Slowly, Slowly in the Wind

by Patricia Highsmith

  The psychiatrist lost his temper, which was at least human.

  “You’ll never get anywhere talking to people like that, boy.”

  Clive said, “Some perfectly ordinary strangers in Indiana said, ‘Maybe that kid ain’t kiddin’.” They seem to have had more sense than you!”

  The psychiatrist laughed.

  Clive smoldered. One thing might have helped to prove his story, Woodrow Wilson’s necktie, which still hung in his closet. But these bastards damned well didn’t deserve to see that tie. Even as he ate his suppers with his mother, went to movies with her, and delivered groceries, he was planning. He’d do something more important next time: start a fire in the depths of a big building, plant a bomb somewhere, take a machine gun up to some penthouse and let ’em have it down on the street. Kill a hundred people at least. They’d have to come up in the building to get him. They’d know then. They’d treat him like somebody who existed.

  One for the Islands

  The voyage wasn’t to be much longer.

  Most people were bound for the mainland, which was not far at all now. Others were bound for the islands to the west, some of which were very far indeed.

  Dan was bound for a certain island that he believed probably farther than any of the others the ship would touch at. He supposed that he would be about the last passenger to disembark.

  On the sixth day of the smooth, uneventful voyage, he was in excellent spirits. He enjoyed the company of his fellow-passengers, had joined them a few times in the games that were always in progress on the top deck forward, but mostly he strolled the deck with his pipe in his mouth and a book under his arm, the pipe unlighted and the book forgotten, gazing serenely at the horizon and thinking of the island to which he was going. It would be the finest island of them all, Dan imagined. For some months now, he had devoted much of his time to imagining its terrain. There was no doubt, he decided finally, that he knew more about his island than any man alive, a fact which made him smile whenever he thought of it. No, no one would ever know a hundredth of what he knew about his island, though he had never seen it. But then, perhaps no one else had ever seen it, either.

  Dan was happiest when strolling the deck, alone, letting his eyes drift from soft cloud to horizon, from sun to sea, thinking always that his island might come into view before the mainland. He would know its outline at once, he was sure of that. Strangely, it would be like a place he had always known, but secretly, telling no one. And there he would finally be alone.

  It startled him sometimes, unpleasantly, too, suddenly to encounter, face to face, a passenger coming round a corner. He found it disturbing to bump into a hurrying steward in one of the twisting, turning corridors of D-deck, which being third class was more like a catacomb than the rest, and which was the deck where Dan had his cabin. Then there had been the time, the second day of the voyage, when for an instant he saw very close to his eyes the ridged floor of the corridor, with a cigarette butt between two ridges, a chewing-gum wrapper, and a few discarded matches. That had been unpleasant, too.

  “Are you for the mainland?” asked Mrs. Gibson-Leyden, one of the first-class passengers, as they stood at the rail one evening.

  Dan smiled a little and shook his head. “No, the islands,” he said pleasantly, rather surprised that Mrs. Gibson-Leyden didn’t know by now. But on the other hand, there had been little talk among the passengers as to where each was going. “You’re for the mainland, I take it?” He spoke to be friendly knowing quite well that Mrs. Gibson-Leyden was for the mainland.

  “Oh, yes,” Mrs. Gibson-Leyden said. “My husband had some idea of going to an island, but I said, not for me!”

  She laughed with an air of satisfaction, and Dan nodded. He liked Mrs. Gibson-Leyden because she was cheerful. It was more than could be said for most of the first-class passengers. Now he leaned his forearms on the rail and looked out at the wake of moonlight on the sea that shimmered like the back of a gigantic sea dragon with silver scales. Dan couldn’t imagine that anyone would go to the mainland when there were islands in abundance, but then he had never been able to understand such things, and with a person like Mrs. Gibson-Leyden, there was no use in trying to discuss them and to understand. Dan drew gently on his empty pipe. He could smell a fragrance of lavender cologne from Mrs. Gibson-Leyden’s direction. It reminded him of a girl he had once known, and he was amused now that he could feel drawn to Mrs.Gibson-Leyden, certainly old enough to have been his mother, because she wore a familiar scent.

