# Mosquitoes (Faulkner)/The Third Day

THE THIRD DAY
This morning waked in a quiet fathomless mist. It was upon the world of water unstirred; soon the first faint wind of morning would thin it away, but now it was about the Nausikaa timelessly: the yacht was a thick jewel swaddled in soft gray wool, while in the wool somewhere dawn was like a suspended breath. The first morning of Time might well be beyond this mist, and trumpets preliminary to a golden flourish; and held in suspension in it might be heard yet the voices of the Far Gods on the first morning saying, It is well: let there be light. A short distance away, a shadow, a rumor, a more palpable thickness: this was the shore. The water fading out of the mist became as a dark metal in which the Nausikaa was rigidly fixed, and the yacht was motionless, swaddled in mist like a fat jewel.
five o’clock
Up from the darkness of the companionway the niece came, naked and silent as a ghost. She stood for a space, but there was no sound from anywhere, and she crossed the deck and stopped again at the rail, breathing the soft chill mist into her lungs, feeling the mist swaddling her firm simple body with a faint lingering chillness. Her legs and arms were so tan that naked she appeared to wear a bathing suit of a startling white. She climbed the rail. The tender rocked a little under her, causing the black motionless water to come alive, making faint sounds. Then she slid over the stern and swam out into the mist.
The water divided with oily reluctance, closing again be​hind her with scarce a ripple. Here, at the water level, she could see nothing save a grayness and flaccid disturbed tongues of water lapping into it, leaving small fleeting gaps between mist and water before the mist filled them again silently as settling wings. The hull of the yacht was a vague thing, a thing felt, known, rather than seen. She swam slowly, circling the place where she knew it should be.
She swam slowly and steadily, trying to keep her approximate distance from the yacht by instinct. But, consciously this was hard to do; consciously in this vague restricted immensity, this limitless vagueness whose center was herself, the yacht could be in any direction from her. She paused and trod water while little tongues of water kissed her face, lapping against her lips. It’s on my right, she told herself. It’s on my right, over there. Not fear: merely a faint unease, an exasperation; but to reassure herself she swam a few strokes in that direction. The mist neither thickened nor thinned.
She trod water again and water licked at her face soundlessly. Damn your fool soul, she whispered, and at that moment a round huge thing like a dead lidless eye watched her suddenly from the mist and there came a faint sound from somewhere in the mist above her head. In two strokes she touched the hull of the yacht: a vindication, and she knew a faint pride and a touch of relief as she swam along the hull and circled the stern. She grasped the gunwale of the tender and hung there for a while, getting her wind back.
That faint sound came again from the deck; a movement, and she spoke into the mist: “David?” The mist took the word, sweeping it lightly against the hull, then it rebounded again and the mist absorbed it. But he had heard and he appeared vaguely above her at the rail, looking down at her where she hung in the water. “Go away, so I can get out,” ​she said. He didn’t move, and she added: “I haven’t got on a bathing suit. Go away a minute, David.”
But he didn’t move. He leaned over the rail, looking at her with a dumb and utter longing and after a while she slid quickly and easily into the tender, and still he remained motionless, making no move to help her as her grave simple body came swiftly aboard the yacht. “Be back in a minute,” she said over her shoulder and her startling white bathing suit sped across the deck and out of the ken of his dog’s eyes. The mist without thinning was filling with light: an imminence of dawn like a glory, a splendor of trumpets unheard.
Her minute was three minutes. She reappeared in her little colored linen dress, her dark coarse hair still damp, carrying her shoes and stockings in her hand. He hadn’t moved at all.
“Well, let’s get going,” she said. She looked at him impatiently. “Aren't you ready yet?” He stirred at last, watching her with the passive abjectness of a dog. “Come on,” she said sharply. “Haven’t you got the stuff for breakfast yet? What’s the matter with you, David? Snap out of your trance.” She examined him again, with a sober impersonality. “You didn‘t believe I was going to do it—is that it? Or are you backing out yourself? Come on, say so now, if you want to call it of.” She came nearer, examining his face with her grave opaque eyes. She extended her hand. “David?”
He took her hand slowly, looking at her, and she grasped his hand and shook his arm sharply. “Wake up. Say, you haven’t— Come on, let’s get some stuff for breakfast, and beat it. We haven’t got all day.”
He followed her and in the galley she switched on the light and chose a flat box of bacon and a loaf of bread, putting them on a table and delving again among boxes and lockers ​and shelves. “Have you got matches? a knife?” she asked over her shoulder. “And—where are oranges? Let’s take some oranges. I love oranges, don’t you?” She turned her head to look at him. His hand was just touching her sleeve, so diffidently that she had not felt it. She turned suddenly, putting the oranges down, and put her arms about him, hard and firm and sexless, drawing his cheek down to her sober moist kiss. She could feel his hammering erratic heart against her breast, could hear it surging in the silence almost as though it were in her own body. His arms tightened and he moved his head, seeking her mouth, but she evaded him with a quick movement, without reproof.
“No, no, not that. Everybody does that.” She strained him against her hard body again, then released him. “Come on, now. Have you got everything?” She examined the shelves again, finding at last a small basket. It was filled with damp lettuce but she dumped the lettuce out and put her things in it. “You take my shoes. They’ll go in your pocket, won’t they?” She crumpled her limp blonde stockings into her slippers and gave them to him. Then she picked up the basket and snapped off the light.
Day was a nearer thing yet, though it was not quite come. Though the mist had not thinned, the yacht was visible from stem to stern, asleep like a gull with folded wings; and against the hull the water sighed a long awakening sigh. The shoreline was darker, a more palpable vagueness in the mist.
“Say,” she remarked, stopping suddenly, “how are we going to get ashore? I forgot that. We don’t want to take the tender.”
“Swim,” he suggested. Her dark damp head came just to his chin and she mused for a time in a sober consternation.
​“Isn’t there some way we can go in the tender and then pull it back to the yacht with a rope?”
“I. . . Yes. Yes, we can do that.”
“Well, you get a rope then. Snap into it.”
When he returned with a coiled line she was already in the tender with the oars, and she watched with interest while he passed the rope around a stanchion and brought both ends into the boat with him and made one of the ends fast to the ringbolt in the stem of the skiff. Then she caught the idea and she sat and paid out the line while he pulled away for shore. Soon they beached and she sprang ashore, still holding the free end of the rope. “How’re we going to keep the tender from pulling the rope back around that post and getting aloose?” she asked.
“I’ll show you,” he answered, and she watched him while he tied the oars and the rowlocks together with the free end of the line and wedged them beneath the thwarts. “That'll hold, I guess. Somebody’ll be sure to see her pretty soon,” he added, and prepared to draw the skiff back to the yacht.
“Wait a minute,” she said. She mused gravely, gazing at the dim shadowy yacht, then she borrowed matches from him, and sitting on the gunwale of the tender she tore a strip of paper from the bacon box and with a charred match printed Going to— She looked up. “Where are we going?” He looked at her and she added quickly: “I mean, what town? We'll have to go to a town somewhere, you know, to get back to New Orleans so I can get some clothes and my seventeen dollars. What’s the name of a town?”
After a while he said: “I don’t know. I never—”
“That’s right, you never were over here before, either, were you? Well, what’s that town the ferries go to? the one Jenny’s always talking about you have fun at?” She stared again at the vague shape of the Nausikaa, then she suddenly printed ​Mandeville. “That’s the name of it—Mandeville. Which way is Mandeville from here?” He didn’t know, and she added: “No matter, we'll find it, I guess.” She signed the note and laid it on the sternseat, weighting it with a small rock. “Now, pull her off,” she commanded, and soon there came back to them across the motionless water a faint thud.
“Good-by, Nausikaa,” she said. “Wait,” she added, “I better put my shoes on, I guess.” He gave her her slippers and she sat flat on the narrow beach and put them on, returning the crumpled stockings to him. “Wait,” she said again, taking the stockings again and flipping them out. She slid one of them over her brown arm and withdrew a crumpled wad—the money she had been able to rake up by ransacking her aunt’s and Mrs. Wiseman’s and Miss Jameson’s things. She reached her hand and he drew her to her feet. “You’d better carry the money,” she said, giving it to him. “Now, for breakfast,” she said, clutching his hand.
six o’clock
Trees heavy and ancient with moss loomed out of it hugely and grayly: the mist might have been a sluggish growth between and among them. No, this mist might have been the first prehistoric morning of time itself; it might have been the very substance in which the seed of the beginning of things fecundated; and these huge and silent trees might have been the first of living things, too recently born to know either fear or astonishment, dragging their sluggish umbilical cords from out the old miasmic womb of a nothingness latent and dreadful. She crowded against him, suddenly quiet and subdued, trembling a little like a puppy against the reassurance of his arm. “Gee,” she said in a small voice.
That small sound did not die away. It merely dissolved into the moist gray surrounding them, and it was as if at a ​movement of any sort the word might repeat itself somewhere between sky and ground as a pebble is shaken out of cotton batting. He put his arm across her shoulders and at his touch she turned quickly beneath his armpit, hiding her face.
“I’m hungry,” she said at last, in that small voice. “That’s what’s the matter with me,” she added with more assurance. “I want something to eat.”
“Want me to build a fire?” he asked of the dark coarse crown of her head.
“No, no,” she answered quickly, holding to him. “Besides, we are too close to the lake, here. Somebody might see it. We ought to get farther from the shore.” She clung to him, inside his arm. “I guess we’d better wait here until the fog goes away, though. A piece of bread will do.” She reached her brown hand. “Let’s sit down somewhere. Let’s sit down and eat some bread,” she decided. “And when the fog goes away we can find the road. Come on, let’s find a log or something.”
She drew him by the hand and they sat at the foot of a huge tree, on the damp ground, while she delved into the basket. She broke a bit from the loaf and gave it to him, and a fragment for herself. Then she slid further down against her propped heels until her back rested against him, and bit from her bread. She sighed contentedly.
“There now. Don’t you just love this?” she raised her grave chewing face to look at him. “All gray and lonesome. Makes you feel kind of cold on the outside and warm inside, doesn’t it?—say, you aren’t eating your bread. Eat your bread, David. I love bread, don’t you?” She moved again, inward upon herself: in some way she seemed to get herself yet closer against him.
The mist was already beginning to thin, breaking with heavy reluctance before a rumor of motion too faint to be ​called wind. The mist broke raggedly and drifted in sluggish wraiths that seemed to devour all sound, swaying and swinging like huge spectral apes from tree to tree, rising and falling, revealing somber patriarchs of trees, hiding them again. From far, far back in the swamp there came a hoarse homely sound—an alligator’s lovesong.
“Chicago,” she murmured. “Didn’t know we were so near home.” Soon the sun; and she sprawled against him, contentedly munching her bread.
seven o'clock
They hadn’t found the road, but they had reached a safe distance from the lake. She had discovered a butterfly larger than her two hands clinging to a spotlight of sun on the ancient trunk of a tree, moving its damp lovely wings like laboring exposed lungs of glass or silk; and while he gathered firewood—a difficult feat, since neither of them had thought of a hatchet—she paused at the edge of a black stream to harry a sluggish thick serpent with a small switch. A huge gaudy bird came up and cursed her, and the snake ignored her with a sort of tired unillusion and plopped heavily into the thick water. Then, looking around, she saw thin fire in the somber equivocal twilight of the trees.
They ate again: the oranges; they broiled bacon, scorched it, dropped it on the ground, retrieved it and wiped it and chewed it down; and the rest of the loaf. “Don’t you just love camping?” She sat crosslegged and wiped a strip of bacon on her skirt. “Let’s always do this, David: let’s don’t ever have a house where you’ve always got to stay in one place. We’ll just go around like this, camping . . . David?” She raised the strip of bacon and met his dumb yearning eyes. She poised her bacon.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she told him sharply. Then, ​more gently: “Don’t ever look at anybody like that. You'll never get anybody to run away with you if you look at ’em like that, David.” She extended her hand. His hand came out, slowly and diffidently, but her grip was hard, actual. She shook his arm for emphasis.
“How was I looking at you?” he asked after a while, in a voice that didn’t seem to him to be his voice at all. “How do you want me to look at you?”
“Oh—you know how. Not like that, though. Like that, you look at me just like a—a man, that’s all. Or a dog. Not like David.” She writhed her hand free and ate her strip of bacon. Then she wiped her fingers on her dress. “Gimme a cigarette.”
The mist had gone, and the sun came already sinister and hot among the trees, upon the miasmic earth. She sat on her crossed legs, replete, smoking. Abruptly she poised the cigarette in a tense cessation of all movement. Then she moved her head quickly and stared at him in consternation. She moved again, suddenly slapping her bare leg.
“What is it?” he asked.
For reply she extended her flat tan palm. In the center of it was a dark speck and a tiny splash of crimson. “Good Lord, gimme my stockings,” she exclaimed. “We’ll have to move. Gee, I’d forgotten about them,” she said, drawing her stockings over her straightening legs. She sprang to her feet. “We'll soon be out, though. David, stop looking at me that way. Look like you were having a good time, at least. Cheer up, David. A man would think you were losing your nerve already. Buck up: I think it’s grand, running off like this. Don’t you think it’s grand?” She turned her head and saw again that diffident still gesture of his hand touching her dress. Across the hot morning there came the high screech of the Nausikaa’s whistle.
eight o’clock
“No, sir,” the nephew answered patiently. “It’s a pipe.”
