“So I tiptoed across to the seat. It was hot in there, with the sun beating down on it: I could smell hot resin, even above the smell of the place itself. In a corner of the ceiling there was a dirt dobber’s nest — a hard lump of clay with holes in it, stuck to the ceiling, and big green flies made a steady droning sound.
I remember how hot it was in there, and that feeling places like that give you — a kind of letting down of the bars of pretense, you know; a kind of submerging of civilized strictures before the grand implacability of nature and the physical body. And I stood there, feeling this feeling and the heat, and hearing the drone of those big flies, holding my breath and listening for a sound from beyond the partition. But there wasn’t any sound from beyond it, so I put my head down through the seat.”
Mark Frost snored. The moon, the pallid belly of the moon, inundating the world with a tarnished magic not of living things, laying her silver fleshless hand on the water that whispered and lapped against the hull of the yacht.
The Semitic man clutched his dead cigar and he and Fairchild sat in the implacable laxing of muscles and softening tissue of their forty odd years, seeing two wide curious blue eyes into which an inverted surprise came clear as water, and long golden curls swinging downward above the ordure; and they sat in silence, remembering youth and love, and time and death,
ELEVEN O’CLOCK
Mark Frost had roused and with a ghostly epigram had taken himself off to bed. Later the Semitic man rose and departed, leaving him with a cigar; and Fairchild sat with his stockinged feet on the rail, puffing at the unfamiliar weed. He could see the whole deck in the pallid moonlight, and presently he remarked some one sitting near the afterrail.
How long this person had been there Fairchild could not have told, but he was there now, alone and quite motionless, and there was something about his attitude that unleashed Fairchild’s curiosity, and at last he rose from his chair.
It was David, the steward. He sat on a coiled rope and he held something in his hands, between his knees. When Fairchild stopped beside him David raised his head slowly into the moonlight and gazed at the older man, making no effort to conceal that which he held. Fairchild leaned nearer to see. It was a slipper, a single slipper, cracked and stained with dried mud and disreputable, yet seeming still to hold in its mute shape something of that hard and sexless graveness of hers.
After a while David looked away, gazing again out across the dark water and its path of shifting silver, holding the slipper between his hands; and without speaking Fairchild turned and went quietly away.
THE FOURTH DAY
SEVEN O’CLOCK
FAIRCHILD WAKED AND lay for a while luxuriously on his back. After a time he turned on his side to doze again, and when he turned he noticed the square of paper lying on the floor, as though it had been thrust under the door. He lay watching it for a while, then he came fully awake, and he rose and crossed the room and picked it up.
Dear Mr. Fairchild: I am leaveing the boat to day I have got a better job I have got 2 days comeing to me I will not claim it I am leaveing the boat be fore the trip is over tell Mrs. More I have got a better job ask her she will pay you $5 dollars of it you loned me yours truly DAVID WEST.
He reread the note, brooding over it, then he folded it and put it in the pocket of his pajama jacket, and poured himself a drink. The Semitic man in his berth snored, profound, defenseless on his back.
Fairchild sat again in his berth, his drink untasted beside him, and he unfolded the note and read it through again, remembering youth, thinking of age and slackening flesh like an old thin sorrow everywhere in the world.
EIGHT O’CLOCK
“Now, don’t you worry at all,” they reassured Mrs. Maurier, “we can do just as we did yesterday: it will be more fun than ever, that way. Dorothy and I can open cans and warm things. We can get along just as well without a steward as with one. Can’t we, Dorothy?”
“It will be like a picnic,” Miss Jameson agreed. “Of course, the men will have to help, too,” she added, looking at Pete with her pale humorless eyes.
Mrs. Maurier submitted, dogging them with her moaning fatuousness while Mrs. Wiseman and Miss Jameson and the niece opened cans and heated things, smearing dreadfully about the galley with grease and juices and blood from the niece’s thumb; opening, at Mark Frost’s instigation, a can labeled Beans, which turned out to be green string beans.
