Mosquitoes

by William Faulkner

  “But, I say,” Major Ayers interrupted, “why do they herd their fish?”

  “They round ’em up and brand ’em, you see. Al Jackson brands—”

  “Brand ’em?”

  “Sure: marks ’em so he can tell his fish from ordinary wild fish-mavericks, they call ’em. And now he owns nearly all the fish in the world; a fish millionaire, even if he is fish-poor right now. Wherever you see a marked fish, it’s one of Al Jackson’s.”

  “Marks his fish, eh?”

  “Sure: notches their tails.”

  “Mr. Fairchild,” Mrs. Maurier said.

  “But our fish at home have notched tails.” Major Ayers objected.

  “Well, they are Jackson fish that have strayed off the range, then.”

  “Why doesn’t he establish a European agent?” the ghostly poet asked viciously.

  Major Ayers stared about from face to face. “I say,” he began. He stuck there. The hostess rose decisively.

  “Come, people, let’s go on deck.”

  “No, no,” the niece said quickly, “go on: tell us some more,” Mrs. Wiseman rose also.

  “Dawson,” she said firmly, “shut up. We simply cannot stand any more. This afternoon has been too trying. Come on, let’s go up,” she said, herding the ladies firmly out of the room, taking Mr. Talliaferro along also.

  NINE O’CLOCK

  He needed a bit of wire. He had reached that impasse familiar to all creators, where he could not decide which of a number of things to do next. His object had attained that stage of completion in which the simplicity of the initial impulse dissolves into a number of trivial necessary details; and lying on his bunk in the cabin he and Mr. Talliaferro shared, his saw at hand and a thin litter of sawdust and shavings well impermeating the bed clothing, he held his wooden cylinder to the small inadequate light and decided that he could do with a bit of stiff wire or something of that nature.

  He swung his legs out of the berth and flowed to the floor in a single beautiful motion, and crossing the room on his bare feet he searched Mr. Talliaferro’s effects without success, so he passed from the cabin.

  Still on his bare feet he went along the passage, and opening another door he let subdued light from the passage into a room filled with snoring, discerning vaguely the sleeper and, on a peg in the wall, a stained white cap. Captain’s room, he decided, leaving the door open and traversing the room silently to another door.

  There was a dim small light in this room, gleaming dully on the viscid anatomy of the now motionless engine. But he ignored the engine now, going about his search with businesslike expedition. There was a wooden cabinet against the wall: some of the drawers were locked. He rummaged through the others, pausing at times to raise certain objects to the light for a closer inspection, discarding them again. He closed the last drawer and stood with his hand on the cabinet, examining the room.

  A piece of wire would do, a short piece of stiff wire . . . there were wires on one wall, passing among and between switches. But these were electric wires and probably indispensable. Electric wires . . . battery room. It must be there, beyond that small door.

  It was there—a shadow-filled cubbyhole smelling of acids, of decomposition; a verdigris of decay. Plenty of wires here, but no loose ones. . . . He stared around, and presently he saw something upright and gleaming dully. It was a piece of mechanism, steel, smooth and odorless and rather comforting in this tomb of smells, and he examined it curiously, striking matches. And there, attached to it, was exactly what he needed—a small straight steel rod.

  I wonder what it does, he thought. It looked—a winch of some kind, maybe. But what would they want with a winch down here? Something they don’t use much, evidently, he assured himself. Too clean. Cleaner than the engine. Not greased all over like the engine. They mustn’t hardly ever use it. . . . Or a pump. A pump, that’s what it is. They won’t need a pump once a year: not any bilge in a boat kept up like a grand piano. Anyhow, they couldn’t possibly need it before tomorrow, and I’ll be through with it then. Chances are they wouldn’t miss it if I kept it altogether.

