CHAPTER I

On a day when Pius XI was Pope in Rome and Roosevelt II was President in Washington, when Murray I was Governor in Oklahoma City and Slywood O'Toole was Sheriff in Jack Oak County, in the Twenty-Sixth year of the State and the One Hundred and Fifty-Eighth of the Republic, on the Fourth Sunday of Autumn (which, as you have already guessed, was October 15, 1933), a girl was born to Sheriff Slywood O'Toole and his wife, Mary Theresa. This child was to be known in History as Dotty O'Toole and later as Dotty Peisson.

It may be helpful to be told something of the circumstances in which she was conceived.

On a cold, clear January night, Slywood and Mary Theresa had gone to a dance, the last (though they did not know it then) that they would ever attend; almost the last thing that they would ever do for pure pleasure in this world. And even on that last occasion the pleasure was a withered one.

They had driven to a neighboring County Seat, and to the home or, more properly, the barn of the Bohannons. The people there, the Bohannons, the Croskys, the Perrys, the Chronics, the Crispins, the Allhollows, the Bluesrems and the others, might have been variously described: as young progressives, as agrarian radicals, as country sophisticates, as petty urbanites, as short-grass savants. Actually they were a bunch of small town dudes, a little condescending even to their own pleasures, and the Barn Dance to them was something of an affectation.

At that time, and for several years before and for three times as many after, money ran out faster than it ran in. This caused in some a dull worry and a foreboding of real hardship. In others it brought a cuckooness and avidity for the Deformity of Things to Come. People with no warrant for it had become very vocal; and when the Dudes talked about Henry George they meant not the calf buyer, but the nostrum-peddler; when they spoke of Veblen they meant the straw-splitter and not the wheat farmer, indeed the wheat farmer spelled his name Weblein, and his given name was Adalbert. However, Adalbert had as sound a grasp on economics as Thorstein.

“Wheat is nineteen cents a bushel, and bread is still ten cents a loaf. A bushel of wheat will make sixty-three loaves of bread. If wheat should fall to ten cents a bushel the price of bread still would not drop more than a cent a loaf. If cotton were delivered to the gins free, a work shirt would still cost the same. If lumber were supplied to the builders for nothing, the price of a house wouldn't drop. And the discouraging thing is that nobody is to blame. All of us hate the middle man, and we are each of us the man in the middle. When the pinch is on we are all of us pinched, and there is nothing we can do till the pinch is off.”

The Dudes, however, did not agree with him. Few of them were farmers, though they were all keyed to the price of wheat. Some of them worked for the grain elevators and some for the Implement Companies. But they all talked economics. And they all talked one way except Mary Theresa O'Toole.

“I was never one to suffer fools willingly,” she said, “not even present fools. The fool wants his money, and he is constrained to take funny paper for it. That is all there is to it. When the pot is empty there is no use gazing at it from a different angle to see if it will look full.”

She was wrong in this, for in the years to come, many billions would be shaken by subterfuge from that empty pot. But she continued: “I came here to dance, but this is the most depressing crowd I ever saw. And it won't help matters to go home again, because my man is more dismal than any of you.”

She was in a bad mood and it was a bad party. The brew was green and the corn jaundiced, and for her the dance was not a success.

Then on the way home, and at home for many hours, there was a tedious argument that ended in black anger.

“You haven't been paid in more than six months,” she said to Slywood, “yet you've got more than five hundred dollars of County money. You've got to write yourself a voucher against your pay, and we'll use a little of it. I'm tired of starving on jack rabbit stew.”

“I'm an honest man,” said Slywood. “Besides, there are lots of others besides myself who haven't been paid. I will not touch a penny of the County money for myself. And I'll dole it out only where it is most needed.”

“You're not particularly honest. You're just scrupulous. That's no virtue. It's a fault of inferior people. You've forged warrants before — and this is something that is owed to you.”

“I never forged anything, though I did run some doubtful ones through. But that was in the days when there was plenty of money in the kitty and everyone was dipping in a little. Now, when the County is broke, I have a certain obligation. I'm just not going to touch any of it.”

They argued about that and about their diminishing live stock. Rustling of live stock had never completely disappeared, and there was here an insolence in the looters that made them strike the Sheriff first. He had lost thirteen head in three months. He could not keep his cattle penned up all the time; he did not have enough food for them. He had to keep them on the winter wheat. Moreover, since the last time he had been shot at (and the last one was meant to get him) he was afraid even to guard his own stock carefully. And if it be said that a man afraid of gun-shot should not be sheriff, that argument will not hold. Everyone is afraid of gun-shot.

The O'Tooles no longer drank coffee; they could not afford it. They burned wheat grains and brewed a brew that was evil stuff. They boiled whole wheat and ate it like mush. They burned wheat in the stove; it was cheaper than coal and more plentiful than wood.

“This life shrivels me,” said Mary Theresa, “and I'm only twenty-five. I should not be shriveled yet.”

She was a little on the bony side, and the wind on the high plains had given her complexion a leathery texture. But she was not shriveled. She was still pretty despite her nose which was a shade too prominent. She could not blame that on the hard times.

“I have decided that we will not have any more children till we can provide for them,” she said, “and, since I am neither a pagan nor a modern, I believe a key in the door is the only answer. I have made a bed for myself in the old parlor, and from now on I will sleep there with the door locked.”

“There isn't any key to that door,” said Slywood. “The keys to all the inside doors have been lost for years.”

“There is a key, and I have it. I turned the house upside down for it, and I found it.”

Then she went into the old parlor and locked the door and went to bed, “This isn't something that happens to us!” shouted Slywood to the closed door. “This only happens to other people!”

She did not answer.

“It isn't right,” said Slywood. “I am your husband!”

But still she did not answer.

“This isn't God's way,” he cried. “He will provide. A locked door is the end of a home.”

When there was no response he became very angry. Though it was the middle of the night, he went out and got the two sleepy children whom they had left with the Slaters, and brought them home. He then called his wife to unlock the door and tend to her children, though they went at once to their own beds.

As the silence continued, his anger grew until he could no longer contain it. He broke open the door, and went in and settled the thing like a man, or at least as he thought a man would settle it. Though she bit him so that it didn't heal for a month, yet he had had her; and it was thus and there that Dotty had been conceived.

Floyd was four and Catherine was two at the time that Dotty was born. It was to take her a few years, surprisingly few, to achieve her dominance over them. The first look she cast on them was one of withering contempt, but at that time she had not the means to implement it.

“She is the meanest looking baby I ever did see,” said Mrs. Slater.

“Why, my baby is pretty,” protested Mary Theresa.

“There has not been, since the world was made, a pretty baby, and you know that as well as I do. But she will be pretty; and mean.”

“I guess so. I will admit that I never saw such hate in the eyes of a three-day old child before. My other two didn't show any expression at all at that age. Come to think of it, they still don't. I dread the day when she has teeth, and words.”

Mary Theresa was a little afraid of her new daughter. She continued to be afraid throughout her life. She had the child baptized Dorothy Theresa, the Dorothy from Slywood's mother and the Theresa from Mary Theresa, and also because she was born on October 15th, the feast day of St. Teresa of Avila.

Dotty lived in Jack Oak County for more than three years. There was in this State, and at one time in several others, the institution of Defective or Provisional Counties, which is to say Counties without County Seats. There being no city or town in the County, there was no place for a County Seat. Occasionally a meeting of representatives of the several townships was held in the home of one of the officials, usually the sheriff; and what County business was transacted at all was transacted then. By arrangement there was a room, or at least a desk in a room, given over to this County in the County Seat of an adjoining County (which had a town), and the tax and property records were also kept in that adjoining County Seat.

The population was quite sparse, and the land was short grass pasture and wheat land. Jack Oak County was a misnomer. The County would not grow even Jack Oak except for one very small canyon which was called Jack Oak Canyon. The rest of the County was unable to grow trees of any sort. It would not grow corn; it would not grow alfalfa; it would not grow fruit or vegetable. It grew cactus and soapweed, rattle snake and bull bat, jack rabbit and prairie dogs. It grew short grass and Russian thistles and some wheat. Water was a hundred and ninety feet down, but the wind always held, and the windmills were kept up when everything else was allowed to run down. And in the end it was the wind that was the downfall of Jack Oak County.

The Black Blizzard, named by an enterprising newspaper man who took notice of the thing, occurred several years after the beginning of this story. The newspaper man was in Wichita, or Grand Junction, or Oklahoma City, or Tulsa, or in Topeka, or Kansas City. Anyhow, to the best of anyone's knowledge, it was in Kansas City that he was forced to notice it. He may have exaggerated. It is true that they turned on the Street lights at nine in the morning, and that by noon those same lights could not be seen from the bottoms of the poles. But a citizen of Jack Oak County who was in Kansas City at the time, said that it was a clear day compared to those back home, and that those folks hadn't seen nothing, nothing. Besides, the blizzard only lasted two days in Kansas City, and it lasted three years in Jack Oak County, and brought eleven thousand separate dust storms (they were counted) and removed, in places, thirty-six inches of top soil.

Sheriffs' sales were common then, and Slywood became adept as an auctioneer. Not that much money was ever involved. The O'Tooles lived badly, while others lived not at all, or gave up and went elsewhere.

Slywood had long since discarded his scruples and gone through the five hundred dollars of County money, and whatever else he could lay his hands on. Still Mary Theresa shriveled, and her nose became more prominent.

Floyd and Catherine looked dully at the world, and Dotty both loved and hated the dirty wind. By her third birthday she was still almost unacquainted with water for washing. Mary Theresa had simply decided that it was not worth while. And if there had been eleven thousand separate dust storms, then surely Dotty had been lost in the Storms eleven thousand times; for she could never be restrained, but ran out into the face of them. She would be found half-buried. But when she was brought in, she always fought to get back out. That double-damned wind was her enemy, and her best companion.

And then there was an end to the business. Everyone else was gone when Slywood decided to leave. When his last cow but one had been stolen, and that last one had died; when the wind mill had been blown over for the last time, for Slywood no longer had help to right it, when the last of the wheat in the grainery was more dust than wheat, and the tractor was buried over the wheels, Slywood O'Toole put the last of his gasoline in his car and packed up his belongings and put them and his wife and children into the car. He appropriated, with the tatters of his honesty gone, the final thirteen dollars in the County Treasury, and marked the books closed. When he closed the front door of his house, he closed the history of Jack Oak County with it.

We have no way of telling whether the County is still there. The latest Atlas does not list it. There is the dim memory of the Legislature's passing an amendment to absorb several of the Defective Counties.

But such as it was, it is gone forever. There are people there again, we are sure. We know of at least three families who later went back. But they returned to a place of another name, for Jack Oak County is gone.

CHAPTER II

There is no way of telling now, just how big the house on Elm Road was. The house is no longer there, and Elm Road has become Elm Street. It is a fact that things seen large in childhood shrink when seen later, but that cannot be true of this house.

It must have been a large house from the number of people in it. The five O'Tooles added to its already large population, but they were not enough to burst it.

The house belonged to Grandmother Kearns, who was Dotty's mother's mother. Or it may have belonged to Uncle George Kearns, her bachelor son, and Dotty's mother's brother, who was a tall, unsmiling man with a white bony face. There is reason to believe that he held his mother's mortgage on it; for he kept a strict account of every nickel he ever gave her, all of it applied against something. He wasn't stingy; he was most careful with money. What someone else said of him was, ‘Oh, the hell he isn't stingy, it cuts his soul to turn loose of a dollar.’

That was true enough, but his soul was so often cut he was getting used to it. Nor did he really have much money; he had only the reputation for having money. Nobody had much money left that year; and there were many, many people living off George Kearns in the house on Elm Road.

There was Uncle Thomas Kearns, a younger brother of George; Thomas, his wife, Aunt Janet and their children, Andrew, Robert, and Joyce. There was Uncle William Kearns, the youngest Kearns brother, and Aunt Helen his wife, and their children, Howard James, Michael John, Mary Elizabeth, Peter William, Mary Margaret, John Donlevy, and Clara Anne. Helen called all her children by their double names.

Then there was Uncle Timothy Reilly, a brother of Grandmother Kearns; and Aunt Martha Kearns, the spinster sister of George, Thomas, and William Kearns, and Mary Theresa O'Toole.

There were others in the house, but they were relations who stayed only a week or two at a time before continuing on their way to look for a job somewhere. When they left, their places would be taken by still others.

Uncle George was in a sense supporting all of them. At least the grocery bill, which was mostly unpaid, was owed in his name.

“Never mention money or hardship to children,” Aunt Jenny would say. “Children should be happy. They should not worry. It isn't something that grown-ups should let intrude on them at all.”

“But you are not a child,” Aunt Helen would answer, “and still it seems to worry you very little.”

Aunt Helen, who had moved her family in first, resented the rest of them as interlopers.

It was a big house, a high house, two stories and an attic that had been turned into a third floor of living quarters. It was an old white wooden castle built the year after the Run, gabled and porched and pointed. From the two highest turrets lightning rods stood up like tufted animal ears. Some of the porches had been enclosed for sleeping rooms, and other lean-tos had been added. There was, moreover, an inside cellar, an outside fruit cellar, and a summer house in the garden. There was a garden, there was an orchard with fruit trees — there were vegetables, flowers, and shade trees. Though an abstract of the deed indicates that the entire property covered only two-and-a-half acres, this was probably a surveyor's mistake. There were individual elm trees that would measure nearly that much in cross-cut. There were also hickory and oak and maples; two pecan trees, cherry, plum, peach, pear (no, there was only a stump of an old pear tree), apple, and crab apple. And of those growths that are between tree and bush and both at once and neither, there were persimmon and huckleberry and sumac and witch hazel; and sassafras and Orange Orange. There was a grape arbor with a seat inside and completely covered with vines; and there was moreover row after row of trellised grapes, blue Concords, white Niagaras, red — but nobody remembers any longer what kind of red grapes they had there.

There were a watermelon patch and a musk melon patch, and cucumbers. There were rows of tomato plants, pole beans and string beans, peas and sweet corn. There were lettuce and carrots and okra, green peppers and red peppers and onions. There were rhubarb and strawberries. There were Logan berries and blackberries and Boyson berries. There were also June berries and Dew berries, but these two did badly and it may be that they should not even have been attempted.

There were chickens: at least three clutches always following their mothers, and a multitude of unaffiliated older pullets waiting to be killed. There were the laying hens. There were the ducks and the duck pond which was a dozen or more feet across and deep enough for the younger children to swim. There were bee hives and there were rabbit hutches. And there was a pasture — cow lot with a cow and a calf. There was even a pig lot and, while there was not then a pig in residence, yet shortly before the O'Tooles had arrived there had been a large hog in it that had been butchered. Soon there would be a younger pig in it again, if Uncle George could find one for the right price, with the correct bone structure and ear texture. These were the means by which he could tell if a young pig would be thrifty and would be able to put on a maximum of meat with a minimum of food, or none at all.

Besides all this there was the lawn, and the extensive flower gardens and ornamentals, and the low twisted cedar trees. Now how are you going to get all of that on two and a half acres? It would puzzle a city planner; it would confound an efficiency expert or an engineer; it would stump an Archangel and cause God himself to ponder the problem.

The answer, however, has recently been found in some notes of Uncle George Kearns. For, while the property itself was only two and a half acres, the other half of the block, which being irregular was nearer to three acres than two and a half, was owned by a man who had gone back to Sedalia, Missouri and had not visited his property for fifteen years. This, also, was used by the Kearns clan, which made in all, nearly five and a half acres. In an area that large, the history of the family would make sense.

And oh, yes, there was also a wood lot which was mined by them daily with double-bit axe and cross-cut saw.

It may have been that the grocery bill, owed by Uncle George Kearns, was not really so large, for the big family had much of its provender from its own soil. Besides there were hundreds of jars of fruit and vegetables in the old fruit cellar, including more than thirty jars of watermelon pickles alone.

