“Somebody, some drug clerk or something, has shredded the tender — and do you know what I believe? I believe that he’s always writing it for some woman, that he fondly believes he’s stealing a march on some brute bigger or richer or handsomer than he is; I believe that every word a writing man writes is put down with the ultimate intention of impressing some woman that probably don’t care anything at all for literature, as is the nature of women. Well, maybe she ain’t always a flesh and blood creature. She may be only the symbol of a desire. But she is feminine. Fame is only a by-product..., Do you remember, the old boys never even bothered to sign their things.... But, I don’t know. I suppose nobody ever knows a man’s reasons for what he does: you can only generalize from results.”
“He very seldom knows his reasons, himself,” the other said. “And by the time he has recovered from his astonishment at the unforeseen result he got, he has forgotten what reason he once believed he had.... But how can you generalize from a poem? What result does a poem have? You say that substance doesn’t matter, has no proper place in a poem. You have,” the Semitic man continued with curious speculation, “the strangest habit of contradicting yourself, of fumbling around and then turning tail and beating your listener to the refutation.... But God knows, there is plenty of room for speculation in modern verse. Fumbling, too, though the poets themselves do most of this. Don’t you agree, Eva?”
His sister answered “What?” turning upon him her dark, preoccupied gaze. He repeated the question. Fairchild interrupted in full career:
“The trouble with modern verse is, that to comprehend it you must have recently passed through an emotional experience identical with that through which the poet himself has recently passed. The poetry of modern poets is like a pair of shoes that only those whose feet are shaped like the cobbler’s feet, can wear; while the old boys turned out shoes that anybody who can walk at all can wear—”
“Like overshoes,” the other suggested.
“Like overshoes,” Fairchild agreed. “But, then, I ain’t disparaging. Perhaps the few that the shoes fit can go a lot further than a whole herd of people shod alike could go.”
“Interesting, anyway,” the Semitic man said, “to reduce the spiritual progress of the race to terms of an emotional migration; esthetic Israelites crossing unwetted a pink sea of dullness and security. What about it, Eva?”
Mrs. Wiseman, thinking of Jenny’s soft body, came out of her dream. “I think you are both not only silly, but dull.” She rose. “I want to burn another cigarette, Dawson.”
He gave her one, and a match, and she left them. Fairchild turned a few pages. “It’s kind of difficult for me to reconcile her with this book,” he said slowly. “Does it strike you that way?”
“Not so much that she wrote this,” the other answered, “but that she wrote anything at all. That anybody should. But there’s no puzzle about the book itself. Not to me, that is. But you, straying trustfully about this park of dark and rootless trees which Dr. Ellis and your Germans have recently thrown open to the public... You’ll always be a babe in that wood, you know. Bewildered, and slightly annoyed; restive, like Ashur-bani-pal’s stallion when his master mounted Mm.”
“Emotional bisexuality,” Fairchild said.
“Yes. But you are trying to reconcile the book and the author. A book is the writer’s secret life, the dark twin of a man: you can’t reconcile them. And with you, when the inevitable clash comes, the author’s actual self is the one that goes down, for you are of those for whom fact and fallacy gain rerisimilitude by being in cold print.”
“Perhaps so,” Fairchild said, with detachment, brooding again on a page. “Listen:
“‘Lips that of thy weary all seem weariest,
Seem wearier for the curled and pallid sly
Still riddle of thy secret face, and thy
Sick despair of its own ill obsessed;
Lay not to heart thy boy’s hand, to protest
That smiling leaves thy tired mouth reconciled,
For swearing so keeps thee but ill beguiled
With secret joy of thine own woman’s breast.
“Weary thy mouth with smiling; canst thou bride
Thyself with thee and thine own kissing slake?
Thy virgin’s waking doth itself deride
With sleep’s sharp absence, coming so awake,
And near thy mouth thy twinned heart’s grief doth hide
For there’s no breast between: it cannot break.’
