# Mosquitoes (Faulkner)/Prologue

MOSQUITOES
​In spring, the sweet young spring, decked out with little green, necklaced, braceleted with the song of idiotic birds, spurious and sweet and tawdry as a shopgirl in her cheap finery, like an idiot with money and no taste; they were little and young and trusting, you could kill them sometimes. But now, as August like a languorous replete bird winged slowly through the pale summer toward the moon of decay and death, they were bigger, vicious; ubiquitous as undertakers, cunning as pawnbrokers, confident and unavoidable as politicians. They came cityward lustful as country boys, as passionately integral as a college football squad; pervading and monstrous but without majesty: a biblical plague seen through the wrong end of a binocular: the majesty of Fate become contemptuous through ubiquity and sheer repetition.
MOSQUITOES
PROLOGUE
I
“The sex instinct,” repeated Mr. Talliaferro in his careful cockney, with that smug complacence with which you plead guilty to a characteristic which you privately consider a virtue, “is quite strong in me. Frankness, without which there can be no friendship, without which two people cannot really ever ‘get’ each other, as you artists say; frankness, as I was saying, I believe—”
“Yes,” his host agreed. “Would you mind moving a little?” He complied with obsequious courtesy, remarking the thin fretful flashing of the chisel beneath the rhythmic maul. Wood scented gratefully slid from its mute flashing, and slapping vainly about himself with his handkerchief he moved in a Bluebeard’s closet of blonde hair in severed clots, examining with concern a faint even powdering of dust upon his neat small patent leather shoes. Yes, one must pay a price for Art....
Watching the rhythmic power of the other’s back and arm he speculated briefly upon which was more to be desired—muscularity in an undershirt, or his own symmetrical sleeve, and reassured he continued:
“. . .frankness compels me to admit that the sex instinct is perhaps my most dominating compulsion.” Mr. Talliaferro believed that Conversation—not talk: Conversation—with an intellectual equal consisted of admitting as many so-called un​publishable facts as possible about oneself. Mr. Talliaferro often mused with regret on the degree of intimacy he might have established with his artistic acquaintances had he but acquired the habit of masturbation in his youth. But he had not even done this.
“Yes,” his host agreed again, thrusting a hard hip into him. “Not at all,” murmured Mr. Talliaferro quickly. A harsh wall restored his equilibrium roughly and hearing a friction of cloth and plaster he rebounded with repressed alacrity.
“Pardon me,” he chattered. His entire sleeve indicated his arm in gritty white and regarding his coat with consternation he moved out of range and sat upon an upturned wooden block. Brushing did no good, and the ungracious surface on which he sat recalling his trousers to his attention, he rose and spread his handkerchief upon it. Whenever he came here he invariably soiled his clothes, but under that spell put on us by those we admire doing things we ourselves cannot do, he always returned.
The chisel bit steadily beneath the slow arc of the maul. His host ignored him. Mr. Talliaferro slapped viciously and vainly at the back of his hand, sitting in lukewarm shadow while light came across roofs and chimneypots, passing through the dingy skylight, becoming weary. His host labored on in the tired light while the guest sat on his hard block regretting his sleeve, watching the other’s hard body in stained trousers and undershirt, watching the curling vigor of his hair.
Outside the window New Orleans, the vieux carré, brooded in a faintly tarnished languor like an aging yet still beautiful courtesan in a smokefilled room, avid yet weary too of ardent ways. Above the city summer was hushed warmly into the bowled weary passion of the sky. Spring and the cruellest months were gone, the cruel months, the wantons that break the fat hybernatant dullness and comfort of Time; August ​was on the wing, and September—a month of languorous days regretful as woodsmoke. But Mr. Talliaferro’s youth, or lack of it, troubled him no longer. Thank God.
No youth to trouble the individual in this room at all. What this room troubled was something eternal in the race, something immortal. And youth is not deathless. Thank God. This unevenly boarded floor, these rough stained walls broken by high small practically useless windows beautifully set, these crouching lintels cutting the immaculate ruined pitch of walls which had housed slaves long ago, slaves long dead and dust with the age that had produced them and which they had served with a kind and gracious dignity—shades of servants and masters now in a more gracious region, lending dignity to eternity. After all, only a few chosen can accept service with dignity: it is man’s impulse to do for himself. It rests with the servant to lend dignity to an unnatural proceeding. And outside, above rooftops becoming slowly violet, summer lay supine, unchaste with decay.
As you entered the room the thing drew your eyes: you turned sharply as to a sound, expecting movement. But it was marble, it could not move. And when you tore your eyes away and turned your back on it at last, you got again untarnished and high and clean that sense of swiftness, of space encompassed; but on looking again it was as before: motionless and passionately eternal—the virginal breastless torso of a girl, headless, armless, legless, in marble temporarily caught and hushed yet passionate still for escape, passionate and simple and eternal in the equivocal derisive darkness of the world. Nothing to trouble your youth or lack of it: rather something to trouble the very fibrous integrity of your being. Mr. Talliaferro slapped his neck savagely.
The manipulator of the chisel and maul ceased his labor and straightened up, flexing his arm and shoulder muscles. ​And as though it had graciously waited for him to get done, the light faded quietly and abruptly: the room was like a bathtub after the drain has been opened. Mr. Talliaferro rose also and his host turned upon him a face like that of a heavy hawk, breaking his dream. Mr. Talliaferro regretted his sleeve again and said briskly:
“Then I may tell Mrs. Maurier that you will come?”
“What?” the other asked sharply, staring at him. “Oh, Hell, I have work to do. Sorry. Tell her I am sorry.”
Mr. Talliaferro’s disappointment was tinged faintly with exasperation as he watched the other cross the darkening room to a rough wood bench and raise a cheap enamelware water pitcher, gulping from it.
“But, I say,” said Mr. Talliaferro fretfully.
“No, no,” the other repeated brusquely, wiping his beard on his upper arm. “Some other time, perhaps. I am too busy to bother with her now. Sorry.” He swung back the open door and from a hook screwed into it he took down a thin coat and a battered tweed cap. Mr. Talliaferro watched his muscles bulge the thin cloth with envious distaste, recalling anew the unmuscled emphasis of his own pressed flannel. The other was palpably on the verge of abrupt departure and Mr. Talliaferro, to whom solitude, particularly dingy solitude, was unbearable, took his stiff straw hat from the bench where it flaunted its wanton gay band above the slim yellow gleam of his straight malacca stick.
“Wait,” he said, “and I'll join you.”
The other paused, looking back. “I’m going out,” he stated belligerently.
Mr. Talliaferro, at a momentary loss, said fatuously: “Why—ah, I thought—I should—” The hawk’s face brooded above him in the dusk remotely and he added quickly: “I could return, however.”
​“Sure it’s no trouble?”
“Not at all, my dear fellow, not at all! Only call on me. I will be only too glad to return.”
“Well, if you’re sure it’s no trouble, suppose you fetch me a bottle of milk from the grocer on the corner. You know the place, don’t you? Here’s the empty one.”
With one of his characteristic plunging movements the other passed through the door and Mr. Talliaferro stood in a dapper fretted surprise, clutching a coin in one hand and an unwashed milk bottle in the other. On the stairs, watching the other’s shape descending into the welled darkness, he stopped again and standing on one leg like a crane he clasped the bottle under his arm and slapped at his ankle, viciously and vainly.
2
Descending a final stair and turning into a darkling corridor he passed two people indistinguishably kissing, and he hastened on toward the street door. He paused here in active indecision, opening his coat. The bottle had become clammy in his hand. He contemplated it through his sense of touch with acute repugnance. Unseen, it seemed to have become unbearably dirty. He desired something, vaguely—a newspaper, perhaps, but before striking a match he looked quickly over his shoulder. They were gone, hushing their chimed footsteps up the dark curve of the stair: their chimed tread was like a physical embrace. His match flared a puny fledged gold that followed his clasped gleaming stick as if it were a train of gun powder. But the passage was empty, swept with chill stone, imminent with weary moisture . . . the match burned down to the even polished temper of his fingernails and plunged him back into darkness more intense.
He opened the street door. Twilight ran in like a quiet violet dog and nursing his bottle he peered out across an un​dimensional feathered square, across stencilled palms and Andrew Jackson in childish effigy bestriding the terrific arrested plunge of his curly balanced horse, toward the long unemphasis of the Pontalba building and three spires of the cathedral graduated by perspective, pure and slumbrous beneath the decadent languor of August and evening. Mr. Talliaferro thrust his head modestly forth, looking both ways along the street. Then he withdrew his head and closed the door again.
