Mosquitoes

by William Faulkner

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Don’t mention it,” Pete replied, raising his hat slightly. “Jenny up, too?”

  “Say, I dreamed you lost that thing,” the niece told him. “Yes, she’ll be out soon, I guess.”

  “That’s good. I was afraid she was going to lay there and starve to death.”

  “No, she’ll be out pretty soon.” They stood facing each other in the narrow passage, blocking it completely, and the niece said, “Get on, Pete. I feel too tired to climb over you this morning.”

  He stood aside for her, and watching her retreat he called after her, “Losing your pants.”

  She stopped and dragged at her hips as a shapeless fabric descended from beneath the raincoat and wadded slow and lethargic about her feet. She stood on one leg and kicked at the mass, then stooping she picked from amid its folds a man’s frayed and shapeless necktie. “Damn that string,” she said, kicking out of the garment and picking it up.

  Pete turned in the narrow corridor, counting discreet identical doors. He smelled coffee and he added to himself, A hard trip, and, with unction: I’ll tell the world it is.

  EIGHT O’CLOCK

  “It’s the steering gear,” Mrs. Maurier explained at the breakfast table. “Some—”

  “I know,” Mrs. Wiseman exclaimed immediately above the grapefruit, “German spies!”

  Mrs. Maurier stared at her with patient astonishment. She said, “How cute. . . . It worked perfectly yesterday. The captain said it worked perfectly yesterday. But this morning, when the storm came up . . . anyway, we’re aground, and they are sending someone to get a tug to pull us off. They are trying to find the trouble this morning, but I don’t know—”

  Mrs. Wiseman leaned toward her and patted her fumbling ringed hand. “There, there, don’t you feel badly about it: it wasn’t your fault. They’ll get us off soon, and we can have just as much fun here as we would sailing around. More, perhaps: motion seems to have had a bad effect on the party. I wonder—” Fairchild and his people had not yet arrived: before each vacant place its grapefruit, innocent and profound. Surely just the prospect of more grapefruit couldn’t have driven them—Mrs. Maurier followed her gaze.

  “Perhaps it’s just as well,” she murmured.

  “Anyway, I’ve always wanted to be shipwrecked,” Mrs. Wiseman went on. “What do they call it? scuttled the ship, isn’t it? But surely Dawson and Julius couldn’t have thought of this, though.” Mrs. Maurier, brooding above her plate, raised her eyes, cringing. “No, no,” the other answered herself hastily, “of course not: that’s silly. It just happened, as things do. But let this be a lesson to you children, never to lay yourselves open to suspicion,” she added looking from the niece to the nephew. The steward appeared with coffee and Mrs. Maurier directed him to leave the gentlemen’s grapefruit until it suited their pleasure to come for it.

  “They couldn’t have done it if they’d wanted to,” the niece replied. “They don’t know anything about machinery. Josh could have done it. He knows all about automobile motors. I bet you could fix it for ’em if you wanted to, couldn’t you, Gus?”

  He didn’t seem to have heard her at all. He finished his breakfast, eating with a steady and complete preoccupation, then thrusting his chair back he asked generally for a cigarette. His sister produced a package from somewhere. It bore yet faint traces of pinkish scented powder, and Miss Jameson said sharply:

  “I wondered who took my cigarettes. It was you, was it?”

  “I thought you’d forgot ’em, so I brought ’em up with me.” She and her brother took one each, and she slid the package acrost the table. Miss Jameson picked it up, stared into it a moment, then put it in her handbag. The nephew had a patent lighter. They all watched with interest, and after a while. Mr. Talliaferro with facetious intent offered him a match. But it took fire finally, and he lit his cigarette and snapped the cap down. “Gimme a light too, Gus,” his sister said quickly, and from the pocket of his shirt he took two matches, laid them beside her plate. He rose.

  He whistled four bars of “Sleepytime Gal” monotonously, ending on a prolonged excruciating note, and from the bed clothing at the foot of his bunk he got the steel rod and stood squinting his eyes against the smoke of his cigarette, examining it. One end of it was kind of blackened, and pinching the cloth of his trouserleg about it, he shuttled it swiftly back and forth. Then he examined it again. It was still kind of black. The smoke of his cigarette was making his eyes water, so he spat it and ground his heel on it.

  After a time he found a toothbrush and crossing the passage to a lavatory he scrubbed the rod. A little of the black came off, onto the brush, and he dried the rod on his shirt and scrubbed the brush against the screen in a port, then against a redleaded water pipe, and then against the back of his hand. He sniffed at it . . . a kind of machinery smell yet, but you won’t notice it with toothpaste on it. He returned and replaced the brush among Mr. Talliaferro’s things.

  He whistled four bars of “Sleepytime Gal” monotonously. The engine room was deserted. But he was making no effort toward concealment, anyway. He found the wrenches again and went to the battery room and restored the rod without haste, whistling with monotonous preoccupation. He replaced the wrenches and stood for a while examining the slumbering engine with rapture. Then still without haste he quitted the room.

