He held the door open for her courteously, and then walked faster than she along the passage, so she followed the rustling oil-skinned figure with its shock of blond hair. He disappeared around some curve.
Thinking again of Daisy Belle Cates, it seemed to her suddenly childish and unfair to give her no chance to defend herself against the nagging little question in Marcia's own mind. There could be a dozen reasons for Daisy Belle's absence from the cabin the previous night, a dozen reasons for the damp coat, a dozen reasons for a merely careless misstatement—all of them innocent.
She came to a main lobby. Daisy Belle was not about, neither was she in the cabin on B deck. She wanted to talk to Mickey, too; probably he would be on deck. She put the nurse's coat around her shoulders and climbed the stairs again to the lobby of the deck which, on the Magnolia, corresponded to, and in practice was the boat deck. Still she saw none of the Lerida survivors. She went out on deck, and instantly it seemed to her she entered a remote and secret world. The fog was everywhere; the ship seemed to lie quite still in it, unmoving, except for that deep faraway pulsation. The railings were beaded with moisture. She could scarcely see beyond them. But Gili was standing at the railing. She, too, wore a nurse's thick, warm coat. Her golden head was bare and looked rather lank and wet. She turned quickly and saw Marcia.
"Oh," she said. A flash of expectancy in her face changed to quite frank and open disappointment. "Oh, it's you." Marcia said: "Have you seen Andre? Or Mrs. Cates?" "No." Gili's voice was sullen. She waited a moment and shivered a little and glanced swiftly back of her, along the deck both ways, her green eyes darting here and there. She said: "I don't like the fog. I feel all the time as if somebody is near me, somebody I can't see or hear or ... I don't like it." Marcia, suddenly, didn't like it either. She said, however, lightly: "Why don't you go inside then?"
Gili did not reply. Instead she tugged at a pocket and got out a cigarette case and clicked it open. She offered it to Marcia. "Cigarette?"
"Thank you, I . . ." Marcia stopped.
The case was Mickey's. She knew it and remembered it well—the thin, plain gold, the design around the edge. She stared at it and saw, besides the case, tables in restaurants with rose-shaded lamps, tables in the sun, along the walks, below the bronze-leafed trees of the Bois—she could almost hear the squawking taxis and smell liqueurs and coffee. She sad stiffly: "Where did you get that?" Gili was looking at her. Her face was secret, her eyes uneasy. She licked her mouth, and said: "Oh, that. The case. I—I borrowed it. It belongs to Mickey."
Fog was so close it seemed to drift between them. For an instant, Marcia thought, how odd—she knows his real name. Mickey.
Then Gili's green eyes changed, and Marcia could see that change. Uneasiness was suddenly shot with brilliance, with triumph.
Gili gave a kind of shrug. She bit her full red lip and looked away. Marcia said, in a voice she did not recognize as her own, it was so stern, so queer and hard: "Where did you know him? How long?"
Gili bit her lip again. She shot a sidewise, green glance at Marcia. She said: "All right. We may as well understand each other, you and I. I knew it would have to be some time. It may as will be now. Mickey belongs to me. He only came back to you for your money. We wanted to leave Europe, you see, and we have no money." She smiled. "He knew he could get enough for both of us from you."
10
Someone came rapidly along the deck behind Marcia. She heard the quick, hard tread and she saw the flash of relief in Gili's face as she looked beyond Marcia over her shoulder. "Why, Colonel Morgan," cried Gili. Her voice was eager, her face alight. Her eyes avoided Marcia. "How nice," cried Gili, and Josh Morgan stopped beside them.
"Hello," he said, looking at Marcia, then looking at Gili. His coat was faintly beaded with fog; the metal on his cap looked frosted. He seemed very big and substantial, looming up in the gray mist. Gili said quickly with a nervous sort of giggle: "I'm going inside. The fog is too cold. See you later . . ." She hunched her coat up around her neck and slid away hurriedly across the wet strip of deck and inside the ship.
"Now what's all that for?" said Josh Morgan. He looked from the door which had closed so quickly, with such a suggestion of slyness and haste, back to Marcia. "She's scuttling away like a scared cat. What's she done?"
Marcia moved, so she avoided his eyes, so she looked into the fog, so he could not see her face. Actually she was conscious only of a deep inner stillness, as if everything about her had stopped.
It wasn't true; it couldn't be true!
Yet hadn't an unwilling awareness caught and stored up certain small things—a look in Gili's eyes, the way her head moved against Mickey's shoulder, a knowledgeableness, somehow, between them? Only that morning she had thought of Gili's presence in Mickey's cabin—so assured, so at ease—and then she had reassured herself, almost without intending to do it. She had answered a question without admitting that it was a question.
But Gili was lying. She had to be lying. Mickey loved her, Marcia.
The man beside her said rather gently: "Come and walk with me, will you? Have you had lunch? It's past time, you know. . . ."
"I had a late breakfast," she replied automatically. She could not look at him. The railing was wet and cold under her hands, but it seemed just then the only fixed and certain point in life. If she held the railing tightly enough, long enough . . . Josh Morgan put his hand over her own. "Look at me. What's that woman done to you?"
She stared down at his hand. It was big and warm and well-shaped, with a small seal ring on the little finger.
Then she thought of Mickey's hands—fine and square, with their pitiful scarred fingertips, fingertips that had once been so strong and fine—the fingers of a musician. Gili had lied.
Josh Morgan took her own hands from the railing and tucked one of them under his arm. "I've got to have a walk. Come along." She could feel the texture of his sleeve, the hard warmth of flesh and muscle below it. His overcoat, swinging loose because of the sling on his other arm, swung a little over her too. The fog was cold and moist against her cheeks and lips. She moved along beside him, as if he had wound her up and set her in motion. They reached a sheltered spot beside a projecting bulkhead. It was not far, as a matter of fact, from where she had found Mickey in the darkness of the previous night.
Josh Morgan was watching her closely. He said: "Stay here, will you? I'll be back."
Close to the ship the water was visible; she watched the black waves with curling white caps rush away from the ship and then dissolve into gray. Josh Morgan returned and he had a steamer chair which he set up in the protected angle of the bulkhead. "Come on," he said, "sit here."
She said stiffly: "I've got to talk to Mickey."
"All right, all right. Anything you like. I'll get him for you. Only just for a minute or two, stay here. Are you warm?"
She was in the chair. He leaned over to tuck her coat around her chin. For a moment it was like any other ocean voyage—a steamer chair, the rush of water, the fresh, wet sea air.
He sat down on the foot of her chair and lighted a cigarette. "Don't talk if you don't want to. I'll do the talking. How about my life story? Let me see. Well, I was born in California, I went to school in Massachusetts, studied law at Columbia and got a job writing for a newspaper. Then I went to Paris and got another job. . . . You're not listening to me. Well, it isn't very interesting, really. Listen, Marcia, that woman's a little wharf rat. Don't let her hurt you like that. I can't"—he tossed the cigarette over the railing into the fog; he leaned over suddenly, quite near—"I can't bear it," he said. He put his arm around her, holding her close, as one might gather up a child. Only then he kissed her, turning her face with his hard cheek, feeling for her lips. His mouth moved away a little but still so she could feel its warmth and tenderness, and he kissed her again. There was only, in all the world, the rush and murmur of the fog-shrouded waves and the man who held her, close against him, his mouth upon her own.