Fairchild glanced about with a sort of ludicrous helplessness. “What am I supposed to do?” he asked. “Jump overboard with a shovel and shovel the sand away?”
“A man who has reiterated his superiority as much as you have for the last week should never be at a loss for what to do,” Mrs. Wiseman told him. “We ladies have already thought of that. You are the one to think of something else.”
“Well, I’ve already thought of not jumping overboard and shoveling her off,” Fairchild answered, “but that don’t seem to help much, does it?”
“You ought to coil ropes or something like that,” Miss Jameson suggested. “That’s what they were always doing on all the ships I ever read about.”
“All right,” Fairchild agreed equably. “We’ll coil ropes, then. Where are the ropes?”
“That’s your trouble,” Mrs. Wiseman said. “You’re captain now.”
“Well, we’ll find some ropes and coil ’em.” He addressed Mrs. Maurier. “We have your permission to coil ropes?”
“No: really,” said Mrs. Maurier in her helpless astonished voice. “Isn’t there something we can do? Can’t we signal to them with a sheet? They may not know that this is the right boat.”
“Oh, they know, I guess. Anyway, we’ll coil ropes and be ready for them. Come on here, you men.” He named over his depleted watch and herded it forward. He herded it down to his cabin and nourished it with stimulants.
“We may coil the right rope, at that,” the Semitic man suggested. “Major Ayers ought to know something about boats: it should be in his British blood.”
Major Ayers didn’t think so. “American boats have amphibious traits that are lacking in ours,” he explained. “Half the voyage on land, you know,” he explained tediously.
“Sure,” Fairchild agreed. He brought his watch above again and forward, where instinct told him the ropes should be. “I wonder where the captain is. Surely he ain’t drowned, do you reckon?”
“I guess not,” the Semitic man answered. “He gets paid for this.... There comes a boat.”
The boat came from the tug, and soon it came alongside and the captain came over the rail. A stranger followed him and they went below without haste, leaving Mrs. Maurier’s words like vain unmated birds in the air. “Let’s get ready, then,” Fairchild ordered his crew. “Let’s tie a rope to something.”
So they tied a rope to something, knotting it intricately, then Major Ayers discovered that they had tied it to a winch handle which fitted loosely into a socket and which would probably come out quite easily, once a strain came onto the rope. So they untied it and found something attached firmly to the deck, and they tied the rope to this, and after a while the captain and the stranger, clutching a short evil pipe, came back on deck and stood and watched them. “We’ve got the right rope,” Fairchild told his watch in an undertone, and they knotted the rope intricately and straightened up.
“How’s that, Cap?” Fairchild asked.
“All right,” the captain answered. “Can we trouble you for a match?”
Fairchild gave them a match. The stranger fired his pipe and they got into the tender and departed. They hadn’t got far when the one called Walter came out and called them, and they put about and returned for him. Then they went back to the tug. Fairchild’s watch had ceased work, and it gazed after the tender. After a time Fairchild said: “He said that was the right rope. So I guess we can quit.”
So they did, and went aft to where the ladies were, and presently the tender came bobbing back across the water. It came alongside again and a negro, sweating gently and regularly, held it steady while the one called Walter and yet another stranger got aboard, bringing a rope that trailed away into the water behind them.
Every one watched with interest while Walter and his companion made the line fast in the bows, after having removed Fairchild’s rope. Then Walter and his friend went below.
“Say,” Fairchild said suddenly, “do you reckon they’ve found our whisky?”
“I guess not,” the Semitic man assured him. “I hope not,” he amended; and they all returned in a body to stare down into the tender where the negro sat without selfconsciousness, eating of a large grayish object. While they watched the negro Walter and his companion returned, and the stranger bawled at the tug through his hands. A reply at last, and the other end of the line which they had recently brought aboard the yacht and made fast, slid down from the deck of the tug and plopped heavily into the water; and Walter and his companion drew it aboard the yacht and coiled it down, wet and dripping. Then they elbowed themselves to the rail, cast the rope into the tender and got in themselves, and the negro stowed his strange edible object temporarily away and rowed back to the tug.
“You guessed wrong again,” Mark Frost said with sepuldirai irony. He bent and scratched his ankles. “Try another rope.”
“You wait,” Fairchild retorted, “wait ten minutes, then talk. Well be under full steam in ten minutes.... Where did that boat come from?”
