“Josh.” She lay flat, perfectly still.
“Huh.”
“Didn’t you do something to that boat?”
After a while he said, “What boat?” She was silent, taut with listening. He said, “Why? What would I want to do anything to the boat for? What makes you think I did?”
“Didn’t you, now? Honest?”
“You’re crazy. I never hurt—I never was down there except when you came tagging down there, that morning. What would I want to do anything to it for?” They lay motionless, a kind of tenseness. He said, suddenly, “Did you tell her I did something to it?”
“Aw, don’t be a goof. I’m not going to tell on you.”
“You’re damn right you won’t. I never did anything to it.”
“All right, all right: I’m not going to tell if you haven’t got guts to. You’re yellow, Josh,” she told him calmly.
“Look here, I told you that if you wanted to stay in here, you’d have to keep quiet, didn’t I? Shut up, then. Or get out.”
“Didn’t you break that boat, honest?”
“No, I told you. Now, you shut up or get out of here.”
They lay quiet for a time. After a while she moved carefully, turning onto her belly by degrees. She lay still again for a time, then she raised her head. He seemed to be asleep, so she lowered her head and relaxed her muscles, spreading her arms and legs to where the sheet was still cool.
“I’m glad we’re going tomorrow,” she murmured, as though to herself. “I like to ride on the train. And mountains again. I love mountains, all blue and . . . blue. . . . We’ll be seeing mountains day after tomorrow. Little towns on ’em that don’t smell like people eating all the time . . . and mountains. . . .”
“No mountains between here and Chicago,” her brother said grufHy. “Shut up.”
“Yes, there are.” She raised herself to her elbow. “There are some. I saw some coming down here.”
“That was in Virginia and Tennessee. We don’t go through Virginia to Chicago, dumbbell.”
“We go through Tennessee, though.”
“Not that part of Tennessee. Shut up, I tell you. Here, you get up and go back to your room.”
“No. Please, just a little while longer. I’ll lie still. Come on, Gus, don’t be so crummy.”
“Get out, now,” he repeated implacably.
“I’ll be still: I won’t say a w—”
“No. Outside, now. Go on. Go on, Gus, like I tell you.”
She heaved herself over nearer. “Please, Josh. Then I’ll go.”
“Well. Be quick about it.” He turned his face away and she leaned down and took his ear between her teeth, biting it just a little, making a kind of meaningless maternal sound against his ear. “That’s enough,” he said presently, turning his head and his moistened ear. “Get out, now.”
She rose obediently and returned to her room. It seemed to be hotter in here than in his room, so she got up and removed her pajamas and got back in bed and lay on her back, cradling her dark grave head in her arms and gazing into the darkness; and after a while it wasn’t so hot and it was like she was on a high place looking away out where mountains faded dreaming and blue and on and on into a purple haze under the slanting and solemn music of the sun. She’d see ’em day after tomorrow. Mountains . . .
7
Fairchild went directly to the marble and stood before it, clasping his hands at his burly back. The Semitic man sat immediately on entering the room, pre-empting the single chair. The host was busy beyond the rep curtain which constituted his bedroom, from where he presently reappeared with a bottle of whisky. He had removed both shirt and undershirt now, and beneath a faint reddish fuzz his chest gleamed with heat, like an oiled gladiator’s.
“I see,” Fairchild remarked as the host entered, “that you too have been caught by this modern day fetish of virginity. But you have this advantage over us: yours will remain inviolate without your having to shut your eyes to its goings-on. You don’t have to make any effort to keep yours from being otherwise. Very satisfactory. And very unusual. The greatest part of man’s immolation of virginity is, I think, composed of an alarm and a suspicion that someone else may be, as the term is, getting it.”
“Perhaps Gordon’s alarm regarding his own particular illusion of it is, that someone else may not get it,” the Semitic man suggested.
“No, I guess not,” Fairchild said. “He don’t expect to sell this to anybody, you know. Who Would payout good money for a virginity he couldn’t later violate, if only to assure himself it was the genuine thing?”
“Leda clasping her duck between her thighs could yet be carved out of it, however,” the other pointed out; “it is large enough for that. Or—”
“Swan,” corrected Fairchild.
“No. Duck,” the Semitic man insisted. “Americans would prefer a duck. Or udders and a fig leaf might be added to the thing as it stands. Isn’t that possible, Gordon?”
“Yes. It might be restored,” Gordon admitted dryly. He disappeared again beyond the curtain and returned with two heavy tumblers and a shaving mug bearing a name in Gothic lettering of faded gilt. He drew up the bench on which his enamel water pitcher rested, and Fairchild came and sat upon it. Gordon took the shaving mug and went to lean his tall body against the wall. His intolerant hawk’s face was like bronze in the unshaded glare of the light. The Semitic man puffed at his cigar. Fairchild raised his glass, squinting through it.