“A pipe, eh?” repeated Major Ayers, glaring at him with his hard affable little eyes. “You make pipes, eh?”
“I’m making this one,” the nephew replied with preoccupation.
“Came away and left your own ashore, perhaps?” Major Ayers suggested after a time.
“Naw. I don’t smoke ’em. I’m just making a new kind.”
“Ah, I see. For the market.” Major Ayers’ mind slowly took fire. “Money in it, eh? Americans would buy a new kind of pipe, too. You’ve made arrangements for the marketing of it, of course?”
“No, I’m just making it. For fun,” the nephew explained in that patient tone you use with obtuse children. Major Ayers glared at his bent preoccupied head.
“Yes,” he agreed. “Best to say nothing about it until you’ve completed all your computations regarding the cost of production. Don’t blame you at all.” Major Ayers brooded with calculation. He said: “Americans really would buy a new sort of pipe. Strange no one had thought of that.” The nephew carved minutely at his pipe. Major Ayers said secretly: “No, I don’t blame you at all. But when you’ve done, you'll require capital: that sort of thing, you know. And then . . . a word to your friends at the proper time, eh?”
The nephew looked up. “A word to my friends?” he repeated. “Say, I’m just making a pipe, I tell you. A pipe. Just to be making it. For fun.”
“Right you are,” Major Ayers agreed suavely. “No offense, dear lad. I don’t blame you, don’t blame you at all. Experienced the same situation myself.”
nine o’clock
They had found the road at last—two faint scars and a powder of unbearable dust upon a raised levee traversing the swamp. But between them and the road was a foul sluggish width of water and vegetation and biology. Huge cypress roots thrust up like weathered bones out of a green scum and a quaking neither earth nor water, and always those bearded eternal trees like gods regarding without alarm this puny desecration of a silence of air and earth and water ancient when hoary old Time himself was a pink and dreadful miracle in his mother’s arms.
It was she who found the fallen tree, who first essayed its oozy treacherous bark and first stood in the empty road stretching monotonously in either direction between battalioned patriarchs of trees. She was panting a little, whipping a broken green branch about her body, watching him as he inched his way across the fallen trunk.
“Come on, David,” she called impatiently. “Here’s the road: we're all right now.” He was across the ditch and he now struggled up the rank reluctant levee bank. She leaned down and reached her hand to him. But he would not take it, so she leaned further and clutched his shirt. “Now, which way is Mandeville?”
“That way,” he answered immediately, pointing.
“You said you never were over here before,” she accused.
“No. But we were west of Mandeville when we went aground, and the lake is back yonder. So Mandeville must be that way.”
“I don’t think so. It’s this way: see, the swamp isn’t so thick this way. Besides, I just know it’s this way.”
He looked at her a moment. “All right,” he agreed. “I’ll guess you are right.”
​“But don’t you know which way it is? Isn’t there any way you could tell?” She bent and whipped her legs with the broken branch.
“Well, the lake is over yonder, and we were west of Mandeville last night—”
“You're just guessing,” she interrupted harshly.
“Yes,” he answered. “I guess you are right.”
“Well, we’ve got to go somewhere. We can’t stand here.” She twitched her shoulders, writhing her body beneath her dress. “Which way, then?”
“Well, we w—”
She turned abruptly in the direction she had chosen. “Come on, I’ll die here.” She strode on ahead.
ten o’clock
She was trying to explain it to Pete. The sun had risen sinister and hot, climbing into a drowsy haze, and up from a low vague region neither water nor sky clouds like fat little girls in starched frocks marched solemnly.
“It’s a thing they join at that place he’s going to. Only they have to work to join it, and sometimes you don’t even get to join it then. And the ones that do join it don’t get anything except a little button or something.”
“Pipe down and try it again,” Pete told her, leaning with his elbows and one heel hooked backward on the rail, his hat slanted across his reckless dark face, squinting his eyes against the smoke of his cigarette. “What’re you talking about?”
“There’s something in the water,” Jenny remarked with placid astonishment, creasing her belly over the rail and staring downward into the faintly rippled water while the land breeze molded her little green dress. “It must of fell off the boat. . . .Oh, I’m talking about that college he’s going to. You ​work to join things there. You work three years, she says. And then maybe you—”
“What college?”
“I forgot. It’s the one where they have big football games in the papers every year. He’s—”
“Yale and Harvard?”
“Uhuh, that’s the one she said. He’s—”
“Which one? Yale, or Harvard?”
“Uhuh. And so he—’
“Come on, baby. You're talking about two colleges. Was it Yale she said, or Harvard? or Sing Sing or what?”
“Oh,” Jenny said. “It was Yale. Yes, that’s the one she said. And he’ll have to work three years to join it. And even then maybe he won’t.”
“Well, what about it? Suppose he does work three years: what about it?”
“Why, if he does, he won’t get anything except a little button or something, even if he does join it, I mean.” Jenny brooded softly, creasing herself upon the rail. “He’s going to have to work for it,” she recurred again in a dull soft amazement. “He'll have to work three years for it, and even then he may not—”
“Don’t be dumb all your life, kid,” Pete told her.
Wind and sun were in Jenny’s drowsing hair. The deck swept trimly forward, deserted. The others were gathered on the deck above. Occasionally they could hear voices, and a pair of masculine feet were crossed innocently upon the rail directly over Pete’s head. A half-smoked cigarette spun in a small twinkling arc astern. Jenny watched it drop lightly onto the water, where it floated amid the other rubbish that had caught her attention. Pete spun his own cigarette backward over his shoulder, but this one sank immediately, to her placid surprise.
​“Let the boy join his club, if he wants,” Pete added. “What kind of a club is it? What do they do?”
“I don’t know. They just join it. You work for it three years, she said. Three years. . . . Gee, by that time you’d be too old to do anything if you got to join it. . . . Three years. My Lord.”
“Sit down and give your wooden leg a rest,” Pete said. “Don’t be a dumbbell forever.” He examined the deck a moment, then without changing his position against the rail he turned his head toward Jenny. “Give papa a kiss.”
Jenny also glanced briefly up the deck. Then she came with a sort of wary docility, raising her ineffable face. . . presently Pete withdrew his face. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
“The matter with what?” said Jenny innocently.
Pete unhooked his heel and he put his arm around Jenny. Their faces merged again and Jenny became an impersonal softness against his mouth and a single blue eye and a drowsing aura of hair.
eleven o’clock
The swamp did not seem to end, ever. On either side of the road it brooded, fetid and timeless, somber and hushed and dreadful. The road went on and on through a bearded tunnel, beneath the sinister brass sky. The dew was long departed and dust puffed listlessly to her fierce striding. David tramped behind her, watching two splotches of dead blood on her stockings. Abruptly there were three of them and he drew abreast of her. She looked over her shoulder, showing him her wrung face.
“Don’t come near me!” she cried. “Don’t you see you make ’em worse?”
He dropped behind again and she stopped suddenly, drop​ping the broken branch and extending her arms. “David,” she said. He went to her awkwardly, and she clung to him, whimpering. She raised her face, staring at him. “Can’t you do something? They hurt me, David.” But he only looked at her with his unutterable dumb longing.
She tightened her arms, released him quickly. “We’ll be out soon.” She picked up the branch again. “It'll be different then. Look! There’s another big butterfly!” Her squeal of delight became again a thin whimpering sound. She strode on.
Jenny found Mrs. Wiseman in their room, changing her dress.
“Mr. Ta—Talliaferro,” Jenny began. Then she said: “He’s an awful refined man, I guess. Don’t you think so?”
“Refined?” the other repeated. “Exactly that. Ernest invented that word.”
“He did?” Jenny went to the mirror and looked at herself a while. “Her brother’s refined, too, ain’t he?”
“Whose brother, honey?” Mrs. Wiseman paused and watched Jenny curiously.
“The one with that saw.”
“Oh. Yes, fairly so. He seems to be too busy to be anything else. Why?”
“And that popeyed man. All English men are refined, though. There was one in a movie I saw. He was awful refined.” Jenny looked at her reflected face, timelessly and completely entertained. Mrs. Wiseman gazed at Jenny’s fine minted hair, at her sleazy little dress revealing the divine inevitability of her soft body.
“Come here, Jenny,” she said.
twelve o’clock
When he reached her she sat huddled in the road, crouching bonelessly upon herself, huddling her head in her crossed thin arms. He stood beside her, and presently he spoke her name. She rocked back and forth, then wrung her body in an ecstasy. “They hurt me, they hurt me,” she wailed, crouching again in that impossible spasm of agony. David knelt beside her and spoke her name again, and she sat up.
“Look,” she said wildly, “on my legs—look, look,” staring with a sort of fascination at a score of great gray specks hovering about her blood-flecked stockings, making no effort to brush them away. She raised her wild face again. “Do you see them? They are everywhere on me—my back, my back, where I can’t reach.” She lay suddenly flat, writhing her back in the dust, clutching his hand. Then she sat up again and against his knees she turned wringing her body from the hips, trying to draw her bloody legs beneath her brief skirt. He held her while she writhed in his grasp, staring her wild bloodless face up at him. “I must get in water,” she panted. “I must get in water. Mud, anything. I’m dying, I tell you.”
“Yes, yes: I’ll get you some water. You wait here. Will you wait here?”
“You'll get me some water? You will? You promise?”
“Yes, yes,” he repeated. “I’ll get you some. You wait here. You wait here, see?” he repeated idiotically. She bent again inward upon herself, moaning and writhing in the dust, and he plunged down the bank, stripping his shirt off and dipped it into the foul warm ditch. She had dragged her dress up about her shoulders, revealing her startling white bathing suit between her knickers and the satin band binding ​her breasts. “On my back,” she moaned, bending forward again, “quick! quick!”
He laid the wet shirt on her back and she caught the ends of it and drew it around her, and presently she leaned back against his knees with a long shuddering sigh. “I want a drink. Can’t I have a drink of water, David?”
“Soon,” he promised with despair. “You can have one soon as we get out of the swamp.”
She moaned again, a long whimpering sound, lowering her head between her arms. They crouched together in the dusty road. The road went on shimmering before them, endless beneath bearded watching trees, crossing the implacable swamp with a puerile bravado like a thin voice cursing in a cathedral. Needles of fire darted about them, about his bare shoulders and arms. After a while she said:
“Wet it again, please, David.”
He did so, and returned, scrambling up the steep rank levee side.
“Now, bathe my face, David.” She raised her face and closed her eyes and he bathed her face and throat and brushed her damp coarse hair back from her brow.
“Let’s put the shirt on you,” he suggested.
“No,” she demurred against his arm, without opening her eyes, drowsily. “They’ll eat you alive without it.”
“They don’t bother me like they do you. Come on, put it on.” She demurred again and he tried awkwardly to draw the shirt over her head. “I don’t need it,” he repeated.
“No. . . . Keep it, David. . . . You ought to keep it. Besides, I’d rather have it underneath. . . . Oooo, it feels so good. You're sure you don’t need it?” She opened her eyes, watching him with that sober gravity of hers. He insisted and she sat up and slipped her dress over her head. He helped her to don the shirt, then she slipped her dress on again. ​“I wouldn’t take it, only they hurt me so damn bad. I’ll do something for you some day, David. I swear I will.”
“Sure,” he repeated. “I don’t need it.”
He rose, and she came to her feet in a single motion, before he could offer to help her. “I swear I wouldn’t take it if they didn’t hurt me so much, David,” she persisted, putting her hand on his shoulder and raising her tanned serious face.
“Sure, I know.”
“I’ll pay you back somehow. Come on: let’s get out of here.”
one o’clock
Mrs. Wiseman and Miss Jameson drove Mrs. Maurier moaning and wringing her hands, from the galley and prepared lunch—grapefruit again, disguised thinly.
“We have so many of them,” the hostess apologized helplessly. “And the steward gone. . . . We are aground, too, you see,” she explained.
“Oh, we can stand a little hardship, I guess,” Fairchild reassured her jovially. “The race hasn’t degenerated that far. In a book, now, it would be kind of terrible; if you forced characters in a book to eat as much grapefruit as we do, both the art boys and the humanitarians would stand on their hindlegs and howl. But in real life— In life, anything might happen; in actual life people will do anything. It’s only in books that people must function according to arbitrary rules of conduct and probability; it’s only in books that events must never flout credulity.”
“That’s true,” Mrs. Wiseman agreed. “People’s characters, when writers delineate them by revealing their likings and dislikings, always appear so perfect, so inevitably consistent, but in li—”
“That’s why literature is art and biology isn’t,” her brother ​interrupted. “A character in a book must be consistent in all things, while man is consistent in one thing only: he is consistently vain. It’s his vanity alone which keeps his particles damp and adhering one to another, instead of like any other handful of dust which any wind that passes can disseminate.”
“In other words, he is consistently inconsistent,” Mark Frost recapitulated.
“I guess so,” the Semitic man replied. “Whatever that means. . . . But what were you saying, Eva?”
