Mosquitoes

by William Faulkner

  She could still hear people moving about: voices and feet, and she kept waiting for that first taste of crying that comes into your throat before you really get started—that feeling that here are two little salty canals just under your ears when you feel sorry for yourself, and that other kind of feeling you have at the base of your nose. Only my nose don’t get red when I cry, she thought, in a placid imminent misery of sadness and meaningless despair, waiting passive and still and without dread for it to begin. But before it began, Mrs. Wiseman entered the room.

  She came over to Jenny and Jenny looked up and saw the other’s dark small head, like a deer’s head, against the light, and that dark intent way the other had of looking at her; and presently Mrs. Wiseman said:

  “What is it, Jenny? What’s the matter?”

  But she had forgotten what it was, almost: all she could remember was that there had been something; but now that the other had come Jenny could hardly remember that she had forgotten anything even, and so she just lay and looked up at the other’s dark slender head against the unshaded light.

  “Poor child, you have had a hard day, haven’t you?” She put her hand on Jenny’s brow, smoothing back the fine hushed gold of Jenny’s hair, stroking her hand along Jenny’s cheek. Jenny lay quiet under the hand, drowsing her eyes like a stroked kitten, and then she knew she could cry all right, whenever she wanted to. Only it was almost as much fun just lying here and knowing you could cry whenever you got ready to, as the crying itself would be. She opened her blue ineffable eyes.

  “Do you suppose he’s really drownded?” she asked. Mrs. Wiseman’s hand stroked Jenny’s cheek, pushing her hair upward and away from her brow.

  “I don’t know, darling,” she answered soberly. “He’s a luckless man. And anything may happen to a luckless man. But don’t you think about that any more. Do you hear?” She leaned her face down to Jenny’s. “Do you hear?” she said again.

  * * *

  “No,” Fairchild said, “he ain’t the sort to get drowned. Some people just ain’t that sort. . . . I wonder—” He broke off suddenly and gazed at his companions. “Say, do you suppose he went off because he thought that girl was gone for good?”

  “Drowned himself for love?” Mark Frost said. “Not in this day and time. People suicide because of money and disease: not for love.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Fairchild objected. “They used to die because of love. And human nature don’t change. Its actions achieve different results under different conditions, but human nature don’t change.”

  “Mark is right,” the Semitic man said. “People in the old books died of heartbreak also, which was probably merely some ailment that any modern surgeon or veterinarian could cure out of hand. But people do not die of love. That’s the reason love and death iri conjunction have such an undying appeal in books: they are never very closely associated anywhere else.

  “But as for a broken heart in this day of general literacy and facilities for disseminating the printed word—” He made a sound of disparagement. “Lucky he who believes that his heart is broken: he can immediately write a book and so take revenge (what is more terrible than the knowledge that the man you just knocked down discovered a coin in the gutter while getting up?) on him or her who damaged his or her ventricles. Besides cleaning up in the movies and magazines. No, no,” he repeated, “you don’t commit suicide when you are disappointed in love. You write a book.”

  “I don’t know about that,” repeated Fairchild stubbornly. “People will do anything. But I suppose it takes a fool to believe that and act on that principle.” Beyond the eastern horizon was a rumor of pale silver, pallid and chill and faint, and they sat for a while in silence, thinking of love and death. The red eye of a cigarette twelve inches from the deck: this was Mark Frost. Fairchild broke the silence.

  “The way she went off with Da—the steward. It was kind of nice, wasn’t it? And came back. No excuses, no explanations— ‘think no evil,’ you know. That’s what these postwar young folks have taught us. Only old folks like Julius and me would ever see evil in what people, young people, do. But then, I guess folks growing up into the manner of looking at life that we inherited, would find evil in anything where inclination wasn’t subservient to duty. We were taught to believe that duty is infallible, or it wouldn’t be duty, and if it were just unpleasant enough, you got a mark in heaven, sure. . . . But maybe it ain’t so different, taken one generation by another. Most of our sins are vicarious, anyhow. I guess when you are young you have too much fun just being, to sin very much. But it’s kind of nice, being young in this generation.”

  “Surely. We all think that, when our arteries begin to harden,” the Semitic man rejoined. “Not only are most of our sins vicarious, but most of our pleasures are too. Look at our books, our stage, the movies. Who supports ’em? Not the young folks. They’d rather walk around or just sit and hold each other’s hands.”

  “It’s a substitute,” Fairchild said. “Don’t you see?”

  “Substitute for what? When you are young and in love yesterday and out today and in again tomorrow, do you know anything about love? Is it anything to you except a rather dreadful mixture of jealousy and thwarted desires and interference with that man’s world which after all, we all prefer, and nagging and maybe a little pleasure like a drug? It’s not the women you sleep with that you remember, you know.”

