The line inched forward, stopped, inched forward again when the bell rang. The policeman at the curb held the line again and Pete sat watching the swarming darting newsboys, and the loafers and shoppers and promenaders, and little colt-like girls with their monotonous blonde legs. The bell rang, but the cop still held them. Pete leaned out, jazzing his idling engine. “Come on, come on, you blue-bellied bastard,” he called. “Let’s go.”
At last the cop lowered his glove and Pete whipped skilfully into St. Charles, and presently the street widened and became an avenue picketed with palms, and settling onto his spine and slanting his damaged straw hat to a swaggering slant on his dark reckless head, he began to overhaul the slow ones, passing them up.
3
Fairchild’s splitting head ultimately roused him and he lay for some time submerged in the dull throbbing misery of his body before he discovered that the boat was stationary again and, after an effort of unparalleled stoicism, that it was eleven o’clock. No sound anywhere, yet there was something in the atmosphere of his surroundings, something different. But trying to decide what it was only made his head pound the worse, so he gave it up and lay back again. The Semitic man slumbered in his berth.
After a while Fairchild groaned, and rose and wavered blundering across the cabin and drank deeply of water. Then he saw land through the port: a road and a weathered board wall, and beyond it, trees. Mandeville he decided. He tried to rouse the Semitic man, but the other cursed him from slumber and rolled over to face the wall.
He hunted again for a bottle, but there were not even any empty ones: who ever did it had made a clean sweep. Well, a cup of coffee, then. So he got into his trousers and crossed the passage to a lavatory and held his head beneath a tap for a while. Then he returned and finished dressing and sallied forth.
Some one slumbered audibly in Major Ayers’ room. It was Major Ayers himself, and Fairchild closed the door and went on, struck anew with that strange atmosphere which the yacht seemed to have gained overnight. The saloon was empty also, and a broken meal offended his temporarily refined sensibilities with partially emptied cups and cold soiled plates.
But still no sound, no human sound, save Major Ayers and the Semitic man in slumber’s strophe and antistrophe. He stood in the door of the saloon and groaned again. Then he took his splitting head on deck.
Here he blinked in the light, shutting his eyes against it while hot brass hammers beat against his eyeballs. Three men dangled their legs over the edge of the quay and regarded him, and he opened his eyes again and saw the three men.
“Good morning,” he said. “What town’s this? Mandeville?”
The three men looked at him. After a time one said:
“Mandevilie? Mandeville what?”
“What town is it, then?” he asked, but as he spoke awareness came to him and looking about he saw a steel bridge and a trolley on the bridge, and further still, a faint mauve smudge on the sky, and in the other direction the flag that floated above the yacht club, languorous in a faint breeze. The three men sat and swung their legs and watched him. Presently one of them said:
“Your party went off and left you.”
“Looks like it,” Fairchild agreed. “Do you know if they said anything about sending a car back for us?”
“No, she ain’t going to send back to-day,” the man answered. Fairchild cleared his aching eyes: it was the captain. “Trolley track over yonder a ways,” he called after Fairchild as he turned and descended the companionway.
4
Major Ayers’ appointment was for three o’clock. His watch corroborated and commended him as he stepped from the elevator into a long cool corridor glassed on either hand by opaque plate from beyond which came a thin tapping of typewriters.
Soon he found the right door and entered it, and across a low barrier he gave his card to a thin scented girl, glaring at her affably, and stood in the ensuing interval gazing out the window across diversified rectangles of masonry, toward the river.
The girl returned. “Mr. Reichman will see you now,” she said across her chewing gum, swinging the gate open for him.
Mr. Reichman shook his hand and offered him a chair and a cigar. He asked Major Ayers for his impressions of New Orleans and immediately interrupted the caller’s confused staccato response to ask Major Ayers, for whom the war had served as the single possible condition under which he could have returned to England at all, and to whom for certain private reasons London had been interdict since the Armistice, how affairs compared between the two cities.
