# Mosquitoes (Faulkner)/The Fourth Day

THE FOURTH DAY
seven o’clock
Fairchild waked and lay for a while luxuriously on his back. After a time he turned on his side to doze again, and when he turned he noticed the square of paper lying on the floor, as though it had been thrust under the door. He lay watching it for a while, then he came fully awake, and he rose and crossed the room and picked it up.
   Dear Mr. Fairchild: I am leaveing the boat to day I have got a better job I have got 2 days comeing to me I will not claim it I am leaveing the boat be fore the trip is over tell Mrs. More I have got a better job ask her she will pay you $5 dollars of it you loned me yours truly
   David West.
He reread the note, brooding over it, then he folded it and put it in the pocket of his pajama jacket, and poured himself a drink. The Semitic man in his berth snored, profound, defenseless on his back.
Fairchild sat again in his berth, his drink untasted beside him, and he unfolded the note and read it through again, remembering youth, thinking of age and slackening flesh like an old thin sorrow everywhere in the world.
eight o’clock
“Now, don’t you worry at all,” they reassured Mrs. Maurier, “we can do just as we did yesterday: it will be more fun than ​ever, that way. Dorothy and I can open cans and warm things. We can get along just as well without a steward as with one. Can’t we, Dorothy?”
“It will be like a picnic,” Miss Jameson agreed. “Of course, the men will have to help, too,” she added, looking at Pete with her pale humorless eyes.
Mrs. Maurier submitted, dogging them with her moaning fatuousness while Mrs. Wiseman and Miss Jameson and the niece opened cans and heated things, smearing dreadfully about the galley with grease and juices and blood from the niece’s thumb; opening, at Mark Frost’s instigation, a can labeled Beans, which turned out to be green string beans.
But they got coffee made at last, and breakfast was finally not very late. As they had said, it was like a picnic, though there were no ants, as the Semitic man pointed out just before he was ejected from the kitchen.
“We'll open a can of them for you,” his sister offered briskly.
Besides, there was still plenty of grapefruit.
at breakfast
Fairchild—But I saw him after we got back to the yacht. I know I did.
Mark—No, he wasn’t in the boat when we came back: I remember now. I never saw him after we changed places, just after Jenny and Ernest fell out.
Julius—That’s so. . . . Was he in the boat with us at all? Does anybody remember seeing him in the boat at all?
Fairchild—Sure he was: don’t you remember how Mark kept hitting him with his oar? I tell you I saw—
Mark—He was in the boat at first. But after Jenny and—Fairchild—Sure he was. Don’t you remember seeing him after we came back, Eva?
​Eva—I don’t know. My back was toward all of you while we were rowing. And after Ernest threw Jenny out, I don’t remember who was there and who wasn’t.
Fairchild—Talliaferro was facing us. Didn’t you see him, Talliaferro? And Jenny, Jenny ought to remember. Don’t you remember seeing him, Jenny?
Mr. Talliaferro—I was watching the rope, you know.
Fairchild—How about you, Jenny? Don’t you remember?
Eva—Now, don’t you bother Jenny about it. How could she be expected to remember anything about it? How could anybody be expected to remember anything about such an idiotic—idiotic—
Fairchild—Well, I do. Don’t you all remember him going below with us, after we got back?
Mrs. Maurier (wringing her hands)—Doesn’t some one remember something about it? It’s terrible. I don’t know what to do: you people don’t seem to realize what a position it puts me in, with such a dreadful thing hanging over me. You people have nothing to lose, but I live here, I have a certain . . . And now a thing like this—
Fairchild—Ah, he ain’t drowned. He'll turn up soon: you watch what I say.
The Niece—And if he is drowned, we'll find him all right. The water isn’t very deep between here and the shore. (Her aunt gazed at her dreadfully.)
The Nephew—Besides, a dead body always floats after forty-eight hours. All we have to do is wait right here until to-morrow morning: chances are he’ll be bumping alongside, ready to be hauled back on board. (Mrs. Maurier screamed. Her scream shuddered and died among her chins and she gazed about at her party in abject despair.)
Fairchild—Aw, he ain’t drowned. I tell you I saw—
The Niece—Sure. Cheer up, Aunt Pat. We’ll get him back, ​even if he is. It’s not like losing him altogether, you know. If you send his body back, maybe his folks won’t even claim your boat or anything.
Eva—Shut up, you children.
Fairchild—But I tell you I saw—
nine o'clock
Forward, Jenny, the niece, her brother come temporarily out of his scientific shell, and Pete stood in a group; Pete in his straw hat and the nephew with his lean young body and the two girls in their little scanty dresses and awkward with a sort of terrible grace. So flagrantly young they were that it served as a barrier between them and the others, causing even Mr. Talliaferro to lurk nearby without the courage to join them.
“These young girls,” Fairchild said. He watched the group, watched the niece and, Jenny as they clung to the rail and swung aimlessly back and forth, pivoting on their heels, in a sheer wantonness of young muscles. “They scare me,” he admitted. “Not as a possible or probable chastity, you know. Chastity aint. . .”
“A bodiless illusion multiplied by lack of opportunity,” Mark Frost said.
“What?” he asked, looking at the poet. “Well, maybe so.” He resumed his own tenuous thought. “Maybe we all have different ideas of sex, like all races do. . . . Maybe us three sitting here are racially unrelated to each other, as regards sex. Like a Frenchman and an Anglo-Saxon and a Mongol, for instance.”
“Sex,” said the Semitic man, “to an Italian is something like a firecracker at a children’s party; to a Frenchman, a business the relaxation from which is making money; to an English​man, it is a nuisance; to an American, a horserace. Now, which are you?”
Fairchild laughed. He watched the group forward a while. “Their strange sexless shapes, you know,” he went on. “We, you and I, grew up expecting something beneath a woman’s dress. Something satisfying in the way of breasts and hips and such. But now. . .
“Do you remember the pictures you used to get in packages of cigarettes, or that you saw in magazines in barber shops? Anna Held and Eva Tanguay with shapes like elegant parlor lamp chimneys? Where are they now? Now, on the street, what do you see? Creatures with the uncomplex awkwardness of calves or colts, with two little knobs for breasts and indicated buttocks that, except for their soft look, might well belong to a boy of fifteen. Not satisfying any more; just exciting and monotonous. And mostly monotonous.
“Where,” he continued, “are the soft bulging rabbitlike things women used to have inside their clothes? Gone, with the poor Indian and ten cent beer and cambric drawers. But still, they are kind of nice, these young girls: kind of like a thin monotonous flute music or something.”
“Shrill and stupid,” the Semitic man agreed. He, too, gazed at the group forward for a time. “Who was the fool who said that our clothing, our custom in dress, does not affect the shape of our bodies and our behavior?”
“Not stupid,” the other objected. “Women are never stupid. Their mental equipment is too sublimely sufficient to do what little directing their bodies require. And when your mentality is sufficient to your bodily needs, where there is such a perfect mating of capability and necessity, there can’t be any stupidity. When women have more intelligence than that, they become nuisances sooner or later. All they need is enough intelligence ​to move and eat and observe the cardinal precautions of existence—”
“And recognize the current mode in time to standardize themselves,” Mark Frost put in.
“Well, yes. And I don’t object to that, either,” Fairchild said. “As a purely lay brother to the human race, I mean. After all they are merely articulated genital organs with a kind of aptitude for spending whatever money you have; so when they get themselves up to look exactly like all the other ones, you can give all your attention to their bodies.”
“How about the exceptions?” Mark Frost asked. “The ones that don’t paint or bob their hair?”
“Poor things,” Fairchild answered, and the Semitic man said:
“Perhaps there is a heaven, after all.”
“You believe they have souls, then?” Fairchild asked.
“Certainly. If they are not born with them, it’s a poor creature indeed who can’t get one from some man by the time she’s eleven years old.”
“That’s right,” Fairchild agreed. He watched the group forward for a time. Then he rose. “I think I’ll go over and hear what they’re talking about.”
Mrs. Wiseman came up and borrowed a cigarette of Mark Frost, and they watched Fairchild’s burly retreating back. The Semitic man said: “There’s a man of undoubted talent, despite his fumbling bewilderment in the presence of sophisticated emotions.”
“Despite his lack of self-assurance, you mean,” Mark Frost corrected.
“No, it isn’t that,” Mrs. Wiseman put in. “You mean the same thing that Julius does: that having been born an American of a provincial midwestern lower middle class family, he ​has inherited all the lower middle class’s awe of Education with a capital E, an awe which the very fact of his difficulty in getting to college and staying there, has increased.”
“Yes,” her brother agreed. “And the reaction which sheer accumulated years and human experience has brought about in him has swung him to the opposite extreme without destroying that ingrained awe or offering him anything to replace it with, at all. His writing seems fumbling, not because life is unclear to him, but because of his innate humorless belief that, though it bewilder him at times, life at bottom is sound and admirable and fine; and because hovering over this American scene into which he has been thrust, the ghosts of the Emersons and Lowells and other exemplifiers of Education with a capital E who, ‘seated on chairs in handsomely carpeted parlors’ and surrounded by an atmosphere of half calf and security, dominated American letters in its most healthy American phase ‘without heat or vulgarity,’ simper yet in a sort of ubiquitous watchfulness. A sort of puerile bravado in flouting while he fears,” he explained.
“But,” his sister said, “for a man like Dawson there is no better American tradition than theirs—if he but knew it. They may have sat among their objects, transcribing their Greek and Latin and holding correspondences across the Atlantic, but they still found time to put out of their New England ports with the Word of God in one hand and a belaying pin in the other and all sails drawing aloft; and whatever they fell foul of was American. And it was American. And is yet.”
“Yes,” her brother agreed again. “But he lacks what they had at command among their shelves of discrete books and their dearth of heat and vulgarity—a standard of literature that is international. No, not a standard, exactly: a belief, a conviction that his talent need not be restricted to delineat​ing things which his conscious mind assures him are American reactions.”
“Freedom?” suggested Mark Frost hollowly.
“No. No one needs freedom. We cannot bear it. He need only let himself go, let himself forget all this fetich of culture and education which his upbringing and the ghosts of those whom circumstance permitted to reside longer at college than himself, and whom despite himself he regards with awe, assure him that he lacks. For by getting himself and his own bewilderment and inhibitions out of the way by describing, in a manner that even translation cannot injure (as Balzac did) American life as American life is, it will become eternal and timeless despite him.