This was Dotty's province for a few years. Here she played and lived with brother and sister, ten cousins, as well as the children of the town and country. Yet she had already begun to have a contempt for children as have many philosophers.

“There is nobody to play with here but a bunch of blamed kids,” she told her mother. “No damned body at all.”

“But you are only a child yourself. You won't be six for four more months. You're the youngest of all the thirteen of you.”

“It's all a damned question of outlook,” said Dotty.

“Yes, I know it is, dear,” said Mary Theresa, “but don't press the point so much. It gives me an uncomfortable feeling. And don't say damn. I am used to it, but it bothers your Aunt Helen.”

Then Dotty made a crude remark about her Aunt Helen, and her mother whipped her for it. But she didn't whip her very often. Not nearly enough, according to most; for Mary Theresa loved her perverse daughter.

Dotty remained a solitary in the midst of the company. For friends she had only Clara Anne, who was an imbecile, though she was already six; a black dog that belonged to the Potters; and one of the ducks. Three friends are enough, but just barely enough. A person should make more than three in the world if possible.

“How long has Dotty been reading?” Grandmother Kearns asked Mary Theresa. “When did you teach her?”

“I don't remember teaching her at all. How long has Dotty been reading, Slywood?”

“I never did notice. How long have you been reading, Dotty?”

“Just since I came in from out doors, about ten minutes.”

“No, I don't mean just today. I mean other times.”

“Saturday I read about half an hour.”

“But how long since you first began to read?”

“When Catherine got her first primer and was too dumb to learn it and used to cry over it, then I had to help her.”

“But how could a little girl of five help a big girl of seven?” asked Grandma Kearns.

“Be very careful who you're calling a little girl,” said Dotty.

“But how could you learn?” persisted Grandmother. “How could you help Catherine until you had learned yourself?”

“Some things are just instinctive,” said Dotty.

“Maybe, but that isn't one of them,” said Grandmother.

Then Dotty gave her that withering look that was to exasperate so many, but which she could never forego.

As a matter of fact Mary Theresa, though she had forgotten it, had taught her daughter three different afternoons when they were back in Jack Oak County; and Slywood O'Toole himself, had helped her with some hard words one night. But in those days they had been worried and distraught and did many things with no memory of them.

Since they had come to Elm Road, Uncle Tim Reilly had been teaching Dotty for some months. But since nobody ever paid any attention to what Uncle Tim did, these sessions passed unnoticed.

But reading is a valuable acquisition, and those who do not learn to read, often regret the oversight later in life. Dotty was lucky to have learned it so young and so well.

We will not deny that Dotty had a childhood, though it was a foreshortened one. She had a lot of it that summer before she had to go to school. And she had much of it in and out of school, in the three years that followed — before she crossed the causeway that first time and found the town where it was ordained that she would finally live. For the four years after that she had a childhood, though she was a prisoner of sorts and had not yet been able to break away. When she was thirteen and skipped off, she was still a child and had to find a halfway house to live in. It was not till she was seventeen that she broke out of that also. Then she was no longer a child. Yet she always had something of the child in her, which she has not lost yet. But so far, it was still that first summer in the house on Elm Road.

“I was wondering,” she asked her mother, “whether I mightn't be part Gypsy?”

“I have wondered about it a little bit, too,” said Mary Theresa. “But it's impossible. You are Irish and nothing else. That is one of the things the Irish have to learn to live with: being Irish.”

“I thought maybe you might have met a Gypsy once.”

“Dotty, I am warning you!”

“Well, maybe it wasn't your fault. Maybe he hypnotised you.”

“I haven't spanked you for a week, Dotty.”

“Maybe he did it and you don't remember it. Maybe I'm half Gypsy, after all. In these days who can be sure of her paternity?”

So Mary Theresa did spank her daughter, and quite vigorously. There is a point where precocity is no longer cute. But that wasn't the end of it. To this day Dotty tells people that she is half Gypsy. In her bohemian days she learned considerable of the Romany language and lore. And the turn of mind she had already.

It wasn't that Dot looked like a Gypsy. She was fair to freckled, and her hair was the color of straw. It was sometimes the light yellow of oat straw, and other times the deep protein of rich wheat, or the paler color of poor wheat. Or it could turn the shade of rye straw or barley straw. The color of it seemed to vary with her moods, but it was always straw color.

Dotty wasn't a tomboy, though she acted like one. She could never, in any situation or costume be taken for a boy. She was all grace from the first, and strength and resiliency. She climbed so dangerously high on tree and building that she frightened people out of their wits. She didn't run like a boy, though she could outrun those her age. She didn't throw like a boy, though she threw perfectly. She threw like a girl who threw like a boy. There is a difference.

She didn't lie like a boy; they are most of them half-grown before they master the art. She lied like a girl to whom it is natural.

Her childhood was full of the sounds and smells of childhood, which will not be gone into. It is fun to get sentimental about them, but Dotty herself was never sentimental, and it would not be decent to get sentimental on her behalf. Even in later life she never showed this weakness, whatever appeared on the outside. Sometimes she was silly; sometimes she was sick; but she was never sentimental.

There is an idea, encouraged by the study of the calendars, that the summer is three months long, and the rest of the year nine months, or three times as much. This is a notion that it takes some determination to combat, but it is not true. The summer is at least as large as all the rest put together; and this is because, while it dominates its own period, all of the other seasons are also shot full of it — often weeks at a time, many times several days, and at least an hour or two in all but the few meanest days of the year. Particularly in childhood does the summer loom large.

Yet it does have its limits: two iron doors of a prison where you must enter and leave not till the last farthing is paid. There is a modern heresy that school is fun, which makes about as much sense as a grown-up smacking his lips over cabbage or beets or turnips or any of the more repulsive vegetables, to convince a child that they are good.

School is not fun. It is a vicious lie told by vicious people that it is fun. It may be necessary sometimes, for some. But it is not fun. It is an abridgement of freedom; it is a foreshortening of the soul. It is one of the evil things of an evil world. And it is to Dotty's credit that she saw through this fraud and was never fooled for an instant.

It is a prison and it smells of iron. There are mediocrities and nothing-children who are taken in by it; there are dummies and little babies who think it is fun. There are long-nosed busy people and snifflers and fatties who think it is fun. There are people who have skimmed milk instead of blood in their veins who take refuge within its walls. There are starers and stammerers and gophers and kids with little pig eyes who like it. But Dotty was none of these. She, by damned, knew better, and she recognized a jail when she saw one.

There are some schools better than others, and St. Joseph's was better than most.

The sisters were all devoted, except Sister Mary Catherine. How could she be devoted when she had no brains to be devoted with? No wonder she was teaching the first grade! If they had a lower grade they would have had her teaching that. She was as much of a baby as some of the babies. She cooed in season, and was even guilty of talking baby talk to some of the thumb-sucking dribblers. You will have to admit that that is a sickening thing to do. Yet it may not have been discreet for Dotty to express herself so plainly to the good sister on these subjects. It may not have been discreet, but Dotty had not learned discretion; in her whole life she never learned it. It followed that Dotty did not become a particular pet of Sister Mary Catherine. But for this, she would have, for the sister was much taken by her appearance.

The only one who really had any brains was Sister Mary Regina, the eighth grade teacher. Dotty struck up a close friendship with her, and spent long periods talking with her in the convent kitchen and other secluded places.

They had some amazingly deep talks, and between them they stripped down the world, layer by layer, like an onion, and revealed its workings. They talked about bull frogs and moon changes, and street lights (how the pulley lets them down without breaking the wires), and why a dog will chase a blue-eyed cat but back off from a yellow-eyed cat; about water puppies, whether they will turn into real puppies and is that the origin of the species? — and why does a scissor-tail never fly much higher than the tops of the trees — if he fell from there wouldn't it hurt him just as much as if he fell from all the way up so why is he afraid — while hawks and even blue jays fly higher just for fun; about snakes being afraid of people and people being afraid of snakes, and one of them is bound to be wrong to be afraid; and why a cow is skittish if you slip up on her left side but not her right side, but a horse is the other way around; and if a rabbit is viviparous as the encyclopedia says doesn't that make the Easter Bunny something of an anomaly; and when will there be another eclipse because Dotty wasn't born yet at the time of the other one; and why children make some women nervous, and don't they know that they make children nervous too. And if they won't let you drive a car when you're little, how will you know how when you get big? And if a goat sees ghosts, how does anyone know that he can, how does he tell people? And if a calf is color-blind how can he tell that his mother is the red cow and not one of the black cows? And on a farm why do men like to talk behind the barn when there's nothing out there? And how can a duck learn to swim but a chicken that's adopted by a duck and thinks she's a duck can't learn to swim but just stands on the edge of the pool and complains and is afraid to go it.

By such discussions Dotty acquired a foundation in all the sciences, for Sister Hillary Regina was remarkably apt at answering questions, which after all is what teachers are for.

Only on one subject they did not agree. Sister Mary Regina said that it was quite impossible for Dotty to transfer from the first to eighth grade. It wouldn't do any good to talk to Father Van Heuvel. It wouldn't do any good to talk to anyone. It couldn't be done, and that was the end of it.

“If I have to spend much more time with those babies I'm likely to go mad,” said Dotty.

“A little patience goes a long ways,” said Sister.

“Mine has already gone a long ways. One of these days something will snap inside me. Then you'll be sorry.”

“I will be very sorry if it happens, Dotty.”

“You just won't believe what goes on in the first grade. The sentences they give us would just chill you. It's the repetition that gets me. The same little words over and over again till I think I'll go wild. You can't have any idea what goes on in that first grade.”

“I have a pretty good idea,” said Sister Mary Regina.

So Dotty grew in wisdom, though something did often nearly snap inside.

CHAPTER III

Dotty had already encountered both the Mystery and the Adversary. And she had known that she would, perhaps more than most, be a battleground between them, and that it might long be a drawn battle. Nor had she any assurance at all that it would be a successful battle. Rather she had premonitions of defeat and destruction.

She was crying one night and since she cried perhaps less than any child in town, her mother came to her to see what was wrong.

“Well, it's just that I have the damnest nightmares every time I go to sleep. And I'm afraid that I won't be able to wake up from one of them, and then I'll be lost.

“I dream I'm in Hell.”

“Dotty, I have been very careful not to tell you about Hell. You are too little. I don't believe in worrying little children. You will learn it soon enough. Have they already taught you about it in school? I didn't think they taught them much about it in the first grade.”

“The first grade? Half of them don't even know the Hail Mary yet. They're all babies in the first grade.”

“Then how did you learn about it?”

“I've been there, five times tonight; and lots of other nights. I've seen the blamed place. Do you want me to tell you what it's like?”

“No, don't Dotty, please. You scare me sometimes. Little girls don't go to Hell.”

“That's all you know about it. I've seen them there, some of them not much bigger than me, one of them not as big. You have no idea how many different kinds of people are there; and they put them there for the damnest things.”

“I know they do. But good little girls don't go to Hell.”

“And when was I ever? But innocent people like you wouldn't understand things like that, mother.”

“I have not always been innocent.”

“Oh, mother, with you it couldn't be serious. But they say I'm too little to go to Confession. And it's four months till Holy Thursday when I can go. What if something happens to me before that?”

“Let me teach you the Act of Contrition.”

“Oh, I know that. I say it all the time. But the trouble is that I don't mean it when I say it. What do you do when you can't mean it? If I die tonight I'll go to Hell.”

“Dotty, you can't mean it.”

But she did. She meant it definitely. And who should know better than she?

Then she went to sleep and had another nightmare and went to Hell again.

So it was four months till the day before Holy Thursday when she was shriven and saved her soul for the first of many times. But before that happened she went through much.

She wasn't in perpetual revolt, but she rebelled often; especially at night during the lightning, for that was storm country. When her grandmother got up and lit the blessed candle and her mother came to sprinkle the children with holy water, that was when Dotty revolted.

“I dare you! I dare you!” she would say to the God of the thunder. “I'm right here. You know where I am. I dare you to hit me. You can put me in Hell in five minutes, in one minute, in a second. I will count to ten and I can be there before I finish. Just let me see if you have enough nerve to kill me. One, two, three — you flinched — I wasn't the one who flinched. You could have hit me with that one if you wanted to; four, five — you flinched again. You’ re afraid to kill me,  —  seven, eight. Oh, you did it! I didn't think you'd do it! You killed me! No you didn't. I thought for a minute you'd killed me. You thought you could scare me with a loud one. Nine, ten. There, you started to rain. You were the one who flinched. I didn't flinch.”

She also revolted in the day time.

“It is just too damned sweet,” she would say to herself. “If that's the way it is, I won't go. Nothing can be that sweet. I bet they're over-run with flies.”

She made some verses. If folks don't make verses by that age they'll never be any good at it. She wrote large with an indelible pencil, and her tongue was purple from licking it.

‘Angels all have yellow hair,

Bright and sweet, so could we be.

God and Gabriel waiting there,

Everybody there but me.

‘Gather at the Golden Gate

Blow that silly horn, you queer.

Mama, Papa, let them wait,

Call the roll. I won't say ‘here’!

‘Everybody come and join,

All be shrived of sense and sin.

Pay them all in golden coin.

All but me. I won't come in.’

“And that's the way it's going to be,” she said. “They've had their chance. If they want me to come, they will have to put on a better show. I bet there isn't a blamed one of those Angels who ever chewed tobacco in her life.”

Then she wrote another one:

‘Children gather in the sky,

Laundered in the blood of Lamb.

Clean the whole damned bunch, but I

Like me better like I am.’

For that was one of Dotty's rebel days. And if you don't know how plain much fun it is to be mean, then you don't know Dotty.

But with the Mystery Itself Dotty made an early intimate and weird acquaintance. Theologians have a phrase ‘The Indwelling of the Trinity’, but it came to Dotty in different words. Not because she would not have understood those words (she might have), but because she had never met them.

“What I am,” said Dotty, “is a mountain with a cave in the middle of it. If there is a light in the cave, it can be seen shining all through the mountain. If people look at me they ought to be able to tell whether I have it. I can tell if other people have it.

That was true. Dotty had the gift, unusual but not really rare, of being able to tell whether people were in Grace; she had the gift even when she was not herself in Grace. There would be many times when she wished she hadn't it, and she knew that it was dangerous. There would be times when she would be in a roomful of bright people, and come to realize with a sudden horror that not a one of them had it, not she herself, that there was no Grace in that room.

In February there was a moment of panic when Father Van Heuvel decreed that Dotty, who was a half year younger than her youngest classmate, was too young for the first communion class. There was almost nobody, not even her mother, who understood the urgency of this for Dotty. In the end it was Sister Mary Regina who got her in. And so in time it was done.

Not that it seemed to do any good. By Easter night she was in black revolt again. But she knew now that in her dangerous game there was always a point of return. It was devilish dangerous to play that game, for to be caught off base was destruction. But she played it for years.

The only one she knew who seemed to have battled with Principalities in the Arena itself was her old Uncle Tim Reilly.

“I tell you, Dot, the game isn't worth the candle. You're going to get burnt in the end. I used to think that I could play it loose and still win the game, but I'm afraid I was wrong. I haven't been back for forty years now. I don't know the way back anymore. What's the use of being an old rebel and clown when you know you're already lost? An old man's defiance wears very thin”

“But you still like to hell it up, don't you, Uncle Tim?”

“No. I don't believe I do. I don't know why I keep it up. Oh, it's fun to give scandal and to outrage the outrageable. But even in that I've become a little bit old hat.”

“I don't believe I understand the phrase, Uncle Tim.”

“Never mind. It is just a realization that comes now and then that even in my chosen field I am not successful. I've been a hellion from my youth. Yet now and then I get an accidental look into one of those quiet good souls. And I have been dumbfounded by the evil I have come on there unaware. It can make my own rakishness seem like a toy. It is as if I were the amateur and they the professionals. And why be damned for an attitude that may be shallow after all? I get so tired of it that I even think of repenting, if it weren't so hard.”

