“I don’t mind the heat,” he explained fretfully. “I like it, in fact. Like an old racehorse, you know. He’s willing enough, you know, but in the cool weather when his muscles are stiff and his bones ache, the young ones all show him up. But about Fourth of July, when the sun gets hot and his muscles loosen up and his old bones don’t complain any more, then he’s good as any of ’em.”
“Yes?” repeated Gordon looking above them into shadow. The Semitic man removed his cigar.
“It will be better on the water tomorrow,” he said.
Gordon brooded above them. Then he remembered himself. “Come up,” he directed abruptly, elbowing the Semitic man aside and extending his latchkey.
“No, no,” Fairchild demurred quickly. “We won’t stop. Julius just reminded me: we came to see if you’d change your mind and come with us on Mrs. Maurier’s boat tomorrow? We saw Tal—”
“I have,” Gordon interrupted him. “I’m coming.”
“That’s good,” Fairchild agreed heartily. “You probably won’t regret it much. He may enjoy it, Julius,” he added. “Besides, you’ll be wise to go on and get it over with, then she’ll let you alone. After all, you can’t afford to ignore people that own food and automobiles, you know. Can he, Julius?”
The Semitic man agreed. “When he clutters himself up with people (which he can’t avoid doing) by all means let it be with people who own food and whisky and motor cars. The less intelligent, the better.” He struck a match to his cigar. “But he won’t last very long with her, anyway. He’ll last even a shorter time than you did,” he told Fairchild.
“Yes, I guess you’re right. But he ought to keep a line on her, anyhow. If you can neither ride nor drive the beast yourself, it’s a good idea to keep it in a pasture near by: you may someday be able to swap it for something, you know.”
“A Ford, for instance, or a radio,” the Semitic man suggested. “But you’ve got your simile backward.”
“Backward?” repeated the other.
“You were speaking from the point of view of the rider,” he explained.
“Oh,” Fairchild remarked. He emitted a disparaging sound. “‘Ford’ is good,” he said heavily.
“I think ‘radio’ is pretty good, myself,” the other said complacently.
“Oh, dry up,” Fairchild replaced his hat. “So you are coming with us, then,” he said to Gordon.
“Yes. I’m coming. But won’t you come up?”
“No, no: not tonight. I know your place, you see,” Gordon made no reply, brooding his tall head in the shadow. “Well, I’ll phone her and have her send a car for you tomorrow,” Fairchild added. “Come on, Julius, let’s go. Glad you changed your mind,” he added belatedly. “Good night, Come on, Julius.”
They crossed the street and entered the square. Once within the gates they were assailed, waylaid from behind every blade and leaf with a silent, vicious delight.
“Good Lord,” exclaimed Fairchild, flipping his handkerchief madly about, “let’s go over to the docks. Maybe there ain’t any nautical ones,” He hurried on, the Semitic man ambling beside him, clamping his dead cigar.
“He’s a funny chap,” the Semitic man remarked. They waited for a trolley to pass, then crossed the street. The wharf, the warehouse, was a formal rectangle with two slender masts projecting above it at a faint angle. They went on between two dark buildings and halted again while a switch engine drew an interminable monotony of cars up the track.
“He ought to get out of himself more,” Fairchild commented. “You can’t be an artist all the time. You’ll go crazy.”
“You couldn’t,” the other corrected. “But then, you are not an artist. There is somewhere within you a bewildered stenographer with a gift for people, but outwardly you might be anything. You are an artist only when you are telling about people, while Gordon is not an artist only when he is cutting at a piece of wood or stone. And it’s very difficult for a man like that to establish workable relations with people. Other artists are too busy playing with their own egos, workaday people will not or cannot bother with him, so his alternatives are misanthropy or an endless gabbling of esthetic foster sisters of both sexes. Particularly if his lot is cast outside of New York city.”
“There you go: disparaging our Latin Quarter again. Where’s your civic pride? where’s your common courtesy, even? Even the dog won’t bite the hand that holds the bread.”
“Corn belt,” the other said shortly, “Indiana talking. You people up there are born with the booster complex, aren’t you? Or do you acquire it with sunburned necks?”
“Oh, well, we Nordics are at a disadvantage,” Fairchild replied. His tone was unctuous, the other detected something falsely frank in it. “We’ve got to fix our idea on a terrestrial place. Though we know it’s second rate, that’s the best we can do. But your people have got all heaven for your old home town, you know.”
“I could forgive everything except the unpardonable clumsiness of that,” the other told him. “Your idea is not bad. Why don’t you give it to Mark Frost — roughly, you know — and let him untangle it for you? You and he could both use it then — if you are quick enough, that is.”
Fairchild laughed. “Now, you layoff our New Orleans bohemian life; stay away from us if you don’t like it. I like it, myself: there is a kind of charming futility about it, like—”
“Like a country club where they play croquet instead of golf,” the other supplied for him.
“Well, yes,” Fairchild agreed. “Something like that.” The warehouse loomed above them, and they passed into it and amid the ghosts of the ends of the earth. “A croquet player may not be much of a go-getter, but what do you think of a man that just sits around and criticises croquet?”
“Well, I’m like the rest of you immortals: I’ve got to pass the time in some way in order to gain some idea of how to pass eternity,” the Semitic man answered. They passed through the warehouse and onto the dock. It was cooler here, quieter. Two ferry boats passed and repassed like a pair of golden swans in a barren cycle of courtship. The shore and the river curved away in a dark embracing slumber to where a bank of tiny lights flickered and trembled, bodiless and far away. It was much cooler here and they removed their hats. The Semitic man unclamped his dead cigar and cast it outward. Silence, water, night, absorbed it without a sound.
The First Day
TEN O’CLOCK
The Nausikaa lay in the basin — a nice thing, with her white, matronly hull and mahogany-and-brass superstructure and the yacht club flag at the peak. A firm, steady wind blew in from the lake and Mrs. Maurier, having already gota taste of the sea from it, had donned her yachting cap and she now clashed and jangled in a happy, pointless ecstasy. Her two cars had made several trips and would make several more, creeping and jouncing along the inferior macadam road upon and beside which the spoor of Coca Cola and the almond bar betrayed the lair of the hot dog and the less-than-one-percent. All the jollity of departure under a perfect day, heatridden city behind, and a breeze too steady for the darn things to light on you. Her guests each with his or her jar of almond cream and sunburn lotion came aboard in bright babbling surges, calling, “Ship ahoy, everyone,” and other suitable nautical cries, while various casuals, gathered ‘along the quay, looked on with morose interest. Mrs. Maurier in her yachting cap clashed and jangled in a happy and senseless excitement.
On the upper deck where the steward broke out chairs for them, her guests in their colored clothing gathered, dressed for deep water in batik and flowingties and open collars, informal and colorful with the exception of Mark Frost, the ghostly young man, a poet who produced an occasional cerebral and obscure poem in four or seven lines reminding one somehow of the funotioh of evacuation excruciatingly and incompletely performed. He wore ironed serge and a high starched collar and he borrowed a cigarette of the steward and lay immediately at full length on something, as was his way. Mrs. Wiseman and Miss Jameson, flanking Mr. Talliaferro, sat with cigarettes also. Fairchild, accompanied by Gordon, the Semitic man, and a florid stranger in heavy tweeds, and carrying among them several weighty-looking suitcases, had gone directly below.