William Faulkner - Mosquitoes

“Of course there was,” said Fairchild quickly. “For the sake of the story, if nothing else.”

“Pride, anyway, I guess. She had that.” The Semitic man reached for the bottle. Gordon came and refilled his mug. “It must have been pretty hard for her, even if there was only pride to suffer. But women can stand anything—”

“And enjoy it,” Fairchild put in. “But go on.”

“That’s all. They were married in the Cathedral. She wasn’t a Catholic — Ireland had yet to migrate in any sizable quantities when her people established themselves in New England. That was another thing, mind you. And her horseless Lochinvar was present. Bets had been made that if he stayed away or passed the word, no one would attend at all. Maurier was still regarded — Well, imagine for yourself a situation like that: a tradition of ease unassailable and unshakable gone to pieces right under you, and out of the wreckage rising a man who once held your stirrup while you mounted. . Thirty years is barely the adolescence of bitterness, you know.

“I’d like to have seen her, coming out of the church afterward” They would have had a canopy leading from the door to the carriage: there must have been a canopy, and flowers, heavy ones — Lochinvar would have sent gardenias; and she, decked out in all the pagan trappings of innocence and her beautiful secret face beside that cold, violent man, graying now, but you have remarked how it takes the harlequinade of aristocracy to really reveal peasant blood, haven’t you? And her Lochinvar to wish her godspeed, watching her ankles as she got into the carriage.

“They never had any children. Maurier may have been too old; she herself may have been barren. Often that type is. But I don’t think so. I believe — But who knows? I don’t. Anyway, that explains her, to me. At first you think it’s just silliness, lack of occupation — a tub of washing, to be exact. But I see something thwarted back of it all, something stifled, yet which won’t quite die.”

“A virgin,” Fairchild said immediately. “That’s what it is, exactly. Fooling with sex, kind of dabbing at it, like a kitten at a ball of string. She missed something: her body told her so, insisted, forced her to try to remedy it and fill the vacuum. But now her body is old; it no longer remembers that it missed any· thing, and all she has left is a habit, the ghost of a need to rectify something the lack of which her body has long since forgotten about.”

The Semitic man lit his cold cigar again. Fairchild gazed at his glass, turning it this way and that slowly in his hand. Gordon stood yet against the wall, looking beyond them and watching something not in this room. The Semitic man slapped his other wrist, then wiped his palm on his handkerchief. Fairchild spoke.

“And I missed it, missed it clean,” he mused. “And then Gordon — Say,” he looked up suddenly, “how did you happen to learn all this?”

“Julius Kauffman was my grandfather,” the Semitic man replied.

“Oh. . Well, it’s a good thing you told me about it. I guess I won’t have another chance to get anything from her at first hand.” He chuckled without mirth.

“Oh, yes, you will,” the other told him. “She won’t hold this boat party against us. People are far more tolerant of artists than artists are of people.” He puffed at his cigar for a time. “The trouble with you,” he said, “is that you don’t act right at all. You are the most disappointing artist I know. Mark Frost is much nearer the genuine thing than you are. But then, he’s got more time to be a genius than you have: you spend too much time writing. And that’s where Gordon is going to fall down. You and he typify genius décolleté. And people who own motor cars and food draw the line just at negligé—somewhere about the collarbone. And remind me to give that to Mark tomorrow: it struck me several times these last few days that he needs a new one.”

“Speaking of décolleté—” Fairchild mopped his face again. “What is it that makes a man drink whisky on a night like this, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” the other answered. “Perhaps it’s a scheme of nature’s to provide for our Italian immigrants. Or of Providence. Prohibition for the Latin, politics for the Irish, invented He them.”

Fairchild filled his glass again, unsteadily. “Might as well make a good job of it,” he said. Gordon yet leaned against the wall, motionless and remote. Fairchild continued: “Italians and Irish. Where do we homegrown Nordics come in? What has He invented for us?”

“Nothing,” the Semitic man answered. “You invented Providence.” Fairchild raised his tumbler, gulping, and a part of the liquor ran over thinly and trickled from both corners of his mouth down his chin. Then he set the glass down and stared at the other with a mild astonishment.

“I am afraid,” he enunciated carefully, “that that one is going to do the business for me.” He wiped his chin unsteadily, and moving he struck his empty glass to the floor. The Semitic man groaned.

“Now we’ll have to move again, just when I had become inured to them. Or perhaps you’d like to lie down for a while?”

Fairchild sat and mused a moment. “No, I don’t,” he stated thickly. “If I lie down, I wouldn’t get up again. Little air, fresh air. I’ll go outside.” The Semitic man rose and helped him to his feet. Fairchild pulled himself together. “Come along, Gordon. I’ve got to get outside for a while.”

Gordon came out of his dream. He came and raised the bottle to the light, and divided it between his mug and the Semitic man’s tumbler, and supporting Fairchild between them they drank. Then Fairchild must examine the marble again.

“I think it’s kind of nice.” He stood before it, swaying, swallowing the hot salty liquid that continued to fill his throat. “You kind of wish she could talk, don’t you? It would be sort of like wind through trees. . No. . not talk: you’d like to watch her from a distance on a May morning, bathing in a pool where there were a lot of poplar trees. Now, this is the way to forget your grief.”

“She is not blond,”.Gordon said harshly, holding the empty bottle in his hand. “She is dark, darker than fire. She is more terrible and beautiful than fire.” He ceased and stared at them. Then he raised the bottle and hurled it crashing into the huge littered fireplace.

“Not—?” murmured Fairchild, trying to focus his eyes.

“Marble, purity,” Gordon said in his harsh, intolerant voice. “Pure because they have yet to discover some way to make it unpure. They would if they could, God damn them!” He stared at them for a moment from beneath his caverned bronze brows. His eyes were pale as two bits of steel. “Forget grief,” he repeated harshly. “Only an idiot has no grief; only a fool would forget it. What else is there in this world sharp enough to stick to your guts?”

He took the thin coat from behind the door and put it on over his naked torso, and they helped Fairchild from the room and down the dark stairs, abruptly subdued and quiet.

8

Mark Frost stood on the corner, frankly exasperated. The street light sprayed his tall ghostly figure with shadows of bitten late August leaves, and he stood in indecision, musing fretfully. His evening was spoiled: too late to instigate anything on his own hook or to join anyone else’s party, too soon to go home. Mark Frost depended utterly upon other people to get his time passed.

He was annoyed principally with Mrs. Maurier. Annoyed and unpleasantly shocked and puzzled. At her strange. . not coldness: rather, detachment, aloofness. . callousness. If you were at all artistic, if you had any taint of art in your blood, dining with her filled the evening. But now, tonight. . Never saw the old girl so bloodless in the presence of genius, he told himself. Didn’t seem to give a damn whether I stayed or not. But perhaps she doesn’t feel well, after the recent excitement, he added generously. Being a woman, too. . He had completely forgotten about the niece: the sepulchral moth of his heart had completely forgotten that temporary flame.