“Oh, it's easy enough. I do it all the time.”

“It gets harder as you grow older, Dotty.”

People began to get jobs again; and the crowd in the house on Elm Road lessened. Some of them went to the City and some of them to T. Town. In a couple of years people began to go into the army: Uncle Tom, Uncle William, Uncle George protesting violently, and Slywood O'Toole himself. The women and children who had moved out of the Elm Road house moved back in to wait out the duration. So it was the same bunch, except for the men.

The War, as such, had no more effect on them than if the men had followed an oil strike to another county or state. But it was a conversation piece, and the misdirection of it particularly was such. Dotty had little part in this. She was too honest to jump on a man when he was down, even a straw man, and was rather inclined to defend the state of things than otherwise. She did not think it a supreme crime that Uncle George had to go; it even tickled her a little that Uncle Thomas and Uncle William had to go and — though her mother made a great show about being sad about it — that Slywood O'Toole had to go. But one thing puzzled her: why they had not called up Uncle Tim Reilly.

“It may be, Uncle Tim, that Congress and the War Department have forgotten you. Perhaps it's a new generation and nobody has told them of your remarkable history. If you like, I'll write a couple of letters tonight and get it straightened out. They might give you a brigade or even an army if they are reminded.”

“I'd just as soon you didn't bother, Dotty.”

“It's no trouble at all. I love to write letters, but I never have anyone to write to because everyone I know is right here in the same house. I bet a lot of people are writing to the War Department now. I'll just tell them of the commands you held in the Indian Wars and the Spanish-American War. I'll remind them of what you did at San Juan Hill, and how heavily Pershing leaned on you. I'll tell them how you finally trapped Villa, and how you extricated the Army of the Potomac. I bet they haven't very many men of brigadier status who have been through seven wars. They can do with a little reminding.”

“I'd rather you didn't. Dotty. To tell the truth, I'm not feeling quite up to it. I've been a little run down lately.”

“Oh, you'll feel much better as soon as the blood-spilling begins. That's what you men of action need to set you up.”

That night Dotty wrote letters to her Congressman, to the head of the War Department, to the President, and to the Governor, telling all about her Uncle Tim. Nobody answered except someone inconsequential on the Governor's staff, and his screed ran in part — 

‘Tell that old fraud ‘Hello' for me. Ask him if he remembers when we used to wrangle mules when the Glen Pool play was on, and how we rough-necked the first well in the Osage.’

No mention of the War Record of Uncle Tim. No hint that he would be called to the colors.

But there was still another instance of the incompetence of the War Department.

“Whoever is the best fighter should have the best job in a fight,” said Dotty. “But Shantytown Shadrack's sister says that Shantytown is still a yard bird, and Mr. Grudaire is a Major. And Shantytown used to call Mr. Grudaire a yellow-belly and make him walk around him. Now will someone please explain that to me?”

“Mr. Grudaire is a lawyer, so naturally he would be competent to handle men,” explained Mary Theresa.

“Then why couldn't he handle Shantytown Shadrack? As for handling men, Shantytown handled a whole roomful of men with a knife three inches long.”

“Who told you that?”

“Uncle Tim told me that.”

“But surely you wouldn't want a man with as little integrity as Mr. Shadrack to be a Major?”

“If I were running this thing — and it's kind of too bad I'm not — I'd give the best fighters the best jobs and go a little bit easy on this Integrity business. If Mr. Grudaire couldn't handle Shantytown, how can he handle whatever a Major is supposed to handle?”

“He did get Mr. Shadrack put under a peace bond one time.”

“He may come on some people he can't do that with.”

Uncle George had risen, by his undoubted ability, to be a Corporal and Mail Clerk. But even with this he was not satisfied. Slywood O'Toole, however, had risen even higher. On the basis of his experience as Sheriff of Jack Oak County, he had now become a Sergeant in the M. P.s. In his own phrase he had the whole army by the tail.

He was stationed in a port city of Texas, and this circumstance opened a new adventure for Dotty. Her encounter with an odd, dirty, enchanting city on the sea made her recognize immediately that, for better or worse, it would have to be her home.

When she first smelled the sea, she knew there was no sense in ever living beyond the smell of it, even if she had to go ragged to remain there.

Dotty, who made up her mind on impulse and then rationalized, was never able to rationalize this.

CHAPTER IV

Slywood O'Toole was in Texas, which is not, strictly speaking, over-seas. Still, it is a little bit foreign. To visit him took eighteen hours by bus. The bus was crowded and everyone was cranky except Dotty, who loved to travel.

They had to change in Oklahoma City, and in Dallas, and in Waco. From Oklahoma City to Dallas there was a double-header running, and Dotty rode on the second bus, separated from her family. Mary Theresa was frantic when she discovered Dotty was not with them on the bus.

“Stop the bus! Stop it, I say! My little girl is left behind!”

“Your little girl is on the second bus. They are both going the same place and will arrive at the same time.”

“How could she have gotten on the second bus?”

“Believe me, lady, it took some doing. She had to escape from both us drivers. I had her once, but it would have been easier to load a wild cat. I'm glad Perkins has her. I hate uproar on a night run.”

“But who will take care of her?”

“Lady, you are her mother and you ask that? I don't think she needs anyone to take care of her.”

“Maybe Dotty will be lost and we never see her again,” said Big Sister Catherine.

“Maybe she's on the bus going the other way,” said Big Brother Floyd.

“Dare I hope so? asked Mary Theresa. “Oh, what am I saying? I can't be that tired and cranky. She's my baby. If anything happens to her I shall hold you directly responsible, driver.”

“I am sure that a number of things will happen to her,” said the driver, “but she will live through them all, and I will not be responsible.”

You would think that with forty-eight passengers sitting in the bus, besides the driver, and those standing in the aisles, there would be a few at least half-way compatible. But at first it seemed they weren't.

“Dammit, go away,” said one man. “I want to sleep.”

“Dammit, too much sleep isn't good for you,” answered Dotty. “A trip is an event. Stay awake and enjoy it.”

“If you were my daughter,” said one lady — no, a woman, she wasn't a lady — “there would be a painful awakening for someone.”

“That is a two-way street,” said Dot. “What odds would you lay who that someone would be?”

Probably the most gruesome character on the bus was a man who had a fiddle in a case and wouldn't even take it out to give them a tune. Nor would he let Dotty do so.

“There is probably a reason you won't let me open it,” said Dotty. “I thought you were peculiar when I first laid eyes on you. This will bear a little looking into.” So she went to Mr. Perkins the driver and reported her suspicions — more than that, her near-certainty — that one of his passengers was carrying a machine gun in a violin case.

“If he really had a fiddle in there he wouldn't be so fussy about letting me take it out,” Dotty explained. “Don't you think there is something a little peculiar about him?”

“All musicians are peculiar, Dotty. I don't think he has a machine gun in it.”

“But can we afford to take chances? After all, we're responsible for the lives of all the people on this bus. Do you think I should write a note and throw it out for the station master at the next flag stop?”

“Hell, I don't care what you do. Dotty. Write a hundred notes if it will keep you quiet.”

So she wrote the note and threw it out at the next stop. If the station master found it, he seemed not to have acted on it, for they were not stopped along the line.

After this, Dotty, snubbed, rebuffed, disregarded, insulted, cut to the quick, and just plain frozen by the sleepy riders, went back and sat with the negroes, who were friendlier and more courteous. She had interesting conversations that lasted well into the night.

In the Dallas Bus Station the cafeteria stayed open all night and they had breakfast at one in the morning. Dotty had coffee for the first time in her life. Mary Theresa was either too tired to object or else she did not notice it. But when they got the Waco bus, Dotty had to ride with the rest of them. They were no bother since they were all tired and went quickly to sleep. Floyd and Catherine who were bad travellers were both fretful. But there were some drunken soldiers on the bus and Dotty had quite a bit of fun with them. And she enjoyed the dawn, for she already knew a secret that many people never learn: that the dawn isn't miraculous when you get up to see it. It is the crown of a perfect night and it is only a miracle when you stay up to see it.

It is the days that are for sleeping, and how people ever got them mixed up we never will know. So Dot slept soundly from Waco to Houston, where they arrived at noon.

Then, on the last sector of the trip she became alarmingly wide-awake, and for a reason. On the flyways the migrating birds always know the reason at precisely this distance, and give voice. And if you have anything in you you know it too, even if you are not aware, the first time, what it is. For forty miles the sense of the Sea permeates the land and the air; the paint will not stay on the houses, the ground under the short grass looks white, and birds that have no business there, fly over the land. And the breeze is from the sea, always from the sea.

The crossing of the causeway to the Island is the crisis and the dividing line. It is one of the final things and, for the full glory of it, it is imperative that it be experienced before the end of the ninth year — Dotty was by only a couple of months under the line. After such age it is not possible to enter a new world at all. Floyd and Catherine were too old. They were stodgy and set in their ways. They didn't deserve such an adventure. Mary Theresa was too old to know what was happening. This is one of the iron-bound laws. If Sea and Island are not discovered by the end of the ninth year, it is too late, and you have missed one of life's spices.

Slywood O'Toole had grown a little hair-line moustache, and he was natty in suntans and white leggings and M. P. brassard and bepainted helmet liner. But the sea was booming over the hill and below the sea wall.

“Aren't you glad to see your father, Dotty?”

“What father? Oh, hello, papa. Why are we standing here? Why don't we go down to the beach?”

“How do you know that the beach is in that direction, Dotty?”

“What a question when I can hear it and smell it and sense it. Besides the buses marked ‘Beach’ go that way.”

“That last is a clincher,” said Slywood. Slywood had changed. Or rather he now showed a side of his character which he had always had, but had seldom revealed to his family. He was on duty as he talked to them on the edge of the fort area, and he was abusive to all the young soldiers who came within his ken.

“We M. P.s have to keep after the boys,” he explained. “Have to keep them looking sharp and out of trouble. Most of them are made out of pretty inferior material, and their own sergeants don't do as good a job on them as they might.”

This, Dotty realized, was an excuse, not a reason. So Dotty came to know, as she had suspected for a long time, that her father was a mean man. Now and again he gave voice to the withering hatred behind the voluble sarcasm as he stripped the hide from a suddenly sullen recruit.

Most of them were not from the Fort at all. They were in town on passes from the training camps about. They were there for the drinking and the girls and the beach, and they didn't like to be tongue-lashed by a patsy with a little moustache, whose only edge was a brassard on his arm.

Mary Theresa and Catherine and Floyd suspected nothing. They accepted Slywood's word that it was all necessary. But Dotty, wiser than the rest of them, knew that her father was being contemptible and that he enjoyed doing contemptible work. But it didn't spoil her day; there was too much to see and enjoy in the island town for that day to be spoiled.

Of course there were gruesome preliminaries. They had to get a room first. It turned out to be a very dirty room in a paint-peeled house. They had to have a bath, and then they had to eat. But before the afternoon was entirely wasted they got to the beach, and there Dotty went wild. She could swim, of course. She had swum in the duck pond. But Floyd and Catherine, who could swim too, did not instinctively master the breakers as Dotty did, though they were both bigger. Mary Theresa, who had swum a lot as a youngster, went out quite some distance so she could watch her three children in the open sea. But it was only Dotty who seemed to need watching. The only reason she did not drown was that (as it now appeared for the first time) she was a Sea Urchin and not a little girl at all.

Though Floyd and Catherine took it calmly and did not really fall in love with the beach it was that they were sticks. You can be nice about it if you want to be, but the recording angel on that last day will have to write it down of them: ‘They were Sticks.’ It was Mary Theresa who felt some of the excitement of Dotty in this new setting. She had been in the dry dust country too long, and had shriveled a little, she had those years in the house on Elm Road unshrivelled her entirely. But she would have enjoyed herself more had she not felt, ever and again, the careful eyes of Slywood O'Toole watching them from the top of the sea wall, and heard his voice raised in abuse of the sometimes careless, sometimes happy, sometimes drunken soldiers. In a way, she resented his watching them, even if he was her loving husband, whom she had not seen in sixteen weeks.

For one thing, Colonel Keen had introduced himself to Mary Theresa, and the introduction had been confirmed by the sharp-eyed Slywood coming down from the sea wall. There was a peculiar undercurrent to this. Dotty did not understand it; but she had an uncanny suspicion, and about all it needed was a name to make it come clear.

Mary Theresa did not dare to understand it. If she had not known better, if she were not certain that such a thing was impossible to Slywood, she would almost have believed that in his eagerness to win favor from Keen, his superior, he was offering him his wife, a little too obviously. This, of course, would be impossible in a husband like Slywood; it is just that there was an odd yet familiar atmosphere about the place, and these thoughts would crop up.

But Colonel Keen was very generous. It is believed that he gave Floyd a dollar to spend as he would. It is almost certain that he gave Catherine that amount too. Dotty he recognized as much the sharper-eyed of the three. There is indirect evidence that he gave her a sum a much as five times what he gave the others. She could hardly have done what she did the rest of the evening and night on less.

Sergeant O'Toole had to return to the Fort. Mary Theresa, after Colonel Keen had fed them, took her three children back to the tourist home and left them with instructions to remain. Then she went out again.

But Dotty did not stay there, for it was hardly dark, and Mary Theresa must have been crazy to suppose that she would. She had surveyed and found an easy window for exit and — which is more important — for reentry. And she went out on the town with something over four dollars and sixty cents in her bag.

Up on the pavilion you could get little souvenir shells for as little as fifteen cents, and big balloons for a dime. Every time you made the lady turn away and reach to get you a gimcrack, you could steal one worth twice as much, for Dotty was in a roguish mood, and stealing isn't really stealing when you're having a ball. There was a penny arcade with games and devices and dirty thirty-second flicker movies. There were fish ponds and contests of skill. Below the railing at the edge of the balcony, the surf boomed and swished and was caught by the lights from everywhere, making a joke of the darkness.

There was a door into the Blue Room where there was dancing going on, and the soldiers and their girls were drinking and having fun. They put Dotty out of there several times. They said she had to have an escort. She got one, but they said they didn't mean one no bigger than herself, so she turned him loose again. They said she was too young to be there; you had to be grown up first before you could come in. But she would have enjoyed it as much as any of them, and there is something wrong with a system where one is either too young or too old to have fun.

There was a soldier named Carson, and they called him Kit, though his name, he told Dotty, was Helmrich. There was another one named Richard Railley. He would say the damnest things and people would look at him and say ‘Really?’, and he'd say ‘No, Railley.’ This caused hilarity for himself and his friends, but for no-one else. And the third of the loose-screw soldiers was named ninety-proof Nolan. Dotty believed, from what she was able to fathom from their conversation, that he was a whisky-taster by profession, and so had earned his name.

With these three was a girl, Naomi. The four of them had just been put out of the Blue Room for being rowdy and making too much noise. Since Dotty had also been ejected, but for being too little, not for being rowdy-a lot of time they gave her to be rowdy in there when she wasn't in there thirty seconds before they put her out again, there was a bond of friendship between them. She went with them to the darkest corner of the pavilion, and drank wine with them till it was all consumed.

After that they went to Naomi's room and sat around on the sofa and floor, and talked some of the damnest talk that you ever heard. Dotty was the only one with any money left, so she gave three dollars to Helmrich (Kit) Carson who went to get a bottle of snake-bite serum, which Dotty knew was a euphemism for pop-skull whisky. For Dotty was not slow at understanding phrases, just because she came from Oklahoma.

Dotty stayed there till it was plain straight-up midnight, and got higher than a balloon, and never laughed so much in her life. Then she kissed the three soldiers goodnight, and Naomi too, and took her leave, for things were slowing down. Helmrich was slowing down, and Railley and Naomi were more interested in smooching than in telling jokes; and the right time to leave a party is just before it loses its glow.