“Life everywhere is the same, you know. Manners of living it may be different—are they not different between adjoining villages? family names, profits on a single field or orchard, work influences—but man’s old compulsions, duty and inclination: the axis and the circumference of his squirrel cage, they do not change. Details don’t matter, details only entertain us. And nothing that merely entertains us can matter, because the things that entertain us are purely speculative: prospective pleasures which we probably will not achieve. The other things only surprise us. And he who has stood the surprise of birth can stand anything.”
ten o’clock
“Gabriel’s pants,” the nephew said, raising his head. “I’ve already told you once what I’m making, haven’t I?” He had repaired to his retreat in the lee of the wheelhouse, where he would be less liable to interruption. Or so he thought.
Jenny stood beside his chair and looked at him placidly. “I wasn’t going to ask you again,” she replied without rancor, “I just happened to be walking by here.” Then she examined ​the visible deck space with a brief comprehensive glance. “This is a fine place for courting,” she remarked.
“Is, huh?” the nephew said. “What’s the matter with Pete?” His knife ceased and he raised his head again. Jenny answered something vaguely. She moved her head again and stood without exactly looking at him, placid and rife, giving him to think of himself surrounded enclosed by the sweet cloudy fire of her thighs, as young girls do. The nephew laid his pipe and his knife aside.
“Where’m I going to sit?” Jenny asked, so he moved over in his canvas chair, making room, and she came with slow unreluctance and squirmed into the sagging chair. “It’s a kind of tight fit,” she remarked.
. . . Presently the nephew raised his head. “You don’t put much pep into your petting,” he remarked. So Jenny placidly put more pep into it. . . . After a time the nephew raised his head and gazed out over the water. “Gabriel’s pants,” he murmured in a tone of hushed detachment, stroking his hand slowly over the placid points of Jenny’s thighs, “Gabriel’s pants.” . . . After a while he raised his head.
“Say,” he said abruptly, “where’s Pete?”
“Back yonder, somewheres,” Jenny answered. “I saw him just before you stopped me.”
The nephew craned his neck, looking aft along the deck. Then he uncraned it, and after a while he raised his head. “I guess that’s enough,” he said. He pushed at Jenny’s blonde abandon. “Get up, now. I got my work to do. Beat it, now.”
“Gimme time to,” Jenny said placidly, struggling out of the chair. It was a kind of tight fit, but she stood erect finally, smoothing at her clothes. The nephew resumed his tools, and so after a while Jenny went away.
eleven o'clock
It was a thin volume bound in dark blue boards and a narrow orange arabesque of esoteric design unbroken across front and back near the top, and the title, in orange, Satyricon in Starlight.
“Now, here,” said Fairchild, flattening a page under his hand, his heavy hornrimmed spectacles riding his blobby benign face jauntily, “is the Major’s syphilis poem. After all, poetry has accomplished something when it causes a man like the Major to mull over it for a while. Poets lack business judgment. Now, if I—”
“Perhaps that’s what makes one a poet,” the Semitic man suggested, “being able to sustain a fine obliviousness of the world and its compulsions.”
“You’re thinking of oyster fishermen,” Mrs. Wiseman said. “Being a successful poet is being just glittering and obscure and imminent enough in your public life to excuse whatever you might do privately.”
“If I were a poet—” Fairchild attempted.
“That’s right,” the Semitic man said. “Nowadays the gentle art has attained that state of perfection where you don’t have to know anything about literature at all to be a poet; and the time is coming when you won’t even have to write to be one. But that day hasn’t quite arrived yet: you still have to write something occasionally; not very often, of course, but still occasionally. And if it’s obscure enough every one is satisfied and you have vindicated yourself and are immediately forgotten and are again at perfect liberty to dine with whoever will invite you.”
“But listen,” repeated Fairchild, “if I were a poet, you know what I’d do? I’d—”
“You’d capture an unattached but ardent wealthy female. ​Or, lacking that, some other and more fortunate poet would divide a weekend or so with you: there seems to be a noblesse oblige among them,” the other answered. “Gentleman poets, that is,” he added.
“No,” said Fairchild, indefatigable, “I’d intersperse my book with photographs and art studies on ineffable morons in bathing suits or clutching imitation lace window curtains across their middles. That’s what I’d do.”
“That would damn it as Art,” Mark Frost objected.
“You're confusing Art with Studio Life, Mark,” Mrs. Wiseman told him. She forestalled him and accepted a cigarette. “I’m all out, myself. Sorry. Thanks.”
“Why not?” Mark Frost responded. “If studio life costs you enough, it becomes art. You have to have a good reason to give to your people back home in Ohio or Indiana or somewhere.”
“But everybody wasn’t born in the Ohio valley, thank God,” the Semitic man said. Fairchild stared at him, kind and puzzled, a trifle belligerent. “I speak for those of us who read books instead of write them,” he explained. “It’s bad enough to grow into the conviction after you reach the age of discretion that you are to spend the rest of your life writing books, but to have your very infancy darkened by the possibility that you may have to write the Great American Novel . . .”
“Oh,” Fairchild said. “Well, maybe you are like me, and prefer a live poet to the writings of any man.”
“Make it a dead poet, and I’ll agree.”
“Well. . .” He settled his spectacles. “Listen to this”: Mark Frost groaned, rising, and departed. Fairchild read implacably:
“‘On rose and peach their droppings bled,
Love a sacrifice has lain, ​Beneath his hand his mouth is slain,
Beneath his hand his mouth is dead—’
“No: wait.” He skipped back up the page. Mrs. Wiseman listened restively, her brother with his customary quizzical phlegm.
“ ‘The Raven bleak and Philomel
Amid the bleeding trees were fixed,
His hoarse cry and hers were mixed
And through the dark their droppings fell
“Upon the red erupted rose,
Upon the broken branch of peach
Blurred with scented mouths, that each
To another sing, and close—’”
He read the entire poem through. “What do you make of it?” he asked.
“Mostly words,” the Semitic man answered promptly, “a sort of cocktail of words. I imagine you get quite a jolt from it, if your taste is educated to cocktails.”
“Well, why not?” Mrs. Wiseman said with fierce protectiveness. “Only fools require ideas in verse.”
“Perhaps so,” her brother admitted. “But there’s no nourishment in electricity, as you poets nowadays seem to believe.”
“Well, what would you have them write about, then?” she demanded. “There’s only one possible subject to write anything about. What is there worth the effort and despair of writing about, except love and death?”
“That’s the feminine of it. You’d better let art alone and stick to artists, as is your nature.”
“But women have done some good things,” Fairchild objected. “I’ve read—”
​“They bear geniuses. But do you think they care anything about the pictures and music their children produce? That they have any other emotion than a fierce tolerance of the vagaries of the child? Do you think Shakespeare’s mother was any prouder of him than, say, Tom o’ Bedlam’s?”
“Certainly she was,” Mrs. Wiseman said. “Shakespeare made money.”
“You made a bad choice for comparison,” Fairchild said.
“All artists are kind of insane. Don’t you think so?” he asked Mrs. Wiseman.
“Yes,” she snapped. “Almost as insane as the ones that sit around and talk about them.”
“Well—” Fairchild stared again at the page under his hand. He said slowly: “It’s a kind of dark thing. It’s kind of like somebody brings you to a dark door. Will you enter that room, or not?”
“But the old fellows got you into the room first,” the Semitic man said. “Then they asked you if you wanted to go out or not.”
“I don’t know. There are rooms, dark rooms, that they didn’t know anything about at all. Freud and these other—”
“Discovered them just in time to supply our shelterless literati with free sleeping quarters. But you and Eva just agreed that subject, substance, doesn’t signify in verse, that the best poetry is just words.”
“Yes. . . infatuation with words,” Fairchild agreed. “That’s when you hammer out good poetry, great poetry. A kind of singing rhythm in the world that you get into without knowing it, like a swimmer gets into a current. Words. . . .I had it once.”
“Shut up, Dawson,” Mrs. Wiseman said. “Julius can afford to be a fool.”
“Words,” repeated Fairchild. “But it’s gone out of me, ​now. That first infatuation, I mean; that sheer infatuation with and marveling over the beauty and power of words. That has gone out of me. Used up, I guess. So I can’t write poetry any more. It takes me too long to say things, now.”
“We all wrote poetry, when we were young,” the Semitic man said. “Some of us even put it down on paper. But all of us wrote it.”
“Yes,” repeated Fairchild, turning slowly onward through the volume. “Listen:
“‘O spring O wanton O cruel
baring to the curved and hungry hand
of march your white unsubtle thighs . . .”
And listen.” He turned onward. Mrs. Wiseman was gazing aft where Jenny and Mr. Talliaferro had come into view and now leaned together upon the rail. The Semitic man listened with weary courtesy.
“‘. . .above unsapped convolvulæ of hills
april a bee sipping perplexed with pleasure. . .’
“It’s a kind of childlike faith in the efficacy of words, you see, a kind of belief that circumstance somehow will invest the veriest platitude with magic. And, darn it, it does happen at times, let it be historically or grammatically incorrect or physically impossible; let it even be trite: there comes a time when it will be invested with a something not of this life, this world, at all. It’s a kind of fire, you know. . . .” He fumbled himself among words, staring at them, at the Semitic man’s sad quizzical eyes and Mrs. Wiseman’s averted face.
“Somebody, some drug clerk or something, has shredded the tender—and do you know what I believe? I believe that he’s ​always writing it for some woman, that he fondly believes he’s stealing a march on some brute bigger or richer or handsomer than he is; I believe that every word a writing man writes is put down with the ultimate intention of impressing some woman that probably don’t care anything at all for literature, as is the nature of women. Well, maybe she ain’t always a flesh and blood creature. She may be only the symbol of a desire. But she is feminine. Fame is only a by-product. . . . Do you remember, the old boys never even bothered to sign their things. . . . But, I don’t know. I suppose nobody ever knows a man’s reasons for what he does: you can only generalize from results.”
“He very seldom knows his reasons, himself,” the other said. “And by the time he has recovered from his astonishment at the unforeseen result he got, he has forgotten what reason he once believed he had. . . . But how can you generalize from a poem? What result does a poem have? You say that substance doesn’t matter, has no proper place in a poem. You have,” the Semitic man continued with curious speculation, “the strangest habit of contradicting yourself, of fumbling around and then turning tail and beating your listener to the refutation. . . . But God knows, there is plenty of room for speculation in modern verse. Fumbling, too, though the poets themselves do most of this. Don’t you agree, Eva?”
His sister answered “What?” turning upon him her dark, preoccupied gaze. He repeated the question. Fairchild interrupted in full career:
“The trouble with modern verse is, that to comprehend it you must have recently passed through an emotional experience identical with that through which the poet himself has recently passed. The poetry of modern poets is like a pair of shoes that only those whose feet are shaped like the cobbler’s ​feet, can wear; while the old boys turned out shoes that anybody who can walk at all can wear—”
“Like overshoes,” the other suggested.
