She was gone. Maria, crying, looked at him so wantonly that he nearly choked. Then she climbed the stairs in her gray silk dress and shut the door to their room. He followed her and found her lying on their bed in the dark. “Who was it, Mummy?” he asked. “Just tell me who it was and I’ll forget about it.”
“It wasn’t anybody,” she said. “There wasn’t anybody.”
“Now, Mummy,” he said heavily. “I know better than that. I don’t want to reproach you. That isn’t why I ask, I just want to know so I can forget about it.”
“Please let me alone!” she cried. “Please let me alone for a little while.”
Waking at dawn in the guest room, Will saw the whole thing clearly. He was astonished to realize how the strength of his feeling had obstructed his vision. The villain was Henry Bulstrode. It was Henry who had been with her on the train when she returned that rainy night at two. It was Henry who had whistled when she did her dance at the Women’s Club. It was Henry’s head and shoulders he had seen on Madison Avenue when he recognized Maria ahead of him. And now he remembered poor Helen Bulstrode’s haggard face at the Townsends’ party?the face of a woman who was married to a libertine. It was her husband’s unregeneracy that she had been trying to forget. The spate of drunken French she had aimed at him must have been about Maria and Henry. Henry Bulstrode’s face, grinning with naked and lascivious mockery, appeared in the middle of the guest room. There was only one thing to do.
Will bathed, dressed, and ate his breakfast. Maria slept on. It was still early when he finished his coffee, and he decided to walk to the train. He strode down Shadrock Road with the peculiar briskness of the aging. Only a few people had gathered on the platform for the eight-nineteen when he reached the station. Trace Bearden joined him, and then Buff Worden. And then Henry Bulstrode stepped out of the waiting room, showed his white teeth in a smile, and frowned at his newspaper. Without any warning at all, Will walked over to him and knocked him down. Women screamed, and the scuffle that followed was very confusing. Herbert McGrath, who had missed the action, assumed that Henry had started it and stood over him saying, “No more of this, young man! No more of this!” Trace and Buff pinned Will’s arms to his sides and quick-stepped him down to the far end of the platform, asking, “You crazy, Will? Have you gone crazy?” Then the eight-nineteen came around the bend, the fracas was suspended by the search for seats, and when the stationmaster rushed out onto the platform to see what was happening, the train had departed and they were all gone.
The amazing thing was how well Will felt when he boarded the train. Now his fruitful life with Maria would be resumed. They would walk on Sunday afternoons again, and play word games by the open fire again, and weed the roses again, and love one another under the sounds of the rain again, and hear the singing of the crows; and he would buy her a present that afternoon as a signal of love and forgiveness. He would buy her pearls or gold or sapphires?something expensive; emeralds maybe; something no young man could afford. BRIMMER
No one is interested in a character like Brimmer because the facts are indecent and obscene; but come then out of the museums, gardens, and ruins where obscene facts are as numerous as daisies in Nantucket. In the dense population of statuary around the Mediterranean shores there are more satyrs than there are gods and heroes. Their general undesirability in organized society only seems to have whetted their aggressiveness and they are everywhere; they are in Paestum and Syracuse and in the rainy courts and porches north of Florence. They are even in the gardens of the American Embassy. I don’t mean those pretty boys with long ears?although Brimmer may have been one of those in the beginning. I mean the older satyrs with lined faces and conspicuous tails. They always carry grapes or pipes, and the heads are up and back in attitudes of glee. Aside from the long ears, the faces are never animal?these are the faces of men, sometimes comely and youthful, but advanced age does not change in any way the lively cant of the head and the look of lewd glee.
I speak of a friend, an acquaintance anyhow?a shipboard acquaintance on a rough crossing from New York to Naples. These were his attitudes in the bar where I mostly saw him. His eyes had a pale, horizontal pupil like a goat’s eye. Laughing eyes, you might have said, although they were sometimes very glassy. As for the pipes, he played, so far as I know, no musical instrument; but the grapes could be accounted for by the fact that he almost always had a glass in his hand. Many of the satyrs stand on one leg with the other crossed over in front?toe down, heel up?and that’s the way he stood at the bar, his legs crossed, his head up in that look of permanent glee, and the grapes, so to speak, in his right hand. He was lively?witty and courteous and shrewd?but had he been much less I would have been forced to drink and talk with him anyhow. Excepting Mme. Troyan, there was no one else on board I would talk with.
How dull travel really is! How, at noon, when the whistle sounds and the band plays and the confetti has been thrown, we seem to have been deceived into joining something that subsists upon the patronage of the lonely and the lost?the emotionally second-rate of all kinds. The whistle blows again. The gangways and the lines are cleared and the ship begins to move. We see the faces of our dearly beloved friends and relations rubbed out by distance, and going over to the port deck to make a profoundly emotional farewell to the New York skyline we find the buildings hidden in rain. Then the chimes sound and we go below to eat a heavy lunch. Obsolescence might explain that chilling unease we experience when we observe the elegance of the lounges and the wilderness of the sea. What will we do between now and tea? Between tea and dinner? Between dinner and the horse races? What will we do between here and landfall?
She was the oldest ship of the line and was making that April her last Atlantic crossing. Many seasoned travelers came down to say goodbye to her famous interiors and to filch an ashtray or two, but they were sentimentalists to a man, and when the go-ashore was sounded they all went ashore, leaving the rest of us, so to speak, alone. It was a cheerless, rainy midday with a swell in the channel and, beyond the channel, gale winds and high seas. Her obsolescence you could see at once was more than a matter of marble fireplaces and grand pianos. She was a tub. It was not possible to sleep on the first night out, and going up on deck in the morning I saw that one of the lifeboats had been damaged in the gale. Below me, in second class, some undiscourageable travelers were trying to play Ping-Pong in the rain. It was a bleak scene to look at and a hopeless prospect for the players and they finally gave up. A few minutes later a miscalculation of the helmsman sent a wall of water up the side of the ship and filled the stern deck with a boiling sea. Up swam the Ping-Pong table and; as I watched, it glided overboard and could be seen bobbing astern in the wake, a reminder of how mysterious the world must seem to a man lost overboard.
