The mist had gone, and the sun came already sinister and hot among the trees, upon the miasmic earth. She sat on her crossed legs, replete, smoking. Abruptly she poised the cigarette in a tense cessation of all movement. Then she moved her head quickly and stared at him in consternation. She moved again, suddenly slapping her bare leg.
“What is it?” he asked.
For reply she extended her flat tan palm. In the center of it was a dark speck and a tiny splash of crimson. “Good Lord, gimme my stockings,” she exclaimed. “We’ll have to move. Gee, I’d forgotten about them,” she said, drawing her stockings over her straightening legs. She sprang to her feet. “We’ll soon be out, though. David, stop looking at me that way. Look like you were having a good time, at least. Cheer up, David. A man would thing you were losing your nerve already. Buck up: I think it’s grand, running off like this. Don’t you think it’s grand?” She turned her head and saw again that diffident still gesture of his hand touching her dress. Across the hot morning there came the high screech of the Nausikaa’s whistle.
EIGHT O’CLOCK
“No, sir,” the nephew answered patiently. “It’s a pipe.”
“A pipe, eh?” repeated Major Ayers, glaring at him with his hard affable little eyes. “You make pipes, eh?”
“I’m making this one,” the nephew replied with preoccupation.
“Came away and left your own ashore, perhaps?” Major Ayers suggested after a time.
“Naw. I don’t smoke ’em. I’m just making a new kind.”
“Ah, I see. For the market,” Major Ayers’s mind slowly took fire. “Money in it, eh? Americans would buy a new kind of pipe, too. You’ve made arrangements for the marketing of it, of course?”
“No, I’m just making it. For fun,” the nephew explained in that patient tone you use with obtuse children. Major Ayers glared at his bent preoccupied head.
“Yes,” he agreed. “Best to say nothing about it until you’ve completed all your computations regarding the cost of production. Don’t blame you at all,” Major Ayers brooded with calculation. He said, “Americans really would buy a new sort of pipe. Strange no one had thought of that,” The nephew carved minutely at his pipe. Major Ayers said secretly, “No, I don’t blame you at all. But when you’ve done, you’ll require capitaclass="underline" that sort of thing, you know. And then — a word to your friends at the proper time, eh?”
The nephew looked up. “A word to my friends?” he repeated. “Say, I’m just making a pipe, I tell you. A pipe. Just to be making it. For fun.”
“Right you are,” Major Ayers agreed suavely. “No offense, dear lad. I don’t blame you, don’t blame you at all. Experienced the same situation myself.”
* * *
NINE O’CLOCK
They had found the road at last — two faint scars and a powder of unbearable dust upon a raised levee traversing the swamp. But between them and the road was a foul sluggish width of water and vegetation and biology. Huge cypress roots thrust up like weathered bones out of a green scum and a quaking neither earth nor water, and always those bearded eternal trees like gods regarding without alarm this puny desecration of a silence of air and earth and water ancient when hoary old Time himself was a pink and dreadful miracle in his mother’s arms.
It was she who found the fallen tree, who first essayed its oozy treacherous bark and first stood in the empty road stretching monotonously in either direction between battalioned patriarchs of trees. She was panting a little, whipping a broken green branch about her body, watching him as he inched his way across the fallen trunk.
“Come on, David,” she called impatiently. “Here’s the road: we’re all right now,” He was across the ditch and he now struggled up the rank reluctant levee bank. She leaned down and reached her hand to him. But he would not take it, so she leaned farther and clutched his shirt. “Now, which way is Mandeville?”
“That way,” he answered immediately, pointing.
“You said you never were over here before,” she accused.
“No. But we were west of Mandeville when we went aground, and the lake is back yonder. So Mandeville must be that way.”
“I don’t think so. It’s this way: see, the swamp isn’t so thick this way. Besides, I just know it’s this way.”
He looked at her a moment. “All right,” he agreed. “I guess you are right.”
“But don’t you know which way it is? Isn’t there any way you could tell?” She bent and whipped her legs with the broken branch.
“Well, the lake is over yonder, and we were west of Mandeville last night—”
“You’re just guessing,” she interrupted harshly.
“Yes,” he answered. “I guess you are right.”
“Well, we’ve got to go somewhere. We can’t stand here.” She twitched her shoulders, writhing her body beneath her dress. “Which way, then?”
“Well, we w—”
She turned abruptly in the direction she had chosen. “Come on, I’ll die here.” She strode on ahead.
TEN O’CLOCK
She was trying to explain it to Pete. The sun had risen sinister and hot, climbing into a drowsy haze, and up from a low vague region neither water nor sky clouds like fat little girls in starched frocks marched solemnly.
“It’s a thing they join at that place he’s going to. Only they have to work to join it, and sometimes you don’t even get to join it then. And the ones that do join it don’t get anything except a little button or something.”
“Pipe down and try it again,” Pete told her, leaning with his elbows and one heel hooked backward on the rail, his hat slanted across his reckless dark face, squinting his eyes against the smoke of his cigarette. “What’re you talking about?”
“There’s something in the water,” Jenny remarked with placid astonishment, creasing her belly over the rail and staringdowward into the faintly rippled water while the land breeze molded her little green dress. “It must of fell off the boat. . Oh, I’m talking about that college he’s going to. You work to join things there. You work three years, she says and then maybe you—”
“What college?”
“I forgot. It’s the one where they have big football games in the papers every year. He’s—”
“Yale and Harvard?”
“Uhuh, that’s the one she said. He’s—”
“Which one? Yale, or Harvard?”
“Uhuh. And so he—”
“Come on, baby. You’re talking about two colleges. Was it Yale she said, or Harvard? or Sing Sing or what?”
“Oh,” Jenny said. “It was Yale. Yes, that’s the one she said. And he’ll have to work three years to join it. And even then maybe he won’t.”
“Well, what about it? Suppose he does work three years: what about it?”
“Why, if he does, he won’t get anything except a little button or something, even if he does join it, I mean.” Jenny brooded softly, creasing herself upon the rail. “He’s going to have to work for it,” she recurred again in a dull soft amazement. “He’ll have to work three years for it, and even then he may not—”
“Don’t be dumb all your life, kid,” Pete told her.
Wind and sun were in Jenny’s drowsing hair. The deck swept trimly forward, deserted. The others were gathered on the deck above. Occasionally they could hear voices, and a pair of masculine feet were crossed innocently upon the rail directly over Pete’s head. A half-smoked cigarette spun in a small twinkling arc astern. Jenny watched it drop lightly onto the water, where it floated amid the other rubbish that had caught her attention. Pete spun his own cigarette backward over his shoulder, but this one sank immediately, to her placid surprise.