“What’d the bird do?” the nephew asked. “Gyp you?”
“It was cold, that night. Late November, and a cold wind came right out of the north, whistling around that building, among the bare trees. Just a few dead leaves on the trees, making a kind of sad dry sound. We had won a football game that afternoon, and I could hear yelling occasionally, and see lights in the dormitories where the ones that could alfford to lived, wann and jolly looking, with the bare trees swaying and waving across the windows. Still celebrating the game we had won.
“So I walked back and forth, stamping my feet, and after a while I went around the corner of the library where it wasn’t so cold, and I could stick out my head occasionally in case they came looking for me. From this side of the building I could see the hall where the girl students lived. It was all lighted up, as if for a party, and I could see shadows coming and going upon the drawn shades where they were dressing and fixingtheir hair and all; and pretty soon I heard a crowd coming across the campus and I thought, here they come at last.i fsut they passed on, going toward the girls’ hall, where the party was.
“I walked up and down some more, stamping my feet. Pretty soon I heard a clock striking nine. In half an hour I’d have to be back at the power house. They were playing music at the party: I could hear it even in spite of the closed windows; and I thought maybe I’d go closer. But the wind was colder: there was a little snow in it, and besides I was afraid they mighr come for me and I wouldn’t be there. So I stamped my feet, walking up and down.
“Pretty soon I knew it must be nine-thirty, but I stayed a while longer, and soon it was snowing hard—a blizzard. It was the first snow of the year, and somebody came to the door of the party and saw it, and then they all came out to look, yelling: I could hear the girl’s voices, kind of high and excited and fresh, and the music was louder. Then they went back, and the music was faint again, and then the clock struck ten. So I went back to the power house. I was already late.” He ceased, musing on the glittering battalions of waves and hands of wind slapping them whitely. He laughed again. “But I nearly joined one, though.”
“How about the bird?” the nephew asked. “Didn’t you hunt him up the next day?”
“He was gone. I never saw him again. I found out later he wasn’t even a student in the college. I never did know what became of him,” Fairchild rose. “Well, you get it finished, and we’ll form a stock company and get rich.”
The nephew sat clutching his knife and his cylinder, gazing after Fairchild’s stocky back until the other passed from view. “You poor goof,” the nephew said, resuming his work again.
TWO O’CLOCK
It was that interval so unbearable to young active people: directly after lunch on a summer day. Everyone else was dozing somewhere, no one to talk to and nothing to do. It was warmer than in the forenoon, though the sky was still clear and waves yet came in before a steady wind, slapping the Nausikaa on her comfortable beam and creaming on to fade and die frothing up the shoaling beach and its still palisade of trees.
The niece hung over the bows, watching the waves. They were diminishing: by sunset there would be none at all. But occasionally one came in large enough to send up a thin exhilarating spray. Her dress whipped about her bare legs and she gazed downward into the restless water, trying to make up her mind to get her bathing suit. But if I go in now I’ll get tired and then when the others go in later, I won’t have anything to do. She gazed down into the water, watching it surge and shift and change, watching the slack anchor cables severing the incoming waves, feeling the wind against her back.
Then the wind blew upon her face and she idled along the deck and paused again at the wheelhouse, yawning. Nobody there. But that’s so, the helmsman went off early to get word for a tug. She entered the room, examining the control fixtures with interest. She touched the wheel tentatively. It turned all right: they must have fixed it, whatever was broken about it. She removed her hand and examined the room again, hopefully, and her eyes came upon a binocular suspended from a nail in the wall.
Through the binocular she saw a blur in two colors, but presently under her fingers the blur became trees startlingly distinct and separate leaf by leaf and bough by bough, and pendants of rusty green moss were beards of contemplative goats ruminating among the trees and above a yellow strip of beach and a smother of foam in which the sun hung little fleeting rainbows.
She watched this for a time, entranced, then swinging the glass slowly, waves slid past at arm’s length, curling and creaming; and swinging the glass farther, the rail of the yacht leaped monstrously into view and upon the rail a nameless object emitting at that instant a number of circular yellow basins, The yellow things fell into the water, seemingly so near, yet without any sound, and swinging the glass again, the thing that had emitted them was gone and in its place the back of a man close enough for her to touch him by extending her hand.
She lowered the glass and the man’s back sprang away, becoming that of the steward carrying a garbage pail, and she knew then what the yellow basins were. She raised the glass again and again the steward sprang suddenly and silently within reach of her arm. She called, “Hey!” and when he paused and turned, his face was plain as plain. She waved her hand to him, but he only looked at her a moment. Then he went on and around a corner.