“I was thinking of how book people, when you find them in real life, have such a perverse and disconcerting way of liking and disliking the wrong things. For instance, Dorothy here. Suppose you were drawing Dorothy’s character in a novel, Dawson. Any writer would give her a liking for blue jewelry: white gold, and platinum, and sapphires in dull silver—you know. Wouldn’t you do that?”
“Why, yes, so I would,” Fairchild agreed with interest. “She would like blue things, sure enough.”
“And then,” the other continued, “music. You’d say she would like Grieg, and those other cold mad northern people with icewater in their veins, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” Fairchild agreed again, thinking immediately of Ibsen and the Peer Gynt legend and remembering a sonnet of Siegfried Sassoon’s about Sibelius that he had once read in a magazine. “That’s what she would like.”
“Should like,” Mrs. Wiseman corrected. “For the sake of esthetic consistency. But I bet you are wrong. Isn’t he, Dorothy?”
“Why, yes,” Miss Jameson replied. “I always liked Chopin.”
Mrs. Wiseman shrugged: a graceful dark gesture. “And there you are. That’s what makes art so discouraging. You come to expect anything associated with and dependent on the actions of man to be discouraging. But it always shocks ​me to learn that art also depends on population, on the herd instinct just as much as manufacturing automobiles or stockings does—”
“Only they can’t advertise art by means of women’s legs yet,” Mark Frost interrupted.
“Don’t be silly, Mark,” Mrs. Wiseman said sharply. “That’s exactly how art came to the attention of the ninety-nine who don’t produce it and so have any possible reason for buying it—postcards and lithographs barely esoteric enough to escape police persecution. Ask any man on the street what he understands by the word art: he'll tell you it means a picture. Won’t he?” she appealed to Fairchild.
“That’s so,” he agreed. “And it’s a wrong impression. Art means anything consciously done well, to my notion. Living, or building a good lawn mower, or playing poker. I don’t like this modern idea of restricting the word to painting, at all.”
“The art of Life, of a beautiful and complete existence of the Soul,” Mrs. Maurier put in. “Don’t you think that is Art’s greatest function, Mr. Gordon?”
“Of course you don’t, child,” Mrs. Wiseman told Fairchild, ignoring Mrs. Maurier. “As rabidly American as you are, you can’t stand that, can you? And there’s the seat of your bewilderment, Dawson—your belief that the function of creating art depends on geography.”
“It does. You can’t grow corn without something to plant it in.”
“But you don’t plant corn in geography: you plant it in soil. It not only does not matter where that soil is, you can even move the soil from one place to another—around the world, if you like—and it will still grow corn.”
“You’d have a different kind of corn, though—Russian corn, or Latin or Anglo-Saxon corn.”
“All corn is the same to the belly,” the Semitic man said.
​“Julius!” exclaimed Mrs. Maurier. “The Soul’s hunger: that is the true purpose of Art. There are so many things to satisfy the grosser appetites. Don’t you think so, Mr. Talliaferro?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Wiseman took her brother up. “Dawson clings to his conviction for the old reason: it’s good enough to live with and comfortable to die with—like a belief in immortality. Insurance against doubt or alarm.”
“And laziness,” her brother added. Mrs. Maurier exclaimed “Julius” again. “Clinging spiritually to one little spot of the earth’s surface, so much of his labor is performed for him. Details of dress and habit and speech which entail no hardship in the assimilation and which, piled one on another, become quite as imposing as any single startling stroke of originality, as trivialities in quantities will. Don’t you agree? But then, I suppose that all poets in their hearts consider prosewriters shirkers, don’t they?”
“Yes,” his sister agreed. “We do think they are lazy—just a little. Not mentally, but that their. . .not hearts—” “Souls?” her brother suggested. “I hate that word, but it’s the nearest thing. . . .” She met her brother’s sad quizzical eyes and exclaimed: “Oh, Julius! I could kill you, at times. He’s laughing at me, Dawson.”
“He’s laughing at us both,” Fairchild said. “But let him have his fun, poor fellow.” He chuckled, and lit a cigarette. “Let him laugh. I always did want to be one of those old time eunuchs, for one night. They must have just laughed themselves to death when those sultans and things would come visiting.”
“Mister Fairchild! Whatever in the world!” exclaimed Mrs. Maurier.
“It’s a good thing there’s some one to see something amusing ​in that process,” the other rejoined. “The husbands, the active participants, never seem to.”
“That’s a provision of nature’s for racial survival,” Fairchild said. “If the husbands ever saw the comic aspect of it. . . . But they never do, even when they have the opportunity, no matter how white and delicate the hand that decorates their brows.”
“It’s not lovely ladies nor dashing strangers,” the Semitic man said, “it’s the marriage ceremony that disfigures our foreheads.”
Fairchild grunted. Then he chuckled again. “There’d sure be a decline in population if a man were twins and had to stand around and watch himself making love.”
“Mister Fairchild!”
“Chopin,” Mrs. Wiseman interrupted. “Really, Dorothy, I’m disappointed in you.” She shrugged again, flashing her hands. Mrs. Maurier said with relief:
“How much Chopin has meant to me in my sorrows”—she looked about in tragic confiding astonishment—“no one will ever know.”
“Surely,” agreed Mrs. Wiseman, “he always does.” She turned to Miss Jameson. “Just think how much better Dawson would have done you than God did. With all deference to Mrs. Maurier, so many people find comfort in Chopin. It’s like having a pain that aspirin will cure, you know. I could have forgiven you even Verdi, but Chopin! Chopin,” she repeated, then with happy inspiration: “Snow rotting under a dead moon.”
Mark Frost sat staring at his hands on his lap, beneath the edge of the table, moving his lips slightly. Fairchild said:
“What music do you like, Eva?”
“Oh—Debussy, George Gershwin, Berlioz perhaps—why not?”
​“Berlioz,” repeated Miss Jameson mimicking the other’s tone: “Swedenborg on a French holiday.” Mark Frost stared at his hands on his lap, moving his lips slightly.
“Forget your notebook, Mark?” Fairchild asked quizzically.
“It’s very sad,” the Semitic man said. “Man gets along quite well until that unhappy day on which some one else discovers him thinking. After that, God help him: he doesn’t dare leave home without a notebook. It’s very sad.”
“Mark’s not such an accomplished buccaneer as you and Dawson,” his sister answered quickly. “At least he requires a notebook.”
“My dear girl,” the Semitic man murmured in his lazy voice, “you flatter yourself.”
“So do I,” Fairchild said. “I always—”
“Whom?” the Semitic man asked. “Yourself, or me?”
“What?” said Fairchild, staring at him.
“Nothing. Excuse me: you were saying—?”
“I was saying that I always carry my portfolio with me because it’s the only comfortable thing I ever found to sit on.”
Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words. It seemed endless, as though it might go on forever. Ideas, thoughts, became mere sounds to be bandied about until they were dead.
Noon was oppressive as a hand, as the ceaseless blow of a brass hand: a brass blow neither struck nor withheld; brass rushing wings that would not pass. The deck blistered with it, the rail was too hot to touch and the patches of shadow about the deck were heavy and heat soaked as sodden blankets. The water was an unbearable glitter, the forest was a bronze wall cast at a fearful heat and not yet cooled, and no breeze was anywhere under the world’s heaven.
But the unbearable hiatus of noon passed at last and the ​soundless brazen wings rushed westward. The deck was deserted as it had been on that first afternoon when he had caught her in midflight like a damp swallow, a swallow hard and passionate with flight; and it was as though he yet saw upon the deck the wet and simple prints of her naked feet, and he seemed to feel about him like an odor that young hard graveness of hers. No wonder she was gone out of it: she who here was as a flame among stale ashes, a little tanned flame; who, gone, was as a pipe blown thinly and far away, as a remembered surf on a rocky coast at dawn. . .ay ay strangle your heart o israfel winged with loneliness feathered bitter with pride.
Dust spun from their feet, swirling sluggish and lazy in the brooding dreadful noon. Beside them always and always those eternal bearded trees, bearded and brooding, older and stiller than eternity. The road ran on like a hypnotism: a dull and endless progression from which there was no escape.
After a while he missed her from her position at his shoulder and he stopped and looked back. She was kneeling beside the foul ditch. He watched her stupidly, then he suddenly realized what she was about and he ran back to her, grasping her by the shoulder. “Here, you can’t do that! That stuff is poison: you can’t drink it!”
“I can’t help it! I’ve got to have some water, I’ve got to!” She strained against his hands. “Please, David. Just one mouthful. Please, David. Please, David.”
He got his hands under her arms, but his feet slid in the rank sloping grass and he went up to his knees in thick reluctant water. She twisted in his hands. “Please, oh, please! Just enough to wet my mouth. Look at my mouth.” She ​raised her face: her broad pale lips were parched, rough. “Please, David.”
But he held her. “Put your feet in it, like mine. That'll help some,” he said through his own dry harsh throat. “Here, let me take off your shoes.”
She sat whimpering like a dog while he removed her slippers. Then she slid her legs into the water and moaned with partial relief. The sunlight was beginning to slant at last, slanting westward like a rushing of unheard golden wings across the sky; though the somber twilight under the trees was unchanged—somber and soundless, brooding, and filled with a vicious darting of invisible fire.
“I must have water,” she said at last. “You'll have to find me some water, David.”
“Yes.” He climbed heavily out of the hot ooze, out of the mud and slime. He bent and slid his hands under her arms. “Get up. We must go on.”
two o’clock
Jenny yawned, frankly, then she did something to the front of her dress, drawing it away from her to peer down into her bosom. It seemed to be all right, and she settled her dress again with a preening motion, lifting her shoulders and smoothing it over her hips. She went upstairs and presently she saw them, sitting around like always. Mrs. Maurier wasn’t there.
She drifted over to the rail and laxed herself against it and stood there, placidly waiting until Mr. Talliaferro became aware of her presence.
“I was watching these things in the water,” she said when he came to her like a tack to a magnet, volitionless and verbose.
“Where?” He also stared overside.
​“That stuff there,” she answered, looking forward to the group of chairs.
“Why, that’s just refuse from the galley,” Mr. Talliaferro said with surprise.
“Is it? It’s kind of funny looking. . . . There’s some more of it down here a ways.” Mr. Talliaferro followed her, intrigued and curious. She stopped and glanced back over her shoulder and beyond him: Mr. Talliaferro aped her but saw no living thing except Mark Frost on the edge of the group. The others were out of sight beyond the deckhouse. “It’s farther on,” Jenny said.
Further along she stopped again and again she looked forward. “Where?” Mr. Talliaferro asked.
“Here.” Jenny stared at the lake a moment. Then she examined the deck again. Mr. Talliaferro was thoroughly puzzled now, even a trifle alarmed. “It was right here, that funny thing I saw. I guess it’s gone, though.”
“What was it you saw?”
“Some kind of a funny thing,” she answered with detachment. . . . “The sun is hot here.” Jenny moved away and went to where an angle of the deckhouse wall formed a shallow niche. Mr. Talliaferro followed her in amazement. Again Jenny peered around him, examining that part of the deck which was in sight and the immediate approaches to it. Then she became utterly static beside him and without moving at all she seemed to envelop him, giving him to think of himself surrounded, enclosed by the sweet cloudy fire of her thighs, as young girls can.
Mr. Talliaferro saw her as through a blonde mist. A lightness was moving down his members, a lightness so exquisite as to be almost unbearable, while above it all he listened to the dry interminable incoherence of his own voice. That unbearable lightness moved down his arms to his hands, and ​down his legs, reaching his feet at last, and Mr. Talliaferro fled.
Jenny looked after him. She sighed.
After a while the white dusty road left the swamp behind. It ran now through a country vaguely upland: sand and pines and a crisp thick undergrowth sunburnt and sibilant.
“We’re out of it at last,” she called back to him. Her pace quickened and she called over her shoulder: “It can’t be much further now. Come on, let’s run a while.” He shouted to her, but she trotted on, drawing away from him. He followed her splotched flashing legs at a slower pace, steadily losing distance.
Her legs twinkled on ahead in the shimmering forgotten road. Heat wavered and shimmered above the road and the sky was a metallic intolerable bowl and the tall pines in the windless afternoon exuded a thin exhilarating odor of resin and heat, casting sparse patches of shade upon the shimmering endless ribbon of the road. Lizards scuttled in the dust before them, hissing abruptly amid the dusty brittle undergrowth beside the road. The road went on and on, endless and shimmering ahead of them. He called to her again, but she trotted on unheeding.
Without faltering in her pace she turned and ran from the road and when he reached her she leaned against a tree, panting. “I ran too much,” she gasped through her pale open mouth. “I feel funny—all gone. Better hold me up,” she said, staring at him. “No: let me lie down.” She slumped against him. “My heart’s going too fast. Feel how it’s going.” He felt her heart leaping against his hand. “It’s too fast, isn’t it? What’ll I do now?” she asked soberly. “Do something quick, David,” she told him, staring at him, and he lowered her awkwardly and knelt beside her, supporting her ​head. She closed her eyes against the implacable sky, but opened them immediately and struggled to rise. “No, no: I mustn’t stay here. I want to get up again. Help me up.”
He did so, and had to hold her on her feet. “I must go on,” she repeated. “Make me go on, David. I don’t want to die here. Make me go on, I tell you.” Her face was flushed: he could see blood pumping in her throat, and holding her so he knew sharp and utter terror. “What must I do?” she was saying. “You ought to know. Don’t you know what to do? I’m sick, I tell you. They’ve given me hydrophobia or something.”