But they got coffee made at last, and breakfast was finally not very late. As they had said, it was like a picnic, though there were no ants, as the Semitic man pointed out just before he was ejected from the kitchen.
“Well open a can of them for you,” his sister offered briskly.
Besides, there was still plenty of grapefruit.
AT BREAKFAST
Fairchild — But I saw him after we got back to the yacht. I know I did.
Mark — No, he wasn’t in the boat when we came back: I remember now. I never saw him after we changed places, just after Jenny and Ernest fell out.
Julius — That’s so…. Was he in the boat with us at all?
Does anybody remember seeing him in the boat at all? Fairchild — Sure he was: don’t you remember how Mark kept hitting him with his oar? I tell you I saw —
Mark — He was in the boat at first. But after Jenny and — Fairchild — Sure he was. Don’t you remember seeing him after we came back, Eva?
Eva — I don’t know. My back was toward all of you while we were rowing. And after Ernest threw Jenny out, I don’t remember who was there and who wasn’t.
Fairchild — Talliaferro was facing us. Didn’t you see him, Talliaferro? And Jenny, Jenny ought to remember. Don’t you remember seeing him, Jenny?
Mr. Talliaferro — I was watching the rope, you know.
Fairchild — How about you, Jenny? Don’t you remember?
Eva — Now, don’t you bother Jenny about it. How could she be expected to remember anything about it? How could anybody be expected to remember anything about such an idiotic — idiotic —
Fairchild — Well, I do. Don’t you all remember him going below with us, after we got back?
Mrs. Maurier (wringing her hands) — Doesn’t some one remember something about it? It’s terrible. I don’t know what to do: yous people don’t seem to realize what a position it puts me in, with such a dreadful thing hanging over me. You people have nothing to lose, but I live here, I have a certain… And now a thing like this —
Fairchild — Ah, he ain’t drowned. He’ll turn up soon: you watch what I say.
The Niece — And if he is drowned, we’ll find him all right. The water isn’t very deep between here and the shore. (Her aunt gazed at her dreadfully.)
The Nephew — Besides, a dead body always floats after forty-eight hours. All we have to do is wait right here until tomorrow morning: chances are he’ll be bumping alongside, ready to be hauled back on board. (Mrs. Maurier screamed. Her scream shuddered and died among her chins and she gazed about at her party in abject despair.)
Fairchild — Aw, he ain’t drowned. I tell you I saw —
The Niece — Sure. Cheer up, Aunt Pat. Well get him back, even if he is. It’s not like losing him altogether, you know.
If you send his body back, maybe his folks won’t even claim your boat or anything.
Eva — Shut up, you children.
Fairchild — But I tell you I saw —
NINE O’CLOCK
Forward, Jenny, the niece, her brother come temporarily out of his scientific shell, and Pete stood in a group; Pete in his straw hat and the nephew with his lean young body and the two girls in their little scanty dresses and awkward with a sort of terrible grace. So flagrantly young they were that it served as a barrier between them and the others, causing even Mr. Talliaferro to lurk nearby without the courage to join them.
“These young girls,” Fairchild said. He watched the group, watched the niece and Jenny as they clung to the rail and swung aimlessly back and forth, pivoting on their heels, in a sheer wantonness of young muscles. “They scare me,” he admitted. “Not as a possible or probable chastity, you know. Chastity ain’t..
“A bodiless illusion multiplied by lack of opportunity,” Mark Frost said.
“What?” he asked, looking at the poet. “Well, maybe so.” He resumed his own tenuous thought. “Maybe we all have different ideas of sex, like all races do…. Maybe us three sitting here are racially unrelated to each other, as regards sex. Like a Frenchman and an Anglo-Saxon and a Mongol, for instance.”
“Sex,” said the Semitic man, “to an Italian is something like a firecracker at a children’s party; to a Frenchman, a business the relaxation from which is making money; to an Englishman, it is a nuisance; to an American, a horserace. Now, which are you?”
Fairchild laughed. He watched the group forward a while. “Their strange sexless shapes, you know,” he went on. “We, you and I, grew up expecting something
