Jenny also glanced briefly up the deck. Then she came with a sort of wary docility, raising her ineffable face . . . presently Pete withdrew his face. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
“The matter with what?” said Jenny innocently.
Pete unhooked his heel and he put his arm around Jenny. Their faces merged again and Jenny became an impersonal softness against his mouth and a single blue eye and a drowsing aura of hair.
ELEVEN O’CLOCK
The swamp did not seem to end, ever. On either side of the road it brooded, fetid and timeless, somber and hushed and dreadful. The road went on and on through a bearded tunnel, beneath the sinister brass sky. The dew was long departed and dust puffed listlessly to her fierce striding. David tramped behind her, watching two splotches of dead blood on her stockings. Abruptly there were three of them and he drew abreast of her. She looked over her shoulder, showing him her wrung face.
“Don’t come near me!” she cried. “Don’t you see you make ’em worse?”
He dropped behind again and she stopped suddenly, dropping the broken branch and extending her arms. “David,” she said. He went to her awkwardly, and she clung to him, whimpering. She raised her face, staring at him. “Can’t you do something? They hurt me, David.” But he only looked at her with his unutterable dumb longing.
She tightened her arms, released him quickly. “We’ll be out soon.” She picked up the branch again. “It’ll be different then. Look! There’s another big butterfly!” Her squeal of delight became again a thin whimpering sound. She strode on.
* * *
Jenny found Mrs. Wiseman in their room, changing her dress. “Mr. Ta—Talliaferro,” Jenny began. Then she said, “He’s an awful refined man, I guess. Don’t you think so?”
“Refined?” the other repeated. “Exactly that. Ernest invented that word.”
“He did?” Jenny went to the mirror and looked at herself a while. “Her brother’s refined, too, ain’t he?”
“Whose brother, honey?” Mrs. Wiseman paused and watched Jenny curiously.
“The one with that saw.”
“Oh, Yes, fairly so. He seems to be too busy to be anything else. Why?”
“And that popeyed man. All English men are refined, though. There was one in a movie I saw. He was awful refined.” Jenny looked at her reflected face, timelessly and completely entertained. Mrs. Wiseman gazed at Jenny’s fine minted hair, at her sleazy little dress revealing the divine inevitability of her soft body.
“Come here, Jenny,” she said.
TWELVE O’CLOCK
When he reached her she sat huddled in the road, crouching bonelessly upon herself, huddling her head in her crossed thin arms. He stood beside her, and presently he spoke her name. She rocked back and forth, then wrung her body in an ecstasy. “They hurt me, they hurt me,” she wailed, crouching again in that impossible spasm of agony. David knelt beside her and spoke her name again, and she sat up.
“Look,” she said wildly, “on my legs—look, look,” staring with a sort of fascination at a score of great gray specks hovering about her blood-flecked stockings, making no effort to brush them away. She raised her wild face again. “Do you see them? They are everywhere on me—my back, my back, where I can’t reach.” She lay suddenly flat, writhing her back in the dust, clutching his hand. Then she sat up again and against his knees she turned wringing her body from the hips, trying to draw her bloody legs beneath her brief skirt. He held her while she writhed in his grasp, staring her wild bloodless face up at him. “I must get in water,” she panted. “I must get in water. Mud, anything. I’m dying, I tell you.”
“Yes, yes: I’ll get you some water. You wait here. Will you wait here?”
“You’ll get me some water? You will? You promise?”
“Yes, yes,” he repeated. “I’ll get you some. You wait here. You wait here, see?” he repeated idiotically. She bent again inward upon herself, moaning and writhing in the dust, and he plunged down the bank, stripping his shirt off and dipped it into the foul warm ditch. She had dragged her dress up about her shoulders, revealing her startling white bathing suit between her knickers and the satin band binding her breasts. “On my back,” she moaned, bending forward again, “quick! quick!”
He laid the wet shirt on her back and she caught the ends of it and drew it around her, and presently she leaned back against his knees with a long shuddering sigh. “I want a drink. Can’t I have a drink of water, David?”
“Soon,” he promised with despair. “You can have one soon as we get out of the swamp.”
She moaned again, a long whimpering sound, lowering her head between her arms. They crouched together in the dusty road. The road went on shimmering before them, endless beneath bearded watching trees, crossing the implacable swamp with a puerile bravado like a thin voice cursing in a cathedral. Needles of fire darted about them, about his bare shoulders and arms. After a while she said:
“Wet it again, please, David.”
He did so, and returned, scrambling up the steep rank levee side.
“Now, bathe my face, David.” She raised her face and closed her eyes and he bathed her face and throat and brushed her damp coarse hair back from her brow.
“Let’s put the shirt on you,” he suggested.
“No,” she demurred against his arm, without opening her eyes, drowsily. “They’ll eat you alive without it.”
“They don’t bother me like they do you. Come on, put it on.” She demurred again and he tried awkwardly to draw the shirt over her head. “I don’t need it,” he repeated.
