# Mosquitoes (Faulkner)/The Second Day

THE SECOND DAY
By three o’clock the storm had blown itself out across the lake and by dawn, when the helmsman waked the captain, the lake, as he had predicted, was running pretty high. The trend was directly inshore; waves came up in endless battalions under a cloudless sky, curling and creaming along the hull, fading and dying as the water shoaled astern of the yacht to a thin white smother against a dark impenetrable band of trees. The Nausikaa rose and fell, bows on, dragging at her taut cables. The helmsman roused the captain and returned swiftly to the wheelhouse.
The deckhand got the anchors up and the helmsman rang the telegraph. The Nausikaa shivered awake, coming to life again, and pausing for a moment between two waves like a swimmer, she surged ahead. She paid off a little and the helmsman spun the wheel. But she didn’t respond, falling off steadily and gaining speed, and as the helmsman put the wheel down hard the Nausikaa fell broadside on into the trough of the waves. The helmsman rang the telegraph again and shouted to the deckhand to let go the anchors.
By seven o’clock the Nausikaa, dragging her anchors, had touched bottom with a faint jar. She considered a moment, then freed herself and crawling a bit further up the shoaling sand she turned herself a little, and with a barely perceptible list she sat down like a plump bather waist deep in the water, taking the waves on her beam.
Dorothy Jameson had a bold, humorless style. She preferred portraits, though she occasionally painted still life— ​harsh, implacable fruit and flowers in dimensionless bowls upon tables without depth. Her teeth were large and white in the pale revelation of her gums, and her gray eyes were coldly effective. Her body was long, loosely articulated and frail, and while spending in Greenwich Village the two years she had considered necessary for the assimilation of American tendencies in painting, she had taken a lover although she was still a virgin.
She took the lover principally because he owed her money which he had borrowed of her in order to pay a debt to another woman. The lover ultimately eloped to Paris with a wealthy Pittsburgh lady, pawning her—Dorothy’s—fur coat on the way to the dock and mailing the ticket back to her from shipboard. The lover himself was a musician. He was quite advanced, what is known as a radical; and in the intervals of experimenting with the conventional tonal scale he served as part of an orchestra in an uptown dancing place. It was here that he met the Pittsburgh lady.
But this episode was complete, almost out of her memory even. She had had a year abroad and had returned to New Orleans where she settled down to a moderate allowance which permitted her a studio in the vieux carré and her name several times on the police docket for reckless driving and a humorless and reasonably pleasant cultivation of her individuality, with no more than a mild occasional nagging at the hands of her family, like a sound of rain heard beyond a closed window.
She had always had trouble with her men. Principally through habit since that almost forgotten episode she had always tried for artists, but sooner or later they inevitably ran out on her. With the exception of Mark Frost, that is. And in his case, she realized, it was sheer inertia more than anything else. And she admitted with remote perspicuity, ​who cared one way or the other whether they kept Mark Frost? No one ever cared long for an artist who did nothing save create art, and very little of that.
But other men, men she recognized as having potentialities, all passed through a violent but temporary period of interest which ceased as abruptly as it began, without leaving even the lingering threads of mutually remembered incidence, like those brief thunderstorms of August that threaten and dissolve for no apparent reason, without producing any rain.
At times she speculated with almost masculine detachment on the reason for this. She always tried to keep their relations on the plane which the men themselves seemed to prefer—certainly no woman would, and few women could, demand less of their men than she did. She never made arbitrary demands on their time, never caused them to wait for her nor to see her home at inconvenient hours, never made them fetch and carry for her; she fed them and she flattered herself that she was a good listener. And yet. . . She thought of the women she knew: how all of them had at least one obviously entranced male; she thought of the women she had observed: how they seemed to acquire a man at will, and if he failed to stay acquired, how readily they replaced him.
She thought of the women on board, briefly reviewing them. Eva Wiseman. She had had one husband, practically discarded him. Men liked her. Fairchild, for instance: a man of undisputed ability and accomplishment. Yet this might be due to his friendship with her brother. But no, Fairchild was not that sort: social obligations rested too lightly upon him. It was because he was attracted to her. Because of kindred tastes? But I create, too, she reminded herself.
Then she thought of the two young girls. Of the niece Patricia, with her frank curiosity in things, her childish delight in strenuous physical motion, of her hard unsentimentality and ​no interest whatever in the function of creating art (I'll bet she doesn’t even read) and Gordon aloof and insufferably arrogant, yet intrigued. And Fairchild also interested in his impersonal way. Even Pete, probably.
Pete, and Jenny. Jenny with her soft placidity, her sheer passive appeal to the senses, and Mr. Talliaferro, braving Mrs. Maurier’s displeasure to dangle about her, fawning almost. Even she felt Jenny’s appeal—an utterly mindless rifeness of young, pink flesh, a supine potential fecundity lovely to look upon: a doll awaiting a quickening and challenging it with neither joy nor sorrow. She had brought one man with her. . . . No, not even brought: he had followed in her blonde troubling orbit as a tide follows the moon, without volition, against his inclination, perhaps. Two women who had no interest whatever in the arts, yet who without effort drew to themselves men, artistic men. Opposites, antitheses . . . perhaps, she thought, I have been trying for the wrong kind of men, perhaps the artistic man is not my type.
seven o’clock
“No, ma’am,” the nephew replied courteously, “it’s a pipe.”
“Oh,” she murmured, “a pipe.”
He bent over his wooden cylinder, paring at it with a knife, delicately, with care. It was much cooler to-day. The sun had risen from out a serrated miniature sea, into a cloudless sky. For a while the yacht had had a perceptible motion—it was this motion which had roused her—but now it had ceased, although sizable waves yet came in from the lake, creaming whitely along the hull, and spent themselves shoaling up the beach toward a dark cliff of trees. She’d had no idea last night that they were so close to land, either. But distances always confused her by night.
She wished she’d brought a coat: had she anticipated such a ​cool spell in August . . . She stood huddling her scarf about her shoulders, watching his brown intent forearms and his coarse, cropped head exactly like his sister’s, mildly desiring breakfast. I wonder if he’s hungry? she thought. She remarked:
“Aren’t you rather chilly this morning without a coat?” He carved at his object with a rapt maternal absorption, and after a while she said, louder:
“Wouldn’t it be simpler to buy one?”
“I hope so,” he murmured . . . then he raised his head and the sun shone full into his opaque yellow-flecked eyes. “What’d you say?”
“I should think you’d wait until we got ashore and buy one instead of trying to make one.”
“You can’t buy one like this. They don’t make ’em.” The cylinder came in two sections, carved and fitted cunningly. He raised one piece, squinting at it, and carved an infinitesimal sliver from it. Then he returned it to its husband. Then he broke them apart again and carved an infinitesimal sliver from the other piece, fitted them together again. Miss Jameson watched him.
“Do you carry the design in your head?” she asked.
He raised his head again. “Huh?” he said in a dazed tone.
“The design you’re carving. Are you just carving from memory, or what?”
“Design?” he repeated. “What design?”
It was much cooler to-day.
There was in Pete’s face a kind of active alarm not quite yet dispersed, and clutching his sheet of newspaper he rose with belated politeness, but she said, “No, no: I'll get it. Keep your seat.” So he stood acutely, clutching his paper, while ​she fetched a chair and drew it up beside his. “It’s quite chilly this morning isn’t it?”
“Sure is,” he agreed. “When I woke up this morning and felt all that cold wind and the boat going up and down, I didn’t know what we were into. I didn’t feel so good this morning, anyway, and with the boat going up and down like it was . . . it’s still now, though. Looks like they went in closer to the bank and parked it this time.”
“Yes, it seems to me we're closer than we were last night.” When she was settled he sat also, and presently he forgot and put his feet back on the rail. Then he remembered and removed them.
“Why, how did you manage to get a paper this morning? Did we put in shore somewhere last night?” she asked, raising her feet to the rail.
For some reason he felt uncomfortable about his paper. “It’s just an old piece,” he explained lamely. “I found it downstairs somewhere. It kind of kept my mind off of how bad I felt.” He made a gesture repudiating it.
“Don’t throw it away,” she said quickly, “go on—don’t let me interrupt if you found something interesting in it. I’m sorry you aren’t feeling well. Perhaps you'll feel better after breakfast.”
“Maybe so,” he agreed, without conviction. “I don’t feel much like breakfast, waking up like I did and feeling kind of bad, and the boat going up and down too.”
“You'll get over that, I’m sure.” She leaned nearer to see the paper. It was a single sheet of a Sunday magazine section: a depressing looking article in small print about Romanesque architecture, interspersed with blurred indistinguishable photographs. “Are you interested in architecture?” she asked intensely.
“I guess not,” he replied. “I was just looking it over until ​they get up.” He slanted his hat anew: under cover of this movement he raised his feet to the rail, settling down on his spine. She said:
“So many people waste their time over things like architecture and such. It’s much better to be a part of life, don’t you think? Much better to be in it yourself and make your own mistakes and enjoy making them and suffering for them, than to make your life barren through dedicating it to an improbable and ungrateful posterity. Don’t you think so?”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” Pete said cautiously. He lit a cigarette. “Breakfast is late to-day.”
“Of course you hadn’t. That’s what I admire about a man like you. You know life so well that you aren’t afraid of what it might do to you. You don’t spend your time thinking about life, do you?”
“Not much,” he agreed. “A man don’t want to be a fish, though.”
“You'll never be a fish, Pete (every one calls you Pete, don’t they?—do you mind?) I think the serious things really are the things that make for happiness—people and things that are compatible, love. . . . So many people are content just to sit around and talk about them instead of getting out and attaining them. As if life were a joke of some kind. . . . May I have a cigarette? Thanks. You smoke this brand, too, I see. A m— Thanks. I like your hat: it just suits the shape of your face. You have an extremely interesting face—do you know it? And your eyes. I never saw eyes exactly the color of yours. But I suppose lots of women have told you that, haven’t they?”
“I guess so,” Pete answered. “They'll tell you anything.”
“Ts that what love has meant to you, Pete—deception?” she leaned to the match, staring at him with the humorless invitation of her eyes, “Is that your opinion of us?”
​“Aw, they don’t mean anything by it,” Pete said in something like alarm. “What time do they have breakfast on this line?” He rose. “I guess I better run downstairs a minute before it’s ready. It oughtn’t to be long,” he added. Miss Jameson was gazing quietly out across the water. She wore a thin scarf about her shoulders: a webbed brilliant thing that lent her a bloodless fragility, as did the faint bridge of freckles (relict of a single afternoon of sunlight) across her nose. She now sat suddenly quiet, poising the cigarette in her long, delicate fingers; and Pete stood beside her, acutely uncomfortable—why, he knew not. “I guess I’ll go downstairs before breakfast,” he repeated. “Say”—he extended his newspaper—“why don’t you look it over while I’m gone?”
Then she looked at him again, and took the paper. “Ah, Pete, you don’t know much about us—for all your experience.”
“Sure,” he replied. “I'll see you again, see?” and he went away. I’m glad I had a clean collar yesterday, he thought, turning into the companionway. This trip sure ought to be over in a couple of years. . . . Just as he began the descent he looked back at her. The newspaper lay across her lap but she wasn’t looking at it. And she had thrown the cigarette away, too. My God, Pete said to himself. Then he was struck by a thought. Pete, my boy, he told himself, it’s going to be a hard trip. He descended into the narrow passage. It swept forward on either hand, broken smugly by spaced mute doors with brass knobs. He slowed momentarily, counting doors to find his own, and while he paused the door at his hand opened suddenly and the niece appeared clutching a raincoat about her.
“Hello,” she said.
“Don’t mention it,” Pete replied, raising his hat slightly. “Jenny up, too?”