“Like overshoes,” Fairchild agreed. “But, then, I ain’t disparaging. Perhaps the few that the shoes fit can go a lot further than a whole herd of people shod alike could go.”
“Interesting, anyway,” the Semitic man said, “to reduce the spiritual progress of the race to terms of an emotional migration; esthetic Israelites crossing unwetted a pink sea of dullness and security. What about it, Eva?”
Mrs. Wiseman, thinking of Jenny’s soft body, came out of her dream. “I think you are both not only silly, but dull.” She rose. “I want to burn another cigarette, Dawson.”
He gave her one, and a match, and she left them. Fairchild turned a few pages. “It’s kind of difficult for me to reconcile her with this book,” he said slowly. “Does it strike you that way?”
“Not so much that she wrote this,” the other answered, “but that she wrote anything at all. That anybody should. But there’s no puzzle about the book itself. Not to me, that is. But you, straying trustfully about this park of dark and rootless trees which Dr. Ellis and your Germans have recently thrown open to the public . . . You'll always be a babe in that wood, you know. Bewildered, and slightly annoyed; restive, like Ashur-bani-pal’s stallion when his master mounted him.”
“Emotional bisexuality,” Fairchild said.
“Yes. But you are trying to reconcile the book and the author. A book is the writer’s secret life, the dark twin of a man: you can’t reconcile them. And with you, when the inevitable clash comes, the author’s actual self is the one that goes down, for you are of those for whom fact and fallacy gain verisimilitude by being in cold print.”
​“Perhaps so,” Fairchild said, with detachment, brooding again on a page. “Listen:
“‘Lips that of thy weary all seem weariest,
Seem wearier for the curled and pallid sly
Still riddle of thy secret face, and thy
Sick despair of its own ill obsessed;
Lay not to heart thy boy’s hand, to protest
That smiling leaves thy tired mouth reconciled,
For swearing so keeps thee but ill beguiled
With secret joy of thine own woman’s breast.
“‘Weary thy mouth with smiling; canst thou bride
Thyself with thee and thine own kissing slake?
Thy virgin’s waking doth itself deride
With sleep’s sharp absence, coming so awake,
And near thy mouth thy twinned heart’s grief doth hide
For there’s no breast between: it cannot break.’
“‘Hermaphroditus,’” he read. “That’s what it’s about. It’s a kind of dark perversion. Like a fire that don’t need any fuel, that lives on its own heat. I mean, all modern verse is a kind of perversion. Like the day for healthy poetry is over and done with, that modern people were not born to write poetry any more. Other things, I grant. But not poetry. Kind of like men nowadays are not masculine and lusty enough to tamper with something that borders so close to the unnatural. A kind of sterile race: women too masculine to conceive, men too feminine to beget. . . .”
He closed the book and removed his spectacles slowly. “You and me sitting here, right now, this is one of the most insidious things poetry has to combat. General education has made it too easy for everybody to have an opinion on it. On ​everything else, too. The only people who should be allowed an opinion on poetry should be poets. But as it is. . .But then, all artists have to suffer it, though: oblivion and scorn and indignation and, what is worse, the adulation of fools.”
“And,” added the Semitic man, “what is still worse: talk.”
twelve o'clock
“You must get rather tired of bothering about it,” Fairchild suggested as they descended toward lunch. (There was an offshore breeze and the saloon was screened. And besides, it was near the galley.) “Why don’t you leave it in your state-room? Major Ayers is pretty trustworthy, I guess.”
“It’ll be all right,” Pete replied. “I’ve got used to it. I’d miss it, see?”
“Yes,” the other agreed. “New one, eh?”
“I’ve had it a while.” Pete removed it and Fairchild remarked its wanton gay band and the heavy plaiting of the straw.
“I like a panama, myself,” he murmured. “A soft hat. . . . This must have cost five or six dollars, didn’t it?”
“Yeh,” Pete agreed, “but I guess I can look out for it.”
“It’s a nice hat,” the Semitic man said. “Not everybody can wear a stiff straw hat. But it rather suits the shape of Pete’s face, don’t you think?”
“Yes, that’s so,” Fairchild agreed. “Pete has a kind of humorless reckless face that a stiff hat just suits. A man with a humorous face should never wear a stiff straw hat. But then, only a humorless man would dare buy one.”
Pete preceded them into the saloon. The man’s intent was kindly, anyway. Funny old bird. Easy. Easy. Somebody’s gutting. Anybody’s. Fairchild spoke to him again with a kind of tactful persistence:
“Look here, here’s a good place to leave it while you eat. ​You hadn’t seen this place, I reckon. Slip it under here, see? It'll be safe as a church under here until you want it again. Look, Julius, this place was made for a stiff straw hat, wasn’t it?” This place was a collapsible serving table of two shelves that let shallowly into the bulkhead: it operated by a spring and anything placed on the lower shelf would be inviolate until some one came along and lowered the shelves again.
“It don’t bother me any,” Pete said.
“All right,” the other answered. “But you might as well leave it here: it’s such a grand place to leave a hat. Lots better than the places in theaters. I kind of wish I had a hat to leave there, don’t you, Julius?”
“I can hold it all right,” Pete said again.
“Sure,” agreed Fairchild readily, “but just try it a moment.” Pete did so, and the other two watched with interest. “It just fits, don’t it? Why not leave it there, just for a trial?”
“I guess not. I guess I’ll hold onto it,” Pete decided. He took his hat again and when he had taken his seat he slid it into its usual place between the chairback and himself.
Mrs. Maurier was chanting: “Sit down, people,” in an apologetic, hopeless tone. “You must excuse things. I had hoped to have lunch on deck, but with the wind blowing from the shore. . .”
“They’ve found where we are and that we are good to eat, so it doesn’t make any difference where the wind blows from,” Mrs. Wiseman said, businesslike with her tray.
“And with the steward gone, and things so unsettled,” the hostess resumed in antistrophe, roving her unhappy gaze. “And Mr. Gordon—”
“Oh, he’s all right,” Fairchild said heavily helpful, taking his seat. “He'll show up all right.”
“Don’t be a fool, Aunt Pat,” the niece added. “What would he want to get drowned for?”
​“I’m so unlucky,” Mrs. Maurier moaned, “things—things happen to me, you see,” she explained, haunted with that vision of a pale implacability of water, and sodden pants, and a red beard straying amid the slanting green regions of the sea in a dreadful simulation of life.
“Aw, shucks,” the niece protested, “ugly like he is, and so full of himself. . . . He’s got too many good reasons for getting drowned. It’s the ones that don’t have any excuse for it that get drowned and run down by taxis and things.”
“But you never can tell what people will do,” Mrs. Maurier rejoined, becoming profound through the sheer disintegration of comfortable things. “People will do anything.”
“Well, if he’s drowned, I guess he wanted to be,” the niece said bloodlessly. “He certainly can’t expect us to fool around here waiting for him, anyway. I never heard of anybody fading out without leaving a note of some kind. Did you, Jenny?”
Jenny sat in a soft anticipatory dread. “Did he get drownded?” she asked. “One day at Mandeville, I saw . . . Into Jenny’s heavenly eyes there welled momentarily a selfless emotion, temporarily pure and clean. Mrs. Wiseman looked at her, compelling her with her eyes. She said:
“Oh, forget about Gordon for a while. If he’s drowned (which I don’t believe) he’s drowned; if he isn’t, he’ll show up again, just as Dawson says.”
“That’s what I say,” the niece supported her quickly. “Only he’d better show up soon, if he wants to go back with us. We’ve got to get back home.”
“You have?” her aunt said with heavy astonished irony, “How are you going, pray?”
“Perhaps her brother will make us a boat with his saw,” Mark Frost suggested.
“That’s an idea,” Fairchild agreed. “Say, Josh, haven’t you ​got a tool of some sort that'll get us off again?” The nephew regarded Fairchild solemnly.
“Whittle it off,” he said. “Lend you my knife if you bring it back right away.” He resumed his meal.
“Well, we’ve got to get back,” his sister repeated. “You folks can stay around here if you want to, but me and Josh have got to get back to New Orleans.”
“Going by Mandeville?” Mark Frost asked.
“But the tug should be here at any time,” Mrs. Maurier insisted, reverting again to her hopeless amaze. The niece gave Mark Frost a grave speculative stare.
“You're smart, aren’t you?”
“I’ve got to be,” Mark Frost answered equably, “or I’d—”
“—have to work, huh? It takes a smart man to sponge off of Aunt Pat, don’t it?”
“Patricia!” her aunt exclaimed.
“Well, we have got to get back. We've got to get ready to go up to New Haven next month.”
Her brother came again out of his dream. “We have?” he repeated heavily.
“I’m going, too,” she answered quickly. “Hank said I could.”
“Look here,” her brother said, “are you going to follow me around all your life?”
“I’m going to Yale,” she repeated stubbornly. “Hank said I could go.”
“Hank?” Fairchild repeated, watching the niece with interest.
“It’s what she calls her father,” her aunt explained. “Patricia—”
“Well, you can’t go,” her brother answered violently. “Dam’f I’m going to have you tagging around behind me forever. I can’t move, for you. You ought to be a bill collector.”
​“I don’t care: I’m going,” she repeated stubbornly. Her aunt said vainly:
“Theodore!”
“Well, I can’t do anything, for her,” he complained bitterly. “I can’t move, for her. And now she’s talking about going—She worried Hank until he had to say she could go. God knows, I’d ’a’ said that too: I wouldn’t want her around me all the time.”
“Shut your goddam mouth,” his sister told him. Mrs. Maurier chanted “Patricia, Patricia.” “I’m going, I’m going, I’m going!”
“What’ll you do up there?” Fairchild asked. The niece whirled, viciously belligerent. Then she said:
“What’d you say?”
“I mean, what'll you do to pass the time while he’s at classes and things? Are you going to take some work, too?”
“Oh, I’ll just go around with balloon pants. To night clubs and things. I won’t bother him: I won’t hardly see him, he’s such a damn crum.”
“Like hell you will,” her brother interrupted, “you’re not going, I tell you.”
“Yes, I am. Hank said I could go. He said I could. I—”
“Well, you won’t ever see me: I’m not going to have you tagging around after me up there.”