  “Well, I’m supposed to meet my husband back in the game room,” Mrs. Gibson-Leyden said, moving away. “He went down to get a sweater.”

  Dan nodded, awkwardly now. Her departure made him feel abandoned, absurdly lonely, and immediately he reproached himself for not having made more of an effort at communication with her. He smiled, straightened, and peered into the darkness over his left shoulder, where the mainland would appear before dawn, then his island, later.

  Two people, a man and a woman, walked slowly down the deck, side by side, their figures quite black in the darkness. Dan was conscious of their separateness from each other. Another isolated figure, short and fat, moved into the light of the windows in the superstructure: Dr. Eubanks, Dan recognized. Forward, Dan saw a group of people standing on deck and at the rails, all isolated, too. He had a vision of stewards and stewardesses below, eating their solitary meals at tiny tables in the corridors, hurrying about with towels, trays, menus. They were all alone, too. There was nobody who touched anybody, he thought, no man who held his wife’s hand, no lovers whose lips met—at least he hadn’t seen any so far on this voyage.

  Dan straightened still taller. An overwhelming sense of aloneness, of his own isolation, had taken possession of him, and because his impulse was to shrink within himself, he unconsciously stood as tall as he could. But he could not look at the ship any longer, and turned back to the sea.

  It seemed to him that only the moon spread its arms, laid its web protectively, lovingly, over the sea’s body. He stared at the veils of moonlight as hard as he could, for as long as he could—which was perhaps twenty-five seconds—then went below to his cabin and to sleep.

  He was awakened by the sound of running feet on the deck, and a murmur of excited voices.

  The mainland, he thought at once, and threw off his bedcovers. He did want a good look at the mainland. Then as his head cleared of sleep, he realized that the excitement on deck must be about something else. There was more running now, a woman’s wondering “Oh!” that was half a scream, half an exclamation of pleasure. Dan hurried into his clothes and ran out of his cabin.

  His view from the A-deck companionway made him stop and draw in his breath. The ship was sailing downward, had been sailing downward on a long, broad path in the sea itself. Dan had never seen anything like it. No one else had either, apparently. No wonder everyone was so excited.

  “When?” asked a man who was running after the hurrying captain. “Did you see it? What happened?”

  The captain had no time to answer him.

  “It’s all right. This is right,” said a petty officer, whose calm, serious face contrasted strangely with the wide-eyed alertness of everyone else.

  “One doesn’t notice it below,” Dan said quickly to Mr. Steyne who was standing near him, and felt idiotic at once, because what did it matter whether one felt it below or not? The ship was sailing downward, the sea sloped downward at about a twenty degree angle with the horizon, and such a thing had never been heard of before, even in the Bible.

  Dan ran to join the passengers who were crowding the forward deck. “When did it start? I mean, where?” Dan asked the person nearest him.

  The person shrugged, though his face was as excited, as anxious as the rest.

  Dan strained to see what the water looked like at the side of the swath, for the slope did not seem more than two miles bro
ad. But whatever was happening, whether the swath ended in a sharp edge or sloped up to the main body of the sea, he could not make out, because a fine mist obscured the sea on either side. Now he noticed the golden light that lay on everything around them, the swath, the atmosphere, the horizon before them. The light was no stronger on one side than on the other, so it could not have been the sun. Dan couldn’t find the sun, in fact. But the rest of the sky and the higher body of the sea behind them was bright as morning.

  “Has anybody seen the mainland?” Dan asked, interrupting the babble around him.

  “No,” said a man.

  “There’s no mainland,” said the same unruffled petty officer.

  Dan had a sudden feeling of having been duped.

  “This is right,” the petty officer added laconically. He was winding a thin line around and round his arm, bracing it on palm and elbow.

  “Right?” asked Dan.

  “This is it,” said the petty officer.

  “That’s right, this is it,” a man at the rail confirmed, speaking over his shoulder.