She hung the binocular back on its nail and followed along the deck where he had disappeared. Inside the companionway and obliquely through the galley door she could see him moving about, washing the luncheon dishes, and she sat on the top step of the stairs. There was a small round window beside her, and he bent over the sink while lightfell directly upon his brown head. She watched him quietly, intently but without rudeness, as a child would, until he looked up and saw her tanned serious face framed roundly in the port. “Hello,” she said.
“Hello,” he answered as gravely.
“You have to work all the time, don’t you?” she asked. “Say, I liked the way you went over after that man, yesterday. With your clothes on, too. Not many. have sense enough to dive away from the propeller. What’s your name?”
David West, he told her, scraping a stew pan and sloshing water into it. Stearn rose from the water and about it bobbed a cake of thick implacable-looking yellow soap. The niece sat bent forward to see through the window, rubbing her palms on her bare calves.
“It’s too bad you have to work whether we are aground or not,” she remarked. “The captain and the rest of them don’t have anything to do now, except just lie around. They can have more fun than us, now. Aunt Pat’s kind of terrible,” she explained. “Have you been with her long?”
“No, ma’am. This is my first trip. But I don’t mind light work like this. Ain’t much to do, when you get settled down to it. Ain’t nothing to what I have done.”
“Oh. You don’t—You are not a regular cook, are you?”
“No, ma’am. Not regular. It was Mr. Fairchild got me this job with Mrs.—with her.”
“He did? Gee, he knows everybody almost, don’t he?”
“Does he?”
She gazed through the round window, watching a blackened kettle brighten beneath his brush. Soap frothed, piled like summer clouds, floated in the sink like small reflections of clouds. “Have you known him long?” she asked. “Mr. Fairchild, I mean?”
“I didn’t know him any until a couple of days ago. I was in that park where that statue is, down close to the docks, and he came by and we were talking and I wasn’t working then, and so he got me this job. I can do any kind of work,” he added with quiet pride.
“You can? You don’t live in New Orleans, do you?”
“Indiana,” he told her. “I’m just traveling around.”
“Gee,” the niece said, “I wish I were a man, like that. I bet it’s all right, going around wherever you want to. I guess I’d work on ships. That’s what I’d do.”
&nb
sp; “Yes,” he agreed. “That’s where I learned to cook—on a ship.”
“Not—”
“Yes’m, to the Mediterranean ports, last trip.”
“Gee,” she said again. “You’ve seen lots, haven’t you? What would you do, when the ship got to different places? You didn’t just stay on the ship, did you?”
“No’m, I went to a lot of towns. Away from the coast.”
“To Paris, I bet.”
“No’m,” he admitted, with just a trace of apology, “I never seemed to get to Paris. But next—”
“I knew you wouldn’t,” she said quickly. “Say, men just go to Europe because they say European women are fast, don’t they? Are European women like that? promiscuous; like they say?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I nev—”
“I bet you never had time to fool with them, did you? That’s what I’d do: I wouldn’t waste my time on women, if I went to Europe. They make me sick—these little college boys in their balloon pants, and colored stickers all over their suitcases, bringing empty cognac bottles back with ’em and snickering about French girls and trying to make love to you in French. Say, I bet where you went you could see a lot of mountains and little cute towns on the side of ’em, and old gray walls and ruined castles on the mountains, couldn’t you?”
“Yes’m. And one place was high over a lake. It was blue as . . . blue like . . . washing water,” he said finally. “Water with bluing in it. They put bluing in the water when they wash clothes, country folks do,” he explained.
“I know,” she said impatiently. “Were there mountains around it?”
“The Alps Mountains, and little white boats on it no bigger than water beetles. You couldn’t see ’em moving: you only could see the water kind of spreading out to each side. The water would keep on spreading out until it pretty near touched both shores whenever a boat passed. And you could lay on your back on the mountain where I was and watch eagles flying around way up above the water, until sunset. Then the eagles all went back to the mountains.” David gazed through the port, past her sober tanned face mooned there by the round window, not even seeing it any more, seeing instead his washing-powder-colored lake and his lonely mountains and eagles against the blue.
“And then the sun would go down, and sometimes the mountains would look like they were on fire all over. That was the ice and snow on ’em. It was pretty at night too,” he added simply, scrubbing again at his pots.
“Gee,” she said with hushed young longing. “And that’s what you get for being a woman. I guess I’ll have to get married and have a bunch of kids.” She watched him with her grave opaque eyes. “No, I’m not, either,” she said fiercely, “I’m going to make Hank let me go there next summer. Can’t you go back then, too? Say, you fix it up to go back then, and I’ll go home and see Hank about it and then I’ll come over. Josh’ll want to come too, most likely, and you’ll know where the places are. Can’t you do that?”
“I guess I could,” he answered slowly. “Only—”
“Only what?”
“Nothing,” he said at last.
“Well, you fix it up to go, then. I’ll give you my address, and you can write me when to start and where to meet you. . . . I guess I couldn’t go over on the same boat you’ll be on, could I?”
