"George," said Catriona. "I think I have to go now."
"Oh, come on. We've settled our business. Patched up our differences. Have one more link snifter before you go."
"Well... I shouldn't."
"Who says you shouldn't? Let me tell you, you should! It relaxes the inhibitions. And there is no reason whatever why you should be feeling inhibited, is there?"
Catriona finished her cigarette and stubbed it out. George said, "One more little one, huh?"
It was the way he raised one eyebrow and rubbed his hands together that put her off. He looked suddenly grotesque—ingratiating and yet boorish at the same time. She found her shoes, slipped them on, and stood up. "No," she said. "I have to get ready for dinner. But thanks, anyway. If thanks is the word."
With one loping step forward, George suddenly snatched at Catriona's arm. Catriona, however, twisted herself away; and for a moment the two of them stood staring at each other, both of them surprised—George at his own behavior, and Catriona at the swiftness of her own reaction. It had been as quick as a well-rehearsed wrestling move, and if someone else had been in the room, and half-turned away at the crucial moment, they might not even have noticed that anything had happened.
"Ah," said George, "so you're as much of a tease as I thought you were. They have a name for girls like you in the States."
"They have a name for men like you the whole world over."
"Catriona, you're getting me wrong."
"I don't think so, George. I think you're getting me wrong. I think you've badly misunderstood what this phenomenon you think I'm a part of is all about. Young girls may be freer these days, but we're not all straight out of The Beautiful and Damned. My God, you're being so damned middle-aged!".
"You vamp," said George, in a soft, critical snarl.
"Oh, don't you just wish I was? A siren gliding into your life with slicked-back hair and dark eyes and half a gallon of Nights of Allah splashed over my shoulders. But, my dear George, we may have petting parties, we free and immoral young things, and we may have love affairs, but we have them only amongst our own immoral young selves. The last person I want to coax into the back of a struggle buggy is a wheezing old marine financier who's probably going to get his corset laces tangled up with the convertible top."
"Well," breathed George, "you're really something of a bitch, aren't you?"
"Perhaps you're right," Catriona retorted. "Perhaps I am a bitch. But then perhaps you should get it through your head that you're talking to someone who behaves the way they do in spite of people like you—not because of you. You and your whole stuffy, cheesy, pompous generation. You know what Scott Fitzgerald called it, the way young people feel today? 'One vast juvenile intrigue.' And it's true, that's exactly what it is. The young against the old. If my mother knew how young I was when I first kissed a boy, she'd probably fall over with her legs in the air. She still thinks that I'm going to shrivel up like an Egyptian mummy before I'm thirty because I've been living with a man without even being engaged to him. It mortified her! It scandalised her! But it's all part of young people fighting against old people. It's modern. And you know something else that Scott Fitzgerald says? 'At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.' "
George was noisily pouring himself another highball. "I'm glad you're well acquainted with the holy scrolls of the most tawdry and illiterate young American writer being published today."
"Of course I am. Didn't you ever have heroes? People you believed in?"
"The only people I ever believed in were William McKinley, J. Pierpoint Morgan, and Mark Hanna."
"Oh, yes? And what did they have to say for themselves?"
"Mark Hanna uttered the great truth that anyone who has any experience of public life knows that they never owe the public anything. And Morgan pointed out the greater truth that men don't go into business for their health."
"You obviously don't. Not the way you've been trying to do business with me. Any more of that pawing and you'll have a heart seizure."
"What the hell do you mean, pawing?" George roared. Really roared, with his neck veins bulging, and his fist clenched so tightly around the stem of his highball glass that Catriona was sure it was going to snap.
"This is still my father's ship, Mr. Welterman," Catriona replied. Her heart was tumbling over and over, cake and circuses, but she managed to keep her voice quite level, and as cool as she could. "And on my father's ship, I expect to be treated with respect. Even by you."
George circled cagily around the room, his fingers drumming on chairbacks, table-tops, bureaux lids. Drrrrp, drrrrp, drrrrp. He was breathing with the regular heaves of a long-distance swimmer, and his whole body was crammed with emotional tension.
"You're such a hypocrite," Catriona told him; and she was pleased by the assured, throaty way her voice came out. "You speak to me as if I'm a delinquent shopgirl. You talk about moral codes, and the middle class, and you give me all that applesauce about capitalism. God, you're a hypocrite! All you can think about is how to rake more money together, and how to get your hand up my dress at the same time. Moral codes? The only moral codes you live by are getting rich and taking as many dumb Doras to bed as you can fit in between telephone calls."
George abruptly stopped his pacing and stared across the room at Catriona as if he had decided something important.
"I'm going to show you something," he said.
"Well, I'm not interested," Catriona told him. "I'm leaving."
"Wait!" George bellowed at her; and in two or three violent wrenches, he pulled his quilted wrap down, and tore away his cravat, and bared his body from the waist up.
Catriona, who had been starting towards the door, stopped in shock. George Welterman was well-built for a man of his age, and a little underexercised, a little overweight, but it was not his physique which stopped Catriona so abruptly. It was the pattern of crimson and twisted burns which were emblazoned on his naked chest; a pattern which, as he turned towards her, formed itself into a single word and a single device, all fashioned from skin that had been shrivelled up like the umbilical cord of a three-day baby. She could not even begin to imagine what agony George must have endured to scar his body so deeply and irrevocably with a bean, and with letters three inches high that spelled out the name MYRTLE.
"Is this the kind of thing that you find on the chest of a hypocrite?" George panted. His forehead was glassy with sweat. Tributaries of sweat ran from his shaggy armpits. His belly swelled in and out as he breathed.
Catriona said, "George, I can't stay here any longer." Her voice was as uncontrolled as if she were speaking into a high wind.
George tugged off the robe that was bunched around his waist and threw it aside. Then, with quick jerks, he loosened his belt and kicked off his slippers.
"You have a right to go?" he asked her. "You think you have a right to insult me that way and then walk out? You call this floating stewpot of flatulent egotists your ship? Respect you want? On your ship? I'll tell you who owns this ship, Catriona, my darling. Mr. O'Hara owns this ship, and the National Marine Bank, and a hundred other creditors. My company, IMM, is one of them. So when you get high and fancy with me, when you talk about respect, just remember that this is our ship, my pet, not yours, and that a only respect we'll give you is the respect you deserve. You bitch."