​“Say, I dreamed you lost that thing,” the niece told him. “Yes, shell be out soon, I guess.”
“That’s good. I was afraid she was going to lay there and starve to death.”
“No, she'll be out pretty soon.” They stood facing each other in the narrow passage, blocking it completely, and the niece said: “Get on, Pete. I feel too tired to climb over you this morning.”
He stood aside for her, and watching her retreat he called after her: “Losing your pants.”
She stopped and dragged at her hips as a shapeless fabric descended from beneath the raincoat and wadded slow and lethargic about her feet. She stood on one leg and kicked at the mass, then stooping she picked from amid its folds a man’s frayed and shapeless necktie. “Damn that string,” she said, kicking out of the garment and picking it up.
Pete turned in the narrow corridor, counting discrete identical doors. He smelled coffee and he added to himself: A hard trip, and, with unction: I’ll tell the world it is.
eight o'clock
“It’s the steering gear,” Mrs. Maurier explained at the breakfast table. “Some—”
“I know,” Mrs. Wiseman exclaimed immediately above the grapefruit, “German spies!”
Mrs. Maurier stared at her with patient astonishment. She said, How cute. “It worked perfectly yesterday. The captain said it worked perfectly yesterday. But this morning, when the storm came up. . . anyway, were aground, and they are sending some one to get a tug to pull us off. They are trying to find the trouble this morning, but I don’t know . . .”
Mrs. Wiseman leaned toward her and patted her fumbling ​ringed hand. “There, there, don’t you feel badly about it: it wasn’t your fault. They’ll get us off soon, and we can have just as much fun here as we would sailing around. More, perhaps: motion seems to have had a bad effect on the party. I wonder. . .” Fairchild and his people had not yet arrived: before each vacant place its grapefruit, innocent and profound. Surely just the prospect of more grapefruit couldn’t have driven them . . . Mrs. Maurier followed her gaze.
“Perhaps it’s just as well,” she murmured.
“Anyway, I’ve always wanted to be shipwrecked,” Mrs. Wiseman went on. “What do they call it? scuttled the ship, isn’t it? But surely Dawson and Julius couldn’t have thought of this, though.” Mrs. Maurier, brooding above her plate, raised her eyes, cringing. “No, no,” the other answered herself hastily, “of course not: that’s silly. It just happened, as things do. But let this be a lesson to you children, never to lay yourselves open to suspicion,” she added looking from the niece to the nephew. The steward appeared with coffee and Mrs. Maurier directed him to leave the gentlemen’s grapefruit until it suited their pleasure to come for it.
“They couldn’t have done it if they’d wanted to,” the niece replied. “They don’t know anything about machinery. Josh could have done it. He knows all about automobile motors. I bet you could fix it for ’em if you wanted to, couldn’t you, Gus?”
He didn’t seem to have heard her at all. He finished his breakfast, eating with a steady and complete preoccupation, then thrusting his chair back he asked generally for a cigarette. His sister produced a package from somewhere. It bore yet faint traces of pinkish scented powder, and Miss Jameson said sharply:
“I wondered who took my cigarettes. It was you, was it?”
“I thought you’d forgot ’em, so I brought ’em up with me.”
​She and her brother took one each, and she slid the package across the table. Miss Jameson picked it up, stared into it a moment, then put it in her handbag. The nephew had a patent lighter. They all watched with interest, and after a while Mr. Talliaferro with facetious intent offered him a match. But it took fire finally, and he lit his cigarette and snapped the cap down. “Gimme a light too, Gus,” his sister said quickly, and from the pocket of his shirt he took two matches, laid them beside her plate. He rose.
He whistled four bars of “Sleepytime Gal” monotonously, ending on a prolonged excruciating note, and from the bed clothing at the foot of his bunk he got the steel rod and stood squinting his eyes against the smoke of his cigarette, examining it. One end of it was kind of blackened, and pinching the cloth of his trouserleg about it, he shuttled it swiftly back and forth. Then he examined it again. It was still kind of black. The smoke of his cigarette was making his eyes water, so he spat it and ground his heel on it.
After a time he found a toothbrush and crossing the passage to a lavatory he scrubbed the rod. A little of the black came off, onto the brush, and he dried the rod on his shirt and scrubbed the brush against the screen in a port, then against a redleaded water pipe, and then against the back of his hand. He sniffed at it . . . a kind of machinery smell yet, but you won’t notice it with toothpaste on it. He returned and replaced the brush among Mr. Talliaferro’s things.
He whistled four bars of “Sleepytime Gal” monotonously. The engine room was deserted. But he was making no effort toward concealment, anyway. He found the wrenches again and went to the battery room and restored the rod without haste, whistling with monotonous preoccupation. He replaced the wrenches and stood for a while examining the slumbering ​engine with rapture. Then still without haste he quitted the room.
The captain, the steward and the deckhand sat at breakfast in the saloon. He paused in the door.
“Broke down, have we?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” the captain answered shortly. They went on with their breakfast.
“What’s the trouble?” No reply, and after a time he suggested: “Engine play out?”
“Steering gear,” the captain answered shortly.
“You ought to be able to fix that. . . . Where is the steering gear?”
“Engine room,” the captain replied. The nephew turned away.
“Well, I haven’t touched anything in the engine room.”
The captain bent above his plate, chewing. Then his jaws ceased and he raised his head sharply, staring after the nephew retreating down the passage.
ten o’clock
“The trouble with you, Talliaferro, is that you ain’t bold enough with women. That’s your trouble.”
“But I—” Fairchild wouldn’t let him finish.
“I don’t mean with words. They don’t care anything about words except as little things to pass the time with. You can’t be bold with them with words: you can’t even shock them with words. Though the reason may be that half the time they are not listening to you. They ain’t interested in what you’re going to say: they are interested in what you’re going to do.”
“Yes, but . . . How do you mean, be bold? What must I do to be bold?”
“How do they do it everywhere? Ain’t every paper you ​pick up full of accounts of men being caught in Kansas City or Omaha under compromising conditions with young girls who’ve been missing from Indianapolis and Peoria and even Chicago for days and days? Surely if a man can get as far as Kansas City with a Chicago girl, without her shooting him through chance or affection or sheer exuberance of spirits or something, he can pretty safely risk a New Orleans girl.”
“But why should Talliaferro want to take a New Orleans girl, or any other girl, to Kansas City?” the Semitic man asked. They ignored him.
“I know,” Mr. Talliaferro rejoined. “But these men have always just robbed a cigar store. I couldn’t do that, you know.”
“Well, maybe New Orleans girls won’t require that: maybe they haven’t got that sophisticated yet. They may not be aware that their favors are worth as high as a cigar store. But I don’t know: there are moving pictures, and some of ’em probably even read newspapers, too, so I’d advise you to get busy right away. The word may have already got around that if they just hold off another day or so, they can get a cigar store for practically nothing. And there ain’t very many cigar stores in New Orleans, you know.”
“But,” the Semitic man put in again, “Talliaferro doesn’t want a girl and a cigar store both, you know.”
“That’s right,” Fairchild agreed. “You ain’t looking for tobacco, are you, Talliaferro?”
eleven o’clock
“No, sir,” the nephew answered patiently, “it’s a pipe.”
“A pipe?” Fairchild drew nearer, interested. “What’s the idea? Will it smoke longer than an ordinary pipe? Holds more tobacco, eh?”
“Smokes cooler,” the nephew corrected, carving minutely ​at his cylinder. “Won’t burn your tongue. Smoke the tobacco down to the last grain, and it won’t burn your tongue. You change gears on it, kind of, like a car.”
“Well, I’m damned. How does it work?” Fairchild dragged up a chair, and the nephew showed him how it worked. “Well, I’m damned,” he repeated, taking fire. “Say, you ought to make a pile of money out of it, if you make it work, you know.”
“It works,” the nephew answered, joining his cylinders again. “Made a little one out of pine. Smoked pretty good for a pine pipe. It’ll work all right.”
“What kind of wood are you using now?”
“Cherry.” He carved and fitted intently, bending his coarse dark head above his work. Fairchild watched him. “Well, I’m damned,” he said again in a sort of heavy astonishment. “Funny nobody thought of it before. Say, we might form a stock company, you know, with Julius and Major Ayers. He’s trying to get rich right away at something that don’t require work, and this pipe is a lot better idea than the one he’s got, for I can’t imagine even Americans spending very much money for something that don’t do anything except keep your bowels open. That’s too sensible for us, even though we will buy anything. . . . Your sister tells me you and she are going to Yale college next month.”
“I am,” he corrected, without raising his head. “She just thinks she’s going too. That’s all. She kept on worrying dad until he said she could go. She’ll be wanting to do something else by then.”
“What does she do?” Fairchild asked. “I mean, does she have a string of beaux and run around dancing and buying things like most girls like her do?”
“Naw,” the nephew answered. “She spends most of her time and mine too tagging around after me. Oh, she’s all ​right, I guess,” he added tolerantly, “but she hasn’t got much sense.” He unfitted the cylinders, squinting at them.
“That’s where she changes gear, is it?” Fairchild leaned nearer again. “‘Yes, she’s a pretty nice sort of a kid. Kind of like a racehorse colt, you know. . . . So you’re going up to Yale. I used to want to go to Yale, myself, once. Only I had to go where I could. I guess there is a time in the life of every young American of the class that wants to go to college or accepts the inevitability of education, when he wants to go to Yale or Harvard. Maybe that’s the value of Yale and Harvard to our American life: a kind of illusion of an intellectual nirvana that makes the ones that can’t go there work like hell where they do go, so as not to show up so poorly alongside of the ones that can go there.
“Still, ninety out of a hundred Yale and Harvard turn out are reasonably bearable to live with, if they ain’t anything else. And that’s something to be said for any manufactory, I guess. But Id like to have gone there. . . .” The nephew was not listening particularly. He shaved and trimmed solicitously at his cylinder. Fairchild said:
“It was a kind of funny college I went to. A denominational college, you know, where they turned out preachers. I was working in a mowing machinery factory in Indiana, and the owner of the factory was a trustee of this college. He was a sanctimonious old fellow with a beard like a goat, and every year he offered a half scholarship to be competed for by young men working for him. You won it, you know, and he found you a job near the college to pay your board, but not enough to do anything else—to keep you from fleshly temptations, you know—and he had a monthly report on your progress sent to him. And I won it, that year.
“It was just for one year, so I tried to take everything I could. I had about six or seven lectures a day, besides the ​work I had to do to earn my board. But I kind of got interested in learning things: I learned in spite of the instructors we had. They were a bunch of brokendown preachers: head full of dogma and intolerance and a belly full of big meaningless words. English literature course whittled Shakespeare down because he wrote about whores without pointing a moral, and one instructor always insisted that the head devil in Paradise Lost was an inspired prophetic portrait of Darwin, and they wouldn’t touch Byron with a ten foot pole, and Swinburne was reduced to his mother and his old standby, the ocean. And I guess they’d have cut this out had they worn one piece bathing suits in those days. But in spite of it, I kind of got interested in learning things. I would like to have looked inside of my mind, after that year was up. . . .” He gazed out over the water, over the snoring waves, steady and windfrothed. He laughed. “And I joined a fraternity, too, almost.”
The nephew bent over his pipe. Fairchild produced a package of cigarettes. The nephew accepted one with abstraction. He accepted a light, also. “I guess you’ve got your eye on a fraternity, haven’t you?” Fairchild suggested.
“Senior club,” the nephew corrected shortly. “If I can make it.”
“Senior club,” Fairchild repeated. “That means you won’t join for three years, eh? That’s a good idea. I like that idea. But I had to do everything in one year, you see. I couldn’t wait. I never had much time to mix with other students. Six hours a day at lectures, and the rest of the time working and studying for next day. But I couldn’t help but hear something about it, about rushing and pledges and so on, and how so-and-so were after this fellow and that, because he made the football team or something.
