Mosquitoes

  Day was a nearer thing yet, though it was not quite come. Though the mist had not thinned, the yacht was visible from stem to stern, asleep like a gull with folded wings; and against the hull the water sighed a long awakening sigh. The shoreline was darker, a more palpable vagueness in the mist.

  “Say,” she remarked, stopping suddenly, “how are we going to get ashore? I forgot that. We don’t want to take the tender.”

  “Swim,” he suggested. Her dark damp head came just to his chin and she mused for a time in a sober consternation.

  “Isn’t there some way we can go in the tender and then pull it back to the yacht with a rope?”

  “I . . . Yes. Yes, we can do that.”

  “Well, you get a rope then. Snap into it.”

  When he returned with a coiled line she was already in the tender with the oars, and she watched with interest while he passed the rope around a stanchion and brought both ends into the boat with him and made one of the ends fast to the ringbolt in the stem of the skiff. Then she caught the idea and she sat and paid out the line while he pulled away for shore. Soon they beached and she sprang ashore, still holding the free end of the rope. “How’re we going to keep the tender from pulling the rope back around that post and getting aloose?” she asked.

  “I’ll show you,” he answered, and she watched him while he tied the oars and the row locks together with the free end of the line and wedged them beneath the thwarts. “That’ll hold, I guess. Somebody’ll be sure to see her pretty soon,” he added, and prepared to draw the skiff back to the yacht.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. She mused gravely, gazing at the dim shadowy yacht, then she borrowed matches from him, and sitting on the gunwale of the tender she tore a strip of paper from the bacon box and with a charred match printed Going to—She looked up. “Where are we going?” He looked at her and she added quickly, “I mean, what town? We’ll have to go to a town somewhere, you know, to get back to New Orleans so I can get some clothes and my seventeen dollars. What’s the name of a town?”

  After a while he said, “I don’t know. I never—”

  “That’s right, you never were over here before, either, were you? Well, what’s that town the ferries go to—the one Jenny’s always talking about you have fun at?” She stared again at the vague shape of the Nausikaa, then she suddenly printed Mandeville. “That’s the name of it—Mandeville. Which way is Mandeville from here?” He didn’t know, and she added, “No matter, we’ll find it, I guess.” She signed the note and laid it on the sternseat, weighting it with a small rock. “Now, pull her off,” she commanded, and soon there came back to them across the motionless water a faint thud.

  “Good-by, Nausikaa,” she said. “Wait,” she added, “I better put my shoes on, I guess.” He gave her her slippers and she sat flat on the narrow beach and put them on, returning the crumpled stockings to him. “Wait,” she said again, taking the stockings again and flipping them out. She slid one of them over her brown arm and withdrew a crumpled wad—the money she had been able to rake up by ransacking her aunt’s and Mrs. Wiseman’s and Miss Jameson’s things. She reached her hand and he drew her to her feet. “You’d better carry the money,” she said, giving it to him. “Now, for breakfast,” she said, clutching his hand.

  SIX O’CLOCK

  Trees heavy and ancient with moss loomed out of it hugely and grayly: the mist might have been a sluggish growth between and among them. No, this mist might have been the first prehistoric morning of time itself; it might have been the very substance in which the seed of the beginning of things fecundated; and these huge and silent trees might have been the first of living things, too recently born to know either fear or astonishment, dragging their sluggish umbilical cords from out the old miasmic womb of a nothingness latent and dreadful. She crowded against him, suddenly quiet and subdued, trembling a little like a puppy against the reassurance of his arm. “Gee,” she said in a small voice.

  That small sound did not die away. It merely dissolved into the moist gray surrounding them, and it was as if at a movement of any sort the word might repeat itself somewhere between sky and ground as a pebble is shaken out of cotton batting. He put his arm across her shoulders and at his touch she turned quickly beneath his armpit, hiding her face.

  “I’m hungry,” she said at last, in that small voice. “That’s what’s the matter with me,” she added with more assurance. “I want something to eat.”

  “Want me to build a fire?” he asked of the dark coarse crown of her head.

  “No, no,” she answered quickly, holding to him. “Besides, we are too close to the lake, here. Somebody might see it. We ought to get farther from the shore.” She clung to him, inside his arm. “I guess we’d better wait here until the fog goes away, though. A piece of bread will do.” She reached her brown hand. “Let’s sit down somewhere. Let’s sit down and eat some bread,” she decided. “And when the fog goes away we can find the road. Come on, let’s find a log or something.”

  She drew him by the hand and they sat at the foot of a huge tree, on the damp ground, while she delved into the basket. She broke a bit from the loaf and gave it to him, and a fragment for herself. Then she slid farther down against her propped heels until her back rested against him, and bit from her bread. She sighed contentedly.