She closed her eyes and all her muscles relaxed at once and she slipped to the ground and he knelt again beside her in terror and despair. “Raise my head a little,” she muttered and he sat and drew her across his legs and raised her head against his breast, smoothing her damp hair from her forehead. “That’s right.” She opened her eyes. “Cheer up, David. . . . I told you once about looking at me like that.” Then she closed her eyes again.
three o’clock
“If we were only afloat,” Mrs. Maurier moaned for the twelfth time. “They can’t be further than Mandeville: I know they can’t. What will Henry say to me!”
“Why don’t they start her up and try to get off again?” Fairchild asked. “Maybe the sand has settled or something by now,” he added vaguely.
“The captain says they can’t, that we’ll have to wait for the tug. They sent for the tug yesterday, and it hasn’t come yet,” she added in a sort of stubborn astonishment. She rose and went to the rail and stared up the lake toward Mandeville.
“You wouldn’t think it’d take a tug to pull us off,” Fair​child remarked. “She ain’t such a big boat, you know. Seems like any sort of a boat would pull us off. I’ve seen little launches hauling bigger boats than this around. And a river tug can haul six or eight of these steel barges, upstream, too.”
Mrs. Maurier returned hopefully. “It really doesn’t seem necessary to have a tug to move this yacht, does it? You’d think that sailors could think of some way, something with ropes and things,” she added, also vaguely.
“What would they stand on while they pulled the ropes?” Mark Frost wanted to know. “They couldn’t pull from the shore. That isn’t the way we want to go.”
“They might row out in the tender and anchor,” the Semitic man offered as his mite.
“Why, yes,” Mrs. Maurier agreed, brightening. “If they could just anchor the tender securely, they might . . . if there were something to pull the rope with. The men themselves. . . . Do you suppose the sailors themselves could move a boat like this by hand?”
“I’ve seen a single river tug not much bigger than a Ford hauling a whole string of loaded steel barges up the river,” Fairchild repeated. He sat and stared from one to another of his companions and a strange light came into his eyes. “Say,” he said suddenly, “I bet that if all of us were to . . .”
The Semitic man and Mark Frost groaned in simultaneous alarm, and Pete sitting on the outskirt of the group rose hastily and unostentatiously and headed for the companionway. He ducked into his room and stood listening.
Yes, they were really going to try it. He could hear Fairchild’s burly voice calling for all the men, and also one or two voices raised in protest; and above all of them the voice of the old woman in an indistinguishable senseless excitement. Jesus Christ, he whispered, clutching his hat.
People descending the stairs alarmed him and he sprang ​behind the open door. It was Fairchild and the fat Jew, but they passed his door and entered the room next to his, from which he heard immediately sounds of activity that culminated in a thin concussion of glass and glass.
“My God, man’—the fat Jew’s voice—“what have you done? Do you really think we can move this boat?”
“Naw. I just want to stir em up a little. Life’s getting altogether too tame on this boat: nothing’s happened at all to-day. I did it principally to see Talliaferro and Mark Frost sweat some.” Fairchild laughed. His laughter died into chuckles, heavily. “But I have seen a little river tug no bigger than a Ford hauling a st—”
“Good Lord,” the other man said again. “Finish your drink. O immaculate cherubim,” he said, going on down the passage. Fairchild followed. Pete heard their feet on the stairs, then crossing the deck. He returned to the port.
Yes, sir, they were going to try it, sure as hell. They were now embarking in the tender: he could hear them, thumping and banging around and talking; a thin shriek of momentary alarm. Women, too (Damn to hell, I bet Jenny’s with ’em, Pete whispered to himself). And somebody that didn’t want to go at all.
Voices without; alarums and excursions, etc:
Come on, Mark, you’ve got to go. All the men will be needed, hey, Mrs. Maurier?
Yes, indeed; indeed, yes. All the men must help.
Sure: all you brave strong men have got to go.
I’m a poet, not an oarsman. I can’t—
So is Eva: look at her, she’s going.
Shelley could row a boat.
Yes, and remember what happened to him, too.
​I’m going to keep you all from drowning, Jenny. That’s (Damn to hell, Pete whispered) why I’m going.
Aw, come on, Mark; earn your board and keep
Oooo, hold the boat still, Dawson.
Come on, come on. Say, where’s Pete?
Pete!
Pete! (Feet on the deck.)
Pete! Oh, Pete! (At the companionway.) Pete! (Jesus Christ, Pete whispered, making no sound.)
Never mind, Eva. We’ve got a boatload now. If anybody else comes, they’ll have to walk.
There’s somebody missing yet. Who is it?
Ah, we’ve got enough. Come on.
But somebody ain’t here. I don’t guess he fell overboard while we were not looking, do you?
Oh, come on and let’s go. Shove off, you Talliaferro (a scream).
Look out, there: catch her! Y’all right, Jenny? Let’s go, then. Careful, now.
Ooooooo!
“Damn to hell, she’s with ’em,” Pete whispered again, trying to see through the port. More thumping, and presently the tender came jerkily and lethargically into sight, loaded to the gunwales like a nigger excursion. Yes, Jenny was in it, and Mrs. Wiseman and five men, including Mr. Talliaferro. Mrs. Maurier leaned over the rail above Pete’s head, waving her handkerchief and shrieking at them as the tender drew uncertainly away, trailing a rope behind it. Almost every one had an oar: the small boat bristled with oars beating the water vainly, so that it resembled a tarantula with palsy and no knee joints. But they finally began to get the knack of it and gradually the boat began to assume something like a ​definite direction. As Pete watched it there came again feet on the stairs and a voice said guardedly:
“Ed.”
An indistinguishable response from the captain’s room and the voice added mysteriously: “Come up on deck a minute.”
Then the footsteps withdrew, accompanied.
The tender evinced a maddening inclination to progress in any fashion save that for which it was built. Fairchild turned his head and glanced comprehensively about his small congested island enclosed with an unrhythmic clashing of blades. The oars clashed against each other, jabbing and scuttering at the tortured water until the tender resembled an ancient stiffjointed horse in a state of mad unreasoning alarm.
“Weve got too many rowers,” Fairchild decided. Mark Frost drew in his oar immediately, striking the Semitic man across the knuckles with it. “No, no: not you,” Fairchild said. “Julius, you quit: you ain’t doing any good, anyhow; you're the one that’s holding us back. Gordon, and Mark, and Talliaferro and me—”
“I want to row,” Mrs. Wiseman said. “Let me have Julius’ oar. Ernest will have to help Jenny watch the rope.”
“Take mine,” Mark Frost offered quickly, extending his oar and clashing it against some one else’s. The boat rocked alarmingly. Jenny squealed.
“Look out,” Fairchild exclaimed. “Do you want to have us all in the water? Julius, pass your oar along—that’s it. Now, you folks sit still back there. Dammit, Mark, if you hit anybody else with that thing, we’ll throw you out. Shelley could swim, too, you know.”
Mrs. Wiseman got fixed at last with her oar, and at last the tender became comparatively docile. Jenny and Mr. Talliaferro sat in the stern, paying out the line. “Now,” Fairchild ​glanced about at his crew and gave the command: “Let’s go.”
“Give way, all,” Mrs. Wiseman corrected with inspiration. They dipped their oars anew. Mark Frost drew his oar in once more, clashing it against Gordon’s.
“Let me get my handkerchief,” he said. “My hands are tender.”
“That’s what I want, too,” Mrs. Wiseman decided. “Gimme your handkerchief, Ernest.”
Mark Frost released his oar and it leapt quickly overboard. “Catch that paddle!” Fairchild shouted. Mrs. Wiseman and Mr. Talliaferro both reached for it and Gordon and the Semitic man trimmed the boat at the ultimate instant. It became stable presently and Jenny closed her mouth upon her soundless scream.
The oar swam away and stopped just beyond reach, raising and falling on the faint swells. “Well have to row over and get it,” Mrs. Wiseman said. So they did, but just before they reached it the oar swam on again, slowly and maddeningly. The rowers clashed and churned. Mr. Talliaferro sat in a taut diffident alarm.
“I really think,” he said, “we’d better return to the yacht. The ladies, you know.” But they didn’t heed him.
“Now, Ernest,” Mrs. Wiseman directed sharply, “reach out and grab it.” But it eluded them again, and Fairchild said:
“Let’s let the damn thing go. We’ve got enough left to row with, anyway.” But at that moment the oar, rocking sedately, swung slowly around and swam docilely up alongside.
“Grab it! grab it!” Mrs. Wiseman cried.
“I really think—” Mr. Talliaferro offered again. Mark Frost grabbed it and it came meekly and unresistingly out of the water.
“I’ve got it,” he said, and as he spoke it leapt viciously at ​him and struck him upon the mouth. Then it became docile again.
They got started again, finally; and after a few false attempts they acquired a vague sort of rhythm though Mark Frost, favoring his hands, caught a crab at every stroke for a while, liberally wetting Mr. Talliaferro and Jenny where they sat tensely in the stern. Jenny’s eyes were quite round and her mouth was a small red O: a continuous soundless squeal. Mr. Talliaferro’s expression was that of a haggard anticipatory alarm. He said again: “I really think—”
“I suspect we had better try to go another way,” the Semitic man suggested without emphasis from the bows, “or we'll be aground ourselves.”
They all scuttered their oars upon the water, craning their necks. The shore was only a few yards away and immediately, as though they had heard the Semitic man speak, needles of fire assailed the crew with fierce joy.
They bent to their oars again, flapping their spare frantic hands about their heads, and after a few minutes of violent commotion the tender acquiesced and crept slowly and terrifically seaward again. But their presence was now known, the original scouting party was reënforced and offing could not help them.
“I really think,” Mr. Talliaferro said, “for the ladies’ sake, that we’d better return.”
“So do I,” Mark Frost abetted quickly.
“Don’t lose your nerve, Mark,? Mrs. Wiseman told him.
“Just a little more and we can take a nice long boatride this afternoon.”
“I’ve had enough boatriding in the last half hour to do me a long time,” the poet answered. “Let’s go back. How about it, you fellows back there? How about it, Jenny? Don’t you want to go back?”
​Jenny answered “Yes, sir,” in a small frightened voice, clutching the seat with both hands. Her green dress was splotched and stained with water from Mark Frost’s oar. Mrs. Wiseman released one hand and patted Jenny’s knee.
“Shut up, Mark. Jenny’s all right. Aren’t you, darling? It'll be such a good joke if we really were to get the yacht afloat. Look sharp, Ernest. Isn’t that rope almost tight?”
It was nearly taut, sliding away into the water in a lovely slender arc and rising again to the bow of the yacht. Mrs. Maurier stood at the rail, waving her handkerchief at intervals. On the farther wall sat three people in attitudes studiedly casual: these were the captain, the helmsman and the deckhand.
“Now,” Fairchild said, “let’s all get started at the same time. Talliaferro, you keep the rope straight, and Julius—” he glanced over his shoulder, sweating, marshaling his crew. “Durn that shore,” he exclaimed in an annoyed tone, “there it is again.” They were nearly ashore a second time. Commotion, and more sweat and a virulent invisible fire; and after a while the tender acquiesced reluctantly and again they attained the necessary offing.
“Give way, all!” Mrs. Wiseman cried. They dug their oars anew.
“Mine hurts my hands,” Mark Frost complained. “Is it moving, Ernest?” The tender was off the yacht’s quarter: the bows of the yacht pointed inshore of them. Mr. Talliaferro rose cautiously and knelt on the seat, putting his hand on Jenny’s shoulder to steady himself.
“Not yet,” he replied.
“Pull all you know, men,” Fairchild panted, releasing one hand momentarily and batting it madly about his face. The crew pulled and sweated, goaded unto madness with invisible needles of fire, clashing one another’s fingers with their oars, ​and presently the tender acquired a motion reminiscent of the rocking horses of childhood.
“The rope’s becoming loose,” Mr. Talliaferro called in a warning tone.
“Pull,” Fairchild urged them, gritting his teeth. Mark Frost groaned dismally and released one hand to fan it across his face.
“Its still loose,” Mr. Talliaferro said after a time.
“She must be moving then,” Fairchild panted.
“Maybe it’s because we aren’t singing,” Mrs. Wiseman suggested presently, resting on her oar. “Don’t you know any deep sea chanteys, Dawson?”
“Let Julius sing: he ain’t doing anything,” Fairchild answered. “Pull, you devils!”
Mr. Talliaferro shrieked suddenly: “She’s moving! She’s moving!”
They all ceased rowing to stare at the yacht. Sure enough, she was swinging slowly across their stern. “She’s moving!” Mr. Talliaferro screamed again, waving his arms. Mrs. Maurier responded madly from the deck of the yacht with her handkerchief; beyond her, the three men sat motionless and casual. “Why don’t the fools start the engine?” Fairchild gasped. “Pull!” he roared.
They dipped their oars with new life, flailing the water like mad. The yacht swung slowly; soon she was pointing her prow seaward of them, and continued to swing slowly around. “She’s coming off, she’s coming off,” Mr. Talliaferro chanted in a thin falsetto, his voice breaking, fairly dancing up and down. Mrs. Maurier was shrieking also, waving her handkerchief. “She’s coming off,” Mr. Talliaferro chanted, standing erect and clutching Jenny’s shoulder. “Pull! Pull!”