  “No, thank God,” Fairchild said. The other continued:

  “It’s the old problem of the aristocracy over and over: a natural envy of that minority which is at liberty to commit all the sins which the majority cannot stop earning a living long enough to commit.” He lit his cigar again. “Young people always shape their lives as the preceding generation requires of them. I don’t mean exactly that they go to church when they are told to, for instance, because their elders expect it of them—though God only knows what other reason they could possibly have for going to church as it is conducted nowadays, with a warden to patrol the building in the urban localities and in the rural districts squads of K.K.K.’s beating the surrounding copses and all those traditional retreats that in the olden days enabled the church to produce a soul for every one it saved. But youth in general lives unquestioningly according to the arbitrary precepts of its elders.

  “For instance, a generation ago higher education was not considered so essential, and young people grew up at home into the convention that the thing to do was to get married at twenty-one and go to work immediately, regardless of one’s equipment or inclination or aptitude. But now they grow up into the convention that youth, that being under thirty years of age, is a protracted sophomore course without lectures, in which one must spend one’s entire time dressed like a caricature, drinking homemade booze and pawing at the opposite sex in the intervals of being arrested by traffic policemen.

  “A few years ago a so called commercial artist (groan, damn you) named John Held began to caricature college life, cloistered and otherwise, in the magazines; ever since then college life, cloistered and otherwise, has been busy caricaturing John Held. It is expected of them by their elders, you see. And the young people humor them: young people are far more tolerant of the inexplicable and dangerous vagaries of their elders than the elders ever were or ever will be of the natural and harmless foibles of their children. . . . But perhaps they both enjoy it.”

  “I don’t know,” Fairchild said. “Not even the old folks would like to be surrounded by people making such a drama of existence. And the young folks wouldn’t like it, either: young people have so many other things to do, you know. I think—” His voice ceased, died into darkness and a faint lapping sound of water. The moon had swum up out of the east again, that waning moon of decay, worn and affable and cold. It was a magic on the water, a magic of pallid and fleshless things. The red eye of Mark Frost’s cigarette arced slow and lateral in his invisible hand, returned to its station twel
ve inches above the deck, and glowed and faded like a pulse. “You see,” Fairchild added like an apology, “I believe in young love in the spring, and things like that. I guess I’m a hopeless sentimentalist.”

  The Semitic man grunted. Mark Frost said, “Virtue through abjectness and falsification: immolation of insincerity.” Fairchild ignored him, wrapped in this dream of his own.

  “When youth goes out of you, you get out of it. Out of life, I mean. Up to that time you just live; after that, you are aware of living and living becomes a conscious process. Like thinking does in time, you know. You become conscious of thinking, and then you start right off to think in words. And first thing you know, you don’t have thoughts in your mind at all: you just have words in it. But when you are young, you just be. Then you reach a stage where you do. Then a stage where you think, and last of all, where you remember. Or try to.”

  “Sex and death,” said Mark Frost sepulchrally, arcing the red eye of his cigarette, “a blank wall on which sex casts a shadow, and the shadow is life.” The Semitic man grunted again, immersed in one of his rare periods of uncommunicativeness. The moon climbed higher, the pallid unmuscled belly of the moon, and the Nausikaa dreamed like a silver gull on the dark restless water.

  “I don’t know,” Fairchild said again. “I never found anything shadowy about life, people. Least of all, about my own doings. But it may be that there are shadowy people in the world, people to whom life is a kind of antic shadow. But people like that make no impression on me at all, I can’t seem to get them at all. But this may be because I have a kind of firm belief that life is all right.” Mark Frost had cast away his final cigarette and was now a long prone shadow. The Semitic man was motionless also, holding his dead cigar.

  “I was spending the summer with my grandfather, in Indiana. In the country. I was a boy then, and it was a kind of family reunion, with aunts and cousins that hadn’t seen each other in years. Children, too, all sizes.

  “There was a girl that I remember, about my age, I reckon. She had blue eyes and a lot of long, prim, golden curls. This girl, Jenny, must have looked like her, when she was about twelve. I didn’t know the other children very well, and besides I was used to furnishing my own diversion anyway; so I just kind of hung around and watched them doing the things children do. I didn’t know how to go about getting acquainted with them. I’d seen how the other newcomers would do it, and I’d kind of plan to myself how I’d go about it: what I’d say when I went up to them. . . .” He ceased and mused for a time in a kind of hushed surprise. “Just like Talliaferro,” he said at last, quietly. “I hadn’t thought of that before.” He mused for a time. Then he spoke again.

  “I was kind of like a dog going among strange dogs. Scared, kind of, but acting haughty and aloof. But I watched them. The way she made up to them, for instance. The day after she came she was the leader, always telling them what to do next. She had blue dresses, mostly.” Mark Frost snored in silence. The Nausikaa dreamed like a gull on the dark water.

  “This was before the day of water works and sewage systems in country homes, and this one had the usual outhouse. It was down a path from the house. In the late summer there were tall burdocks on either side of the path, taller than a twelve-year-old boy by late August. The outhouse was a small square frame box kind of thing, with a partition separating the men from the women inside.

