0 PASS THE time while he waited for Dreiser s signal, Foxe studied the view from the laboratory window. Main Beach, white as detergent powder, reached away in a long scimitar curve, as if some fairly simple equation was drawing it towards the axis where water met sky. The line of it divided the blue of the sea from the green of the shore, and all would have been too dazzling to stare at but for the double-tinted glass of the lab window. The only real interruptions to the curves of colour were the jagged hiccups made by the new hotels of Front Town, each in its own way a sample of tourist architecture at its larkiest and most ebullient. Foxe could never unders tand how any of them had got built. In the six weeks he had been on Hog s Cay no progress at all seemed to have been made on the newest one, which remained about four-fifths finished a few hundred yards along the beach. The same web of irregular scaffolding mottled one wall, and the same man in a yellow singlet and blue jeans lay sprawled on the planking near the top of it. He d only been there for three days, to be fair, but he hadn t moved during that time. Perhaps he was dead, or perhaps just a bundle of bright rags, but most probably he was having a snooze, not unusually long by Island standards. It took a lot to disturb this pervading lethargy, so it was a proof of the day s importance that Foxe could see a man actually working in the foreground of his view. The II
|
商品评论(0条)