  The captain, the steward, and the deckhand sat at breakfast in the saloon. He paused in the door.

  “Broke down, have we?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” the captain answered shortly. They went on with their breakfast.

  “What’s the trouble?” No reply, and after a time he suggested, “Engine play out?”

  “Steering gear,” the captain answered shortly.

  “You ought to be able to fix that. . . . Where is the steering gear?”

  “Engine room,” the captain replied. The nephew turned away.

  “Well, I haven’t touched anything in the engine room.”

  The captain bent above his plate, chewing. Then his jaws ceased and he raised his head sharply, staring after the nephew retreating down the passage.

  TEN O’CLOCK

  “The trouble with you, Talliaferro, is that you ain’t bold enough with women. That’s your trouble.”

  “But I—” Fairchild wouldn’t let him finish.

  “I don’t mean with words. They don’t care anything about words except as little things to pass the time with. You can’t be bold with them with words: you can’t even shock them with words. Though the reason may be that half the time they are not listening to you. They ain’t interested in what you’re going to say: they are interested in what you’re going to do.”

  “Yes, but—How do you mean, be bold? What must I do to be bold?”

  “How do they do it everywhere? Ain’t every paper you pick up full of accounts of men being caught in Kansas City or Omaha under compromising conditions with young girls who’ve been missing from Indianapolis and Peoria and even Chicago for days and days? Surely if a man can get as far as Kansas City with a Chicago girl, without her shooting him through chance or affection or sheer exuberance of spirits or something, he can pretty safely risk a New Orleans girl.”

  “But why should Talliaferro want to take a New Orleans girl or any other girl, to Kansas City?” the Semitic man asked. They ignored him.

  “I know,” Mr. Talliaferro rejoined. “But these men have always just robbed a cigar store. I couldn’t do that, you know.”

  “Well, maybe New Orleans girls won’t require that: maybe they haven’t got that sophisticated yet. They may not be aware that their favors are worth as high as a cigar store. But I don’t know: there are moving pictures, and some of ’em probably even read newspapers, too, so I’d advise you to get busy right away. The word may have already got around that if they just hold off another day or so, they can get
a cigar store for practically nothing. And there ain’t very many cigar stores in New Orleans, you know.”

  “But,” the Semitic man put in again, “Talliaferro doesn’t want a girl and a cigar store both, you know.”

  “That’s right,” Fairchild agreed. “You ain’t looking for tobacco, are you, Talliaferro?”

  ELEVEN O’CLOCK

  “No, sir,” the nephew answered patiently, “it’s a pipe.”

  “A pipe?” Fairchild drew nearer, interested. “What’s the idea? Will it smoke longer than an ordinary pipe? Holds more tobacco, eh?”

  “Smokes cooler,” the nephew corrected, carving minutely at his cylinder. “Won’t burn your tongue. Smoke the tobacco down to the last grain, and it won’t burn your tongue. You change gears on it, kind of, like a car.”

  “Well, I’m damned. How does it work?” Fairchild dragged up a chair, and the nephew showed him how it worked. “Well, I’m damned,” he repeated, taking fire. “Say, you ought to make a pile of money out of it, if you make it work, you know.”

  “It works,” the nephew answered, joining his cylinders again. “Made a little one out of pine. Smoked pretty good for a pine pipe. It’ll work all right.”

  “What kind of wood are you using now?”

  “Cherry.” He carved and fitted intently, bending his coarse dark head above his work. Fairchild watched him, “Well, I’m damned,” he said again in a sort of heavy astonishment. “Funny nobody thought of it before. Say, we might form a stock company, you know, with Julius and Major Ayers. He’s trying to get rich right away at something that don’t require work, and this pipe is a lot better idea than the one he’s got, for I can’t imagine even Americans spending very much money for something that don’t do anything except keep your bowels open. That’s too sensible for us, even though we will buy anything. . . . Your sister tells me you and she are going to Yale college next month.”

  “I am” he corrected, without raising his head. “She just thinks she’s going too. That’s all. She kept on worrying dad until he said she could go. She’ll be wanting to do something else by then.”

  “What does she do?” Fairchild asked. “I mean, does she have a string of beaux and run around dancing and buying things like most girls like her do?”

  “Naw,” the nephew answered. “She spends most of her time and mine too tagging around after me. Oh, she’s all right, I guess,” he added tolerantly, “but she hasn’t got much sense.” He unfitted the cylinders, squinting at them.

  “That’s where she changes gear, is it?” Fairchild leaned nearer again. “Yes, she’s a pretty nice sort of a kid. Kind of like a race-horse colt, you know. . . . So you’re going up to Yale. I used to want to go to Yale, myself, once. Only I had to go where I could. I guess there is a time in the life of every young American of the class that wants to go to college or accepts the inevitablity of education, when he wants to go to Yale or Harvard. Maybe that’s the value of Yale and Harvard to our American life: a kind of illusion of an intellectual nirvana that makes the ones that can’t go there work like hell where they do go, so as not to show up so poorly alongside of the ones that can go there.

