She lay in bed — her bed, especially built for her, was the most comfortable on board — surrounded, lapped in security and easeful things, walled and secure within the bland, hushed planes of the bulkheads. A faint, happy sound came in to her: little tongues of water lapping ceaselessly alongside the yacht, against her yacht — that island of security that was always waiting to transport her comfortably beyond the rumors of the world and its sorrows; and beyond the yacht, space: water and sky and darkness and silence; a worn cold moon neither merry nor sad.... Mrs. Maurier lay in her easy bed, within her comfortable room, weeping long shuddering sobs: a passive terrible hysteria without a sound.
THIS morning waked in a quiet fathomless mist. It was upon the world of water unstirred; soon the first faint wind of morning would thin it away, but now it was about the Nausikaa timelessly: the yacht was a thick jewel swaddled in soft gray wool, while in the wool somewhere dawn was like a suspended breath. The first morning of Time might well be beyond this mist, and trumpets preliminary to a golden flourish; and held in suspension in it might be heard yet the voices of the Far Gods on the first morning saying, It is well: let there be light. A short distance away, a shadow, a rumor, a more palpable thickness: this was the shore. The water fading out of the mist became as a dark metal in which the Nausikaa was rigidly fixed, and the yacht was motionless, swaddled in mist like a fat jewel.
FIVE O’CLOCK
Up from the darkness of the companionway the niece came, naked and silent as a ghost. She stood for a space, but there was no sound from anywhere, and she crossed the deck and stopped again at the rail, breathing the soft chill mist into her lungs, feeling the mist swaddling her firm simple body with a faint lingering chillness. Her legs and arms were so tan that naked she appeared to wear a bathing suit of a startling white. She climbed the rail. The tender rocked a little under her, causing the black motionless water to come alive, making faint sounds. Then she slid over the stem and swam out into the mist.
The water divided with oily reluctance, closing again behind her with scarce a ripple. Here, at the water level, she could see nothing save a grayness and flaccid disturbed tongues of water lapping into it, leaving small fleeting gaps between mist and water before the mist filled them again silently as settling wings. The hull of the yacht was a vague thing, a thing felt, known, rather than seen. She swam slowly, circling the place where she knew it should be.
She swam slowly and steadily, trying to keep her approximate distance from the yacht by instinct. But, consciously this was hard to do; consciously in this vague restricted immensity, this limitless vagueness whose center was herself, the yacht could be in any direction from her. She paused and trod water while little tongues of water kissed her face, lapping against her lips. Iris on my right, she told herself. Iris on my right, over there. Not fear: merely a faint unease, an exasperation; but to reassure herself she swam a few strokes in that direction. The mist neither thickened nor thinned.
She trod water again and water licked at her face soundlessly. Damn your fool soul, she whispered, and at that moment a round huge thing like a dead lidless eye watched her suddenly from the mist and there came a faint sound from somewhere in the mist above her head. In two strokes she touched the hull of the yacht: a vindication, and she knew a faint pride and a touch of relief as she swam along the hull and circled the stern. She grasped the gunwale of the tender and hung there for a while, getting her wind back.
That faint sound came again from the deck; a movement, and she spoke into the mist: “David?” The mist took the word, sweeping it lightly against the hull, then it rebounded again and the mist absorbed it. But he had heard and he appeared vaguely above her at the rail, looking down at her where she hung in the water. “Go away, so I can get out,” she said. He didn’t move, and she added: “I haven’t got on a bathing suit. Go away a minute, David.”
But he didn’t move. He leaned over the rail, looking at her with a dumb and utter longing and after a while she slid quickly and easily into the tender, and still he remained motionless, making no move to help her as her grave simple body came swiftly aboard the yacht. “Be back in a minute,” she said over her shoulder and her startling white bathing suit sped across the deck and out of the ken of his dog’s eyes. The mist without thinning was filling with light: an imminence of dawn like a glory, a splendor of trumpets unheard.
Her minute was three minutes. She reappeared in her little colored linen dress, her dark coarse hair still damp, carrying her shoes and stockings in her hand. He hadn’t moved at all.