  “It was a hot day, in the middle of the afternoon. The others were down in the orchard, under the trees. From where I had been, in a big tree in the yard, I could see them, and the girls’ colored dresses in the shade; and when I climbed down from the tree and went across the back yard and through the gate and along the path toward the privy I could still see them occasionally through gaps in the burdocks. They were sitting around in the shade, playing some game, or maybe just talking.

  “I went on down the path and went inside, and when I turned to shut the door to the men’s side, I looked back. And I saw her blue dress kind of shining, coming along the path between the tall weeds. I couldn’t tell if she had seen me or not, but I knew that if I went back I’d have to pass her, and I was ashamed to do this. It would have been different if I’d already been there and was coming away: or it seemed to me that it would have. Boys are that way, you know,” he added uncertainly, turning his bewilderment again toward his friend. The other grunted. Mark Frost snored in his shadow.

  “So I shut the door quick and stood right quiet, and soon I heard her enter the other side. I didn’t know yet if she’d seen me, but I was going to stay quiet as I could until she went away. I just had to do that, it seemed to me.

  “Children are much more psychic than adults. More of a child’s life goes on in its mind than people believe. A child can distill the whole gamut of experiences it has never actually known, into a single instant. Anthropology explains a little of it. But not much, because the gaps in human knowledge that have to be bridged by speculation are too large. The first thing a child is taught is the infallibility and necessity of precept, and by the time the child is old enough to add anything to our knowledge of the mind, it has forgotten. The soul sheds every year, like snakes do, I believe. You can’t recall the emotions you felt last year: you remember only that an emotion was associated with some physical fact of experience. But all you have of it now is a kind of ghost of happiness and a vague and meaningless regret. Experience: why should we be expected to learn wisdom from experience? Muscles only remember, and it takes repetition and repetition to teach a muscle anything. . . .”

  Arcturus, Orion swinging head downward by his knees, in the southern sky an electric lobster fading as the moon rose. Water lapped at the hull of the Nausikaa with little sounds.

  “So I tiptoed across to the seat. It was hot in there, with the sun beating down on it: I could smell hot resin, even above the smell of the place itself. In a corner of the ceiling there was a dirt dobber’s nest—a hard lump of clay with holes in it, stuck to the ceiling, and big green flies made a steady droning sound. I remember how hot it was in there, and that feeling places like that give you—a kind of letting down of the bars of pretense, you know; a kind of submerging of civilized strictures before the grand implacability of nature and the physical body. And I stood there, feeling this feeling and the heat, and hearing the drone of those big flies, holding my breath and listening for a sound from beyond the partition. But there wasn’t any sound from beyond it, so I put my head down through the seat.”

  Mark Frost snored. The moon, the pallid belly of the moon, inundating the world with a tarnishedmagic not of living things, laying her silver fleshless hand on the water that whispered and lapped against the hull of the yacht. The Semitic man clutched his dead cigar and he and Fairchild sat in the implacable laxing of muscles and softening tissue of their forty odd years, seeing two wide curious blue eyes into which an inverted surprise came clear as water, and long golden curls swinging downward above the ordure; and they sat in silence, remembering youth and love, and time and death.

  ELEVEN O’CLOCK

  Mark Frost had roused and with a ghostly epigram had taken himself off to bed. Later the Semitic man rose and departed, leaving him with a cigar; and Fairchild sat with his stockinged feet on the rail, puffing at the unfamiliar weed. He could see the whole deck in the pallid moonlight, and presently he remarked someone sitting near the afterrail. How long this person had been there Fairchild could not have told, but he was there now, alone and quite motionless, and there was something about his attitude that unleashed Fairchild’s curiosity, and at last he rose from his chair.

  It was David, the steward. He sat on a coiled rope and he held something in his hands, between his knees. When Fairchild stopped beside him David raised his head slowly into the moonlight and gazed at the older man, making no effort to conceal that which he held. Fairchild leaned nearer to see. It was a slipper, a single slipper, cracked and stained with dried mud and disreputable, yet seeming still to hold i
n its mute shape something of that hard and sexless graveness of hers.

  After a while David looked away, gazing again out across the dark water and its path of shifting silver, holding the slipper between his hands; and without speaking Fairchild turned and went quietly away.

  The Fourth Day

  SEVEN O’CLOCK

  Fairchild waked and lay for a while luxuriously on his back. After a time he turned on his side to doze again, and when he turned he noticed the square of paper lying on the floor, as though it had been thrust under the door. He lay watching it for a while, then he came fully awake, and he rose and crossed the room and picked it up.

  Dear Mr. Fairchild: I am leaveing the boat to dqy I have got a better job I have got 2 days comeing to me I will not claim it I am leaveing the boat be fore the trip is over tell Mrs. More I have got a better job ask her she will pay you $5 dollars of it you loned me yours truly

  DAVID WEST.

  He reread the note, brooding over it, then he folded it and put it in the pocket of his pajama jacket, and poured himself a drink. The Semitic man in his berth snored, profound, defenseless on his back.