Fairchild returned to the couch and reclined again, laughing. Abruptly he ceased chuckling and lay for a time in alarmed concern. Then he groaned again, and rose and took his hat.
As he stepped into the alley, the Semitic man pausing at the entrance spoke to him. “Where are you going?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Fairchild replied. “Somewhere. The Great Illusion has just called,” he explained. “He has an entirely new scheme to-night.”
“Oh. Slipping out, are you?” the other asked, lowering his voice.
“No, he just dashed away. But I don’t dare stay in this evening. He’ll be back inside of two hours to tell me why this one didn’t work. We’ll have to go somewhere else.” The Semitic man mopped his handkerchief across his bald head. Beyond the lattice blind beside them the typewriter still chattered. Fairchild chuckled again. Then he sighed. “I wish Talliaferro could find him a woman. I’m tired of being seduced…. Let’s go over to Gordon’s.”
6
The niece had already yawned elaborately several times at the lone guest: she was prepared, and recognized the preliminary symptoms indicating that her brother was on the point of his customary abrupt and muttered departure from the table. She rose also, with alacrity.
“Well,” she said briskly, “I’ve enjoyed knowing you a lot, Mark. Next summer maybe we’ll be back here, and we’ll have to do it again, won’t we?”
“Patricia,” her aunt said, “sit down.”
“I’m sorry, Aunt Pat. But Josh wants me to sit with him to-night. He’s going away to-morrow,” she explained to the guest.
“Aren’t you going, too?” Mark Frost asked.
“Yes, but this is our last night here, and Gus wants me to—”
“Not me,” her brother denied quickly. “You needn’t come away on my account.”
“Well, I think I’d better, anyway.”
Her aunt repeated “Patricia.”
But the niece ignored her. She circled the table and shook the guest’s hand briskly, before he could rise. “Good-by,” she repeated. “Until next summer.” Her aunt said “Patricia” again, firmly. She turned again at the door and said politely: “Good night, Aunt Pat.”
Her brother had gone on up the stairs. She hurried after him, leaving her aunt to call “Patricia!” from the dining room, and reached the head of the stairs in time to see his door close behind him. When she tried the knob, the door was locked, so she came away and went quietly to her room.
She stripped off her clothes in the darkness and lay on her bed, and after a while she heard him banging and splashing in the connecting bathroom. When these sounds had ceased she rose and entered the bathroom quietly from her side, and quietly she tried his door. Unlocked.
She snapped on the light and spun the tap of the shower until needles of water drummed viciously into the bath. She thrust her hand beneath it at intervals: soon it was stinging and cold; and she drew her breath as for a dive and sprang beneath it, clutching a cake of soap, and cringed shuddering and squealing while the water needled her hard simple body in its startling bathing suit of white skin, matting her coarse hair, stinging and blinding her.
She whirled the tap again and the water ceased its antiseptic miniature thunder, and after toweling herself vigorously she found that she was hot as ever, though not sticky any longer; so moving more slowly she returned to her room and donned fresh pajamas.
This suit had as yet its original cord. Then she went on her bare silent feet and stood again at the door of her brother’s room, listening.
“Look out, Josh,” she called suddenly, flinging open the door, “I’m coming in.”
His room was dark, but she could discern the shape of him on the bed and she sped across the room and plumped jouncing onto the bed beside him. He jerked himself up sharply.
“Here,” he exclaimed. “What do you want to come in here worrying me, for?” He raised himself still further: a brief violent struggle, and the niece thudded solidly on the floor. She said Ow in a muffled surprised tone. “Now, get out and stay out,” her brother added. “I want to go to sleep.”
“Aw, lemme stay a while. I’m not going to bother you.”
“Haven’t you been staying under my feet for a week, without coming in here where I’m trying to go to sleep? Get out, now.”
“Just a little while,” she begged. “I’ll lie still if you want to go to sleep.”
“You won’t keep still. You go on, now.”
“Please, Gus. I swear I will.”
“Well,” he agreed at last, grudgingly. “But if you start flopping around—”
“I’ll be still,” she promised. She slid quickly onto the bed and lay rigidly on her back. Outside, in the hot darkness, insects scraped and rattled and droned. The room, however, was a spacious quiet coolness, and the curtains at the windows stirred in a ghost of a breeze.
