“Yes, yes: I’ll get you some water. You wait here Will you wait here?”
“You’ll get me some water? You will? You promise?”
“Yes, yes,” he repeated. “I’ll get you some. You wait here. You wait here, see?” he repeated idiotically. She bent again inward upon herself, moaning and writhing in the dust, and he plunged down the bank, stripping his shirt off and dipped it into the foul warm ditch. She had dragged her dress up about her shoulders, revealing her startling white bathing suit between her knickers and the satin band binding her breasts. “On my back,” she moaned, bending forward again, “quick! quick!”
He laid the wet shirt on her back and she caught the ends of it and drew it around her, and presently she leaned back against his knees with a long shuddering sigh. “I want a drink. Can’t I have a drink of water, David?”
“Soon,” he promised with despair. “You can have one soon as we get out of the swamp.”
She moaned again, a long whimpering sound, lowering her head between her arms. They crouched together in the dusty road. The road went on shimmering before them, endless beneath bearded watching trees, crossing the implacable swamp with a puerile bravado like a thin voice cursing in a cathedral. Needles of fire darted about them, about his bare shoulders and arms. After a while she said:
“Wet it again, please, David.”
He did so, and returned, scrambling up the steep rank levee side.
“Now, bathe my face, David.” She raised her face and closed her eyes and he bathed her face and throat and brushed her damp coarse hair back from her brow.
“Let’s put the shirt on you,” he suggested.
“No,” she demurred against his arm, without opening her eyes, drowsily. “They’ll eat you alive without it.”
“They don’t bother me like they do you. Come on, put it on.” She demurred again and he tried awkwardly to draw the shirt over her head. “I don’t need it,” he repeated.
“No…. Keep it, David…. You ought to keep it. Besides, I’d rather have it underneath…. Oooo, it feels so good. You’re sure you don’t need it?” She opened her eyes, watching him with that sober gravity of hers. He insisted and she sat up and slipped her dress over her head. He helped her to don the shirt, then she slipped her dress on again.
“I wouldn’t take it, only they hurt me so damn bad. I’ll do something for you some day, David. I swear I will.”
“Sure,” he repeated. “I don’t need it.”
He rose, and she came to her feet in a single motion, before he could offer to help her. “I swear I wouldn’t take it if they didn’t hurt me so much, David,” she persisted, putting her hand on his shoulder and raising her tanned serious face.
“Sure, I know.”
“I’ll pay you back somehow. Come on: let’s get out of here.”
ONE O’CLOCK
Mrs. Wiseman and Miss Jameson drove Mrs. Maurier moaning and wringing her hands, from the galley and prepared lunch — grapefruit again, disguised thinly.
“We have so many of them,” the hostess apologized helplessly. “And the steward gone…. We are aground, too, you see,” she explained.
“Oh, we can stand a little hardship, I guess,” Fairchild reassured her jovially. “The race hasn’t degenerated that far. In a book, now, it would be kind of terrible; if you forced characters in a book to eat as much grapefruit as we do, both the art boys and the humanitarians would stand on their hind legs and howl.
But in real life — In life, anything might happen; in actual life people will do anything. It’s only in books that people must function according to arbitrary rules of conduct and probability; it’s only in books that events must never flout credulity.”
“That’s true,” Mrs. Wiseman agreed. “People’s characters, when writers delineate them by revealing their likings and dislikings, always appear so perfect, so inevitably consistent, but in li—”
“That’s why literature is art and biology isn’t,” her brother interrupted. “A character in a book must be consistent in all things, while man is consistent in one thing only: he is consistently vain. It’s his vanity alone which keeps his particles damp and adhering one to another, instead of like any other handful of dust which any wind that passes can disseminate.”
“In other words, he is consistently inconsistent,” Mark Frost recapitulated.
“I guess so,” the Semitic man replied. “Whatever that means…. But what were you saying, Eva?”
“I was thinking of how book people, when you find them in real life, have such a perverse and disconcerting way of liking and disliking the wrong things. For instance, Dorothy here. Suppose you were drawing Dorothy’s character in a novel, Dawson. Any writer would give her a liking for blue jewelry: white gold, and platinum, and sapphires in dull silver — you know. Wouldn’t you do that?”
