadness, a loneliness around me. I had been ill, alone, helpless. Why had my friend left me in my bad time?
Then I became sensible again. ‘Torvald, you old fool,’ I said to myself. ‘Why should a pretty twenty-year-old spend her time with you? Look at it his way, man – you’ve had a winter of her kindness and care. She brought a lamp into your dark time; ever since the Harvest Home party when (like a fool) you had too much whisky. And she helped you home and put you into bed … Well, for some reason or another Andrina hasn’t been able to come these last few days. I’ll find out, today, the reason.’
It was time for me to get to the village. There was not a piece of read of a gram of butter in the cupboard. The shop was also the Post Office – I had to collect two weeks’ pension. I promised myself a beer or two in the pub, to wash the last of that sickness out of me.
I realized, as I slowly walked those two miles, that I knew nothing about Andrina at all. I had never asked, and she had said nothing. What was her father? Had she sisters and brothers? I had never even leaned in out talks where she lived on the island. It was enough that she came every evening, soon after sunset, did her quiet work in the house, and stayed a while; and left a peace behind – a feeling that a clean summer wind had blown though the heart of the house, bringing light and sweetness.
But the girl had never stopped, all last winter, asking me questions about myself – all the good and bad and exciting things that had happened to me. Of course I told her this and that. Old men love to make their past important, to make a simple life sound full of interest and great success. I gave her stories in which I was as wild, brave seaman, who was known and feared across all the seas of the world, from Hong Kong to Durban to San Francisco. Oh, what a famous sea captain I was!
And the girl loved these stories, true or not true, turning the lamp down a little, to make everything more mysterious, stirring the fire into new flowers of flame…
One Story I did not tell her. It is the time in my life that hurts me every time I think of it. I don’t think of it often, because that time is locked up and the key is dropped deep in the Atlantic Ocean, but it is a ghost, as I said earlier, that woke during my recent illness.
On her last evening at my fireside I did, I know, tell a little of that story, just a few half-ashamed pieces of it.
Suddenly, before I had finished –did she already know the ending? – she had put a white look and a cold kiss on my cheek, and hone out at the door; as I learned later, for the last time.
Hurt or no, I will tell the story here and now. You who look and listen are not Andrina – to you it will seem a story of rough country people, a story of the young and foolish, the young and heartless.