“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’ 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 to-day—” “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 bafflement:

“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’ 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 in 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.”

.          .          .          .          .          .          .

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 rife as whipped cream, blonde 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 some one 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 to-morrow—you and I?”

“To-morrow?” Jenny repeated with soft astonishment.

“To-night, then,” he amended. “What d’ye say?”

“To-night? Can we get there to-night? 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 to-morrow, then. We’ll go to-morrow, 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. “To-morrow 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 drowned. . . .

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 are 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 lipstick 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 there 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.

.          .          .          .          .          .          .

“No,” Fairchild said, “he ain’t the sort to get drowned. Some people just ain’t that sort. . . . I wonder,” he broke off suddenly and gazed at his companions. “Say, do you suppose he went off because he thought that girl was gone for good?”

“Drowned himself for love?” Mark Frost said. “Not in this day and time. People suicide because of money and disease: not for love.”

“I don’t know about that,” Fairchild objected. “They used to die because of love. And human nature don’t change. Its actions achieve different results under different conditions, but human nature don’t change.”

“Mark is right,” the Semitic man said. “People in the old books died of heartbreak also, which was probably merely some ailment that any modern surgeon or veterinarian could cure out of hand. But people do not die of love. That’s the reason love and death in conjunction have such an undying appeal in books: they are never very closely associated anywhere else.

“But as for a broken heart in this day of general literacy and facilities for disseminating the printed word—” he made a sound of disparagement. “Lucky he who believes that his heart is broken: he can immediately write a book and so take revenge (what is more terrible than the knowledge that the man you just knocked down discovered a coin in the gutter while getting up?) on him or her who damaged his or her ventricles. Besides cleaning up in the movies and magazines. No, no,” he repeated, “you don’t commit suicide when you are disappointed in love. You write a book.”

“I don’t know about that,” repeated Fairchild stubbornly. “People will do anything. But I suppose it takes a fool to believe that and act on that principle.” Beyond the eastern horizon was a rumor of pale silver, pallid and chill and faint, and they sat for a while in silence, thinking of love and death. The red eye of a cigarette twelve inches from the deck: this was Mark Frost. Fairchild broke the silence.

“The way she went off with Da—— the steward. It was kind of nice, wasn’t it? And came back. No excuses, no explanations—‘think no evil’ you know. That’s what these postwar young folks have taught us. Only old folks like Julius and me would ever see evil in what people, young people, do. But then, I guess folks growing up into the manner of looking at life that we inherited, would find evil in anything where inclination wasn’t subservient to duty. We were taught to believe that duty is infallible, or it wouldn’t be duty, and if it were just unpleasant enough, you got a mark in heaven, sure. . . . But maybe it ain’t so different, taken one generation by another. Most of our sins are vicarious, anyhow. I guess when you are young you have too much fun just being, to sin very much. But it’s kind of nice, being young in this generation.”

“Surely. We all think that, when our arteries begin to harden,” the Semitic man rejoined. “Not only are most of our sins vicarious, but most of our pleasures are too. Look at our books, our stage, the movies. Who supports ’em? Not the young folks. They’d rather walk around or just sit and hold each other’s hands.”

“It’s a substitute,” Fairchild said. “Don’t you see?”

“Substitute for what? When you are young and in love yesterday and out to-day and in again to-morrow, do you know anything about love? Is it anything to you except a rather dreadful mixture of jealousy and thwarted desires and interference with that man’s world which after all, we all prefer, and nagging and maybe a little pleasure like a drug? It’s not the women you sleep with that you remember, you know.”

“No, thank God,” Fairchild said. The other continued:

“It’s the old problem of the aristocracy over and over: a natural envy of that minority which is at liberty to commit all the sins which the majority cannot stop earning a living long enough to commit.” He lit his cigar again. “Young people always shape their lives as the preceding generation requires of them. I don’t mean exactly that they go to church when they are told to, for instance, because their elders expect it of them—though God only knows what other reason they could possibly have for going to church as it is conducted nowadays, with a warden to patrol the building in the urban localities and in the rural districts squads of K.K.K.’s beating the surrounding copses and all those traditional retreats that in the olden days enabled the church to produce a soul for every one it saved. But youth in general lives unquestioningly according to the arbitrary precepts of its elders.