“Are you the only one in the world that’s going up there next year? Are you the only one that'll be there? I’m not going up there to waste my time hanging around the entrance to Dwight or Osborne hall just to see you. You won’t catch me sitting on the rail of the Green with freshmen. I’ll be going to places that maybe you'll get into in three years, if you don’t bust out or something. Don’t you worry about me. Who was it,” she rushed on, “got invited up for Prom Week last year, only Hank wouldn’t let me go? Who was it saw the game last ​fall, while you were perched up on the top row with a bunch of newspaper reporters, in the rain?”
“You didn’t go up for Prom Week.”
“Because Hank wouldn’t let me. But I’ll be there next year, and you can haul out the family sock on it.”
“Oh, shut up for a while,” her brother said wearily. “Maybe some of these ladies want to talk some.”
two o’clock
And there was the tug, squatting at her cables, breaking the southern horizon with an effect of abrupt magic, like a stereopticon slide flashed on the screen while you had turned your head for a moment.
“Look at that boat,” said Mark Frost, broaching. Mrs. Maurier directly behind him, shrieked:
“It’s the tug!” She turned and screamed down the companionway: “It’s the tug: the tug has come!” The others all chanted “The tug! The tug!” Major Ayers exclaimed dramatically and opportunely:
“Ha, gone away!”
“It has come at last,” Mrs. Maurier shrieked. “It came while we were at lunch. Has any one—” She roved her eyes about. “The captain— Has he been notified? Mr. Talliaferro—?”
“Surely,” Mr. Talliaferro agreed with polite alacrity, mounting the stairs and disintegrating his members with expedition, “I’ll summon the captain.”
So he rushed forward and the others came on deck and stared at the tug, and a gentle breeze blew offshore and they slapped intermittently at their exposed surfaces. Mr. Talliaferro shouted: “Captain! oh, Captain!” about the deck: he screamed it into the empty wheelhouse and returned. “He must be asleep,” he told them.
“We are off at last,” Mrs. Maurier intoned, “we can get off ​at last. The tug has come: I sent for it days and days ago. But we can get off, now. But the captain. . . . Where is the captain? He shouldn’t be asleep, at this time. Of all times for the captain to be asleep—Mr. Talliaferro—”
“But Gordon,” Mark Frost said, “how about—”
Miss Jameson clutched his arm. “Let’s get off, first,” she said.
“I called him,” Mr. Talliaferro reminded them. “He must be asleep in his room.”
“He must be asleep,” Mrs. Maurier repeated. “Will some gentleman—”
Mr. Talliaferro took his cue. “I’ll go,” he said.
“If you will be so kind,” Mrs. Maurier screamed after him. She stared again at the tug. “He should have been here, so we could be all ready to start,” she said fretfully. She waved her handkerchief at the tug: it ignored her.
“We might be getting everything ready, though,” Fairchild suggested. “We ought to have everything ready when they pull us off.”
“That’s so,” Mark Frost agreed. “We’d better run down and pack, hadn’t we?”
“Ah, we ain’t going back home yet. We've just started the cruise. Are we, folks?”
They all looked at the hostess. She roved her stricken eyes, but she said at last, bravely: “Why, no. No, of course not, if you don’t want to. . . . But the captain: we ought to be ready,” she repeated.
“Well, let’s get ready,” Mrs. Wiseman said.
“Nobody knows anything about boats except Fairchild,” Mark Frost said. Mr. Talliaferro returned, barren.
“Me?” Fairchild repeated. “Talliaferro’s been across the whole ocean. And there’s Major Ayers. All Britishers cut their teeth on anchor chains and marlinspikes.”
​“And draw their toys with lubbers’ lines,” Mrs. Wiseman chanted. “It’s almost a poem. Finish it, some one.”
Mr. Talliaferro made a sound of alarm. “No: really, I—” Mrs. Maurier turned to Fairchild.
“Will you assume charge until the captain appears, Mr. Fairchild?”
“Mr. Fairchild,” Mr. Talliaferro parroted. “Mr. Fairchild is temporary captain, people. The captain doesn’t seem to be on board,” he whispered to Mrs. Maurier.
Fairchild glanced about with a sort of ludicrous helplessness. “What am I supposed to do?” he asked. “Jump overboard with a shovel and shovel the sand away?”
“A man who has reiterated his superiority as much as you have for the last week should never be at a loss for what to do,” Mrs. Wiseman told him. “We ladies have already thought of that. You are the one to think of something else.”
“Well, I’ve already thought of not jumping overboard and shoveling her off,” Fairchild answered, “but that don’t seem to help much, does it?”
“You ought to coil ropes or something like that,” Miss Jameson suggested. “That’s what they were always doing on all the ships I ever read about.”
“All right,” Fairchild agreed equably. “We’ll coil ropes, then. Where are the ropes?”
“That’s your trouble,” Mrs. Wiseman said. “You're captain now.”
“Well, we'll find some ropes and coil ’em.” He addressed Mrs. Maurier. “We have your permission to coil ropes?”
“No: really,” said Mrs. Maurier in her helpless astonished voice. “Isn’t there something we can do? Can’t we signal to them with a sheet? They may not know that this is the right boat.”
“Oh, they know, I guess. Anyway, we'll coil ropes and be ​ready for them. Come on here, you men.” He named over his depleted watch and herded it forward. He herded it down to his cabin and nourished it with stimulants.
“We may coil the right rope, at that,” the Semitic man suggested. “Major Ayers ought to know something about boats: it should be in his British blood.”
Major Ayers didn’t think so. “American boats have amphibious traits that are lacking in ours,” he explained. “Half the voyage on land, you know,” he explained tediously.
“Sure,” Fairchild agreed. He brought his watch above again and forward, where instinct told him the ropes should be. “I wonder where the captain is. Surely he ain’t drowned, do you reckon?”
“I guess not,” the Semitic man answered. “He gets paid for this. . . . There comes a boat.”
The boat came from the tug, and soon it came alongside and the captain came over the rail. A stranger followed him and they went below without haste, leaving Mrs. Maurier’s words like vain unmated birds in the air. “Let’s get ready, then,” Fairchild ordered his crew. “Let’s tie a rope to something.”
So they tied a rope to something, knotting it intricately, then Major Ayers discovered that they had tied it to a winch handle which fitted loosely into a socket and which would probably come out quite easily, once a strain came onto the rope. So they untied it and found something attached firmly to the deck, and they tied the rope to this, and after a while the captain and the stranger, clutching a short evil pipe, came back on deck and stood and watched them. “We’ve got the right rope,” Fairchild told his watch in an undertone, and they knotted the rope intricately and straightened up.
“How’s that, Cap?” Fairchild asked.
“All right,” the captain answered. “Can we trouble you for a match?”
​Fairchild gave them a match, The stranger fired his pipe and they got into the tender and departed. They hadn’t got far when the one called Walter came out and called them, and they put about and returned for him. Then they went back to the tug. Fairchild’s watch had ceased work, and it gazed after the tender. After a time Fairchild said: “He said that was the right rope. So I guess we can quit.”
So they did, and went aft to where the ladies were, and presently the tender came bobbing back across the water. It came alongside again and a negro, sweating gently and regularly, held it steady while the one called Walter and yet another stranger got aboard, bringing a rope that trailed away into the water behind them.
Every one watched with interest while Walter and his companion made the line fast in the bows, after having removed Fairchild’s rope. Then Walter and his friend went below.
“Say,” Fairchild said suddenly, “do you reckon they’ve found our whisky?”
“I guess not,” the Semitic man assured him. “I hope not,” he amended; and they all returned in a body to stare down into the tender where the negro sat without selfconsciousness, eating of a large grayish object. While they watched the negro Walter and his companion returned, and the stranger bawled at the tug through his hands. A reply at last, and the other end of the line which they had recently brought aboard the yacht and made fast, slid down from the deck of the tug and plopped heavily into the water; and Walter and his companion drew it aboard the yacht and coiled it down, wet and dripping. Then they elbowed themselves to the rail, cast the rope into the tender and got in themselves, and the negro stowed his strange edible object temporarily away and rowed back to the tug.
“You guessed wrong again,” Mark Frost said with sepul​chral irony. He bent and scratched his ankles. “Try another rope.”
“You wait,” Fairchild retorted, “wait ten minutes, then talk. We'll be under full steam in ten minutes. . . . Where did that boat come from?”
This boat was a skiff, come when and from where they knew not; and beneath the drowsy afternoon there came faintly from somewhere up the lake the fretful sound of a motor boat engine. The skiff drew alongside, manned by a malariaridden man wearing a woman’s dilapidated hat of black straw that lent him a vaguely bereaved air.
“Whar’s the drownded feller?” he asked, grasping the rail.
“We don’t know,” Fairchild answered. “We missed him somewhere between here and the shore.” He extended his arm. The newcomer followed his gesture sadly.
“Any reward?”
“Reward?” repeated Fairchild.
“Reward?” Mrs. Maurier chimed in, breathlessly. “Yes, there is a reward: I offer a reward.”
“How much?”
“You find him first,” the Semitic man put in. “There’ll be a reward, all right.”
The man clung yet to the rail. “Have you drug fer him yet?”
“No, we’ve just started hunting,” Fairchild answered. “You go on and look around, and we'll get our boat and come out and help you. There’ll be a reward.”
The man pushed his skiff clear and engaged his oars. The sound of the motor boat grew clearer steadily; soon it came into view, with two men in it, and changed its course and bore down on the skiff. The fussy little engine ceased its racket and it slid up to the skiff, pushing a dying ripple under its ​stem. The two boats clung together for a time, then they parted, and at a short distance from each other they moved slowly onward while their occupants prodded at the lake bottom with their oars.
“Look at them,” the Semitic man said, “just like buzzards. Probably be a dozen boats out there in the next hour. How do you suppose they learned about it?”
“Lord knows,” Fairchild answered. “Let’s get our crew and go out and help look. We better get the tug’s men.”
They shouted in turn for a while, and presently one came to the rail of the tug and gazed apathetically at them, and went away; and after a while the small boat came away from the tug and crossed to them. A consultation, assisted by all hands, while the man from the tug moved unhurriedly about the business of making fast another and dirtier rope to the Nausikaa’s bows. Then he and Walter went back to the tug, paying out the line behind them while Mrs. Maurier’s insistence wasted itself upon the somnolent afternoon. The guests looked at one another helplessly. Then Fairchild said with determination:
“Come on, we'll go in our boat.” He chose his men, and they gathered all the available oars and prepared to embark.
“Here comes the tug’s boat again,” Mark Frost said.
“They forgot and tied one end of that rope to something.” Mrs. Wiseman said viciously. The boat came alongside without haste and it and the yacht’s tender lay rubbing noses, and Walter’s companion asked, without interest:
“Wher’s the feller y’all drownded?”
