William Faulkner - Mosquitoes

“So I shut the door quick and stood right quiet, and soon I heard her enter the other side. I didn’t know yet if she’d seen me, but I was going to stay quiet as I could until she went away. I just had to do that, it seemed to me.

“Children are much more psychic than adults. More of a child’s life goes on in its mind than people believe. A child can distill the whole gamut of experiences it has never actually known, into a single instant. Anthropology explains a little of it. But not much, because the gaps in human knowledge that have to be bridged by speculation are too large. The first thing a child is taught is the infallibility and necessity of precept, and by the time the child is old enough to add anything to our knowledge of the mind, it has forgotten. The soul sheds every year, like snakes do, I believe. You can’t recall the emotions you felt last year: you remember only that an emotion was associated with some physical fact of experience. But all you have of it now is a kind of ghost of happiness and a vague and meaningless regret. Experience: why should we be expected to learn wisdom from experience? Muscles only remember, and it takes repetition and repetition to teach a muscle anything. . ”

Arcturus, Orion swinging head downward by his knees, in the southern sky an electric lobster fading as the moon rose. Water lapped at the hull of the Nausikaa with little sounds.

“So I tiptoed across to the seat. It was hot in there, with the sun beating down on it: I could smell hot resin, even above the smell of the place itself. In a corner of the ceiling there was a dirt dobber’s nest — a hard lump of clay with holes in it, stuck to the ceiling, and big green flies made a steady droning sound. I remember how hot it was in there, and that feeling places like that give you — a kind of letting down of the bars of pretense, you know; a kind of submerging of civilized strictures before the grand implacability of nature and the physical body. And I stood there, feeling this feeling and the heat, and hearing the drone of those big flies, holding my breath and listening for a sound from beyond the partition. But there wasn’t any sound from beyond it, so I put my head down through the seat.”

Mark Frost snored. The moon, the pallid belly of the moon, inundating the world with a tarnishedmagic not of living things, laying her silver fleshless hand on the water that whispered and lapped against the hull of the yacht. The Semitic man clutched his dead cigar and he and Fairchild sat in the implacable laxing of muscles and softening tissue of their forty odd years, seeing two wide curious blue eyes into which an inverted surprise came clear as water, and long golden curls swinging downward above the ordure; and they sat in silence, remembering youth and love, and time and death.

ELEVEN O’CLOCK

Mark Frost had roused and with a ghostly epigram had taken himself off to bed. Later the Semitic man rose and departed, leaving him with a cigar; and Fairchild sat with his stockinged feet on the rail, puffing at the unfamiliar weed. He could see the whole deck in the pallid moonlight, and presently he remarked someone sitting near the afterrail. How long this person had been there Fairchild could not have told, but he was there now, alone and quite motionless, and there was something about his attitude that unleashed Fairchild’s curiosity, and at last he rose from his chair.

It was David, the steward. He sat on a coiled rope and he held something in his hands, between his knees. When Fairchild stopped beside him David raised his head slowly into the moonlight and gazed at the older man, making no effort to conceal that which he held. Fairchild leaned nearer to see. It was a slipper, a single slipper, cracked and stained with dried mud and disreputable, yet seeming still to hold in its mute shape something of that hard and sexless graveness of hers.

After a while David looked away, gazing again out across the dark water and its path of shifting silver, holding the slipper between his hands; and without speaking Fairchild turned and went quietly away.

SEVEN O’CLOCK

Fairchild waked and lay for a while luxuriously on his back. After a time he turned on his side to doze again, and when he turned he noticed the square of paper lying on the floor, as though it had been thrust under the door. He lay watching it for a while, then he came fully awake, and he rose and crossed the room and picked it up.

Dear Mr. Fairchild: I am leaveing the boat to dqy I have got a better job I have got 2 days comeing to me I will not claim it I am leaveing the boat be fore the trip is over tell Mrs. More I have got a better job ask her she will pay you $5 dollars of it you loned me yours truly

DAVID WEST.

He reread the note, brooding over it, then he folded it and put it in the pocket of his pajama jacket, and poured himself a drink. The Semitic man in his berth snored, profound, defenseless on his back.

Fairchild sat again in his berth, his drink un tasted beside him, and he unfolded the note and read it through again, remembering youth, thinking of age and slackening flesh like an old thin sorrow everywhere in the world.

EIGHT O’CLOCK

“Now, don’t you worry at all,” they reassured Mrs. Maurier, “we can do just as we did yesterday: it will be more fun than ever, that way. Dorothy and I can open cans and warm things. We can get along just as well without a steward as with one. Can’t we, Dorothy?”

“It will be like a picnic,” Miss Jameson agreed. “Of course, the men will have to help, too,” she added, looking at Pete with her pale humorless eyes.

Mrs. Maurier submitted, dogging them with her moaning fatuousness while Mrs. Wiseman and Miss Jameson and the niece opened cans and heated things, smearing dreadfully about the galley with grease and juices and blood from the niece’s thumb; opening, at Mark Frost’s instigation, a can labeled Beans, which turned out to be green string beans.

But they got coffee made at last, and breakfast was finally not very late. As they had said, it was like a picnic, though there were no ants, as the Semitic man pointed out just before he was ejected from the kitchen.

“We’ll open a can of them for you,” his sister offered briskly.

Besides, there was still plenty of grapefruit.

AT BREAKFAST

Fairchild — But I saw him after we got back to the yacht. I know I did.

Mark — No, he wasn’t in the boat when we came back: I remember now. I never saw him after we changed places, just after Jenny and Ernest fell out.

Julius — That’s so. . Was he in the boat with us at all? Does anybody remember seeing him in the boat at all?

Fairchild — Sure he was: don’t you remember how Mark kept hitting him with his oar? I tell you I saw—

Mark — He was in the boat at first. But after Jenny and—

Fairchild — Sure he was. Don’t you remember seeing him after we came back, Eva?

Eva — I don’t know. My back was toward all of you while we were rowing. And after Ernest threw Jenny out, I don’t remember who was there and who wasn’t.

Fairchild— Talliaferro was facing us. Didn’t you see him, Talliaferro? And Jenny, Jenny ought to remember. Don’t you remember seeing him, Jenny?

Mr. Talliaferro — I was watching the rope, you know.

Fairchild — How about you, Jenny? Don’t you remember?

Eva — Now, don’t you bother Jenny about it. How could she be expected to remember anything about it? How could anybody be expected to remember anything about such an idiotic— idiotic—

Fairchild — Well, I do. Don’t you all remember him going below with us, after we got back?

Mrs. Maurier (wringing her hands) — Doesn’t someone remember something about it? It’s terrible. I don’t know what to do: you people don’t seem to realize what a position it puts me in, with such a dreadful thing hanging over me. You people have nothing to lose, but I live here, I have a certain— And now a thing like this—