  “There now. Don’t you just love this?” She raised her grave chewing face to look at him. “All gray and lonesome. Makes you feel kind of cold on the outside and warm inside, doesn’t it? . . . Say, you aren’t eating your bread. Eat your bread, David. I love bread, don’t you?” She moved again, inward upon herself: in some way she seemed to get herself yet closer against him.

  The mist was already beginning to thin, breaking with heavy reluctance before a rumor of motion too faint to be called wind. The mist broke raggedly and drifted in sluggish wraiths that seemed to devour all sound, swaying and swinging like huge spectral apes from tree to tree, rising and falling, revealing somber patriarchs of trees, hiding them again. From far, far back in the swamp there came a hoarse homely sound—an alligator’s love-song.

  “Chicago,” she murmured. “Didn’t know we were so near home.” Soon the sun; and she sprawled against him, contentedly munching her bread.

  SEVEN O’CLOCK

  They hadn’t found the road, but they had reached a safe distance from the lake. She had discovered a butterfly larger than her two hands clinging to a spotlight of sun on the ancient trunk of a tree, moving its damp lovely wings like laboring exposed lungs of glass or silk; and while he gathered firewood—a difficult feat, since neither of them had thought of a hatchet—she paused at the edge of a black stream to harry a sluggish thick serpent with a small switch. A huge gaudy bird came up and cursed her, and the snake ignored her with a sort of tired un illusion and plopped heavily into the thick water. Then, looking around. she saw thin fire in the somber equivocal twilight of the trees.

  They ate again: the oranges; they broiled bacon, scorched it, dropped it on the ground, retrieved it and wiped it and chewed it down; and the rest of the loaf. “Don’t you just love camping?” She sat crosslegged and wiped a strip of bacon on her skirt. “Let’s always do this, David: let’s don’t ever have a house where you’ve always got to stay in one place. We’ll just go around like this, camping . . . David?” She raised the strip of bacon and met his dumb yearning eyes. She poised her bacon.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she told him sharply. Then, more gently: “Don’t ever look at anybody like that. You’ll never get anybody to run away with you if you look at ’em like that, David.” She extended her hand. His hand came out, slowly and diffidently, but her grip was hard, actual. She shook his arm for emphasis.

  “How was I looking at you?” he asked after a while, in a voice that didn’t seem to him to be his voice at all. “How do you want me to look at you?”

  “Oh—you know how. Not like that, though. Li
ke that, you look at me just like a—a man, that’s all. Or a dog. Not like David.” She writhed her hand free and ate her strip of bacon. Then she wiped her fingers on her dress. “Gimme a cigarette.”

  The mist had gone, and the sun came already sinister and hot among the trees, upon the miasmic earth. She sat on her crossed legs, replete, smoking. Abruptly she poised the cigarette in a tense cessation of all movement. Then she moved her head quickly and stared at him in consternation. She moved again, suddenly slapping her bare leg.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  For reply she extended her flat tan palm. In the center of it was a dark speck and a tiny splash of crimson. “Good Lord, gimme my stockings,” she exclaimed. “We’ll have to move. Gee, I’d forgotten about them,” she said, drawing her stockings over her straightening legs. She sprang to her feet. “We’ll soon be out, though. David, stop looking at me that way. Look like you were having a good time, at least. Cheer up, David. A man would thing you were losing your nerve already. Buck up: I think it’s grand, running off like this. Don’t you think it’s grand?” She turned her head and saw again that diffident still gesture of his hand touching her dress. Across the hot morning there came the high screech of the Nausikaa’s whistle.

  EIGHT O’CLOCK

  “No, sir,” the nephew answered patiently. “It’s a pipe.”

  “A pipe, eh?” repeated Major Ayers, glaring at him with his hard affable little eyes. “You make pipes, eh?”

  “I’m making this one,” the nephew replied with preoccupation.

  “Came away and left your own ashore, perhaps?” Major Ayers suggested after a time.

  “Naw. I don’t smoke ’em. I’m just making a new kind.”

  “Ah, I see. For the market,” Major Ayers’s mind slowly took fire. “Money in it, eh? Americans would buy a new kind of pipe, too. You’ve made arrangements for the marketing of it, of course?”

  “No, I’m just making it. For fun,” the nephew explained in that patient tone you use with obtuse children. Major Ayers glared at his bent preoccupied head.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “Best to say nothing about it until you’ve completed all your computations regarding the cost of production. Don’t blame you at all,” Major Ayers brooded with calculation. He said, “Americans really would buy a new sort of pipe. Strange no one had thought of that,” The nephew carved minutely at his pipe. Major Ayers said secretly, “No, I don’t blame you at all. But when you’ve done, you’ll require capital: that sort of thing, you know. And then—a word to your friends at the proper time, eh?”

  The nephew looked up. “A word to my friends?” he repeated. “Say, I’m just making a pipe, I tell you. A pipe. Just to be making it. For fun.”