“I’ll go along in their boat and show ’em,” Fairchild decided. Mark Frost got back aboard the yacht with alacrity. Fairchild stopped him. “You folks come on behind us in this boat. The more to hunt, the better.”
Mark Frost groaned and acquiesced. The others took their ​places, and under Fairchild’s direction the two tenders retraced the course of yesterday. The first two boats were some distance ahead, moving slowly, and the tenders separated also and the searchers poled along, prodding with their oars at the lake floor. And such is the influence of action on the mind that soon even Fairchild’s burly optimism became hushed and uncertain before the imminence of the unknown, and he too was accepting the possible for the probable, unaware.
The sun was hazed, as though wearied of its own implacable heat, and the water—that water which might hold, soon to be revealed, the mute evidence of ultimate flouting of all man’s strife—lapped and plopped at the mechanical fragilities that supported them: a small sound, monotonous and without rancor—it could well wait! They poled slowly on.
Soon the four boats, fanwise, had traversed the course, and they turned and quartered back and forth again, slowly and in silence. Afternoon drew on, drowsing and somnolent. Yacht and tug lay motionless in a blinding shimmer of water and sun. . . .
Again the course of yesterday was covered foot by foot, patiently and silently and in vain; and the four boats as without volition drew nearer each other, drifting closer together as sheep huddle, while water lapped and plopped beneath their hulls, sinister and untroubled by waiting . . . soon the motor boat drifted up and scraped lightly along the hull in which Fairchild sat, and he raised his head, blinking against the glare. After a while he said:
“Are you a ghost, or am I?”
“I was about to ask you that,” Gordon, sitting in the motor boat, replied. They sat and stared at each other. The other boats came up, and presently the one called Walter spoke.
“Is this all you wanted out here,” he asked in a tone of ​polite disgust, breaking the spell, “or do you want to row around some more?”
Fairchild went immoderately into hysterical laughter.
four o’clock
The malarial man had attached his skiff to the fat man’s motor boat and they had puttered away in a morose dejection, rewardless; the tug had whistled a final derisive blast, showed them her squat, unpretty stern, where the negro leaned eating again of his grayish object, and as dirty a pair of heels as it would ever be their luck to see, and sailed away. The Nausikaa was free once more and she sped quickly onward, gaining offing, and the final sharp concussion of flesh and flesh died away beneath the afternoon.
Mrs. Maurier had gazed at him, raised her hands in a fluttering cringing gesture, and cut him dead.
“But I saw you on the boat right after we came back,” Fairchild repeated with a sort of stubborn wonder. He opened a fresh bottle.
“You couldn’t have,” Gordon answered shortly. “I got out of the boat in the middle of Talliaferro’s excitement.” He waved away the proffered glass. The Semitic man said triumphantly, “I told you so,” and Fairchild essayed again, stubbornly:
“But I saw—”
“If you say that again,” the Semitic man told him, “I’ll kill you.” He addressed Gordon. “And you thought Dawson was drowned?”
“Yes. The man who brought me back—I stumbled on his house this morning—he had already heard of it, some way. It must have spread all up and down the lake. He didn’t remember the name, exactly, and when I named over the ​party and said Dawson Fairchild, he agreed. Dawson and Gordon—you see? And so I thought—”
Fairchild began to laugh again. He laughed steadily, trying to say something. “And so—and so he comes back and sp-spends—” Again that hysterical note came into his laughter and his hands trembled, clinking the bottle against the glass and sloshing a spoonful of the liquor onto the floor “and spends . . . He comes back, you know, and spends half a day looking—looking for his own bububod—”
The Semitic man rose and took the bottle and glass from him and half led, half thrust him into his bunk. “You sit down and drink this.” Fairchild drank the whisky obediently. The Semitic man turned to Gordon again. “What made you come back? Not just because you heard Dawson was drowned, was it?”
Gordon stood against the wall, mudstained and silent. He raised his head and stared at them, and through them, with his harsh, uncomfortable stare. Fairchild touched the Semitic man’s knee warningly.
“That’s neither here nor there,” he said. “The question is, Shall we or shall we not get drunk? I kind of think we’ve got to, myself.”
“Yes,” the other agreed. “It looks like it’s up to us. Gordon ought to celebrate his resurrection, anyway.”
“No,” Gordon answered, “I don’t want any.” The Semitic man protested, but again Fairchild gripped him silent, and when Gordon turned toward the door, he rose and followed him into the passage.
“She came back too, you know,” he said.
Gordon looked down at the shorter man with his lean bearded face, his lonely hawk’s face arrogant with shyness and pride. “I know it,” he answered (your name is like a little ​golden bell hung in my heart). “The man who brought me back was the same one who brought them back yesterday.”
“He was?” said Fairchild. “He’s doing a landoffice business with deserters, ain’t he?”
“Yes,” Gordon answered. And he went on down the passage with a singing lightness in his heart, a bright silver joy like wings.
The deck was deserted, as on that other afternoon. But he waited patiently in the hushed happiness of his dream and his arrogant bitter heart was young as any yet, as forgetful of yesterday and to-morrow; and soon, as though in answer to it, she came barelegged and molded by the wind of motion, and her grave surprise ebbed and she thrust him a hard tanned hand.
“So you ran away,” she said.
“And so did you,” he answered after an interval filled with a thing all silver and clean and fine.
“That’s right. We’re sure the herrings on this boat, aren’t we?”
“Herrings?”
“Guts, you know,” she explained. She looked at him gravely from beneath the coarse dark bang of her hair. “But you came back,” she accused.
“And so did you,” he reminded her from amid his soundless silver wings.
five o’clock
“But were moving again, at last,” Mrs. Maurier repeated at intervals, with a detached air, listening to a sound somehow vaguely convivial that welled at intervals up the companionway. Presently Mrs. Wiseman remarked the hostess’ preoccupied air and she too ceased, hearkening.
​“Not again?” she said with foreboding.
“I’m afraid so,” the other answered unhappily.
Mr. Talliaferro hearkened also. “Perhaps I’d better . . .” Mrs. Maurier fixed him with her eye, and Mrs. Wiseman said:
“Poor fellows. They have had to stand a great deal in the last few days.”
“Boys will be boys,” Mr. Talliaferro added with docile regret, listening with yearning to that vaguely convivial sound. Mrs. Maurier listened to it, coldly detached and speculative. She said:
“But we are moving again, anyway.”
six o’clock
The sun was setting across the scudding water: the water was shot goldenly with it, as was the gleaming mahogany-and-brass elegance of the yacht, and the silver wings in his heart were touched with pink and gold while he stood and looked downward upon the coarse crown of her head and at her body’s grave and sexless replica of his own attitude against the rail—an unconscious aping both comical and heart-shaking.
“Do you know,” he asked, “what Cyrano said once?” Once there was a king who possessed all things. All things were his: power, and glory, and wealth, and splendor and ease. And so he sat at dusk in his marble court filled with the sound of water and of birds and surrounded by the fixed gesturing of palms, looking out across the hushed fading domes of his city and beyond, to the dreaming lilac barriers of his world.
“No: what?” she asked. But he only looked down upon her with his cavernous uncomfortable eyes. “What did he say?” she repeated. And then: “Was he in love with her?”
“I think so. . . . Yes, he was in love with her. She couldn’t leave him, either. Couldn’t go away from him at all.”
​“She couldn’t? What’d he done to her? Locked her up?”
“Maybe she didn’t want to,” he suggested.
“Huh.” And then: “She was an awful goof, then. Was he fool enough to believe she didn’t want to?”
“He didn’t take any chances. He had her locked up. In a book.”
“In a book?” she repeated. Then she comprehended. “Oh . . . . That’s what you’ve done, isn’t it? With that marble girl without any arms and legs you made? Hadn’t you rather have a live one? Say, you haven’t got any sweetheart or anything, have you?”
“No,” he answered. “How did you know?”
“You look so bad. Shabby. But that’s the reason: no woman is going to waste time on a man that’s satisfied with a piece of wood or something. You ought to get out of yourself. You'll either bust all of a sudden some day, or just dry up. . . . How old are you?”
“Thirty-six,” he told her. She said:
“Gabriel’s pants. Thirty-six years old, and living in a hole with a piece of rock, like a dog with a dry bone. Gabriel’s pants. Why don’t you get rid of it?” But he only stared down at her. “Give it to me, won’t you?”
“No.”
“I’ll buy it from you, then.”
“No.”
“Give you—” she looked at him with sober detachment. “Give you seventeen dollars for it. Cash.”
“No.”
She looked at him with a sort of patient exasperation. “Well, what are you going to do with it? Have you got any reason for keeping it? You didn’t steal it, did you? Don’t tell me you haven’t got any use for seventeen dollars, living like you do. I bet you haven’t got five dollars to your name, right now. ​Bet you came on this party to save food. I’ll give you twenty dollars, seventeen in cash.” He continued to gaze at her as though he had not heard. —and the king spoke to a slave crouching at his feet—Halim—Lord?—I possess all things, do I not?—Thou art the Son of Morning, Lord—Then listen, Halim: I have a desire— “Twenty-five,” she said, shaking his arm.
“No.”
“No, no, no, no!” she hammered both brown fists on the rail. “You make me so damn mad! Can’t you say anything except No? You—you—” she glared at him with her angry tanned face and her grave opaque eyes, and used that phrase Jenny had traded her.
He took her by the elbows, and she became taut, still watching his face: he could feel the small hard muscles in her arms. “What are you going to do?” she asked. He raised her from the floor, and she began to struggle. But he carried her implacably across the deck and sat on a deckchair and turned her face downward across his knees. She clawed and kicked in a silent fury, but he held her, and she ceased to struggle, and set her teeth into his leg through the gritty cloth of his trousers, and clung like a raging puppy while he drew her skirt tight across her thighs and spanked her, good.
“I meant it!” she cried, raging and tearless, when he had dragged her teeth loose and set her upright on his lap. There was a small wet oval on his trouserleg. “I meant it!” she repeated, taut and raging.
“I know you meant it. That’s why I spanked you. Not because you said it: what you said doesn’t mean anything because you’ve got the genders backward. I spanked you because you meant it, whether you knew what to say or not.”