“There was a fellow at my boarding house; a kind of handsome tall fellow he was, always talking about the big athletes ​and such in school. He knew them all by their first names. And he always had some yarn about girls: always showing you a pink envelope or something—a kind of gentlemanly innuendo, protecting their good names. He was a senior, he told me, and he was the first one to talk to me about fraternities. He said he had belonged to one a long time, though he didn’t wear a badge. He had given his badge to a girl who wouldn’t return it. . . . You see,” Fairchild explained again, “I had to work so much. You know: getting into a rut of work for bread and meat, where chance couldn’t touch me much. Chance and information. That’s what they mean by wisdom, horsesense, you know. . . .
“He was the one that told me he could get me in his fraternity, if I wanted to.” He drew at his cigarette, flipped it away. “It’s young people who put life into ritual by making conventions a living part of life: only old people destroy life by making it a ritual. And I wanted to get all I could out of being at college. The boy that belongs to a secret pirates’ gang and who dreams of defending an abstraction with his blood, hasn’t quite died out before twenty-one, you know. But I didn’t have any money.
“Then he suggested that I get more work to do, temporarily. He pointed out to me other men who belonged to it or who were going to join—baseball players, and captains of teams, and prize scholars and all. So I got more work. He told me not to mention it to anybody, that that was the way they did it. I didn’t know anybody much, you see,” he explained. “I had to work pretty steady all day: no chance to get to know anybody well enough to talk to ’em.” He mused upon the ceaseless fading battalions of waves. “So I got some more work to do.
“This had to be night work, so I got a job helping to fire the college power plant. I could take my books along and ​study while the steam was up. Only it cut into my sleep some, and sometimes I would get too drowsy to study. So I had to give up one of my lecture courses, though the instructor finally agreed to let me try to make it up during the Christmas vacation. But I learned how to sleep in a cinder pile or a coal bunker, anyway.” The nephew was interested now. His knife was idle in his hand, his cylinder reposed, forgetting the agony of wood.
“It would take twenty-five dollars, but working overtime as I was, I figured it wouldn’t be any actual cost at all, except the loss of sleep. And a young fellow can stand that if he has to. I was used to work, you know, and it seemed to me that this was just like finding twenty-five dollars.
“I had been working about a month when this fellow came to me and told me that something had happened and that the fraternity would have to initiate right away, and he asked me how much I had earned. I lacked a little of having twenty-five dollars, so he said he would loan me the difference to make it up. So I went to the power house manager and told him I had to have some money to pay a dentist with, and got my pay up to date and gave it to this fellow, and he told me where to be the following night—behind the library at a certain hour. So I did: I was there, like he said.” Fairchild laughed again.
“What'd the bird do?” the nephew asked. “Gyp you?”
“It was cold, that night. Late November, and a cold wind came right out of the north, whistling around that building, among the bare trees. Just a few dead leaves on the trees, making a kind of sad dry sound. We had won a football game that afternoon, and I could hear yelling occasionally, and see lights in the dormitories where the ones that could afford to lived, warm and jolly looking, with the bare trees ​swaying and waving across the windows. Still celebrating the game we had won.
“So I walked back and forth, stamping my feet, and after a while I went around the corner of the library where it wasn’t so cold, and I could stick out my head occasionally in case they came looking for me. From this side of the building I could see the hall where the girl students lived. It was all lighted up, as if for a party, and I could see shadows coming and going upon the drawn shades where they were dressing and fixing their hair and all; and pretty soon I heard a crowd coming across the campus and I thought, here they come at last. But they passed on, going toward the girls’ hall, where the party was.
“I walked up and down some more, stamping my feet. Pretty soon I heard a clock striking nine. In half an hour I’d have to be back at the power house. They were playing music at the party: I could hear it even in spite of the closed windows, and I thought maybe I’d go closer. But the wind was colder: there was a little snow in it, and besides I was afraid they might come for me and I wouldn’t be there. So I stamped my feet, walking up and down.
“Pretty soon I knew it must be nine thirty, but I stayed a while longer, and soon it was snowing hard—a blizzard. It was the first snow of the year, and somebody came to the door of the party and saw it, and then they all came out to look, yelling: I could hear the girls’ voices, kind of high and excited and fresh, and the music was louder. Then they went back, and the music was faint again, and then the clock struck ten. So I went back to the power house. I was already late.” He ceased, musing on the glittering battalions of waves and hands of wind slapping them whitely. He laughed again. “But I nearly joined one, though.”
​“How about the bird?” the nephew asked. “Didn’t you hunt him up the next day?”
“He was gone. I never saw him again. I found out later he wasn’t even a student in the college. I never did know what became of him.” Fairchild rose. “Well, you get it finished, and we’ll form a stock company and get rich.”
The nephew sat clutching his knife and his cylinder, gazing after Fairchild’s stocky back until the other passed from view. “You poor goof,” the nephew said, resuming his work again.
two o’clock
It was that interval so unbearable to young active people: directly after lunch on a summer day. Every one else was dozing somewhere, no one to talk to and nothing to do. It was warmer than in the forenoon, though the sky was still clear and waves yet came in before a steady wind, slapping the Nausikaa on her comfortable beam and creaming on to fade and die frothing up the shoaling beach and its still palisade of trees.
The niece hung over the bows, watching the waves. They were diminishing: by sunset there would be none at all. But occasionally one came in large enough to send up a thin exhilarating spray. Her dress whipped about her bare legs and she gazed downward into the restless water, trying to make up her mind to get her bathing suit. But if I go in now I’ll get tired and then when the others go in later, I won’t have anything to do. She gazed down into the water, watching it surge and shift and change, watching the slack anchor cables severing the incoming waves, feeling the wind against her back.
Then the wind blew upon her face and she idled along the deck and paused again at the wheelhouse, yawning. Nobody there. But that’s so, the helmsman went off early to get word ​for a tug. She entered the room, examining the control fixtures with interest. She touched the wheel, tentatively. It turned all right: they must have fixed it, whatever was broken about it. She removed her hand and examined the room again, hopefully, and her eyes came upon a binocular suspended from a nail in the wall.
Through the binocular she saw a blur in two colors, but presently under her fingers the blur became trees startlingly distinct and separate leaf by leaf and bough by bough, and pendants of rusty green moss were beards of contemplative goats ruminating among the trees and above a yellow strip of beach and a smother of foam in which the sun hung little fleeting rainbows.
She watched this for a time, entranced, then swinging the glass slowly, waves slid past at arms’ length, curling and creaming; and swinging the glass further, the rail of the yacht leapt monstrously into view and upon the rail a nameless object emitting at that instant a number of circular yellow basins. The yellow things fell into the water, seemingly so near, yet without any sound, and swinging the glass again, the thing that had emitted them was gone and in its place the back of a man close enough for her to touch him by extending her hand.
She lowered the glass and the man’s back sprang away, becoming that of the steward carrying a garbage pail, and she knew then what the yellow basins were. She raised the glass again and again the steward sprang suddenly and silently within reach of her arm. She called “Hey!” and when he paused and turned, his face was plain as plain. She waved her hand to him, but he only looked at her a moment. Then he went on and around a corner.
She hung the binocular back on its nail and followed along the deck where he had disappeared. Inside the companion​way and obliquely through the galley door she could see him moving about, washing the luncheon dishes, and she sat on the top step of the stairs. There was a small round window beside her, and he bent over the sink while light fell directly upon his brown head. She watched him quietly, intently but without rudeness, as a child would, until he looked up and saw her tanned serious face framed roundly in the port. “Hello,” she said.
“Hello,” he answered as gravely.
“You have to work all the time, don’t you?” she asked. “Say, I liked the way you went over after that man, yesterday. With your clothes on, too. Not many have sense enough to dive away from the propeller. What’s your name?”
David West, he told her, scraping a stew pan and sloshing water into it. Steam rose from the water and about it bobbed a cake of thick implacable looking yellow soap. The niece sat bent forward to see through the window, rubbing her palms on her bare calves.
“It’s too bad you have to work whether we are aground or not,” she remarked. “The captain and the rest of them don’t have anything to do now, except just lie around. They can have more fun than us, now. Aunt Pat’s kind of terrible,” she explained. “Have you been with her long?”
“No, ma’am. This is my first trip. But I don’t mind light work like this. Ain’t much to do, when you get settled down to it. Ain’t nothing to what I have done.”
“Oh. You don’t— You are not a regular cook, are you?”
“No, ma’am. Not regular. It was Mr. Fairchild got me this job with Mrs.—with her.”
“He did? Gee, he knows everybody almost, don’t he?”
“Does he?”
She gazed through the round window, watching a blackened kettle brighten beneath his brush. Soap frothed, piled like ​summer clouds, floated in the sink like small reflections of clouds. “Have you known him long?” she asked. “Mr. Fairchild, I mean?”
“I didn’t know him any until a couple of days ago. I was in that park where that statue is, down close to the docks, and he came by and we were talking and I wasn’t working then, and so he got me this job. I can do any kind of work,” he added with quiet pride.
“You can? You don’t live in New Orleans, do you?”
“Indiana,” he told her. “I’m just traveling around.”
“Gee,” the niece said, “I wish I were a man, like that. I bet it’s all right, going around wherever you want to. I guess I’d work on ships. That’s what I’d do.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “That’s where I learned to cook—on a ship.”
“Not—”
“Yes’m, to the Mediterranean ports, last trip.”
“Gee,” she said again. “You’ve seen lots, haven’t you? What would you do, when the ship got to different places? You didn’t just stay on the ship, did you?”
“No’m. I went to a lot of towns. Away from the coast.”
“To Paris, I bet.”
“No’m,” he admitted, with just a trace of apology, “I never seemed to get to Paris. But next—”
“I knew you wouldn’t,” she said quickly. “Say, men just go to Europe because they say European women are fast, don’t they? Are European women like that? promiscuous, like they say?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I nev—”
“I bet you never had time to fool with them, did you? That’s what I’d do: I wouldn’t waste my time on women, if I went to Europe. They make me sick—these little college boys in their balloon pants, and colored stickers all over their ​suitcases, bringing empty cognac bottles back with ’em and snickering about French girls and trying to make love to you in French. Say, I bet where you went you could see a lot of mountains and little cute towns on the side of ’em, and old gray walls and ruined castles on the mountains, couldn’t you?”
“Yes’m. And one place was high over a lake. It was blue as. . . blue like . . . washing water,” he said finally. “Water with bluing in it. They put bluing in the water when they wash clothes, country folks do,” he explained.
“I know,” she said impatiently. “Were there mountains around it?”
“The Alps Mountains, and little white boats on it no bigger than water beetles. You couldn’t see ’em moving: you only could see the water kind of spreading out to each side. The water would keep on spreading out until it pretty near touched both shores whenever a boat passed. And you could lay on your back on the mountain where I was and watch eagles flying around way up above the water, until sunset. Then the eagles all went back to the mountains.” David gazed through the port, past her sober tanned face mooned there by the round window, not even seeing it any more, seeing instead his washing powder colored lake and his lonely mountains and eagles against the blue.
“And then the sun would go down, and sometimes the mountains would look like they were on fire all over. That was the ice and snow on ’em. It was pretty at night too,” he added simply, scrubbing again at his pots.
“Gee,” she said with hushed young longing. “And that’s what you get for being a woman. I guess I’ll have to get married and have a bunch of kids.” She watched him with her grave opaque eyes. “No, I’m not, either,” she said fiercely, “I’m going to make Hank let me go there next summer. Can’t ​you go back then, too? Say, you fix it up to go back then, and I’ll go home and see Hank about it and then I’ll come over. Josh’ll want to come too, most likely, and you’ll know where the places are. Can’t you do that?”