“‘Hermaphroditus,’” he read. “That’s what it’s about. It’s a kind of dark perversion. Like a fire that don’t need any fuel, that lives on its own heat. I mean, all modern verse is a kind of perversion. Like the day for healthy poetry is over and done with, that modern people were not born to write poetry any more. Other things, I grant. But not poetry. Kind of like men nowadays are not masculine and lusty enough to tamper with something that borders so close to the unnatural. A kind of sterile race: women too masculine to conceive, men too feminine to beget...
He closed the book and removed his spectacles slowly. “You and me sitting here, right now, this is one of the most insidious things poetry has to combat. General education has made it too easy for everybody to have an opinion on it. On everything else, too. The only people who should be allowed an opinion on poetry should be poets. But as it is... But then, all artists have to suffer it, though: oblivion and scorn and indignation and, what is worse, the adulation of fools.”
“And,” added the Semitic man, “what is still worse: talk.”
TWELVE O’CLOCK
“You must get rather tired of bothering about it,” Fairchild suggested as they descended toward lunch. (There was an offshore breeze and the saloon was screened. And besides, it was near the galley.) “Why don’t you leave it in your stateroom? Major Ayers is pretty trustworthy, I guess.”
“It’ll be all right,” Pete replied. “I’ve got used to it. I’d miss it, see?”
“Yes,” the other agreed. “New one, eh?”
“I’ve had it a while.” Pete removed it and Fairchild remarked its wanton gay band and the heavy plaiting of the straw.
“I like a panama, myself,” he murmured. “A soft hat.... This must have cost five or six dollars, didn’t it?”
“Yeh,” Pete agreed, “but I guess I can look out for it.”
“It’s a nice hat,” the Semitic man said. “Not everybody can wear a stiff straw hat. But it rather suits the shape of Pete’s face, don’t you think?”
“Yes, that’s so,” Fairchild agreed. “Pete has a kind of humorless reckless face that a stiff hat just suits. A man with a humorous face should never wear a stiff straw hat. But then, only a humorless man would dare buy one,”
Pete preceded them into the saloon. The man’s intent was kindly, anyway. Funny old bird. Easy. Easy. Somebody’s gutting. Anybody’s. Fairchild spoke to him again with a kind of tactful persistence:
“Look here, here’s a good place to leave it while you eat.
You hadn’t seen this place, I reckon. Slip it under here, see? It’ll be safe as a church under here until you want it again. Look, Julius, this place was made for a stiff straw hat, wasn’t it?” This place was a collapsible serving table of two shelves that let shallowly into the bulkhead: it operated by a spring and anything placed on the lower shelf would be inviolate until some one came along and lowered the shelves again.
“It don’t bother me any,” Pete said.
“All right,” the other answered. “But you might as well leave it here: it’s such a grand place to leave a hat. Lots better than the places in theaters. I kind of wish I had a hat to leave there, don’t you, Julius?”
“I can hold it all right,” Pete said again.
“Sure,” agreed Fairchild readily, “but just try it a moment.” Pete did so, and the other two watched with interest. “It just fits, don’t it? Why not leave it there, just for a trial?”
“I guess not. I guess I’ll hold onto it,” Pete
decided. He took his hat again and when he had taken his seat he slid it into its usual place between the chairback and himself.
Mrs. Maurier was chanting: “Sit down, people,” in an apologetic, hopeless tone. “You must excuse things. I had hoped to have lunch on deck, but with the wind blowing from the shore...”
“They’ve found where we are and that we are good to eat, so it doesn’t make any difference where the wind blows from,” Mrs. Wiseman said, businesslike with her tray.
“And with the steward gone, and things so unsettled,” the hostess resumed in antistrophe, roving her unhappy gaze. “And Mr. Gordon—”
“Oh, he’s all right,” Fairchild said heavily helpful, taking his seat. “He’ll show up all right.”
“Don’t be a fool, Aunt Pat,” the niece added. “What would he want to get drowned for?”
“I’m so unlucky,” Mrs. Maurier moaned, “things — things happen to me, you see,” she explained, haunted with that vision of a pale implacability of water, and sodden pants, and a red beard straying amid the slanting green regions of the sea in a dreadful simulation of life.