Suddenly she became lax, and wept, and he held her against his breast. But she ceased crying as abruptly, and lay quiet ​while he moved his hand over her face, slowly and firmly, but lightly. It is like a thing heard, not as a music of brass and plucked strings is heard and a pallid voluption of dancing girls among the strings; nay, Halim, it is no pale virgin from Tal with painted fingernails and honey and myrrh cunningly beneath her tongue. Nor is it a scent as of myrrh and roses to soften and make to flow like water the pith in a man’s bones, nor yet—Stay, Halim: Once I was . . . once I was? Is not this a true thing? It is dawn, in the high cold hills, dawn ts like a wind in the clean hills, and on the wind comes the thin piping of shepherds, and the smell of dawn and of almond trees on the wind. Is not that a true thing?—Ay, Lord. I told thee that. I was there.
“Are you a petter, as well as a he-man?” she asked, becoming taut again and rolling upward her exposed eye. His hand moved slowly along her cheekbone and jaw, pausing, tracing a muscle, moving on. Then hark thee, Halim: I desire a thing that, had I not been at all, becoming aware of it I would awake; that, dead, remembering it I would cling to this world though it be as a beggar in a tattered robe; yea, rather that would I than a king among kings amid the soft and scented sounds of paradise. Find me this, O Halim. “Say,” she said curiously, no longer alarmed, “what are you doing that for?”
“Learning your face.”
“Learning my face? Are you going to make me in marble?” she asked quickly, raising herself. “Can you do a marble of my head?”
“Yes.”
“Can I have it?” she thrust herself away, watching his face. “Make two of them, then,” she suggested. And then: “If you won’t do that, give me the other one, the one you’ve got, and I’ll pose for this one without charging you anything. How about that?”
​“Maybe.”
“I’d rather do that than to have this one. Have you learned my face good?” She moved again, quickly, returning to her former position. She turned her face up. “Learn it good.” Now, this Halim was an old man, so old that he had forgotten much. He had held this king on his first pony, walking patiently beside him through the streets and paths; he had stood between the young prince and all those forms of sudden and complete annihilation which the young prince had engendered after the ingenuous fashion of boys; he had got himself between the young prince and the inevitable parental admonishment which these entailed. And he sat with his gray hands on his thin knees and his gray head bent above his hands while dusk came across the simple immaculate domes of the city and into the court, stilling the sound of birds so that the lilac silence of the court was teased only by the plashing of water, and on among the grave restlessness of the palms. After a while Halim spoke.—Ah, Lord, in the Georgian hills I loved this maid myself, when I was a lad. But that was long ago, and she is dead.
She lay still against his breast while sunset died like brass horns across the water. She said, without moving:
“You’re a funny man. . . . I wonder if I could sculp? Suppose I learn your face? . . . Well, don’t, then. I’d just as soon lie still. You’re a lot more comfortable to lie on than you look. Only I’d think you’d be getting tired now—I’m no humming bird. Aren’t you tired of holding me?” she persisted. He moved his head at last and looked at her again with his caverned uncomfortable eyes, and she tried to do something with her eyes, assuming at the same time an attitude, a kind of leering invitation, so palpably theatrical and false that it but served to emphasize that grave, hard sexlessness of hers.
“What are you trying to do?” he asked quietly, “vamp me?”
​She said “Shucks.” She sat up, then squirmed off his lap and to her feet. “So you won’t give it to me? You just won't?”
“No,” he told her soberly. She turned away, but presently she stopped again and looked back at him.
“Give you twenty-five dollars for it.”
“No.”
She said “Shucks” again, and she went on on her brown silent feet, and was gone. (Your name is like a little golden bell hung in my heart, and when I think of you. . .) The Nausikaa sped on. It was twilight abruptly; soon, a star.
seven o’clock
The place did appear impregnable, but then he had got used to feeling it behind him in his chair, where he knew nothing was going to happen to it. Besides, to change now, after so many days, would be like hedging on a bet. . . . Still, to let those two old bums kid him about it . . . He paused in the door of the saloon.
The others were seated and well into their dinner, but before four vacant places that bland eternal grapefruit, sinister and bland as taxes. Some of them hadn’t arrived: he’d have time to run back to his room and leave it. And let one of them drunkards throw it out the window for a joke?
Mrs. Wiseman carrying a tray said briskly: “Gangway, Pete,” and he crowded against the wall for her to pass, and then the niece turned her head and saw him. “Belly up,” she said, and he heard a further trampling drawing near. He hesitated a second, then he thrust his hat into the little cubbyhole between the two shelves. He'd risk it to-night, anyway. He could still sort of keep an eye on it. He took his seat.
Fairchild’s watch surged in: a hearty joviality that pres​ently died into startled consternation when it saw the grapefruit. “My God,” said Fairchild in a hushed tone.
“Sit down, Dawson,” Mrs. Wiseman ordered sharply. “We've had about all that sort of humor this voyage will stand.”
“That’s what I think,” he agreed readily. “That’s what Julius and Major Ayers and me think at every meal. And yet, when we come to the table, what do we see?”
“My first is an Indian princess,” said Mark Frost in a hollow lilting tone. “But it’s a little early to play charades yet, isn’t it?”
Major Ayers said “Eh?” looking from Mark Frost to Fairchild. Then he ventured: “It’s grapefruit, isn’t it?”
“But we have so many of them,” Mrs. Maurier explained. “You are supposed to never tire of them.”
“That’s it,” said Fairchild solemnly. “Major Ayers guessed it the first time. I wasn’t certain what it was, myself. But you can’t fool Major Ayers; you can’t fool a man that’s traveled as much as he has, with just a grapefruit. I guess you’ve shot lots of grapefruit in China and India, haven’t you, Major?”
“Dawson, sit down,” Mrs. Wiseman repeated. “Make them sit down, Julius, or go out to the kitchen if they just want to stand around and talk.”
Fairchild sat down quickly. “Never mind,” he said. “We can stand it if the ladies can. The human body can stand anything,” he added owlishly. “It can get drunk and stay up and dance all night, and consume crate after crate of gr—” Mrs. Wiseman leaned across his shoulder and swept his grapefruit away. “Here,” he exclaimed.
“They don’t want ’em,” she told Miss Jameson across the table. “Get his, too.” So they reft Major Ayers of his also, and Mrs. Wiseman clashed the plates viciously onto her tray. In passing behind Mrs. Maurier she struck the collapsible ​serving table with her hip and said “Damn!” pausing to release the catch and slam it back into the bulkhead. Pete’s hat slid onto the floor and she thrust it against the wall with her toe.
“Yes, sir,” Fairchild repeated, “the human body can stand lots of things. But if I have to eat another grapefruit. . . Say, Julius, I was examining my back to-day, and do you know, my skin is getting dry and rough, with a kind of yellowish cast. If it keeps on, first thing I know I won’t any more dare undress in public than Al Jack—”
Mark Frost made a sound of sharp alarm. “Look out, people,” he exclaimed, rising. “I’m going to get out of here.”
“—son would take off his shoes in public,” Fairchild continued unperturbed. Mrs. Wiseman returned and she stood with her hands on her hips, regarding Fairchild’s unkempt head with disgust. Mrs. Maurier gazed helplessly at him.
“Every one’s finished,” Mrs. Wiseman said. “Come on, let’s go on deck.”
“No,” Mrs. Maurier protested. She said firmly: “Mr. Fairchild.”
“Go on,” the niece urged him. “What about Al Jackson?”
“Shut up, Pat,” Mrs. Wiseman commanded. “Come on, you all. Let ’em stay here and drivel to each other. Let’s lock ’em in here: what do you say?”
Mrs. Maurier asserted herself. She rose. “Mr. Fairchild, I simply will not have—if you continue in this behavior, I shall leave the room. Don’t you see how trying—how difficult—how difficult”—beneath the beseeching helplessness of her eyes her various chins began to quiver a little—“how difficult—”
Mrs. Wiseman touched her arm. “Come: it’s useless to argue with them now. Come, dear.” She drew Mrs. Maurier’s chair aside and the old woman took a step and stopped abruptly, clutching the other’s arm.
​“I’ve stepped on something,” she said, peering blindly.
Pete rose with a mad inarticulate cry.
“Old man Jackson”—Fairchild continued—“claims to be a lineal descendant of Old Hickory. A fine old southern family with all a fine old southern family’s pride. Al has a lot of that pride, himself: that’s why he won’t take off his shoes in company. I’ll tell you the reason later.
“Well, old man Jackson was a bookkeeper or something, drawing a small salary with a big family to support, and he wanted to better himself with the minimum of labor, like a descendant of any fine old southern family naturally would, and so he thought up the idea of taking up some of this Louisiana swamp land and raising sheep on it. He’d noticed how much ranker vegetation grows on trees in swampy land, so he figured that wool ought to grow the same rank way on a sheep raised in a swamp. So he threw up his bookkeeping job and took up a few hundred acres of Tchufuncta river swamp and stocked it with sheep, using the money his wife’s uncle, a member of an old aristocratic Tennessee moonshining family, had left ’em.
“But his sheep started right in to get themselves drowned, so he made lifebelts for ’em out of some small wooden kegs that had been part of the heritage from that Tennessee uncle, so that when the sheep strayed off into deep water they would float until the current washed ’em back to land again. This worked all right, but still his sheep kept on disappearing—the ewes and lambs did, that is. Then he found that the alligators were—”
“Yes,” murmured Major Ayers, “Old Hickory.”
“—getting them. So he made some imitation rams’ horns out of wood and fastened a pair to each ewe and to every lamb when it was born. And that reduced his losses by alli​gators to a minimum scarcely worth notice. The rams’ flesh seemed to be too rank even for alligators.
“After a time the lifebelts wore out, but the sheep had learned to swim pretty well by then, so old man Jackson decided it wasn’t worth while to put any more lifebelts on ’em. The fact is, the sheep had got to like the water: the first crop of lambs would only come out of the water at feeding time; and when the first shearing time came around, he and his boys had to round up the sheep with boats.
“By the next shearing time, those sheep wouldn’t even come out of the water to be fed. So he and his boys would go out in boats and set floating tubs of feed around in the bayous for them. This crop of lambs could dive, too. They never saw one of them on land at all: they’d only see their heads swimming across the bogues and sloughs.
“Finally another shearing time came around. Old man Jackson tried to catch one of them, but the sheep could swim faster than he and his boys could row, and the young ones dived under water and got away. So they finally had to borrow a motor boat. And when they finally tired one of those sheep down and caught it and took it out of the water, they found that only the top of its back had any wool on it. The rest of its body was scaled like a fish. And when they finally caught one of the spring lambs on an alligator hook, they found that its tail had broadened out and flattened like a beaver’s, and that it had no legs at all. They didn’t hardly know what it was, at first.”
“I say,” murmured Major Ayers.