“I guess I could,” he answered slowly. “Only—”
“Only what?”
“Nothing,” he said at last.
“Well, you fix it up to go, then. I’ll give you my address, and you can write me when to start and where to meet you . . . I guess I couldn’t go over on the same boat you'll be on, could I?”
“I’m afraid not,” he answered.
“Well, it'll be all right, anyway. Gee, David, I wish we could go to-morrow, don’t you? I wonder if they let people swim in that lake? But I don’t know, maybe it’s nicer to be away up there where you were, looking down at it. Next summer. . . ” her unseeing eyes rested on his brown busy head while her spirit lay on its belly above Maggiore, watching little white boats no bigger than water beetles, and the lonely arrogant eagles aloft in blue sunshot space surrounded and enclosed by mountains cloud brooded, taller than God.
David dried his pots and pans and hung them along the bulkhead in a burnished row. He washed out his dishcloths and hung them to dry upon the wall. The niece watched him.
“It’s too bad you have to work all the time,” she said with polite regret.
“I’m all done, now.”
“Let’s go swimming, then. It ought to be good now. I’ve just been waiting for somebody to go in with me.”
“I can’t,” he answered. “I’ve got a little more work I better do now.”
“I thought you were through. Will it take you very long? If it won’t, let’s go in then: I’ll wait for you.”
​“Well, you see, I don’t go in during the day. I go in early in the morning, before you are up.”
“Say, I hadn’t thought of that. I bet it’s fine then, isn’t it? How about calling me in the morning, when you are ready to go in? Will you?” He hesitated again and she added, watching him with her sober opaque eyes, “Is it because you don’t like to go swimming with girls? That’s all right: I won’t bother you. I swim pretty well. You won’t have to keep me from drowning.”
“It ain’t that,” he answered lamely. “You see, I—I haven’t got a bathing suit,” he blurted.
“Oh, is that all? I’ll get my brother’s for you. It'll be kind of tight, but I guess you can wear it. I’ll get it for you now, if you'll go in.”
“I can’t,” he repeated. “I’ve still got some cleaning up to do.”
“Well—” She got to her feet. “If you won’t, then. But in the morning? you promised, you know.”
“All right,” he agreed.
“I’ll try to be awake. But you just knock on the door—the second door on the right of the passage, you know.” She turned on her silent bare feet. She paused again. “Don’t forget you promised,” she called back. Then her flat boy’s body was gone, and David turned again to his work.
The niece went on up the deck and turned the corner of the deckhouse on her silent feet just in time to see Jenny rout and disperse an attack by Mr. Talliaferro. She stepped back beyond the corner, unseen.
Boldness. But Fairchild had said you can’t be bold with words. How, then, to be bold? To try to do anything without words, it seemed to him, was like trying to grow grain ​without seed. Still, Fairchild had said . . . who knew people, women. . . .
Mr. Talliaferro prowled restlessly, having the boat to himself practically, and presently he found Jenny sleeping placidly in a chair in the shade of the deckhouse. Blonde and pink and soft in sleep was Jenny: a passive soft abandon fitting like water to the sagging embrace of the canvas chair. Mr. Talliaferro envied that chair with a surge of fire like an adolescent’s in his dry bones; and while he stood regarding the sprawled awkwardness of Jenny’s sweet thighs and legs and one little soiled hand dangling across her hip, that surge of imminence and fire and desolation seemed to lightly distend all his organs, leaving a thin salty taste on his tongue. Mr. Talliaferro glanced quickly about the deck.
He glanced quickly about the deck, then feeling rather foolish, but strangely and exuberantly young, he came near and bending he traced with his hand lightly the heavy laxness of Jenny’s body through the canvas which supported her. Then he thought terribly that some one was watching him, and he sprang erect with an alarm like a nausea, staring at Jenny’s closed eyes. But her eyelids lay shadowed, a faint transparent blue upon her cheeks, and her breath was a little regular wind come recently from off fresh milk. But he still felt eyes upon him and he stood acutely, trying to think of something to do, some casual gesture to perform. A cigarette his chaotic brain supplied at last. But he had none, and still spurred by this need, he darted quickly away and to his cabin.
The nephew slept yet in his berth, and breathing rather fast, Mr. Talliaferro got his cigarettes and then he stood before the mirror, examining his face, seeking wildness, recklessness there. But it bore its customary expression of polite faint alarm, and he smoothed his hair, thinking of the sweet passive sag of that deckchair . . . yes, almost directly over ​his head. . . . He rushed back on deck in a surge of fear that she had waked and risen, gone away. He restrained himself by an effort to a more sedate pace, reconnoitering the deck. All was well.
He smoked his cigarette in short nervous puffs, hearing his heart, tasting that warm salt. Yes, his hand was actually trembling, and he stood in a casual attitude, looking about at water and sky and shore. Then he moved, and still with casualness he strolled back to where Jenny slept, unchanged her supine abandon, soft and oblivious and terrifying.
Mr. Talliaferro bent over her. Then he got on one knee, then on both knees. Jenny slept ineffably, breathing her sweet regular breath upon his face . . . he wondered if he could rise quickly enough, in an emergency . . . he rose and looked about, then tiptoed across the deck and still on tiptoe he fetched another chair and set it beside Jenny’s, and sat down. But it was for reclining, so he tried sitting on the edge of it. Too high, and amid his other chaotic emotions was a harried despair of futility and an implacable passing of opportunity. While all the time it was as though he stood nearby yet aloof, watching his own antics. He lit another cigarette with hands that trembled, took three puffs that he did not taste, and cast it away.
Hard this floor his old knees yes yes Jenny her breath Yes yes her red soft mouth where little teeth but showed parted blondeness a golden pink swirl kaleidoscopic a single blue eye not come fully awake her breath yes yes He felt eyes again, knew they were there, but he cast all things away, and sprawled nuzzling for Jenny’s mouth as she came awake.
“Wake sleeping princess Kiss,” Mr. Talliaferro jabbered in a dry falsetto. Jenny squealed, moving her head a little. Then ​she came fully awake and got her hand under Mr. Talliaferro’s chin. “Wake princess with kiss,” Mr. Talliaferro repeated, laughing a thin hysterical laugh, obsessed with an utter and dreadful need to complete the gesture.
Jenny heaved herself up, thrusting Mr. Talliaferro back on his heels. “Whatcher doing, you old—” Jenny glared at him, and seeking about in that vague pinkish region which was her mind, she brought forth finally an expression such as a steam-boat mate or a railroad flagman, heated with wine, might apply to his temporary Saturday night Phillida, who would charge him for it by the letter, like a cablegram.
Jenny watched Mr. Talliaferro’s dapper dispersion with soft, blonde indignation. When he had disappeared she flopped back again. Then she snorted, a soft, indignant sound, and turned again onto her side. Once more she expelled her breath with righteous indignation, and soon thereafter she drowsed again and slept.
nine o’clock
It was a sleazy scrap of slightly soiled applegreen crêpe and its principal purpose seemed to be that of indicating vaguely the shape of Jenny’s behind, as she danced, caressing the twin soft points of her thighs with the lingering sterility of an aged lover. It looked as if she might have slept in it recently, and there was also a small hat of pale straw, of no particular shape, ribboned.
Jenny slid about in Mr. Talliaferro’s embrace with placid skill. She and Pete had just quarreled bitterly. Pete had, that is. Jenny’s bovine troubling placidity had merely dissolved into tears, causing her eyes to be more ineffable than ever, and she had gone calmly about what she had intended all the time: to have as much fun as she could, as long as she was here. Pete couldn’t walk out on her: all he could do would be ​to fuss at her or sulk, or maybe hit her. He had done that once, thereby voluntarily making himself her bond slave. She had rather liked it. . . .
Beyond lights, beyond the sound of the victrola, water was a minor ceaseless sound in the darkness; above, vague drowsy stars. Jenny danced on placidly, untroubled by Mr. Talliaferro’s endless flow of soft words against her neck, hardly conscious of his hand sliding a small concentric circle at the small of her back.
“She looks kind of nice, don’t she?” Fairchild said to his companion as they stood at the head of the companionway, come up for air. “Kind of soft and stupid and young, you know. Passive, and at the same time troubling, challenging.” He watched them for a time, then he added: “Now, there goes the Great Illusion, par excellence.”
“What’s Talliaferro’s trouble?” asked the Semitic man.
“The illusion that you can seduce women. Which you can’t. They just elect you.”
“And then, Gold help you,” the other added.
“And with words, at that,” Fairchild continued. “With words,” he repeated savagely.
“Well, why not with words? One thing gets along with women as well as another. And you are a funny sort to disparage words; you, a member of that species all of whose actions are controlled by words. It’s the word that overturns thrones and political parties and instigates vice crusades, not things: the Thing is merely the symbol for the Word. And more than that, think what a devil of a fix you and I’d be in were it not for words, were we to lose our faith in words. I’d have nothing to do all day long, and you’d have to work or starve to death.” He was silent for a while. Jenny yet slid and poised, pleasuring her soft young placidity, “And, after all, his illusion is just as nourishing as yours. Or mine, either.”
​“I know: but yours or mine ain’t quite so ridiculous as his is.”
“How do you know they aren’t?” Fairchild had no reply, and the other continued: “After all, it doesn’t make any difference what you believe. Man is not only nourished by convictions, he is nourished by any conviction. Whatever you believe, you'll always annoy some one, but you yourself will follow and bleed and die for it in the face of law, hell or high water. And those who die for causes will perish for any cause, the more tawdry it is, the quicker they flock to it. And be quite happy at it, too. It’s a provision of providence to keep their time occupied.” He sucked at his cigar, but it was dead.
“Do you know who is the happiest man in the world today? Mussolini, of course. And do you know who are next? The poor devils he will get killed with his Cæsar illusion. Don’t pity them, however: were it not Mussolini and his illusion it would be some one else and his cause. I believe it is some grand cosmic scheme for fertilizing the earth. And it could be so much worse,” he added. “Who knows? They might all migrate to America and fall into the hands of Henry Ford.
“So don’t you go around feeling superior to Talliaferro. I think his present illusion and its object are rather charming, almost as charming as the consummation of it would be—which is more than you can say for yours.” He held a match to his cigar. His sucking, intent face came abruptly out of the darkness, and as abruptly vanished again. He flipped the match toward the rail. “And so do you, you poor emotional eunuch; so do you, despite that bastard of a surgeon and a stenographer which you call your soul, so do you remember with regret kissing in the dark and all the tender and sweet stupidity of young flesh.”
“Hell,” said Fairchild, “let’s have another drink.”
​His friend was too kind, too tactful to say I told you so.
Mrs. Maurier captured them as they reached the stairs. “Here you are,” she exclaimed brightly, prisoning their arms; “come: let’s all dance a while. We need men. Eva has taken Mark away from Dorothy, and she has no partner. Come, Mr. Fairchild; Julius.”
“Were coming back,” Fairchild answered, “we’re going now to hunt up Gordon and the Major, and we’ll all come right back.”
“No, no,” she said soothingly, “we'll send the steward for them. Come, now.”
“I think we better go,” Fairchild objected quickly. “The steward has been working hard all day: he’s tired out, I expect. And Gordon’s kind of timid; he might not come if you send a servant for him.” She released them doubtfully, staring at them with her round, astonished face.
“You will . . .? Do come back, Mr. Fairchild.”
“Sure, sure,” Fairchild replied, descending hastily.
“Julius,” Mrs. Maurier called after them helplessly.