This boat was a skiff, come when and from where they knew not; and beneath the drowsy afternoon there came faintly from somewhere up the lake the fretful sound of a motor boat engine. The skiff drew alongside, manned by a malaria-ridden man wearing a woman’s dilapidated hat of black straw that lent him a vaguely bereaved air.
“Whar’s the drownded feller?” he asked, grasping the rail.
“We don’t know,” Fairchild answered. “We missed him somewhere between here and the shore.” He extended his arm. The newcomer followed his gesture sadly.
“Any reward?”
“Reward?” repeated Fairchild.
“Reward?” Mrs. Maurier chimed in, breathlessly. “Yes, there is a reward: I offer a reward.”
“How much?”
“You find him first,” the Semitic man put in. “There’ll be a reward, all right.”
The man clung yet to the rail. “Have you drug fer him yet?”
“No, we’ve just started hunting,” Fairchild answered. “You go on and look around, and we’ll get our boat and come out and help you. There’ll be a reward.”
The man pushed his skiff clear and engaged his oars. The sound of the motor boat grew clearer steadily; soon it came into view, with two men in it, and changed its course and bore down on the skiff. The fussy little engine ceased its racket and it slid up to the skiff, pushing a dying ripple under its stem. The two boats clung together for a time, then they parted, and at a short distance from each other they moved slowly onward while their occupants prodded at the lake bottom with their oars.
“Look at them,” the Semitic man said, “just like buzzards. Probably be a dozen boats out there in the next hour. How do you suppose they learned about it?”
“Lord knows,” Fairchild answered. “Let’s get our crew and go out and help look. We better get the tug’s men.” They shouted in turn for a while, and presently one came to the rail of the tug and gazed apathetically at them, and went away; and after a while the small boat came away from the tug and crossed to them. A consultation, assisted by all hands, while the man from the tug moved unhurriedly about the business of making fast another and dirtier rope to the Nausikaa’s bows. Then he and Walter went back to the tug, paying out the line behind them while Mrs. Maurier’s insistence wasted itself upon the somnolent afternoon. The guests looked at one another helplessly. Then Fairchild said with determination:
“Come on, we’ll go in our boat.” He chose his men, and they gathered all the available oars and prepared to embark. “Here comes the tug’s boat again,” Mark Frost said. “They forgot and tied one end of that rope to something.” Mrs. Wiseman said viciously. The boat came alongside without haste and it and the yacht’s tender lay rubbing noses, and Walter’s companion asked, without interest:
“Wher’s the feller y’all drownded?”
“I’ll go along in their boat and show ’em,” Fairchild decided. Mark Frost got back aboard the yacht with alacrity. Fairchild stopped him. “You folks come on beh
ind us in this boat. The more to hunt, the better.”
Mark Frost groaned and acquiesced. The others took their places, and under Fairchild’s direction the two tenders retraced the course of yesterday. The first two boats were some distance ahead, moving slowly, and the tenders separated also and the searchers poled along, prodding with their oars at the lake floor. And such is the influence of action on the mind that soon even Fairchild’s burly optimism became hushed and uncertain before the imminence of the unknown, and he too was accepting the possible for the probable, unaware.
The sun was hazed, as though wearied of its own implacable heat, and the water — that water which might hold, soon to be revealed, the mute evidence of ultimate flouting of all man’s strife — lapped and plopped at the mechanical fragilities that supported them: a small sound, monotonous and without rancor — it could well wait! They poled slowly on.
Soon the four boats, fanwise, had traversed the course, and they turned and quartered back and forth again, slowly and in silence. Afternoon drew on, drowsing and somnolent. Yacht and tug lay motionless in a blinding shimmer of water and sun....
Again the course of yesterday was covered foot by foot, patiently and silently and in vain; and the four boats as without volition drew nearer each other, drifting closer together as sheep huddle, while water lapped and plopped beneath their hulls, sinister and untroubled by waiting... soon the motor boat drifted up and scraped lightly along the hull in which Fairchild sat, and he raised his head, blinking against the glare. After a while he said:
“Are you a ghost, or am I?”
“I was about to ask you that,” Gordon, sitting in the motor boat, 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 motor boat 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 to-morrow; 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’ 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 Ms 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 Ms 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 couldna? 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 Ms 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.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 53