Gili started to speak, sucked in her full red lips and stopped.
Mickey said: "I understand the seamen have been questioned; one of them will talk to save his own skin."
"It's an ironic thing," said Daisy Belle suddenly. "Life and death in that horrible lifeboat; pitching up and down in the waves and darkness, expecting death for all of us at any moment. Never suspecting that actually he was already dead. You saw something of him on the Lerida, Gili. What do you think of it?"
"I know nothing of it!" cried Gili vehemently, her eyes flashing toward Daisy Belle. "Nothing at all. Oh, I talked to him a little on the ship. I never saw him before. Never once. But he"—she shrugged—"he was a man. He talked; I listened. He was nothing to me. Nothing." She paused again, appeared to consider her words and then turned to Mickey, linking her arm through his, and looking up confidingly and appealingly into his face. "You see, don't you, Andre? It was—well, call it a tiny bit of a flirtation; that's all. He was nothing to me. You understand?"
It was, thought Marcia, an instinctive gesture of Gili's part to enlist Mickey's sympathy and aid. Probably in the world she had known she had never been able to put her faith in women's friendship. It was men who ruled everything, and men could be cajoled, men could be enlisted on her side, men could protect her. She leaned one cheek toward Mickey's shoulder and moved it softly against him like a cat rubbing its head, purring and begging for something.
Well, that wasn't fair. Naturally she didn't like Gili's approach to Mickey; naturally she didn't like that arm linked through Mickey's, that golden head brushing his shoulder so softly, so gently. And it was silly, because Gili performed the little gesture as instinctively as she ate.
All the same, Marcia wished Mickey would move away from Gili, decisively. Which was silly, too; it meant nothing to him. Besides, Mickey was an attractive man; certainly Marcia did not intend to go through life having twinges of something very like jealousy every time another woman so much as looked at him. Mickey said: "Did he tell you anything about himself, Gili?"
"Nothing at all," she cried again. "Nothing. I tried to remember. I tried to tell the Captain. But there really wasn't anything. He"—a ghost of a complacent smile came into Gili's face—"he admired me, you know. He talked—oh, nonsense, mostly. But then, really, I only walked the deck a bit with him, leaned over the railing. Half the time I didn't listen at all. He was nothing to me. And now . . ." Suddenly the complacency of a woman admired left her face and her voice. She gave a shrug that this time was more like a shiver and said in a low voice: "I wish I'd never seen him. It's horrible. Death and murder and ... I don't like dead men."
There was a small, queer silence with only the rush of the ship through the water and the murmur of the radio in the distance. Then Daisy Belle said dryly: "I don't think anyone does, Gili. Especially if they've been murdered."
And Mickey said suddenly: "I'm going to talk to the Captain again."
"I'll go inside too." Gili hunched up her shoulders. "I'm cold. The sea frightens me. I was sure last night that we'd all be drowned. I'm going inside where it's warm and lighted." She turned with Mickey, still clinging to his arm. Mickey said: "See you here when I've finished, Marcia."
They vanished into the lighted passageway behind them. And after a moment Daisy Belle said, dryly again: "A man's woman."
"She can't help it."
Daisy Belle smoked for a moment, considering. "No. Actually she can't. She was born that way. And I suppose she's had to live that way. By the favors of a man's world. But," said Daisy Belle, "I think she'll manage. And there was more to that little affair with Castiogne than she pretends!" She laughed shortly, smoked, and added: "Not that I think she murdered him. It's merely instinct for her to cling to some man. The way she's"—she blew out smoke again, slowly, narrowing her eyes—"the way she's clinging to Andre. But Andre, if I may say so, is eminently clingable."
Marcia laughed. Suddenly, Daisy Belle's crispness and directness, the very sound of her flat dry voice seemed to dispel an annoying little cloud. How much did Daisy Belle know about her and about Mickey? How much had those sophisticated, knowledgeable eyes seen and stored away? She said, on an impulse: "You've never asked a question, Daisy Belle."
The older woman glanced at her rather sharply. "About you and Andre? Why should I?"
"Well, but-there we were, dumped down at that grisly little hotel in Lisbon. Traveling together . . ."
Daisy Belle laughed shortly. "My dear child, I've seen something of the world. You are obviously what you are—a decentish American girl who's been having rather a rough time of it, somehow. Andre is obviously what he is, too—a man who has had his own share of"—Daisy Belle paused and caught her breath and said—"of war and horror. Well, then; there you are, both obviously and comprehensibly anxious to get away from Europe, to get home; to straighten out your lives; to resume the kind of life that you and thousands of other men and women ought to have had. There you are—and I like you. What else is there to know? Don't be a fool. I wasn't born yesterday. And if it comes to that, what do you know of me and Luther?"
"Everybody knows about you!"
Daisy Belle's fine profile looked a little grim suddenly against the night. "What do they know?" she said after a moment.
"Why, who you are, all that. You are sort of fabulous, you know."
Again Daisy Belle did not speak for a moment. Then she said: "You mean—it is rumored that Luther and Daisy Belle Cates, well-known members of the so-called international set, are about to buy a house or sell a house, or back a horse, or get a divorce, or—or any damned bit of nonsense anybody can think up? That sort of thing?"
"Well, yes. Only it doesn't seem to fit you, now that I've known you."
Daisy Belle laughed shortly. "You can't imagine me being one of the ten best-dressed women, can you? Well, as a matter of fact, I wasn't. I only had big dressmaker's bills. It was all a question of money; Luther had so much, and so had I. You don't choose your way of living, Marcia; it chooses you. Not that any of that matters now. The point is, how did we get here? At this moment," said Daisy Belle, her eyes narrow and thoughtful, as if she saw a picture somewhere in the blackness beyond that rosy area of light surrounding them, "at this special instant in history. Well, we were in Paris when the Germans came. We went to the Riviera. After a while the Germans came there, too. They were everywhere. . . ." Her elegant, straight shoulders made a little movement of distaste. "Luther was very ill, for a long time. We stayed with a—a friend; in a chateau in the hills back of Nice. Eventually the war was over and we decided to go to Buenos Aires. So here we are."
She stopped. It struck Marcia that there was something tentative in her deliberate pause, something expectant.
Marcia said: "It will be good to be at home."
"Will it?" said Daisy Belle. "Will it? I'm sure I hope so. Well . . ." She had smoked the cigarette down to the last small end of it; she tossed it abruptly into the sea. "I'm going to find Luther. I do think that this Castiogne person took a very inconvenient time to get himself murdered. Of course Gili could have done it, but I don't think she did. For one thing she was too scared. But one of the seamen will eventually confess and that will be the end of that." She patted Marcia's shoulder once, hard, and walked briskly away.
Marcia started to follow her, remembered that Mickey would expect to find her somewhere on deck and, after waiting a few moments, leaning against the railing, she turned and strolled slowly along the lighted white lane of the deck, forward. Watching, as she strolled, the curling white tops of the waves, and the red and gold glitter of the reflected lights from the ship, listening to the murmur and rush of the ship plowing her sturdy way through the water. And the lulling sound of the sea, the feeling of security, of being on an American ship which was the same as being on American soil, seemed to give her a feeling of recovery of herself. As if the girl she had been, the Marcia Colfax who had set gaily forth on the Normandie so long ago, had disappeared, gone away, been asleep, somewhere; as if another girl had taken her place, a woman rather, who had had to summon the strength to combat terror, and hopelessness and sorrow and cold and sometimes hunger. And now that woman had gone again, and Marcia Colfax herself had returned. It was indeed, as if the night just past had been a climax, a final curtain to a play in which she had played a hard and exhausting role.