Then he swung back in his patent chair and said:
“Now, Major, just what is your proposition?”
“Ah, yes,” said Major Ayers, flicking the ash from his cigar. “It’s a salts. Now, all Americans are constipated—”
5
Beneath him, on the ground floor, where a rectangle of light fell outward across the alley, a typewriter was being hammered by a heavy and merciless hand. Fairchild sat with a cigar on his balcony just above the unseen but audible typist, enjoying the cool darkness and the shadowed treefilled spaciousness of the cathedral close beneath his balcony.
An occasional trolley clanged and crashed up Royal street, but this was but seldom, and when it had died away there was no sound save the monotonous merging clatter of the typewriter. Then he saw and recognized Mr. Talliaferro turning the corner and with an exclamation of alarm he sprang to his feet, kicking his chair over backward. Ducking quickly into the room redolent of pennyroyal he snapped off the reading lamp and leaped upon a couch, feigning sleep.
Mr. Talliaferro walked dapperly, swinging his stick, his goal in sight. Yes, Fairchild was right, he knew women, the feminine soul — ? No, not soul: they have no souls. Nature, the feminine nature: that substance, that very substance of their being, impalpable as moonlight, challenging and retreating at the same time; inconsistent, nay, incomprehensible, yet serving their ends with such a devastating practicality.
As though the earth, the world, man and his very desires and impulses themselves, had been invented for the sole purpose of hushing their little hungry souls by filling their time through serving their biological ends….
Yes, boldness. And propinquity. And opportunity, that happy conjunction of technique and circumstance, being with the right one in the right place at the right time. Yes, yes, Opportunity, Opportunity — more important than all, perhaps. Mr. Talliaferro put up Opportunity: he called for a ballot. The ayes had it.
He stopped utterly still in the flash of his inspiration. At last he had it, had the trick, the magic Word. It was so simple that he stood in amaze at the fact that it had not occurred to him before. But then he realized that its very simplicity was the explanation.
And my nature is complex, he told himself, gazing at stars in the hot dark sky, in a path of sky above the open coffin of the street. It was so devastatingly simple that he knew a faint qualm. Was it — was it exactly sporting? Wasn’t it like shooting quail on the ground?
But no, no: now that he had the key, now that he had found the Word, he dared admit to himself that he had suffered. Not so much in his vanity, not physically — after all, man can do without the pleasures of love: it will not kill him; but because each failure seemed to put years behind him with far more finality than the mere recurrence of natal days. Yes, Mr. Talliaferro owed himself reparation, let them suffer who must. And was not that woman’s part from time immemorial?
Opportunity, create your opportunity, prepare the ground by overlooking none of those small important trivialities which mean so much to them, then take advantage of it. And I can do that, he told himself.
Indifference, perhaps, as though women were no rare thing with me; that there is perhaps another woman I had rather have seen, but circumstances over which neither of us had any control intervened. They like a man who has other women, for some reason. Can it be that love to them is half adultery and half jealousy?… Yes, I can do that sort of thing, I really can…. “She would have one suit of black underthings,” Mr. Talliaferro said aloud with a sort of exultation.
He struck the pavement with his stick, lightly. “By God, that’s it,” he exclaimed in a hushed tone, striding on…. “Create the opportunity, lead up to it delicately but firmly Drop a remark about coming to-night only because I had promised….
Yes, they like an honorable man: it increases their latitude. She’ll say, ‘Please take me to dance,’ and I’ll say ‘No, really, I don’t care to dance to-night,’ and she’ll say, ‘Won’t you take me?’ leaning against me, eh? — let’s see — yes, she’ll take my hand.
But I shan’t respond at once. She’ll tease and then I’ll put my arm around her and raise her face in the dark cab and kiss her, coldly, and I’ll say, ‘Do you really want to dance to-night?’ and then shell say, Oh, I don’t know. Suppose we just drive around a while?…’ Will she say that at this point? Well, should she not…
