Jenny remarked his legs, tweeded. How can he stand them heavy clothes in this weather, she thought with placid wonder, calling him soundlessly as he passed. His purposeful stride faltered and he came over beside her.
“Enjoying the evening, eh?” he suggested affably, glaring down at her in the darkness. Inside her borrowed clothes she was ripe as whipped cream, blond and perishable as an expensive pastry.
“Kind of,” she admitted. Major Ayers leaned his elbows on the rail.
“I was on my way below,” he told her.
“Yes, sir,” Jenny agreed, passive in the darkness, like an erotic lightning bug projecting that sense of himself surrounded, enclosed by the sweet, cloudy fire of her thighs, as young girls will. Major Ayers looked down at her vague, soft head. Then he jerked his head sharply, glaring about.
“Enjoying the evening, eh?” he asked again.
“Yes, sir,” Jenny repeated. She bloomed like a cloying heavy flower. Major Ayers moved restively. Again he jerked his head as if he had heard his name spoken. Then he looked at Jenny again.
“Are you a native of New Orleans?”
“Yes, sir. Esplanade.”
“I beg pardon?”
“Esplanade. Where I live in New Orleans,” she explained. “It’s a street,” she added after a while.
“Oh,” Major Ayers murmured. . “Do you like living there?”
“I don’t know. I always lived there.” After a time she added, “It’s not far.”
“Not far, eh?”
“No, sir.” She stood motionless beside him and for the third time Major Ayers jerked his head quickly, as though someone were trying to attract his attention.
“I was on my way below,” he repeated. Jenny waited a while. Then she murmured:
“It’s a fine night for courting.”
“Courting?” Major Ayers repeated.
“With dates.” Major Ayers stared down upon her hushed, soft hair. “When boys come to see you,” she explained. “When you go out with the boys.”
“Go out with boys,” Major Ayers repeated. “To Mandeville, perhaps?”
“Sometimes,” she agreed. “I’ve been there.”
“Do you go often?”
“Why. . sometimes,” she repeated.
“With boys, eh? With men, too, hey?”
“Yes, sir,” Jenny answered with mild surprise. “I don’t guess anybody would just go there by herself.”
Major Ayers calculated heavily. Jenny stood docile and rife, projecting her little enticing aura, doing her best. “I say,” he said presently, “suppose we pop down there tomorrow — you and I?”
“Tomorrow?” Jenny repeated with soft astonishment.
“Tonight, then,” he amended. “What d’ye say?”
“Tonight? Can we get there tonight? It’s kind of late, ain’t it? How’ll we get there?”
“Like those people who went this morning did. There’s a tram or a bus, isn’t there? Or a train at the nearest village?”
“I don’t know. They come back in a boat.”
“Oh, a boat.” Major Ayers considered a moment. “Well, no matter: we’ll wait until tomorrow, then. We’ll go tomorrow, eh?”
“Yes, sir,” Jenny repeated tirelessly, passive and rife, projecting her emanation. Once more Major Ayers looked about him. Then he moved his hand from the rail and as Jenny, seeing the movement, turned to him with a slow unreluctance, he chucked her under the chin.
“Right, then,” he said briskly, moving away. “Tomorrow it is.” Jenny gazed after him in passive astonishment and he turned and came back to her, and giving her an intimate inviting glare he chucked her again under her soft surprised chin. Then he departed permanently.
Jenny gazed after his tweedclad dissolving shape, watching him out of sight. He sure is a foreigner, she told herself. She sighed.
* * *
The water lapped at the hull of the yacht with little sounds, little hushed sounds like boneless hands might make, and she leaned again over the rail, gazing downward into the dark water.
He would be refined as anybody, she mused to herself. Being her brother. . more refined, because she had been away all day with that waiter in the dining room. . But maybe the waiter was refined, too. Except I never found many boys that. . I guess her aunt must have jumped on her. I wonder what she’d ’a’ done when they come back, if we’d got the boat started and went away. . and now that redheaded man and She says he’s drownded. .
