“I bet you been traveling all day,” said Johnny, looking shy and boyish.
“Worse than that. I came down from Newport on the boat last night.”
The casual way she said Newport quite startled him. “I’m going to Ocean City,” he said.
“So am I. Isn’t it a horrid place? I wouldn’t go there for a minute if it weren’t for Dad. He pretends to like it.”
“They say that Ocean City has a great future… I mean in a kind of a realestate way,” said Johnny.
There was a pause.
“I got on in Wilmington,” said Johnny with a smile.
“A horrid place, Wilmington… I can’t stand it.”
“I was born and raised there… I suppose that’s why I like it,” said Johnny.
“Oh, I didn’t mean there weren’t awfully nice people in Wilmington… lovely old families… Do you know the Rawlinses?”
“Oh, that’s all right… I don’t want to spend all my life in Wilmington, anyway… Gosh, look at it rain.”
It rained so hard that a culvert was washed out and the train was four hours late into Ocean City. By the time they got in they were good friends; it had thundered and lightened and she’d been so nervous and he’d acted very strong and protecting and the car had filled up with mosquitoes and they had both been eaten up and they’d gotten very hungry together. The station was pitchblack and there was no porter and it took him two trips to get her bags out and even then they almost forgot her alligatorskin handbag and he had to go back into the car a third time to get it and his own suitcase. By that time an old darkey with a surrey had appeared who said he was from the Ocean House. “I hope you’re going there too,” she said. He said he was and they got in though they had no place to put their feet because she had so many bags. There were no lights in Ocean City on account of the storm. The surreywheels ground through a deep sandbed; now and then that sound and the clucking of the driver at his horse were drowned by the roar of the surf from the beach. The only light was from the moon continually hidden by driving clouds. The rain had stopped but the tense air felt as if another downpour would come any minute. “I certainly would have perished in the storm if it hadn’t been for you,” she said; then suddenly she offered him her hand like a man: “My name’s Strang… Annabelle Marie Strang…. Isn’t that a funny name?” He took her hand. “John Moorehouse is mine… Glad to meet you, Miss Strang.” The palm of her hand was hot and dry. It seemed to press into his. When he let go he felt that she had expected him to hold her hand longer. She laughed a husky low laugh. “Now we’re introduced, Mr. Moorehouse, and everything’s quite all right… I certainly shall give Dad a piece of my mind. The idea of his not meeting his only daughter at the station.”
In the dark hotel lobby lit by a couple of smoked oillamps he saw her, out of the corner of his eye, throw her arms round a tall whitehaired man, but by the time he had scrawled John W. Moorehouse in his most forceful handwriting in the register and gotten his roomkey from the clerk, they had gone. Up in the little pine bedroom it was very hot. When he pulled up the window, the roar of the surf came in through the rusty screen mingling with the rattle of rain on the roof. He changed his collar and washed in tepid water he poured from the cracked pitcher on the washstand and went down to the diningroom to try to get something to eat. A goat-toothed waitress was just bringing him soup when Miss Strang came in followed by the tall man. As the only lamp was on the table he was sitting at, they came towards it and he got up and smiled. “Here he is, Dad,” she said. “And you owe him for the driver that brought us from the station… Mr. Morris, you must meet my father, Dr. Strang… The name was Morris, wasn’t it?” Johnny blushed. “Moorehouse, but it’s quite all right…. I’m glad to meet you, sir.”
Next morning Johnny got up early and went round to the office of the Ocean City Improvement and Realty Company that was in a new greenstained shingled bungalow on the freshly laidout street back of the beach. There was no one there yet so he walked round the town. It was a muggy gray day and the cottages and the frame stores and the unpainted shacks along the railroad track looked pretty desolate. Now and then he slapped a mosquito on his neck. He had on his last clean collar and he was worried for fear it would get wilted. Whenever he stepped off the board sidewalks he got sand in his shoes, and sharp beachburrs stuck to his ankles. At last he found a stout man in a white linen suit sitting on the steps of the realestate office. “Good morning, sir,” he said. “Are you Colonel Wedgewood?” The stout man was too out of breath to answer and only nodded. He had one big silk handkerchief stuck into his collar behind and with another was mopping his face. Johnny gave him the letter he had from his firm and stood waiting for him to say something. The fat man read the letter with puckered brows and led the way into the office. “It’s this asthma,” he gasped between great wheezing breaths. “Cuts ma wind when Ah trah to hurry. Glad to meet you, son.”
Johnny hung round old Colonel Wedgewood the rest of the morning, looking blue-eyed and boyish, listening politely to stories of the Civil War and General Lee and his white horse Traveller and junketings befoa de woa on the Easten Shoa, ran down to the store to get a cake of ice for the cooler, made a little speech about the future of Ocean City as a summer resort—“Why, what have they got at Atlantic City or Cape May that we haven’t got here?” roared the Colonel — went home with him to his bungalow for lunch, thereby missing the train he ought to have taken back to Wilmington, refused a mint julep — he neither drank nor smoked — but stood admiringly by while the Colonel concocted and drank two good stiff ones, for his asthma, used his smile and his blue eyes and his boyish shamble on the Colonel’s colored cook Mamie and by four o’clock he was laughing about the Governor of North Carolina and the Governor of South Carolina and had accepted a job with the Ocean City Improvement and Realty Company at fifteen dollars a week, with a small furnished cottage thrown in. He went back to the hotel and wrote Mr. Hillyard, inclosing the deeds for the lots and his expense account, apologized for leaving the firm at such short notice but explained that he owed it to his family who were in great need to better himself as much as he could; then he wrote to his mother that he was staying on in Ocean City and please to send him his clothes by express; he wondered whether to write Miss O’Higgins, but decided not to. After all, bygones were bygones.
When he had eaten supper he went to the desk to ask for his bill, feeling pretty nervous for fear he wouldn’t have enough money to pay it, and was just coming out with two quarters in his pocket and his bag in his hand when he met Miss Strang. She was with a short dark man in white flannels whom she introduced as Monsieur de la Rochevillaine. He was a Frenchman but spoke good English. “I hope you’re not leaving us,” she said. “No, ma’am, I’m just moving down the beach to one of Colonel Wedgewood’s cottages.” The Frenchman made Johnny uneasy; he stood smiling suave as a barber beside Miss Strang. “Oh, you know our fat friend, do you? He’s a great crony of Dad’s. I think he’s just too boring with his white horse Traveller.” Miss Strang and the Frenchman smiled both at once as if they had some secret in common. The Frenchman stood beside her swinging easily on the balls of his feet as if he were standing beside some piece of furniture he owned and was showing off to a friend. Johnny had a notion to paste him one right where the white flannel bulged into a pot belly. “Well, I must go,” he said. “Won’t you come back later? There’s going to be dancing. We’d love to have you.” “Yes, come back by all means,” said the Frenchman. “I will if I can,” said Johnny and walked off with his suitcase in his hand, feeling sticky under the collar and sore. “Drat that Frenchman,” he said aloud. Still, there was something about the way Miss Strang looked at him. He guessed he must be falling in love.