“Yes, sir, completely atrophied away. Time passed, and they never saw the next crop of lambs at all. The food they set out the birds ate, and when the next shearing time came, they couldn’t even catch one with the motor boat. They hadn’t even seen one in three weeks. They knew they were ​still there, though, because they would occasionally hear ’em baa-ing at night way back in the swamp. They caught one occasionally on a trotline of shark hooks baited with ears of corn. But not many.
“Well, sir, the more old man Jackson thought about that swampful of sheep, the madder he got. He’d stamp around the house and swear he’d catch ’em if he had to buy a motor boat that would run fifty miles an hour, and a diving suit for himself and every one of his boys. He had one boy named Claude—Al’s brother, you know. Claude was kind of wild: hell after women, a gambler and a drunkard—a kind of handsome humorless fellow with lots of dash. And finally Claude made a trade with his father to have half of every sheep he could catch, and he got to work right away. He never bothered with boats or trotlines: he just took off his clothes and went right in the water and grappled for ’em.”
“Grappled for ’em?” Major Ayers repeated.
“Sure: run one down and hem him up under the bank and drag him out with his bare hands. That was Claude, all over. And then they found that this year’s lambs didn’t have any wool on ’em at all, and that its flesh was the best fish eating in Louisiana; being partly cornfed that way giving it a good flavor, you see. So that’s where old man Jackson quit the sheep business and went to fish ranching on a large scale. He knew he had a snap as long as Claude could catch ’em, so he made arrangements with the New Orleans markets right away, and they began to get rich.”
“By Jove,” Major Ayers said tensely, his mind taking fire.
“Claude liked the work. It was an adventurous kind of life that just suited him, so he quit everything and gave all his time to it. He quit drinking and gambling and running around at night, and there was a marked decrease in vice in that neighborhood, and the young girls pined for him at the ​local dances and sat on their front porches of a Sunday evening in vain.
“Pretty soon he could outswim the old sheep, and having to dive so much after the young ones, he got to where he could stay under water longer and longer at a time. Sometimes he’d stay under for a half an hour or more. And pretty soon he got to where he’d stay in the water all day, only coming out to eat and sleep; and then they noticed that Claude’s skin was beginning to look funny and that he walked kind of peculiar, like his knees were stiff or something. Soon after that he quit coming out of the water at all, even to eat, so they’d bring his dinner down to the water and leave it, and after a while he’d swim up and get it. Sometimes they wouldn’t see Claude for days. But he was still catching those sheep, herding ’em into a pen old man Jackson had built in a shallow bayou and fenced off with hog wire, and his half of the money was growing in the bank. Occasionally half eaten pieces of sheep would float ashore, and old man Jackson decided alligators were getting ’em again. But he couldn’t put horns on ’em now because no one but Claude could catch ’em, and he hadn’t seen Claude in some time.
“It had been a couple of weeks since anybody had seen Claude, when one day there was a big commotion in the sheep pen. Old man Jackson and a couple of his other boys ran down there, and when they got there they could see the sheep jumping out of the water every which way, trying to get on land again; and after a while a big alligator rushed out from among ’em, and old man Jackson knew what had scared the sheep.
“And then, right behind the alligator he saw Claude. Claude’s eyes had kind of shifted around to the side of his head and his mouth had spread back a good way, and his teeth had got longer. And then old man Jackson knew what ​had scared that alligator. But that was the last they ever saw of Claude.
“Pretty soon after that, though, there was a shark scare at the bathing beaches along the Gulf coast. It seemed to be a lone shark that kept annoying women bathers, especially blondes; and they knew it was Claude Jackson. He was always hell after blondes.”
Fairchild ceased. The niece squealed and jumped up and came to him, patting his back. Jenny’s round ineffable eyes were upon him, utterly without thought. The Semitic man was slumped in his chair: he may have slept.
Major Ayers stared at Fairchild a long time. At last he said: “But why does the alligator one wear congress boots?”
Fairchild mused a moment. Then he said dramatically: “He’s got webbed feet.”
“Yes,” Major Ayers agreed. He mused in turn. “But this chap that got rich—” The niece squealed again. She sat beside Fairchild and regarded him with admiration.
“Go on, go on,” she said, “about the one that stole the money, you know.”
Fairchild looked at her kindly. Into the silence there came a thin saccharine strain. “There’s the victrola,” he said. “Let’s go up and start a dance.”
“The one who stole the money,” she insisted. “Please.” She put her hand on his shoulder.
“Some other time,” he promised, rising. “Let’s go up and dance now.” The Semitic man yet slumped in his chair, and Fairchild shook him. “Wake up, Julius. I’m safe now.”
The Semitic man opened his eyes and Major Ayers said: “How much did they gain with their fish ranching?”
“Not as much as they would have with a patent nicetasting laxative. All Americans don’t eat fish, you know. Come ​on, let’s go up and hold that dance they’ve been worrying us about every night.”
nine o'clock
“Say,” the niece said as she and Jenny mounted to the deck, “remember that thing we traded for the other night? the one you let me use for the one I let you use?”
“I guess so,” Jenny answered. “I remember trading.”
“Have you used it yet?”
“I never can think of it,” Jenny confessed. “I never can remember what it was you told me. . . . Besides, I’ve got another one, now.”
“You have? Who told it to you?”
“The popeyed man. That Englishman.”
“Major Ayers?”
“Uhuh. Last night we was talking and he kept on saying for us to go to Mandeville to-day. He kept on saying it. And so this morning he acted like he thought I meant we was going. He acted like he was mad.”
“What was it he said?” Jenny told her—a mixture of pidgin English and Hindustani that Major Ayers must have picked up along the Singapore water front, or mayhap at some devious and doubtful place in the Straits, but after Jenny had repeated it, it didn’t sound like anything at all.
“What?” the niece asked. Jenny said it again.
“It don’t sound like anything, to me,” the niece said. “Is that the way he said it?”
“That’s what it sounded like to me,” Jenny replied.
The niece said curiously: “Men sure do swear at you a lot. They’re always cursing you. What do you do to them, anyway?”
“I don’t do anything to them,” Jenny answered. “I’m just talking to them.”
​“Well, they sure do. . . . Say, you can have that one back you loaned me.”
“Have you used it on anybody?” Jenny asked with interest.
“I tried it on that redheaded Gordon.”
“That drownded man? What’d he say?”
“He beat me.” The niece rubbed herself with a tanned retrospective hand. “He just beat hell out of me,” she said.
“Gee,” said Jenny.
ten o’clock
Fairchild gathered his watch, nourished it, and brought it on deck again. The ladies hailed its appearance with doubtful pleasure. Mr. Talliaferro and Jenny were dancing, and the niece and Pete with his damaged hat, were performing together with a skilful and sexless abandon that was almost professional, while the rest of the party watched them.
“Whee,” Fairchild squealed, watching the niece and Pete with growing childish admiration. At the moment they faced each other at a short distance, their bodies rigid as far as the waist. But below this they were as amazing jointless toys, and their legs seemed to fly in every direction at once until their knees seemed to touch the floor. Then they caught hands and whirled sharply together, without a break in that dizzy staccato of heels. “Say, Major, look there! Look there, Julius! Come on, I believe I can do that.”
He led his men to the assault. The victrola ran down at the moment; he directed the Semitic man to attend to it, and went at once to where Pete and the niece stood. “Say, you folks are regular professionals. Pete, let me have her this time, will you? I want her to show me how you do that. Will you show me? Pete won’t mind.”
“All right,” the niece agreed, “I’ll show you. I owe you something for that yarn at dinner to-night.” She put her hand ​on Pete’s arm. “Don’t go off, Pete. I’ll show him and then he can practise on the others. Don’t you go off; you are all right. You might take Jenny for a while. She must be tired: he’s been leaning on her for a half an hour. Come on, Dawson. Watch me now.” She had no bones at all.
Major Ayers and the Semitic man had partners, though more sedately. Major Ayers galloped around in a heavy dragoonish manner: when that record was over Miss Jameson was panting. She offered to sit out the next one, but Fairchild overruled her. He believed he had the knack of it. “We'll put the old girl’s dance over in style,” he told them.
Major Ayers, inflamed by Fairchild’s example, offered for the niece himself. Mr. Talliaferro, reft of Jenny, acquired Mrs. Wiseman; the Semitic man was cajoling the hostess. “We'll put her dance over for her,” Fairchild chanted. They were off.
Gordon had come up from somewhere and he stood in shadow, watching. “Come on, Gordon,” Fairchild shouted to him. “Grab one!” When the music ceased Gordon cut in on Major Ayers. The niece looked up in surprise, and Major Ayers departed in Jenny’s direction.
“I didn’t know you danced,” she said.
“Why not?” Gordon asked.
“You just don’t look like you did. And you told Aunt Pat you couldn’t dance.”
“I can’t,” he answered, staring down at her. “Bitter,” he said slowly. “That’s what you are. New. Like bark when the sap is rising.”
“Will you give it to me?” He was silent. She couldn’t see his face distinctly: only the bearded shape of his tall head. “Why won’t you give it to me?” Still no answer, and his head was ugly as bronze against the sky. Fairchild started the vic​trola again: a saxophone was a wailing obscenity, and she raised her arms. “Come on.”
When that one was finished Fairchild’s watch rushed below again, and presently Mr. Talliaferro saw his chance and followed surreptitiously. Fairchild and Major Ayers were ecstatically voluble: the small room fairly moiled with sound. Then they rushed back on deck.
“Watch your step, Talliaferro,” Fairchild cautioned him as they ascended. “She’s got her eye on you. Have you danced with her yet?” Mr. Talliaferro had not. “Better kind of breathe away from her when you do.”
He led his men to the assault. The ladies demurred, but Fairchild was everywhere, cajoling, threatening, keeping life in the party. Putting the old girl’s dance over. Mrs. Maurier was trying to catch Mr. Talliaferro’s eye. The niece had peremptorily commandeered Pete again, and again Gordon stood in his shadow, haughty and aloof. They were off.
eleven o’clock
“I say,” said Mr. Talliaferro, popping briskly and cautiously into the room, accepting his glass, “we’d better slow up a bit, hadn’t we?”
“What for?” asked the Semitic man, and Fairchild said:
“Ah, it’s all right. She expects it of us. Somebody’s got to be the hoi polloi, you know. Besides, we want to make this cruise memorable in the annals of deep water. Hey, Major? Talliaferro’d better go easy, though.”
“Oh, we'll look out for Talliaferro,” the Semitic man said.
“No damned fear,” Major Ayers assured him. “Have a go, eh?” They all had a go. Then they rushed back on deck.
​“What do you do in New Orleans, Pete?” Miss Jameson asked intensely.