“Udders, and a fig leaf,” he repeated. He drank, and set his tumbler down to light a cigarette. “After all, that is the end of art. I mean—”
“We do get something out of art,” the Semitic man agreed. “We all admit that.”
“Yes,” said Fairchild. “Art reminds us of our youth, of that age when life don’t need to have her face lifted every so often for you to consider her beautiful. That’s about all the virtue there is in art: it’s a kind of Battle Creek, Michigan, for the spirit. And when it reminds us of youth, we remember grief and forget time. That’s something.”
“Something, if all a man has to do is forget time,” the Semitic man rejoined. “But one who spends his days trying to forget time is like one who spends his time forgetting death or digestion. That’s another instance of your unshakable faith in words. It’s like morphine, language is. A fearful habit to form: you become a bore to all who would otherwise cherish you. Of course, there is the chance that you may be hailed as a genius after you are dead long years, but what is that to you? There will still be high endeavor that ends, as always, with kissing in the dark, but where are you? Time? Time? Why worry about something that takes care of itself so well? You were born with the habit of consuming time. Be satisfied with that. Tom o’Bedlam had the only genius for consuming time: that is, to be utterly unaware of it.
“But you speak for the artists. I am thinking of the majority of us who are not artists and who need protection from artists, whose time the artists insist on passing for us. We get along quite well with our sleeping and eating and procreating, if you artists only let us alone. But you accursed who are not satisfied with the world as it is and so must try to rebuild the very floor you are standing on, you keep on talking and shouting and gesturing at us until you get us all fidgety and alarmed. So I believe that if art served any purpose at all, it would at least keep the artists themselves occupied.”
Fairchild raised his glass again. “It’s more than that. It’s getting into life, getting into it and wrapping it around you, becoming a part of it. Women can do it. without art—old biology takes care of that. But men, men . . . A woman conceives: does she care afterward whose seed it was? Not she. And bears, and all the rest of her life—her young troubling years, that is—is filled. Of course the father can look at it occasionally. But in art, a man can create without any assistance at all: what he does is his. A perversion
, I grant you, but a perversion that builds Chartres and invents Lear is a pretty good thing.” He drank, and set his tumbler down.
“Creation, reproduction from within. . . . Is the dominating impulse in the world feminine, after all, as aboriginal peoples believe? . . . There is a kind of spider or something. The female is the larger, and when the male goes to her he goes to death: she devours him during the act of conception. And that’s man: a kind of voraciousness that makes an artist stand beside himself with a notebook in his hand always, putting down all the charming things that ever happen to him, killing them for the sake of some problematical something he might or he might not ever use. Listen,” he said, “love, youth, sorrow and hope and despair—they were nothing at all to me until I found later some need of a particular reaction to put in the mouth of some character of whom I wasn’t at that time certain, and that I don’t yet consider very admirable. But maybe it was because I had to work all the time to earn a living, when I was a young man.”
“Perhaps so,” the Semitic man agreed. “People still believe they have to work to live.”
“Sure you have to work to live,” Fairchild said quickly.
“You’d naturally say that. If a man has had to deny himself any pleasures during his pleasuring years, he always like to believe it was necessary. That’s where you get your Puritans from. We don’t like to see anyone violate laws we observed, and get away with it. God knows, heaven is a dry reward for abnegation.”
Fairchild rose and went to stand again before the fluid, passionate fixity of the marble. “The end of art,” he repeated. “I mean, to the consumer, not to us: we have to do it, they don’t. They can take it or leave it. Probably Gordon feels the same way about stories that I do about sculpture, but for me—” He mused upon the marble for a time. “When the statue is completely nude, it has only a coldly formal significance, you know. But when some foreign matter like a leaf or a fold of drapery (kept there in defiance of gravity by God only knows what) draws the imagination to where the organs of reproduction are concealed, it lends the statue a warmer, a—a—more—”
“Speculative significance,” supplied the Semitic man.
“—speculative significance which I must admit I require in my sculpture.”
“Certainly the moralists agree with you.”
“Why shouldn’t they? The same food nourishes everybody’s convictions alike. And a man that earns his bread in a glue factory must get some sort of pleasure from smelling cattle hooves, or he’d change his job. There’s your perversion, I think.”
“And,” the Semitic man said, “if you spend your life worrying over sex, it’s an added satisfaction to get paid for your time.”
“Yes. But if I earned my bread by means of sex, at least I’d have enough pride about it to be a good honest whore.” Gordon came over and filled the glasses again. Fairchild returned and got his, and prowled aimlessly about the room, examining things. The Semitic man sat with his handkerchief spread over his bald head. He regarded Gordon’s naked torso with envious wonder. “They don’t seem to bother you at all,” he stated fretfully.
“Look here,” Fairchild called suddenly. He had unswaddled a damp cloth from something and he now bent over his find. “Come here, Julius.” The Semitic man rose and joined him.