  “Still, ninety out of a hundred Yale and Harvard turn out are reasonably bearable to live with, if they ain’t anything else. And that’s something to be said for any manufactory, I guess. But I’d like to have gone there. . . .” The nephew was not listening particularly. He shaved and trimmed solicitously at his cylinder. Fairchild said:

  “It was a kind of funny college I went to. A denominational college, you know, where they turned out preachers. I was working in a mowing machinery factory in Indiana, and the owner of the factory was a trustee of this college. He was a sanctimonious old fellow with a beard like a goat, and every year he offered a half scholarship to be competed for by young men working for him. You won it, you know, and he found you a job near the college to pay your board, but not enough to do anything else—to keep you from fleshly temptations, you know—and he had a monthly report on your progress sent to him. And I won it, that year.

  “It was just for one year, so I tried to take everything I could. I had about six or seven lectures a day, besides the work I had to do to earn my board. But I kind of got interested in learning things: I learned in spite of the instructors we had. They were a bunch of brokendown preachers: head full of dogma and intolerance and a belly full of big meaningless words. English literature course whittled Shakespeare down because he wrote about whores without pointing a moral, and one instructor always insisted that the head devil in Paradise Lost was an inspired prophetic portrait of Darwin, and they wouldn’t touch Byron with a ten foot pole, and Swinburne was reduced to his mother and his old standby, the ocean. And I guess they’d have cut this out had they worn one-piece bathing suits in those days. But in spite of it, I kind of got interested in learning things. I would like to have looked inside of my mind after that year was up.” He gazed out over the water, over the snoring waves, steady and wind-frothed. He laughed. “And I joined a fraternity, too, almost.”

  The nephew bent over his pipe. Fairchild produced a package of cigarettes. The nephew accepted one with abstraction. He accepted a light, also. “I guess you’ve got your eye on a fraternity, haven’t you?” Fairchild suggested.

  “Senior club,” the nephew corrected shortly. “If I can make it.”

  “Senior club,” Fairchild repeated. “That means you won’t join for three years, eh? That’s a good idea. I like that idea. But I had to do everything in one year, you see. I couldn’t wait. I never had much time to mix with other students. Six hours a day at lectures, and the rest of the time working and studying for next day. But I couldn’t help but hear something about it, about rushing and pledges and so on, and how so-and-so were after this fellow and that, because he made the football team or something.

  “There was a fellow at my boarding-house; a kind of handsome tall fellow he was, always talking about the big athletes and such in school. He knew them all by their first names. And he always had some yarn about girls: always showing you a pink envelope or something—a kind of gentlemanly innuendo, protecting their good names. He was a senior, he told me, and he was the first one to talk to me about fraternities. He said he had belonged to one a long time, though he didn’t wear a badge. He had given his badge to a girl who wouldn’t return it. . . . You see,” Fairchild explained again, “I had to work so much. You know: getting into a rut of work for bread and meat, where chance couldn’t touch me much. Chance and information. That’s what they mean by wisdom, horsesense, you know.

  “He was the one that told me he could get me in his fraternity, if I wanted to.” He drew at his cigarette, flipped it away. “It’s young people who put life into ritual by making conventions a living part of life: only old people destroy life by making it a ritual. And I wanted to get all I could out of being at college. The boy that belongs to a secret pirates’ gang and who dreams of defending an abstraction with his blood, hasn’t quite died out before twenty-one, you know. But I didn’t have any money.

  “Then he suggested that I get more work to do, temporarily. He pointed out to me other men who belonged to it or who were going to join—baseball players, and captains of teams, and prize scholars and all. So I got more work. He told me not to mention it to anybody, that that was the way they did it. I didn’t know anybody much, you see,” he explained. “I had to work pretty steady all day: no chance to get to know anybody well enough to talk to ’em.” He mused upon the ceaseless fading battalions of waves. “So I got some more work to do.

  “This had to be night work, so I got a job helping to fire the college power plant. I could take my books along and study while the steam was up. Only it cut into my sleep some, and sometimes I would get too drowsy to study. So I had to give up one of my lecture courses, though the instructor finally agreed to let me try to make it up during the Christmas vacation. But I learned how to
sleep in a cinder pile or a coal bunker, anyway.” The nephew was interested now. His knife was idle in his hand, his cylinder reposed, forgetting the agony of wood.

  “It would take twenty-five dollars, but working overtime as I was, I figured it wouldn’t be any actual cost at all, except the loss of sleep. And a young fellow can stand that if he has to. I was used to work, you know, and it seemed to me that this was just like finding twenty-five dollars.

  “I had been working about a month when this fellow came to me and told me that something had happened and that the fraternity would have to initiate right away, and he asked me how much I had earned. I lacked a little of having twenty-five dollars, so he said he would loan me the difference to make it up. So I went to the power house manager and told him I had to have some money to pay a dentist with, and got my pay up to date and gave it to this fellow, and he told me where to be the following night—behind the library at a certain hour. So I did: I was there, like he said.” Fairchild laughed again.