“Why, yes, so I would,” Fairchild agreed with interest. “She would like blue things, sure enough.”
“And then,” the other continued, “music. You’d say she would like Grieg, and those other cold mad northern people with icewater in their veins, wouldst you?”
“Yes,” Fairchild agreed again, thinking immediately of Ibsen and the Peer Gynt legend and remembering a sonnet of Siegfried Sassoon’s about Sibelius that he had once read in a magazine. “That’s what she would like.”
“Should like,” Mrs. Wiseman corrected. “For the sake of esthetic consistency. But I bet you are wrong. Isn’t he, Dorothy?”
“Why, yes,” Miss Jameson replied. “I always liked Chopin.” Mrs. Wiseman shrugged: a graceful dark gesture. “And there you are. That’s what makes art so discouraging. You come to expect anything associated with and dependent on the actions of man to be discouraging. But it always shocks me to learn that art also depends on population, on the herd instinct just as much as manufacturing automobiles or stockings does—”
“Only they can’t advertise art by means of women’s legs yet,” Mark Frost interrupted.
“Don’t be silly, Mark,” Mrs. Wiseman said sharply. “That’s exactly how art came to the attention of the ninety-nine who don’t produce it and so have any possible reason for buying it — postcards and lithographs barely esoteric enough to escape police persecution. Ask any man on the street what he understands by the word art: he’ll tell you it means a picture. Won’t he?” she appealed to Fairchild.
“That’s so,” he agreed. “And it’s a wrong impression. Art means anything consciously done well, to my notion. Living, or building a good lawn mower, or playing poker. I don’t like this modern idea of restricting the word to painting, at all.”
“The art of Life, of a beautiful and complete existence of the Soul,” Mrs. Maurier put in. “Don’t you think that is Art’s greatest function, Mr. Gordon?”
“Of course you don’t, child,” Mrs. Wiseman told Fairchild, ignoring Mrs. Maurier. “As rabidly American as you are, you can’t stand that, can you? And there’s the seat of your bewilderment, Dawson — your belief that the function of creating art depends on geography.”
“It does. You can’t grow corn without something to plant it in.”
“But you don’t plant com in geography: you plant it in soil. It not only does not matter where that soil is, you can even move the soil from one place to another — around the world, if you like — and it will still grow corn.”
“You’d have a different kind of corn, though — Russian corn, or Latin or Anglo-Saxon corn.”
“All corn is the same to the belly,” the Semitic man said.
“Julius!” exclaimed Mrs. Manner. “The Soul’s hunger: that is the true purpose of Art. There are so many things to satisfy the grosser appetites. Don’t you think so, Mr. Talliaferro?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Wiseman took her brother up. “Dawson clings to his conviction for the old reason: it’s good enough to live with and comfortable to die with — like a belief in immortality. Insurance against doubt or alarm.”
“And laziness,” her brother added. Mrs. Maurier exclaimed “Julius” again. “Clinging spiritually to one little spot of the earth’s surface, so much of his labor is performed for him.
Details of dress and habit and speech which entail no hardship in the assimilation and which, piled one on another, become quite as imposing as any single startling stroke of originality, as trivialities in quantities will. Don’t you agree? But then, I suppose that all poets in their hearts consider prosewriters shirkers, don’t they?”
“Yes,” his sister agreed. “We do think they are lazy — just a little. Not mentally, but that their… not hearts—”
“Souls?” her brother suggested. “I hate that word, but it’s the nearest thing….” She met her brother’s sad quizzical eyes and exclaimed: “Oh, Julius! I could kill you, at times. He’s laughing at me, Dawson.”
“He’s laughing at us both,” Fairchild said. “But let him have his fun, poor fellow.” He chuckled, and lit a cigarette. ‘“Let him laugh. I always did want to be one of those old time eunuchs, for one night. They must have just laughed themselves to death when those sultans and things would come visiting.”
“Mister Fairchild! Whatever in the world!” exclaimed Mrs. Maurier.
“It’s a good thing there’s some one to see something amusing in that process,” the other rejoined.