“I’ll bring them up in ten minutes,” the Semitic man promised, following. Mrs. Maurier watched them until they had passed from view, then she turned away. Jenny and Mr. Talliaferro were still dancing, as were Mrs. Wiseman and the ghostly poet. Miss Jameson, partnerless, sat at the card table playing solitaire. Mrs. Maurier looked on until the record played itself through. Then she said firmly:
“I think we’d better change partners among ourselves until the men come up.”
Mr. Talliaferro released Jenny obediently, and Jenny, released, stood around for a while, then she drifted away and down the deck, passing that tall ugly man leaning alone at the rail, and further along the niece spoke from the shadow:
​“Going to bed?”
Jenny paused and turning her head toward the voice she saw the faint glint of Pete’s hat. She went on. “Uhuh,” she replied. The moon was getting up, rising out of the dark water: a tarnished, implacable Venus.
Her aunt came along soon, prowling, peering fretfully into shadowy chairs and obscure corners, implacable and tactless as a minor disease.
“My Lord, what’ve we got to do now?” the niece moaned. She sighed. “She sure makes life real and earnest for everybody, that woman does.”
“Dance, I guess,” Pete answered. The vicious serrated rim of his hat, where the moon fell upon it, glinted dully like a row of filed teeth, like a gaping lithograph of a charging shark.
“Guess so. Say, I’m going to fade out. Stall her off some way, or run yourself would be better.” The niece rose hurriedly. “So long. See you to-m— Oh, you coming too?”
They stepped behind the companionway housing and flattened themselves against it, listening to Mrs. Maurier’s fretful prowling, and clutching Pete’s hand for caution the niece craned her head around the corner. “There’s Dorothy, too,” she whispered and she withdrew her head and they flattened themselves closer yet, clutching hands, while the two searchers passed, pausing to peer into every obscurity.
But they went on, finally, passing from sight, and the niece wriggled her fingers free and moved, and moving found that she had turned into Pete’s arm and against his dark shape and the reckless angle of his hat topping it.
An interval like that between two fencers ere they engage, then Pete’s arm moved with confidence and his other arm came about her shoulders with a technique that was forcing her face upward. She was so still that he stopped again in a momentary flagging of confidence, and out of this lull a hard elbow ​came without force but steadily under his chin. “Try it on your saxophone, Pete,” she told him without alarm.
His hand moved again and caught her wrist, but she held her elbow jammed against his windpipe, increasing the pressure as he tried to remove her arm, their bodies taut against each other and without motion. Some one approached again and he released her, but before they could dodge again around the corner Miss Jameson saw them.
“Who is that?” she said in her high humorless voice. She drew nearer, peering. “Oh, I recognize Pete’s hat. Mrs. Maurier wants you.” She peered at them suspiciously. “What are you folks doing here?”
“Hiding from Aunt Pat,” the niece answered. “What’s she going to make us do, now?”
“Why. . . nothing. She—we ought to be more sociable. Don’t you think so? We never are all together, you know. Anyway, she wants to see Pete. Aren’t you coming too?”
“I’m going to bed. Pete can go if he wants to risk it, though.” She turned away. Miss Jameson put her hand on Pete’s sleeve.
“You don’t mind if I take Pete. then?” she persisted intensely.
“I don’t if he don’t,” the niece replied. She went on. “Good night.”
“That child ought to be spanked,” Miss Jameson said viciously. She slid her hand through Pete’s elbow. “Come on, Pete.”
The niece stood and rubbed one bare sole against the other shin, hearing their footsteps retreating toward the lights and the fatuous reiteration of the victrola. She rubbed her foot rhythmically up and down her shin, gazing out upon the water where the moon had begun to spread her pallid and boneless ​hand. . . . Her foot ceased its motion and she remained motionless for a space. Then she stood on one leg and raised the other one. Under her fingers was a small, hard bump, slightly feverish. Gabriel’s pants, she whispered, they’ve found us again. But there was nothing for it except to wait until the tug came. “And finds a lot of picked bones,” she added aloud. She went on across the deck; at the stairs she stopped again.
It was David, standing there at the rail, his shirt blanching in the level moonlight, against the dark shoreline. She went over beside him, silent on her bare feet.
“Hello, David,” she said quietly, putting her elbows on the rail beside his and hunching her shoulders and crossing her legs as his were. “This would be a good night to be on our mountain, looking down at the lake and the little boats all lighted up, wouldn’t it? I guess this time next summer we'll be there, won’t we? And lots of other places, where you went to. You know nice things, don’t you? When we come back, I’ll know nice things, too.” She gazed downward upon the dark, ceaseless water. It was never still, never the same, and on it moonlight was broken into little fleeting silver wings rising and falling and changing.
“Wish I were in it,” she said, “swimming around in the moonlight. . . . You won’t forget about in the morning, will you?” No, he told her watching her crossed thin arms and the cropped crown of her head. “Say,” she looked up at him, “I tell you what: let’s go in to-night.”
“Now?”
“When the moon gets up more. Aunt Pat wouldn’t let me go now, anyway. But about twelve, when they’ve gone to bed. What do you say?” He looked at her, looked at her in such a strange fashion that she said sharply: “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” he answered at last.
​“Well, I’ll meet you about twelve o’clock, then. I’ll get Gus’ bathing suit for you. Don’t forget, now.”
“No,” he repeated. And when she reached the stairs and looked back at him he was still watching her in that strange manner. But she didn’t puzzle over it long.
ten o'clock
Jenny had the cabin to herself. Mrs.—, that one whose name she always forgot, was still on deck. She could hear them talking, and Mr. Fairchild’s jolly laugh came from somewhere, though he hadn’t been upstairs when she left; and the muted nasal sound of the victrola and thumping feet just over her head. Still dancing. Should she go back? She sat holding a handglass, staring into it, but the handglass was bland, reminding her that after all this was one night she didn’t have to dance any more. And you have to dance so many nights. To-morrow night, perhaps, it said. But I don’t have to dance to-morrow night, she thought . . . staring into the glass and sitting utterly motionless. . . . Its thin whine rose keening to an ecstatic point and in the glass she saw it mar her throat with a small gray speck. She slapped savagely. It eluded her with a weary, practised skill, hanging fuzzily between her and the unshaded light.
My Lord, why do you want to go to Mandeville? she thought. Her palms flashed, smacking cleanly, and Jenny examined her hand with distaste. Where do they carry so much blood she wondered, rubbing her palm on the back of her stocking. And so young, too. I hope that’s the last one. It must have been, for there was no sound save a small lapping whisper of water and a troubling faraway suggestion of brass broken by a monotonous thumping of feet over her head. Dancing still. You really don’t have to dance at all, thought Jenny, yawning into the glass, examining with interest the ​pink and seemingly endless curve of her gullet, when the door opened and the girl, Patricia, entered the room. She wore a raincoat over her pajamas and Jenny saw her reflected face in the mirror.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello,” the niece replied, “I thought you’d have stayed up there prancing around with ’em.”
“Lord,” Jenny said, “you don’t have to dance all your life, do you? You don’t seem to be there.”
The niece thrust her hands into the raincoat pockets and stared about the small room. “Don’t you close that window when you undress?” she asked. “Standing wide open like that. . .”
Jenny put the mirror down. “That window? I don’t guess there’s anybody out there this time of night.”
The niece went to the port and saw a pale sky bisected laterally by a dark rigidity of water. The moon spread her silver hand on it; a broadening path of silver, and in the path the water came alive ceaselessly, no longer rigid. “I guess not,” she murmured. “The only man who could walk on water is dead. . . . Which one is yours?” She threw off the raincoat and turned toward the two berths. The lower garment of her pajamas was tied about her waist with a man’s frayed necktie.
“Is he?” Jenny murmured with detachment. “That one,” she answered vaguely, twisting her body to examine the back of one reverted leg. After a while she looked up. “That ain’t mine. That’s Mrs. What’s-her-name’s you are in.”
“Well, it don’t make any difference.” The niece lay flat, spreading her arms and legs luxuriously. “Gimme a cigarette. Have you got any?”
“I haven’t got any. I don’t smoke.” Jenny’s leg was satisfactory, so she unwrithed herself.
​“You don’t smoke? Why don’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Jenny replied, “I just don’t.”
“Look around and see if Eva’s got some somewhere.” The niece raised her head. “Go on: look in her things, she won’t mind.”
Jenny hunted for cigarettes in a soft blonde futility. “Pete’s got some,” she remarked after a time. “He bought twenty packages just before we left town, to bring on the boat.”
“Twenty packages? Good Lord, where’d he think we were going? He must have been scared of shipwreck or something.”
“I guess so.”
“Gabriel’s pants,” the niece said. “That’s all he brought, was it? Just cigarettes? What did you bring?”
“I brought a comb,” Jenny dragged her little soiled dress over her head. Her voice was muffled, “and some rouge.” She shook out her drowsy gold hair and let the dress fall to the floor. “Pete’s got some, though,” she repeated, thrusting the dress beneath the dressing table with her foot.
“I know,” the niece rejoined, “and so has Mr. Fairchild. And so has the steward, if Mark Frost hasn’t borrowed ’em all. And I saw the captain smoking one, too. But that’s not doing me any good.”
“No,” agreed Jenny placidly. Her undergarment was quite pink, enveloping her from shoulder to knee with ribbons and furbelows. She loosened a few of these and stepped sweetly and rosily out of it, casting it also under the table.
“You aren’t going to leave “em there, are you?” the niece asked. “Why don’t you put ’em on the chair?”
“Mrs.—Mrs. Wiseman puts hers on the chair.”
“Well, you got here first: why don’t you take it? Or hang ’em on those hooks behind the door?”
“Hooks?” Jenny looked at the door. “Oh. . . . They'll be all right there, I guess.” She stripped off her stockings and ​laid them on the dressing table. Then she turned to the mirror again and picked up her comb. The comb passed through her fair, soft hair with a faint sound, as of silk, and her hair lent to Jenny’s divine body a halo like an angel’s. The remote victrola, measured feet, a lapping of water, came into the room.
“You’ve got a funny figure,” the niece remarked after a while, calmly, watching her.
“Funny?” repeated Jenny, looking up with soft belligerence. “It’s no funnier than yours. At least my legs don’t look like birds’ legs.”
“Neither do mine,” the other replied with complacence, flat on her back. “Your legs are all right. I mean, you are kind of thick through the middle for your legs; kind of big behind for them.”
“Well, why not? I didn’t make it like that, did I?”
“Oh, sure. I guess it’s all right if you like it to be that way.”
Without apparent effort Jenny dislocated her hip and stared downward over her shoulder. Then she turned sideways and accepted the mute proffering of the mirror. Reassured, she said: “Sure, it’s all right. I expect to be bigger than that, in front, some day.”
“So do I . . . when I have to. But what do you want one for?”
“Lord,” said Jenny, “I guess I’ll have a whole litter of ’em. Besides, I think they’re kind of cute, don’t you?”
The sound of the victrola came down, melodious and nasal, and measured feet marked away the lapping of waves. The light was small and inadequate, sunk into the ceiling, and Jenny and the niece agreed that they were kind of cute and pink. Jenny was quite palpably on the point of coming to bed and the other said: ​“Don’t you wear any nightclothes?”
“I can’t wear that thing Mrs. What’s-her-name lent me,” Jenny replied. “You said you were going to lend me something, only you didn’t. If I’d depended on you on this trip, I guess I’d be back yonder about ten miles, trying to swim home.”
“That’s right. But it doesn’t make any difference what you sleep in, does it?. . . Turn off the light.” Light followed Jenny rosily as she crossed the room, it slid rosily upon her as she turned obediently toward the switch beside the door. The niece lay flat on her back gazing at the unshaded globe. Jenny’s angelic nakedness went beyond her vision and suddenly she stared at nothing with a vague orifice vaguely in the center of it, and beyond the orifice a pale moonfilled sky.