He employed his immaculate linen handkerchief reluctantly before thrusting the bottle beneath his coat. It bulged distressingly under his exploring hand, and he removed the bottle in mounting desperation. He struck another match, setting the bottle down at his feet to do so, but there was nothing in which he might wrap the thing. His impulse was to grasp it and hurl it against the wall: already he pleasured in its anticipated glassy crash. But Mr. Talliaferro was quite honorable: he had passed his word. Or he might return to his friend’s room and get a bit of paper. He stood in hot indecision until feet on the stairs descending decided for him. He bent and fumbled for the bottle, struck it and heard its disconsolate empty flight, captured it at last and opening the street door anew he rushed hurriedly forth.
The violet dusk held in soft suspension lights slow as bellstrokes, Jackson square was now a green and quiet lake in which abode lights round as jellyfish, feathering with silver mimosa and pomegranate and hibiscus beneath which lantana and cannas bled and bled. Pontalba and cathedral were cut from black paper and pasted flat on a green sky; above them taller palms were fixed in black and soundless explosions. The street was empty, but from Royal street there came the hum of a trolley that rose to a staggering clatter, passed on and ​away leaving an interval filled with the gracious sound of inflated rubber on asphalt, like a tearing of endless silk. Clasping his accursed bottle, feeling like a criminal, Mr. Talliaferro hurried on.
He walked swiftly beside a dark wall, passing small indiscriminate shops dimly lighted with gas and smelling of food of all kinds, fulsome, slightly overripe. The proprietors and their families sat before the doors in tilted chairs, women nursing babies into slumber spoke in soft south European syllables one to another. Children scurried before him and about him, ignoring him or becoming aware of him and crouching in shadow like animals, defensive, passive and motionless.
He turned the corner. Royal street sprang in two directions and he darted into a grocery store on the corner, passing the proprietor sitting in the door with his legs spread for comfort, nursing the Italian balloon of his belly on his lap. The proprietor removed his short terrific pipe and belched, rising to follow the customer. Mr. Talliaferro set the bottle down hastily.
The grocer belched again, frankly. “Good afternoon,” he said in a broad West End accent much nearer the real thing than Mr. Talliaferro’s. “Meelk, hay?”
Mr. Talliaferro extended the coin, murmuring, watching the man’s thick reluctant thighs as he picked up the bottle without repugnance and slid it into a pigeonholed box and opening a refrigerator beside it, took therefrom a fresh one. Mr. Talliaferro recoiled.
“Haven’t you a bit of paper to wrap it in?” he asked diffidently.
“Why, sure,” the other agreed affably. “Make her in a parcel, hay?” He complied with exasperating deliberation, and breathing freer but still oppressed, Mr. Talliaferro took ​his purchase and glacing hurriedly about, stepped into the street. And paused, stricken.
She was under full sail and accompanied by a slimmer one when she saw him, but she tacked at once and came about in a hushed swishing of silk and an expensive clashing of impediments—handbag and chains and beads. Her hand bloomed fatly through bracelets, ringed and manicured, and her hothouse face wore an expression of infantile trusting astonishment.
"Mister Talliaferro! What a surprise," she exclaimed, accenting the first word of each phrase, as was her manner. And she really was surprised. Mrs. Maurier went through the world continually amazed at chance, whether or not she had instigated it. Mr. Talliaferro shifted his parcel quickly behind him, to its imminent destruction, being forced to accept her hand without removing his hat. He rectified this as soon as possible. "I would never have expected to see you in this part of town at this hour," she continued. "But you have been calling on some of your artist friends, I suppose?"
The slim one had stopped also, and stood examining Mr. Talliaferro with cool uninterest. The older woman turned to her. "Mr. Talliaferro knows all the interesting people in the Quarter, darling. All the people who are—who are creating—creating things. Beautiful things. Beauty, you know." Mrs. Maurier waved her glittering hand vaguely toward the sky in which stars had begun to flower like pale and tarnished gardenias. "Oh, do excuse me, Mr. Talliaferro—This is my niece, Miss Robyn, of whom you have heard me speak. She and her brother have come to comfort a lonely old woman—" her glance held a decayed coquetry, and taking his cue Mr. Talliaferro said:
"Nonsense, dear lady. It is we, your unhappy admirers, who need comforting. Perhaps Miss Robyn will take pity on ​us, also?” He bowed toward the niece with calculated formality. The niece was not enthusiastic.
“Now, darling,” Mrs. Maurier turned to her niece with rapture. “Here is an example of the chivalry of our southern men. Can you imagine a man in Chicago saying that?”
“Not hardly,” the niece agreed. Her aunt rushed on:
“That is why I have been so anxious for Patricia to visit me, so she can meet men who are—who are— My niece is named for me, you see, Mr. Talliaferro. Isn't that nice?” She pressed Mr. Talliaferro with recurrent happy astonishment.
Mr. Talliaferro bowed again, came within an ace of dropping the bottle, darted the hand which held his hat and stick behind him to steady it. “Charming, charming,” he agreed, perspiring under his hair.
“But, really, I am surprised to find you here at this hour. And I suppose you are as surprised to find us here, aren't you? But I have just found the most won-derful thing! Do look at it, Mr. Talliaferro: I do so want your opinion.” She extended to him a dull lead plaque from which in dim bas-relief of faded red and blue simpered a Madonna with an expression of infantile astonishment identical with that of Mrs. Maurier, and a Child somehow smug and complacent looking as an old man. Mr. Talliaferro, feeling the poised precariousness of the bottle, dared not release his hand. He bent over the extended object. “Do take it, so you can examine it under the light,” its owner insisted. Mr. Talliaferro perspired again mildly. The niece spoke suddenly:
“I'll hold your package.”
She moved with young swiftness and before he could demur she had taken the bottle from his hand. “Ow,” she exclaimed, almost dropping it herself, and her aunt gushed:
“Oh, you have discovered something also, haven't you? ​Now I've gone and shown you my treasure, and all the while you were concealing something much, much nicer.” She waggled her hands to indicate dejection. “You will consider mine trash, I know you will,” she went on with heavy assumed displeasure. “Oh, to be a man, so I could poke around in shops all day and really discover things! Do show us what you have, Mr. Talliaferro.”
“It's a bottle of milk,” remarked the niece, examining Mr. Talliaferro with interest.
Her aunt shrieked. Her breast heaved with repression, glinting her pins and beads. “A bottle of milk? Have you turned artist, too?”
For the first and last time in his life Mr. Talliaferro wished a lady dead. But he was a gentleman: he only seethed inwardly. He laughed with abortive heartiness.
“An artist? You flatter me, dear lady. I'm afraid my soul does not aspire so high. I am content to be merely a—”
“Milkman,” suggested the young female devil.
“—Mæcenas alone. If I might so style myself.”
Mrs. Maurier sighed with disappointment and surprise. “Ah, Mr. Talliaferro, I am dreadfully disappointed. I had hoped for a moment that some of your artist friends had at last prevailed on you to give something to the world of Art. No, no; don't say you cannot: I am sure you are capable of it, what with your—your delicacy of soul, your—” she waved her hand again vaguely toward the sky above Rampart street. “Ah, to be a man, with no ties save those of the soul! To create, to create.” She returned easily to Royal street. “But, really, a bottle of milk, Mr. Talliaferro?”
“Merely for my friend Gordon. I looked in on him this afternoon and found him quite busy. So I ran out to fetch him milk for his supper. These artists!” Mr. Talliaferro shrugged. “You know how they live.”
​“Yes, indeed. Genius. A hard taskmaster, isn’t it? Perhaps you are wise in not giving your life to it. It is a long lonely road. But how is Mr. Gordon? I am so occupied with things—unavoidable duties, which my conscience will not permit me to evade (I am very conscientious, you know)—that I simply haven’t the time to see as much of the Quarter as I should like. I had promised Mr. Gordon faithfully to call, and to have him to dinner soon. I am sure he thinks I have forgotten him. Please make my peace with him, won’t you? Assure him that I have not forgotten him.”
“I am sure he realizes how many calls you have on your time,” Mr. Talliaferro assured her gallantly. “Don’t let that distress you at all.”