  “Right you are,” Major Ayers agreed suavely. “No offense, dear lad. I don’t blame you, don’t blame you at all. Experienced the same situation myself.”

  * * *

  NINE O’CLOCK

  They had found the road at last—two faint scars and a powder of unbearable dust upon a raised levee traversing the swamp. But between them and the road was a foul sluggish width of water and vegetation and biology. Huge cypress roots thrust up like weathered bones out of a green scum and a quaking neither earth nor water, and always those bearded eternal trees like gods regarding without alarm this puny desecration of a silence of air and earth and water ancient when hoary old Time himself was a pink and dreadful miracle in his mother’s arms.

  It was she who found the fallen tree, who first essayed its oozy treacherous bark and first stood in the empty road stretching monotonously in either direction between battalioned patriarchs of trees. She was panting a little, whipping a broken green branch about her body, watching him as he inched his way across the fallen trunk.

  “Come on, David,” she called impatiently. “Here’s the road: we’re all right now,” He was across the ditch and he now struggled up the rank reluctant levee bank. She leaned down and reached her hand to him. But he would not take it, so she leaned farther and clutched his shirt. “Now, which way is Mandeville?”

  “That way,” he answered immediately, pointing.

  “You said you never were over here before,” she accused.

  “No. But we were west of Mandeville when we went aground, and the lake is back yonder. So Mandeville must be that way.”

  “I don’t think so. It’s this way: see, the swamp isn’t so thick this way. Besides, I just know it’s this way.”

  He looked at her a moment. “All right,” he agreed. “I guess you are right.”

  “But don’t you know which way it is? Isn’t there any way you could tell?” She bent and whipped her legs with the broken branch.

  “Well, the lake is over yonder, and we were west of Mandeville last night—”

  “You’re just guessing,” she interrupted harshly.

  “Yes,” he answered. “I guess you are right.”

  “Well, we’ve got to go somewhere. We can’t stand here.” She twitched her shoulders, writhing her body beneath her dress. “Which way, then?”

  “Well, we w—”

  She turned abruptly in the direction she had chosen. “Come on, I’ll die here.” She strode on ahead.

  TEN O’CLOCK

  She was trying to explain it to Pete. The sun had risen sinister and hot, climbing into a drowsy haze, and up from a low vague region neither water nor sky clouds like fat little girls in starched frocks marched solemnly.

  “It’s a thing they join at that place he’s going to. Only they have to work to join it, and sometimes you don’t even get to join it then. And the ones that do join it don’t get anything except a little button or something.”

  “Pipe down and try it again,” Pete told her, leaning with his elbows and one heel hooked backward on the rail, his hat slanted across his reckless dark face, squinting his eyes against the smoke of his cigarette. “What’re you talking about?”

  “There’s something in the water,” Jenny remarked with placid astonishment, creasing her belly over the rail and staringdowward into the faintly rippled water while the land breeze molded her little green dress. “It must of fell off the boat. . . . Oh, I’m talking about that college he’s going to. You work to join things there. You work three years, she says and then maybe you—”

  “What college?”

  “I forgot. It’s the one where they have big football games in the papers every year. He’s—”

  “Yale and Harvard?”

  “Uhuh, that’s the one she said. He’s—”

  “Which one? Yale, or Harvard?”

  “Uhuh. And so he—”

  “Come on, baby. You’re talking about two colleges. Was it Yale she said, or Harvard? or Sing Sing or what?”

  “Oh,” Jenny said. “It was Yale. Yes, that’s the one she said. And he’ll have to work three years to join it. And even then maybe he won’t.”

  “Well, what about it? Suppose he does work three years: what about it?”

  “Why, if he does, he won’t get anything except a little button or something, even if he does join it, I mean.” Jenny brooded softly, creasing herself upon the rail. “He’s going to have to work for it,” she recurred again in a dull soft amazement. “He’ll have to work three years for it, and even then he may not—”

  “Don’t be dumb all your life, kid,” Pete told her.

  Wind and sun were in Jenny’s drowsing hair. The deck swept trimly forward, deserted. The others were gathered on the deck above. Occasionally they could hear voices, and a pair of masculine feet were crossed innocently upon the rail directly over Pete’s head. A half-smoked cigarette spun in a small twinkling arc astern. Jenny watched it drop lightly onto the water, where it floated amid the other rubbish that had caught her attention. Pete spun his own cigarette backward over his shoulder, but this one sank immediately, to her placid surprise.
br />   “Let the boy join his club, if he wants,” Pete added. “What kind of club is it? What do they do?”

  “I don’t know. They just join it. You work for it three years, she said. Three years. . . . Gee, by that time you’d be too old to do anything if you got to join it. . . . Three years. My Lord.”

  “Sit down and give your wooden leg a rest,” Pete said. “Don’t be a dumbbell forever.” He examined the deck a moment, then without changing his position against the rail he turned his head toward Jenny. “Give papa a kiss.”