“Well, let’s get going,” she said. She looked at him impatiently. “Aren’t you ready yet?” He stirred at last, watching her with the passive abjectness of a dog. “Come on,” she said sharply. “Haven’t you got the stuff for breakfast yet? What’s the matter with you, David? Snap out of your trance.” She examined him again, with a sober impersonality. “You didn’t believe I was going to do it — is that it? Or are you backing out yourself? Come on, say so now, if you want to call it off.” She came nearer, examining his face with her grave opaque eyes. She extended her hand. “David?”
He took her hand slowly, looking at her, and she grasped his hand and shook his arm sharply. “Wake up. Say, you haven’t — Come on, let’s get some stuff for breakfast, and beat it. We haven’t got all day.”
He followed her and in the galley she switched on the light and chose a flat box of bacon and a loaf of bread, putting them on a table and delving again among boxes and lockers and shelves. “Have you got matches? a knife?” she asked over her shoulder. “And — where are oranges? Let’s take some oranges. I love oranges, don’t you?” She turned her head to look at him. His hand was just touching her sleeve, so diffidently that she had not felt it. She turned suddenly, putting the oranges down, and put her arms about him, hard and firm and sexless, drawing his cheek down to her sober moist kiss. She could feel his hammering erratic heart against her breast, could hear it surging in the silence almost as though it were in her own body. His arms tightened and he moved his head, seeking her mouth, but she evaded him with a quick movement, without reproof.
“No, no, not that. Everybody does that.” She strained him against her hard body again, then released him. “Come on, now. Have you got everything?” She examined the shelves again, finding at last a small basket. It was filled with damp lettuce but she dumped the lettuce out and put her things in it. “You take my shoes. They’ll go in your pocket, won’t they?” She crumpled her limp blonde stockings into her slippers and gave them to him. Then she picked up the basket and snapped off the light.
Day was a nearer thing yet, though it was not quite come. Though the mist had not thinned, the yacht was visible from stem to stern, asleep like a gull with folded wings; and against the hull the water sighed a long awakening sigh. The shoreline was darker, a more palpable vagueness in the mist.
“Say,” she remarked, stopping suddenly, “how are we going to get ashore? I forgot that. We don’t want to take the tender.”
“Swim,” he suggested. Her dark damp head came just to his chin and she mused for a time in a sober consternation.
“Isn’t there some way we can go in the tender and then pull it back to the yacht with a rope?”
“I... Yes. Yes, we can do that.”
“Well, you get a rope then. Snap into it.”
When he returned with a coiled line she was already in the tender with the oars, and she watched with interest while he passed the rope around a stanchion and brought both ends into the boat with him and made one of the ends fast to the ringbolt in the stem of the skiff. Then she caught the idea and she sat and paid out the line while he pulled away for shore. Soon they beached and she sprang ashore, still holding the free end of the rope. “How’re we going to keep the tender from pulling the rope back around that post and getting aloose?” she asked.
“I’ll show you,” he answered, and she watched him while he tied the oars and the rowlocks together with the free end of the line and wedg
ed them beneath the thwarts. “That’ll hold, I guess. Somebody’ll be sure to see her pretty soon,” he added, and prepared to draw the skiff back to the yacht.
“Wait a minute,” she said. She mused gravely, gazing at the dim shadowy yacht, then she borrowed matches from him, and sitting on the gunwale of the tender she tore a strip of paper from the bacon box and with a charred match printed Going to — She looked up. “Where are we going?” He looked at her and she added quickly: “I mean, what town? We’ll have to go to a town somewhere, you know, to get back to New Orleans so I can get some clothes and my seventeen dollars. What’s the name of a town?”
After a while he said: “I don’t know. I never—”
“That’s right, you never were over here before, either, were you? Well, what’s that town the ferries go to? the one Jenny’s always talking about you have fun at?” She stared again at the vague shape of the Nausikaa, then she suddenly printed Mandeville. “That’s the name of it — Mandeville. Which way is Mandeville from here?” He didn’t know, and she added: “No matter, we’ll find it, I guess.” She signed the note and laid it on the sternseat, weighting it with a small rock. “Now, pull her off,” she commanded, and soon there came back to them across the motionless water a faint thud.