“Yes, I really don’t know how I get anything done: I am always surprised when I find I have a spare moment for my own pleasure.” She turned her expression of happy astonishment on him again. The niece spun slowly and slimly on one high heel: the sweet young curve of her shanks straight and brittle as the legs of a bird and ending in the twin inky splashes of her slippers, entranced him. Her hat was a small brilliant bell about her face, and she wore her clothing with a casual rakishness, as though she had opened her wardrobe and said, Let’s go downtown. Her aunt was saying:
“But what about our yachting party? You gave Mr. Gordon my invitation?”
Mr. Talliaferro was troubled. “We-ll— You see, he is quite busy now. He— He has a commission that will admit of no delay,” he concluded with inspiration.
“Ah, Mr. Talliaferro! You haven’t told him he is invited. Shame on you! Then I must tell him myself, since you have failed me.”
“No, really—”
She interrupted him. “Forgive me, dear Mr. Talliaferro. ​I didn't mean to be unjust. I am glad you didn't invite him. It will be better for me to do it, so I can overcome any scruples he might have. He is quite shy, you know. Oh, quite, I assure you. Artistic temperament, you understand: so spiritual. . . .”
“Yes,” agreed Mr. Talliaferro, covertly watching the niece who had ceased her spinning and got her seemingly boneless body into an undimensional angular flatness pure as an Egyptian carving.
“So I shall attend to it myself. I shall call him to-night: we sail at noon to-morrow, you know. That will allow him sufficient time, don't you think? He's one of these artists who never have much, lucky people.” Mrs. Maurier looked at her watch. “Heavens above! seven thirty. We must fly. Come, darling. Can't we drop you somewhere, Mr. Talliaferro?”’
“Thank you, no. I must take Gordon’s milk to him, and then I am engaged for the evening.”
“Ah, Mr. Talliaferro! It's a woman, I know.” She rolled her eyes roguishly. “What a terrible man you are.” She lowered her voice and tapped him on the sleeve. “Do be careful what you say before this child. My instincts are all bohemian, but she. . . unsophisticated. . .” Her voice her eyes bathed him warmly and Mr. Talliaferro bridled: had he had a mustache he would have stroked it. Mrs. Maurier jangled and glittered again: her expression became one of pure delight. “But, of course! We will drive you to Mr. Gordon's and then I can run in and invite him for the party. The very thing! How fortunate to have thought of it. Come, darling.”
Without stooping the niece angled her leg upward and outward from the knee, scratching her ankle. Mr. Talliaferro recalled the milk bottle and assented gratefully, falling in on the curbside with meticulous thoughtfulness. A short distance ​up the street Mrs. Maurier's car squatted expensively. The negro driver descended and opened the door and Mr. Talliaferro sank into gracious upholstery, nursing his milk bottle, smelling flowers cut and delicately vased, promising himself a car next year.
3
They rolled smoothly, passing between spaced lights and around narrow corners, while Mrs. Maurier talked steadily of hers and Mr. Talliaferro's and Gordon's souls. The niece sat quietly. Mr. Talliaferro was conscious of the clean young odor of her, like that of young trees; and when they passed beneath lights he could see her slim shape and the impersonal revelation of her legs and her bare sexless knees. Mr. Talliaferro luxuriated, clutching his bottle of milk, wishing the ride need not end. But the car drew up to the curb again, and he must get out, no matter with what reluctance.
“I'll run up and bring him down to you,” he suggested with premonitory tact.
“No, no: let's all go up,” Mrs. Maurier objected. “I want Patricia to see how genius looks at home.”
“Gee, Aunty, I've seen these dives before,” the niece said. “They're everywhere. I'll wait for you.” She jackknifed her body effortlessly, scratching her ankles with her brown hands.
“It’s so interesting to see how they live, darling. You'll simply love it.” Mr. Talliaferro demurred again, but Mrs. Maurier overrode him with sheer words. So against his better judgment he struck matches for them, leading the way up the dark tortuous stairs while their three shadows aped them, rising and falling monstrously upon the ancient wall. Long before they reached the final stage Mrs. Maurier was puffing ​and panting, and Mr. Talliaferro found a puerile vengeful glee in hearing her labored breath. But he was a gentleman; he put this from him, rebuking himself. He knocked on a door, was bidden, opened it:
“Back, are you?” Gordon sat in his single chair, munching a thick sandwich, clutching a book. The unshaded light glared savagely upon his undershirt.
“You have callers,” Mr. Talliaferro offered his belated warning, but the other looking up had already seen beyond his shoulder Mrs. Maurier’s interested face. He rose and cursed Mr. Talliaferro, who had begun immediately his unhappy explanation.
“Mrs. Maurier insisted on dropping in—”
Mrs. Maurier vanquished him anew. “Mister Gordon!” She sailed into the room, bearing her expression of happy astonishment like a round platter stood on edge. “How do you do? Can you ever, ever forgive us for intruding like this?” she went on in her gushing italics. “We just met Mr. Talliaferro on the street with your milk, and we decided to brave the lion in his den. How do you do?” She forced her effusive hand upon him, staring about in happy curiosity. “So this is where genius labors. How charming: so—so original. And that—” she indicated a corner screened off by a draggled length of green rep “—is your bedroom, isn’t it? How delightful! Ah, Mr. Gordon, how I envy you this freedom. And a view—you have a view also, haven’t you?” She held his hand and stared entranced at a high useless window framing two tired looking stars of the fourth magnitude.
“I would have if I were eight feet tall,” he corrected. She looked at him quickly, happily. Mr. Talliaferro laughed nervously.
“That would be delightful,” she agreed readily. “I was so ​anxious to have my niece see a real studio, Mr. Gordon, where a real artist works. Darling—” she glanced over her shoulder fatly, still holding his hand “—darling, let me present you to a real sculptor, one from whom we expect great things. . . . Darling,” she repeated in a louder tone.
The niece, untroubled by the stairs, had drifted in after them and she now stood before the single marble. “Come and speak to Mr. Gordon, darling.” Beneath her aunt’s saccharine modulation was a faint trace of something not so sweet after all. The niece turned her head and nodded slightly without looking at him. Gordon released his hand.
“Mr. Talliaferro tells me you have a commission.” Mrs. Maurier’s voice was again a happy astonished honey. “May we see it? I know artists don’t like to exhibit an incomplete work, but just among friends, you see. . . . You both know how sensitive to beauty I am, though I have been denied the creative impulse myself.”
“Yes,” agreed Gordon, watching the niece.
“I have long intended visiting your studio, as I promised, you remember. So I shall take this opportunity of looking about— Do you mind?”
“Help yourself. Talliaferro can show you things. Pardon me.” He lurched characteristically between them and Mrs. Maurier chanted:
“Yes, indeed. Mr. Talliaferro, like myself, is sensitive to the beautiful in Art. Ah, Mr. Talliaferro, why were you and I given a love for the beautiful, yet denied the ability to create it from stone and wood and clay. . . .”
Her body in its brief simple dress was motionless when he came over to her. After a time he said:
“Like it?”
Her jaw in profile was heavy: there was something mascu​line about it. But in full face it was not heavy, only quiet. Her mouth was full and colorless, unpainted, and her eyes were opaque as smoke. She met his gaze, remarking the icy blueness of his eyes (like a surgeon’s she thought) and looked at the marble again.
“I don’t know,” she answered slowly. Then: “It’s like me.”
“How like you?” he asked gravely.
She didn’t answer. Then she said: “Can I touch it?”
“If you like,” he replied, examining the line of her jaw, her firm brief nose. She made no move and he added: “Aren’t you going to touch it?”
“I’ve changed my mind,” she told him calmly. Gordon glanced ever his shoulder to where Mrs. Maurier pored volubly over something. Mr. Talliaferro yea’d her with restrained passion.
“Why is it like you?” he repeated.
She said irrelevantly: “Why hasn’t she anything here?” Her brown hand flashed slimly across the high unemphasis of the marble’s breast, and withdrew.
“You haven’t much there yourself.” She met his steady gaze steadily. “Why should it have anything there?” he asked.
“You're right,” she agreed with the judicial complaisance of an equal. “I see now. Of course she shouldn’t. I didn’t quite—quite get it for a moment.”
Gordon examined with growing interest her flat breast and belly, her boy’s body which the poise of it and the thinness of her arms belied. Sexless, yet somehow vaguely troubling. Perhaps just young, like a calf or a colt. “How old are you?” he asked abruptly.