Jenny’s bare feet hissed just a little on the uncarpeted floor and she came breathing softly in the dark, and her hand came out of the dark. The niece moved over against the wall. The round orifice in the center of the dark was obscured, then it reappeared, and breathing with a soft blonde intentness Jenny climbed gingerly into the berth. But she bumped her head anyway, lightly, and she exclaimed “ow” with placid surprise. The bunk heaved monstrously, creaking; the porthole vanished again, then the berth became still and Jenny sighed with a soft explosive sound.
Then she changed her position again and the other said: “Be still, can’t you?” thrusting at Jenny’s boneless, naked abandon with her elbow.
“I’m not fixed yet,” Jenny replied without rancor.
“Well, get in then, and quit flopping around.”
Jenny became lax. “I’m fixed now,” she said at last. She sighed again, a frank yawning sound.
Those slightly dulled feet thudthudded monotonously overhead. Outside, in the pale darkness, water lapped at the hull ​of the yacht. The close cabin emptied slowly of heat; heat ebbed steadily away now that the light was off, and in it was no sound save that of their breathing. No other sound at all. “I hope that was the last one, the one I killed,” Jenny murmured.
“God, yes,” the niece agreed. “This party is wearing enough with just people on it. . . . Say, how’d you like to be on a party with a boatful of Mr. Talliaferros?”
“Which one is he?”
“Why, don’t you remember him? You sure ought to. He’s that funny talking little man that puts his hands on you—that dreadful polite one. I don’t see how you could forget a man as polite as him.”
“Oh, yes,” said Jenny, remembering, and the other said:
“Say, Jenny, how about Pete?”
Jenny became utterly still for a moment. Then she said innocently: “What about him?”
“He’s mad at you about Mr. Talliaferro, isn’t he?”
“Pete’s all right, I guess.”
“You keep yourself all cluttered up with men, don’t you?” the other asked curiously.
“Well, you got to do something,” Jenny defended herself.
“Bunk,” the niece said roughly, “bunk. You like petting. That’s the reason. Don’t you?”
“Well, I don’t mind,” Jenny answered. “I’ve kind of got used to it,” she explained. The niece expelled her breath in a thin snorting sound and Jenny repeated: “You’ve got to do something, haven’t you?”
“Oh, sweet attar of bunk,” the niece said. In the darkness she made a gesture of disgust. “You women! That’s the way Dorothy Jameson thinks about it too, I bet. You better look out: I think she’s trying to take Peter away from you.”
“Oh, Pete’s all right,” Jenny repeated placidly. She lay ​perfectly still again. The water was a cool dim sound. Jenny spoke, suddenly confidential.
“Say, you know what she wants Pete to do?”
“No: What?” asked the niece quickly.
“Well— Say, what kind of a girl is she? Do you know her very good?”
“What does she want Pete to do?” the other insisted.
Jenny was silent. Then she blurted in prim disapproval: “She wants Pete to let her paint him.”
“Yes? And then what?”
“That’s it. She wants Pete to let her paint him in a picture.”
“Well, that’s the way she usually goes about getting men, I guess. What’s wrong with it?”
“Well, it’s the wrong way to go about getting Pete. Pete’s not used to that,” Jenny replied in that prim tone.
“I don’t blame him for not wanting to waste his time that way. But what makes you and Pete so surprised at the idea of it? Pete won’t catch lead poisoning just from having his portrait painted.”
“Well, it may be all right for folks like you all. But Pete says he wouldn’t let any strange woman see him without any clothes on. He’s not used to things like that.”
“Oh,” remarked the niece. Then: “So that’s the way she wants to paint him, is it?”
“Why, that’s the way they always do it, ain’t it? In the nude?” Jenny pronounced it nood.
“Good Lord, didn’t you ever see a picture of anybody with clothes on? Where’d you get that idea from? From the movies?”
Jenny didn’t reply. Then she said suddenly: “Besides, the ones with clothes on are all old ladies, or mayors or something. Anyway, I thought . . .”
​“Thought what?”
“Nothing,” Jenny answered, and the other said:
“Pete can get that idea right out of his head. Chances are she wants to paint him all regular and respectable, not to shock his modesty at all. I’ll tell him so, to-morrow.”
“Never mind,” Jenny said quickly, “I’ll tell him. You needn’t to bother about it.”
“All right. Whatever you like. . . . Wish I had a cigarette.” They lay quiet for a time. Outside water whispered against the hull. The victrola was hushed temporarily and the dancers had ceased. Jenny moved again, onto her side, facing the other in the darkness.
“Say,” she asked, “what’s your brother making?”
“Gus? Why don’t you ask him yourself?”
“I did, only. . .”
“What?”
“Only he didn’t tell me. At least, I don’t remember.”
“What did he say when you asked him?”
Jenny mused briefly. “He kissed me. Before I knew it, and he kind of patted me back here and told me to call again later, because he was in conference or something like that.”
“Gabriel’s pants,” the niece murmured. Then she said sharply: “Look here, you leave Josh alone, you hear? Haven’t you got enough with Pete and Mr. Talliaferro, without fooling with children?”
“I’m not going to fool with any children.”
“Well, please don’t. Let Josh alone, anyway.” She moved her arm, arching her elbow against Jenny’s soft nakedness. “Move over some. Gee, woman, you sure do feel indecent. Get over on your side a little, can’t you?”
Jenny moved away, rolling onto her back again, and they lay quiet, side by side in the dark. “Say,” remarked Jenny ​presently, “Mr.— that polite man—” “Talliaferro,” the other prompted. “—Talliaferro. I wonder if he’s got a car?”
“I don’t know. You better ask him. What do you keep on asking me what people are making or what they’ve got, for?”
“Taxicabbers are best, I think,” Jenny continued, unruffled. “Sometimes when they have cars they don’t have anything else. They just take you riding.”
“I don’t know,” the niece repeated. “Say,” she said suddenly, “what was that you said to him this afternoon?”
Jenny said, “Oh.” She breathed placidly and regularly for a while. Then she remarked: “I thought you were there, around that corner.”
“Yes. What was it? Say it again.” Jenny said it again. The niece repeated it after her. “What does it mean?”
“I don’t know. I just happened to remember it. I don’t know what it means.”
“It sounds good,” the other said. “You didn’t think it up yourself, did you?”
“No. It was a fellow told it to me. There was two couples of us at the Market one night, getting coffee: me and Pete and a girl friend of mine and another fellow. We had been to Mandeville on the boat that day, swimming and dancing. Say, there was a man drownded at Mandeville that day. Pete and Thelma, my girl friend, and Roy, this girl friend of mine’s fellow, saw it. I didn’t see it because I wasn’t with them. I didn’t go in bathing with them: it was too sunny. I don’t think blondes ought to expose themselves to hot sun like brunettes, do you?”
“Why not? But what about—”
“Oh, yes. Anyway, I didn’t go in swimming where the man got drownded. I was waiting for them, and I got to talking to a funny man. A little kind of black man—”
“A nigger?”
​“No. He was a white man, except he was awful sunburned and kind of shabby dressed—no necktie and hat. Say, he said some funny things to me. He said I had the best digestion he ever saw, and he said if the straps of my dress was to break Id devastate the country. He said he was a liar by profession, and he made good money at it, enough to own a Ford as soon as he got it paid out. I think he was crazy. Not dangerous: just crazy.”
The niece lay quiet. She said, contemplatively: “You do look like they feed you on bread and milk and put you to bed at sunset every day. . . . What was his name? Did he tell you?” she asked suddenly.
“Yes. It was...” Jenny pondered a while. “I remembered it because he was such a funny kind of man. It was . . . Walker or Foster or something.”
“Walker or Foster? Well, which one was it?”
“It must be Foster because I remembered it by it began with a F like my girl friend’s middle name—Frances. Thelma Frances, only she don’t use both of them. Only I don’t think it was Foster, because—”
“You don’t remember it, then.”
“Yes, I do. Wait. . . . Oh, yes: I remember—Faulkner, that was it.”
“Faulkner?” the niece pondered in turn. “Never heard of him,” she said at last, with finality. “And he was the one that told you that thing?”
“No. It was after that, when we had come back to N.O. That crazy man was on the boat coming back. He got to talking to Pete and Roy while me and Thelma was fixing up downstairs, and he danced with Thelma. He wouldn’t dance with me because he said he didn’t dance very well, and so he had to keep his mind on the music while he danced. He said he could dance with either Roy or Thelma or Pete, but he ​couldn’t dance with me. I think he was crazy. Don’t you?”
“It all sounds crazy, the way you tell it. But what about the one that said that to you?”
“Oh, yes. Well, we was at the Market. There was a big crowd there because it was Sunday night, see, and these other fellows was there. One of them was a snappy looking fellow, and I kind of looked at him. Pete had stopped in a place to get some cigarettes, and me and Thelma and Roy was crowded in with a lot of folks, having coffee. So I kind of looked at this goodlooking fellow.”
“Yes. You kind of looked at him. Go on.”
“All right. And so this goodlooking fellow crowded in behind me and started talking to me. There was a man in between me and Roy, and this fellow that was talking to me said, Is he with you? talking about the man sitting next to me, and I said, No, I didn’t know who he was. And this fellow said, How about coming out with him because he had his car parked outside . . . Pete’s brother has a lot of cars. One of them is the same as Pete’s . . . And then . . . Oh, yes, and I said, where will we go, because my old man didn’t like for me to go out with strangers, and the fellow said he wasn’t a stranger, that anybody could tell me who some name was, I forgot what it was he said his name was. And I said he better ask Pete if I could go, and he said, Who was Pete? Well, there was a big man standing near where we was. He was big as a stevedore, and just then this big man happened to look at me again. He looked at me a minute, and I kind of knew that he’d look at me again pretty soon, so I told this fellow talking to me that he was Pete, and when the big man looked somewheres else a minute this fellow said that to me. And then the big man looked at me again, and the fellow that said that to me kind of went away. So I got up and went ​to where Thelma and Roy was, and pretty soon Pete came back. And that’s how I learned it.”
“Well, it sure sounds good. I wonder . . . Say, let me say it sometimes, will you?”
“All right,” Jenny agreed. “You can have it. Say, what’s that you keep telling your aunt? something about pulling up the sheet or something?” The niece told her. “That sounds good, too,” Jenny said magnanimously.
“Does it? I tell you what: You let me use yours sometime, and you can take mine. How about it?”
“All right,” Jenny agreed again, “it’s a trade.”
Water lapped and whispered ceaselessly in the pale darkness. The curve of the low ceiling directly over the berth lent a faint sense of oppression to the cabin, but this sense of oppression faded out into the comparatively greater spaciousness of the room, of the darkness with a round orifice vaguely in the center of it. The moon was higher and the lower curve of the brass rim of the port was now a thin silver sickle, like a new moon.
Jenny moved again, turning against the other’s side, breathing ineffably across the niece’s face. The niece lay with Jenny’s passive nakedness against her arm, and moving her arm outward from the elbow she slowly stroked the back of her hand along the swell of Jenny’s flank. Slowly, back and forth, while Jenny lay supine and receptive as a cat. Slowly, back and forth and back . . . “I like flesh,” the niece murmured. “Warm and smooth. Wish I’d lived in Rome. . . oiled gladiators. . . . Jenny,” she said abruptly, “are you a virgin?”
“Of course I am,” Jenny answered immediately in a startled tone. She lay for a moment in lax astonishment. “I mean,” she said, “I—yes. I mean, yes, of course I am.” She ​brooded in passive surprise, then her body lost its laxness.
“Say—”
“Well,” the niece agreed judicially, “I guess that’s about what I’d have said, myself.”
“Say,” demanded Jenny, thoroughly aroused, “what did you ask me that for?”