“Aw, shucks,” the niece protested, “ugly like he is, and so full of himself.... He’s got too many good reasons for getting drowned. It’s the ones that don’t have any excuse for it that get drowned and run down by taxis and things.”
“But you never can tell what people will do,” Mrs. Maurier rejoined, becoming profound through the sheer disintegration of comfortable things. “People will do anything.”
“Well, if he’s drowned, I guess he wanted to be,” the niece said bloodlessly. “He certainly can’t expect us to fool around here waiting for him, anyway. I never heard of anybody fading out without leaving a note of some kind. Did you, Jenny?” Jenny sat in a soft anticipatory dread. “Did he get drownded?” she asked. “One day at Mandeville, I saw...” Into Jenny’s heavenly eyes there welled momentarily a selfless emotion, temporarily pure and dean. Mrs. Wiseman looked at her, compelling her with her eyes. She said:
“Oh, forget about Gordon for a while. If he’s drowned (which I don’t believe) he’s drowned; if he isn’t, he’ll show up again, just as Dawson says.”
“That’s what I say,” the niece supported her quickly. “Only he’d better show up soon, if he wants to go back with us. We’ve got to get back home.”
“You have?” her aunt said with heavy astonished irony. “How are you going, pray?”
“Perhaps her brother will make us a boat with his saw,” Mark Frost suggested.
“That’s an idea,” Fairchild agreed. “Say, Josh, haven’t you got a tool of some sort that’ll get us off again?” The nephew regarded Fairchild solemnly.
“Whittle it off,” he said. “Lend you my knife if you bring it back right away.” He resumed his meal.
“Well, we’ve got to get back,” his sister repeated. “You folks can stay around here if you want to, but me and Josh have got to get back to New Orleans.”
“Going by Mandeville?” Mark Frost asked.
“But the tug should be here at any time,” Mrs. Maurier insisted, reverting again to her hopeless amaze. The niece gave Mark Frost a grave speculative stare.
“You’re smart, aren’t you?”
“I’ve got to be,” Mark Frost answered equably, “or I’d—”
“ — have to work, huh? It takes a smart man to sponge off of Aunt Pat, don’t it?”
“Patricia!” her aunt exclaimed.
“Well, we have got to get back. We’ve got to get ready to go up to New Haven next month.”
Her brother came again out of his dream. “We have?” he repeated heavily.
“I’m going, too,” she answered quickly. “Hank said I could.”
“Look here,” her brother said, “are you going to follow me around all your life?”
“I’m going to Yale,” she repeated stubbornly. “Hank said I could go.”
“Hank?” Fairchild repeated, watching the niece with interest.
“It’s what she calls her father,” her aunt explained. “Patricia—”
“Well, you can’t go,” her brother answered violently. “Dam’f I’m going to have you tagging around behind me forever. I can’t move, for you. You ought to be a bill collector.”
“I don’t care: I’m going,” she repeated stubbornly. Her aunt said vainly:
“Theodore!”
“Well, I can’t do anything, for her,” he complained bitterly. “I can’t move, for her. And now she’s talking about going — She worried Hank until he had to say she could go. God knows, I’d ‘a’ said that too: I wouldn’t want her around me all the time.”
“Shut your goddam mouth,” his sister told him. Mrs. Manner chanted “Patricia, Patricia.”
“I’m going, I’m going, I’m going!”
“What’ll you do up there?” Fairchild asked. The niece whirled, viciously belligerent. Then she said:
“What’d you say?”
“I mean, what’ll you do to pass the time while he’s at classes and things? Are you going to take some work, too?”
“Oh, I’ll just go around with balloon pants. To night clubs and things. I won’t bother him: I won’t hardly see him, he’s such a damn crum.”
“Like hell you will,” her brother interrupted, “you’re not going, I tell you.”
“Yes, I am. Hank said I could go. He said I could. I—”
“Well, you won’t ever see me: I’m not going to have you tagging around after me up there.”