“Eighteen, if it’s any of your business,” she replied without rancor, staring at the marble. Suddenly she looked up at him ​again. “I wish I could have it,” she said with sudden sincerity and longing, quite like a four-year-old.
“Thanks,” he said. “That was quite sincere, too, wasn’t it? Of course you can’t have it, though. You see that, don’t you?”
She was silent. He knew she could see no reason why she shouldn’t have it.
“I guess so,” she agreed at last. “I just thought I’d see, though.”
“Not to overlook any bets?”
“Oh, well, by to-morrow I probably won’t want it, anyway. . . . And if I still do, I can get something just as good.”
“You mean,” he amended, “that if you still want it to-morrow, you can get it. Don’t you?”
Her hand, as if it were a separate organism, reached out slowly, stroking the marble. “Why are you so black?” she asked.
“Black?”
“Not your hair and beard. I like your red hair and beard. But you. You are black. I mean. . .” her voice fell and he suggested Soul? “I don’t know what that is,” she stated quietly.
“Neither do I. You might ask your aunt, though. She seems familiar with souls.”
She glanced over her shoulder, showing him her other unequal profile. “Ask her yourself. Here she comes.”
Mrs. Maurier surged her scented upholstered bulk between them. “Wonderful, wonderful,” she was exclaiming in sincere astonishment. “And this. . .” her voice died away and she gazed at the marble, dazed. Mr. Talliaferro echoed her immaculately, taking to himself the showman’s credit.
​“Do you see what he has caught?” he bugled melodiously. “Do you see? The spirit of youth, of something fine and hard and clean in the world; something we all desire until our mouths are stopped with dust.” Desire with Mr. Talliaferro had long since become an unfulfilled habit requiring no longer any particular object at all.
“Yes,” agreed Mrs. Maurier. “How beautiful. What—what does it signify, Mr. Gordon?”
“Nothing, Aunt Pat,” the niece snapped. “It doesn’t have to.”
“But, really—”
“What do you want it to signify? Suppose it signified a—a dog, or an ice cream soda, what difference would it make? Isn’t it all right like it is?”
“Yes, indeed, Mrs. Maurier,” Mr. Talliaferro agreed with soothing haste, “it is not necessary that it have objective significance. We must accept it for what it is: pure form untrammeled by any relation to a familiar or utilitarian object.”
“Oh, yes: untrammeled.” Here was a word Mrs. Maurier knew. “The untrammeled spirit, freedom like the eagle’s.”
“Shut up, Aunty,” the niece told her. “Don’t be a fool.”
“But it has what Talliaferro calls objective significance,” Gordon interrupted brutally. “This is my feminine ideal: a virgin with no legs to leave me, no arms to hold me, no head to talk to me.”
“Mister Gordon!” Mrs. Maurier stared at him over her compressed breast. Then she thought of something that did possess objective significance. “I had almost forgotten our reason for calling so late. Not,” she added quickly, “that we needed any other reason to—to—Mr. Talliaferro, how was it those old people used to put it, about pausing on Life’s busy highroad to kneel for a moment at the Master’s feet? ​. . .” Mrs. Maurier’s voice faded and her face assumed an expression of mild concern. “Or is it the Bible of which I am thinking? Well, no matter: we dropped in to invite you for a yachting party, a few days on the lake—”
“Yes. Talliaferro told me about it. Sorry, but I shall be unable to come.”
Mrs. Maurier’s eyes became quite round. She turned to Mr. Talliaferro. “Mister Talliaferro! You told me you hadn’t mentioned it to him!”
Mr. Talliaferro writhed acutely. “Do forgive me, if I left you under that impression. It was quite unintentional. I only desired that you speak to him yourself and make him reconsider. The party will not be complete without him, will it?”
“Not at all. Really, Mr. Gordon, won’t you reconsider? Surely you won’t disappoint us.” She stooped creaking, and slapped at her ankle. “Pardon me.”
“No. Sorry. I have work to do.”
Mrs. Maurier transferred her expression of astonishment and dejection to Mr. Talliaferro. “It can’t be that he doesn’t want to come. There must be some other reason. Do say something to him, Mr. Talliaferro. We simply must have him. Mr. Fairchild is going, and Eva and Dorothy: we simply must have a sculptor. Do convince him, Mr. Talliaferro.”
“I'm sure his decision is not final: I am sure he will not deprive us of his company. A few days on the water will do him no end of good; freshen him up like a tonic. Eh, Gordon?”
Gordon’s hawk’s face brooded above them, remote and insufferable with arrogance. The niece had turned away, drifting slowly about the room, grave and quiet and curious, straight as a poplar. Mrs. Maurier implored him with her ​eyes doglike, temporarily silent. Suddenly she had an inspiration.
“Come, people, let’s all go to my house for dinner. Then we can discuss it at our ease.”
Mr. Talliaferro demurred. “I am engaged this evening, you know,” he reminded her.
“Oh, Mr. Talliaferro.” She put her hand on his sleeve. “Don’t you fail me, too. I always depend on you when people fail me. Can’t you defer your engagement?”
“Really, I am afraid not. Not in this case,” Mr. Talliaferro replied smugly. “Though I am distressed . . .”
Mrs. Maurier sighed. “These women! Mr. Talliaferro is perfectly terrible with women,” she informed Gordon. “But you will come, won’t you?”
The niece had drifted up to them and stood rubbing the calf of one leg against the other shin. Gordon turned to her. “Will you be there?”
Damn their little souls, she whispered on a sucked breath. She yawned. “Oh, yes. I eat. But I’m going to bed darn soon.” She yawned again, patting the broad pale oval of her mouth with brown fingers.
“Patricia!” her aunt exclaimed in shocked amazement. “Of course you will do nothing of the kind. The very idea! Come, Mr. Gordon.”
“No, thanks. I am engaged myself,” he answered stiffly. “Some other time, perhaps.”
“I simply won’t take No for an answer. Do help me, Mr. Talliaferro. He simply must come.”
“Do you want him to come as he is?” the niece asked.
Her aunt glanced briefly at the undershirt, and shuddered. But she said bravely: “Of course, if he wishes. What are clothes, compared with this?” she described an arc with her ​hand; diamonds glittered on its orbit. “So you cannot evade it, Mr. Gordon. You must come.”
Her hand poised above his arm, pouncing. He eluded it brusquely. “Excuse me.” Mr. Talliaferro avoided his sudden movement just in time, and the niece said wickedly:
“There’s a shirt behind the door, if that’s what you are looking for. You won’t need a tie, with that beard.”
He picked her up by the elbows, as you would a high narrow table, and set her aside. Then his tall controlled body filled and emptied the door and disappeared in the darkness of the hallway. The niece gazed after him. Mrs. Maurier stared at the door, then to Mr. Talliaferro in quiet amazement. “What in the world—” Her hands clashed vainly among her various festooned belongings. “Where is he going?” she said at last.
The niece said suddenly: “I like him.” She too gazed at the door through which, passing, he seemed to have emptied the room. “I bet he doesn’t come back,” she remarked.
Her aunt shrieked. “Doesn’t come back?”
“Well, I wouldn’t, if I were him.” She returned to the marble, stroking it with slow desire. Mrs. Maurier gazed helplessly at Mr. Talliaferro.
“Where—” she began.
“I’ll go see,” he offered, breaking his own trance. The two women regarded his vanishing neat back.
“Never in my life—Patricia, what did you mean by being so rude to him? Of course he is offended. Don’t you know how sensitive artists are? After I have worked so hard to cultivate him, too!”
“Nonsense. It’ll do him good. He thinks just a little too well of himself as it is.”
“But to insult the man in his own house. I can’t understand you young people at all. Why, if I’d said a thing like ​that to a gentleman, and a stranger. . .I can’t imagine what your father can mean, letting you grow up like this. He certainly knows better than this—”
“I’m not to blame for the way he acted. You are the one, yourself. Suppose you’d been sitting in your room in your shimmy, and a couple of men you hardly knew had walked in on you and tried to persuade you to go somewhere you didn’t want to go, what would you have done?”
“These people are different,” her aunt told her coldly. “You don’t understand them. Artists don’t require privacy as we do: it means nothing whatever to them. But any one, artist or no, would object—”
“Oh, haul in your sheet,” the niece interrupted coarsely. “You’re jibbing.”
Mr. Talliaferro reappeared panting with delicate repression. “Gordon was called hurriedly away. He asked me to make his excuses and to express his disappointment over having to leave so unceremoniously.”