“All together,” Fairchild gasped and the crew repeated it, flailing the water. The yacht was almost broadside to ​them, now. “She’s coming!” Mr. Talliaferro screamed in an ecstasy. “She’s co—”
A faint abrupt shock. The tender stopped immediately. They saw the sweet blonde entirety of Jenny’s legs and the pink seat of her ribboned undergarment as with a wild despairing cry Mr. Talliaferro plunged overboard, taking Jenny with him, and vanished beneath the waves.
All but his buttocks, that is. They didn’t quite vanish, and presently all of Mr. Talliaferro rose in eighteen inches of water and stared in shocked amazement at the branch of a tree directly over his head. Jenny, yet prone in the water, was an indistinguishable turmoil of blondeness and green crêpe and fright. She rose, slipped and fell again, then the Semitic man stepped into the water and picked her up bodily and set her in the boat where she sat and gazed at them with abject beseeching eyes, strangling.
Only Mrs. Wiseman had presence of mind to thump her between the shoulders, and after a dreadful trancelike interval during which they sat clutching their oars and gazing at her while she beseeched them with her eyes, she caught her breath, wailing. Mrs. Wiseman mothered her, holding her draggled unhappy wetness while Jenny wept dreadfully. “He—he sc-scared me so bad,” Jenny gasped after a time, shuddering and crying again, utterly abject, making no effort to hide her face.
Mrs. Wiseman made meaningless comforting sounds, holding Jenny in her arms. She borrowed a handkerchief and wiped Jenny’s streaming face. Mr. Talliaferro stood in the lake and dripped disconsolately, peering his harried face across Mrs. Wiseman’s shoulder. The others sat motionless, holding their oars.
Jenny raised her little wet hands futilely about her face. Then she remarked her hand and she held it before her ​face, gazing at it. On it was a thinly spreading crimson stain that grew as she watched it, and Jenny wept again with utter and hopeless misery.
“Oh, you’ve cut your poor hand! Dawson,” Mrs. Wiseman said, “you are the most consummate idiot unleashed. You take us right back to that yacht. Don’t try to row back: we'll never get there. Can’t you pull us back with the rope?”
They could, and Mrs. Wiseman helped Jenny into the bows and the men took their places again. Mr. Talliaferro flitted about in the water with his despairing face. “Jump in,” Fairchild told him. “We ain’t going to maroon you.”
They pulled the tender back to the yacht with chastened expedition. Mrs. Maurier met them at the rail, shrieking with alarm and astonishment. Pete was beside her. The sailors had decreetly vanished.
“What is it? What is it?” Mrs. Maurier chanted, mooning her round alarmed face above them. They brought the tender alongside and held it steady while Mrs. Wiseman helped Jenny across the thwarts and to the rail. Mr. Talliaferro flitted about in a harried distraction, but Jenny shrank from him. “You scared me so bad,” she repeated.
Pete leaned over the rail, reaching his hands while Mr. Talliaferro flitted about his victim. The tender rocked, scraping against the hull of the yacht. Pete caught Jenny’s hands.
“Hold the boat still, you old fool,” he told Mr. Talliaferro fiercely.
His legs were completely numb beneath her weight, but he would not move. He swished the broken branch about her, and at intervals he whipped it across his own back. Her face wasn’t so flushed, and he laid his hand again above her heart. At his touch she opened her eyes.
“Hello, David. I dreamed about water. . . . Where’ve ​you been all these years?” She closed her eyes again. “I feel better,” she said after a while. And then: “What time is it?” He looked at the sun and guessed. “We must go on,” she said. “Help me up.”
She sat up and a million red ants scurried through the arteries of his legs. She stood, dizzy and swaying, holding to him. “Gee, I’m not worth a damn. Next time you elope you’d better make her stand a physical examination, David. Do you hear? . . . But we must go on: come on, make me walk.” She took a few unsteady steps and clutched him again, closing her eyes. “Jesus H, if I ever get out of this alive. . .” She stopped again. “What must we do?” she asked.
“I’ll carry you a ways,” he said.
“Can you? I mean, aren’t you too tired?”
“I’ll carry you a ways, until we get somewhere,” he repeated.
“I guess you'll have to. . . . But if you were me, I’d leave you flat. That’s what I’d do.”
He squatted before her and reached back and slid his hands under her knees, and as he straightened up she leaned forward onto his back and put her arms around his neck, clasping the broken branch against his chest. He rose slowly, hitching her legs further around his hips as the constriction of her skirt lessened.
“You’re awful nice to me, David,” she murmured against his neck, limp upon his back.
Mrs. Wiseman washed and bound Jenny’s hand, interestingly; then she scrubbed Jenny’s little soft wormlike fingers and cleaned her fingernails while Jenny, naked, dried rosily in the cabined air. Underthings were not difficult, and stockings were simple also. But Jenny’s feet were short rather ​than small, and shoes were a problem. Though Jenny insisted that Mrs. Wiseman’s shoes were quite comfortable.
But she was clothed at last and Mrs. Wiseman gathered up the two wet garments gingerly and went to lean her hip against the bunk. The dress Jenny now wore belonged to the girl Patricia and Jenny stood before the mirror, bulging it divinely, examining herself in the mirror, smoothing the dress over her hips with a slow preening motion.
I had no idea there was that much difference between them, the other thought. It’s far more exciting than a bathing suit. . . . “Jenny,” she said, “I think—really, I— Darling, you simply must not go where men can see you, like that. For Mrs. Maurier’s sake, you know; she’s having enough trouble as it is, without any rioting.”
“Don’t it look all right? It feels all right,” Jenny answered, trying to see as much of herself as possible in a twelve-inch glass.
“I don’t doubt it. You must be able to feel every stitch in it. But we’ll have to get something else for you to wear. Slip it off, darling.”
Jenny obeyed. “It feels all right to me,” she repeated. “It don’t feel funny.”
“It doesn’t look funny, not at all. On the contrary, in fact. That’s the trouble with it,” the other answered delving busily in her bag.
“I always thought I had the kind of figure that could wear anything,” Jenny persisted, holding the dress regretfully in her hands.
“You have,” the other told her, “exactly that kind. Terribly like that. Simple and inevitable. Devastating.”
“Devastating,” Jenny repeated with interest. “There was a kind of funny little man at Mandeville that day . . .” She turned to the mirror again, trying to see as much of herself ​as possible. “Ive been told I have a figure like Dorothy Mackaill’s, only not too thin. . . . I think a little flesh is becoming to a girl. Don’t you?”
“Devastating,” the other agreed again. She rose and held a dark colored dress between her hands. “You'll look worse than ever in this . . . terrible as a young widow.” . . . She went to Jenny and held the dress against her, contemplative; then still holding the dress between her hands she put her arms around Jenny. “A little flesh is worse than a little dynamite, Jenny,” she said soberly, looking at Jenny with her dark, sad eyes. . . . “Does your hand still hurt?”
“Its all right now.” Jenny craned her neck, peering downward along her flank. “It’s a little long, ain’t it?”
“Yours will dry soon.” She raised Jenny’s face and kissed her on the mouth. “Slip it on, and well hang your things in the sun.”
four o’clock
He strode on in the dust, along the endless shimmering road between pines like fixed explosions on the afternoon. The afternoon was an endless unbearable brightness. Their shapeless, merged shadow moved on: two steps more and he would tread upon it and through it as he did the sparse shadows of pines, but it moved on just ahead of him between the faded forgotten ruts, keeping its distance effortlessly in the uneven dust. The dust was fine as powder and unbroken; only an occasional hoofprint, a fading ghost of a forgotten passage. Above, the metallic implacable sky resting upon his bowed neck and her lax, damp weight upon his back and her cheek against his neck, rubbing monotonously against it. Thin fire darted upon him constantly. He strode on.
The dusty road swam into his vision, passed beneath his feet and so behind like an endless ribbon. He found that his ​mouth was open, drooling, though no moisture came, and his gums took a thin dry texture like cigarette paper. He closed his mouth, trying to moisten his gums.
Trees without tops passed him, marched up abreast of him, topless, and fell behind; the rank roadside grass approached and became monstrous and separate, blade by blade: lizards hissed in it sibilantly ere it faded behind him. Thin unseen fire darted upon him but he didn’t even feel it, for in his shoulders and arms there was no longer any sensation at all save that of her lax weight upon his back and the brass sky resting against his neck and her moist cheek rubbing against his neck monotonously. He found that his mouth was open again, and he closed it.
“That’s far enough,” she said, presently rousing. “Let me down.” Their merged shadow blended at intervals with the shadows of the tall topless trees, but beyond the shadow of the trees their blended shadow appeared again, two paces ahead of him. And the road went on ahead of him shimmering and blistered and whiter than salt. “Put me down, David,” she repeated.
“No,” he said between his dry, rough teeth, above the remote, imperturbable tramping of his heart, “not tired.” His heart made a remote sound. Each beat seemed to be somewhere in his head, just behind his eyes; each beat was a red tide that temporarily obscured his vision. But it always ended, then another dull surge blinded him for a moment. But remote, like a tramping of soldiers in red uniforms stepping endlessly across the door of a room where he was, where he crouched trying to look out the door. It was a dull, heavy sound, like a steamer’s engines, and he found that he was thinking of water, of a blue monotony of seas. It was a red sound, just back of his eyes.
The road came on, an endless blistering ribbon between ​worn ruts where nothing had passed for a long time. The sea makes a swishing sound in your ears. Regular. Swish. Swish. Not against your eyes, though. Not against the backs of your eyes. The shadow came out of a blotch of larger shadows cast by trees that had no tops. Two steps more. No, three steps now. Three steps. Getting to be afternoon, getting to be later than it was once. Three steps, then. All right. Man walks on his hind legs; a man can take three steps, a monkey can take three steps, but there is water in a monkey’s cage, in a pan. Three steps. All right. One. Two. Three. Gone. Gone. Gone. It’s a red sound. Not behind your eyes. Sea. See. Sea. See. You're in a cave, you're in a cave of dark sound, the sound of the sea is outside the cave. Sea. See. See. See. Not when they keep stepping in front of the door.
There was another sound in his ears now, a faint annoying sound, and the weight on his back was shifting of its own volition, thrusting him downward toward the blistering, blanched dust in which he walked, took three steps a man can take three steps and he staggered, trying to shift his numb arms and get a new grip. His mouth was open again and when he tried to shut it, it made a dry, hissing sound. One. Two. Three. One. Two. Three.
“Let me down, I tell you,” she repeated, thrusting herself backward. “Look, there’s a signboard. Let me down, I tell you. I can walk now.”
She thrust herself away from him, twisting her legs from his grasp and forcing him down, and he stumbled and went to his knees. Her feet touched the ground and still astride of his body she braced herself and held him partially up by his shoulders. He stopped at last, on all fours like a beast, his head hanging between his shoulders; and kneeling beside him in the dust she slid her hand under his forehead to lessen the ​tension on his neck and raised her eyes to the signboard. Mandeville. Fourteen miles, and a crude finger pointing in the direction from which they had come. The front of her dress was damp, blotched darkly with his sweat.
After the women had hovered Jenny’s draggled helplessness below decks Fairchild removed his hat and mopped his face, looking about upon his fatuous Frankenstein with a sort of childlike astonishment. Then his gaze came to rest on Mr. Talliaferro’s haggard damp despair and he laughed and laughed.
“Laugh you may,” the Semitic man told him, “but much more of this sort of humor and you’ll be doing your laughing ashore. I think now, if Talliaferro’d start an active protest with you as its immediate object, that we’d all be inclined to support him.” Mr. Talliaferro dripped forlornly: an utter and hopeless dejection. The Semitic man looked at him, then he too looked about at the others and upon the now peaceful scene of their recent activities. “One certainly pays a price for art,” he murmured, “one really does.”
“Talliaferro’s the only one who has suffered any actual damage,” Fairchild protested. “And I’m just going to buy him off now. Come on, Talliaferro, we can fix you up.”
“That won’t be sufficient,” the Semitic man said, still ominous. “The rest of us have been assailed enough in our vanities to rise from principle.”
“Well, then, if I have to, I’ll buy you all off,” Fairchild answered. He led the way toward the stairs. But he halted again and looked back at them. “Where’s Gordon?” he asked. Nobody knew. “Well, no matter. He knows where to come.” He went on. “After all,” he said, “there are compensations for art, ain’t there?”
The Semitic man admitted that there were. “Though,” he ​added, “it’s a high price to pay for whisky.” He descended in his turn. “Yes, we really must get something out of it. We spend enough time on it and suffer enough moral and mental turmoil because of it.”
“Sure,” Fairchild agreed. “The ones that produce it get a lot from it. They get the boon of keeping their time pretty well filled. And that’s a whole lot to expect in this world,” he said profoundly, fumbling at his door. It opened at last and he said: “Oh, here you are. Say, you just missed it.”
Major Ayers, his neglected tumbler beside him and clutching a book, came up for air when they entered, festooned yet with a kind of affable bewilderment. “Missed what?” he repeated.