“Are you sure you are only nine, Dotty?” Nolan had asked her.

“Yes, nine.” But she lied. She wouldn't be nine till next October 15th.

“I'd give a million dollars if I had it — and I'd get it somewhere if it'd do the trick — if you were just about twice that old.”

“Don't you like me the way I am?”

“You'll never know, Dotty, you'll never know how much. And that isn't whisky talking either. It's the rum and the wine.”

So she left them there, the finest friends she had made all day, and among the finest of her whole life.

Back at the tourist home she moved rapidly, taking care not to be seen. She heard two voices and had to investigate. She saw Colonel Keen kiss her mother right on the front steps. “Oh, for pity sakes,” murmured Dotty, and went for her window and was in bed with not three seconds to spare when her mother came in to check on her.

“Are you asleep, Dotty?”

“I was at last. I had just dropped off after twisting and turning all night. And now you've woke me up and I doubt that I shall be able to close another eye before dawn.”

“I'm so sorry, Dotty. I shouldn't have wakened you. I know you've had a big day. But, Dotty, I wanted to ask you one little thing. I think more of your opinion than that of anyone else in the world. If your mother did something just a little bad — no, not bad either — something a little bit indiscreet, just from being carried away and having a bit of fun, would you think badly of her?”

“I would tell my mother — since we've drifted into this silly third person form — to settle the matter with her own conscience, since I am not her confessor; and to let me get a little sleep.”

“Don't be difficult, Dot. I really do value your opinion. Yet it was such a little thing to do, but it might just be misunderstood. I am almost tempted to tell you what I did just to see how you take it.”

“You mean letting Colonel Keen kiss you? I haven't decided yet how to take it.”

“Dotty, how did you know?”

“Oh, I saw you. Not much I don't see.”

“Just dropped off after twisting and turning all night! You are a little fraud, Dotty. Did you go out when I told you not to? What did you do?”

“At least I didn't let a Colonel kiss me.”

Not a Colonel. A Corporal and two Privates.

“You rather have me there, haven't you dear? But really there wasn't anything wrong. I couldn't stand it if you misunderstood me. You're my favorite child. A mother shouldn't have favorites, but you know that you will always be that with me.”

“Well, my advice to you, mother, is to consider your position very carefully and get yourself firmly in hand before — ”

“Oh, go to sleep.”

And that's what she did.

CHAPTER V

Dotty awoke with a hangover, the first she ever had in her life. Ninety-Proof Nolan had said that hangovers were caused by mixing your drinks, that whatever you start with you should stay with till the end. Then the worst you can have is a simple hangover, not a complex screaming hangover.

Naomi had said that this was a fallacy, that the size of a hangover is largely determined by the alcoholic content of what you consume in whatever form. Dotty recognized that in this, Naomi was right, for she had a talent for seeing behind such sophistries and mythologies and getting to the truth.

Besides, it wasn't such a bad hangover as all that. It was a simple and not a complex hangover. She felt better than Floyd and Catherine, who had each drunk a dollar's worth of soda pop.

Mary Theresa went out to get some sort of soft invalids' breakfasts for these two weak ones and brought it to them and told them to stay in the house for the morning. Then she and Dotty went out and had a couple of he-women breakfasts, for Dotty would never confess that she felt badly. Then they got into their bathing suits and brought their bags and blankets, and went to the beach to spend the morning.

Dotty, after she had swum, began to write, lest something of what had been going be lost. She had a five-year diary from the Christmas before, and every day she wrote something in it. Many of the entries were short and cryptic. A frequent one is ‘T.D.M.T.S.A.A.T.H.G.B.’ and Dotty was the only person in the whole world who knew that it meant ‘This day much the same as all that have gone before.’

But now she wrote at great length about the beach:

There are almost as many people down in the sand as there are grains of sand. I don't like the word creatures so I call everyone people. They're just as much people as I am. Some of the people are smaller than a finger nail, like spiders with shells, and they scoot sideways into holes and pull the holes in after them. I used to think it was a joke about pulling a hole in after you, but they really do it. They close it after them. And there are people a quarter of an inch long who crawl just under the wet and like moles and make it ripple.

Some of the people are worms and some are fishes, but the most ungainly fish you ever saw. I bet a lot of them are crabs. I don't know what a crab is unless it's a fish with a shell. Some of them are sea-going fleas, and some of them are salt-water bugs or knobby snails. Sometimes it is hard to tell if anyone is living in a shell or not. I know the names of a lot of things. I know a Sand Dollar and a Calico Crab. And I know one kind of snail that a man said was a Sand Snail, but another man said ‘No, it isn't, it's a Moss Snail.’ I have been stung by a jelly fish, but they say if you really want to get stung, get stung by a Portugese Man-Of-War. They give you holy hell. I started to collect some shells but a boy said ‘Throw those away, they're a dime a dozen, they're cockle shells', but another boy said, ‘They're not either, they're Ark shells.’ Tommy is the cockle one. I let him kiss me under the pier. David, the Ark one, wants to too, but I said ‘Buddy, let's see a little of that jingle stuff first, a girl likes to be entertained.’ So he's going to take me for a ride on the Ride-Em-And-Dodge-Em this afternoon, and after that I'll let him.

But I digress. Let me tell a little bit about sand. The beach sand isn't like river sand. I don't even know why they call them both sand. River sand is big-grained yellow sand. This is little-grained white to brown stuff, it's so fine that it's almost powder when it's dry. It wouldn't be any good to make cement with. Now let me tell you about the birds. There are two kinds. There are the sand-runners that are little and long-legged and look like road-runners at home. And there are the gulls who are a bunch of long-winged clowns. People throw bread out of the restaurants on the pier, but it never reaches the water till they have it. And there is this about the gulls: they are the only birds who can sleep while they're flying. They go high up and set their wings and sleep while they coast down. You can watch them snap out of it when they get down low. They give a little jerk and a yelp and come awake and get with it again.

The sea smells different from a river or from a lake. There is a Negro dishwasher at the Sea Palace who told me that he had washed dishes in inland towns, but he always gets lonesome for the sea smell and has to come back. And when he comes back and smells it again he always cries. I bet nobody would get lonesome for the smell of the Arkansas River and cry when they came back to it. The dishwasher is in Grace. I can tell when people are. A lot of the people here aren't.

The green slime that forms on the driftwood and the pier pilings is all people too, the smallest that are. I used to think that they were plants, but they are people. You can scratch off a little under your fingernail and look at it; it's a whole city full of living people.

I know now what the sea is, and I'm the only one who knows. I thought about it this morning, and when I thought of it some more I knew that I was right. It is all one big animal, a sort of jellyfish. It goes all the way around the world, and its skin is the surface. When it shivers its hide like a horse does, that makes the waves and the tides. When the gulls fly down and catch fish they are just picking things out of its skin. And all the fish and whales in it are just things that it has swallowed and are swimming around in its intestines. It sprawls all over everyplace and the word for that is amorphous. It isn't a particularized animal, it's a generalized animal. Its brains and its stomach are all through it. The reason that nobody else ever caught on to what it is, is that nobody else can take the Large View quite the way that I can. It gives you an odd feeling to be the only one in the world to know any number of things.

Naomi told me last night that she didn't want to meet my mother. She was afraid she would guess what line of business she was in. When I see her again I will say ‘Give up this business, Naomi, you can have fun without that. It'll be the ruination of you yet.’ You see, I didn't catch onto the line of business she was in myself till I thought about it a little bit today. She is my best friend and the kindest person in the world. But I'm afraid there is a little flaw in her character.

There is a crab they call the Ghost Crab, and a crab they call the Mole Crab and the Stone Crab. David has a surf float and wants me to go riding with him.’

She did go riding with him on the surf float, and they did other things that day, and made all the arcades and rides and galleries. Later she left him for another, and left that one too, for she was always on the lookout for new things.

Everywhere she went she made friends. At one place where they had twelve numbers on a board and you put a dollar on whatever one you wanted to bet on, and a wheel spun, it didn't look as if Dotty would make a friend, for to her amazement the girl who was running the thing counted back to the winner not eleven dollars or even ten, but only eight dollars.

“Here, here, young lady,” said Dotty, “you have short-changed this gentleman. You have given him only eight dollars. You should give him ten, at least.”

“Listen, you midget,” said the girl (her name is Selma, there is no use holding back on these things), “this is an eight pay game.”

“There are twelve numbers,” said Dotty, “and, as the winner keeps his original bet, he should have at least ten more, which leaves one for the house, or eight and one third percent, certainly a generous take. Now you just give him two dollars more or I will blow the whistle on you, as the phrase goes.”

“And you just get out of here, kid, or I'll turn you over my checkered apron, as the phrase goes.”

“But don't you realize that your advantage is three in twelve, or twenty-five percent? That's exorbitant.”

“There's a word for what you are too, and you'd better get out of here before I think of it. All right men, place your bets before the wheel stops spinning.”

“I would advise you gentlemen to play no more,” said Dotty. “The whole place smells to high heaven. I am sure that you could get better odds elsewhere in town.”

There was a paddle. It was really a ping pong paddle, but it had numbers painted on it and was used in some other kind of gambling game. Selma turned Dotty upside down and belabored her with it in what may have been the most severe public paddling ever seen up and down Beach Boulevard.

Dotty was defeated and it hurt her. She said that she would have the law on Selma, that she would have her arrested for barratry. And with that warning she left.

Yet it was no joke about Dotty making friends wherever she went, and this was not an exception. Before Dotty left town she was Selma's friend. In later years they became quite close friends. Often, in times to come, they would refer to that first meeting.

Mary Theresa tried to keep track of Dot a little, but only a little.

“I know you won't get lost. Floyd would be too shy to ask for directions if he were lost, and Catherine would be too dumb to follow them. But neither of those shortcomings apply to you. I don't believe it would be possible to lose you if I put you in a gunny sack and weighted it and threw it into the deepest part of the Gulf.”

“No. I'd get out easy enough. I'd do like Houdini did. One of his secrets was that he would have a razor blade and a small screwdriver and a short length of wire concealed in the natural aperture of his body. Then he — ”

“Dotty!”

“Dotty what? You can get out of almost anything if you have the proper tools.”

So Mary Theresa didn't worry too much when Dotty escaped her. This night, their second in town, darkness caught Dot in an odd sort of joint, and the proprietor said that it was time for children to leave, that they weren't allowed there after the evening program began.

“And that goes for you too, towhead,” he said. “I'm not just talking for my health.”

“I hardly consider myself a child,” Dot told him. “I'll be in the fifth grade in September.” It was true. She had skipped a grade.

“Let it not be supposed that I am opposed to education,” said the man. “In fact I may give you a real education myself if you're not gone by the time I count to fifty. And not being educated, I count by tens.”

“My,” said Dotty, “aren't we rough.”

And the fact of the matter is that that man was rough. If you think that Selma had given her a going over, you should have seen the way that that man manhandled her.

To be spanked twice in one day is a bruising experience for even the strongest characters, and Dotty swore that she would shake the dust of that town from her feet and never return. But she knew that she lied when she said it, for she had fallen in love with the place and its ways.

Dotty went to search for Naomi to lecture her on her way of life, and to see if she could get some more wine to drink and soldiers to flirt with. She did not find Naomi. But she did flirt with the soldiers, and one of them took her bicycle riding.

It was the next day, or the one after that, that Colonel Keen and Dotty had a cryptic talk. These two had been adversaries from the first, and as with adversaries they said things that meant more than they seemed, and understood things that could never be said.

“I have had you watched, Dotty,” began the Colonel. “And your behavior has been reprehensible. I talk to you plainly because you are intelligent and will understand, as many of your age would not. You could be sent to a detention home for some of the things you have done since you came here, and it is only out of consideration of your mother that it has not been done. Now then, I am putting you under a strict seven o'clock curfew. You will be in your room by that hour, not on the street. Moreover, even in the daytime, you will not talk to strangers, at least to none older than yourself.

“You have been observed stealing a total of between seven and ten dollars of value. You may have taken much more unobserved. You have stolen mixed nuts, candy bars, magazines, souvenir shells, balloons, grape pop, peanuts, Fritos, a pint bottle of yellow wine, a set of salt and pepper shakers, an oyster fork, three pennants; and you have taken rides on the various concessions without tickets.”

“It is a lie,” said Dotty. “It is a black lie.”

“All of it, Dotty?”

“No. Not all of it. But the part about the Fritos is a lie. I do not like Fritos. I have never stolen Fritos in my life. It is possible that I took Cheez-Its. The packages are very similar.”

“That is possible, Dotty. I am not acquainted with either. But there is much worse than this. You have made friends, though I am sure you do not understand these things, with a notorious woman.”

“You can throw away that crutch. I understand these things well enough for the point at hand.”

“So much the worse. Now the question is, what are we going to do about it?”

“As a suggestion, you take care of yourself and your troops, and I will take care of myself. I am not under your command.”

“You are very wrong there, Miss Dotty. Your father is under my command, and I will have a voice in the affairs of my men.”

“Well, you will not have a voice in my affairs, now, or in the future.”

“You may be quite mistaken. I have a few ideas about the future. I am accustomed to controlling the future. There may be something in that line which you will not understand for years.”

“I think I know your line in this, and I understand it a little too well. You and I are going to tangle on the road. Colonel, and you are the one who is going to get hurt.”

“I believe a spanking would improve your disposition, little girl.”

“I have had two right recently, and they had a very opposite effect on my disposition.”

“I had a report on both of them. They amused me.”

“I am marking that against you,” said Dot. “I remember such things.”

The Colonel had unction instead of blood. The Colonel was a dangerous man. And after this Dotty went to her mother and advised her to have nothing whatever to do with the sinister colonel. Somehow the admonition startled Mary Theresa almost out of her wits.

“But, Dotty, he may be right. You have been acting scandalously for a little girl.”

“Of course I have, mama; I'd be the last to deny it. I only do it for fun. But there is something wrong with that man. And I want to know what he has over papa.”

“He is his superior officer for one thing. Your father, as much as he is able to be, is a climber. Besides that, being a large and muscular man, he worships those who are more than himself.”

Now Colonel Keen was that. He was quite a handsome man, and he was built like a heavy-weight wrestler. Most of the men would have deferred to him if he had not been a colonel. They would have deferred to him if he had been a yard bird. But Dotty would not defer.

In a way, his presence and his shadow, poisoned the rest of the stay on the Island. Dotty, however, was able to discover who his secret agents were, both of them, and to subvert them. She did this by plain charm. She made them her own. Both were quite young M. P.s. Both hated the Colonel and also — and this was a surprise to Dotty, though not a mortal one — the father, Slywood O'Toole. She knew that he was a little bit mean. She hadn't realized that he was as mean as all that. But there is no question that she had the two of them with her brand on them. Her derelictions would no longer be reported to Colonel Keen.

In the latter part of her stay on the Island, Dotty spent much time with Nicki and Mary Parisi. She was brought to them by Johnny Gozzi, one of the young soldiers set to spy on her. It made his work much easier to know where she was. The Parisis ran an Italian grocery store, but it was other things as well. It was an open-faced fruit market, and it had ice and beer for picnickers. It had also a sandwich bar and an ice cream bar. You could fill a basket at the Parisis that would last a family all day. The Parisis rented out fishing gear and beach equipment. There was a shady arbor where one could sit and drink wine or beer, and not have to bother going out in the sun for a picnic. The small room at the end was open day and night and you could sit at the round table around the clock and have coffee and whatever else they would bother to get you.

This was Johnny Gozzi's hangout, and to a lesser extent Ramford Riorden's, the other young soldier. This became a home for Dotty. Sitting at the round table she played dominoes and cribbage, and pinochle and pitch, and high five and hearts. Here she learned to talk Italian and to know one cheese from another and one wine from another. And here she learned that equivalents are not the same thing. For pane is not bread, we will just be damned if it is bread, it is much more. And salsiccia is not sausage; it is an entirely different kind of meat that begins where sausage ends. Nor is formaggio rat cheese, but a whole universe of cheeses that unfortunate people may go their whole lives without knowing.