  The rod came off easily. Plenty of wrenches in the cabinet, and he just unscrewed the nuts at each end of the rod and lifted it out. He paused again, holding the rod in his hand. . . . Suppose he were to injure the rod some way. He hadn’t considered that and he stood turning the rod this way and that in his fingers, watching dull gleams of light on its slender polished length. It was so exactly what he needed. Steel, too; good steel: it cost twelve thousand dollars. And if you can’t get good steel for that . . . He put his tongue on it. It tasted principally of machine oil, but it must be good hard steel, costing twelve thousand dollars. I guess I can’t hurt anything that cost twelve thousand dollars, specially by just using it one time . . . “If they need it tomorrow, I’ll be through with it, anyway,” he said aloud.

  He replaced the wrenches. His mouth tasted of machine oil and he spat. The captain yet snored, and he passed through the captain’s room on his bare feet, closing the door thoughtfully so the light from the passage wouldn’t disturb the sleeper. He slipped the rod into his pocket. His hands were greasy and so he wiped them on the seat of his trousers.

  He paused again at the galley door, where the steward was still busy over the sink. The steward stopped long enough to find a candle for him, then he returned to his room. He lit the candle, drew Mr. Talliaferro’s suitcase from beneath the bunk and dripping a bit of hot wax onto it, he fixed the candle upright. Then he got Mr. Talliaferro’s pigskin-enclosed shaving kit and propped the rod upon it with one end of the rod in the candle flame. His mouth still tasted of machine oil, so he climbed onto his berth and spat through the port, discovering as he did so that the port was screened. It’ll dry, though.

  He touched the rod. It was getting warm. But he wanted it red hot. His mouth yet tasted of machine oil and he remembered the other cigarette. It was in the same pocket in which he had had the rod, and it too was slightly reminiscent of machinery, but the burning tobacco would soon kill that.

  The rod was getting pretty hot, so he fetched the wooden cylinder from the bunk and laying the cigarette on the edge of the suitcase he picked up the rod and held its heated end firmly against the selected spot on the cylinder; and soon a thin thread of smoke rose curling into the windless air. The smoke had a faint odor like that of scorching leather in it, also. Machine oil, probably.

  TEN O’CLOCK

  It’s being an artist, Mrs. Maurier said to herself with helpless despondence. Mrs. Wiseman, Miss Jameson, Mark, and Mr. Talliaferro sat at bridge. She herself did not feel like playing: the strain of her party kept her too nervous and wrought up. “You simply cannot tell what they’re going to do,” she said aloud in her exasperation, seeing again Major Ayers’s vanishing awkward shape and Fairchild leaning over the rail and howling after him like a bullvoiced Druid priest at a sacrifice.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Wiseman agreed, “it’s like an excursion, isn’t it?—all drunkenness and trampling around,” she added, attempting to finesse. “Damn you, Mark.”

  “It’s worse than that,” the niece corrected, pausing to watch the hissing fall of cards, “it’s like a cattle boat—all trampling around.”

  Mrs. Maurier sighed. “Whatever it is—” Her sentence died stillborn. The niece drifted away and a tall shape appeared from shadow and joined her, and they went on down the dark deck and from her sight. It was that queer shabby Mr. Gordon, and she knew a sudden sharp stab of conscience, of having failed in her duty as a hostess. She had barely exchanged a word with him since they came aboard. It’s that terrible Mr. Fairchild, she told herself. But who could have known that a middleaged man, and a successful novelist, could or would conduct himself so?

  The moon was getting up, spreading a silver flare of moonlight on the water. The Nausikaa swung gently at her cables, motionless but never still, sleeping but not dead,
as is the manner of ships on the seas of the world; cradled like a silver dreaming gull on the water . . . her yacht. Her party, people whom she had invited together for their mutual pleasure. . . . Maybe they think I ought to get drunk with them, she thought.

  She roused herself, creating conversation. The card players shuffled and dealt interminably, replying Mmmm to her remarks, irrelevant and detached, or pausing to answer sensibly with a patient deference. Mrs. Maurier rose briskly.

