Gordon stood against the wall, mudstained and silent. He raised his head and stared at them, and through them, with his harsh, uncomfortable stare. Fairchild touched the Semitic man’s knee warningly.
“That’s neither here nor there,” he said. “The question is, Shall we or shall we not get drunk? I kind of think we’ve got to, myself.”
“Yes,” the other agreed. “It looks like it’s up to us. Gordon ought to celebrate his resurrection, anyway.”
“No,” Gordon answered, “I don’t want any.” The Semitic man protested, but again Fairchild gripped him silent, and when Gordon turned toward the door, he rose and followed him into the passage.
“She came back too, you know,” he said.
Gordon looked down at the shorter man with his lean bearded face, his lonely hawk’s face arrogant with shyness and pride. “I know it,” he answered (your name is like a little golden bell hung in my heart). “The man who brought me back was the same one who brought them back yesterday.”
“He was?” said Fairchild. “He’s doing a landoffice business with deserters, ain’t he?”
“Yes,” Gordon answered. And he went on down the passage with a singing lightness in his heart, a bright silver joy like wings.
* * *
The deck was deserted, as on that other afternoon. But he waited patiently in the hushed happiness of his dream and his arrogant bitter heart was young as any yet, as forgetful of yesterday and tomorrow; and soon, as though in answer to it, she came barelegged and molded by the wind of motion, and her grave surprise ebbed and she thrust him a hard tanned hand.
“So you ran away,” she said.
“And so did you,” he answered after an interval filled with a thing all silver and clean and fine.
“That’s right. We’re sure the herrings on this boat, aren’t we?”
“Herrings?”
“Guts, you know,” she explained. She looked at him gravely from beneath the coarse dark bang of her hair. “But you came back,” she accused.
“And so did you,” he reminded her from amid his soundless silver wings.
FIVE O’CLOCK
“But we’re moving again, at last,” Mrs. Maurier repeated at intervals, with a detached air, listening to a sound somehow vaguely convivial that welled at intervals up the companionway. Presently Mrs. Wiseman remarked the hostess’s preoccupied air and she too ceased, hearkening.
“Not again?” she said with foreboding.
“I’m afraid so,” the other answered unhappily.
Mr. Talliaferro hearkened also. “Perhaps I’d better—” Mrs. Maurier fixed him with her eye, and Mrs. Wiseman said:
“Poor fellows. They have had to stand a great deal in the last few days.”
“Boys will be boys,” Mr. Talliaferro added with docile regret, listening with yearning to that vaguely convivial sound, Mrs. Maurier listened to it, coldly detached and speculative. She said:
“But we are moving again, anyway.”
SIX O’CLOCK
The sun was setting across the scudding water: the water was shot goldenly with it, as was the gleaming mahogany-and-brass elegance of the yacht, and the silver wings in his heart were touched with pink and gold while he stood and looked downward upon the coarse crown of her head and at her body’s grave and sexless replica of his own attitude against the rail — an unconscious aping both comical and heartshaking.
“Do you know,” he asked, “what Cyrano said once?” Once there was a king who possessed all things. All things were his: power, and glory, and wealth, and splendor and ease. And so he sat at dusk in his marble court filled with the sound of water and of birds and surrounded by the fixed gesturing of palms, looking out across the hushed fading domes of his city and beyond, to the dreaming lilac barriers of his world.
“No: what?” she asked. But he only looked down upon her with his cavernous uncomfortable eyes. “What did he say?” she repeated. And then: “Was he in love with her?”
“I think so. . Yes, he was in love with her. She couldn’t leave him, either. Couldn’t go away from him at all.”
“She couldn’t? What’d he done to her? Locked her up?”
“Maybe she didn’t want to,” he suggested.
“Huh.” And then: “She was an awful goof, then. Was he fool enough to believe she didn’t want to?”
“He didn’t take any chances. He had her locked up. In a book.”
“In a book?” she repeated. Then she comprehended. “Oh. . That’s what you’ve done, isn’t it? With that marble girl without any arms and legs you made? Hadn’t you rather have a live one? Say, you haven’t got any sweetheart or anything, have you?”
“No,” he answered. “How did you know?”
“You look so bad. Shabby. But that’s the reason: no woman is going to waste time on a man that’s satisfied with a piece of wood or something. You ought to get out of yourself. You’ll either bust all of a sudden some day, or just dry up. . How old are you?”
“Thirty-six,” he told her. She said:
“Gabriel’s pants. Thirty-six years old, and living in a hole with a piece of rock, like a dog with a dry bone. Gabriel’s pants. Why don’t you get rid of it?” But he only stared down at her.
“Give it to me, won’t you?”
“No.”
“I’ll buy it from you, then.”
“No.”
“Give you—” She looked at him with sober detachment. “Give you seventeen dollars for it. Cash.”
“No.”
She looked at him with a sort of patient exasperation. “Well, what are you going to do with it? Have you got any reason for keeping it? You didn’t steal it, did you? Don’t tell me you haven’t got any use for seventeen dollars, living like you do. I bet you haven’t got five dollars to your name, right now. Bet you came on this party to save food. I’ll give you twenty dollars, seventeen in cash.” He continued to gaze at her as though he had not heard. —and the king spoke to a slave crouching at his feet — Halim— Lord? I possess all things, do I not? — Thou art the Son of Morning, Lord — Then listen, Halim: I have a desire—“Twenty-five,” she said, shaking his arm.
“No.”
“No, no, no, no!” She hammered both brown fists on the rail. “You make me so damn madl Can’t you say anything except No? You — you—” She glared at him with her angry tanned face and her grave opaque eyes, and used that phrase Jenny had traded her.
He took her by the elbows, and she became taut, still watching his face: he could feel the small hard muscles in her arms. “What are you going to do?” she asked. He raised her from the floor, and she began to struggle. But he carried her implacably across the deck and sat on a deckchair and turned her face downward across his knees. She clawed and kicked in a silent fury, but he held her, and she ceased to struggle, and set her teeth into his leg through the gritty cloth of his trousers, and clung like a raging puppy while he drew her skirt tight across her thighs and spanked her, good.
“I meant it!” she cried, raging and tearless, when he had dragged her teeth loose and set her upright on his lap. There was a small wet oval on his trouserleg. “I meant it!” she repeated, taut and raging.
“I know you meant it. That’s why I spanked you. Not because you said it: what you said doesn’t mean anything because you’ve got the genders backward. I spanked you because you meant it, whether you knew what to say or not.”
Suddenly she became lax, and wept, and he held her against his breast. But she ceased crying as abruptly, and lay quiet while he moved his hand over her face, slowly and firmly, but lightly. It is like a thing heard, not as a music of brass and plucked: strings is heard and a pallid voluption of dancing girls among the strings; nay, Halim, it is no pale virgin from Tal with painted fingernails and honey and myrrh cunningly beneath her tongue. Nor is it a scent as of myrrh and roses to soften and make to flow like water the pith in a man’s bones, nor yet — Stay, Halim: Once I was.. once I was? Is not this a true thing? It is dawn, in the high cold hills, dawn is like a wind in the clean hills, and on the wind comes the thin piping of shepherds, and the smell of dawn and of almond trees on the wind. Is not that a true thing? — Ay, Lord. I told thee that. I was there.