“I’m afraid not,” he answered.
“Well, it’ll be all right, anyway. Gee, David, I wish we could go tomorrow, don’t you? I wonder if they let people swim in that lake? But I don’t know, maybe it’s nicer to be away up there where you were, looking down at it. Next summer—” Her unseeing eyes rested on his brown busy head while her spirit lay on its belly above Maggiore, watching little white boats no bigger than water beetles, and the lonely arrogant eagles aloft in blue sunshot space surrounded and enclosed by mountains cloud brooded, taller than God.
David dried his pots and pans and hung them along the bulkhead in a burnished row. He washed out his dishcloths and hung them to dry upon the wall. The niece watched him.
“It’s too bad you have to work all the time,” she said with polite regret.
‘‘I’m all done, now.”
“Let’s go swimming, then. It ought to be good now. I’ve just been waiting for somebody to go in with me.”
“I can’t,” he answered. “I’ve got a little more work I better do now.”
“I thought you were through. Will it take you very long? If it won’t, let’s go in then: I’ll wait for you.”
“Well, you see, I don’t go in during the day. I go in early in the morning, before you are up.”
“Say, I hadn’t thought of that. I bet it’s fine then, isn’t it? How about calling me in the morning, when you are ready to go in? Will you?” He hesitated again and she added, watching him with her sober opaque eyes, “Is it because you don’t like to go swimming with girls? That’s all right: I won’t bother you. I swim pretty well. You won’t have to keep me from drowning.”
“It ain’t that,” he answered lamely. “You see, I—I haven’t got a bathing suit,” he blurted.
“Oh, is that all? I’ll get my brother’s for you. It’ll be kind of tight, but I guess you can wear it. I’ll get it for you now, if you’ll go in.”
“I can’t,” he repeated. “I’ve still got some cleaning up to do.”
“Well—” She got to her feet. “If you won’t, then. But in the morning? you promised, you know.”
“All right,” he agreed.
“I’ll try to be awake. But you just knock on the door—the second door on the right of the passage, you know.” She turned on her silent bare feet. She paused again. “Don’t forget you promised,” she called back. Then her flat boy’s body was gone, and David turned again to his work.
The niece went on up the deck and turned the corner of the deckhouse on her silent feet just in time to see Jenny rout and disperse an attack by Mr. Talliaferro. She stepped back beyond the corner, unseen.
* * *
Boldness. But Fairchild had said you can’t be bold with words. How, then, to be bold? To try to do anything without words, it seemed to him, was like trying to grow grain without seed. Still, Fairchild had said . . . who knew people, women. . . .
Mr. Talliaferro prowled restlessly, having the boat to himself practically, and presently he found Jenny sleeping placidly in a chair in the shade of the deckhouse. Blond and pink and soft in sleep was Jenny: a passive soft abandon fitting like water to the sagging embrace of the canvas chair. Mr. Talliaferro envied that chair with a surge of fire like an adolescent’s in his dry bones; and while he stood regarding the sprawled awkwardness of Jenny’s sweet thighs and legs and one little soiled hand dangling across her hip, that surge of imminence and fire and desolation seemed to lightly distend all his organs, leaving a thin salty taste on his tongue. Mr. Talliaferro glanced quickly about the deck.
He glanced quickly about the deck, then feeling rather foolish, but strangely and exuberantly young, he came near and bending he traced with his hand lightly the heavy laxness of Jenny’s body through the canvas which supported her. Then he thought terribly that someone was watching him, and he sprang erect with an alarm like a nausea, staring at Jenny’s closed eyes. But her eyelids lay shadowed, a faint transparent blue upon her cheeks, and her breath was a little regular wind come recently from off fresh milk. But he still felt eyes upon him and he stood acutely, trying to think of something to do, some casual gesture to perform. A cigarette his chaotic brain supplied at last. But he had none, and still spurred by this need, he darted quickly away and to his cabin.
The nephew slept yet in his berth, and breathing rather fast, Mr. Talliaferro got his cigarettes and then he stood before the mirror, examining his face, seeking wildness, recklessness there. But it bore its customary expression of polite faint alarm, and he smoothed his hair, thinking of the sweet passive sag of th
at deck chair . . . yes, almost directly over his head. . . . He rushed back on deck in a surge of fear that she had waked and risen, gone away. He restrained himself by an effort to a more sedate pace, reconnoitering the deck. All was well.
He smoked his cigarette in short nervous puffs, hearing his heart, tasting that warm salt. Yes, his hand was actually trembling, and he stood in a casual attitude, looking about at water and sky and shore. Then he moved, and still with casualness he strolled back to where Jenny slept, unchanged her supine abandon, soft and oblivious and terrifying.
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