Mosquitoes

by William Faulkner

  “Are you a ghost, or am I?”

  “I was about to ask you that,” Gordon, sitting in the motorboat, replied. They sat and stared at each other. The other boats came up, and presently the one called Walter spoke.

  “Is this all you wanted out here,” he asked in a tone of polite disgust, breaking the spell, “or do you want to row around some more?”

  Fairchild went immoderately into hysterical laughter.

  FOUR O’CLOCK

  The malarial man had attached his skiff to the fat man’s motorboat and they had puttered away in a morose dejection, rewardless; the tug had whistled a final derisive blast, showed them her squat, unpretty stern, where the Negro leaned eating again of his grayish object, and as dirty a pair of heels as it would ever be their luck to see, and sailed away. The Nausikaa was free once more and she sped quickly onward, gaining offing, and the final sharp concussion of flesh and flesh died away beneath the afternoon.

  Mrs. Maurier had gazed at him, raised her hands in a fluttering cringing gesture, and cut him dead.

  “But I saw you on the boat right after we came back,” Fairchild repeated with a sort of stubborn wonder. He opened a fresh bottle.

  “You couldn’t have,” Gordon answered shortly. “I got out of the boat in the middle of Talliaferro’s excitement.” He waved away the proffered glass. The Semitic man said triumphantly, “I told you so,” and Fairchild essayed again, stubbornly:

  “But I saw—”

  “If you say that again,” the Semitic man told him, “I’ll kill you.” He addressed Gordon. “And you thought Dawson was drowned?”

  “Yes. The man who brought me back—I stumbled on his house this morning—he had already heard of it, some way. It must have spread all up and down the lake. He didn’t remember the name, exactly, and when I named over the party and said Dawson Fairchild, he agreed. Dawson and Gordon—you see? And so I thought—”

  Fairchild began to laugh again. He laughed steadily, trying to say something. “And so—and so he comes back and sp-spends—” Again that hysterical note came into his laughter and his hands trembled, clinking the bottle against the glass and sloshing a spoonful of the liquor onto the floor “—and spends . . . He comes back, you know, and spends half a day looking—looking for his own bububod—”

  The Semitic man rose and took the bottle and glass from him and half led, half thrust him into his bunk. “You sit down and drink this.” Fairchild drank the whisky obediently. The Semitic man turned to Gordon again. “What made you come back? Not just because you heard Dawson was drowned, was it?”

  Gordon stood against the wall, mudstained and silent. He raised his head and stared at them, and through them, with his harsh, uncomfortable stare. Fairchild touched the Semitic man’s knee warningly.

  “That’s neither here nor there,” he said. “The question is, Shall we or shall we not get drunk? I kind of think we’ve got to, myself.”

  “Yes,” the other agreed. “It looks like it’s up to us. Gordon ought to celebrate his resurrection, anyway.”

  “No,” Gordon answered, “I don’t want any.” The Semitic man protested, but again Fairchild gripped him silent, and when Gordon turned toward the door, he rose and followed him into the passage.

  “She came back too, you know,” he said.

  Gordon looked down at the shorter man with his lean bearded face, his lonely hawk’s face arrogant with shyness and pride. “I know it,” he answered (your name is like a little golden bell hung in my heart). “The man who brought me back was the same one who brought them back yesterday.”

  “He was?” said Fairchild. “He’s doing a landoffice business with deserters, ain’t he?”

  “Yes,” Gordon answered. And he went on down the passage with a singing lightness in his heart, a bright silver joy like wings.

  * * *

  The deck was deserted, as on that other afternoon. But he waited patiently in the hushed happiness of his dream and his arrogant bitter heart was young as any yet, as forgetful of yesterday and tomorrow; and soon, as though in answer to it, she came barelegged and molded by the wind of motion, and her grave surprise ebbed and she thrust him a hard tanned hand.

  “So you ran away,” she said.

  “And so did you,” he answered after an interval filled with a thing all silver and clean and fine.

  “That’s right. We’re sure the herrings on this boat, aren’t we?”

  “Herrings?”

  “Guts, you know,” she explained. She looked at him gravely from beneath the coarse dark bang of her hair. “But you came back,” she accused.

  “And so did you,” he reminded her from amid his soundless silver wings.

  FIVE O’CLOCK

  “But we’re moving again, at last,” Mrs. Maurier repeated at intervals, with a detached air, listening to a sound somehow vaguely convivial that welled at intervals up the companionway. Presently Mrs. Wiseman remarked the hostess’s preoccupied air and she too ceased, hearkening.

  “Not again?” she said with foreboding.

  “I’m afraid so,” the other answered unhappily.

  Mr. Talliaferro hearkened also. “Perhaps I’d better—” Mrs. Maurier fixed him with her eye, and Mrs. Wiseman said:

  “Poor fellows. They have had to stand a great deal in the last few days.”

  “Boys will be boys,” Mr. Talliaferro added with docile regret, listening with yearning to that vaguely convivial sound, Mrs. Maurier listened to it, coldly detached and speculative. She said:

  “But we are moving again, anyway.”