They all began to tell him about it at once, producing Mr. Talliaferro as evidence from where he lurked unhappily in their midst, for Major Ayers’ inspection and commiseration; and still telling him about it they found seats while Fairchild again assumed the ritual of his hidden suitcase. Major Ayers already had the chair, but the Semitic man attempted the book anyway. “What have you got there?” he asked.
Major Ayers’ hearty bewilderment descended upon him again. “I was passing the time,” he explained quickly. He stared at the book. “It’s quite strange,” he said. Then he added: “I mean, the way . . . The way they get their books up nowadays. I like the way they get their books up. Jolly, with colors, y'know. But I—” He considered a moment. “I rather lost the habit of reading at Sandhurst,” he explained in a burst of confidence. “And then, on active service constantly . . .”
“War is bad,” the Semitic man agreed. “What were you reading?”
“I rather lost the habit of reading at Sandhurst,” Major Ayers explained again. He raised the book again.
​Fairchild opened a fresh bottle. “Somebody’ll have to dig up some more glasses. Mark, see if you can slip back to the kitchen and get one or two more. Let’s see the book,” he said reaching his hand. The Semitic man forestalled him.
“You go ahead and give us some whisky. I’d rather forget my grief that way, just now.”
“But look,” Fairchild insisted. The other fended him off.
“Give us some whisky, I tell you,” he repeated. “Here’s Mark with the glasses. What we need in this country is protection from artists. They even want to annoy us with each other’s stuff.”
“Go ahead,” Fairchild replied equably, “have your joke. You know my opinion of smartness. ” He passed glasses among them.
“He can’t mean that,” the Semitic man said, “Just because the New Republic gives him hell—”
“But the Dial once bought a story of him,” Mark Frost said with hollow envy.
“And what a fate for a man in all the lusty pride of his Ohio valley masculinity: immolation in a home for old young ladies of either sex. . . . That atmosphere was too rare for him. Eh, Dawson?”
Fairchild laughed. “Well, I ain’t much of an Alpinist. What do you want to be in there for, Mark?”
“It would suit Mark exactly,” the Semitic man said, “that vague polite fury of the intellect in which they function. What I can’t see is how Mark has managed to stay out of it. . . . But then, if you’ll look close enough, you'll find an occasional grain of truth in these remarks which Mark and I make and which you consider merely smart. But you utter things not quite clever enough to be untrue, and while we are marveling at your profundity, you lose courage and flatly contradict yourself the next moment. Why, only that tactless ​and well meaning God of yours alone knows. Why any one should worry enough about the temporary meaning or construction of words to contradict himself consciously or to feel annoyed when he has done it unconsciously, is beyond me.”
“Well, it is a kind of sterility—Words,” Fairchild admitted. “You begin to substitute words for things and deeds, like the withered cuckold husband that took the Decameron to bed with him every night, and pretty soon the thing or the deed becomes just a kind of shadow of a certain sound you make by shaping your mouth a certain way. But you have a confusion, too. I don’t claim that words have life in themselves. But words brought into a happy conjunction produce something that lives, just as soil and climate and an acorn in proper conjunction will produce a tree. Words are like acorns, you know. Every one of ’em won’t make a tree, but if you just have enough of ’em, you’re bound to get a tree sooner or later.”
“If you just talk long enough, you’re bound to say the right thing some day. Is that what you mean?” the Semitic man asked.
“Let me show you what I mean.” Fairchild reached again for the book.
“For heaven’s sake,” the other exclaimed, “let us have this one drink in peace. We’ll admit your contention, if that’s what you want. Isn’t that what you say, Major?”
“No, really,” Major Ayers protested, “I enjoyed the book. Though I rather lost the habit of reading at Sa—”
“I like the book myself,” Mark Frost said. “My only criticism is that it got published.”
“You can’t avoid that,” Fairchild told him. “It’s inevitable; it happens to every one who will take the risk of writing down a thousand coherent consecutive words.”
​“And sooner than that,” the Semitic man added, “if you’ve murdered your husband or won a golf championship.”
“Yes,” Fairchild agreed. “Cold print. Your stuff looks so different in cold print. It lends a kind of impersonal authority even to stupidity.”
“That’s backward,” the other said. “Stupidity lends a kind of impersonal authority even to cold print.”
Fairchild stared at him. “Say, what did you just tell me about contradicting myself?”
“I can afford to,” the other answered. “I never authenticate mine.” He drained his glass. “But as for art and artists, I prefer artists: I don’t even object to paying my pro rata to feed them, so long as I am not compelled to listen to them.”
“It seems to me,” Fairchild rejoined, “that you spend a lot of time listening to them, for a man who professes to dislike it and who don’t have to.”
“That’s because I’d have to listen to somebody—artist or shoe clerk. And the artist is more entertaining because he knows less about what he is trying to do. . . . And besides, I talk a little, myself. I wonder what became of Gordon?”
five o’clock
Evening came sad as horns among the trees. The road had dropped downward again into the swamp where amid rank, impenetrable jungle dark streams wallowed aimless and obscene, and against the hidden flame of the west huge trees brooded bearded and ancient as prophets out of Genesis. David lay at full length at the roadside. He had lain there a long time, but at last he sat up and looked about for her.
She stood beside a cypress, up to her knees in thick water, her arms crossed against the tree trunk and her face hidden in her arms, utterly motionless. About them, a moist green twilight filled with unseen fire.
​“David.” Her voice was muffled by her arms, and after it, there was no sound in this fecund, timeless twilight of trees. He sat beside the road, and presently she spoke again. “It’s a mess, David. I didn’t know it was going to be like this.” He made a harsh, awkward sound, as though it were some one else’s voice he was trying to speak with. “Hush,” she said. “It’s my fault: I got you into this. I’m sorry, David.”
These trees were thicker, huger, more ancient than any yet, amid the brooding twilight of their beards. “What must we do now, David?” After a while she raised her head and looked at him and repeated the question.
He answered slowly: “Whatever you want to do.”
She said: “Come here, David.” And he got slowly to his feet and stepped into the black, thick water and went to her, and for a while she looked at him soberly, without moving. Then she turned from the tree and came nearer and they stood in the foul, black water, embracing. Suddenly she clasped him fiercely. “Can’t you do something about it? Can’t you make it different? Must it be like this?”
“What do you want me to do?” he asked slowly in that voice which was not his. She loosed her arms, and he repeated as though prompted: “You do whatever you want to.”
“I’m damn sorry, David, for getting you into this. Josh is right: I’m just a fool.” She writhed her body beneath her dress, whimpering again. “They hurt me so damn bad,” she moaned.
“We must get out of this,” he said. “You tell me what you want to do.”
“It will be all right, if I do what I think is best?” she asked quickly, staring at him with her grave opaque eyes. “You swear it will?”
“Yes,” he answered with utter weariness. “You do whatever you want to.”
​She became at once passive, a submissive docility in his embrace. But he stood holding her loosely, not even looking at her. As abruptly her passiveness faded and she said: “You're all right, David. I’d like to do something for you. Pay you back, some way.” She looked at him again and found that he was looking at her. “David! why, David! Don’t feel that way about it!” But he continued to look at her with his quiet utter yearning. “David, I’m sorry, sorry, sorry. What can I do about it? Tell me: I’ll do it. Anything, just anything.”
“It’s all right,” he said.
“But it isn’t. I want to make it up to you, some way, for getting you into this.” His head was averted: he seemed to be listening. Then the sound came again across the afternoon, among the patriarchal trees—a faint, fretful sound.
“There’s a boat,” he said. “We are close to the lake.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “I heard it a while ago. I think it’s coming in near here.” She moved, and he released her. She listened again, touching his shoulder lightly. “Yes, it’s coming this way. You’d better take your shirt again. Turn your back, please, David.”
six o’clock
“Sure, I know where your boat is, seen her hove to when I come along. In mighty shaller water, too. Ain’t more’n three miles down the lake,” the man told them, setting a galvanized pail of water on the edge of the veranda. His house stood on piles driven into the moist earth at the edge of the jungle. Before it a dark broad stream was seemingly without any movement at all between rigid palisades of trees.
The man stood on the veranda and watched her while she poured dippersful of heavenly water on her head. The water ran through her hair and dripped down her face, sopping ​her dress, while the man stood and watched her. His blue collarless shirt was fastened at the throat by a brass collar button, his sweat-stained suspenders drew his faded cotton trousers snugly over his paunch. His loose jowls moved rhythmically and he spat brownly upon the earth at their feet, barely averting his head.
“You folks been wandering around in the swamp all day?” he asked staring at her with his pale, heavy eyes, roving his gaze slowly up her muddy stockings and her stained dress. “What you want to go back fer, now? Feller got enough, huh?” He spat again, and made a heavy sound of disparagement and disgust. “Ain’t no such thing as enough. Git a real man, next time.” He looked at David and asked him a question, using an unprintable verb.
Anger, automatic and despite his weariness, fired him slowly, but she forestalled him. “Let’s get back to the boat, first,” she said to him. She looked at the man again, meeting his pale heavy stare. “How much?” she asked briskly.
“Five dollars.” He glanced at David again. “In advance.”
David put his hand to his waist. “With my money,” she said quickly, watching him as he dug into his watch pocket and extracted a single bill, neatly folded. “No, no: with mine,” she insisted peremptorily, staying his hand. “Where’s mine?” she asked, and he drew from his trousers her crumpled mass of notes, and she took it.
The man accepted the bill and spat again. He descended heavily from the porch and led the way down to the water where his launch was moored. They got in and he cast off and thrust the boat away from the shore and bent heavily over the engine. “Yes, sir, that’s the way with these town fellers. No guts. Next time, come over to this side and git you a real man. I kin git off most any day. And I won’t be honing ​to git home by sundown, neither,” he added, looking back over his shoulder.
“Shut your mouth,” she told him sharply. “Make him shut up, David.” The man paused, staring at her with his pale sleepy eyes.
“Now, look-a-here,” he began heavily.
“Shut up and start your flivver,” she repeated. “You’ve got your money, so let’s go if we are going.”
“Well, that’s all right, too. I like ’em to have a little git-up-and-git to ’em.” He stared at her with his lazy drooping eyes, chewing rhythmically, then he called her a name. David rose from his seat, but she restrained him with one hand and she cursed the man fluently and glibly. “Now get started,” she finished. “If he opens his head again, David, just knock him right out of the boat.”
The man snarled his yellow teeth at them, then he bent again over the engine. Its fretful clamor rose soon and the boat slid away circling, cutting the black motionless water. Ahead, soon, there was a glint of space beyond the trees, a glint of water; and soon they had passed from the bronze nave of the river onto the lake beneath the rushing soundless wings of sunset and a dying glory of day under the cooling brass bowl of the sky.
The Nausikaa was more like a rosy gull than ever in the sunset, squatting sedately upon the darkening indigo of the water, against the black metallic trees. The man shut off his fussy engine and the launch slid up alongside and the man caught the rail and held his boat stationary, watching her muddy legs as she climbed aboard the yacht.
No one was in sight. They stood at the rail and looked downward upon his thick backside while he spun the flywheel again. The engine caught at last and the launch circled away ​from the yacht and headed again into the sunset while the fussy engine desecrated the calm of water and sky and trees. Soon the boat was only a speck in the fading path of the sunset.
“David?” she said, when it had gone. She turned and put her firm tanned hand on his breast, and he turned his head also and looked at her with his beastlike longing.
“It’s all right,” he said after a time. She put her arms around him again, sexless and hard, drawing his cheek down to her sober moist kiss. This time he didn’t move his head.
“I’m sorry, David.”
“It’s all right,” he repeated. She laid her hands flat on his chest and he released her. For a time they gazed at each other. Then she left him and crossed the deck and descended the companionway without looking back, and so left him and the evening from which the sun had gone suddenly and into which night was as suddenly come, and across which the fretful thin sound of the launch came yet faintly along the dreaming water, beneath the tarnished sky where stars were already pricking like a hushed magical blooming of flowers.
She found the others at dinner in the saloon, since what breeze there was was still offshore and the saloon was screened. They greeted her with various surprise, but she ignored them and her aunt’s round suffused face, going haughtily to her place.
“Patricia,” Mrs. Maurier said at last, “where have you been?”
“Walking,” the niece snapped. In her hand she carried a small crumpled mass and she put this on the table, separating the notes and smoothing them into three flat sheaves.
“Patricia,” said Mrs. Maurier again.
“I owe you six dollars,” she told Miss Jameson, putting one ​of the sheaves beside her plate. “You only had a dollar,” she informed Mrs. Wiseman, passing a single note across the table to her. “I’ll pay you the rest of yours when we get home,” she told her aunt, reaching across Mr. Talliaferro’s shoulder with the third sheaf. She met her aunt’s apoplectic face again.
“I brought your steward back, too. So you haven’t got anything to kick about.”
“Patricia,” Mrs. Maurier said. She said, chokingly: “Mr. Gordon, didn’t he come back with you?”
“He wasn’t with me. What would I want to take him along for? I already had one man.”
Mrs. Maurier’s face became dreadful, and as the blood died swooning in her heart she had again that brief vision of floating inert buttocks, later to wash ashore with that inopportune and terrible implacability of the drowned. “Patricia,” she said dreadfully.