“Good-by, Nausikaa” she said. “Wait,” she added, “I better put my shoes on, I guess.” He gave her her slippers and she sat flat on the narrow beach and put them on, returning the crumpled stockings to him. “Wait,” she said again, taking the stockings again and flipping them out. She slid one of them over her brown arm and withdrew a crumpled wad — the money she had been able to rake up by ransacking her aunt’s and Mrs. Wiseman’s and Miss Jameson’s things. She reached her hand and he drew her to her feet. “You’d better carry the money,” she said, giving it to him. “Now, for breakfast,” she said, clutching his hand.
SIX O’CLOCK
Trees heavy and ancient with moss loomed out of it hugely and grayly: the mist might have been a sluggish growth between and among them. No, this mist might have been the first prehistoric morning of time itself; it might have been the very substance in which the seed of the beginning of things fecundated; and these huge and silent trees might have been the first of living things, too recently born to know either fear or astonishment, dragging their sluggish umbilical cords from out the old miasmic womb of a nothingness latent and dreadful. She crowded against him, suddenly quiet and subdued, trembling a little like a puppy against the reassurance of his arm. “Gee,” she said in a small voice.
That small sound did not die away. It merely dissolved into the moist gray surrounding them, and it was as if at a movement of any sort the word might repeat itself somewhere between sky and ground as a pebble is shaken out of cotton batting. He put his arm across her shoulders and at his touch she turned quickly beneath his armpit, hiding her face.
“I’m hungry,” she said at last, in that small voice. “That’s what’s the matter with me,” she added with more assurance. “I want something to eat.”
“Want me to build a fire?” he asked of the dark coarse crown of her head.
“No, no,” she answered quickly, holding to him. “Besides, we are too close to the lake, here. Somebody might see it. We ought to get farther from the shore.” She clung to him, inside his arm. “I guess we’d better wait here until the fog goes away, though. A piece of bread will do.” She reached her brown hand. “Let’s sit down somewhere. Let’s sit down and eat some bread,” she decided. “And when the fog goes away we can find the road. Come on, let’s find a log or something,”
She drew him by the hand and they sat at the foot of a huge tree, on the damp ground, while she delved into the basket. She broke a bit from the loaf and gave it to him, and a fragment for herself. Then she slid further down against her propped heels until her back rested against him, and bit from her bread. She sighed contentedly.
“There now. Don’t you just love this?” she raised her grave chewing face to look at him. “All gray and lonesome. Makes you feel kind of cold on the outside and warm inside, doesn’t it? — say, you aren’t eating your bread. Eat your bread, David. I love bread, don’t you?” She moved again, inward upon herself: in some way she seemed to get herself yet closer against him.
The mist was already beginning to thin, breaking with heavy reluctance before a rumor of motion too faint to be called wind. The mist broke raggedly and drifted in sluggish wraiths that seemed to devour all sound, swaying and swinging like huge spectral apes from tree to tree, rising and falling, revealing somber patriarchs of trees, hiding them again. From far, far back in the swamp there came a hoarse homely sound — an alligator’s lovesong.
“Chicago,” she murmured. “Didn’t know we were so near home.” Soon the sun; and she sprawled against him, contentedly munching her bread.
SEVEN O’CLOCK
They hadn’t found the road, but they had reached a safe distance from the lake. She had discovered a butterfly larger than her two hands clinging to a spotlight of sun on the ancient trunk of a tree, moving its damp lovely wings like laboring exposed lungs of glass or silk; and while he gathered firewood — a difficult feat, since neither of them had thought of a hatchet — she paused at the edge of a black stream to harry a sluggish thick serpent with a small switch. A huge gaudy bird came up and cursed her, and the snake ignored her with a sort of tired unillusion and plopped heavily into the thick water. Then, looking around, she saw thin fire in the somber equivocal twilight of the trees.
