William Faulkner - Mosquitoes

Fairchild went immoderately into hysterical laughter.

FOUR O’CLOCK

The malarial man had attached his skiff to the fat man’s motorboat and they had puttered away in a morose dejection, rewardless; the tug had whistled a final derisive blast, showed them her squat, unpretty stern, where the Negro leaned eating again of his grayish object, and as dirty a pair of heels as it would ever be their luck to see, and sailed away. The Nausikaa was free once more and she sped quickly onward, gaining offing, and the final sharp concussion of flesh and flesh died away beneath the afternoon.

Mrs. Maurier had gazed at him, raised her hands in a fluttering cringing gesture, and cut him dead.

“But I saw you on the boat right after we came back,” Fairchild repeated with a sort of stubborn wonder. He opened a fresh bottle.

“You couldn’t have,” Gordon answered shortly. “I got out of the boat in the middle of Talliaferro’s excitement.” He waved away the proffered glass. The Semitic man said triumphantly, “I told you so,” and Fairchild essayed again, stubbornly:

“But I saw—”

“If you say that again,” the Semitic man told him, “I’ll kill you.” He addressed Gordon. “And you thought Dawson was drowned?”

“Yes. The man who brought me back — I stumbled on his house this morning — he had already heard of it, some way. It must have spread all up and down the lake. He didn’t remember the name, exactly, and when I named over the party and said Dawson Fairchild, he agreed. Dawson and Gordon — you see? And so I thought—”

Fairchild began to laugh again. He laughed steadily, trying to say something. “And so — and so he comes back and sp-spends—” Again that hysterical note came into his laughter and his hands trembled, clinking the bottle against the glass and sloshing a spoonful of the liquor onto the floor “—and spends. . He comes back, you know, and spends half a day looking — looking for his own bububod—”

The Semitic man rose and took the bottle and glass from him and half led, half thrust him into his bunk. “You sit down and drink this.” Fairchild drank the whisky obediently. The Semitic man turned to Gordon again. “What made you come back? Not just because you heard Dawson was drowned, was it?”

Gordon stood against the wall, mudstained and silent. He raised his head and stared at them, and through them, with his harsh, uncomfortable stare. Fairchild touched the Semitic man’s knee warningly.

“That’s neither here nor there,” he said. “The question is, Shall we or shall we not get drunk? I kind of think we’ve got to, myself.”

“Yes,” the other agreed. “It looks like it’s up to us. Gordon ought to celebrate his resurrection, anyway.”

“No,” Gordon answered, “I don’t want any.” The Semitic man protested, but again Fairchild gripped him silent, and when Gordon turned toward the door, he rose and followed him into the passage.

“She came back too, you know,” he said.

Gordon looked down at the shorter man with his lean bearded face, his lonely hawk’s face arrogant with shyness and pride. “I know it,” he answered (your name is like a little golden bell hung in my heart). “The man who brought me back was the same one who brought them back yesterday.”

“He was?” said Fairchild. “He’s doing a landoffice business with deserters, ain’t he?”

“Yes,” Gordon answered. And he went on down the passage with a singing lightness in his heart, a bright silver joy like wings.

* * *

The deck was deserted, as on that other afternoon. But he waited patiently in the hushed happiness of his dream and his arrogant bitter heart was young as any yet, as forgetful of yesterday and tomorrow; and soon, as though in answer to it, she came barelegged and molded by the wind of motion, and her grave surprise ebbed and she thrust him a hard tanned hand.

“So you ran away,” she said.

“And so did you,” he answered after an interval filled with a thing all silver and clean and fine.

“That’s right. We’re sure the herrings on this boat, aren’t we?”

“Herrings?”

“Guts, you know,” she explained. She looked at him gravely from beneath the coarse dark bang of her hair. “But you came back,” she accused.

“And so did you,” he reminded her from amid his soundless silver wings.

FIVE O’CLOCK

“But we’re moving again, at last,” Mrs. Maurier repeated at intervals, with a detached air, listening to a sound somehow vaguely convivial that welled at intervals up the companionway. Presently Mrs. Wiseman remarked the hostess’s preoccupied air and she too ceased, hearkening.

“Not again?” she said with foreboding.

“I’m afraid so,” the other answered unhappily.

Mr. Talliaferro hearkened also. “Perhaps I’d better—” Mrs. Maurier fixed him with her eye, and Mrs. Wiseman said:

“Poor fellows. They have had to stand a great deal in the last few days.”

“Boys will be boys,” Mr. Talliaferro added with docile regret, listening with yearning to that vaguely convivial sound, Mrs. Maurier listened to it, coldly detached and speculative. She said:

“But we are moving again, anyway.”

SIX O’CLOCK

The sun was setting across the scudding water: the water was shot goldenly with it, as was the gleaming mahogany-and-brass elegance of the yacht, and the silver wings in his heart were touched with pink and gold while he stood and looked downward upon the coarse crown of her head and at her body’s grave and sexless replica of his own attitude against the rail — an unconscious aping both comical and heartshaking.

“Do you know,” he asked, “what Cyrano said once?” Once there was a king who possessed all things. All things were his: power, and glory, and wealth, and splendor and ease. And so he sat at dusk in his marble court filled with the sound of water and of birds and surrounded by the fixed gesturing of palms, looking out across the hushed fading domes of his city and beyond, to the dreaming lilac barriers of his world.

“No: what?” she asked. But he only looked down upon her with his cavernous uncomfortable eyes. “What did he say?” she repeated. And then: “Was he in love with her?”

“I think so. . Yes, he was in love with her. She couldn’t leave him, either. Couldn’t go away from him at all.”

“She couldn’t? What’d he done to her? Locked her up?”

“Maybe she didn’t want to,” he suggested.

“Huh.” And then: “She was an awful goof, then. Was he fool enough to believe she didn’t want to?”

“He didn’t take any chances. He had her locked up. In a book.”

“In a book?” she repeated. Then she comprehended. “Oh. . That’s what you’ve done, isn’t it? With that marble girl without any arms and legs you made? Hadn’t you rather have a live one? Say, you haven’t got any sweetheart or anything, have you?”

“No,” he answered. “How did you know?”

“You look so bad. Shabby. But that’s the reason: no woman is going to waste time on a man that’s satisfied with a piece of wood or something. You ought to get out of yourself. You’ll either bust all of a sudden some day, or just dry up. . How old are you?”

“Thirty-six,” he told her. She said:

“Gabriel’s pants. Thirty-six years old, and living in a hole with a piece of rock, like a dog with a dry bone. Gabriel’s pants. Why don’t you get rid of it?” But he only stared down at her.

“Give it to me, won’t you?”

“No.”

“I’ll buy it from you, then.”

“No.”

“Give you—” She looked at him with sober detachment. “Give you seventeen dollars for it. Cash.”

“No.”