“No. . . . Keep it, David. . . . You ought to keep it. Besides, I’d rather have it underneath. . . . Oooo, it feels so good. You’re sure you don’t need it?” She opened her eyes, watching him with that sober gravity of hers. He insisted and she sat up and slipped her dress over her head. He helped her to don the shirt, then she slipped her dress on again. “I wouldn’t take it, only they hurt me so damn bad. I’ll do something for you some day, David. I swear I will.”
“Sure,” he repeated. “I don’t need it.”
He rose, and she came to her feet in a single motion, before he could offer to help her. “I swear I wouldn’t take it if they didn’t hurt me so much, David,” she persisted, putting her hand on his shoulder and raising her tanned serious face.
“Sure, I know.”
“I’ll pay you back somehow. Come on: let’s get out of here.”
ONE O’CLOCK
Mrs. Wiseman and Miss Jameson drove Mrs. Maurier moaning and wringing her hands from the galley and prepared lunch—grapefruit again, disguised thinly.
“We have so many of them,” the hostess apologized helplessly. “And the steward gone. . . . We are aground, too, you see,” she explained.
“Oh, we can stand a little hardship, I guess,” Fairchild reassured her jovially. “The race hasn’t degenerated that far. In a book, now, it would be kind of terrible; if you forced characters in a book to eat as much grapefruit as we do, both the art boys and the humanitarians would stand on their hind legs and howl. But in real life—In life, anything might happen; in actual life people will do anything. It’s only in books that people must function according to arbitrary rules of conduct and probability; it’s only in books that events must never flout credulity.”
“That’s true,” Mrs. Wiseman agreed. “People’s characters, when writers delineate them by revealing their likings and dislikings, always appear so perfect, so inevitably consistent, but in li—”
“That’s why literature is art and biology isn’t,” her brother interrupted. “A character in a book must be consistent in all things, while man is consistent in one thing only: he is consistently vain. It’s his vanity alone which keeps his particles damp and adhering one to another, instead of like any other handful of dust which any wind that passes can disseminate.”
“In other words, he is consistently inconsistent,” Mark Frost recapitulated.
“I guess so,” the Semitic man replied. “Whatever that means. . . But what were you saying, Eva?”
“I was thinking of how book people, when you find them in real life, have such a perverse and disconcerting way of liking and disliking the wrong things. For instance, Dorothy here. Suppose you were drawing Dorothy’s character in a novel, Dawson. Any writer would give her a liking for blue jewelry: white gold, and platinum, and sapphires in dull silver—you know. Wouldn’t you do that?”
“Why, yes, so I would,” Fairchild agreed with interest. “She would like blue things, sure enough.”
“And then,” the other continued, “music. You’d say she would like Grieg, and those other cold mad northern people with icewater in their veins, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” Fairchild agreed again, thinking immediately of Ibsen and the Peer Gynt legend and remembering a sonnet of Siegfried Sassoon’s about Sibelius that he had once read in a magazine. “That’s what she would like.”
“Should like,” Mrs. Wiseman corrected. “For the sake of esthetic consistency. But I bet you are wrong. Isn’t he, Dorothy?”
“Why, yes,” Miss Jameson replied. “I always liked Chopin.”
Mrs. Wiseman shrugged: a graceful dark gesture. “And there you are. That’s what makes art so discouraging. You come to expect anything associated with and dependent on the actions of man to be discouraging. But it always shocks me to learn that art also depends on population, on the herd instinct just as much as manufacturing automobiles or stockings does—”
“Only they can’t advertise art by means of women’s legs yet,” Mark Frost interrupted.
“Don’t be silly, Mark,” Mrs. Wiseman said sharply. “That’s exactly how art came to the attention of the ninety-nine who don’t produce it and so have any possible reason for buying it—postcards and lithographs barely esoteric enough to escape police persecution. Ask any man on the street what he understands by the word art: he’ll tell you it means a picture. Won’t he?” she appealed to Fairchild.
“That’s so,” he agreed. “And it’s a wrong impression. Art means anything consciously done well, to my notion. Living, or building a good lawn mower, or playing poker. I don’t like this modern idea of restricting the word to painting, at all.”
“The art of Life, of a beautiful and complete existence of the Soul,” Mrs. Maurier put in. “Don’t you think that is Art’s greatest function, Mr. Gordon?”
“Of course you don’t, child,” Mrs. Wiseman told Fairchild, ignoring Mrs. Maurier. “As rabidly American as you are, you can’t stand that, can you? And there’s the seat of your bewilderment, Dawson—your belief that the function of creating art depends on geography.”
“It does. You can’t grow corn without something to plant it in.”
“But you don’t plant corn in geography: you plant it in soil. It not only does not matter where that soil is, you can even move the soil from one place to another—around the world, if you like—and it will still grow corn.”
“You’d have a different kind of corn, though—Russian corn, or Latin or Anglo-Saxon corn.”
“All corn is the same to the belly,” the Semitic man said.
“Julius!” exclaimed Mrs. Maurier. “The Soul’s hunger: that is the true purpose of Art. There are so many things to satisfy the grosser appetites. Don’t you think so, Mr. Talliaferro?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Wiseman took her brother up. “Dawson clings to his conviction for the old reason: it’s good enough to live with and comfortable to die with—like a belief in immortality. Insurance against doubt or alarm.”