  “Come, people, I know you are tired of cards. Let’s have some music and dance a while.”

  “I’d rather play bridge with Mark than dance with him,” Mrs. Wiseman said. . . . “Whose trick was that?”

  “There’ll be plenty of men when the music starts,” Mrs. Maurier said.

  “Mmmm,” replied Mrs. Wiseman. . . . “It’ll take more than a Victrola record to get any men on this party. . . . You’ll need extradition papers. . . . Three without and three aces. How much is that, Ernest?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to dance, Mr. Talliaferro?” Mrs. Maurier persisted.

  “Whatever you wish, dear lady,” Mr. Talliaferro answered with courteous detachment, busy with his pencil. “That makes—” He totted a column of his neat figures, then he raised his head. “I beg your pardon: did you say something?”

  “Don’t bother,” Mrs. Maurier said. “I’ll put on a record myself: I’m sure our party will gather when they hear it.” She wound up the portable Victrola and put on a record. “You finish your rubber, and I’ll look about and see whom I can find,” she added. Mmmm, they replied.

  The Victrola raised its teasing rhythms of saxophones and drums, and Mrs. Maurier prowled around, peering into the shadows. She found the steward first, whom she dispatched to the gentlemen with a command couched in the form of an invitation. Then farther along she discovered Gordon, and her niece sitting on the rail with her legs locked about a stanchion.

  “Do be careful,” she said, “you might fall. We are going to dance a while,” she added happily.

  “Not me,” her niece answered quickly. “Not tonight, anyway. You have to dance enough in this world on dry land.”

  “You will certainly not prevent Mr. Gordon dancing, however. Come, Mr. Gordon, we need you.”

  “I don’t dance,” Gordon answered shortly.

  “You don’t dance?” Mrs. Maurier repeated. “You really don’t dance at all?”

  “Run along, Aunt Pat,” the niece answered for him. “We’re talking about art.”

  Mrs. Maurier sighed. “Where’s Theodore?” she asked at last. “Perhaps he will help us out.”

  “He’s in bed. He went to bed right after dinner. But you might go down and ask him if he wants to get up and dance.”

  Mrs. Maurier stared helplessly at Gordon. Then she turned away. The steward met her. jhe gentlemen were sorry, but they had all gone to bed. They were tired after such a strenuous day. She sighed again and passed on to the companionway. There seemed to be nothing else she could do for them. I’ve certainly tried, she told herself, taking this thin satisfaction, and stopped again while something shapeless in the dark companionway unbent, becoming two; and after a while Pete said from the darkness:

  “It’s me and Jenny.”

  Jenny made a soft meaningless sound, and Mrs. Maurier bent forward suspiciously. Mrs. Wiseman’s remark about excursion boats recurred to her.

  “You are enjoying the moon, I suppose?” she remarked.

  “Yessum,” Jenny answered. “We’re just sitting here.”

  “Don’t you children want to dance? They have started the Victrola,” Mrs. Maurier said in a resurgence of optimism.

  “Yessum,” said Jenny again, after a while. But they made no further move, and Mrs. Maurier sniffed. Quite genteelly, and she said icily:

  “Excuse me, please.”

  They made room for her to pass and she descended without looking back again, and found her door. She snapped the light switch viciously. Then she sighed again.

  It’s being an artist, she told herself again, helplessly.

  * * *

  “Damn, damn, damn,” said Mrs. Wiseman slapping her cards on the table. The Victrola record had played itself through and into an endless monotonous rasping. “Mark, stop that thing, as you love God. I’m far enough behind, without being jinxed.” The ghostly poet rose obediently and Mrs. Wiseman swept her hand amid the cards on the table, scattering them. “I’m not going to spend any more of my life putting little spotted squares of paper in orderly sequence for three dull people, not tonight, anyway. Gimme a cigarette, someone.” She thrust her chair back and Mr. Talliaferro opened his case to her. She took one and lifted her foot to the other knee and scratched a match on the sole of her slipper. “Let’s talk a while instead.”

