“Yes, Talliaferro ain’t bold enough. We better let Major Ayers go, after all. No necessity for disappointing the girl, at least.”
“Besides,” Mr. Talliaferro added quickly, “she is in a room with some one else.”
“No, she ain’t. She’s in a room to herself, now; that one at the end of the hall.”
“That’s Mrs. Maurier’s room,” Mr. Talliaferro said, staring at him.
“No, no; she changed. That room has a broken screen, so she changed. Julius and I were helping her move this afternoon. Weren’t we, Julius? That’s how I happen to know Jenny’s in there now.”
“But, really—” Mr. Talliaferro swallowed again. “Are you sure that’s her room? This is a serious matter, you know.”
“Have another drink,” Fairchild said.
TWELVE O’CLOCK
The deck was deserted. Fairchild and Major Ayers halted and gazed about in pained astonishment. The victrola was hooded and mute, smugly inscrutable. They held a hurried council, then they set forth to beat up stragglers. There were no stragglers.
“Put on a record,” Fairchild suggested at last. “Maybe that’ll get ’em up here. They must have thought we’d gone to bed.”
The Semitic man started the victrola again, and again Major Ayers and Fairchild combed the deck in vain. The moon had risen, its bony erstwhile disc was thumbed into the sky like a coin after too much handling.
Mrs. Maurier routed out the captain and together they repaired to Fairchild’s room. “Find it all,” she directed, “every single one.” The captain found it all. “Now, open that window.”
She gave the captain further directions, when they had finished, and she returned to her room and sat again on the edge of her bed.
Moonlight came into the room level as a lance through the port, like a marble pencil shattering and filling the room with a thin silver dust, as of marble. “It has come, at last,” she whispered, aware of her body, heavy and soft with years.
I should feel happy, I should feel happy, she told herself, but her limbs felt chill and strange to her and within her a terrible thing was swelling, a thing terrible and poisonous and released, like water that has been dammed too long: it was as though there were waking within her comfortable, long familiar body a thing that abode there dormant and which she had harbored unaware.
She sat on the edge of her bed, feeling her strange chill limbs, while that swelling thing within her unfolded like an intricate poisonous flower, an intricate slow convolvulse of petals that grew and faded, died and were replaced by other petals huger and more implacable.
Her limbs were strange and cold: they were trembling. That dark flower of laughter, that secret hideous flower grew and grew until that entire world which was herself was become a slow implacable swirling of hysteria that rose in her throat and shook it as though with a myriad small hands while from overhead there came a thin saccharine strain spaced off by a heavy thumping of feet, where Fairchild was teaching Major Ayers the Charleston.
And soon, another sound; and the Nausikaa trembled and pulsed, girding herself with motion.
Mr. Talliaferro stood in the bows, letting the wind blow upon his face, amid his hair. The worn moon had risen and she spread her boneless hand upon the ceaseless water, and the cold remote stars swung overhead, cold and remote and incurious: what cared they for the haggard despair in his face, for the hushed despair in his heart? They had seen too much of human moiling and indecision and astonishments to be concerned over the fact that Mr. Talliaferro had got himself engaged to marry again.
.. Soon, a sound; and the Nausikaa trembled and pulsed, girding herself with motion.
Suddenly Fairchild stopped, raising his hand for silence. “What’s that?” he asked.
“What’s what?” responded Major Ayers, pausing also and staring at him.
“I thought I heard something fall into the water.” He crossed to the rail and leaned over it. Major Ayers followed him and they listened. But the dark restless water was untroubled by any foreign sound, the night was calm, islanding the worn bland disc of the moon.
“Steward throwing out grapefruit,” Major Ayers suggested at last. They turned away.
“Hope so,” Fairchild said. “Start her up again, Julius.”
And, soon, another sound; and the Nausikaa trembled and pulsed, girding herself with motion.