“One thing and another,” Pete answered cautiously. “I’m in business with my brother,” he added.
“You have lots of friends, I imagine? Girls would all like to dance with you. You are one of the best dancers I ever saw—almost a professional. I like dancing.”
“Yeh,” Pete agreed. He was restive. “I guess—”
“I wonder if you and I couldn’t get together some evening and dance again? I don’t go to night clubs much, because none of the men I know dance very well. But I’d enjoy it, with you.”
“I guess so,” Pete answered. “Well, I—”
“I’ll give you my phone number and address, and you call me soon, will you? You might come out to dinner, and we'll go out afterward, you know.”
“Sure,” Pete answered uncomfortably. He removed his hat and examined the crown. Then he slanted it once more across his dark reckless head. Miss Jameson said:
“Do you ever make dates ahead of time, Pete?”
“Naw,” he answered quickly. “I wouldn’t have a date over a day old. I just call ’em up and take ’em out and bring ’em back in time to go to work next day. I wouldn’t have one I had to wait until to-morrow on.”
“Neither do I. So I tell you what: let’s break the rule one time, and make a date for the first night we are ashore—what do you say? You come out to dinner at my house, and we'll go out later to dance. I’ve got a car.”
“I— Well, you see—”
“We'll just do that,” Miss Jameson continued remorselessly. “We won’t forget that; it’s a promise, isn’t it?”
Pete rose. “I guess we—I guess I better not promise. Something might turn up so I—we couldn’t make it. I guess . . .”
​She sat quietly, looking at him. “Maybe it’ll be better to wait and fix it up when we get back. I might have to be out of town or something that day, see? Maybe we better wait and see how things shape up.” Still she said nothing, and presently she removed her patient humorless eyes and looked out across the darkling water, and Pete stood uncomfortably with his goading urge to keep on saying something. “I guess we better wait and see later, see?”
Her head was turned away, so he departed unostentatiously. He paused again and looked back at her. She gazed still out over the water: an uncomplaining abjectness of passivity, quiet in her shadowed chair.
As he embraced her, Jenny removed his hat slanted viciously upon his reckless head, and examined the broken crown with a recurrence of soft astonishment; and still holding the hat in her hand she came to him in a flowing enveloping movement, without seeming to move at all. Their faces merged and Jenny was immediately utterly boneless, seeming to suspend her merging rifeness by her soft mouth, then she opened her mouth against his. . . after a while Pete raised his head, Jenny’s face was a passive drowsing blur rich, ineffably rich, in the dark; and Pete got out his unfresh handkerchief and wiped her mouth, quite gently.
“Got over it without leaving a scar, didn’t you?” he said. Without volition they swung in a world unseen and warm as water, unseen and rife and beautiful, strange and hushed and grave beneath that waning moon of decay and death. . . . “Give your old man a kiss, kid. . . .”
The niece entered her aunt’s room, without knocking. Mrs. Maurier raised her astonished, shrieking face and dragged a garment shapelessly across her recently uncorseted breast, as ​women do. When she had partially recovered from the shock she ran heavily to the door and locked it.
“It’s just me,” the niece said. “Say, Aunt Pat—”
Her aunt gasped: her breast and chins billowed unconfined. “Why don’t you knock? You should never enter a room like that. Doesn’t Henry ever—”
“Sure he does,” the niece interrupted, “all the time. Say, Aunt Pat, Pete thinks you ought to pay him for his hat. For stepping on it, you know.”
Her aunt stared at her. “What?”
“You stepped through Pete’s hat. He and Jenny think you ought to pay for it. Or offer to, anyway. I expect if you’d offer to, he wouldn’t take it.”
“Thinks I ought to p—” Mrs. Maurier’s voice faded into a shocked, soundless amazement.
“Yes, they think so. . . . I mentioned it because I promised them I would. You don’t have to unless you want to, you know.”
“Thinks I ought to p—” Again Mrs. Maurier’s voice failed her, and her amazement became a chaotic thing that filled her round face interestingly. Then it froze into something definite: a coldly determined displeasure, and she recovered her voice.
“I have lodged and fed these people for a week,” she said without humor. “I do not feel that I am called upon to clothe them also.”
“Well, I just mentioned it because I promised,” the niece repeated soothingly.
Mrs. Maurier, Jenny and the niece had disappeared, to Mr. Talliaferro’s mixed relief. They still had two left, however. They took turn about with them.
Major Ayers, Fairchild and the Semitic man rushed below ​again. Mr. Talliaferro following openly this time, and a trifle erratically.
“How’s it coming along?” Fairchild asked, poising the bottle. Mr. Talliaferro made a wet deprecating sound, glancing at the other two. They regarded him with kindly interest. “Oh, they’re all right,” Fairchild reassured him. “They are as anxious to see you put it over as I am.” He set the bottle down well within reach, and gulped at his glass. “I tell you what, it’s boldness that does the trick with women, ain’t it, Major?”
“Right you are. Boldness: dash in; take ’em by storm.”
“Sure. That’s what you want to do. Have another drink.” He filled Mr. Talliaferro’s glass.
“That’s my plan, exactly. Boldness. Boldness. Boldness.” Mr. Talliaferro stared at the other glassily. He tried to wink. “Didn’t you see me dancing with her?”
“Yes, but that ain’t bold enough. If I were you, if I were doing it, I’d turn the trick to-night, now. Say, Julius, you know what I’d do? I’d go right to her room: walk right in. He’s been dancing with her and talking to her: ground already broken, you see. I bet she’s in there right now, waiting for him, hoping he is bold enough to come in to her. He'll feel pretty cheap to-morrow when he finds he missed his chance, won’t he? You never have but one chance with a woman, you know. If you fail her then, she’s done with you—the next man that comes along gets her without a struggle. It ain’t the man a woman cares for that reaps the harvest of passion, you know: it’s the next man that comes along after she’s lost the other one. I’d sure hate to think I’d been doing work for somebody else to get the benefit of. Wouldn’t you?”
Mr. Talliaferro stared at him. He swallowed twice. “But suppose, just suppose, that she isn’t expecting me.”
“Oh, sure. Of course, you’ve got to take that risk. It would take a bold man, anyway, to walk right in her room, walk right ​in without knocking and go straight to the bed. But how many women would resist? I wouldn’t, if I were a woman. If you were her, Talliaferro, would you resist? I’ve found,” he went on, “that boldness gets pretty near anything, in this world, especially women. But it takes a bold man. . . . Say, I bet Major Ayers would do it.”
“Right you are. I’d walk right in, by Jove. . . .I say, I think I shall, anyway. Which one is it? Not the old one?”
“All right. That is, if Talliaferro don’t want to do it. He has first shot, you know: he’s done all the heavy preparatory work. But it takes a bold man.”
“Oh, Talliaferro’s bold as any man,” the Semitic man said.
“But, really,” Mr. Talliaferro repeated, “suppose she isn’t expecting me. Suppose she were to call out— No, no.”
“Yes, Talliaferro ain’t bold enough. We better let Major Ayers go, after all. No necessity for disappointing the girl, at least.”
“Besides,” Mr. Talliaferro added quickly, “she is in a room with some one else.”
“No, she ain’t. She’s in a room to herself, now; that one at the end of the hall.”
“That’s Mrs. Maurier’s room,” Mr. Talliaferro said, staring at him.
“No, no; she changed. That room has a broken screen, so she changed. Julius and I were helping her move this afternoon. Weren’t we, Julius? That’s how I happen to know Jenny’s in there now.”
“But, really—” Mr. Talliaferro swallowed again. “Are you sure that’s her room? This is a serious matter, you know.”
“Have another drink,” Fairchild said.
twelve o'clock
The deck was deserted. Fairchild and Major Ayers halted and gazed about in pained astonishment. The victrola was hooded and mute, smugly inscrutable. They held a hurried council, then they set forth to beat up stragglers. There were no stragglers.
“Put on a record,” Fairchild suggested at last. “Maybe that'll get em up here. They must have thought we’d gone to bed.”
The Semitic man started the victrola again, and again Major Ayers and Fairchild combed the deck in vain. The moon had risen, its bony erstwhile disc was thumbed into the sky like a coin after too much handling.
Mrs. Maurier routed out the captain and together they repaired to Fairchild’s room. “Find it all,” she directed, “every single one.” The captain found it all. “Now, open that window.”
She gave the captain further directions, when they had finished, and she returned to her room and sat again on the edge of her bed. Moonlight came into the room level as a lance through the port, like a marble pencil shattering and filling the room with a thin silver dust, as of marble. “It has come, at last,” she whispered, aware of her body, heavy and soft with years. I should feel happy, I should feel happy, she told herself, but her limbs felt chill and strange to her and within her a terrible thing was swelling, a thing terrible and poisonous and released, like water that has been dammed too long: it was as though there were waking within her comfortable, long familiar body a thing that abode there dormant and which she had harbored unaware.
She sat on the edge of her bed, feeling her strange chill ​limbs, while that swelling thing within her unfolded like an intricate poisonous flower, an intricate slow convolvulæ of petals that grew and faded, died and were replaced by other petals huger and more implacable. Her limbs were strange and cold: they were trembling. That dark flower of laughter, that secret hideous flower grew and grew until that entire world which was herself was become a slow implacable swirling of hysteria that rose in her throat and shook it as though with a myriad small hands while from overhead there came a thin saccharine strain spaced off by a heavy thumping of feet, where Fairchild was teaching Major Ayers the Charleston.
And soon, another sound; and the Nausikaa trembled and pulsed, girding herself with motion.
Mr. Talliaferro stood in the bows, letting the wind blow upon his face, amid his hair. The worn moon had risen and she spread her boneless hand upon the ceaseless water, and the cold remote stars swung overhead, cold and remote and incurious: what cared they for the haggard despair in his face, for the hushed despair in his heart? They had seen too much of human moiling and indecision and astonishments to be concerned over the fact that Mr. Talliaferro had got himself engaged to marry again.
. . . Soon, a sound; and the Nausikaa trembled and pulsed, girding herself with motion.
Suddenly Fairchild stopped, raising his hand for silence. “What’s that?” he asked.
“What’s what?” responded Major Ayers, pausing also and staring at him.
“I thought I heard something fall into the water.” He crossed to the rail and leaned over it. Major Ayers followed him and they listened. But the dark restless water was un​troubled by any foreign sound, the night was calm, islanding the worn bland disc of the moon.
“Steward throwing out grapefruit,” Major Ayers suggested at last. They turned away.
“Hope so,” Fairchild said. “Start her up again, Julius.”
And, soon, another sound; and the Nausikaa trembled and pulsed, girding herself with motion.