Jenny gazed into the dark water, thinking of death, of being helpless in that terrible suffocating resilience of water, feeling again that utter and dreadful helpfulness of terror and fear. So when Mr. Talliaferro was suddenly and silently beside her, touching her, she recognized him by instinct. And feeling again her world become unstable and shifting beneath her, feeling all familiar solid things fall away from under her and seeing familiar faces and objects arc swooping away from her as she plunged from glaring sunlight through a timeless interval into Fear like a green lambence straying to receive her, she was stark and tranced. But at last she could move again, screaming.
“You scared me so bad,” she gasped piteously, shrinking from him. She turned and ran, ran toward light, toward the security of walls.
* * *
The room was dark: no sound within it, and after the dim spaciousness of the deck it seemed close and hot. But here were comfortable walls and Jenny snapped on the light and entered, entered into an atmosphere of familiarity. Here was a vague ghost of the scent she liked and with which she had happily been impregnated when she came aboard and which had not yet completely died away, and the thin sharp odor of lilacs which she had come to associate with Mrs. Wiseman and which lingered also in the room, and the other’s clothing, and her own comb on the dressing table and the bright metal cylinder of her lip-stick beside it.
Jenny looked at her face in the mirror for a while. Then she removed a garment and returned to gaze at her stainless pink- and-whiteness, ineffable, unmarred by any thought at all. Then she removed the rest of her clothes, and again before the glass she passed her comb through the drowsing miniature Golconda of her hair, then she got her naked body placidly into bed, as was her habit since three nights.
But she didn’t turn out the light. She lay in her berth, gazing up at the smug glare of light upon the painted unbroken sweep of the ceiling. Time passed while she lay rosy and motionless, measured away by the small boneless hands of water lapping against the hull beyond the port; and she could-hear feet also, and people moving about and making sounds.
She didn’t know what it was she wanted, except it was something. So she lay on her back rosy and quiet beneath the unshaded glare of the inadequate light, and after a while she thought that maybe she was going to cry. Maybe that was it, so she lay naked and rosy and passive on her back, waiting to begin.
She could still hear people moving about: voices and feet, and she kept waiting for that first taste of crying that comes into your throat before you really get started — that feeling that here are two little salty canals just under your ears when you feel sorry for yourself, and that other kind of feeling you have at the base of your nose. Only my nose don’t get red when I cry, she thought, in a placid imminent misery of sadness and meaningless despair, waiting passive and still and without dread for it to begin. But before it began, Mrs. Wiseman entered the room.
She came over to Jenny and Jenny looked up and saw the other’s dark small head, like a deer’s head, against the light, and that dark intent way the other had of looking at her; and presently Mrs. Wiseman said:
“What is it, Jenny? What’s the matter?”
But she had forgotten what it was, almost: all she could remember was that there had been something; but now that the other had come Jenny could hardly remember that she had forgotten anything even, and so she just lay and looked up at the other’s dark slender head against the unshaded light.
“Poor child, you have had a hard day, haven’t you?” She put her hand on Jenny’s brow, smoothing back the fine hushed gold of Jenny’s hair, stroking her hand along Jenny’s cheek. Jenny lay quiet under the hand, drowsing her eyes like a stroked kitten, and then she knew she could cry all right, whenever she wanted to. Only it was almost as much fun just lying here and knowing you could cry whenever you got ready to, as the crying itself would be. She opened her blue ineffable eyes.
“Do you suppose he’s really drownded?” she asked. Mrs. Wiseman’s hand stroked Jenny’s cheek, pushing her hair upward and away from her brow.
“I don’t know, darling,” she answered soberly. “He’s a luckless man. And anything may happen to a luckless man. But don’t you think about that any more. Do you hear?” She leaned her face down to Jenny’s. “Do you hear?” she said again.