  SIX O’CLOCK

  The sun was setting across the scudding water: the water was shot goldenly with it, as was the gleaming mahogany-and-brass elegance of the yacht, and the silver wings in his heart were touched with pink and gold while he stood and looked downward upon the coarse crown of her head and at her body’s grave and sexless replica of his own attitude against the rail—an unconscious aping both comical and heartshaking.

  “Do you know,” he asked, “what Cyrano said once?” Once there was a king who possessed all things. All things were his: power, and glory, and wealth, and splendor and ease. And so he sat at dusk in his marble court filled with the sound of water and of birds and surrounded by the fixed gesturing of palms, looking out across the hushed fading domes of his city and beyond, to the dreaming lilac barriers of his world.

  “No: what?” she asked. But he only looked down upon her with his cavernous uncomfortable eyes. “What did he say?” she repeated. And then: “Was he in love with her?”

  “I think so. . . . Yes, he was in love with her. She couldn’t leave him, either. Couldn’t go away from him at all.”

  “She couldn’t? What’d he done to her? Locked her up?”

  “Maybe she didn’t want to,” he suggested.

  “Huh.” And then: “She was an awful goof, then. Was he fool enough to believe she didn’t want to?”

  “He didn’t take any chances. He had her locked up. In a book.”

  “In a book?” she repeated. Then she comprehended. “Oh. . . . That’s what you’ve done, isn’t it? With that marble girl without any arms and legs you made? Hadn’t you rather have a live one? Say, you haven’t got any sweetheart or anything, have you?”

  “No,” he answered. “How did you know?”

  “You look so bad. Shabby. But that’s the reason: no woman is going to waste time on a man that’s satisfied with a piece of wood or something. You ought to get out of yourself. You’ll either bust all of a sudden some day, or just dry up. . . . How old are you?”

  “Thirty-six,” he told her. She said:

  “Gabriel’s pants. Thirty-six years old, and living in a hole with a piece of rock, like a dog with a dry bone. Gabriel’s pants. Why don’t you get rid of it?” But he only stared down at her.

  “Give it to
me, won’t you?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll buy it from you, then.”

  “No.”

  “Give you—” She looked at him with sober detachment. “Give you seventeen dollars for it. Cash.”

  “No.”

  She looked at him with a sort of patient exasperation. “Well, what are you going to do with it? Have you got any reason for keeping it? You didn’t steal it, did you? Don’t tell me you haven’t got any use for seventeen dollars, living like you do. I bet you haven’t got five dollars to your name, right now. Bet you came on this party to save food. I’ll give you twenty dollars, seventeen in cash.” He continued to gaze at her as though he had not heard. —and the king spoke to a slave crouching at his feet—Halim— Lord? I possess all things, do I not?—Thou art the Son of Morning, Lord—Then listen, Halim: I have a desire—“Twenty-five,” she said, shaking his arm.

  “No.”

  “No, no, no, no!” She hammered both brown fists on the rail. “You make me so damn madl Can’t you say anything except No? You—you—” She glared at him with her angry tanned face and her grave opaque eyes, and used that phrase Jenny had traded her.

  He took her by the elbows, and she became taut, still watching his face: he could feel the small hard muscles in her arms. “What are you going to do?” she asked. He raised her from the floor, and she began to struggle. But he carried her implacably across the deck and sat on a deckchair and turned her face downward across his knees. She clawed and kicked in a silent fury, but he held her, and she ceased to struggle, and set her teeth into his leg through the gritty cloth of his trousers, and clung like a raging puppy while he drew her skirt tight across her thighs and spanked her, good.

  “I meant it!” she cried, raging and tearless, when he had dragged her teeth loose and set her upright on his lap. There was a small wet oval on his trouserleg. “I meant it!” she repeated, taut and raging.

  “I know you meant it. That’s why I spanked you. Not because you said it: what you said doesn’t mean anything because you’ve got the genders backward. I spanked you because you meant it, whether you knew what to say or not.”

  Suddenly she became lax, and wept, and he held her against his breast. But she ceased crying as abruptly, and lay quiet while he moved his hand over her face, slowly and firmly, but lightly. It is like a thing heard, not as a music of brass and plucked: strings is heard and a pallid voluption of dancing girls among the strings; nay, Halim, it is no pale virgin from Tal with painted fingernails and honey and myrrh cunningly beneath her tongue. Nor is it a scent as of myrrh and roses to soften and make to flow like water the pith in a man’s bones, nor yet—Stay, Halim: Once I was . . . once I was? Is not this a true thing? It is dawn, in the high cold hills, dawn is like a wind in the clean hills, and on the wind comes the thin piping of shepherds, and the smell of dawn and of almond trees on the wind. Is not that a true thing?—Ay, Lord. I told thee that. I was there.