“Then he’s not coming to dinner.” Mrs. Maurier sighed, feeling her age, the imminence of dark and death. She seemed not only unable to get new men any more, but to hold to the old ones, even. . . Mr. Talliaferro, too. . . age, age. . . . She sighed again. “Come, darling,” she said in a strangely chastened tone, quieter, pitiable in a way. The niece put both her firm tanned hands on the marble, hard, hard. O beautiful, she whispered in salutation and farewell, turning quickly away.
“Let’s go,” she said, “I’m starving.”
Mr. Talliaferro had lost his box of matches: he was desolated. So they were forced to feel their way down the stairs, disturbing years and years of dust upon the rail. The stone corridor was cool and dank and filled with a suppressed minor humming. They hurried on.
​Night was fully come and the car squatted at the curb in patient silhouette; the negro driver sat within with all the windows closed. Within its friendly familiarity Mrs. Maurier’s spirits rose again. She gave Mr. Talliaferro her hand, sugaring her voice again with a decayed coquetry.
“You will call me, then? But don’t promise: I know how completely your time is taken up—” she leaned forward, tapping him on the cheek—“Don Juan!”
He laughed deprecatingly, with pleasure. The niece from her corner said:
“Good evening, Mr. Tarver.”
Mr. Talliaferro stood slightly inclined from the hips, frozen. He closed his eyes like a dog awaiting the fall of the stick, while time passed and passed . . . he opened his eyes again, after how long he knew not. But Mrs. Maurier’s fingers were but leaving his cheek and the niece was invisible in her corner: a bodiless evil. Then he straightened up, feeling his cold entrails resume their proper place.
The car drew away and he watched it, thinking of the girl’s youngness, her hard clean youngness, with fear and a troubling unhappy desire like an old sorrow. Were children really like dogs? Could they penetrate one’s concealment, know one instinctively?
Mrs. Maurier settled back comfortably. “Mr. Talliaferro is perfectly terrible with women,” she informed her niece.
“I bet he is,” the niece agreed, “perfectly terrible.”
4
Mr. Talliaferro had been married while quite young by a rather plainfaced girl whom he was trying to seduce. But now, at thirty-eight, he was a widower these eight years. He had been the final result of some rather casual biological research ​conducted by two people who, like the great majority, had no business producing children at all. The family originated in northern Alabama and drifted slowly westward ever after, thus proving that a certain racial impulse in the race, which one Horace Greeley summed up in a slogan so excruciatingly apt that he didn’t have to observe it himself, has not yet died away. His brothers were various and they attained their several milieus principally by chance; milieus ranging from an untimely heaven via some one else’s horse and a rope and a Texas cottonwood, through a classical chair in a small Kansas college, to a state legislature via some one else’s votes. This one got as far as California. They never did know what became of Mr. Talliaferro’s sister.
Mr. Talliaferro had got what is known as a careful raising: he had been forced while quite young and pliable to do all the things to which his natural impulses objected, and to forgo all the things he could possibly have had any fun doing. After a while nature gave up and this became a habit with him. Nature surrendered him without a qualm: even disease germs seemed to ignore him.
His marriage had driven him into work as drouth drives the fish down stream into the larger waters, and things had gone hard with them during the years during which he had shifted from position to position, correspondence course to correspondence course, until he had an incorrect and impractical smattering of information regarding every possible genteel method of gaining money, before finally and inevitably gravitating into the women’s clothing section of a large department store.
Here he felt that he had at last come into his own (he always got along much better with women than with men) and his restored faith in himself enabled him to rise with comfortable ease to the coveted position of wholesale buyer. He ​knew women’s clothes and, interested in women, it was his belief that knowledge of the frail intimate things they preferred gave him an insight which no other man had into the psychology of women. But he merely speculated on this, for he remained faithful to his wife, although she was bedridden: an invalid.
And then, when success was in his grasp and life had become smooth at last for them, his wife died. He had become habituated to marriage, sincerely attached to her, and readjustment came slowly. Yet in time he became accustomed to the novelty of mature liberty. He had been married so young that freedom was an unexplored field to him. He took pleasure in his snug bachelor quarters in the proper neighborhood, in his solitary routine of days: of walking home in the dusk for the sake of his figure, examining the soft bodies of girls on the street, knowing that if he cared to take one of them, that there was none save the girls themselves to say him nay; to his dinners alone or in company with an available literary friend.
Mr. Talliaferro did Europe in forty-one days, gained thereby a worldly air and a smattering of esthetics and a precious accent, and returned to New Orleans feeling that he was Complete. His only alarm was his thinning hair, his only worry was the fact that some one would discover that he had been born Tarver, not Talliaferro.
But long since celibacy had begun to oppress him.
5
Handling his stick smartly he turned into Broussard’s. As he had hoped, here was Dawson Fairchild, the novelist, resembling a benevolent walrus too recently out of bed to have made a toilet, dining in company with three men. Mr. Talliaferro paused diffidently in the doorway and a rosy cheeked ​waiter resembling a studious Harvard undergraduate in an actor’s dinner coat, assailed him courteously. At last he caught Fairchild’s eye and the other greeted him across the small room, then said something to his three companions that caused them to turn half about in their chairs to watch his approach. Mr. Talliaferro, to whom entering a restaurant alone and securing a table was an excruciating process, joined them with relief. The cherubic waiter spun a chair from an adjoining table deftly against Mr. Talliaferro’s knees as he shook Fairchild’s hand.
“You're just in time,” Fairchild told him, propping his fist and a clutched fork on the table. “This is Mr. Hooper. You know these other folks, I think.”
Mr. Talliaferro ducked his head to a man with iron gray hair and an orotund humorless face like that of a thwarted Sunday school superintendent, who insisted on shaking his hand, then his glance took in the other two members of the party—a tall, ghostly young man with a thin evaporation of fair hair and a pale prehensile mouth, and a bald Semitic man with a pasty loose jowled face and sad quizzical eyes.
“We were discussing—” began Fairchild when the stranger interrupted with a bland and utterly unselfconscious rudeness.
“What did you say the name was?” he asked, fixing Mr. Talliaferro with his eye. Mr. Talliaferro met the eye and knew immediately a faint unease. He answered the question, but the other brushed the reply aside. “I mean your given name. I didn’t catch it to-day.”
“Why, Ernest,” Mr. Talliaferro told him with alarm.
“Ah, yes: Ernest. You must pardon me, but traveling, meeting new faces each Tuesday, as I do—” he interrupted himself with the same bland unconsciousness. “What are your impressions of the get-together to-day?” Ere Mr. Tal​liaferro could have replied, he interrupted himself again. “You have a splendid organization here,” he informed them generally, compelling them with his glance, “and a city that is worthy of it. Except for this southern laziness of yours. You folks need more northern blood, to bring out all your possibilities. Still, I won’t criticize: you boys have treated me pretty well.” He put some food into his mouth and chewed it down hurriedly, forestalling any one who might have hoped to speak.
“I was glad that my itinerary brought me here, to see the city and be with the boys to-day, and that one of your reporters gave me the chance to see something of your bohemian life by directing me to Mr. Fairchild here, who, I understand, is an author.” He met Mr. Talliaferro’s expression of courteous amazement again. “I am glad to see how you boys are carrying on the good work; I might say, the Master’s work, for it is only by taking the Lord into our daily lives—” He stared at Mr. Talliaferro once more. “What did you say the name was?”
“Ernest,” suggested Fairchild mildly.
“—Ernest. People, the man in the street, the breadwinner, he on whom the heavy burden of life rests, does he know what we stand for, what we can give him in spite of himself—forgetfulness of the trials of day by day? He knows nothing of our ideals of service, of the benefits to ourselves, to each other, to you”—he met Fairchild’s burly quizzical gaze—“to himself. And, by the way,” he added coming to earth again, “there are a few points on this subject I am going to take up with your secretary to-morrow.” He transfixed Mr. Talliaferro again. “What were your impressions of my remarks to-day?”
“I beg pardon?”
“What did you think of my idea for getting a hundred ​percent church attendance by keeping them afraid they'd miss something good by staying away?”
Mr. Talliaferro turned his stricken face to the others, one by one. After a while his interrogator said in a tone of cold displeasure: “You don’t mean to say you do not recall me?”
Mr. Talliaferro cringed. “Really, sir—I am distressed—” The other interrupted heavily.
“You were not at lunch to-day?”