Nicki said that he would guess that he had about sixty different kinds of cheeses. His guess must have been a conservative one; it would seem that he had nearer a thousand. The Parisis ground their own coffee and they made their own bread (pane, not bread). They seasoned their own sausage, “And I'm damned if I don't think they lay their own eggs,” Ramford Riorden had said. Some of these were too big for a chicken to have laid. They'd have killed a chicken.

They got stuff from Italy and from Mexico. They even got stuff from Syria. They made their groceries out of the stuff. Dotty spent most of three days at the Parisi establishment and as much of three nights as she could arrange. There are those who will say that a little girl could not learn all that she learned in three days, but these are people who have never known the fever of discovery and the thrill of mastering a whole new world.

“If you are ever in trouble — ,” Mary Parisi had said to her.

“And don't think that I won't be,” said Dotty.

“You can always come here,” said Mary. And probably they both knew that it would happen. There can be a million pledges and promises, but there can never be one more definite than that.

It was late at night — the last night they were in town — that Dotty overheard a quarrel between her parents.

“Well, I don't know what you want me to do,” said Mary Theresa. “I've been as nice to him as the law allows. I've walked a tightrope till they should have me in a circus. But I have to draw a line somewhere. I can't have him climbing all over me. What do you expect of your wife?”

“I expect her to realize that the Colonel is my key to advancement, and to be agreeable to him.”

“Agreeable is a very disagreeable word as you use it. He may be a colonel, but there is another word for what he is. And there is a word for what you are about to be.”

“You go back to him now and apologize, Theresa. People don't get by with slapping colonels and clawing them up like that. It can cost me a promotion.”

“You don't trade me for a promotion! You will set the same service!”

There was the sound of stumbling and then a heavy sound, and Dotty knew that her mother had clawed Slywood (she had a talent for it), and that the blood was running down his face. Then there were other sounds, and Dotty knew that Slywood was beating Mary Theresa heavily.

Incidents like that made Dotty sad of heart.

So soon the trip was over. Sunday morning the O'Tooles went early to Mass. On the Island City, the Church is easy to find. It is on the main corner of town, and the street it is on is Church Street. And when you find a Church named for Mary you can be sure you are in the right place.

Afterwards, with only a quick breakfast, they were put on their bus by the cryptic Colonel Keen and the stony-faced Slywood O'Toole, both bearing marks of recent battle.

So Dotty left the Island for a time, and began the long ride home.

CHAPTER VI

The rift had begun, and it would never stop. Mary Theresa used to pass the letters from Slywood around for all to read. Now she read parts, but only parts from them aloud. And she kept them under lock.

But for the fact that Dotty had a way with locks, Mary Theresa would have been alone with her troubles, as she believed herself to be. But Dotty kept in quite close touch with the situation, and she knew that there was a rift and that it would never be closed completely.

Slywood O'Toole, it was now clear, was an ink-stained sadist. He liked to torture his wife with his letters, in which he hinted, and often detailed his derelictions.

He did this in the most insulting way.

He had not always been mean, not excessively mean; but now he was so completely. He speculated that he might never come back, at least not permanently; he demanded that Mary Theresa endorse his allotment checks back to him, for girls cost money, even for a handsome M. P. sergeant. He called her a drudge and a dupe and challenged her to do anything about it. He spoke slightingly of their three children, and said that he doubted it they were really his. This was the cruelest of all; he knew they were his. He taunted Mary Theresa, and even suggested that she go out and get a man if she were woman enough to do it. And he called her a sniveler.

This last remark was a true one; she had become a sniveler. Though she suffered wordlessly, she did not suffer in silence; she became quite a one for sighing and muttering.

Still she might not have suffered as much as Dotty did. Though herself often bad, Dotty had come to expect goodness in certain established persons; her parents; her kindred (except for a few); the Religious, etc. And, having been given special views of Hell in her early dreams, it shocked her that her father would elect to join the place. She was hot with shame and anger, and exasperated that her mother did not take steps to bring the phoney to heel instead of sniffling and sighing.

But after her first anger was gone she considered it from all angles. Then, being a sensible and practical person, she did the only sensible and practical thing that could be done.

On the manner of making a cilicium there is an astonishing lack of information in current references. They tell a little what it is, they touch lightly on the history of it, but they plain do not tell you how to make one. The older texts, assuming it so common as to need no explanation, simply allude to it, but they detail it not at all.

There is a certain doubt as to whom one should ask about it, who would really know about it, who would understand why the question was asked, and how it could be asked at all without defeating the purpose. For the virtue and penance of wearing it is that the wearing of it should be secret. But Dotty was always a wide reader, and she knew how to find information even in the circumscribed local libraries. Well then, it is made of goats' hair, or, in some cases, of camels' hair; and perhaps burlap would come close to it, for it has been translated out as sack cloth, as well as hair cloth, and hair shirt. Dotty tried it in two versions: one with a strip from an old buffalo robe that belonged to Uncle Tim Reilly, and was now mangy and discarded. But the buffalo hide was thick and bulky and would be noticed. So she used the second version which was burlap worn next to the skin wrapped around the loins. And these burlap strips, for further effect, Dotty would set out in the crab grass to gather chiggers. Penance! This was penance!

The sufferings of Dotty in her hair shirt are beyond words to describe. But she endured it three months.

Did it work? Of course it worked. You can try it yourself. It always works. Self-mortification always produces results, and only those who have never tried it can ever doubt it. Not all, it is true, are the hair shirt type; but penance is the most open meadow there is, and all may walk in it.

Once again Mary Theresa passed Slywood's letters around for all to read, and once again they were friendly and open. All but one she passed around, the first of the new ones, and that was far too intimate. But he had changed back to his old only-a-little-bit-mean, not-really-too-bad self. And only Dotty knew what had brought it about.

“Well, I have come this far along the path,” said Dotty, “and I am curious to see just how far it will lead. They say that curiosity killed a cat, but do they know for a fact that it did? I suppose they found a dead cat and held an autopsy? I bet that cat doctor didn't any more know what killed that cat than anybody. Father Van Heuvel says that mysticism is not for everyone, that it is a two-edged sword, that there is a false charisma as well as a true. He isn't sure that I can tell the difference, but I am sure.”

Dotty wore the hair shirt no more. It had only been a symbol, an introduction to her, a beginning of this thing. But she still did penance so secret that it can never be given out. She did it all her life, even when she was out of Grace; for the penance of those out of Grace can help others even when it cannot help themselves.

Only once, though, in those early days did Dotty meet a beneficiary of her mystical offerings. It happened the night that Dotty went to bed with a high fever. She told no one that she had it. She believed it to be no ordinary fever; she believed it to be an answer to her prayer that she be allowed to suffer extraordinarily. She was delirious and she knew it; but she believed that some great thing would come to her in her delirium. She prayed earnestly that she be allowed to suffer for a period the fires of Purgatory; and that for that period the most forgotten soul there might be spared the suffering that she took on herself.

“For only a few minutes, for only a few minutes, for as long as You will allow. Only You can know how weary they must be of it. For a while, for a little while let me bear it for the most forgotten one. Let her (it must be her) rest for a little and maybe have a drink of water which I will not take.”

Then in the intensity of her fever, she knew that it was happening to her, for this was fire, Purgatory fire, kindred of Hell fire save that it is not eternal.

Suddenly an old Irishwoman, the most forgotten soul in Purgatory was sitting there in the room watching her, and smiling at the favor.

“I want to thank you, Dotty. This is very kind of you, even if it is only for a little while. I tell you it gets pretty tiresome. A person appreciates a little respite.”

“I am told,” said Dotty in her agony, “that there are false as well as true revelations. If you assure me that you are a true one, I will believe you.”

“No, I am neither. Dotty. I am only a dream you are having.”

The old woman had been suffering for a long time. She appeared kindness itself, and it seemed a shame that she was the most forgotten soul of all.

“I know you're a dream, in a manner of speaking. Yet you're as real as anything else is. I am glad that I can help you. Now I want you to give a sign for when I wake up so I will remember this.”

“I cannot give you a sign. I am nothing. Only a dream of yours.”

“You can give me a sign if you want to. I have done what I could to help you. If this fire is real it must leave a sign on me.”

“You are right. I can give you a sign. In the morning you will have a sign on you.”

“Will it be red like the fire?”

“Yes, Dotty, red like the fire.”

“Will it be the stigmata? But I am not worthy of that.”

“Nor is anyone. But it will not be the stigmata. It will be the measles.”

And the sign was on her in the morning — the worst case of measles ever seen in the house on Elm Road. What amazed both her mother and her grandmother was that a girl as sick as Dotty should be so amused over the whole thing.

This should have made Dotty doubtful of all mystical experiences. She was to have them again, and she did always cock a wary eye at them before accepting them in a kindly spirit. And she had in fact been given a sign, a sign that she must never demand a sign.

“But if I did not reach her, and it is only a dream, who is to say that I will not be able to reach her? What is the difference if I will not know whom I help or when? Poor old Dot may someday be the most forgotten soul there if she ever reaches that far. And the only chance I'll have of a little rest will be for some wayward such as I to think of me as I thought of her.”

There were four years with frequent entries T.D.M.T.S.A.A.T.H.G.B. in the diary. These were the years when Dotty became beautiful, but she was the last to notice it. They were also the years in which she became extremely erudite and clever, but of this she was aware in every detail.

In these same four years, which is roughly from her ninth to thirteenth birthday, Dotty lived by a curious one-sided bargain with the Lord. For on her side she had agreed not only to be good but (as much as is humanly possible) to be perfect. And from the Lord she required that He withhold from her and her family all serious evil and tragedy and disturbance.

She assumed, though she knew she was forbidden to ask for a sign, that the Lord had agreed to her terms. She was later to learn that He is very wary of a bargain; will not, in fact, bargain at all. This can seem shockingly unfair to one having entered into a bargain in all good faith; but it is always a bargain made on a false assumption. And he does not break a pledge who gives none.

However, until the very end of the period, it seemed that it was a genuine two-sided bargain and that it would be kept.

Dotty read widely now and in books exactly fitting to her years and temper. In particular she read St. John of the Cross: the Ascent of Mount Carmel and the Dark Night of the Soul. It has been said with a straight face, by those to whom a straight face is a normal condition, that these are difficult writings. One eminent professor confessed them totally beyond his comprehension, and another called them the most profound and possibly the murkiest writings ever penned by man.

Yet they are no such thing. A child can understand them, but those who were never children cannot.

“ — This is the purple which is spoken of in the songs, upon which God reclines. Clad in this purple the soul journeys when it goes forth from itself in the dark night — by this secret ladder — to the perfect union.”

What child could not understand this? What pedant could? Or who could doubt that the disguise of the soul is of three colors, green, purple, and white; the sovereigns against those three enemies: the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. What other colors could it wear?

In the second week of the seventh grade Dotty had a run-in with Sister Mary Claire in religion class. They had been talking of the Little Flower, Saint Theresa (the French, not the Spanish for whom Dotty was named), and Dotty gave it for her candid opinion that the Little Flower was a lightweight and greatly overrated.

“It may be that there has to be a patron saint for every trade and avocation and state of life and class,” said Dotty. “If so, Saint Theresa is the patron saint of insipid people, for they are the only ones who are taken with her.”

“That is a terrible thing to say, Dotty. She is the Little Flower of the Child Jesus.”

“Oh, I have no doubt that she was a nice enough girl — within her limits. But she was limited, and her advocates are all limited people.”

“All my life I have been one of her most fervent advocates,” said Sister Mary Claire.

“You see,” said Dotty, “that's just what I mean. But tell me, honestly, don't you feel her sweetness just a little bit cloying?”

“No, I do not.”

“Don't you think that sometimes the Lord rolls his eyes and says ‘O Lord, how much longer is she going to keep it up? I could be off pitching horseshoes with Lazarus and Job.’ ”

“It is not clever to give a Green-Pasture-ish tinge to it, Dotty. Nor to affect to think in dialect. I believe you are being a little blasphemous.”

“We can blaspheme only God. A personal and perspicacious opinion on the limitations of one of the minor saints can hardly be called blasphemy.”

That is what did it. No fan likes to have her favorite dubbed minor. Dotty was sent to Father Van Heuvel for a reprimand.

He was holding class himself, but he was glad to see her.

“You are sent over so seldom nowadays, Dotty, that I have come to miss you. It was probably a good thing when you decided to be good, but it has deprived me of a little of that salt that I find necessary to my diet. Now just what do you have against the Little Flower of the Child Jesus and of Sister Mary Claire?”

“Not a thing in the world. I was only trying to point out how limited she is, and that her devotees are also that way. Now you would hardly compare her with St. Catherine of Sienna, or St. Teresa of Avila.”

“No, she had not their scope nor their way with the world. She will never be your particular patron, as she will be for millions. But you must be careful not to feel contempt for those of different and perhaps simpler minds than your own. Pride and contempt of the mundane are two serious flaws in you. Dotty, as they were in both of the great ladies you have mentioned.”

“But I humble myself to beat Hell, I mean I try to be humble.”

“But often in a prideful and show-boat way.”

The result of their talk was that Dotty did not return to Sister Mary Claire's seventh grade religion class. Instead she entered the special class of Father Van Heuvel which was even then in session. All of the pupils except Dotty were eighth graders, and all were thought by Father to possess some special talent or interest. Several believed themselves to have vocations. Others had been selected to give them the opportunity to move ahead according to their capabilities.

They were a little more intelligent than most. They were also looser, more free, more Dotty-kind of people. Joe Elias, who was a Syrian, could do card and handkerchief tricks. He said that his grandmother had been a genuine magician in the old country. Agatha Perkins was so clever and comical that she was even able to live down the name of Agatha. Tommy Etzel had a father who was the richest farmer around and had given the Blessed Virgin's altar to the church when it was built. Sedalia O'Conner had everything in the world in her favor. She was pretty and serene, wealthy and well, intelligent and mannered, and so universally kind that she had whole galaxies of friends. Even Dotty, who was always repelled by anyone too perfect, had long been drawn to her.

“But I do sniff one little thing about her,” Dotty gossiped to Father Van Heuvel. “If she doesn't watch it, when she grows up and gets married and gets double rich, she could turn a bit heavy you can see by the line of her chin and just under; and when that happens there is a danger that she will turn into a blasted Lady Bountiful.”

“Yes, there is an ever-present danger with that type, Dotty.”

One day in class Dotty propounded a question. Not that she did not propound a question every day, but on this particular day it was a particular one that she had trouble in phrasing, though she knew quite well what she meant.

“Can you be decent and still be a rounder? That is the thing. Can you have it free and easy, be a dead game sport and a wheel and a high flyer, and still keep it clean? Can you booze and gamble and beachcomb and bum and still keep yourself unsoiled?”

“We will put it this way, Dotty,” said the Father. “It is hard to keep oneself unsoiled in any life. And in the free and easy life there are manifold forms of temptation, though possibly fewer than in the stilted life. Per se, many things are indifferent — boozing, gambling, beachcombing and bumming, being neither good nor evil, but in their abuse being evil. And with these are the free-wheeling and dead-game sporting, the high flying and keeping of extravagant hours and doubtful company. All of these can be sheer pleasure, but you will find this about them: they all have a thin edge; it will quickly wear dull. The fun fast fades from them when taken as a daily diet, and new stimulations are required. These may be the sins of the flesh, fornication and its approaches, the pitch that defiles. The fun of life is much in the change of pace. If every day is a fun day, the fun will turn pale. Yes, it is possible to be a free-wheeler and still remain unsoiled, Dotty. It is hard, but all things are hard. See that the free-wheeling is incidental and not an end in itself. Remember to keep your life Christocentric and all things will be added to you, you will have an unfailing guide, a real handbook of how to have fun.”

