“Right, then,” he said briskly, moving away. “To-morrow it is.” Jenny gazed after him in passive astonishment and he turned and came back to her, and giving her an intimate inviting glare he chucked her again under her soft surprised chin. Then he departed permanently.
Jenny gazed after his tweedclad dissolving shape, watching him out of sight. He sure is a foreigner, she told herself. She sighed.
The water lapped at the hull of the yacht with little sounds, little hushed sounds like boneless hands might make, and she leaned again over the rail, gazing downward into the dark water.
He would be refined as anybody, she mused to herself. Being her brother… more refined, because she had been away all day with that waiter in the dining room….
But maybe the waiter was refined, too. Except I never found many boys that… I guess her aunt must have jumped on her. I wonder what she’d ‘a’ done when they come back, if we’d got the boat started and went away… and now that redheaded man and She says he’s drowned….
Jenny gazed into the dark water, thinking of death, of being helpless in that terrible suffocating resilience of water, feeling again that utter and dreadful helpfulness of terror and fear. So when Mr. Talliaferro was suddenly and silently beside her, touching her, she recognized him by instinct.
And feeling again her world become unstable and shifting beneath her, feeling all familiar solid things fall away from under her and seeing familiar faces and objects arc swooping away from her as she plunged from glaring sunlight through a timeless interval into Fear like a green lambence straying to receive her, she was stark and tranced. But at last she could move again, screaming.
“You scared me so bad,” she gasped piteously, shrinking from ‘him. She turned and ran, ran toward light, toward the security of walls.
The room was dark: no sound within it, and after the dim spaciousness of the deck it seemed close and hot. But here “were comfortable walls and Jenny snapped on the light and entered, entered into an atmosphere of familiarity.
Here was a vague ghost of the scent she liked and with which she had happily been impregnated when she came aboard and which had not yet completely died away, and the thin sharp odor of lilacs which she had come to associate with Mrs. Wiseman and which lingered also in the room, and the other’s clothing, and her own comb on the dressing table and the bright metal cylinder of her lipstick beside it.
Jenny looked at her face in the mirror for a while. Then she removed a garment and returned to gaze at her stainless pink-and-whiteness, ineffable, unmarred by any thought at all. Then she removed the rest of her clothes, and again before the glass she passed her comb through the drowsing miniature Golconda of her hair, then she got her naked body placidly into bed, as was her habit since three nights.
But she didn’t turn out the light. She lay in her berth, gazing up at the smug glare of light upon the painted unbroken sweep of the ceiling. Time passed while she lay rosy and motionless, measured away by the small boneless hands of water lapping against the hull beyond the port; and she could hear feet also, and people moving about and making sounds.
She didn’t know what it was she wanted, except it was something. So she lay on her back rosy and quiet beneath the unshaded glare of the inadequate light, and after a while she thought that maybe she was going to cry. Maybe that was it, so she lay naked and rosy and passive on her back, waiting to begin.
She could still hear people moving about: voices and feet, and she kept waiting for that first taste of crying that comes into your throat before you really get started — that feeling that there are two little salty canals just under your ears when you feel sorry for yourself, and that other kind of feeling you have at the base of your nose.
Only my nose don’t get red when I cry, she thought, in a placid imminent misery of sadness and meaningless despair, waiting passive and still and without dread for it to begin. But before it began, Mrs. Wiseman entered the room.
She came over to Jenny and Jenny looked up and saw the other’s dark small head, like a deer’s head, against the light, and that dark intent way the other had of looking at her; and presently Mrs. Wiseman said:
“What is it, Jenny? What’s the matter?”
But she had forgotten what it was, almost: all she could remember was that there had been something; but now that the other had come Jenny could hardly remember that she had forgotten anything even, and so she just lay and looked up at the other’s dark slender head against the unshaded light.
“Poor child, you have had a hard day, haven’t you?” She put her hand on Jenny’s brow, smoothing back the fine hushed gold of Jenny’s hair, stroking her hand along Jenny’s cheek. Jenny lay quiet under the hand, drowsing her eyes like a stroked kitten, and then she knew she could cry all right, whenever she wanted to. Only it was almost as much fun just lying here and knowing you could cry whenever you got ready to, as the crying itself would be. She opened her blue ineffable eyes.
“Do you suppose he’s really drownded?” she asked. Mrs. Wiseman’s hand stroked Jenny’s cheek, pushing her hair upward and away from her brow.
“I don’t know, darling,” she answered soberly. “He’s a luckless man And anything may happen to a luckless man. But don’t you think about that any more Do you hear?” She leaned her face down to Jenny’s. “Do you hear?” she said again.
“No,” Fairchild said, “he ain’t the sort to get drowned. Some people just ain’t that sort…. I wonder,” he broke off suddenly and gazed at his companions. “Say, do you suppose he went off because he thought that girl was gone for good?”
“Drowned himself for love?” Mark Frost said. “Not in this day and time. People suicide because of money and disease; not for love.”
“I don’t know about that,” Fairchild objected. “They used to die because of love. And human nature don’t change. Its actions achieve different results under different conditions, but human nature don’t change.”
“Mark is right,” the Semitic man said. “People in the old books died of heartbreak also, which was probably merely some ailment that any modern surgeon or veterinarian could cure out of hand. But people do not die of love. That’s the reason love and death in conjunction have such an undying appeal in books: they are never very closely associated anywhere else.
“But as for a broken heart in this day of general literacy and facilities for disseminating the printed word—” he made a sound of disparagement. “Lucky he who believes that his heart is broken: he can immediately write a book and so take revenge (what is more terrible than the knowledge that the man you just knocked down discovered a coin in the gutter while getting up?) on him or her who damaged his or her ventricles. Besides cleaning up in the movies and magazines. No, no,” he repeated, “you don’t commit suicide when you are disappointed in love. You write a book.”
“I don’t know about that,” repeated Fairchild stubbornly. “People will do anything. But I suppose it takes a fool to believe that and act on that principle.” Beyond the eastern horizon was a rumor of pale silver, pallid and chill and faint, and they sat for a while in silence, thinking of love and death. The red eye of a cigarette twelve inches from the deck: this was Mark Frost. Fairchild broke the silence.
“The way she went off with Da — the steward. It was kind of nice, wasn’t it? And came back. No excuses, no explanations— ‘think no evil’ you know. That’s what these postwar young folks have taught us. Only old folks like Julius and me would ever see evil in what people, young people, do.
But then, I guess folks growing up into the manner of looking at life that we inherited, would find evil in anything where inclination wasn’t subservient to duty. We were taught to believe that duty is infallible, or it wouldn’t be duty, and if it were just unpleasant enough, you got a mark in heaven, sure….
But maybe it ain’t so different, taken one generation by another. Most of our sins are vicarious, anyhow. I guess when you are young you have too much fun just being, to sin very much. But it’s kind of nice, being young in this generation.”
“Surely. We all think that, when our arteries begin to harden,” the Semitic man rejoined. “Not only are most of our sins vicarious, but most of our pleasures are too look at our books, our stage, the movies. Who supports ’em? Not the young folks. They’d rather walk around or just sit and hold each other’s hands.”
“It’s a substitute,” Fairchild said. “Don’t you see?”
“Substitute for what? When you are young and in love yesterday and out to-day and in again to-morrow, do you know anything about love? Is it anything to you except a rather dreadful mixture of jealousy and thwarted desires and interference with that man’s world which after all, we all prefer, and nagging and maybe a little pleasure like