  “No islands, either?” asked Dan, alarmed.

  “No,” said the petty officer, not unkindly, but in an abrupt way that hurt Dan in his breast.

  “Well—what’s all this talk about the mainland?” Dan asked.

  “Talk,” said the petty officer, with a twinkle now.

  “Isn’t it won-derful!” said a woman’s voice behind him, and Dan turned to see Mrs. Gibson-Leyden—Mrs. Gibson-Leyden who had been so eager for the mainland—gazing rapturously at the empty white and gold mist.

  “Do you know about this? How much farther does it go?” asked Dan, but the petty officer was gone. Dan wished he could be as calm as everyone else—generally he was calmer—but how could he be calm about his vanished island? How could the rest just stand there at the rails, for the most part taking it all quite calmly, he could tell by the voices now and their casual postures.

  Dan saw the petty officer again and ran after him. “What happens?” he asked. “What happens next?” His questions struck him as foolish, but they were as good as any.

  “This is it,” said the petty officer with a smile. “Good God, boy!”

  Dan bit his lips.

  “This is it!” repeated the petty officer. “What did you expect?”

  Dan hesitated. “Land,” he said in a voice that made it almost a question.

  The petty officer laughed silently and shook his head. “You can get off any time you like.”

  Dan gave a startled look around him. It was true, people were getting off at the port rail, stepping over the side with their suitcases. “Onto what?” Dan asked, aghast.

  The petty officer laughed again, and disdaining to answer him, walked slowly away with his coiled line.

  Dan caught his arm. “Get off here? Why?”

  “As good a place as any. Whatever spot strikes your fancy.” The petty officer chuckled. “It’s all alike.”

  “All sea?”

  “There’s no sea,” said the petty officer. “But there’s certainly no land.”

  And there went Mr. and Mrs. Gibson-Leyden now, off the starboard rail.

  “Hey!” Dan called to them, but they didn’t turn.

  Dan watched them disappear quickly. He blinked his eyes. They had not been holding hands, but they had been near each other, they had been together.

  Suddenly Dan realized that if he got off the boat as they had done, he could still be alone, if he wanted to be. It was strange, of course, to think of stepping out into space. But the instant he was able to conceive it, barely conceive it, it became right to do it. He could feel it filling him with a gradual but overpowering certainty, that he only reluctantly yielded to. This was right, as the petty officer had said. And this was as good a place as any.

  Dan looked around him. The boat was really almost empty now. He might as well be last, he thought. He’d meant to be last. He’d go down and get his suitcase packed. What a nuisance! The mainland passengers, of course, had been packed since the afternoon before.

  Dan turned impatiently on the companionway where he had once nearly fallen, and he climbed up again. He didn’t want his suitcase after all. He didn’t want anything with him.

  He put a foot up on the starboard rail and stepped off. He walked several yards on an invisible ground that was softer than grass. It wasn’t what he had thought it would be like, yet now that he was here, it wasn’t strange, either. In fact there was even that sense of recognition that he had imagined he would feel when he set foot on his island. He turned for a last look at the ship that was still on its downward course. Then suddenly, he was impatient with himself. Why look at a ship, he asked himself, and abruptly turned and went on.

  A Curious Suicide

  Dr. Stephen McCullough had a first-class compartment to himself on the express from Paris to Geneva. He sat browsing in one of the medical quarterlies he had brought from America, but he was not concentrating. He was toying with the idea of murder. That was why he had taken the train instead of flying, to give himself time to think or perhaps merely dream.

  He was a serious man of forty-five, a little overweight, with a prominent and spreading nose, a brown mustache, brown-rimmed glasses, a receding hairline. His eyebrows were tense with an inward anxiety, which his patients often thought a concern with their problems. Actually, he was unhappily married, and though he refused to quarrel with Lillian—that meant answer her back—there was discord between them. In Paris yesterday he had answered Lillian back, and on a ridiculous matter about whether he or she would take back to a shop on the Rue Royale an evening bag that Lillian had decided she did not want. He had been angry not because he had had to return the bag, but because he had agreed, in a weak moment fifteen minutes before, to visit Roger Fane in Geneva.