“No,” Mr. Talliaferro replied with effusive gratitude, “I take only a glass of buttermilk at noon. I breakfast late, you see.” The other man stared at him with chill displeasure, and Mr. Talliaferro added with inspiration: “You have mistaken me for some one else, I fear.”
The stranger regarded Mr. Talliaferro for a cold moment. The waiter placed a dish before Mr. Talliaferro and he fell upon it in a flurry of acute discomfort.
“Do you mean—” began the stranger. Then he put his fork down and turned his disapproval coldly upon Fairchild. “Didn’t I understand you to say that this—gentleman was a member of Rotary?”
Mr. Talliaferro suspended his fork and he too looked at Fairchild in shocked unbelief. “I a member of Rotary?” he repeated.
“Why, I kind of got the impression he was,” Fairchild admitted. “Hadn’t you heard that Talliaferro was a Rotarian?” he appealed to the others. They were noncommittal and he continued: “I seem to recall somebody telling me you were a Rotarian. But then, you know how rumors get around. Maybe it is because of your prominence in the business life of our city. Talliaferro is a member of one of our largest ladies’ clothing houses,” he explained. “He is just the man to help you figure out some way to get God into the mercan​tile business. Teach Him the meaning of service, hey, Talliaferro?”
“No: really, I—” Mr. Talliaferro objected with alarm. The stranger interrupted again.
“Well, there’s nothing better on God’s green earth than Rotary. Mr. Fairchild had given me to understand that you were a member,” he accused with a recurrence of cold suspicion. Mr. Talliaferro squirmed with unhappy negation. The other stared him down, then he took out his watch. “Well, well. I must run along. I run my day to schedule. You’d be astonished to learn how much time can be saved by cutting off a minute here and a minute there,” he informed them. “And—”
“I beg pardon?”
“What do you do with them?” Fairchild asked.
“When you’ve cut off enough minutes here and there to make up a sizable mess, what do you do with them?”
“—Setting a time limit to everything you do makes a man get more punch into it; makes him take the hills on high, you might say.” A drop of nicotine on the end of the tongue will kill a dog, Fairchild thought, chuckling to himself. He said aloud:
“Our forefathers reduced the process of gaining money to proverbs. But we have beaten them; we have reduced the whole of existence to fetiches.”
“To words of one syllable that look well in large red type,” the Semitic man corrected.
The stranger ignored them. He half turned in his chair. He gestured at the waiter’s back, then he snapped his fingers until he had attracted the waiter’s attention. “Trouble with these small second-rate places,” he told them. “No pep, no efficiency, in handling trade. Check, please,” he directed briskly. The cherubic waiter bent over them.
​“You found the dinner nice?” he suggested.
“Sure, sure, all right. Bring the bill, will you, George?” The waiter looked at the others, hesitating.
“Never mind, Mr. Broussard,” Fairchild said quickly. “We won’t go right now. Mr. Hooper here has got to catch a train. You are my guest,” he explained to the stranger. The other protested conventionally: he offered to match coins for it, but Fairchild repeated: “You are my guest to-night. Too bad you must hurry away.”
“I haven’t got the leisure you New Orleans fellows have,” the other explained. “Got to keep on the jump, myself.” He arose and shook hands all around. “Glad to’ve met you boys,” he said to each in turn. He clasped Mr. Talliaferro’s elbow with his left hand while their rights were engaged. The waiter fetched his hat and he gave the man a half dollar with a flourish. “If you’re ever in the little city”—he paused to reassure Fairchild.
“Sure, sure,” Fairchild agreed heartily, and they sat down again. The late guest paused at the street door a moment, then he darted forth shouting, “Taxi! Taxi!” The cab took him to the Monteleone hotel, three blocks away, where he purchased two to-morrow’s papers and sat in the lobby for an hour, dozing over them. Then he went to his room and lay in bed staring at them until he had harried his mind into unconsciousness by the sheer idiocy of print.
6
“Now,” said Fairchild, “let that be a lesson to you young men. That’s what you'll come to by joining things, by getting the habit of it. As soon as a man begins to join clubs and lodges, his spiritual fiber begins to disintegrate. When you are young, you join things because they profess high ​ideals. You believe in ideals at that age, you know. Which is all right, as long as you just believe in them as ideals and not as criterions of conduct. But after a while you join more things, you are getting older and more sedate and sensible; and believing in ideals is too much trouble so you begin to live up to them with your outward life, in your contacts with other people. And when you’ve made a form of behavior out of an ideal, it’s not an ideal any longer, and you become a public nuisance.”
“It’s a man’s own fault if the fetich men annoy him,” the Semitic man said. “Nowadays there are enough things for every one to belong to something.”
“That’s a rather stiff price to pay for immunity, though,” Fairchild objected.
“That need not bother you,” the other told him. “You have already paid it.”
Mr. Talliaferro laid aside his fork. “I do hope he’s not offended,” he murmured. Fairchild chuckled.
“At what?” the Semitic man asked. He and Fairchild regarded Mr. Talliaferro kindly.
“At Fairchild’s little joke,” Mr. Talliaferro explained.
Fairchild laughed. “I’m afraid we disappointed him. He probably not only does not believe that we are bohemians, but doubts that we are even artistic. Probably the least he expected was to be taken to dinner at the studio of two people who are not married to each other, and to be offered hashish instead of food.”
“And to be seduced by a girl in an orange smock and no stockings,” the ghostly young man added in a sepulchral tone.
“Yes,” Fairchild said. “But he wouldn’t have succumbed, though.”
​“No,” the Semitic man agreed. “But, like any Christian, he would have liked the opportunity to refuse.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Fairchild admitted. He said: “I guess he thinks that if you don’t stay up all night and get drunk and ravish somebody, there’s no use in being an artist.”
“Which is worse?” murmured the Semitic man.
“God knows,” Fairchild answered. “I’ve never been ravished . . .” He sucked at his coffee. “But he’s not the first man that ever hoped to be ravished and was disappointed. I’ve spent a lot of time in different places laying myself open, and always come off undefiled. Hey, Talliaferro?”
Mr. Talliaferro squirmed again, diffidently. Fairchild lit a cigarette. “Well, both of them are vices, and we’ve all seen to-night what an uncontrolled vice will lead a man into—defining a vice as any natural impulse which rides you, like the gregarious instinct in Hooper.” He ceased a while. Then he chuckled again. “God must look about our American scene with a good deal of consternation, watching the antics of these volunteers who are trying to help Him.”
“Or entertainment,” the Semitic man amended. “But why American scene?”
“Because our doings are so much more comical. Other nations seem to be able to entertain the possibility that God may not be a Rotarian or an Elk or a Boy Scout after all. We don’t. And convictions are always alarming, unless you are looking at them from behind.”
The waiter approached with a box of cigars. The Semitic man took one. Mr. Talliaferro finished his dinner with decorous expedition. The Semitic man said:
“My people produced Jesus, your people Christianized him. And ever since you have been trying to get him out of your church. And now that you have practically succeeded, look at what is filling the vacuum of his departure. Do you think ​that your new ideal of willynilly Service without request or recourse is better than your old ideal of humility? No, no”—as the other would have spoken—“I don’t mean as far as results go. The only ones who ever gain by the spiritual machinations of mankind are the small minority who gain emotional or mental or physical exercise from the activity itself, never the passive majority for whom the crusade is set afoot.”
“Katharsis by peristalsis,” murmured the blond young man, who was nurturing a reputation for cleverness. Fairchild said:
“Are you opposed to religion, then—in its general sense, I mean?”
“Certainly not,” the Semitic man answered. “The only sense in which religion is general is when it benefits the greatest number in the same way. And the universal benefit of religion is that it gets the children out of the house on Sunday morning.”
“But education gets them out of the house five days a week,” Fairchild pointed out.
“That’s true, too. But I am not at home myself on those days: education has already got me out of the house six days a week.” The waiter brought Mr. Talliaferro’s coffee. Fairchild lit another cigarette.
“So you believe the sole accomplishment of education is that it keeps us away from home?”
“What other general result can you name? It doesn’t make us all brave or healthy or happy or wise, it doesn’t even keep us married. In fact, to take an education by the modern process is like marrying in haste and spending the rest of your life making the best of it. But, understand me: I have no quarrel with education. I don’t think it hurts you much, except to make you unhappy and unfit for work, for which man was cursed by the gods before they had learned ​about education. And if it were not education, it would be something else just as bad, and perhaps worse. Man must fill his time some way, you know.”
