NINE O’CLOCK
“But I saw him about four o’clock,” Fairchild argued. “He was in the boat with us. Didn’t you see him, Major? but that’s so: you were not with us. You saw him, Mark, didn’t you?”
“He was in the boat when we started. I remember that. But I don’t remember seeing him after Ernest fell out.”
“Well, I do. I know I saw him on deck right after we got back. But I can’t remember seeing him in the boat after Jenny and Talliaferro — Ah, he’s all right, though. He’ll show up soon. He ain’t the sort to get drowned.”
“Don’t be too sure of that,” Major Ayers said. “There are no women missing, you know.”
Fairchild laughed his burly appreciative laugh. Then he met Major Ayers’s glassy solemn stare, and ceased. Then he laughed once more, somewhat after the manner of one feeling his way into a dark room, and ceased again, turning on Major Ayers his trustful baffled expression. Major Ayers said:
“This place to which these young people went today”—“Mandeville,” the Semitic man supplied—“what sort of a place is it?” They told him. “Ah, yes. They have facilities for that sort of thing, eh?”
“Well, not more than usual,” the Semitic man answered, and Fairchild said, still watching Major Ayers with a sort of cautious baffiement:
“Not any more than you can carry along with you. We Americans always carry our own facilities with us. It’s living high tension go-getting lives like we do in this country, you see.”
Major Ayers glared at him politely. “Somewhat like the Continent,” he suggested after a time.
“Not exactly,” the Semitic man said. “In America you often find an H in caste.” Fairchild and Major Ayers stared at the Semitic man.
“As well as a cast in chaste,” Mark Frost put in. Fairchild and Major Ayers now stared at him, watching him while he lit a fresh cigarette from the stub of his present one, and left his chair and went to lie at full length on the deck.
“Why not?” the Semitic man took him up. “Love itself is stone blind.”
“It has to be,” Mark Frost answered. Major Ayers stared from one to the other for a while. He said:
“This Mandeville, now. It is a convention, eh? A local convention?”
“Convention?” Fairchild repeated,
“I mean, like our Gretna Green. You ask a lady there, and immediately there is an understanding: saves unnecessary explanations and all that.”
“I thought Gretna Green was a place where they used to go to get marriage licenses in a hurry,” Fairchild said suspiciously.
“It was, once,” Major Ayers agreed. “But during the Great Fire all the registrars’ and parsons’ homes were destroyed. And in those days communication was so poor that word didn’t get about until a fortnight or so later. In the meantime quite a few young people had gone there in all sincerity, you know, and were forced to return the next day without benefit of clergy. Of course the young ladies durst not tell until matters were remedied, which, during those unsettled times, might be any time up to a month or so. But by that time, of course, the police had heard of it — London police always hear of things in time, you know.”
“And so, when you go to Gretna Green now, you get a policeman,” the Semitic man said.
“You’ve Yokohama in mind,” Major Ayers answered as gravely. “Of course, they are native policemen,” he added.
“Like whitebait,” the Semitic man suggested.
“Or sardines,” Mark Frost corrected.
“Or sardines,” Major Ayers agreed suavely. He sucked violently at his cold pipe while Fairchild stared at him with intrigued bewilderment.
“But this young lady, the one who popped off with the steward. And came back the same day. . Is this customary with your young girls? I ask for information,” he added quickly. “Our young girls don’t do that, you know; with us, only decayed countesses do that — cut off to Italy with chauffeurs and second footmen. And they never return before nightfall. But our young girls—”
“Art,” the Semitic man explained succinctly. Mark Frost elaborated:
“In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior; in America, it’s an excuse for a form of behavior.”
“Yes. But, I say—” Major Ayers mused again, sucking violently at his cold pipe. Then: “She’s not the one who did that tweaky little book, is she? The syphilis book?”
“No. That was Julius’s sister; the one named Eva,” Fairchild said. “This one that eloped and then came back ain’t an artist at all. It’s just the artistic atmosphere of the boat, I guess.”
“Oh,” said Major Ayers. “Strange,” he remarked. He rose and thumped his pipe against his palm. Then he blew through the stem and put it in his pocket. “I think I shall go below and have a whisky. Who’ll come along?”
“I guess I won’t, right now,” Fairchild decided. The Semitic man said later on. Major Ayers turned to the prone poet.
“And you, old thing?”
“Bring it up to us,” Mark Frost suggested. But Fairchild vetoed this. The Semitic man supported him and Major Ayers departed.
“I wish I had a drink,” Mark Frost said.
“Go down and have one, then,” Fairchild told him. The poet groaned.
The Semitic man lighted his cigar again and Fairchild spoke from his tentative bewilderment. “That was interesting, about Gretna Green, wasn’t it? I didn’t know about that. Never read it anywhere, I mean. But I guess there’s lots of grand things in the annals of all people that never get into the history books.” The Semitic man chuckled. Fairchild tried to see his face in the obscurity. Then he said:
“Englishmen are funny folks: always kidding you at the wrong time. Things just on the verge of probability, and just when you have made up your mind to take it one way, you find they meant it the other.” He mused a while in the darkness.
“It was kind of nice, wasn’t it? Young people, young men and girls caught in that strange hushed magic of sex and the mystery of intimate clothing and functions and all, and of lying side by side in the darkness, telling each other things. . that’s the charm of virginity: telling each other things. Virginity don’t make any difference as far as the body’s concerned. Young people running away together in a flurry of secrecy and caution and desire, and getting there to find—” Again he turned his kind; baffled face toward his friend. He continued after a while.
“Of course the girls would be persuaded, after they’d come that far, wouldn’t they? You know — strange surroundings, a strange room like an island is an uncharted sea full of monsters like landlords and strangers and such; the sheer business of getting their bodies from place to place and feeding ’em and caring for ’em; and your young man thwarted and lustful and probably fearful that you’d change your mind and back out altogether, and a strange room all secret and locked and far away from familiar things and you young and soft and nice to look at and knowing it, too. . Of course they’d be persuaded.
“And, of course, when they got back home they wouldn’t tell, not until another parson turned up and everything was all regular again. And maybe not then. Maybe they’d whisper it to a friend some day, after they’d been married long enough to prefer talking to other women to talking to their husbands, while they were discussing the things women talk about. But they wouldn’t tell the young unmarried ones, though. And if they, even a year later, ever got wind of another one being seen going there or coming away — They are such practical creatures, you know: only men hold to conventions for moral reasons.”
“Or from habit,” the Semitic man added.
“Yes,” Fairchild agreed. . “I wonder what became of Gordon.”
* * *