“Josh.” She lay flat, perfectly still.
“Huh.”
“Didn’t you do something to that boat?”
After a while he said: “What boat?” She was silent, taut with listening. He said: “Why? What would I want to do anything to the boat for? What makes you think I did?”
“Didn’t you, now? Honest?”
“You’re crazy. I never hurt — I never was down there except when you came tagging down there, that morning. What would I want to do anything to it, for?” They lay motionless, a kind of tenseness. He said, suddenly: “Did you tell her I did something to it?”
“Aw, don’t be a goof. I’m not going to tell on you.”
“You’re damn right you won’t. I never did anything to it.”
“All right, all right: I’m not going to tell if you haven’t got guts to. You’re yellow, Josh,” she told him calmly.
“Look here, I told you that if you wanted to stay in here, you’d have to keep quiet, didn’t I? Shut up, then. Or get out.”
“Didn’t you break that boat, honest?”
“No, I told you. Now, you shut up or get out of here.” They lay quiet for a time. After a while she moved carefully, turning onto her belly by degrees. She lay still again for a time, then she raised her head. He seemed to be asleep, so she lowered her head and relaxed her muscles, spreading her arms and legs to where the sheet was still cool.
“I’m glad we’re going to-morrow,” she murmured, as though to herself. “I like to ride on the train. And mountains again. I love mountains, all blue and… blue..,. We’ll be seeing mountains day after to-morrow. Little towns on ’em that don’t smell like people eating all the time… and mountains…
“No mountains between here and Chicago,” her brother said gruffly. “Shut up.”
“Yes, there are.” She raised herself to her elbow. “There are some. I saw some coming down here.”
“That was in Virginia and Tennessee. We don’t go through Virginia to Chicago, dumbbell.”
“We go through Tennessee, though.”
“Not that part of Tennessee. Shut up, I tell you. Here, you get up and go back to your room.”
“No. Please, just a little while longer. I’ll lie still. Come on, Gus, don’t be so crummy.”
“Get out, now,” he repeated implacably.
“HI be still: I won’t say a w—”
“No. Outside, now. Go on. Go on, Gus, like I tell you.” She heaved herself over nearer. “Please, Josh. Then I’ll go.”
“Well. Be quick about it.” He turned his face away and she leaned down and took his ear between her teeth, biting it just a little, making a kind of meaningless maternal sound against his ear. “That’s enough,” he said presently, turning his head and his moistened ear. “Get out, now.”
She rose obediently and returned to her room. It seemed to be hotter in here than in his room, so she got up and removed her pajamas and got back in bed and lay on her back, cradling her dark grave head in her arms and gazing into the darkness; and after a while it wasn’t so hot and it was like she was on a high place looking away out where mountains faded dreaming and blue and on and on into a purple haze under the slanting and solemn music of the sun. She’d see ’em day after to-morrow. Mountains…
7
Fairchild went directly to the marble and stood before it, clasping his hands at his burly back. The Semitic man sat immediately on entering the room, preempting the single chair. The host was busy beyond the rep curtain which constituted his bedroom, from where he presently reappeared with a bottle of whisky. He had removed both shirt and undershirt now and beneath a faint reddish fuzz his chest gleamed with heat like an oiled gladiator’s.
“I see,” Fairchild remarked as the host entered, “that you too have been caught by this modern day fetich of virginity. But you have this advantage over us: yours will remain inviolate without your having to shut your eyes to its goings-on. You don’t have to make any effort to keep yours from being otherwise. Very satisfactory.
And very unusual. The greatest part of man’s immolation of virginity is, I think, composed of an alarm and a suspicion that some one else may be, as the term is, getting it.”
“Perhaps Gordon’s alarm regarding his own particular illusion of it is, that some one else may not get it,” the Semitic man suggested.
“No, I guess not,” Fairchild said. “He don’t expect to sell this to anybody, you know. Who would pay out good money for a virginity he couldn’t later violate, if only to assure himself it was the genuine thing?”
“Leda clasping her duck between her thighs could yet be carved out of it, however,”