“For instance, a generation ago higher education was not considered so essential, and young people grew up at home into the convention that the thing to do was to get married at twenty-one and go to work immediately, regardless of one’s equipment or inclination or aptitude. But now they grow up into the convention that youth, that being under thirty years of age, is a protracted sophomore course without lectures, in which one must spend one’s entire time dressed like a caricature, drinking homemade booze and pawing at the opposite sex in the intervals of being arrested by traffic policemen.

“A few years ago a so-called commercial artist (groan, damn you) named John Held began to caricature college life, cloistered and otherwise, in the magazines; ever since then college life, cloistered and otherwise, has been busy caricaturing John Held. It is expected of them by their elders, you see. And the young people humor them: young people are far more tolerant of the inexplicable and dangerous vagaries of their elders than the elders ever were or ever will be of the natural and harmless foibles of their children. . . . But perhaps they both enjoy it.”

“I don’t know,” Fairchild said. “Not even the old folks would like to be surrounded by people making such a drama of existence. And the young folks wouldn’t like it, either: young people have so many other things to do, you know. I think . . .” His voice ceased, died into darkness and a faint lapping sound of water. The moon had swum up out of the east again, that waning moon of decay, worn and affable and cold. It was a magic on the water, a magic of pallid and fleshless things. The red eye of Mark Frost’s cigarette arced slow and lateral in his invisible hand, returned to its station twelve inches above the deck, and glowed and faded like a pulse. “You see,” Fairchild added like an apology, “I believe in young love in the spring, and things like that. I guess I’m a hopeless sentimentalist.”

The Semitic man grunted. Mark Frost said: “Virtue through abjectness and falsification: immolation of insincerity.” Fairchild ignored him, wrapped in this dream of his own.

“When youth goes out of you, you get out of it. Out of life, I mean. Up to that time you just live; after that, you are aware of living and living becomes a conscious process. Like thinking does in time, you know. You become conscious of thinking, and then you start right off to think in words. And first thing you know, you don’t have thoughts in your mind at all: you just have words in it. But when you are young, you just be. Then you reach a stage where you do. Then a stage where you think, and last of all, where you remember. Or try to.”

“Sex and death,” said Mark Frost sepulchrally, arcing the red eye of his cigarette, “a blank wall on which sex casts a shadow, and the shadow is life.” The Semitic man grunted again, immersed in one of his rare periods of uncommunicativeness. The moon climbed higher, the pallid unmuscled belly of the moon, and the Nausikaa dreamed like a silver gull on the dark restless water.

“I don’t know,” Fairchild said again. “I never found anything shadowy about life, people. Least of all, about my own doings. But it may be that there are shadowy people in the world, people to whom life is a kind of antic shadow. But people like that make no impression on me at all, I can’t seem to get them at all. But this may be because I have a kind of firm belief that life is all right.” Mark Frost had cast away his final cigarette and was now a long prone shadow. The Semitic man was motionless also, holding his dead cigar.

“I was spending the summer with my grandfather, in Indiana. In the country. I was a boy then, and it was a kind of family reunion, with aunts and cousins that hadn’t seen each other in years. Children, too, all sizes.

“There was a girl that I remember, about my age, I reckon. She had blue eyes and a lot of long, prim, golden curls. This girl, Jenny, must have looked like her, when she was about twelve. I didn’t know the other children very well, and besides I was used to furnishing my own diversion anyway; so I just kind of hung around and watched them doing the things children do. I didn’t know how to go about getting acquainted with them. I’d seen how the other newcomers would do it, and I’d kind of plan to myself how I’d go about it: what I’d say when I went up to them. . . .” He ceased and mused for a time in a kind of hushed surprise. “Just like Talliaferro,” he said at last, quietly. “I hadn’t thought of that before.” He mused for a time. Then he spoke again.