It was clay, yet damp, and from out its dull, dead grayness Mrs. Maurier looked at them. Her chins, harshly, and her flaccid jaw muscles with savage verisimilitude. Her eyes were caverns thumbed with two motions into the dead familiar astonishment of her face; and yet, behind them, somewhere within those empty sockets, behind all her familiar surprise, there was something else—something that exposed her face for the mask it was, and still more, a mask unaware. “Well, I’m damned,” Fairchild said slowly, staring at it. “I’ve known her for a year, and Gordon comes along after four days—Well, I’ll be damned,” he said again.
“I could have told you,” the Semitic man said. “But I wanted you to get it by yourself. I don’t see how you missed it; I don’t see how anyone with your faith in your fellow man could believe that anyone could be as silly as she, without reason.”
“An explanation for silliness?” Fairchild repeated. “Does her sort of silliness require explanation?”
“It shouts it,” the other answered. “Look how Gordon got it, right away.”
“That’s so,” Fairchild admitted. He gazed at the face again, then he looked at Gordon with envious admiration. “And you got it right away, didn’t you?”
Gordon was replenishing the glasses again. “He couldn’t have missed it,” the Semitic man repeated. “I don’t see how you missed it. You are reasonably keen about people—sooner or later.”
“Well, I guess I missed her,” Fairchild returned, and extended his tumbler. “But it’s the usual thing, ain’t it? Plantations and things? First family, and all that?”
“Something like that,” the Semitic man agreed. He returned to his chair and Fairchild sat again beside the water pitcher. “She’s a Northerner, herself. Married it. Her husband must have been pretty old when they married. That’s what explains her, I think.”
“What does? Being a Northerner, or marriage? Marriage starts and explains lots of things about us, just like singleness or widowhood does. And I guess the Ohio river can affect your destiny, too. But how does it explain her?”
“The story is that her people forced her to marry old Maurier. He had been overseer on a big place before the Civil War. He disappeared in ’63, and when the war was over he turned up again riding a horse with a Union Army cavalry saddle and a hundred thousand dollars in uncut Federal notes for a saddle blanket. Lord knows what the amount really was, or how he got it, but it was enough to establish him. Money. You can’t argue against money: you only protest.
“Everybody expected him to splurge about with his money: show up the penniless aristocracy, that sort of thing; work out some of the inhibitions he must have developed during his over-seer days. But he didn’t. Perhaps he’d got rid of his inhibitions during his sojourn at the war. Anyway, he failed to live up to character, so people decided that he was a moral coward, that he was off somewhere in a hole with his money, like a rat. And this was the general opinion until a rumor got out about several rather raw land deals in which he was assisted by a Jew named Julius Kauffman who was acquiring a fortune and an unsavory name during those years immediately following General Butler’s assumption of the local purple.
“And when the smoke finally cleared somewhat, he had more money than ever rumor could compute and he was the proprietor of that plantation on which he had once been a head servant, and within a decade he was landed gentry. I don’t doubt but that he had dug up some blueblood emigre ancestry. He was a small shrewd man, a cold and violent man; just the sort to have an unimpeachable genealogy. Humorless and shrewd, but I don’t doubt that he sat at times in the halls of his newly adopted fathers, and laughed.
“The story is that her father came to New Orleans on a business trip, with a blessing from Washington. She was young, then; probably a background of an exclusive school, and a social future, the taken-for-granted capital letter kind, but all somehow rather precarious—cabbage, and a footman to serve it; a salon in which they sat politely, surrounded by objects, and spoke good French: and bailiff’s men on the veranda and the butcher’s bill in the kitchen—gentility: evening clothes without fresh linen underneath. I imagine he—her father—was pretty near at the end of his rope. Some government appointment, I imaginev brought him south: hijacking privileges with official sanction, you know.
“The whole family seemed to have found our climate salubrious, though, what with hibiscus and mimosa on the lawn instead of bailiffs, and our dulcet airs after the rigors of New England; and she cut quite a figure among the jeunesse dorée of the nineties; fell in love with a young chap, penniless but real people, who led cotillions and went without gloves to send her flowe
rs and glacé trifles from the rue Vendôme and sang to a guitar among the hibiscus and mimosa when stars were wont to rise. Old Maurier had made a bid, himself, in the meantime. Maurier was not yet accepted by the noblesse. But you can’t ignore money, you know: you can only protest. And tremble. It took my people to teach the world that. . . . And so—” The Semitic man drained his glass. He continued:
“You know how it is, how there comes a certain moment in the course of human events during which everything—public attention, circumstance, even destiny itself—is caught at the single possible instant, and the actions of certain people, for no reason at all, become of paramount interest and importance to the rest of the world? That’s how it was with these people. There were wagers laid; a famous gambler even made a book on it. And all the time she went about her affairs, her parties and routs and balls, behind that cold Dresden China mask of hers. She was quite beautiful then, they say. People always painting her, you know. Her face in every exhibition, her name a byword in the street and a toast at Antoine’s or the St. Charles. . . . But then, perhaps nothing went on behind that mask at all.”