“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.
It was she who found the fallen tree, who first essayed its oozy treacherous bark and first stood in the empty road stretching monotonously in either direction between battalioned patriarchs of trees. She was panting a little, whipping a broken green branch about her body, watching him as he inched his way across the fallen trunk.
“Come on, David,” she called impatiently. “Here’s the road: we’re all right now.” He was across the ditch and he now struggled up the rank reluctant levee bank. She leaned down and reached her hand to him. But he would not take it, so she leaned further and clutched his shirt. “Now, which way is Mandeville?”
“That way,” he answered immediately, pointing.
“You said you never were over here before,” she accused.
“No. But we were west of Mandeville when we went aground, and the lake is back yonder. So Mandeville must be that way.”
“I don’t think so. It’s this way: see, the swamp isn’t so thick this way. Besides, I just know it’s this way.”
He looked at her a moment. “All right,” he agreed. “I guess you are right.”
“But don’t you know which way it is? Isn’t there any way you could tell?” She bent and whipped her legs with the broken branch.
“Well, the lake is over yonder, and we were west of Mandeville last night—”
“You’re just guessing,” she interrupted harshly.
“Yes,” he answered. “I guess you are right.”
“Well, we’ve got to go somewhere. We can’t stand here.” She twitched her shoulders, writhing her body beneath her dress. “Which way, then?”
“Well, we w—”
She turned abruptly in the direction she had chosen. “Come on, I’ll die here.” She strode on ahead.
TEN O’CLOCK
She was trying to explain it to Pete. The sun had risen sinister and hot, climbing into a drowsy haze, and up from a low vague region neither water nor sky clouds like fat little girls in starched frocks marched solemnly.
“It’s a thing they join at that place he’s going to. Only they have to work to join it, and sometimes you don’t even get to join it then. And the ones that do join it don’t get anything except a little button or something.”
“Pipe down and try it again,” Pete told her, leaning with his elbows and one heel hooked backward on the rail, his hat slanted across his reckless dark face, squinting his eyes against the smoke of his cigarette. “What’re you talking about?”
“There’s something in the water,” Jenny remarked with placid astonishment, creasing her belly over the rail and staring downward into the faintly rippled water while the land breeze molded her little green dress. “It must of fell off the boat….. Oh, I’m talking about that college he’s going to. You work to join things there. You work three years, she says. And then maybe you—”
“What college?”
“I forgot. It’s the one where they have big football games in the papers every year. He’s—”
“Yale and Harvard?”
“Uhuh, that’s the one she said. He’s—”
“Which one? Yale, or Harvard?”
“Uhuh. And so he—”
“Come on, baby. You’re talking about two colleges. Was it Yale she said, or Harvard? or Sing Sing or what?”
“Oh,” Jenny said. “It was Yale. Yes, that’s the one she said. And he’ll have to work three years to join it. And even then maybe he won’t.”
“Well, what about it? Suppose he does work three years: what about it?”
“Why, if he does, he won’t get anything except a little button or something, even if he does join it, I mean.” Jenny brooded softly, creasing herself upon the rail. “He’s going to have to work for it,” she recurred again in a dull soft amazement. “He’ll have to work three years for it, and even then he may not—”
“Don’t be dumb all your life, kid,” Pete told her.
Wind and sun were in Jenny’s drowsing hair. The deck swept trimly forward, deserted. The others were gathered on the deck above. Occasionally they could hear voices, and a pair of masculine feet were crossed innocently upon the rail directly over Pete’s head. A half-smoked cigarette spun in a small twinkling arc astern.
Jenny watched it drop lightly onto the water, where it floated amid the other rubbish that had caught her attention. Pete spun his own cigarette backward over his shoulder, but this one sank immediately, to her placid surprise.
“Let the boy join his club, if he wants,” Pete added. “What kind of a club is it? What do they do?”
“I don’t know. They just join it. You work for it three years, she said. Three years…. Gee, by that time you’d be too old to do anything if you got to join it…. Three years. My Lord.”
“Sit down and give your wooden leg a rest,” Pete said. “Don’t be a dumbbell forever.” He examined the deck a moment, then without changing his position against the rail he turned his head toward Jenny. “Give papa a kiss.”
Jenny also glanced briefly up the deck. Then she came with a sort of wary docility, raising her ineffable face… presently Pete withdrew his face. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
“The matter with what?” said Jenny innocently.
Pete unhooked his heel and he put his arm around Jenny. Their faces merged again and Jenny became an impersonal softness against his mouth and a single blue eye and a drowsing aura of hair.
ELEVEN O’CLOCK
The swamp did not seem to end, ever. On either side of the road it brooded, fetid and timeless, somber and hushed and dreadful. The road went on and on through a bearded tunnel, beneath the sinister brass sky. The dew was long departed and dust puffed listlessly to her fierce striding. David tramped behind her, watching two splotches of dead blood on her stockings. Abruptly there were three of them and he drew abreast of her. She looked over her shoulder, showing him her wrung face.
“Don’t come near me!” she cried. “Don’t you see you make ’em worse?”
He dropped behind again and she stopped suddenly, dropping the broken branch and extending her arms. “David,” she said. He went to her awkwardly, and she clung to him, whimpering. She raised her face, staring at him. “Can’t you do something? They hurt me, David.” But he only looked at her with his unutterable dumb longing.
She tightened her arms, released him quickly. “We’ll be out soon.” She picked up the branch again. “It’ll be different then. Look! There’s another big butterfly!” Her squeal of delight became again a thin whimpering sound. She strode on.
Jenny found Mrs. Wiseman in their room, changing her dress.
“Mr. Ta — Talliaferro,” Jenny began. Then she said: “He’s an awful refined man, I guess. Don’t you think so?”
“Refined?” the other repeated. “Exactly that. Ernest invented that word.”
“He did?” Jenny went to the mirror and looked at herself a while. “Her brother’s refined, too, ain’t he?”
“Whose brother, honey?” Mrs. Wiseman paused and watched Jenny curiously.
“The one with that saw.”
“Oh. Yes, fairly so. He seems to be too busy to be anything else. Why?”
“And that popeyed man. All English men are refined, though. There was one in a movie I saw. He was awful refined.” Jenny looked at her reflected face, tunelessly and completely entertained. Mrs. Wiseman gazed at Jenny’s fine minted hair, at her sleazy little dress revealing the divine inevitability of her soft body.
“Come here, Jenny,” she said.
TWELVE O’CLOCK
When he reached her she sat huddled in the road, crouching bonelessly upon herself, huddling her head in her crossed thin arms. He stood beside her, and presently he spoke her name. She rocked back and forth, then wrung her body in an ecstasy. “They hurt me, they hurt me,” she wailed, crouching again in that impossible spasm of agony. David knelt beside her and spoke her name again, and she sat up.
“Look,” she said wildly, “on my legs — look, look,” staring with a sort of fascination at a score of great gray specks hovering about her blood-flecked stockings, making no effort to brush them away. She raised her wild face again. “Do you see them?
They are everywhere on me