This was a good answer to Dotty's question. The only trouble was that she did not hear all of it. While the answer was being given a great horsefly came in the open window and prowled about — a real threat to life and limb. Dotty watched it while she listened. She heard all she wanted to hear: that one may be a free-wheeler without transgression. But she heard only dimly the part that the secret of having fun is a change of pace. She wanted it all to be at a high pace, and the horsefly may only have been an excuse for not hearing it.

Dotty had already achieved education and aplomb. She could read and understand. In mathematics she was the best girl in school, and she bested all the boys except one. She did write a bad hand. Still, it could always be read, and many fine and flourishing hands cannot always be.

She learned a lot from Father Van Heuvel whom she treated as an equal. You cannot treat people as interiors just because they are Dutch.

“There is a certain stability about your kind,” Dotty told him. “Oh, it's true you Dutch are stodgy and prosaic, not brilliant and intransigent like us Irish.”

“In one thing you exceed: in feeling sorry for yourselves. The Irish have brought it to a fine art.”

“Perhaps if others were as good at it they would indulge it equally. But there has to be Dutch in the world. We cannot all be birds. Some are born to be rocks.”

“That is high praise from you. Dotty. On a rock the Church was founded.”

“I wouldn't have picked Peter if it'd been me. I don't mean to criticize, but do you know who I'd have picked? Thomas. There was a man with a mind of his own. If he'd have been picked, the Church would have had an easier time.”

“Much easier, Dotty. But it would have been Arian, or the modern word for the same thing, Episcopal. It would not have been Catholic.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am sure. Dotty.”

“Well, some are born to be rocks, and it may be a good thing for the rest of us that they are. We can't all be Irish and talented. But I always thought it would have been a good thing if He'd picked one Irishman for an Apostle. I wonder why He overlooked that? He didn't overlook much.”

“We do not know for certain the race of all of the Apostles. Only eight can absolutely be set down for Jewish. There is slight evidence that two are Greek, and we can only guess about the other two.”

“Then maybe one of them was a wandering Irishman after all? But what if it should turn out to be Judas? Maybe there was no oversight on His part. He may have picked one Irishman, and in kindness it is hidden from us.”

“There is something a little Irish about Judas, Dotty. And in legend he was red-headed.”

CHAPTER VII

There was a curious worsening in the country in those years. It may have been the war. There are those who say that wars are a bad influence. One theory is that while the best and most vigorous (the flower of the country is the phrase) are away in Service, the worst elements take control. Another theory is that with the most disreputable and vicious elements away in Service, the mediocrities and neuters try to move into their places, to play the cock when the cock is gone.

Whatever the reason, there were more odd and inadequate people strutting around than there would normally be.

Mary Theresa had gone to work in Tulsa, and now she came back to town only on weekends and on days off. Tulsa was sixty miles away. Lots of people commuted to work that distance. Distances one traveled to work was a main topic of conversation. Whenever Mary came back she brought with her an eerie bunch of folks. Everybody was riding with everybody and that was to be expected. But Mary's friends always came late and talked loud and coarsely. They drank loudly and with verbal flourishes, not with the quiet dignity of an honest drunk like Uncle Tim. And they talked much of informal arrangements that they, if they thought of it, must have believed were beyond Dotty's comprehension.

“I do not like your friends, mama,” she told Mary Theresa.

“But they are not really friends. They're people I work with and ride with. You must know that the country is in a titanic effort, and there should be no idle hands. Women work as welders and — ”

“Well, did they have to empty the sewers to get workers? They'd probably get more work done if they were a little less titanic and more selective.”

“Do not be smart, Dotty. They are not bad people, only casual.”

“Well, I do not want you to have anything more to do with any of them.”

“Do not give me orders, my little girl. It is my duty to work, and the money is handy; and if I want to get home to see my children and my family I must ride with anyone coming this way that day.”

“Well, it's just that I worry about you, your being so naïve and all.”

“After all, I am your mother, Dotty.”

“I know. That's what makes it so funny, you being such a child in so many ways. I think it would be a good idea if I went to Tulsa with you; I could go to school there. That way I could look after you and keep you out of trouble.”

“Do you think that I will get into trouble, Dotty?”

“I am very much afraid that you will. If you associate with those queer people and don't have me around you may become like them.”

“That will be enough for now, you comical little girl. You will stay here at least for the rest of this year, and maybe the next. Then, if the duration endures, you may come with me and go to high school there. But I will have no more criticism of my friends.”

“A minute ago you said they were not friends, and now they are friends. Oh, I am mortally afraid you will become like them!”

“Do not talk so extravagantly, Dotty. In fact, for the moment, it would be nice if you did not talk at all.”

But for all that, Mary Theresa did become like them. It was nothing that Dotty could put her finger on. But just as an old cloth wears thin and weakens and the fiber is not what it was; so the fiber of Mary Theresa was now a bit worn. She would never be coarse, not like her friends; but she was not as fine as she had been.

Then there was the matter of the letters. One was from Colonel Keen to Mary Theresa. Dotty suspected that there had been others.

“Why does that awful man write to you? Why don't you just mark them ‘Incorrectly and Presumptively Addressed’ and send them back?”

“The Colonel has written me about your father. Slywood has not been well. People get fevers in the islands. They may send him down to Australia. And he may not be well in other ways. The Colonel, I believe, is genuinely concerned about him, and about us. He is a kind man, though he did sometimes let his affections run away with him.”

“I doubt that he is kind. I doubt that he is concerned. He is an old angle player.”

“Well, I don't know what angle he could be playing.”

“You will learn more of these things as you get older, mama. There is no question but that he is after you. I would burn his letters unread.”

There was cause of concern in Slywood's recent letters. It wasn't that he had turned extra mean again. It was just that he had gone backwards. It was obvious there was something the matter with him. He wrote like a boy, like a slow boy, like Floyd. He seemed to have lost all sense of responsibility and to have but a slight grasp of time and place.

“Do the fevers make people a little nutty, mama?”

“Possibly, though that may not be the proper word.”

“It's proper enough. I think my father will bear watching. He may get himself into trouble accidentally.”

“That is much what Colonel Keen wrote.”

“Oh him! Now that's a man who will really bear watching.”

You wouldn't have thought that Colonel Keen was an Okie. He looked as if he came from one of those smart-aleck Eastern states. Yet Dotty learned accidentally that he was an Okie and had a step-sister in the town itself, and a brother in Tulsa. The discovery made her uneasy. After the war he might be coming back to the state. He was as likely to settle there as anywhere else. And if he did settle near them, somehow there would be trouble.

It was in the late summer, or early fall of 1945, that God first began to break His bargain according to Dotty's story. From the other viewpoint, however, there was the clear fact that He had not made a bargain at all, that He had never given a sign.

“Well, it was preventable,” argued Dotty. “You knew that papa had been sick and was irresponsible. You should have been watching out for him. You were the only one with the facilities to do it.”

Slywood O'Toole had deserted. He had disappeared somewhere in the middle of Sydney, Australia. He had been transferred to Australia for duty, and for some hospitalization. And he had plain deserted the Army. This was both serious and badly-timed. Had he waited only three days more at least he would have deserted in peacetime instead of wartime, and this, from one viewpoint (the official one) would have been less serious.

This information had come to Mary Theresa in several forms, and she had transmitted it to the family. She had received an official notice of some kind which she told them about but did not show them. And there had been a visit to their house by an Army Colonel, a leaf colonel, not a bird colonel like Colonel Keen, who had demanded to know if they had any information from Slywood, He cited the penalties for refusing to divulge information as to his whereabouts.

There was also a letter from Colonel Keen himself, breaking the news as gently as possible, for he always kept track of the men who had been in his command, and had an interest in their troubles and their families.

Dotty was doubtful of this.

“There is a funny smell to this. There is a funny smell about that man. The first time I met him I thought I was just smelling some new kind of fish, there were so many around. But this is rottener than a spoiled fish. Do you know what has happened, mama? You have been dealt for; you have been bargained away. You've been bought and sold. And papa isn't going to come home at all. He has to stay away as part of the bargain.”

“Dotty, you are a maniac!”

“I am on the verge when a terrible thing like this happens.”

“You do not know that anything has happened. Your father has been sick, and I believe, not entirely responsible. He must have wandered away. We will soon hear from him again. And I'm sure that the army will be lenient. The record will show that he had not been well.”

“No. When we hear from him it will be to tell us that he is not coming home at all.”

After this things go swiftly, or seem to.

The war was over, and in another ten or twenty or thirty years things would be back to normal. The weird people who had dominated, began to disappear. Young and once-young men began to return, having become somewhat weird and strange during their travels. The war plants closed down their lines, though they employed as many people as ever who now shuffled papers pertaining to termination.

Mary Theresa still worked in the same plant, although the plant was terminated. It was a fancily-named agency whose translation was Surplus Sales. And she seemed (at the very beginning of 1946) to show an eagerness that was not quite untainted with something else, and at the same time a curious apprehension.

It irritated Dotty that she could not figure it out, for her mother had always been quite transparent to her. But it is hard to work without a key. Dotty had wanted to come to Tulsa and live with her mother and go to school there for the second semester. Mary Theresa had a larger and better apartment and there was no reason that the arrangement could not have been made. But it was disallowed.

Had Dotty been permitted to live with her at the beginning of the year, much of the mix-up and murkiness that followed would have been avoided. Dotty was aware that a second blow in the dismal sequence had occurred. But it was some weeks before she found out that Colonel Keen was not only back, but that he had been put in charge of the surplus property disposal at the very plant where Mary Theresa worked. It was he who had gotten her the new and better job which had made possible the new and better apartment. It was for him that she had shown an eagerness that was not quite untainted with something else, and at the same time a curious apprehension. It was on account of him, no doubt, that Mary Theresa didn't want Dotty living with her.

When Dotty learned of Keen's advent she was desolate, but in her own fashion. Dotty's emotions were in rational balance and larded with enough humor to keep them from sticking to the pan. The insistence that humor is the core of the soul, even in the middle of trial and tragedy, stayed with Dotty through all the months that followed, which were filled with shock after shock. She tried to fight back with prayer, patience, exposition, common sense, murder, flight, but also with humor. Always with humor.

Two of the worst shocks came to her in the summer of 1946. One was a letter from Slywood O'Toole in Australia saying that he had remarried. He would not return. He said he knew they would think it odd; it seemed odd to him also. But then it was done and there was no use arguing about it. He wrote like a boy, defiant and a little bewildered. He said that if they ever happened to be down that way to stop in and visit him and his new family. This letter from Slywood came directly to Dotty. Mary Theresa had heard from Slywood two weeks previously to the same effect. She had said nothing about it.

It was only a couple of weeks later that Dotty was allowed to take the bus to Tulsa to spend Saturday and Sunday with her mother.

She walked into a strange situation. With her mother she found Colonel Keen, and a middle-aged priest whom she did not know. Her mother did not look right; Colonel Keen did not look right (but then there was no right in him ever); and the priest, most of all, did not look right. They were talking of legal aspects and ecclesiastical sanctions and such. Dotty felt herself begin to tremble as though her soul had turned back to clay for the moment.

It was mid-afternoon before Dotty got her mother alone.

“It is time that you and I had a serious talk,” she said.

“Oh, don't be so dramatic, Dotty. I am your mother, and I do not have to give an account to any twelve-year-old, even if she happens to be my favorite daughter. I am not sure that I would be able to explain the situation to you, or that you would be able to understand it. What do you want to know?”

“I want to know if that man is a Catholic priest.”

“Why, of course he is, Dotty.”

“Then why don't you look me in the eye when you answer?”

“See here, I can look anybody in the eye. I do no wrong. I can look you in the eye till you drop yours.”

“Then tell me what he really is.”

“You remember that Christ said ‘Other sheep I have that are not of this flock.’ ”

“Then tell me what flock he is of.”

“He is an ordained priest. Dotty. Only he is now one of a group who has gone beyond the narrow Church and is organizing on a more liberal and humanist basis.”

“And what do they call their abomination?”

“I believe it is the Free Catholic Church of America.”

“Then he is a Judas Priest?”

“I will slap you, Dotty.”

“I wish you would. It might relieve the tension and make you thoroughly ashamed of yourself. This Free Catholic Church, I understand, was organized by the hypocrites who still want to call themselves Catholics, and yet to remarry.”

“Yes, essentially that. But not for hypocrites, Dotty; for mature persons who have thought things through and have seen the need for a more modern and liberal way of life, sanctified by the Church; who have considered all matters from all sides and progressed beyond.”

“Bosh, mama. Now let me have a guess. Colonel Keen has been a member of this new church for some years?”

“Yes, but how did you know?”

“By the stench, I have finally identified it.”

“What stench?”

“It is not of the senses. And you intend to marry this man when you are already married?”

“I am not married. That is being taken care of. Your father has abandoned us. You will have a new father.”

“Want to bet?”

“Slywood is in another world — as though he had never been. He is a closed book. I am starting over with a clean page.”

“It is not clean, mama. It is filthy! Does grandma know about this?”

“Yes. By now, yes.”

“How did she take it?”

“I have not faced her. I wrote to her, but she has not answered.”

“There will be a lot of people and things you will not be able to face.”

“I will have no more of such talk from you. Many of the churches permit remarriage under these conditions. The Episcopals, for instance, in some of their branches, and a great many — ”

“Yes, they teach satanism. It is no new thing with them.”

“I will not have you stay here with me till you change your attitude. Pack your bag, and at once! I will take you down to the bus station and you can return to your precious grandmother this very afternoon.”

Silently Dotty packed her bag. Her mother took her to the station and not a word passed between them in the hour and ten minutes they waited for Dotty's bus to leave. Dotty still had her humor, but for a while it was heavily overlaid with other things.

The only ones who were really shocked about this thing were Grandmother Kearns, Dotty herself, and Uncle Tim Reilly, the old reprobate. The uncles and aunts and cousins took it as nothing at all. They were not even interested.

Mary Theresa and Colonel Keen were married on September first of that year (1946) with none of Mary Theresa's family present. The couple were to be gone for one week. Then Dotty was to join them in their new home. Floyd and Catherine were to remain with their grandmother for the present.

“We will have to break the strongest stick first,” the Colonel had said. Dotty was to start high school there, and this new adventure was intended in some way to take her mind off the other new event.

On the day of her arrival Dotty was met at the station by Colonel Keen. Her mother was not with him.

“We will have to learn to be friends now, Dotty. You have become my daughter.”

“I will just be damned if I have become any such thing.”

“These things take time. I know that step-fathers are traditionally disliked.”

“You are thinking of step-mothers. I would have no objection to a step-father, if he were anyone but you, and if my father were not still living, and if I were eligible to have a step-father.”

“I am giving you a present, Dotty. I have thought of everything that you might possibly want or have use for. It may be that you will have a special use for this.”

He gave her three ten dollar bills.

“Yes, I will have a special use for this. And you are not able to guess what it is.”

“In five years from now. Dotty, think back. Then ask if I had not guessed exactly what you would use it for.”

At home (Oh Hell, that wasn't home) at the house, Dotty greeted her mother icily, and was shown to her new room. She left her bag there but did not unpack it. Then she told them she was going shopping.

She made one purchase of almost seventeen dollars, another purchase of sixty-five cents, and still another of thirty-five cents. Then she walked about the town.

She returned to the house just in time for supper, and immediately afterwards went to her room. She left the door open a crack and listened intently. From time to time she looked nervously at her watch.

“It is most important that they act on schedule, or on what I surmise is their schedule,” she thought.

About eleven o'clock she heard the Colonel go to bed, and her mother go to the bathroom where she was sure her mother would spend some time. Dotty opened her sixty-five cent purchase, which was a kitchen paring knife. She opened her thirty-five cent purchase which was a small roll of friction tape, and with the one she taped the handle of the other. She went into the bedroom where Colonel Keen was in bed.