“Oh, haul in your sheet,” the niece interrupted wearily. “You're jibbing. Gosh, I’m hungry.” She sat down and met her brother’s cold gaze. “And you too, Josh,” she added, taking a piece of bread.
The nephew glanced briefly at his aunt’s wrung face. “You ought to beat hell out of her,” he said calmly, going on with his dinner.
nine o’clock
“But I saw him about four o’clock,” Fairchild argued. “He was in the boat with us. Didn’t you see him, Major? but that’s so: you were not with us. You saw him, Mark, didn’t you?”
“He was in the boat when we started. I remember that. But I don’t remember seeing him after Ernest fell out.”
“Well, I do. I know I saw him on deck right after we got back. But I can’t remember seeing him in the boat ​after Jenny and Talliaferro . . . Ah, he’s all right, though. He'll show up soon. He ain’t the sort to get drowned.”
“Don’t be too sure of that,” Major Ayers said. “There are no women missing, you know.”
Fairchild laughed his burly appreciative laugh. Then he met Major Ayers’ glassy solemn stare, and ceased. Then he laughed once more, somewhat after the manner of one feeling his way into a dark room, and ceased again, turning on Major Ayers his trustful baffled expression. Major Ayers said:
“This place to which these young people went to-day—” “Mandeville,” the Semitic man supplied. “—what sort of a place is it?” They told him. “Ah, yes. They have facilities for that sort of thing, eh?”
“Well, not more than usual,” the Semitic man answered, and Fairchild said, still watching Major Ayers with a sort of cautious bafflement:
“Not any more than you can carry along with you. We Americans always carry our own facilities with us. It’s living high tension go-getting lives like we do in this country, you see.”
Major Ayers glared at him politely. “Somewhat like the Continent,” he suggested after a time.
“Not exactly,” the Semitic man said. “In America you often find an H in caste.” Fairchild and Major Ayers stared at the Semitic man.
“As well as a cast in chaste,” Mark Frost put in. Fairchild and Major Ayers now stared at him, watching him while he lit a fresh cigarette from the stub of his present one, and left his chair and went to lie at full length on the deck.
“Why not?” the Semitic man took him up. “Love itself is stone blind.”
“It has to be,” Mark Frost answered. Major Ayers stared from one to the other for a while. He said:
​“This Mandeville, now. It is a convention, eh? A local convention?”
“Convention?” Fairchild repeated.
“I mean, like our Gretna Green. You ask a lady there, and immediately there is an understanding: saves unnecessary explanations and all that.”
“I thought Gretna Green was a place where they used to go to get marriage licenses in a hurry,” Fairchild said suspiciously.
“It was, once,” Major Ayers agreed. “But during the Great Fire all the registrars’ and parsons’ homes were destroyed. And in those days communication was so poor that word didn’t get about until a fortnight or so later. In the meantime quite a few young people had gone there in all sincerity, you know, and were forced to return the next day without benefit of clergy. Of course the young ladies durst not tell until matters were remedied, which, during those unsettled times, might be any time up to a month or so. But by that time, of course, the police had heard of it—London police always hear of things in time, you know.”
“And so, when you go to Gretna Green now, you get a policeman,” the Semitic man said.
“You’ve Yokohama in mind,” Major Ayers answered as gravely. “Of course, they are native policemen,” he added.
“Like whitebait,” the Semitic man suggested.
“Or sardines,” Mark Frost corrected.
“Or sardines,” Major Ayers agreed suavely. He sucked violently at his cold pipe while Fairchild stared at him with intrigued bewilderment.
“But this young lady, the one who popped off with the steward. And came back the same day. . . . Is this customary with your young girls? I ask for information,” he added quickly. “Our young girls don’t do that, you know; ​with us, only decayed countesses do that—cut off to Italy with chauffeurs and second footmen. And they never return before nightfall. But our young girls . . .”
“Art,” the Semitic man explained succinctly. Mark Frost elaborated:
“In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior; in America, it’s an excuse for a form of behavior.”
“Yes. But, I say—” Major Ayers mused again, sucking violently at his cold pipe. Then: “She’s not the one who did that tweaky little book, is she? The syphilis book?”
“No. That was Julius’ sister; the one named Eva,” Fairchild said. “This one that eloped and then came back ain’t an artist at all. It’s just the artistic atmosphere of the boat, I guess.”
“Oh,” said Major Ayers. “Strange,” he remarked. He rose and thumped his pipe against his palm. Then he blew through the stem and put it in his pocket. “I think I shall go below and have a whisky. Who'll come along?”
“I guess I won’t, right now,” Fairchild decided. The Semitic man said later on. Major Ayers turned to the prone poet.
“And you, old thing?”
“Bring it up to us,” Mark Frost suggested. But Fairchild vetoed this. The Semitic man supported him and Major Ayers departed.
“I wish I had a drink,” Mark Frost said.
“Go down and have one, then,” Fairchild told him. The poet groaned.
The Semitic man lighted his cigar again and Fairchild spoke from his tentative bewilderment. “That was interesting, about Gretna Green, wasn’t it? I didn’t know about that. Never read it anywhere, I mean. But I guess there’s lots of grand things in the annals of all people that never get into ​the history books.” The Semitic man chuckled. Fairchild tried to see his face in the obscurity. Then he said:
“Englishmen are funny folks: always kidding you at the wrong time. Things just on the verge of probability, and just when you have made up your mind to take it one way, you find they meant it the other.” He mused a while in the darkness.
“It was kind of nice, wasn’t it? Young people, young men and girls caught in that strange hushed magic of sex and the mystery of intimate clothing and functions and all, and of lying side by side in the darkness, telling each other things . . . that’s the charm of virginity: telling each other things. Virginity don’t make any difference as far as the body’s concerned. Young people running away together in a flurry of secrecy and caution and desire, and getting there to find”. . . again he turned his kind, baffled face toward his friend. He continued after a while.
“Of course the girls would be persuaded, after they’d come that far, wouldn’t they? You know—strange surroundings, a strange room like an island in an uncharted sea full of monsters like landlords and strangers and such; the sheer business of getting their bodies from place to place and feeding ’em and caring for ’em; and your young man thwarted and lustful and probably fearful that you’d change your mind and back out altogether, and a strange room all secret and locked and far away from familiar things and you young and soft and nice to look at and knowing it, too. . . . Of course they’d be persuaded.
“And, of course, when they got back home they wouldn’t tell, not until another parson turned up and everything was all regular again. And maybe not then. Maybe they’d whisper it to a friend some day, after they’d been married long enough to prefer talking to other women to talking to their ​husbands, while they were discussing the things women talk about. But they wouldn’t tell the young unmarried ones, though. And if they, even a year later, ever got wind of another one being seen going there or coming away . . . They are such practical creatures, you know: only men hold to conventions for moral reasons.”
“Or from habit,” the Semitic man added.
“Yes,” Fairchild agreed. . . . “I wonder what became of Gordon.”
Jenny remarked his legs, tweeded. How can he stand them heavy clothes in this weather, she thought with placid wonder, calling him soundlessly as he passed. His purposeful stride faltered and he came over beside her.
“Enjoying the evening, eh?” he suggested affably, glaring down at her in the darkness. Inside her borrowed clothes she was rife as whipped cream, blonde and perishable as an expensive pastry.
“Kind of,” she admitted. Major Ayers leaned his elbows on the rail.
“I was on my way below,” he told her.
“Yes, sir,” Jenny agreed, passive in the darkness, like an erotic lightning bug projecting that sense of himself surrounded, enclosed by the sweet, cloudy fire of her thighs, as young girls will. Major Ayers looked down at her vague, soft head. Then he jerked his head sharply, glaring about.
“Enjoying the evening, eh?” he asked again.
“Yes, sir,” Jenny repeated. She bloomed like a cloying heavy flower. Major Ayers moved restively. Again he jerked his head as if he had heard his name spoken. Then he looked at Jenny again.
“Are you a native of New Orleans?”
“Yes, sir. Esplanade.”
​“I beg pardon?”
“Esplanade. Where I live in New Orleans,” she explained. “Its a street,” she added after a while.
“Oh,” Major Ayers murmured. . . . “Do you like living there?”
“I don’t know. I always lived there.” After a time she added: “It’s not far.”
“Not far, eh?”
“No, sir.” She stood motionless beside him and for the third time Major Ayers jerked his head quickly, as though some one were trying to attract his attention.
“I was on my way below,” he repeated. Jenny waited a while. Then she murmured:
“It’s a fine night for courting.”
“Courting?” Major Ayers repeated.
“With dates.” Major Ayers stared down upon her hushed, soft hair. “When boys come to see you,” she explained.
“When you go out with the boys.”
“Go out with boys,” Major Ayers repeated. “To Mandeville, perhaps?”
“Sometimes,” she agreed. “I’ve been there.”
“Do you go often?”
“Why. . . sometimes,” she repeated.
“With boys, eh? With men, too, hey?”
“Yes, sir,” Jenny answered with mild surprise. “I don’t guess anybody would just go there by herself.”
Major Ayers calculated heavily. Jenny stood docile and rife, projecting her little enticing aura, doing her best. “I say,” he said presently, “suppose we pop down there tomorrow—you and I?”
“To-morrow?” Jenny repeated with soft astonishment.
“To-night, then,” he amended. “What d’ye say?”
​“To-night? Can we get there to-night? It’s kind of late, ain’t it? How’ll we get there?”
“Like those people who went this morning did. There’s a tram or a bus, isn’t there? Or a train at the nearest village?”
“I don’t know. They come back in a boat.”
“Oh, a boat.” Major Ayers considered a moment. “Well, no matter: we’ll wait until to-morrow, then. We’ll go to-morrow, eh?”
“Yes, sir,” Jenny repeated tirelessly, passive and rife, projecting her emanation. Once more Major Ayers looked about him. Then he moved his hand from the rail and as Jenny, seeing the movement, turned to him with a slow unreluctance, he chucked her under the chin.
“Right, then,” he said briskly, moving away. “To-morrow it is.” Jenny gazed after him in passive astonishment and he turned and came back to her, and giving her an intimate inviting glare he chucked her again under her soft surprised chin. Then he departed permanently.
Jenny gazed after his tweedclad dissolving shape, watching him out of sight. He sure is a foreigner, she told herself. She sighed.
The water lapped at the hull of the yacht with little sounds, little hushed sounds like boneless hands might make, and she leaned again over the rail, gazing downward into the dark water.
He would be refined as anybody, she mused to herself. Being her brother . . . more refined, because she had been away all day with that waiter in the dining room. . . . But maybe the waiter was refined, too. Except I never found many boys that. . .I guess her aunt must have jumped on her. I wonder what she’d ’a’ done when they come back, if we’d got ​the boat started and went away . . . and now that redheaded man and She says he’s drowned. . . .
Jenny gazed into the dark water, thinking of death, of being helpless in that terrible suffocating resilience of water, feeling again that utter and dreadful helpfulness of terror and fear. So when Mr. Talliaferro was suddenly and silently beside her, touching her, she recognized him by instinct. And feeling again her world become unstable and shifting beneath her, feeling all familiar solid things fall away from under her and seeing familiar faces and objects arc swooping away from her as she plunged from glaring sunlight through a timeless interval into Fear like a green lambence straying to receive her, she was stark and tranced. But at last she could move again, screaming.
“You scared me so bad,” she gasped piteously, shrinking from him. She turned and ran, ran toward light, toward the security of walls.
The room was dark: no sound within it, and after the dim spaciousness of the deck it seemed close and hot. But here were comfortable walls and Jenny snapped on the light and entered, entered into an atmosphere of familiarity. Here was a vague ghost of the scent she liked and with which she had happily been impregnated when she came aboard and which had not yet completely died away, and the thin sharp odor of lilacs which she had come to associate with Mrs. Wiseman and which lingered also in the room, and the other’s clothing, and her own comb on the dressing table and the bright metal cylinder of her lipstick beside it.
Jenny looked at her face in the mirror for a while. Then she removed a garment and returned to gaze at her stainless pink-and-whiteness, ineffable, unmarred by any thought at all. Then she removed the rest of her clothes, and again before the ​glass she passed her comb through the drowsing miniature Golconda of her hair, then she got her naked body placidly into bed, as was her habit since three nights.
But she didn’t turn out the light. She lay in her berth, gazing up at the smug glare of light upon the painted unbroken sweep of the ceiling. Time passed while she lay rosy and motionless, measured away by the small boneless hands of water lapping against the hull beyond the port; and she could hear feet also, and people moving about and making sounds.
She didn’t know what it was she wanted, except it was something. So she lay on her back rosy and quiet beneath the unshaded glare of the inadequate light, and after a while she thought that maybe she was going to cry. Maybe that was it, so she lay naked and rosy and passive on her back, waiting to begin.
She could still hear people moving about: voices and feet, and she kept waiting for that first taste of crying that comes into your throat before you really get started—that feeling that there are two little salty canals just under your ears when you feel sorry for yourself, and that other kind of feeling you have at the base of your nose. Only my nose don’t get red when I cry, she thought, in a placid imminent misery of sadness and meaningless despair, waiting passive and still and without dread for it to begin. But before it began, Mrs. Wiseman entered the room.