They ate again: the oranges; they broiled bacon, scorched it, dropped it on the ground, retrieved it and wiped it and chewed it down; and the rest of the loaf. “Don’t you just love camping?” She sat crosslegged and wiped a strip of bacon on her skirt. “Let’s always do this, David: let’s don’t ever have a house where you’ve always got to stay in one place. We’ll just go around like this, camping... David?” She raised the strip of bacon and met his dumb yearning eyes. She poised her bacon.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she told him sharply. Then, more gently: “Don’t ever look at anybody like that. You’ll never get anybody to run away with you if you look at ’em like that, David.” She extended her hand. His hand came out, slowly and diffidently, but her grip was hard, actual. She shook his arm for emphasis.
“How was I looking at you?” he asked after a while, in a voice that didn’t seem to him to be his voice at all. “How do you want me to look at you?”
“Oh — you know how. Not like that, though. Like that, you look at me just like a — a man, that’s all. Or a dog. Not like David.” She writhed her hand free and ate her strip of bacon. Then she wiped her fingers on her dress. “Gimme a cigarette.”
The mist had gone, and the sun came already sinister and hot among the trees, upon the miasmic earth. She sat on her crossed legs, replete, smoking. Abruptly she poised the cigarette in a tense cessation of all movement. Then she moved her head quickly and stared at him in consternation. She moved again, suddenly slapping her bare leg.
“What is it?” he asked.
For reply she extended her flat tan palm. In the center of it was a dark speck and a tiny splash of crimson. “Good Lord, gimme my stockings,” she exclaimed. “We’ll have to move. Gee, I’d forgotten about them,” she said, drawing her stockings over her straightening legs. She sprang to her feet. “We’ll soon be out, though. David, stop looking at me that way. Look like you were having a good time, at least. Cheer up, David. A man would think you were losing your nerve already. Buck up: I think it’s grand, running off like this. Don’t you think it’s grand?” She turned her head and saw again that diffident still gesture of his hand touching her dress. Across the hot morning there came the high screech of the Nausikaa’s whistle.
EIGHT O’CLOCK;
“No, sir,” the nephew answered patiently. “It’s a pipe.”
“A pipe, eh?” repeated Major Ayers, glaring at him with his hard affable little eyes. “You make pipes, eh?”
“I’m making th
is one,” the nephew replied with preoccupation.
“Came away and left your own ashore, perhaps?” Major Ayers suggested after a time.
“Naw. I don’t smoke ’em. I’m just making a new kind.”
“Ah, I see. For the market.” Major Ayers’ mind slowly took fire. “Money in it, eh? Americans would buy a new kind of pipe, too. You’ve made arrangements for the marketing of it, of course?”
“No, I’m just making it. For fun,” the nephew explained in that patient tone you use with obtuse children. Major Ayers glared at his bent preoccupied head.
“Yes,” he agreed. “Best to say nothing about it until you’ve completed all your computations regarding the cost of production. Don’t blame you at all.” Major Ayers brooded with calculation. He said: “Americans really would buy a new sort of pipe. Strange no one had thought of that.” The nephew carved minutely at his pipe. Major Ayers said secretly: “No, I don’t blame you at all. But when you’ve done, you’ll require capital: that sort of thing, you know. And then... a word to your friends at the proper time, eh?” The nephew looked up. “A word to my friends?” he repeated. “Say, I’m just making a pipe, I tell you, A pipe. Just to be making it. For fun.”
“Right you are,” Major Ayers agreed suavely. “No offense, dear lad. I don’t blame you, don’t blame you at all. Experienced the same situation myself.”
NINE O’CLOCK
They had found the road at last — two faint scars and a powder of unbearable dust upon a raised levee traversing the swamp. But between them and the road was a foul sluggish width of water and vegetation and biology. Huge cypress roots thrust up like weathered bones out of a green scum and a quaking neither earth nor water, and always those bearded eternal trees like gods regarding without alarm this puny desecration of a silence of air and earth and water ancient when hoary old Time himself was a pink and dreadful miracle in his mother’s arms.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 44