“Have you come to tell me that we can be friends, Dotty?” he asked.

“No, I have not.”

He was looking at her with an apprehensive half-smile. She stabbed him in the chest. He still half-smiled at her. She stabbed him seven more times. She left the knife there and went to her room, got her bag and left the house. She caught the city bus on the corner and rode to the bus station. Her bus was just pulling out. She was the last one to board it. Her almost seventeen dollar purchase would take her some seven hundred miles.

She was returning to the sea island town where she had been for a week, some four years ago, with fifteen dollars and no hopes.

She was one month and one week short of her thirteenth year.

CHAPTER VIII

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” said Dotty. “I confess to Almighty God and to you Father that I have sinned. My last confession was one week and four days ago. I said my penance and went to Communion. Since then my sins have all been trivial, except one. I killed a man.”

“Well, that is not trivial. Are you sorry for it?”

“I am desolate, but I would do it again.”

“Then you are not contrite?”

“I have tried hard to have contrition. I have not been able to have it. I am coming to you for help in this.”

“What is your name?”

“I don't have to tell you my name. You have no right to ask me my name. You know better than that. What's the matter with you, anyhow?”

“I only wish to say that if you are called Dotty (and I believe that you are), then the man that you killed is not dead, nor is he even badly hurt. But he is disturbed, and he is worried about you.”

“But how did he track me here? Or how would he have done it if I had been Dotty?”

“He did not track you. He only guessed — I do not know how — that you might come here.”

“But you can't tell him that I've come here. You're not allowed to tell what you learn here.”

“I believe that you had better tell me this outside of the confessional also. That will solve the problem. Now then, whom are you living with?”

“I don't have to tell you.”

“I know you don't. But I am asking you.”

“I am living with the Parisis.”

“Oh, them!”

“Why do you say ‘Oh them,’ father? They are the kindest people in the world.”

“Without a doubt. We will talk about that outside the confessional. Now have you found the grace to be contrite for the attempted murder?”

“I have not. I am close to it, but I cannot quite manage it yet.”

“Then I will not be able to give you absolution.”

“And if you don't, I won't be able to go to Communion. I have been going every morning for years. It is hard to get through the day without it.”

“I know it is. But your absolution is deferred. I would suggest that you come back tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, if it is necessary, even if you don't think yourself ready for it.”

“All right. I will.”

“And I want to talk to you on the front step of the Church.”

“All right.”

But, once outside, she would answer nothing.

“It is quite a pretty church you have here, father. I could not help but notice it as I strolled by. Shall we call its architecture, Presidio Spanish?”

“Yes, let's do. What is your name, little girl?”

“I quite admire the appearance of the oleanders along the walks of your fine town, though I must confess that I am not entranced by their smell. I hear that quite good catches of Spanish mackerel are being taken in the Gulf this week.”

“I am a Red Snapper man myself. I had a phone call about a little girl named Dotty, who had fled from an impasse in a distant town, about six hundred and eighty miles distant, I believe. She had been here before and had fallen in love with the town, possibly because of the oleanders and the Presidio Spanish effect of the Church. Do you know anything of Dotty?”

“It is a common enough nickname, Father. I envision her as a little prig. I understand that this is the leading sulphur port of the world.”

“Are you going to enter our school? You can start Monday. You will be only a week late. I believe you should ask the — whomever you are living with — to make the arrangements.”

“I don't much believe that I care to go to school again. I may be over-educated as it is. That might be the source of my troubles.”

“I do not believe that being over-educated is the source of your troubles, little girl. And we do have (in my own opinion, but mine only) the best school in the world. You are not of legal age to be out of school. You be here Monday or I will have to make circumspect inquiries about you.”

“It has been a pleasure, Father. The shelled walks here remind me so much of the South of France.”

There had been neither prosecution nor pursuit. Colonel Keen, who had remained calm, saw to it that there was not even a report of it.

“But it was an attempt on your life,” said the stubborn investigator. “Any of those eight wounds could have been mortal.”

“What wounds? Eight superficial scratches? How could a ninety-pound girl, with a blade not four inches long, hurt a man like me?”

“You are remarkably muscled. It would take some power to drive through. Still, several of the cuts are ugly. Or, she could have got you in the throat.”

“But she didn't. She didn't really want to kill me. And even a ninety-pound girl has more power than she chose to use.”

“Did you lose consciousness?”

“Good God, no! I don't even blink for things like that.”

“Then why didn't you stop her after the first stab? It must have taken some time for her to have inflicted eight.”

“It was her play, and I let her have it. There is no question that she is a wronged party. Whatever is right, she is wronged. I was never able to reach the girl at all, and her mother may not understand that there is anything there to reach.”

“But would you lie there and let her kill you?”

“I doubt it. Resolves have a way of softening when there is real danger. But I do not believe that there was any. I let her make her play, and I will let her make it yet. For only a second, I thought that I had acquired a daughter; and someday, in some manner, I might still reach her mind.”

“But you will make no attempt to find her?”

“None. Though I am fairly sure where she has gone.”

“Will not the mother worry about her?”

“Some. But that is a penalty she must pay. I will check from time to time to see that the girl is all right, and I will send money if it is needed or acceptable.”

“But how will you do that if you do not trace her?”

“There are ways. It will not be hard.”

“This is a very unorthodox investigation.”

“Let us keep it that way.”

The town was not as Dotty had thought it would be. The town closes up on Labor Day. The summer tourists go home, since they must get back to work and their children have to go to school. The concessions on the pleasure pier close, the marine exhibits close, the corn-dog and health drink stands close. The amusement park booths are shuttered, except for Saturdays and Sundays. And on Beach Boulevard itself, half of the places are shut up to sleep eight months till the next Splash Day.

The places that remain open must live on the natives and the seamen until the next season when the tourists come back. But when Dotty got there it was still warm, even hot. And the beach was still there — thirty miles of it in the sun. It was not crowded, but neither was it lonesome. There were always a few dozen surf swimmers scattered about. The fishermen were on the piers, fewer of them, it is true; but they were the best and saltiest of the lot.

Dotty had made the acquaintance of about a dozen middling old men who had come to the island to retire. They would go fishing every day till they could no longer be out. There were the night workers, girls from the clubs, who often came to the beach in the daytime. Dotty knew many of them.

Always there were seamen around. They liked to come here. They came not only when their own boats were in the harbor, but because they could have more fun on the island they would come down from Texas City and Houston and all the way from Port Arthur and Beaumont and Orange. They would come up from Corpus when they had a couple of days off. The town was not really dead. It was just that for eight months of the year it was less crowded than for the other four.

That first week Dotty solved two problems, or had them solved for her. She entered high school at the parish school, under the name of Dorothy Parisi. Nobody was too surprised at the Parisis coming up with a thirteen-year-old blonde daughter. They had come up with the unexpected before.

Also Dotty had received absolution.

“It isn't easy to sit here in this box,” Father told her. “We make the most important decisions on earth. Four or five hundred Congressmen and Senators will get together with a great bother to make a ruling. But theirs are temporal, and ours are eternal rulings. Do you know that what is happening here in this confessional is more important than what is happening in Washington, D.C.?”

“They are not now in session,” said Dotty.

“Do not dull my point. I am putting my own soul on the line for you. I am, in a way, going to pledge for you, and the failure of a pledge is burning. I am giving you absolution in one of the hardest cases I have ever had to decide. I have had to judge that you have contrition when you yourself are not sure that you have it.”

“I would not have you do anything wrong for me.”

“Nobody could make me do anything that I believed wrong inside the confessional. But the Lord only knows his reasons for making up my mind for me on you in this. Now please don't try to kill anyone else. You have no idea how much trouble it makes for everyone.”

“I will try not to.”

“Ego te absolvo,” he said, and he did.

Dotty became quite sociable after these little things were cleared up. She was popular at school. She was popular even with the most popular: Hugh McDonald, Betsy Mish, Felicien Cassell, Miriam LeBlanc, Anthony Gunn, Victor Hambledon, Catherine Collins and kids like that. Many of them were seniors and the smoothest kids in school.

These, and many more used to come down to the Parisis in the evenings and play the piano or sit at the round table and study and drink coffee and wine. It was Dotty who introduced them to that wine drinking jazz. None of them had it at home.

Dot became so friendly with the proprietors and regulars of all the places that she something of a fixture. They tended to forget that she was really too young to be in some of the establishments. She could be found at the Sea Serpent, and the Scarecrow, and the Red Pirate. She also frequented the Octopus Bar, the Wooden Ship, the Oyster House, and Little Mexico. She haunted the Red Snapper Drive-in Emporium and the Hop Hut.

She was also well acquainted with the rougher places: the Smelly Goat (not its real name), the Snake Pit (not its real name), and the Bloody Bucket (not its real name either). She sold crab meat in a lot of these places. She sold it for two old derelicts who were crabbers way down off west beach. They couldn't sell it themselves as they were denied entrée in most of the places on account of their disreputude. And when you are too disreputable to enter the Smelly Goat, for instance, then you are way down.

The two old derelicts lived in a tent and neither of them owned shoes. Dotty sold crab meat and fish for them and bought wine which she brought to them. Not good wine like they had at the Parisis, but wino wine which is cheaper.

Their names were Sherman J. Wintergarden the Third, and Jacob Norman Spencer-Cartwright.

Dotty had other enterprises. On the nights when her fingers were itchy she would go to the Jamaica Inn and to the Balalaika, to the Little Oyster (it is upstairs over the Oyster House itself), to the French Casino, to the Beach Comber, to the Jungle Club. She would wait till they let her play the piano. Many of the players were from New Orleans and all of them had played there, and its influence was prevalent. But there were those who played real Galveston-style music. It isn't the same thing as New Orleans; don't let anyone tell you it is the same thing. There was Jeannie who played at the Hop Hut who could play Galveston-style when the mood was on her. She taught many of the tricks to Dotty. One of the girls at the Golden Gate could do it, and George Dushane could play it. There was a negro at the Creola Room who was also named George who could do it.

Dotty resolved to become the foremost Galveston-style piano player in the world. There are those who say that she became just that. She was good, very good, possibly the best. But that was some years after this first period of her return.

Dotty got around so much that she was known as the Mayor of Tremont Avenue. She was not known as the Mayor to everyone, but to several dozen people she was.

She did well in school, and did it, as it were, with her left hand. She learned French and Latin. Learned them? It was as though she had known them before and they just came back to her. She had always known Missal Latin. From her insisting that the Parisis talk Italian among themselves she had learned that also.

She learned history. First of all she learned the history of her own island. It is presumptive to try to learn all history till you are grounded in the history of your own place. She learned why it is a landfall, always a landfall; why a canoe from Haiti will come ashore here; why a boat from anywhere will come ashore here. Lafitte had had landfall here, and a long time before him, Cabeza de Vaca with Esteban. Two or three others had waded ashore here. It was not a violent shipwreck island. Always the mariners were able to come ashore.

It has the best hidden harbor in the world, for it has not the appearance of an island, and nobody would suspect a harbor behind it.

She learned the history of the great wave that killed ten thousand people. She talked to a dozen people who had lived through it; old negroes and old coots and old storytellers. She could distinguish those who had really seen it from those who only said that they had.

She learned about old Tremont Avenue when (but further downtown, not where she lived on it) it had been one of the gilded streets of America.

She had, meanwhile, made a second bargain with God, though she was still not convinced that He was guiltless in the first. As before, she pledged that she would be as perfect as it was humanly possibly to be, and He in His turn was to shield her and her new family, the Parisis, from all real evil and tragedy.

There is no way to tell how Nicki and Mary Parisi felt about the acquisition of a daughter. It is true that they had told her, years before, that she would always be welcome, that their home would be her home if she ever needed it. They had not expected to be taken up so literally.

There were money payments made to the Parisis that Dotty knew nothing of. It is possible that the payments originated with Colonel Keen. And then Dotty was a worker. She was a fabulous worker. Many people came to the Parisi establishment to see her, for she was popular. Dotty meant money in the pockets of the Parisis. It wasn't that they were money-crazy. But they had a healthy appreciation of it, and their little bar and coffee shop made money as it never had before.

Besides, the school year did not last forever. The summers came around and the golden crowds returned. That first year was the year that Dotty had really grown. She was woman-sized now and strong as a pony. She and her sparkling friends were main attractions along the beach.

That was the year that Claud Armande, the sidewalk painter, began to come to the Parisis. He didn't paint sidewalks, he set up his rack on the sidewalks and painted pictures of people. He was the first of the many people to come to the Parisis.

Kitty Kark, Arthur Braden, Cora English, Karl Zaleski, all students at the medical school, began to frequent the place and propound atheism and liberalism. Estelle Beausoleil appeared. And late in that season came, for the first time, Finnegan who was a legend in his own lifetime.

There was Selma Steichert, an old friend, who had once spanked Dotty with a paddle.

CHAPTER IX

“A glass of muscatel and a kiss, please, young lady.” That is what he said.

Dotty gave him the wine and a kiss. She gave him three dollars and seventy cents back out of five.

“How much is the wine, towhead?”

“Thirty cents.”

“Then haven't you shorted me a dollar?”

“No. I haven't shorted you.”

“Drop the other shoe, lighthead.”

“What?”

“The explanation.”

“The kiss was a dollar. You ordered it. Didn't you expect to pay for it?”

“Then you are a professional?”

“I am not anything. I am Dotty. I try to fill all reasonable orders.”

“Isn't a dollar high?”

“I don't think so. I will post a scale of rates.”

“I am a commercial artist. I will do it for you. This glossy piece of cardboard will do fine. How will we head it?”

“Why, Dotty Specials, of course.”

He lettered rapidly and well. He did it with a fine brush and a very small can of black paint.

“We should start off with something cheap for a leader.”

“Rub noses five cents,” said Dotty. And so he lettered it.

“Little kiss fifty cents. Big kiss one dollar. Squeeze, a quarter. Bear Hug, a dollar. Hold Dotty on lap, fifty cents. Sit on Dotty's lap, a dollar a minute. If over two hundred and fifty pounds add five percent surtax.”

“What else shall we put, Dotty?”

“No free samples. Do not order anything not on the menu.”

He finished it that way and Dotty tacked it up on the wall.

“We may have invented a new sort of gold mine,” said Dot. “I will let the wealth roll in now. What is your name?”

“In Rome they call me Il Arlecchino.”

“You have been in Rome?”

“Rome, Georgia. And in Paris they call me Il Bouffon.”

“Paris, Texas?”

“Certainly. Are we not in Texas?”

“But what is your real name?”

“Smith. Joe Smith. Here, I will write it out for you. I know it's unusual. It takes genius to devise a name like that. My father was a genius.”

“Everybody is a genius,” said Karl Zaleski who was present. “There are now more geniuses than people. Even some of the dogs are geniuses.”

“There will be no need to copyright the plan,” said Joe Smith, ignoring Karl, “since there can be only one Dotty and she is beyond copyright. I believe the plan is safe. Imitators would be ineffectual.”

“Dotty maintains her virtue,” said Karl Zaleski, “and yet a little of it can be rubbed off for a nickel.”

“I will lose no virtue for a little nose-rubbing,” said Dotty.

“Oh, but you will,” insisted Karl. “The nose, like the nape of the neck, the palms of the hands, the throat and the knees, is among the tertiary amatory regions of the body. It is not, of course, as compelling as the lips, the tongue, the breasts, and other of the secondary amatory regions; not surely of the attraction of the primary amatory regions, but — ”

“That will be enough,” said Dotty. “The line is drawn with the cautionary phrase, ‘Do not order anything not on the menu.’ ”

“There are no lines,” said Karl. “That is the hardest thing for the doltish to learn. In a dialectic and evolvate world there are no lines that can be drawn. There are only merging zones.”