“But to go back to religion”—“the spirit protestant eternal,” murmured the blond young man hoarsely—“do you mean any particular religion, or just the general teaching of Christ?”
“What has Christ to do with it?”
“Well, it’s generally accepted that he instigated a certain branch of it, whatever his motives really were.”
“Its generally accepted that first you must have an effect to discern a cause. And it is a human trait to foist the blunders of the age and the race upon some one or something too remote or heedless or weak to resist. But when you say religion, you have a particular sect in mind, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” Fairchild admitted. “I always think of the Protestant religion.”
“The worst of all,” the Semitic man said. “To raise children into, I mean. For some reason one can be a Catholic or a Jew and be religious at home. But a Protestant at home is only a Protestant. It seems to me that the Protestant faith was invented for the sole purpose of filling our jails and morgues and houses of detention. I speak now of its more rabid manifestations, particularly of its activities in smaller settlements. How do young Protestant boys in small towns spend Sunday afternoons, with baseball and all such natural muscular vents denied them? They kill, they slay and steal and burn. Have you ever noticed how many juvenile firearm accidents occur on Sunday, how many fires in barns and outhouses happen on Sunday afternoon?” He ceased and shook the ash from his cigar carefully into his coffee cup. Mr. Talliaferro seeing an opening, coughed and spoke.
“By the way, I saw Gordon to-day. Tried to persuade him for our yachting party to-morrow. He doesn’t enthuse, so to ​speak. Though I assured him how much we’d all like to have him.”
“Oh, he’ll come, I guess,” Fairchild said. “He’d be a fool not to let her feed him for a few days.”
“He’d pay a fairly high price for his food,” the Semitic man remarked drily. Fairchild looked at him and he added: “Gordon hasn’t served his apprenticeship yet, you know. You’ve got through yours.”
“Oh,” Fairchild grinned. “Well, yes, I did kind of play out on her, I reckon.” He turned to Mr. Talliaferro. “Has she been to him in person to sell him the trip, yet?”
Mr. Talliaferro hid his mild retrospective discomfort behind a lighted match. “Yes. She stopped in this afternoon. I was with him at the time.”
“Good for her,” the Semitic man applauded, and Fairchild said with interest:
“She did? What did Gordon say?”
“He left,” Mr. Talliaferro admitted mildly.
“Walked out on her, did he?” Fairchild glanced briefly at the Semitic man. He laughed. “You are right,” he agreed. He laughed again, and Mr. Talliaferro said:
“He really should come, you know. I thought perhaps”—diffidently—“that you’d help me persuade him. The fact that you will be with us, and your—er—assured position in the creative world . . .”
“No, I guess not,” Fairchild decided. “I’m not much of a hand for changing folks” opinions. I guess I won’t meddle with it.”
“But, really,” Mr. Talliaferro persisted, “the trip would benefit the man’s work. Besides,” he added with inspiration, “he will round out our party. A novelist, a painter—”
“I am invited, too,” the blond young man put in sepulchrally. Mr. Talliaferro accepted him with apologetic effusion.
​“By all means, a poet. I was about to mention you, my dear fellow. Two poets, in fact, with Eva W———”
“I am the best poet in New Orleans,” the other interrupted with sepulchral belligerence.
“Yes, yes,” Mr. Talliaferro agreed quickly, “—and a sculptor. You see?” he appealed to the Semitic man. The Semitic man met Mr. Talliaferro’s importunate gaze kindly, without reply. Fairchild turned to him.
“We—ll,” he began. Then: “What do you think?”
The Semitic man glanced briefly at him. “I think we'll need Gordon by all means.” Fairchild grinned again and agreed.
“Yes, I guess you’re right.”
7
The waiter brought Fairchild’s change and stood courteously beside them as they rose. Mr. Talliaferro caught Fairchild’s eye and leaned nearer, diffidently, lowering his tone.
“Eh?” Fairchild said in his burly jovial voice, not lowering it.
“Would like a moment, if you’ve time. Your advice—”
“Not to-night?” Fairchild asked in alarm.
“Why, yes.” Mr. Talliaferro was faintly apologetic. “Just a few moments, if you are alone—” he gestured meaningly with his head toward the other two.
“No, not to-night. Julius and I are spending the evening together.” Mr. Talliaferro’s face fell, and Fairchild added kindly: “Some other time, perhaps.”
“Yes, of course,” Mr. Talliaferro agreed faultlessly. “Some other time.”
8
The car swept sibilantly up the drive and on around the house. There was a light on the veranda vaguely beyond vines. They descended and Mrs. Maurier crossed the veranda and passed clashing and jangling through a French window. The niece turned the corner and followed the veranda to where beyond a nook spaced with wicker and chintz, and magazines gaily on a table, her brother sat coatless on a divan beneath a wall lamp. There was a faint litter of shavings about his feet and clinging to his trousers, and at the moment he bent with a carpenter’s saw over something in his lap. The saw scraped fretfully, monotonously, and she stopped beside him and stood scratching her knee. Presently he raised his head.
“Hello,” he remarked without enthusiasm. “Go to the library and get me a cigarette.”
“I’ve got one on me, somewhere.” She searched the pockets of her linen dress, but without success. “Where’—she said. She mused a moment, spreading her pocket with her hand and staring into it. Then she said, oh, yes, and took off her hat. From the crown of it she produced one limp cigarette. “I ought to have another,” she mused aloud, searching the hat again. “I guess that’s all, though. You can have it: I don’t want one, anyway.” She extended the cigarette and skirled her hat onto the lounge beside.
“Look out,” he said quickly, “don’t put it there. I need all this space. Put it somewhere else, can’t you?” He pushed the hat off the divan, onto the floor, and accepted the cigarette. The tobacco was partially shredded from it and it was limp, like a worm. “Whatcher been doing to it? How long’ve you had it, anyway?” She sat beside him and he raked a match across his thigh.
​“How’s it coming, Josh?” she asked, extending her hand toward the object on his lap. It was a cylinder of wood larger than a silver dollar and about three inches long. He fended her off with the hand that held the lighted match, thrusting the elbow beneath her chin.
“Let it alone, I tell you.”
“Oh, all right. Keep your shirt on.” She moved slightly away and he took up the saw again, putting the burning cigarette on the wicker lounge between them. A thin pencil of smoke rose from it into the windless air, and soon a faint smell of burning. She picked up the cigarette, drew once at it and replaced it so it would not scorch the wicker. The saw grated jerkily and thinly; outside, beyond the vines, insects scraped monotonously one to another in the heavy, swooning darkness. A moth, having evaded the screen wire, gyrated idiotically beneath and about the light. She raised her skirt to stare at a small feverish spot on her brown knee. . . . The saw grated jerkily, ceased, and he laid it aside again. The cylinder was in two sections, fitted one to another, and she drew one foot beneath the other knee, bending nearer to watch him, breathing against his neck. He moved restively and she said at last:
“Say, Gus, how long will it take you to get it finished?”
He raised his face, suspending his knife blade. They were twins: just as there was something masculine about her jaw, so was there something feminine about his.
“For God’s sake,” he exclaimed, “let me alone, can’t you? Go away and pull your clothes down. Don’t you ever get tired of waving your legs around?”
A yellow negro in a starched jacket stepped silently around the corner. When they looked up he turned without speaking. “All right, Walter,” she said. But he was gone. They fol​lowed, leaving the cigarette to lift its unwavering plume and a thin smell of burning wicker into the somnolent air.
9
fool fool you have work to do o cursed of god cursed and forgotten form shapes cunningly sweated cunning to simplicity shapes out of chaos more satisfactory than bread to the belly form by a madmans dream gat on the body of chaos le garçon vierge of the soul horned by utility o cuckold of derision.
The warehouse, the dock, was a formal rectangle without perspective. Flat as cardboard, and projecting at a faint motionless angle above it, against a lighter spaciousness and a sky not quite so imminent and weary, masts of a freighter lying against the dock. Form and utility, Gordon repeated to himself. Or form and chance. Or chance and utility. Beneath it, within the somber gloom of the warehouse where men had sweated and labored, across the empty floor lately thunderous with trucks, amid the rich overripe odors of the ends of the earth—coffee and resin and tow and fruit—he walked, surrounded by ghosts, passing on.
