“All together,” Fairchild gasped and the crew repeated it, flailing the water. The yacht was almost broadside to them now. “She’s coming!” Mr. Talliaferro screamed in an ecstasy. “She’s co—”
A faint abrupt shock. The tender stopped immediately. They saw the sweet blond entirety of Jenny’s legs and the pink seat of her ribboned undergarment as with a wild despairing cry Mr. Talliaferro plunged overboard, taking Jenny with him, and vanished beneath the waves.
All but his buttocks, that is. They didn’t quite vanish, and presently all of Mr. Talliaferro rose in eighteen inches of water and stared in shocked amazement at the branch of a tree directly over his head. Jenny, yet prone in the water, was an indistinguishable turmoil of blondness and green crepe and fright. She rose, slipped and fell again, then the Semitic man stepped into the water and picked her up bodily and set her in the boat where she sat and gazed at them with abject beseeching eyes, strangling.
Only Mrs. Wiseman had presence of mind to thump her between the shoulders, and after a dreadful trancelike interval during which they sat clutching their oars and gazing at her while she beseeched them with her eyes, she caught her breath, wailing. Mrs. Wiseman mothered her, holding her draggled unhappy wetness while Jenny wept dreadfully. “He — he sc-scared me so bad,” Jenny gasped after a time, shuddering and crying again, utterly abject, making no effort to hide her face.
Mrs. Wiseman made meaningless comforting sounds, holding Jenny in her arms. She borrowed a handkerchief and wiped Jenny’s streaming face. Mr. Talliaferro stood in the lake and dripped disconsolately, peering his harried face across Mrs. Wiseman’s shoulder. The others sat motionless, holding their oars.
Jenny raised her little wet hands futilely about her face. Then she remarked her hand and she held it before her face, gazing at it. On it was a thinly spreading crimson stain that grew as she watched it, and Jenny wept again with utter and hopeless misery.
“Oh, you’ve cut your poor hand! Dawson,” Mrs. Wiseman said, “you are the most consummate idiot unleashed. You take us right back to that yacht. Don’t try to row back: we’ll never get there. Can’t you pull us back with the rope?”
They could, and Mrs. Wiseman helped Jenny into the bows and the men took their places again. Mr. Talliaferro flitted about in the water with his despairing face. “Jump in,” Fairchild told him. “We ain’t going to maroon you.”
They pulled the tender back to the yacht with chastened expedition. Mrs. Maurier met them at the rail, shrieking with alarm and astonishment. Pete was beside her. The sailors had discreetly vanished.
“What is it? What is it?” Mrs. Maurier chanted, mooning her round alarmed face above them. They brought the tender alongside and held it steady while Mrs. Wiseman helped Jenny across the thwarts and to the rail. Mr. Talliaferro flitted about in a harried distraction, but Jenny shrank from him. “You scared me so bad,” she repeated.
Pete leaned over the rail, reaching his hands while Mr. Talliaferro flitted about his victim. The tender rocked, scraping against the hull of the yacht. Pete caught Jenny’s hands.
“Hold the boat still, you old fool,” he told Mr. Talliaferro fiercely.
* * *
His legs were completely numb beneath her weight, but he would not move. He swished the broken branch about her, and at intervals he whipped it across his own back. Her face wasn’t so flushed, and he laid his hand again above her heart. At his touch she opened her eyes.
“Hello, David. I dreamed about water. . Where’ve you been all these years?” She closed her eyes again. “I feel better,” she said after a while. And then: “What time is it?” He looked at the sun and guessed. “We must go on,” she said. “Help me up.”
She sat up and a million red ants scurried through the arteries of his legs. She stood, dizzy and swaying, holding to him. “Gee, I’m not worth a damn. Next time you elope you’d better make her stand a physical examination, David. Do you hear?. . But we must go on: come on, make me walk.” She took a few unsteady steps and clutched him again, closing her eyes. “Jesus H, if I ever get out of this alive—” She stopped again. “What must we do?” she asked.
“I’ll carry you a ways,” he said.
“Can you? I mean, aren’t you too tired?”
“I’ll carry you a ways, until we get somewhere,” he repeated.
“I guess you’ll have to. . But if you were me, I’d leave you flat. That’s what I’d do.”
He squatted before her and reached back and slid his hands under her knees, and as he straightened up she leaned forward onto his back and put her arms around his neck, clasping the broken branch against his chest. He rose slowly, hitching her legs farther around his hips as the constriction of her skirt lessened.
“You’re awful nice to me, David,” she murmured against his neck, limp upon his back.
* * *
Mrs. Wiseman washed and bound Jenny’s hand, interestingly; then she scrubbed Jenny’s little soft wormlike fingers and cleaned her fingernails while Jenny, naked, dried rosily in the cabined air. Underthings were not difficult, and stockings were simple also. But Jenny’s feet were short rather than small, and shoes were a problem. Though Jenny insisted that Mrs. Wiseman’s shoes were quite comfortable.
But she was clothed at last and Mrs. Wiseman gathered up the two wet garments gingerly and went to lean her hip against the bunk. The dress Jenny now wore belonged to the girl Patricia and Jenny stood before the mirror, bulging it divinely, examining herself in the mirror, smoothing the dress over her hips with a slow preening motion.
I had no idea there was that much difference between them, the other thought. It’s far more exciting than a bathing suit.. . “Jenny,” she said, “I think — really, I — Darling, you simply must not go where men can see you, like that. For Mrs. Maurier’s sake, you know; she’s having enough trouble as it is, without any rioting.”
“Don’t it look all right? It feels all right,” Jenny answered, trying to see as much of herself as possible in a twelve-inch glass.
“I don’t doubt it. You must be able to feel every stitch in it. But we’ll have to get something else for you to wear. Slip it off, darling.”
Jenny obeyed. “It feels all right to me,” she repeated. “It don’t feel funny.”
“It doesn’t look funny, not at all. On the contrary, in fact. That’s the trouble with it,” the other answered delving busily in her bag.
“I always thought I had the kind of figure that could wear anything,” Jenny persisted, holding the dress regretfully in her hands.
“You have,” the other told her, “exactly that kind. Terribly like that. Simple and inevitable. Devastating.”
“Devastating,” Jenny repeated with interest. “There was a kind of funny little man at Mandeville that day—” She turned to the mirror again, trying to see as much of herself as possible. “I’ve been told I have a figure like Dorothy Mackaill’s, only not too thin. . I think a little flesh is becoming to a girl. Don’t you?”
“Devastating,” the other agreed again. She rose and held a dark-colored dress between her hands. “You’ll look worse than ever in this. . terrible as a young widow.”. . She went to Jenny and held the dress against her, contemplative; then still holding the dress between her hands she put her arms around Jenny. “A little flesh is worse than a little dynamite, Jenny,” she said soberly, looking at Jenny with her dark, sad eyes. . ”Does your hand still hurt?”