EPILOGUE
1
LAKE WATER HAD done strange things to Jenny’s little green dress. It was rough-dried and draggled, and it had kind of sagged here and drawn up there. The skirt in the back, for instance; because now between the gracious miniature ballooning of its hem and the tops of her dingy stockings, you saw pink flesh.
But she was ineffably unaware of this as she stood on Canal street waiting for her car to come along, watching Pete’s damaged hat slanting away amid the traffic, clutching the dime he had given her for carfare in her little soiled hand.
Soon her car came along and she got in it and gave the conductor her dime and received change and put seven cents in the machine while men, unshaven men and coatless men and old men and spruce young men and men that smelled of toilet water and bay rum and sweat and men that smelled of just sweat, watched her with the moist abjectness of hounds.
Then she went on up the aisle, rife, placidly unreluctant, and then the car jolted forward and she sat partly upon a fat man in a derby and a newspaper, who looked up at her and then hunched over to the window and dived again into his newspaper with his derby on.
The car hummed and spurted and jolted and stopped and jolted and hummed and spurted between croaching walls and old iron lovely as dingy lace, and shrieking children from south Europe once removed and wild and soft as animals and cheerful with filth; and old rich food smells, smells rich enough to fatten the flesh through the lungs; and women screaming from adjacent door to door in bright dirty shawls. Her three pennies had got warm and moist in her hand, so she changed them to the other hand and dried her palm on her thigh.
Soon it was a broader street at right angles — a weary green spaciousness of late August foliage and civilization again in the shape of a filling station; and she descended and passed between houses possessing once and long ago individuality, reserve, but now become somehow vaguely and dingily identical; reaching at last an iron gate through which she went and on up a shallow narrow concrete walk bordered on either side by beds in which flowers for some reason never seemed to grow well, and so on across the veranda and into the house.
Her father was on the night force and he now sat in his sock feet and with his galluses down, at his supper of mackerel (it is Friday) and fried potatoes and coffee and an early afternoon edition. He wiped his mustache with two sweeps of the back of his hand.
“Where you been?”
Jenny entered the room removing her hat. She dropped it to the floor and came up in a flanking movement. “On a boat ride,” she answered. Her father drew his feet under his chair to rise and his face suffused slowly with relief and anger.
“And you think you can go off like that, without a word to nobody, and then walk back into this house—” But Jenny captured him and she squirmed onto his rising lap and though he tried to defend himself, kissed him through his mackerelish mustache, and held him speechless so while she delved amid that vague pinish region which was her mind. After a while she remembered it.
“Haul up your sheet,” she said. “You’re jibbing.”
2
Pete was the baby: he was too young to have been aware of it, of course, but that electric sign with the family name on it had marked a climacteric: the phoenix-like rise of the family fortunes from the dun ashes of respectability and a small restaurant catering to Italian working people, to the final and ultimate Americanization of the family, since this fortune, like most American ones, was built on the flouting of a statutory impediment.
Prior to nineteen-nineteen you entered a dingy room fecund with the rich heavy odor of Italian cooking, you sat surrounded by Italian faces and frank Italian eating sounds, at oilcloth of a cheerful red-and-white check and cunningly stained, impermeated with food, where you were presently supplied with more food.
Perhaps old lady Ginotta herself came bustling out with soup and one thumb in a thick platter and a brisk word for you, or by Joe, anyway, barearmed and skilful and taciturn, while Mr. Ginotta himself in his stained apron stood talking to a table of his intimates.
Perhaps if you lingered long enough over your banana or overripe oft-handled grapes you would see Pete in his ragged corduroy knickers and faded clean shirt, with his curling shock of hair and his queer golden eyes, twelve years old and beautiful as only an Italian lad can be.
But now, all this was changed. Where was once a dingy foodladen room, wooden floored and not too clean, was now a tiled space cleared and waxed for dancing and enclosed on one side by mirrors and on the other by a row of booths containing each a table and two chairs and lighted each by a discreet table lamp of that surreptitious and unmistakable shade of pink and curtained each with heavy maroon rep.
And where you once got food good and Italian and