“Just to see what you’d say. It doesn’t make any difference, you know, whether you are or not. I know lots of girls that say they’re not. I don’t think all of ’em are lying, either.”
“Maybe it don’t to some folks,” Jenny rejoined primly, “but I don’t approve of it. I think a girl loses a man’s respect by pom—prom—I don’t approve of it, that’s all. And I don’t think you had any right to ask me.”
“Good Lord, you sound like a girl scout or something. Don’t Pete ever try to persuade you otherwise?”
“Say, what’re you asking me questions like that for?”
“I just wanted to see what you’d say. I don’t think it’s anything to tear your shirt over. You’re too easily shocked, Jenny,” the niece informed her.
“Well, who wouldn’t be? If you want to know what folks say when you ask ’em things like that, why don’t you ask ’em to yourself? Did anybody ever ask you if you were one?”
“Not that I know of. But I wou—”
“Well, are you?”
The niece lay perfectly still a moment. “Am I what?”
“Are you a virgin?”
“Why, of course I am,” she answered sharply. She raised herself on her elbow. “I mean— Say, look here—”
“Well, that’s what I’d ’a’ said, myself,” Jenny responded with placid malice from the darkness.
The niece poised on her tense elbow above Jenny’s sweet regular breathing. “Anyway, what bus—I mean— You asked ​me so quick,” she rushed on, “I wasn’t even thinking about being asked something like that.”
“Neither was I. You asked me quicker than I asked you.”
“But that was different. We were talking about you being one. We were not even thinking about me being one. You asked it so quick I had to say that. It wasn’t fair.”
“So did I have to say what I said. It was as fair for you as it was for me.”
“No, it was different. I had to say I wasn’t: quick, like that.”
“Well, I’ll ask it when you’re not surprised, then. Are you?”
The niece lay quiet for a time. “You mean, sure enough?”
“Yes.” Jenny breathed her warm intent breath across the other’s face.
The niece lay silent again. After a time she said: “Hell,” and then: “Yes, I am. It’s not worth lying about.”
“That’s what I think,” Jenny agreed smugly. She became placidly silent in the darkness. The other waited a moment, then said sharply:
“Well? Are you one?”
“Sure I am.”
“I mean, sure enough. You said sure enough, didn’t you?”
“Sure, I am,” Jenny repeated.
“You’re not playing fair,” the niece accused, “I told you.”
“Well, I told you, too.”
“Honest? You swear?”
“Sure, I am,” Jenny said again with her glib and devastating placidity.
The niece said, “Hell.” She snorted thinly.
They lay quiet, side by side. They were quiet on deck, too, but it seemed as though there still lingered in the darkness a thin stubborn ghost of syncopation and thudding tireless ​feet. Jenny wiggled her free toes with pleasure. Presently she said:
“You're mad, ain’t you?” No reply. “You’ve got a good figure, too,” Jenny offered, conciliatory. “I think you’ve got a right sweet little shape.”
But the other refused to be cajoled. Jenny sighed again ineffably, her milk-and-honey breath. She said: “Your brother’s a college boy, ain’t he? I know some college boys. Tulane. I think college boys are cute. They don’t dress as well as Pete . . . sloppy.” She mused for a time. “I wore a frat pin once, for a couple of days. I guess your brother belongs to it, don’t he?”
“Gus? Belong to one of these jerkwater clubs? I guess not. He’s a Yale man—he will be next month, that is. I’m going with him. They don’t take every Tom, Dick and Harry that shows up in up there. You have to wait until sophomore year. But Gus is going to work for a senior society, anyhow. He don’t think much of fraternities. Gee, you’d sure give him a laugh if he could hear you.”
“Well, I didn’t know. It seems to me one thing you join is about like another. What’s he going to get by joining the one he’s going to join?”
“You don’t get anything, stupid. You just join it.”
Jenny pondered this a while. “And you have to work to join it?”
“Three years. And only a few make it, then.”
“And if you do make it, you don’t get anything except a little button or something? Good Lord . . . Say, you know what I’m going to tell him to-morrow? I’m going to tell him he better hold up the sheet: he’s—he’s— What’s the rest of it?”
“Oh, shut up and get over on your side,” the niece said ​sharply, turning her back. “You don’t understand anything about it.”
“I sure don’t,” Jenny agreed, rolling away and onto her other side, and they lay with their backs to each other and their behinds just touching, as children do. . . . “Three years. . . Good Lord.”
Fairchild had not returned. But she had known they would not: she was not even surprised, and so once more her party had evolved into interminable cards. Mrs. Wiseman, herself, Mr. Talliaferro and Mark. By craning her neck she could see Dorothy Jameson’s frail humorless intentness and the tawdry sophistication of Jenny’s young man where they swung their legs from the roof of the wheelhouse. The moon was getting up and Pete’s straw hat was a dull implacable gleam slanted above the red eye of his eternal cigarette. And, yes, there was that queer, shy, shabby Mr. Gordon, mooning alone, as usual; and again she felt a stab of reproof for having neglected him. At least the others seemed to be enjoying the voyage, however trying they might be to one another. But what could she do for him? He was so difficult, so ill at ease whenever she extended herself for him. . . Mrs. Maurier rose.
“For a while,” she explained; “Mr. Gordon. . . the trials of a hostess, you know. You might play dummy until I—no: wait.” She called Dorothy with saccharine insistence and presently Miss Jameson responded. “Won’t you take my hand for a short time? I’m sure the young gentleman will excuse you.”
“I’m sorry,” Miss Jameson called back. “I have a headache. Please excuse me.”
“Go on, Mrs. Maurier,” Mrs. Wiseman said, “we can pass ​the time until you come back: we’ve got used to sitting around.”
“Yes, do,” Mr. Talliaferro added, “we understand.”
Mrs. Maurier looked over to where Gordon still leaned his tall body upon the rail. “I really must,” she explained again. “It’s such a comfort to have a few on whom I can depend.”
“Yes, do,” Mr. Talliaferro repeated.
When she had gone Mrs. Wiseman said: “Let’s play red dog for pennies. I’ve got a few dollars left.”
She joined him quietly. He glanced his gaunt face at her, glanced away. “How quiet, how peaceful it is,” she began, undeterred, leaning beside him and gazing also out across the restless slumber of water upon which the worn moon spread her ceaseless peacock’s tail like a train of silver sequins. In the yet level rays of the moon the man’s face was spare and cavernous, haughty and inhuman almost. He doesn’t get enough to eat, she knew suddenly and infallibly. It’s like a silver faun’s face, she thought. But he is so difficult, so shy. . . . “So few of us take time to look inward and contemplate ourselves, don’t you think? It’s the life we lead, I suppose. Only he who creates has not lost the art of this: of making his life complete by living within himself. Don’t you think so, Mr. Gordon?”
“Yes,” he answered shortly. Beyond the dimensionless curve of the deck on which he stood he could see, forward and downward, the stem of the yacht: a pure triangle of sheer white with small waves lapping at its horizontal leg, breaking and flashing each with its particle of shattered moonlight, making a ceaseless small whispering. Mrs. Maurier moved her hands in a gesture: moonlight smoldered greenly amid her rings.
“To live within yourself, to be sufficient unto yourself. ​There is so much unhappiness in the world . . .” she sighed again with astonishment. “To go through life, keeping yourself from becoming involved in it, to gather inspiration for your Work—ah, Mr. Gordon, how lucky you who create are. As for we others, the best we can hope is that sometime, somewhere, somehow we may be fortunate enough to furnish that inspiration, or the setting for it, at least. But, after all, that would be an end in itself, I think. To know that one had given her mite to Art, no matter how humble the mite or the giver . . . The humble laborer, Mr. Gordon: she, too, has her place in the scheme of things; she, too, has given something to the world, has walked where gods have trod. And I do so hope that you will find on this voyage something to compensate you for having been taken away from your Work.”
“Yes,” said Gordon again, staring at her with his arrogant uncomfortable stare. The man looks positively uncanny, she thought with a queer cold feeling within her. Like an animal, a beast of some sort. Her own gaze fluttered away and despite herself she glanced quickly over her shoulder to the reassuring group at the card table. Dorothy’s and Jenny’s young man’s legs swung innocent and rhythmic from the top of the wheelhouse, and as she looked Pete snapped his cigarette outward and into the dark water, twinkling.
“But to be a world in oneself, to regard the antics of man as one would a puppet show—ah, Mr. Gordon, how happy you must be.”
“Yes,” he repeated. Sufficient unto himself in the city of his arrogance, in the marble tower of his loneliness and pride, and . . . She coming into the dark sky of his life like a star, like a flame . . . O bitter and new . . . Somewhere within him was a far dreadful laughter, unheard; his whole life was become toothed with jeering laughter, and he faced the old woman again, putting his hand on her and turning her face upward ​into the moonlinght. Mrs. Maurier knew utter fear. Not fright, fear: a passive and tragic condition like a dream. She whispered Mr. Gordon, but made no sound.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said harshly, staring at her face as a surgeon might. “Tell me about her,” he commanded. “Why aren’t you her mother, so you could tell me how conceiving her must have been, how carrying her in your loins must have been?”
Mr. Gordon! she implored through her dry lips, without making a sound. His hand moved over her face, learning the bones of her forehead and eyesockets and nose through her flesh.
“There’s something in your face, something behind all this silliness,” he went on in his cold level voice while an interval of frozen time refused to pass. His hand pinched the loose sag of flesh around her mouth, slid along the fading line of her cheek and jaw. “I suppose you’ve had what you call your sorrows, too, haven’t you?”
“Mr. Gordon!” she said at last, finding her voice. He released her as abruptly and stood over her, gaunt and ill nourished and arrogant in the moonlight while she believed she was going to faint, hoping vaguely that he would make some effort to catch her when she did, knowing that he would not do so. But she didn’t faint, and the moon spread her silver and boneless hand on the water, and the water lapped and lapped at the pure dreaming hull of the Nausikaa with a faint whispering sound.
eleven o’clock
“Do you know,” said Mrs. Wiseman rising and speaking across her chair, “what I’m going to do if this lasts another night? I’m going to ask Julius to exchange with me and let ​me get drunk with Dawson and Major Ayers in his place. And so, to one and all: Good night.”
“Aren’t you going to wait for Dorothy?” Mark Frost asked. She glanced toward the wheelhouse.
“No. I guess Pete can look out for himself,” she replied, and left them. The moon cast a deep shadow on the western side of the deck, and near the companionway some one lay in a chair. She slowed, passing. “Mrs. Maurier?” she said. “We wondered what had become of you. Been asleep?”
Mrs. Maurier sat up slowly, as a very old person moves. The younger woman bent down to her, quickly solicitous. “You don’t feel well, do you?”
“Is it time to go below?” Mrs. Maurier asked, raising herself more briskly. “Our bridge game. . .”
“You all had beat us too badly. But can’t I—”
“No, no,” Mrs. Maurier objected quickly, a trifle testily. “Its nothing: I was just sitting here enjoying the moonlight.”
“We thought Mr. Gordon was with you.” Mrs. Maurier shuddered.
“These terrible men,” she said with an attempt at lightness. “These artists!”
“Gordon, too? I thought he had escaped Dawson and Julius.”
“Gordon, too,” Mrs. Maurier replied. She rose. “Come, I think we’d better go to bed.” She shuddered again, as with cold: her flesh seemed to shake despite her, and she took the younger woman’s arm, clinging to it. “I do feel a little tired,” she confessed. “The first few days are always trying, don’t you think? But we have a very nice party, don’t you think so?”
“An awfully nice party,” the other agreed without irony. “But we are all tired: we’ll all feel better to-morrow, I know.”