She came over to Jenny and Jenny looked up and saw the other’s dark small head, like a deer’s head, against the light, and that dark intent way the other had of looking at her; and presently Mrs. Wiseman said:
“What is it, Jenny? What’s the matter?”
But she had forgotten what it was, almost: all she could remember was that there had been something; but now that the other had come Jenny could hardly remember that she ​had forgotten anything even, and so she just lay and looked up at the other’s dark slender head against the unshaded light.
“Poor child, you have had a hard day, haven’t you?” She put her hand on Jenny’s brow, smoothing back the fine hushed gold of Jenny’s hair, stroking her hand along Jenny’s cheek. Jenny lay quiet under the hand, drowsing her eyes like a stroked kitten, and then she knew she could cry all right, whenever she wanted to. Only it was almost as much fun just lying here and knowing you could cry whenever you got ready to, as the crying itself would be. She opened her blue ineffable eyes.
“Do you suppose he’s really drownded?” she asked. Mrs. Wiseman’s hand stroked Jenny’s cheek, pushing her hair upward and away from her brow.
“I don’t know, darling,” she answered soberly. “He’s a luckless man. And anything may happen to a luckless man. But don’t you think about that any more. Do you hear?” She leaned her face down to Jenny’s. “Do you hear?” she said again.
“No,” Fairchild said, “he ain’t the sort to get drowned. Some people just ain’t that sort. . . . I wonder,” he broke off suddenly and gazed at his companions. “Say, do you suppose he went off because he thought that girl was gone for good?”
“Drowned himself for love?” Mark Frost said. “Not in this day and time. People suicide because of money and disease: not for love.”
“I don’t know about that,” Fairchild objected. “They used to die because of love. And human nature don’t change. Its actions achieve different results under different conditions, but human nature don’t change.”
“Mark is right,” the Semitic man said. “People in the old books died of heartbreak also, which was probably merely some ailment that any modern surgeon or veterinarian could cure ​out of hand. But people do not die of love. That’s the reason love and death in conjunction have such an undying appeal in books: they are never very closely associated anywhere else.
“But as for a broken heart in this day of general literacy and facilities for disseminating the printed word—” he made a sound of disparagement. “Lucky he who believes that his heart is broken: he can immediately write a book and so take revenge (what is more terrible than the knowledge that the man you just knocked down discovered a coin in the gutter while getting up?) on him or her who damaged his or her ventricles. Besides cleaning up in the movies and magazines. No, no,” he repeated, “you don’t commit suicide when you are disappointed in love. You write a book.”
“I don’t know about that,” repeated Fairchild stubbornly. “People will do anything. But I suppose it takes a fool to believe that and act on that principle.” Beyond the eastern horizon was a rumor of pale silver, pallid and chill and faint, and they sat for a while in silence, thinking of love and death. The red eye of a cigarette twelve inches from the deck: this was Mark Frost. Fairchild broke the silence.
“The way she went off with Da— the steward. It was kind of nice, wasn’t it? And came back. No excuses, no explanations—‘think no evil’ you know. That’s what these postwar young folks have taught us. Only old folks like Julius and me would ever see evil in what people, young people, do. But then, I guess folks growing up into the manner of looking at life that we inherited, would find evil in anything where inclination wasn’t subservient to duty. We were taught to believe that duty is infallible, or it wouldn’t be duty, and if it were just unpleasant enough, you got a mark in heaven, sure. . . . But maybe it ain’t so different, taken one generation by another. Most of our sins are vicarious, anyhow. I guess when you are young you have too much fun just being, to sin very ​much. But it’s kind of nice, being young in this generation.”
“Surely. We all think that, when our arteries begin to harden,” the Semitic man rejoined. “Not only are most of our sins vicarious, but most of our pleasures are too. Look at our books, our stage, the movies. Who supports ’em? Not the young folks. They’d rather walk around or just sit and hold each other’s hands.”
“It’s a substitute,” Fairchild said. “Don’t you see?”
“Substitute for what? When you are young and in love yesterday and out to-day and in again to-morrow, do you know anything about love? Is it anything to you except a rather dreadful mixture of jealousy and thwarted desires and interference with that man’s world which after all, we all prefer, and nagging and maybe a little pleasure like a drug? It’s not the women you sleep with that you remember, you know.”
“No, thank God,” Fairchild said. The other continued:
“It’s the old problem of the aristocracy over and over: a natural envy of that minority which is at liberty to commit all the sins which the majority cannot stop earning a living long enough to commit.” He lit his cigar again. “Young people always shape their lives as the preceding generation requires of them. I don’t mean exactly that they go to church when they are told to, for instance, because their elders expect it of them—though God only knows what other reason they could possibly have for going to church as it is conducted nowadays, with a warden to patrol the building in the urban localities and in the rural districts squads of K.K.K.’s beating the surrounding copses and all those traditional retreats that in the olden days enabled the church to produce a soul for every one it saved. But youth in general lives unquestioningly according to the arbitrary precepts of its elders.
“For instance, a generation ago higher education was not considered so essential, and young people grew up at home into ​the convention that the thing to do was to get married at twenty-one and go to work immediately, regardless of one’s equipment or inclination or aptitude. But now they grow up into the convention that youth, that being under thirty years of age, is a protracted sophomore course without lectures, in which one must spend one’s entire time dressed like a caricature, drinking homemade booze and pawing at the opposite sex in the intervals of being arrested by traffic policemen.
“A few years ago a so called commercial artist (groan, damn you) named John Held began to caricature college life, cloistered and otherwise, in the magazines; ever since then college life, cloistered and otherwise, has been busy caricaturing John Held. It is expected of them by their elders, you see. And the young people humor them: young people are far more tolerant of the inexplicable and dangerous vagaries of their elders than the elders ever were or ever will be of the natural and harmless foibles of their children. . . . But perhaps they both enjoy it.”
“I don’t know,” Fairchild said. “Not even the old folks would like to be surrounded by people making such a drama of existence. And the young folks wouldn’t like it, either: young people have so many other things to do, you know. I think . . .?” His voice ceased, died into darkness and a faint lapping sound of water. The moon had swum up out of the east again, that waning moon of decay, worn and affable and cold. It was a magic on the water, a magic of pallid and fleshless things. The red eye of Mark Frost’s cigarette arced slow and lateral in his invisible hand, returned to its station twelve inches above the deck, and glowed and faded like a pulse. “You see,” Fairchild added like an apology, “I believe in young love in the spring, and things like that. I guess I’m a hopeless sentimentalist.”
The Semitic man grunted. Mark Frost said: “Virtue through ​abjectness and falsification: immolation of insincerity.” Fairchild ignored him, wrapped in this dream of his own.
“When youth goes out of you, you get out of it. Out of life, I mean. Up to that time you just live; after that, you are aware of living and living becomes a conscious process. Like thinking does in time, you know. You become conscious of thinking, and then you start right off to think in words. And first thing you know, you don’t have thoughts in your mind at all: you just have words in it. But when you are young, you just be. Then you reach a stage where you do. Then a stage where you think, and last of all, where you remember. Or try to.”
“Sex and death,” said Mark Frost sepulchrally, arcing the red eye of his cigarette, “a blank wall on which sex casts a shadow, and the shadow is life.” The Semitic man grunted again, immersed in one of his rare periods of uncommunicativeness. The moon climbed higher, the pallid unmuscled belly of the moon, and the Nausikaa dreamed like a silver gull on the dark restless water.
“I don’t know,” Fairchild said again. “I never found anything shadowy about life, people. Least of all, about my own doings. But it may be that there are shadowy people in the world, people to whom life is a kind of antic shadow. But people like that make no impression on me at all, I can’t seem to get them at all. But this may be because I have a kind of firm belief that life is all right.” Mark Frost had cast away his final cigarette and was now a long prone shadow. The Semitic man was motionless also, holding his dead cigar.
“I was spending the summer with my grandfather, in Indiana. In the country. I was a boy then, and it was a kind of family reunion, with aunts and cousins that hadn’t seen each other in years. Children, too, all sizes.
“There was a girl that I remember, about my age, I reckon. ​She had blue eyes and a lot of long, prim, golden curls. This girl, Jenny, must have looked like her, when she was about twelve. I didn’t know the other children very well, and besides I was used to furnishing my own diversion anyway; so I just kind of hung around and watched them doing the things children do. I didn’t know how to go about getting acquainted with them. I’d seen how the other newcomers would do it, and I’d kind of plan to myself how I’d go about it: what I’d say when I went up to them. . . .” He ceased and mused for a time in a kind of hushed surprise. “Just like Talliaferro,” he said at last, quietly. “I hadn’t thought of that before.” He mused for a time. Then he spoke again.
“I was kind of like a dog going among strange dogs. Scared, kind of, but acting haughty and aloof. But I watched them. The way she made up to them, for instance. The day after she came she was the leader, always telling them what to do next. She had blue dresses, mostly.” Mark Frost snored in the silence. The Nausikaa dreamed like a gull on the dark water.
“This was before the day of water works and sewage systems in country homes, and this one had the usual outhouse. It was down a path from the house. In the late summer there were tall burdocks on either side of the path, taller than a twelve-year-old boy by late August. The outhouse was a small square frame box kind of thing, with a partition separating the men from the women inside.
“It was a hot day, in the middle of the afternoon. The others were down in the orchard, under the trees. From where I had been, in a big tree in the yard, I could see them, and the girls’ colored dresses in the shade; and when I climbed down from the tree and went across the back yard and through the gate and along the path toward the privy I could still see them occasionally through gaps in the burdocks. They were ​sitting around in the shade, playing some game, or maybe just talking.
“I went on down the path and went inside, and when I turned to shut the door to the men’s side, I looked back. And I saw her blue dress kind of shining, coming along the path between the tall weeds. I couldn’t tell if she had seen me or not, but I knew that if I went back I’d have to pass her, and I was ashamed to do this. It would have been different if I’d already been there and was coming away: or it seemed to me that it would have. Boys are that way, you know,” he added uncertainly, turning his bewilderment again toward his friend. The other grunted. Mark Frost snored in his shadow.
“So I shut the door quick and stood right quiet, and soon I heard her enter the other side. I didn’t know yet if she’d seen me, but I was going to stay quiet as I could until she went away. I just had to do that, it seemed to me.
“Children are much more psychic than adults. More of a child’s life goes on in its mind than people believe. A child can distil the whole gamut of experiences it has never actually known, into a single instant. Anthropology explains a little of it. But not much, because the gaps in human knowledge that have to be bridged by speculation are too large. The first thing a child is taught is the infallibility and necessity of precept, and by the time the child is old enough to add anything to our knowledge of the mind, it has forgotten. The soul sheds every year, like snakes do, I believe. You can’t recall the emotions you felt last year: you remember only that an emotion was associated with some physical fact of experience. But all you have of it now is a kind of ghost of happiness and a vague and meaningless regret. Experience: why should we be expected to learn wisdom from experience? Muscles only remember, and it takes repetition and repetition to teach a muscle anything. . . .”
​Arcturus, Orion swinging head downward by his knees, in the southern sky an electric lobster fading as the moon rose, Water lapped at the hull of the Nausikaa with little sounds.
“So I tiptoed across to the seat. It was hot in there, with the sun beating down on it: I could smell hot resin, even above the smell of the place itself. In a corner of the ceiling there was a dirt dobber’s nest—a hard lump of clay with holes in it, stuck to the ceiling, and big green flies made a steady droning sound. I remember how hot it was in there, and that feeling places like that give you—a kind of letting down of the bars of pretense, you know; a kind of submerging of civilized strictures before the grand implacability of nature and the physical body. And I stood there, feeling this feeling and the heat, and hearing the drone of those big flies, holding my breath and listening for a sound from beyond the partition. But there wasn’t any sound from beyond it, so I put my head down through the seat.”
Mark Frost snored. The moon, the pallid belly of the moon, inundating the world with a tarnished magic not of living things, laying her silver fleshless hand on the water that whispered and lapped against the hull of the yacht. The Semitic man clutched his dead cigar and he and Fairchild sat in the implacable laxing of muscles and softening tissue of their forty odd years, seeing two wide curious blue eyes into which an inverted surprise came clear as water, and long golden curls swinging downward above the ordure; and they sat in silence, remembering youth and love, and time and death.
eleven o’clock
Mark Frost had roused and with a ghostly epigram had taken himself off to bed. Later the Semitic man rose and departed, leaving him with a cigar; and Fairchild sat with his ​stockinged feet on the rail, puffing at the unfamiliar weed. He could see the whole deck in the pallid moonlight, and presently he remarked some one sitting near the afterrail. How long this person had been there Fairchild could not have told, but he was there now, alone and quite motionless, and there was something about his attitude that unleashed Fairchild’s curiosity, and at last he rose from his chair.
It was David, the steward. He sat on a coiled rope and he held something in his hands, between his knees. When Fairchild stopped beside him David raised his head slowly into the moonlight and gazed at the older man, making no effort to conceal that which he held. Fairchild leaned nearer to see. It was a slipper, a single slipper, cracked and stained with dried mud and disreputable, yet seeming still to hold in its mute shape something of that hard and sexless graveness of hers.
After a while David looked away, gazing again out across the dark water and its path of shifting silver, holding the slipper between his hands; and without speaking Fairchild turned and went quietly away.