“No, thank God,” Fairchild said. The other continued: “It’s the old problem of the aristocracy over and over: a natural envy of that minority which is at liberty to commit all the sins which the majority cannot stop earning a living long enough to commit.”
He lit his cigar again. “Young people always shape their lives as the preceding generation requires of them. I don’t mean exactly that they go to church when they are told to, for instance, because their elders expect it of them — though God only knows what other reason they could possibly have for going to church as it is conducted nowadays, with a warden to patrol the building in the urban localities and in the rural districts squads of K.K.K.’s beating the surrounding copses and all those traditional retreats that in the olden days enabled the church to produce a soul for every one it saved. But youth in general lives unquestioningly according to the arbitrary precepts of its elders.
“For instance, a generation ago higher education was not considered so essential, and young people grew up at home into the convention that the thing to do was to get married at twenty-one and go to work immediately, regardless of one’s equipment or inclination or aptitude.
But now they grow up into the convention that youth, that being under thirty years of age, is a protracted sophomore course without lectures, in which one must spend one’s entire time dressed like a caricature, drinking homemade booze and pawing at the opposite sex in the intervals of being arrested by traffic policemen.
“A few years ago a so called commercial artist (groan, damn you) named John Held began to caricature college life, cloistered and otherwise, in the magazines; ever since then college life, cloistered and otherwise, has been busy caricaturing John Held. It is expected of them by their elders, you see.
And the young people humor them: young people are far more tolerant of the inexplicable and dangerous vagaries of their elders than the elders ever were or ever will be of the natural and harmless foibles of their children…. But perhaps they both enjoy it.”
“I don’t know,” Fairchild said. “Not even the old folks would like to be surrounded by people making such a drama of existence. And the young folks wouldn’t like it, either: young people have so many other things to do, you know. I think.. His voice ceased, died into darkness and a faint lapping sound of water.
The moon had swum up out of the east again, that waning moon of decay, worn and affable and cold. It was a magic on the water, a magic of pallid and fleshless things. The red eye of Mark Frost’s cigarette arced slow and lateral in his invisible hand, returned to its station twelve inches above the deck, and glowed and faded like a pulse. “You see,” Fairchild added like an apology, “I believe in young love in the spring, and things like that. I guess I’m a hopeless sentimentalist.”
The Semitic man grunted. Mark Frost said: “Virtue through abjectness and falsification: immolation of insincerity.” Fairchild ignored him, wrapped in this dream of his own.
“When youth goes out of you, you get out of it. Out of life, I mean. Up to that time you just live; after that, you are aware of living and living becomes a conscious process.
Like thinking does in time, you know. You become conscious of thinking, and then you start right off to think in words. And first thing you know, you don’t have thoughts in your mind at all: you just have words in it. But when you are young, you just be. Then you reach a stage where you do. Then a stage where you think, and last of all, where you remember. Or try to.”
“Sex and death,” said Mark Frost sepulchrally, arcing the red eye of his cigarette, “a blank wall on which sex casts a shadow, and the shadow is life.” The Semitic man grunted again, immersed in one of his rare periods of uncommunicativeness. The moon climbed higher, the pallid unmuscled belly of the moon, and the Nausikaa dreamed like a silver gull on the dark restless water.
“I don’t know,” Fairchild said again. “I never found anything shadowy about life, people. Least of all, about my own doings. But it may be that there are shadowy people in the world, people to whom life is a kind of antic shadow.
But people like that make no impression on me at all, I can’t seem to get them at all. But this may be because I have a kind of firm belief that life is all right.” Mark Frost had cast away his final cigarette and was now a long prone shadow. The Semitic man was motionless also, holding his dead cigar.
“I was spending the summer with my grandfather, in Indiana. In the country. I was a boy then, and it was a kind of family reunion, with aunts and cousins that hadn’t seen each other in years. Children, too, all sizes.
“There was a girl that I remember, about my age, I reckon.
She had blue eyes and a lot of long, prim, golden curls. This girl, Jenny, must have looked like her, when she was about twelve. I didn’t know the other children very well, and besides I was used to furnishing my own diversion anyway; so I just kind of hung around and watched them doing the things children do.
I didn’t know how to go about getting acquainted with them. I’d seen how the other newcomers would do it, and I’d kind of plan to myself how I’d go about it: what I’d say when I went up to them… He ceased and mused for a time in a kind of hushed surprise. “Just like Talliaferro,” he said at last, quietly. “I hadn’t thought of that before.” He mused for a time. Then he spoke again.
“I was kind of like a dog going among strange dogs. Scared, kind of, but acting haughty and aloof. But I watched them. The way she made up to them, for instance. The day after she came she was the leader, always telling them what to do next. She had blue dresses, mostly.” Mark Frost snored in the silence. The Nausikaa dreamed like a gull on the dark water.
“This was before the day of water works and sewage systems in country homes, and this one had the usual outhouse. It was down a path from the house. In the late summer there were tall burdocks on either side of the path, taller than a twelve-year-old boy by late August. The outhouse was a small square frame box kind of thing, with a partition separating the men from the women inside.
“It was a hot day, in the middle of the afternoon. The others were down in the orchard, under the trees. From where I had been, in a big tree in the yard, I could see them, and the girls’ colored dresses in the shade; and when I climbed down from the tree and went across the back yard and through the gate and along the path toward the privy I could still see them occasionally through gaps in the burdocks. They were sitting around in the shade, playing some game, or maybe just talking.
“I went on down the path and went inside, and when I turned to shut the door to the men’s side, I looked back. And I saw her blue dress kind of shining, coming along the path between the tall weeds.
I couldn’t tell if she had seen me or not, but I knew that if I went back I’d have to pass her, and I was ashamed to do this. It would have been different if I’d already been there and was coming away: or it seemed to me that it would have. Boys are that way, you know,” he added uncertainly, turning his bewilderment again toward his friend. The other grunted. Mark Frost snored in his shadow.
“So I shut the door quick and stood right quiet, and soon I heard her enter the other side. I didn’t know yet if she’d seen me, but I was going to stay quiet as I could until she went away. I just had to do that, it seemed to me.
“Children are much more psychic than adults. More of a child’s life goes on in its mind than people believe. A child can distil the whole gamut of experiences it has never actually known, into a single instant. Anthropology explains a little of it. But not much, because the gaps in human knowledge that have to be bridged by speculation are too large.
The first thing a child is taught is the infallibility and necessity of precept, and by the time the child is old enough to add anything to our knowledge of the mind, it has forgotten. The soul sheds every year, like snakes do, I believe. You can’t recall the emotions you felt last year: you remember only that an emotion was associated with some physical fact of experience.
But all you have of it now is a kind of ghost of happiness and a vague and meaningless regret. Experience: why should we be expected to learn wisdom from experience? Muscles only remember, and it takes repetition and repetition to teach a muscle anything….”
Arcturus, Orion swinging head downward by his knees, in the southern sky an electric lobster fading as the moon rose. Water lapped at the hull of the Nausïkaa with little