“And laziness,” her brother added. Mrs. Maurier exclaimed “Julius” again. “Clinging spiritually to one little Spot of the earth’s surface, so much of his labor is performed for him. Details of dress and habit and speech which entail no hardship in the assimilation and which, piled one on another, become quite as imposing as any single startling stroke of originality, as trivialities in quantities will. Don’t you agree? But then, I suppose that all poets in their hearts consider prosewriters shirkers, don’t they?”
“Yes,” his sister agreed. “We do think they are lazy—just a little. Not mentally, but that their . . . not hearts—” “Souls?” her brother suggested. “I hate that word, but it’s the nearest thing. . . .” She met her brother’s quizzical eyes and exclaimed, “Oh, Julius! I could kill you, at times. He’s laughing at me, Dawson.”
“He’s laughing at us both,” Fairchild said. “But let him have his fun, poor fellow.” He chuckled, and lit a cigarette. “Let him laugh. I always did want to be one of those old-time eunuchs, for one night. They must have just laughed themselves to death when those sultans and things would come visiting.”
“Mister Fairchild! Whatever in the world!” exclaimed Mrs. Maurier.
“It’s a good thing there’s someone to see something amusing in that process,” the other rejoined. “The husbands, the active participants, never seem to.”
“That’s a provision of nature’s for racial survival,” Fairchild said. “If the husbands ever saw the comic aspect of it. . . . But they never do, even when they have the opportunity, no matter how white and delicate the hand that decorates their brows.”
“It’s not lovely ladies nor dashing strangers,” the Semitic man said, “it’s the marriage ceremony that disfigures our foreheads.”
Fairchild grunted. Then he chuckled again. “There’d sure be a decline in population if a man were twins and had to stand around and watch himself making love.”
“Mister Fairchild!”
“Chopin,” Mrs. Wiseman interrupted. “Really, Dorothy, I’m disappointed in you.” She shrugged again, flashing her hands. Mrs. Maurier said with relief:
“How much Chopin has meant to me in my sorrows”—she looked about in tragic confiding astonishment—“no one will ever know.”
“Surely,” agreed Mrs. Wiseman, “he always does.” She turned to Miss Jameson. “Just think how much better Dawson would have done you than God did. With all deference to Mrs. Maurier, so many people find comfort in Chopin. It’s like having a pain that aspirin will cure, you know. I could have forgiven you even Verdi, but Chopin! Chopin,” she repeated, then with happy inspiration: “Snow rotting under a dead moon.”
Mark Frost sat staring at his hands on his lap, beneath the edge of the table, moving his lips slightly. Fairchild said:
“What music do you like, Eva?”
“Oh—Debussy, George Gershwin. Berlioz perhaps—why not?”
“Berlioz,” repeated Miss Jameson mimicking the other’s tone: “Swedenborg on a French holiday.” Mark Frost stared at his hands on his lap, moving his lips slightly.
“Forget your notebook, Mark?” Fairchild asked quizzically.
“It’s very sad,” the Semitic man said. “Man gets along quite well until that unhappy day on which someone else discovers him thinking. After that, God help him: he doesn’t dare leave home without a notebook. It’s very sad.”
“Mark’s not such an accomplished buccaneer as you and Dawson,” his sister answered quickly. “At least he requires a notebook.”
“My dear girl,” the Semitic man murmured in his lazy voice, “you flatter yourself.”
“So do I,” Fairchild said. “I always—”
“Whom?” the Semitic man asked. “Yourself, or me?”
“What?” said Fairchild, staring at him.
“Nothing. Excuse me: you were saying—?”
“I was saying that I always carry my portfolio with me because it’s the only comfortable thing I ever found to sit on.”
* * *
Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words. It seemed endless, as though it might go on forever. Ideas, thoughts, became mere sounds
to be bandied about until they were dead.
Noon was oppressive as a hand, as the ceaseless blow of a brass hand: a brass blow neither struck nor withheld; brass rushing wings that would not pass. The deck blistered with it, the rail was too hot to touch and the patches of shadow about the deck were heavy and heat-soaked as sodden blankets. The water was an unbearable glitter, the forest was a bronze wall cast at a fearful heat and not yet cooled, and no breeze was anywhere under the world’s heaven.
But the unbearable hiatus of noon passed at last and the soundless brazen wings rushed westward. The deck was deserted as it had been on that first afternoon when he had caught her in midflight like a damp swallow, a swallow hard and passionate with flight; and it was as though he yet saw upon the deck the wet and simple prints of her naked feet, and he seemed to feel about him like an odor that young hard graveness of hers. No wonder she was gone out of it: she who here was as a flame among stale ashes, a little tanned flame; who, gone, was as a pipe blown thinly and far away, as a remembered surf on a rocky coast at dawn . . . ay ay strangle your heart o israfel winged with loneliness feathered bitter with pride.
Mosquitoes Page 18