The hull of the freighter bulked, forecastle and poop soaring darkly sharp, solid, cutting off vision, soaring its superstructure on the sky. The unseen river continued a ceaseless sound against the hull, lulling it with a simulation of the sea, and about the piles of the wharf. The shore and the river curved away like the bodies of two dark sleepers embracing, curved one to another in slumber; and far away opposite the Point, banked lights flickered like a pile of yet living ashes in a wind. Gordon paused, leaning over the edge of the wharf, staring down into the water.
stars in my hair in my hair and beard i am crowned with ​stars christ by his own hand an autogethsemane carved darkly out of pure space but not rigid no no an unmuscled wallowing fecund and foul the placid tragic body of a woman who conceives without pleasure bears without pain
what would i say to her fool fool you have work to do you have nothing accursed intolerant and unclean too warm your damn bones then whisky will do as well or a chisel and maul any damn squirrel keeps warm in a cage go on go on then israfel revolted surprised behind a haycock by a male relation fortitude become a matchflame snuffed by a small white belly where was it i once saw a dogwood tree not white but tan tan as cream what will you say to her bitter and new as a sunburned flame bitter and new those two little silken snails somewhere under her dress horned pinkly yet reluctant o israfel ay wax your wings with the thin odorless moisture of her thighs strangle your heart with hair fool fool cursed and forgotten of god
He flung back his head and laughed a huge laugh in the loneliness. His voice surged like a dark billow against the wall behind him, then ebbing outward over the dim, formless river, it died slowly away . . . then from the other shore a mirthless echo mocked him, and it too died away. He went on treading the dark resin-scented wharf.
Presently he came to a break in the black depthless monotony of the wall, and the wall again assumed a pure and inevitable formal significance sharp against the glow of the city. He turned his back to the river and soon was among freight cars black and angular, looming; and down the tracks, much further away than it appeared, an engine glared and panted while filaments of steel radiating from it toward and about his feet were like incandescent veins in a dark leaf.
There was a moon, low in the sky and worn, thumbed partly away like an old coin, and he went on. Above banana and palm the cathedral spires soared without perspective on the ​hot sky. Looking through the tall pickets into Jackson square was like looking into an aquarium—a moist and motionless absinthe-cloudy green of all shades from ink black to a thin and rigid feathering of silver on pomegranate and mimosa—like coral in a tideless sea, amid which globular lights hung dull and unstraying as jellyfish, incandescent yet without seeming to emanate light; and in the center of it Andrew’s baroque plunging stasis nimbused about with thin gleams as though he too were recently wetted.
He crossed the street into shadow, following the wall. Two figures stood indistinguishably at his door. “Pardon me,” he said touching the nearer man peremptorily, and as he did so the other man turned.
“Why, here he is now,” this one said. “Hello, Gordon, Julius and I were looking for you.”
“Yes?” Gordon loomed above the two shorter men, staring down at them, remote and arrogant. Fairchild removed his hat, mopping his face. Then he flipped his handkerchief viciously about his head.
“I don’t mind the heat,” he explained fretfully. “I like it, in fact. Like an old racehorse, you know. He’s willing enough, you know, but in the cool weather when his muscles are stiff and his bones ache, the young ones all show him up. But about Fourth of July, when the sun gets hot and his muscles loosen up and his old bones don’t complain any more, then he’s good as any of ’em.”
“Yes?” repeated Gordon looking above them into shadow, The Semitic man removed his cigar.
“It will be better on the water to-morrow,” he said.
Gordon brooded above them. Then he remembered himself. “Come up,” he directed abruptly, elbowing the Semitic man aside and extending his latchkey.
“No, no,” Fairchild demurred quickly, “We won’t stop. ​Julius just reminded me: we came to see if you’d change your mind and come with us on Mrs. Maurier’s boat to-morrow? We saw Tal—”
“I have,” Gordon interrupted him. “I’m coming.”
“That’s good,” Fairchild agreed heartily. “You probably won't regret it much. He may enjoy it, Julius,” he added. “Besides, you'll be wise to go on and get it over with, then she’ll let you alone. After all, you can’t afford to ignore people that own food and automobiles, you know. Can he, Julius?”
The Semitic man agreed. “When he clutters himself up with people (which he can’t avoid doing) by all means let it be with people who own food and whisky and motor cars. The less intelligent, the better.” He struck a match to his cigar. “But he won’t last very long with her, anyway. He'll last even a shorter time than you did,” he told Fairchild.
“Yes, I guess you’re right. But he ought to keep a line on her, anyhow. If you can neither ride nor drive the beast yourself, it’s a good idea to keep it in a pasture nearby: you may some day be able to swap it for something, you know.”
“A Ford, for instance, or a radio,” the Semitic man suggested. “But you’ve got your simile backward.”
“Backward?” repeated the other.
“You were speaking from the point of view of the rider,” he explained.
“Oh,” Fairchild remarked. He emitted a disparaging sound. “‘Ford’ is good,” he said heavily.
“I think ‘radio’ is pretty good, myself,” the other said complacently.
“Oh, dry up.” Fairchild replaced his hat. “So you are coming with us, then,” he said to Gordon.
“Yes. I’m coming. But won’t you come up?”
​“No, no: not to-night. I know your place, you see.” Gordon made no reply, brooding his tall head in the shadow. “Well, I’ll phone her and have her send a car for you to-morrow,” Fairchild added. “Come on, Julius, let’s go. Glad you changed your mind,” he added belatedly. “Good. night. Come on, Julius.”
They crossed the street and entered the square. Once within the gates they were assailed, waylaid from behind every blade and leaf with a silent, vicious delight.
“Good Lord,” exclaimed Fairchild, flipping his handkerchief madly about, “let’s go over to the docks. Maybe there ain’t any nautical ones.” He hurried on, the Semitic man ambling beside him, clamping his dead cigar.
“He’s a funny chap,” the Semitic man remarked. They waited for a trolley to pass, then crossed the street. The wharf, the warehouse, was a formal rectangle with two slender masts projecting above it at a faint angle. They went on between two dark buildings and halted again while a switch engine drew an interminable monotony of cars up the track.
“He ought to get out of himself more,” Fairchild commented. “You can’t be an artist all the time. You'll go crazy.”
“You couldn’t,” the other corrected. “But then, you are not an artist. There is somewhere within you a bewildered stenographer with a gift for people, but outwardly you might be anything. You are an artist only when you are telling about people, while Gordon is not an artist only when he is cutting at a piece of wood or stone. And it’s very difficult for a man like that to establish workable relations with people. Other artists are too busy playing with their own egos, workaday people will not or cannot bother with him, so his alternatives are misanthropy or an endless gabbling of ​esthetic foster sisters of both sexes. Particularly if his lot is cast outside of New York city.”
“There you go: disparaging our Latin Quarter again. Where’s your civic pride? where’s your common courtesy, even? Even the dog won’t bite the hand that holds the bread.”
“Corn belt,” the other said shortly, “Indiana talking. You people up there are born with the booster complex, aren’t you? Or do you acquire it with sunburned necks?”
“Oh, well, we Nordics are at a disadvantage,” Fairchild replied. His tone was unctuous, the other detected something falsely frank in it. “We’ve got to fix our idea on a terrestrial place. Though we know it’s second rate, that’s the best we can do. But your people have got all heaven for your old home town, you know.”
“I could forgive everything except the unpardonable clumsiness of that,” the other told him. “Your idea is not bad. Why don’t you give it to Mark Frost—roughly, you know—and let him untangle it for you? You and he could both use it then—if you are quick enough, that is.”
Fairchild laughed. “Now, you lay off our New Orleans bohemian life; stay away from us if you don’t like it. I like it, myself: there is a kind of charming futility about it, like—”
“Like a country club where they play croquet instead of golf,” the other supplied for him.
“Well, yes,” Fairchild agreed. “Something like that.” The warehouse loomed above them, and they passed into it and amid the ghosts of the ends of the earth. “A croquet player may not be much of a go-getter, but what do you think of a man that just sits around and criticizes croquet?”
“Well, I’m like the rest of you immortals: I’ve got to pass the time in some way in order to gain some idea of how to ​pass eternity,” the Semitic man answered. They passed through the warehouse and onto the dock. It was cooler here, quieter. Two ferry boats passed and repassed like a pair of golden swans in a barren cycle of courtship. The shore and the river curved away in a dark embracing slumber to where a bank of tiny lights flickered and trembled, bodiless and far away. It was much cooler here and they removed their hats. The Semitic man unclamped his dead cigar and cast it outward. Silence, water, night, absorbed it without a sound.