After a while David looked away, gazing again out across the dark water and its path of shifting silver, holding the slipper between his hands; and without speaking Fairchild turned and went quietly away.
The Fourth Day
SEVEN O’CLOCK
Fairchild waked and lay for a while luxuriously on his back. After a time he turned on his side to doze again, and when he turned he noticed the square of paper lying on the floor, as though it had been thrust under the door. He lay watching it for a while, then he came fully awake, and he rose and crossed the room and picked it up.
Dear Mr. Fairchild: I am leaveing the boat to dqy I have got a better job I have got 2 days comeing to me I will not claim it I am leaveing the boat be fore the trip is over tell Mrs. More I have got a better job ask her she will pay you $5 dollars of it you loned me yours truly
DAVID WEST.
He reread the note, brooding over it, then he folded it and put it in the pocket of his pajama jacket, and poured himself a drink. The Semitic man in his berth snored, profound, defenseless on his back.
Fairchild sat again in his berth, his drink un tasted beside him, and he unfolded the note and read it through again, remembering youth, thinking of age and slackening flesh like an old thin sorrow everywhere in the world.
EIGHT O’CLOCK
“Now, don’t you worry at all,” they reassured Mrs. Maurier, “we can do just as we did yesterday: it will be more fun than ever, that way. Dorothy and I can open cans and warm things. We can get along just as well without a steward as with one. Can’t we, Dorothy?”
“It will be like a picnic,” Miss Jameson agreed. “Of course, the men will have to help, too,” she added, looking at Pete with her pale humorless eyes.
Mrs. Maurier submitted, dogging them with her moaning fatuousness while Mrs. Wiseman and Miss Jameson and the niece opened cans and heated things, smearing dreadfully about the galley with grease and juices and blood from the niece’s thumb; opening, at Mark Frost’s instigation, a can labeled Beans, which turned out to be green string beans.
But they got coffee made at last, and breakfast was finally not very late. As they had said, it was like a picnic, though there were no ants, as the Semitic man pointed out just before he was ejected from the kitchen.
“We’ll open a can of them for you,” his sister offered briskly.
Besides, there was still plenty of grapefruit.
AT BREAKFAST
Fairchild — But I saw him after we got back to the yacht. I know I did.
Mark — No, he wasn’t in the boat when we came back: I remember now. I never saw him after we changed places, just after Jenny and Ernest fell out.
Julius — That’s so. . Was he in the boat with us at all? Does anybody remember seeing him in the boat at all?
Fairchild — Sure he was: don’t you remember how Mark kept hitting him with his oar? I tell you I saw—
Mark — He was in the boat at first. But after Jenny and—
Fairchild — Sure he was. Don’t you remember seeing him after we came back, Eva?
Eva — I don’t know. My back was toward all of you while we were rowing. And after Ernest threw Jenny out, I don’t remember who was there and who wasn’t.
Fairchild— Talliaferro was facing us. Didn’t you see him, Talliaferro? And Jenny, Jenny ought to remember. Don’t you remember seeing him, Jenny?
Mr. Talliaferro — I was watching the rope, you know.
Fairchild — How about you, Jenny? Don’t you remember?
Eva — Now, don’t you bother Jenny about it. How could she be expected to remember anything about it? How could anybody be expected to remember anything about such an idiotic— idiotic—
Fairchild — Well, I do. Don’t you all remember him going below with us, after we got back?
Mrs. Maurier (wringing her hands) — Doesn’t someone remember something about it? It’s terrible. I don’t know what to do: you people don’t seem to realize what a position it puts me in, with such a dreadful thing hanging over me. You people have nothing to lose, but I live here, I have a certain— And now a thing like this—
Fairchild — Ah, he ain’t drowned. He’ll turn up soon: you watch what I say.
The Niece — And if he is drowned, we’ll find him all right. The water isn’t very deep between here and the shore. (Her aunt gazed at her dreadfully.)
The Nephew — Besides, a dead body always floats after forty-eight hours. All we have to do is wait right here until tomorrow morning: chances are he’ll be bumping alongside, ready to be hauled back on board. (Mrs. Maurier screamed. Her scream shuddered and died among her chins and she gazed about at her party in abject despair.)
Fairchild — Aw, he ain’t drowned. I tell you I saw—
The Niece — Sure. Cheer up, Aunt Pat. We’ll get him back, even if he is. It’s not like losing him altogether, you know. If you send his body back, maybe his folks won’t even claim your boat or anything.
Eva — Shut up, you children.
Fairchild — But I tell you I saw—
NINE O’CLOCK
Forward, Jenny, the niece, her brother come temporarily out of his scientific shell, and Pete stood in a group; Pete in his straw hat and the nephew with his lean young body and the two girls in their little scanty dresses and awkward with a sort of terrible grace. So flagrantly young they were that it served as a barrier between them and the others, causing even Mr. Talliaferro to lurk near by without the courage to join them.
“These young girls,” Fairchild said. He watched the group, watched the niece and Jenny as they clung to the rail and swung aimlessly back and forth, pivoting on their heels, in a sheer wantonness of young muscles. “They scare me,” he admitted. “Not as a possible or probable chastity, you know. Chastity ain’t—”
“A bodiless illusion multiplied by lack of opportunity,” Mark Frost said.
“What?” he asked, looking at the poet. “Well, maybe so.” He resumed his own tenuous thought. “Maybe we all have different ideas of sex, like all races do. . Maybe us three sitting here are racially unrelated to each other, as regards sex. Like a Frenchman and an Anglo-Saxon and a Mongol, for instance.”
“Sex,” said the Semitic man, “to an Italian is something like a firecracker at a children’s party; to a Frenchman, a business the relaxation from which is making money; to an Englishman, it is a nuisance; to an American, a horserace. Now, which are you?”
Fairchild laughed. He watched the group forward a while. “Their strange sexless shapes, you know,” he went on. “We, you and I, grew up expecting something beneath a woman’s dress. Something satisfying in the way of breasts and hips and such. But now—
“Do you remember the pictures you used to get in packages of cigarettes, or that you saw in magazines in barber shops? Anna Held and Eva Tanguay with shapes like elegant parlor lamp chimneys? Where are they now? Now, on the street, what do you see? Creatures with the uncomplex awkwardness of calves or colts, with two little knobs for breasts and indicated buttocks that, except for their soft look, might well belong to a boy of fifteen. Not satisfying any more; just exciting and monotonous. And mostly monotonous.
“Where,” he continued, “are, the soft bulging rabbitlike things women used to have inside their clothes? Gone, with the poor Indian and ten-cent beer and cambric drawers. But still, they are kind of nice, these young girls: kind of like a thin monotonous flute music or something.”
“Shrill and stupid,” the Semitic man agreed. He, too, gazed at the group forward for a time. “Who was the fool who said that our clothing, our custom in dress, does not affect the shape of our bodies and our behavior?”