  “Are you a petter, as well as a he-man?” she asked, becoming taut again and rolling upward her exposed eye. His hand moved slowly along her cheekbone and jaw, pausing, tracing a muscle, moving on. Then hark thee, Halim: I desire a thing that, had I not been at all, becoming aware of it I would awake; that, dead, remembering it I would cling to this world though it be as a beggar in a tattered robe; yea, rather that would I than a king among kings amid the soft and scented sounds of paradise. Find me this, O Halim. “Say,” she said curiously, no longer alarmed, “what are you doing that for?”

  “Learning your face.”

  “Learning my face? Are you going to make me in marble?” she asked quickly, raising herself. “Can you do a marble of my head?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I have it?” She thrust herself away, watching his face. “Make two of them, then,” she suggested. And then: “If you won’t do that, give me the other one, the one you’ve got, and I’ll pose for this one without charging you anything. How about that?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’d rather do that than to have this one. Have you learned my face good?” She moved again, quickly, returning to her former position. She turned her face up. “Learn it good.” Now, this Halim was an old man, so old that he had forgotten much. He had held this king on his first pony, walking patiently beside him through the streets and paths; he had stood between the young prince and all those forms of sudden and complete annihilation which the young prince had engendered after the ingenuous fashion of boys; he had got himself between the young prince and the inevitable parental admonishment which these entailed. And he sat with his gray hands on his thin knees and his gray head bent above his hands while dusk came across the simple immaculate domes of the city and into the court, stilling the sound of birds so that the lilac silence of the court was teased only by the plashing of water, and on among the grave restlessness of the palms. After a while Halim spoke.—Ah, Lord, in the Georgian hills I loved this maid myself, when I was a lad. But that was long ago, and she is dead.

  She lay still against his breast while sunset died like brass horns across the water. She said, without moving:

  “You’re a funny man. . . . I wonder if I could sculp? Suppose I learn your face? . . . Well don’t, then. I’d just as soon lie still. You’re a lot more comfortable to lie on than you look. Only I’d think you’d be getting tired now—I’m no hummingbird. Aren’t you tired of holding me?” she persisted. He moved his head at last and looked at her again with his caverned uncomfortable eyes, and she tried to do something with her eyes, assuming at the same time an attitude, a kind of leering invitation, so palpably theatrical and false that it but served to emphasize that grave, hard sexlessness of hers.

  “What are you trying to do,” he asked quietly, “vamp me?”

  She said, “Shucks.” She sat up, then squirmed off his lap and to her feet. “So you won’t give it to me? You just won’t?”

  “No,” he told her soberly. She turned away, but presently she stopped again and looked back at him.

  “Give you twenty-five dollars for it.”

  “No.”

  She said, “Shucks,” again, and she went on on her brown silent feet, and was gone. (Your name is like a little golden bell hung in my heart, and when I think of you . . .) The Nausikaa sped on. It was twilight abruptly; soon, a star.

  SEVEN O’CLOCK

  The place did appear impregnable, but then he had got used to feeling it behind him in his chair, where he knew nothing was going to happen to it. Besides, to change now, after so many days, would be like hedging on a bet. . . . Still, to let those two old bums kid him about it . . . He paused in the door of the saloon.

  The others were seated and well into their dinner, but before four vacant places that bland eternal grapefruit, sinister and bland as taxes. Some of them hadn’t arrived: he’d have time to run back to his room and leave it. And let one of them drunkards throw it out the window for a joke?

  Mrs. Wiseman carrying a tray said briskly, “Gangway, Pete,” and he crowded against the wall for her to pass, and then the niece turned her head and saw him. “Belly up,” she said, and he heard a further trampling drawing near. He hesitated a second, then he thrust his hat into the little cubbyhole between the two shelves. He’d risk it tonight, anyway. He could still sort of keep an eye on it. He took his seat.

  Fairchild’s watch surged in: a hearty joviality that presently died into startled consternation when it saw the grapefruit. “My God,” said Fairchild in a hushed tone.

  “Sit down, Dawson,” Mrs. Wiseman ordered sharply. “We’ve had about all that sort of humor this voyage will stand.”

  “That’s what I think,” he agreed readily. “That’s what Julius and Major Ayers and me think at every meal. And yet, when we come to the table, what do we see?”

  “My first is an Indian princess,” said Mark Frost in a hollow lilting tone. “But it’s
a little early to play charades yet, isn’t it?”

  Major Ayers said, “Eh?” looking from Mark Frost to Fairchild. Then he ventured, “It’s grapefruit, isn’t it?”

  “But we have so many of them,” Mrs. Maurier explained. “You are supposed to never tire of them.”

  “That’s it,” said Fairchild solemnly. “Major Ayers guessed it the first time. I wasn’t certain what it was, myself. But you can’t fool Major Ayers; you can’t fool a man that’s traveled as much as he has, with just a grapefruit. I guess you’ve shot lots of grapefruit in China and India, haven’t you, Major?”

  “Dawson, sit down,” Mrs. Wiseman repeated. “Make them sit down, Julius, or go out to the kitchen if they just want to stand around and talk.”