“Are you the only one in the world that’s going up there next year? Are you the only one that’ll be there? I’m not going up there to waste my time hanging around the entrance to Dwight or Osborne hall just to see you. You won’t catch me sitting on the rail of the Green with freshmen. I’ll be going to places that maybe you’ll get into in three years, if you don’t bust out or something. Don’t you worry about me. Who was it,” she rushed on, “got invited up for Prom Week last year, only Hank wouldn’t let me go? Who was it saw the game last fall, while you were perched up on the top row with a bunch of newspaper reporters, in the rain?”
“You didn’t go up for Prom Week.”
“Because Hank wouldn’t let me. But I’ll be there next year, and you can haul out the family sock on it.”
“Oh, shut up for a while,” her brother said wearily. “Maybe some of these ladies want to talk some.”
TWO O’CLOCK
And there was the tug, squatting at her cables, breaking the southern horizon with an effect of abrupt magic, like a stereopticon slide flashed on the screen while you had turned your head for a moment.
“Look at that boat,” said Mark Frost, broaching. Mrs. Maurier directly behind him, shrieked:
“It’s the tug!” She turned and screamed down the companionway: “It’s the tug: the tug has come!” The others all chanted “The tug! The tug!” Major Ayers exclaimed dramatically and opportunely:
“Ha, gone away!”
“It has come at last,” Mrs. Maurier shrieked. “It came while we were at lunch. Has any one—” She roved her eyes about. “The captain — Has he been notified? Mr. Talliaferro — ?”
“Surely,” Mr. Talliaferro agreed with polite alacrity, mounting the stairs and disintegrating his members with expedition, “I’ll summon the captain.”
So he rushed forward and the others came on deck and stared at the tug, and a gentle breeze blew offshore and they slapped intermittently at their exposed surfaces. Mr. Talliaferro shouted: “Captain! oh, Captain!” about the deck: he screamed it into the empty wheelhouse and returned. “He must be asleep,” he told them.
“We are off at last,” Mrs. Maurier intoned, “we can get off at last. The tug has come: I sent for it days and days ago. But we can get off, now. But the captain.... Where is the captain? He shouldn’t be asleep, at this time. Of all times for the captain to be asleep — Mr. Talliaferro—”
“But Gordon,” Mark Frost said, “how about—”
Miss Jameson clutched
his arm. “Let’s get off, first,” she said.
“I called him,” Mr. Talliaferro reminded them. “He must be asleep in his room.”
“He must be asleep,” Mrs. Maurier repeated. “Will some gentleman—”
Mr. Talliaferro took his cue. “I’ll go,” he said.
“If you will be so kind,” Mrs. Maurier screamed after him. She stared again at the tug. “He should have been here, so we could be all ready to start,” she said fretfully. She waved her handkerchief at the tug: it ignored her.
“We might be getting everything ready, though,” Fairchild suggested. “We ought to have everything ready when they pull us off.”
“That’s so,” Mark Frost agreed. “We’d better run down and pack, hadn’t we?”
“Ah, we ain’t going back home yet. We’ve just started the cruise. Are we, folks?”
They all looked at the hostess. She roved her stricken eyes, but she said at last, bravely: “Why, no. No, of course not, if you don’t want to.... But the captain: we ought to be ready,” she repeated.
“Well, let’s get ready,” Mrs. Wiseman said.
“Nobody knows anything about boats except Fairchild,” Mark Frost said. Mr. Talliaferro returned, barren.
“Me?” Fairchild repeated. “Talliaferro’s been across the whole ocean. And there’s Major Ayers. All Britishers cut their teeth on anchor chains and marlinspikes.”
“
“And draw their toys with lubbers’ lines,” Mrs. Wiseman chanted. “It’s almost a poem. Finish it, some one.”
Mr. Talliaferro made a sound of alarm. “No: really, I—” Mrs. Maurier turned to Fairchild.
“Will you assume charge until the captain appears, Mr, Fairchild?”
“Mr. Fairchild,” Mr. Talliaferro parroted. “Mr. Fairchild is temporary captain, people. The captain doesn’t seem to be on board,” he whispered to Mrs. Maurier.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 52