  “Go and see him, Steve,” Lillian had said yesterday morning. “You’re so close to Geneva now, why not? Think of the pleasure it’d give Roger.”

  What pleasure? Why? But Dr. McCullough had rung Roger at the American Embassy in Geneva, and Roger had been very friendly, much too friendly, of course, and had said that he must come and stay a few days and that he had plenty of room to put him up. Dr. McCullough had agreed to spend one night. Then he was going to fly to Rome to join Lillian.

  Dr. McCullough detested Roger Fane. It was the kind of hatred that time does nothing to diminish. Roger Fane, seventeen years ago, had married the woman Dr. McCullough loved. Margaret. Margaret had died a year ago in an automobile accident on an Alpine road. Roger Fane was smug, cautious, mightily pleased with himself and not very intelligent. Seventeen years ago, Roger Fane had told Margaret that he, Stephen McCullough, was hav-ing a secret affair with another girl. Nothing was further from the truth, but before Stephen could prove anything, Margaret had married Roger. Dr. McCullough had not expected the marriage to last, but it had, and finally Dr. McCullough had married Lillian whose face resembled Margaret’s a little, but that was the only similarity. In the past seventeen years, Dr. McCullough had seen Roger and Margaret perhaps three times when they had come to New York on short trips. He had not seen Roger since Margaret’s death.

  Now as the train shot through the French countryside, Dr. McCullough reflected on the satisfaction that murdering Roger Fane might give him. He had never before thought of murdering anybody, but yesterday evening while he was taking a bath in the Paris hotel, after the telephone conversation with Roger, a thought had come to him in regard to murder: most murderers were caught because they left some clue, despite their efforts to erase all the clues. Many murderers wanted to be caught, the doctor realized, and unconsciously planted a clue that led the police straight to them. In the Leopold and Loeb case, one of them had dropped his glasses at the scene, for instance. But suppose a murderer deliberately left a dozen clues, practically down to his calling card? It seemed
to Dr. McCullough that the very obviousness of it would throw suspicion off. Especially if the person were a man like himself, well thought of, a nonviolent type. Also, there’d be no motive that anyone could see, because Dr. McCullough had never even told Lillian that he had loved the woman Roger Fane had married. Of course, a few of his old friends knew it, but Dr. McCullough hadn’t mentioned Margaret or Roger Fane in a decade.

  He imagined Roger’s apartment formal and gloomy, perhaps with a servant prowling about full time, a servant who slept in. A servant would complicate things. Let’s say there wasn’t a servant who slept in, that he and Roger would be having a nightcap in the living room or in Roger’s study, and then just before saying good night, Dr. McCullough would pick up a heavy paperweight or a big vase and—Then he would calmly take his leave. Of course, the bed should be slept in, since he was supposed to stay the night, so perhaps the morning would be better for the crime than the evening. The essential thing was to leave quietly and at the time he was supposed to leave. But the doctor found himself unable to plot in much detail after all.

  Roger Fane’s street in Geneva looked just as Dr. McCullough had imagined it—a narrow, curving street that combined business establishments with old private dwellings—and it was not too well lighted when Dr. McCullough’s taxi entered it at 9 P.M., yet in law-abiding Switzerland, the doctor supposed, dark streets held few dangers for anyone. The front door buzzed in response to his ring, and Dr. McCullough opened it. The door was heavy as a bank vault’s door.

  “Hullo!” Roger’s voice called cheerily down the stairwell. “Come up! I’m on the third floor. Fourth to you, I suppose.”

  “Be right there!” Dr. McCullough said, shy about raising his voice in the presence of the closed doors on either side of the hall. He had telephoned Roger a few moments ago from the railway station, because Roger had said he would meet him. Roger had apologized and said he had been held up at a meeting at his office, and would Steve mind hopping a taxi and coming right over? Dr. McCullough suspected that Roger had not been held up at all, but simply hadn’t wanted to show him the courtesy of being at the station.