  “Where on earth did you get those garters?” Miss Jameson asked curiously.

  “These?” she flipped her skirt down. “Why? Don’t you like ’em?”

  “They are a trifle out of the picture, on you.”

  “What kind would you suggest for me? Pieces of colored string?”

  “You ought to have black ones clasped with natural size red roses,” Mark Frost told her. “That’s what one would expect to find on you.”

  “Wrrrong, me good man,” Mrs. Wiseman answered dramatically. “You have wronged me foully. . . . Where’s Mrs. Maurier, I wonder?”

  “She must have caught somebody. That Gordon man, perhaps,” Miss Jameson replied. “I saw him at the rail yonder a while ago.”

  “Ah, Mr. Talliaferro!” exclaimed Mrs. Wiseman. “Look out for yourself. Widders and artists, you know. You see how susceptible I am, myself. Wasn’t there ever a fortune teller to warn you of a tall stranger in your destiny?”

  “You are a widow only by courtesy,” the poet rejoined, “like the serving maids in sixteenth-century literature.”

  “So are some of the artists, my boy,” Mrs. Wiseman replied. “But all the men on board are not even artists. What, Ernest?”

  Mr. Talliaferro bridled smugly through the smoke of his cigarette. Mrs. Wiseman consumed hers in an unbroken series of deep draughts and flipped it railward: a twinkling scarlet coal. “I said talk,” she reminded them, “not a few mild disjointed beans of gossip.” She rose. “Come on, let’s go to bed, Dorothy.”

  Miss Jameson sat, a humorless inertia. “And leave that moon?”

  Mrs. Wiseman yawned, stretching her arms. The moon spread her silver ceaseless hand on the dark water. Mrs. Wiseman turned, spreading her arms in a flamboyant gesture, in silhouette against it. “Ah, Moon, poor weary one. . . . By yon black moon,” she apostrophized.

  “No wonder it looks tired,” the poet remarked hollowly. “Think of how much adultery it’s had to look upon.”

  “Or assume the blame for,” Mrs. Wiseman amended. She dropped her arms. “I wish I were in love,” she said. “Why aren’t you and Ernest more—more—Come on, Dorothy, let’s go to bed.”

  “Have I got to move?” Miss Jameson said. She rose, however. The men rose also, and the two women departed. When they had gone Mr. Talliaferro gathered up the cards Mrs. Wiseman had scattered. Some of them had fallen to the deck.

  ELEVEN O’CLOCK

  Mr. Talliaferro tapped diffidently at the door of Fairchild’s room, was bidden, and opening it he saw the Semitic man sitting in the lone chair and Major Ayers and Fairchild on the bunk, holding glasses. “Come in,” Fairchild repeated. “How did you escape? Push her overboard and run?”

  Mr. Talliaferro grinned with deprecation, regarding the bottle sitting on a small table, rubbing his hands together with anticipation.

  “The human body can stand anything, can’t it?” the Semitic man remarked. “But I imagine Talliaferro is just about at the end of his rope, without outside aid,” he added. Major Ayers glared at him affably with his china-blue eyes.


  “Yes, Talliaferro’s sure earned a drink,” Fairchild agreed. “Where’s Gordon? Was he on deck?”

  “I think so,” Mr. Talliaferro replied. “I believe he’s with Miss Robyn.”

  “Well, more power to him,” Fairchild said. “Hope she won’t handle him as roughly as she did us, hey, Major?”

  “You and Major Ayers deserved exactly what you got,” the Semitic man rejoined. “You can’t complain.”

  “I guess so. But I don’t like to see a human being arrogating to himself the privileges and pleasures of providence. Quelling nuisances is God’s job.”

  “How about instruments of providence?”

  “Oh, take another drink,” Fairchild told him. “Stop talking so Talliaferro can have one, anyway. Then we better go up on deck. The ladies might begin to wonder what has become of us.”