​Mrs. Maurier descended the stairs slowly, heavily. The other steadied her with her strong hand, and opening Mrs. Maurier’s door she reached in and found the light button. “There. Would you like anything before you go to bed?”
“No, no,” Mrs. Maurier answered, entering and averting her face quickly. She crossed the room and busied herself at the dressing table, keeping her back to the other. “Thank you, nothing. I shall go to sleep at once, I think. I always sleep well on the water. Good night.”
Mrs. Wiseman closed the door. I wonder what it is, she thought, I wonder what happened to her? She went on along the passage to her own door. Something did, something happened to her, she repeated, putting her hand on the door and turning the knob.
twelve o’clock
The moon had got higher, that worn and bloodless one, old and a little weary and shedding her tired silver on yacht and water and shore; and the yacht, the deck and its fixtures, was passionless as a dream upon the shifting silvered wings of water when she appeared in her bathing suit. She stood for a moment in the doorway until she saw movement and his white shirt where he half turned on the coil of rope where he sat. Her lifted hand blanched slimly in the hushed treachery of the moon: a gesture, and her bare feet made no sound on the deck.
“Hello, David. I’m on time, like I said. Where’s your bathing suit?”
“I didn’t think you would come,” he said, looking up at her, “I didn’t think you meant it.”
“Why not?” she asked. “Good Lord, what’d I want to tell you I was for, if I wasn’t?”
​“I don’t know. I just thought . . . You sure are brown, seeing it in the moonlight.”
“Yes, I’ve got a good one,” she agreed. “Where’s your bathing suit? Why haven’t you got it on?”
“You were going to get one for me, you said.”
She stared at his face in consternation. “That’s right: I sure was. I forgot it. Wait, maybe I can wake Josh up and get it. It won’t take long. You wait here.”
He stopped her. “I’ll be all right. Don’t bother about it to-night. I’ll get it some other time.”
“No, I’ll get it. I want somebody to go in with me. You wait.”
“No, never mind: I’ll row the boat for you.”
“Say, you still don’t believe I meant it, do you?” She examined him curiously. “All right, then. I guess I’ll have to go in by myself. You can row the boat, anyway. Come on.”
He fetched the oars and they got in the tender and cast off. “Only I wish you had a bathing suit,” she repeated from the stern. “I’d rather have somebody to go in with me. Couldn’t you go in in your clothes or something? Say, I’ll turn my back, and you take off your clothes and jump in: how about that?”
“I guess not,” he answered in alarm. “I guess I better not do that.”
“Shucks, I wanted somebody to go swimming with me. It’s not any fun, by myself. . . . Take off your shirt and pants, then, and go in in your underclothes. That’s almost like a bathing suit. I went in yesterday in Josh’s.”
“I’ll row the boat for you while you go in,” he repeated. The niece said Shucks again. David pulled steadily on upon the mooned and shifting water. Little waves slapped the bottom of the boat lightly as it rose and fell, and behind them ​the yacht was pure and passionless as a dream against the dark trees.
“I just love to-night,” the niece said. “It’s like we owned everything.” She lay flat on her back on the stern seat, propping her heels against the gunwale. David pulled rhythmically, the motion of the boat was a rhythm that lent to the moon and stars swinging up and down beyond the tapering simplicity of her propped knees a motion slow and soothing as a huge tree in a wind.
“How far do you want to go?” he asked presently.
“I don’t care,” she answered, gazing into the sky. He rowed on, the oarlocks thumping and measured, and she turned onto her belly, dragging her arm in the water while small bubbles of silver fire clung to her arm, broke away reluctantly and swam slowly to the surface, disappeared. . . . Little casual swells slapped the bottom of the boat, lightly, and slid along beside the hull, mooned with bubbling fire. She slid her legs overside and swung from the stern of the boat, dragging through the water. He pulled on a few strokes.
“I can’t row with you hanging there,” he said. Her two hands vanished from the gunwale and her dark head vanished, but when he slewed the boat sharply and half rose, she reappeared, whipping a faint shower of silver drops from her head. The moon slid and ran on her alternate arms and before her spread a fan of silver lines, shifting and spreading and fading.
“Gee,” she said. Her voice came low along the water, not loud but still distinct: little waves lapped at it. “It’s grand: warm as warm. You better come in.” Her head vanished again, he saw her sickling legs as they vanished, and once more she rayed shattered silver from her flung head. She swam up to the boat. “Come on in, David,” she insisted. ​“Take off your shirt and pants and jump in. I’ll swim out and wait for you. Come on, now,” she commanded.
So he removed his outer garments, sitting in the bottom of the boat, and slid quickly and modestly into the water. “Isn’t it grand?” she called to him. “Come on out here.”
“We better not get too far from the boat,” he said cautiously, “she ain’t got any anchor, you know.”
“We can catch it. It won’t drift fast. Come on out here, and I’ll race you back to it.”
He swam out to where her dark wet head awaited him. “I bet I beat you,” she challenged. “Are you ready? One. Two. Three—Go!” And she did beat him and with a single unceasing motion she slid upward and into the tender, and stood erect for the moonlight to slide over her in hushed silver.
“I’ll plunge for distance with you,” she now challenged. David hung by his hands, submerged to his neck. She waited for him to get into the skiff, then she said: “You can dive, can’t you?” But he still clung to the gunwale, looking up at her. “Come on, David,” she said sharply. “Are you timid, or what? I’m not going to look at you, if you don’t want me to.” So he got into the boat, modestly keeping his back to her, but even his wet curious garment could not make ridiculous the young lean splendor of him.
“I don’t see what you are ashamed of. You’ve got a good physique,” she told him. “Tall and hard looking. . . . Are you ready? One. Two. Three—Go!”
But soon she was content to float on her back and recover breath, while he trod water beside her. Little hands of water lapped at her, in her hair and upon her face, and she breathed deeply, closing her eyes against the bland waning moon.
​“I’ll hold you up a while,” he offered, putting his hand under the small of her back.
“You sure can,” she said, holding herself motionless. “Is it hard to do? Let me see if I can hold you up. This water is different from seawater: you don’t hardly sink in seawater if you want to.” She let her legs sink and he lay obediently on his back. “I can hold you up, can’t I? Say, can you carry somebody in the water, like lifesavers?”
“A little,” he admitted and she rolled again onto her back, and he showed her how it was done. Then she must try it herself, and he submitted with dubious resignation. Her hard young arm gripped him chokingly across his throat, jamming his windpipe, and she plunged violently forward, threshing her legs. He jerked up his arms to remove her strangling elbow and his head went under, openmouthed. He fought free of her and reappeared gasping. Her concerned face came to him and she tried to hold him up, unnecessarily.
“I’m so sorry: I didn’t mean to duck you.”
“It’s all right,” he said, coughing and strangling.
“I didn’t do it right, did I? Are you all right now?” She watched him anxiously, trying to support him.
“I’m all right,” he repeated. “You had the wrong hold,” he explained, treading water. “You had me around the neck.”
“Gee, I thought I was doing it right. I’ll do it right this time.”
“I guess we better wait and practise it in shallow water sometime,” he demurred quickly.
“Why. . . all right,” she agreed. “I think I know how, now. I guess I had better learn good, first, though. I’m awful sorry I strangled you.”
“It don’t hurt any more. I don’t notice it.”
“But it was such a dumb thing to do. I’ll learn it good next time.”
​“You know how now, all right. You just got the wrong hold that time. Try it again: see if you don’t know it.”
“You don’t mind?” she said with quick joy. “I won’t catch you wrong this time. . . . No, no: I might duck you again. I’d better learn it first.”
“Sure you won't,” he said. “You know how now. You won’t hurt me. Try it.” He turned onto his back.
“Gee, David,” she said. She slid her arm carefully across his chest and beneath his opposite arm. “That’s right? Now, I’m going.”
She held him carefully, intent on doing it correctly, while he encouraged her. But their progress was maddeningly slow: the boat seemed miles away, and so much of her effort was needed to keep her own head above water. Soon she was breathing faster, gulping air and then closing her mouth against the water her thrusting arm swirled up against her face. I will do it, I will do it, she told herself, but it was so much harder than it had looked. The skiff rose and fell against the stars, and mooned water bubbled about her. It would take more effort or she’d have to give up. And she’d drown before that.
The arm that held him was numb, and she swam harder, shifting her grip and again her hard elbow shut with strangling force upon his windpipe. But he was expecting it and without moving his body he twisted his head aside and filled his lungs and shut his mouth and eyes. . . . Soon she ceased swimming and her arm slid down again, holding him up, and he emptied his lungs and opened his eyes to remark the gunwale of the tender rising and falling against the sky above his head.
“I did make it,” she gasped, “I did make it. Are you all right?” she asked, panting. “I sure did it, David. I knew I could.” She clung to the skiff, resting her head upon her hands. “I thought for a while, when I had to change my hold, ​that I was doing it wrong again. But I did it right, didn’t I?” The remote chill stars swung over them, and the decaying disc of the moon, over the empty world in which they clung by their hands, side by side. “I’m pretty near all in,” she admitted.
“It’s pretty hard,” he agreed, “until you’ve practised a lot. I’ll hold you up until you get your breath.” He put his arm around her under the water.
“I’m not all the way winded,” she protested, but by degrees she relaxed until he supported her whole weight, feeling her heart thumping against his palm, while she clung to the gunwale resting her bowed head upon her hands; and it was like he had been in a dark room and all of a sudden the lights had come on: simple, like that.
It was like one morning when he was in a bunch of hoboes riding a freight into San Francisco and the bulls had jumped them and they had had to walk in. Along the water front it was, and there were a lot of boats in the water, kind of rocking back and forth at anchor: he could see reflections of boats and of the piles of the wharves in the water, wavering back and forth; and after a while dawn had come up out of the smoke of the city, like a sound you couldn’t hear, and a lot of yellow and pink had come onto the water where the boats were rocking, and around the piles of the wharf little yellow lines seemed to come right up out of the water; and pretty soon there were gulls looking like they had pink and yellow feathers, slanting and wheeling around.
And it was like there was a street in a city, a street with a lot of trash in it, but pretty soon he was out of the street and in a place where trees were. It must be spring because the trees were not exactly bare, and yet they didn’t exactly have leaves on them, and there was a wind coming through the trees and he stopped and heard music somewhere; it was like ​he had just waked up and a wind with music in it was coming across green hills brave in a clean dawn. Simple, like that.
She moved at last against his arm. “Maybe I can climb ın now. You better gimme a push, I guess.” His hand found her knee, slid down, and she raised her foot to his palm. He saw her flat boy’s body against the stars rising, and she was in the boat, leaning down to him. “Catch my hands,” she said, extending them, but for a time he didn’t move at all, but only clung to the gunwale and looked up at her with an utter longing, like that of a dog.
Mrs. Maurier lay in bed in her darkened room. There was a port just over the bed and a long pencil of moonlight came slanting through it, shattering upon the floor and filling the room with a cold, disseminated radiance. Upon the chair, vaguely, her clothes: a shapeless, familiar mass, comforting; and about her the intimate familiarity of her own possessions—her toilet things, her clothing, her very particular odor with which she had grown so familiar that she no longer noticed it at all.
She lay in bed—her bed, especially built for her, was the most comfortable on board—surrounded, lapped in security and easeful things, walled and secure within the bland, hushed planes of the bulkheads. A faint, happy sound came in to her: little tongues of water lapping ceaselessly alongside the yacht, against her yacht—that island of security that was always waiting to transport her comfortably beyond the rumors of the world and its sorrows; and beyond the yacht, space: water and sky and darkness and silence; a worn cold moon neither merry nor sad. . . . Mrs. Maurier lay in her easy bed, within her comfortable room, weeping long shuddering sobs: a passive terrible hysteria without a sound.