“I was kind of like a dog going among strange dogs. Scared, kind of, but acting haughty and aloof. But I watched them. The way she made up to them, for instance. The day after she came she was the leader, always telling them what to do next. She had blue dresses, mostly.” Mark Frost snored in the silence. The Nausikaa dreamed like a gull on the dark water.

“This was before the day of water works and sewage systems in country homes, and this one had the usual outhouse. It was down a path from the house. In the late summer there were tall burdocks on either side of the path, taller than a twelve-year-old boy by late August. The outhouse was a small square frame box kind of thing, with a partition separating the men from the women inside.

“It was a hot day, in the middle of the afternoon. The others were down in the orchard, under the trees. From where I had been, in a big tree in the yard, I could see them, and the girls’ colored dresses in the shade; and when I climbed down from the tree and went across the back yard and through the gate and along the path toward the privy I could still see them occasionally through gaps in the burdocks. They were sitting around in the shade, playing some game, or maybe just talking.

“I went on down the path and went inside, and when I turned to shut the door to the men’s side, I looked back. And I saw her blue dress kind of shining, coming along the path between the tall weeds. I couldn’t tell if she had seen me or not, but I knew that if I went back I’d have to pass her, and I was ashamed to do this. It would have been different if I’d already been there and was coming away: or it seemed to me that it would have. Boys are that way, you know,” he added uncertainly, turning his bewilderment again toward his friend. The other grunted. Mark Frost snored in his shadow.

“So I shut the door quick and stood right quiet, and soon I heard her enter the other side. I didn’t know yet if she’d seen me, but I was going to stay quiet as I could until she went away. I just had to do that, it seemed to me.

“Children are much more psychic than adults. More of a child’s life goes on in its mind than people believe. A child can distil the whole gamut of experiences it has never actually known, into a single instant. Anthropology explains a little of it. But not much, because the gaps in human knowledge that have to be bridged by speculation are too large. The first thing a child is taught is the infallibility and necessity of precept, and by the time the child is old enough to add anything to our knowledge of the mind, it has forgotten. The soul sheds every year, like snakes do, I believe. You can’t recall the emotions you felt last year: you remember only that an emotion was associated with some physical fact of experience. But all you have of it now is a kind of ghost of happiness and a vague and meaningless regret. Experience: why should we be expected to learn wisdom from experience? Muscles only remember, and it takes repetition and repetition to teach a muscle anything. . . .”

Arcturus, Orion swinging head downward by his knees, in the southern sky an electric lobster fading as the moon rose. Water lapped at the hull of the Nausikaa with little sounds.

“So I tiptoed across to the seat. It was hot in there, with the sun beating down on it: I could smell hot resin, even above the smell of the place itself. In a corner of the ceiling there was a dirt dobber’s nest—a hard lump of clay with holes in it, stuck to the ceiling, and big green flies made a steady droning sound. I remember how hot it was in there, and that feeling places like that give you—a kind of letting down of the bars of pretense, you know; a kind of submerging of civilized strictures before the grand implacability of nature and the physical body. And I stood there, feeling this feeling and the heat, and hearing the drone of those big flies, holding my breath and listening for a sound from beyond the partition. But there wasn’t any sound from beyond it, so I put my head down through the seat.”

Mark Frost snored. The moon, the pallid belly of the moon, inundating the world with a tarnished magic not of living things, laying her silver fleshless hand on the water that whispered and lapped against the hull of the yacht. The Semitic man clutched his dead cigar and he and Fairchild sat in the implacable laxing of muscles and softening tissue of their forty odd years, seeing two wide curious blue eyes into which an inverted surprise came clear as water, and long golden curls swinging downward above the ordure; and they sat in silence, remembering youth and love, and time and death.