“I do not like this fellow,” said Joe Smith. “I'll punch him in the nose in a minute. It is a tertiary region that has aroused my interest.”

“Do not speak of me in the third person,” said Karl. “I am present and no veil is between us. You have permission to speak to me directly.”

“I do not like you, fellow. I'll punch you in the nose in a minute.”

“That's better,” said Karl.

But it wasn't a punch. It was a hook that Joe hung on him. Joe really hit him too hard. He must have been angry or irritated. When you hit someone just for the hell of it, you don't usually hit that hard.

“It was kind of funny,” said Dot. “But that's the way that fights start. He'll be mad when he wakes up. You can't hit people just because they say things that aren't true.”

“I hit him because what he said was true, and I'd rather it weren't. There really aren't any lines, Dotty. All things are relative, and nothing is any higher than we are. I thought you knew.”

“If I believed that, I'd give up.”

“When you come to believe it, you will give up for a while. But after another while, you'll see that you're still alive, and you'll come down in the ditch with the rest of us.”

“And I was beginning to like you.”

“I'll be back in two years, Dotty, to see if you're ready. I want you.”

He went away and was gone two years.

Tommy Katt and Mossback McCarty, the two beach cops, came in. Everytime someone gets laid out cold, those two will amble in in a matter of seconds. Every man should know his trade, and they knew theirs. The nose was bloody, and they decided that it was broken. They brought Karl back to life by standing him on his feet and shaking him. He was all right then, except for the broken nose.

Quite a few people came in to see what it was all about. Kitty, Arthur, Cora, and some medical students came in and looked at the nose with professional interest. In the Smelly Goat when they have a slow night, they always stage a fight, and that brings in the crowd.

Tommy Katt, the young cop, took Karl home. Mossback stayed. It was late at night and he was tired.

“It's the eternal walking that gets me,” he said. “It isn't good for an old man. There were years when I didn't have to walk a beat — when I was a captain in homicide. Then the commissioner came to realize my true worth and broke me back to the lowest foot cop in town. But I cracked some mighty puzzling murders in my day.”

“You might as well,” said Dotty.

“You will anyhow,” said Selma Steichert.

“We won't listen if you don't want us to,” said Cora English.

However, the compulsion to talk was on Mossback, and such little breakwaters as they threw up could never turn that rising tide.

“You may have heard something of the story, but I'll tell you the truth of it. What made it so spooky is that it happened in broad daylight. A quite attractive young woman walked into the station house that morning. She was ashen blonde, with a certain darkness about the eyes. ‘There is a dead woman,’ she said, ‘at such an address on Eye One Half Street. Go there at once. She has been murdered.’ ‘Your name please, ma'am,’ I asked. ‘You see, we often take the names of people in matters of murder and such. It is good practice.’ ‘My name is of no importance,’ she said, ‘nor can I stay for further questioning.’ ‘But how do we know that it is not a wild goose chase?’ ‘You do not know,’ said the lady, ‘but you have no choice but to investigate.’ ‘Then you will go with us,’ I said. ‘Where I go you cannot follow,’ she told me, and left. I was into the hall after her like a cat but she was nowhere in sight. Yet it was absolutely impossible that she could have disappeared in that short second.

“Well sir, to continue an interesting story, myself and two underlings went to the address for an investigation. But on the way I encountered an aroma in the street which, as you will see, was quite important in later developments. And I will bet a buck that not one of this brilliant company can guess what it was.”

“We bow to the sheer impossibility of the task,” said Cora English. “Please tell us what smelled.”

“It was the fine flavor of Gallagher's Rich Dark,” said Mossback.

“My favorite!” exclaimed Dot.

“I hadn't realized that you smoked a pipe. Miss Dotty. Well sir, we entered at the address, and there is no man jack or maid among you who can tell me what we found there.”

“We have already bowed to the impossible. Now we salute the inevitable,” said Estelle. “My coffee will get cold. I am too entranced to drink it.”

“We found nothing,” said Mossback. “Would you believe it? There was not a dead woman in the entire house.” He sat back in triumph.

“Is this a terminus or a hiatus?” asked Kitty Kark.

“We returned to the station house with some annoyance. But I noticed one inexplicable detail. The aroma of Gallagher's Rich Dark could no longer be discerned in the street.”

“Good God!” cried Arthur Braden.

“Well sir, it wasn't an hour after we were back at the Station when a frightened little man came in to see me. ‘There is a dead woman,’ he said, ‘at such an address on Eye One Half Street. Go there at once. She has been murdered.’ Well, I am a fish who cannot be caught twice on the same worm. And I will say one thing about myself: I can make fast decisions! I put that little man in the drunk tank and we went back to playing checkers, which I find stimulating to the mind.

“And not five minutes after that we had a phone call from patrolman Jeffries. ‘Will one of you homicidals come over to such an address on Eye One Half Street,’ he said. ‘There's a woman here who has been murdered.’ ‘You have been drinking, Jeff,’ I said. ‘What matter? She's dead enough. Get you over here.’ ‘And you keep an eye on her till we get there. They have a habit of disappearing.’

“We went back as fast as I could, but one thing I noticed in the street. In the big neon sign that reads ‘Bragg's Drug Store’, the letter B was not burning, and it had been burning an hour before. You can imagine the weird feeling it gave me. We went to the address on Eye One Half Street and entering we found that there was indeed a dead woman there. And I will wager you the best mine in Galveston County that there is not one cucumber in the whole jar of you who can tell me who she was.

“She was the ashen blonde with the certain darkness about the eyes who had been to see us only an hour and a half before. She who had reported the dead woman before she was dead, who in fact turned out to be herself.

“Well, I took charge at once. ‘Get everyone in here immediately and I will question them,’ I said with the crackle of authority in my voice. ‘Everyone who?’ uttered my underlings, for they had missed the significance of much that I had seen. Bring in every pipe smoker you can find and we will see if any of them has Gallagher's Rich Dark about them. Bring in Braggs who runs the Drug Store and we will have the real story of that letter burned out in his sign. And get that little shrimp out of the drunk tank who came in with the wild story about there being a dead woman there.’

“In fifteen minutes they were assembled, quite a bunch of them. ‘The killer is among you,’ I said. ‘I will either put my finger on him in five minutes or I'll resign my commission. I am putting my reputation on the line.’ And gentlemen, I was as good as my word.”

“Well, which one was it?” asked Kitty.

“Never found out. Resigned my commission. I looked at that little shrimp that we had had in the drunk tank and I believed that I had the answer. ‘I have seen you somewhere before,’ I said. Of course I had. He was the police commissioner. Still is. It was at his suggestion, really his insistence, that I resigned my commission.”

“You can't win them all,” said Nicki Parisi.

“On the citation they gave me they used a lot of fancy words. But what they really broke me for was incompetence.”

“That's the most interesting story I have heard all night,” said Cora. “And that will give you an idea.”

But if a false idea has been given of Mossback McCarty, the beach cop, let it be erased. He was never a captain in homicide. He was never anything but a foot cop. He couldn't pass the examination for anything else. He just liked to come in every night and tell a different story.

It was later the same evening, or perhaps it was another evening a year or so afterwards. Who can say? Almost the same persons were present or others very like them. All of those young people (no, there was nothing young about them), all of those immature old people, together began to attack Dotty. She was, however, impregnable in her mind and instincts, as she would not be later.

It was Karl Zaleski who launched the attack; it was always Karl. It must have been another night, for his nose, though crooked, was healed.

“If people were only logical,” he said, “there would be no room for argument. Everything would immediately be apparent.”

“No,” said Dotty, “only logical people can really disagree. I am logical and you are logical, and there is hardly a thing in the world that we agree on. But those who have not logic are able to accept opposite things at the same time. So they are the ones who have nothing to argue about. They fuss, but they do not argue.”

“You are only throwing dust in my eyes. Pass the murine and then listen. Once we accept the fact of the world as it is we can proceed in a straight line. We can find the motivation of man in evolvate matter. We have the key to history which is the dialectic. We can understand the birth of superstitions and why they will die, We see the symbolism and ridiculousness of the cloak we are wearing, and the necessity of casting it away. We can see through the ghost that is called morality and which now is growing quite thin. We know that tradition is a child's creeper, and that we should push it into a corner as soon as we have learned to walk. We can know that Marx, Darwin, and Freud all said the same thing, and that nobody else has really said anything at all. We, like the great Frenchman, would put out the lights of Heaven; they have always had such an unhealthy effect on Earth. It is all a series of logical steps, Dotty, and you have heard me expound every riser of them in detail before. If you are logical, as you say, at what point does the chain offend your logic?”

“At none. The logic is perfect. Mine is also perfect. It is the beginning where we come out of chaos on opposite sides. ‘Once we accept the fact of the world as it is,’ you say. But you do not accept the fact of the world as it is. You conceive it as wholly material, but its materialism is only one of the many qualities of it. It is only one of the many things it is.”

“You are throwing plain superstition into the middle of an argument, Dotty, where it has no business.”

“To the totally color-blind, the spectrum is a superstition. And all the arguments in the world will not make the color-blind see it. Nor will logic lead him to it, who has not the capacity to crawl up to the basis where the logic begins.”

You may say that high school girls do not talk like that. But they do. Dotty did. And so did Betsy Mish and Miriam LeBlanc, and also Catherine Collins, a little. They were not with her that night, however, or they'd have made mince meat of that bunch.

“Everybody is color-blind but Dotty,” said Cora English.

“No. There are probably more of us who see at least part of the spectrum than of you who are totally color-blind. It is just your habit of hunting in packs that makes it seem there are so many of you.”

“I will tell you a secret, Dotty,” said Kitty Kark. “You believe that you see more than you do. And you believe that what we say has no effect on you. But it does have an effect, every bit of it. It will come to you all at once. It takes only one hole to undermine the dam. Someday, I give you two years, you will perform a natural act, or as you say, you will lose your virtue; and then the scales will fall from your eyes, and everything that we have told you will move in on you and fall into its proper place.”

“I know what you mean. No person ever lost his faith without first acting viciously against it. I might even say that nobody ever lost his faith in good faith. I will say it. It is clever. I hope it will not happen to me. But if it does it will not be a case of the scales falling from my eyes. It will be the case of my being struck blind, as you are.”

“Thank you,” said Cora English.

Dotty wrote a sonnet once. This is the way it went:

I am at home as much as one can be

Who knows the World a symbol and a toy.

I cruise the compromise in prideful joy,

And claim to God I also made the Sea.

I walk in sunlight through the something dark

Defiant of that ambush in the street,

The Noonday Devil in the noonday heat

That smirched the souls of Karl and Kitty Kark.

I walk with winos and I glut and glow,

And glib as any gull I gobble fish,

Me, earthy as e’er born of green-haired turf.

I am at home while this is home below.

I walk the world that is itself a wish.

I am at home beside the creaming surf.

Now this was a good sonnet. It was as good as the best of Felix Cassel, and better than the worst of Betsy Mish. There were other sonneteers in the country at that time. Dotty did not know them, but hers did compare favorably with those of the two best sonneteers in high school.

But you wouldn't think it was good from the way the vultures fell on it and began to tear it.

“I am puzzled,” said Arthur Braden, “by the fifth line, ‘through the something dark’. What does that mean?”

“It means that you are a quibbler and that a good sonnet is never finished. Naturally I will substitute two other syllables when I find the proper ones. Petrarch took thirteen years to polish one sonnet.”

“And he wrote five hundred of them. He must have started about the time of the drying of the flood.”

“I resent the implication that my soul is besmirched,” said Kitty Kark, “though I agree that that of Karl, is. Not believing in the soul, I cannot make wild claims for the one that I do not possess. Yet I doubt that it is smirched. You have hit me below the girdle, Dotty.”

“It is just that you have such a euphonious name,” said Dot.

“Besides, the sonnet is impure in rhyme scheme,” said Karl Zaleski. “It is bastard, half Italian and half English. Were it pure Italian the rhyme of the first and second quatrains would be the same.”

“I tried that. It's harder that way. And it isn't English and Italian. It's Irish and Italian as I have become.”

“The only theme it seems to possess is that you're bragging because you're alive,” said Karl, of the smirched soul.

“Of course I'm bragging because I'm alive. A lot of people aren't.”

“Are not bragging, or are not alive?”

“Well, I'll tell you: if they're not the one, they're not the other.”

Karl himself wrote poems like this:

An Angel's wing has not the tang of turkey,

or even scrawny chicken.

When you take it from the refrigerator cold at night

you look at it and throw it away uneaten.

They are a worse carrion than buzzards

and befouled more than starlings.

And they are so pitifully small when plucked and spitted

that we wonder why we ever took the trouble

to hunt them out of their rocks

and kill them in the first place.

Arthur Braden wrote poems that were all four and seven letter words.

“There is more poetic feeling in the things on the walls of mens' rooms, and a finer handling of vocabulary,” said Dotty.

“What do you know about the things on the walls of mens' rooms.”

“I clean up.”

Cora English wrote poems like this:

Intransitive - colloidal -

vestigial - ambient (also) -

Who can say? - Amorphous perhaps -

But this is for others to decide -

(of a pear rather)

a more imaginative round

stung-worm-bitten-rotten before ripe

born of an angry tree - 

and the converse of the pear is the abyss - 

shape turned inside out.

An arched eyebrow over a sightless eye - 

that is the ultimate.

Such as this was greatly admired by those who fell on a workmanlike sonnet and tore it with bloody teeth.

CHAPTER X

“What time is it, Dotty?” asked Mary Parisi.

“Four.”

“Four o'clock?”

“What else?”

“Dotty, I will run the bunch of nuts off if you want me too. I am not sure that they are a good influence on a young girl. We can always get more nuts. And, more important, they are not good spenders.”

“No. They are the world. If I cannot stand against them I cannot stand against anyone. The nuts will not hurt me. Nothing but me can hurt me.”

“Dotty, are you ashamed of us?”

“A little bit. Not very much. Why?”

“At the Red Room they call you Dorothy Paris? Why have you left off the last ‘i’?”

“Diminished ego. That is my stage name.”

“They haven't any stage.”

“I play the piano there and I am a performer.”

“Why are you ashamed of us, even a little bit, Dotty?”

“The parents of my classmates look down on you. And you do not go to church.”

“I do. I went Christmas.”

“You did not.”

“Well, maybe it was a year ago Christmas. I even made my Easter Duty a couple of years ago.”

“But not this year. And I don't believe that Nicki has been for many years.”

“He is a man. It is different for a man.”

“It should not be.”

“Well, I will go back to the sacraments again if that is what it is. And Nicki would probably go for you, he loves you so much. I know that the fine flocks bad-mouth us, but we bad-mouth nobody. There is a difference there if you can see it.”

“I can see it.”

The City on the Island is curious. It is spotted, but it is beautiful in spots. The Beach is beautiful, and the Boulevard, and the line of buildings behind it. There is almost no prospect so fair anywhere as that line of them between the sea and the sky. In the town are many dozen of the finest and best-kept homes in the South almost buried in foliage and consummate in green and bloom. The palm trees do not grow ratty. The oleanders are everywhere; and sudden, white, green-centered avenues are breathtaking.

The Fort on its low cliff is gracious. Behind it the houses of the retired generals are as dignified and trim as a general's moustache. The weather is always warm and breezy. There are not fifteen days a year when you cannot live outdoors. The crowds, there are crowds four months of the year, are never vulgar or offensive. Their multicoloring blends perfectly with the beach and the buildings as though complementing each other.

That, however, is only part of the City on the Island. It has probably more unpainted houses per capita than any city in the nation. It has been suggested that it has three or four per capita, but that would be impossible. There are multi-story clapboard boxes that would not pass for barns anywhere else. These have wild outside stairways, with a third of the steps missing, which the people navigate dangerously — sometimes successfully, sometimes breaking their necks. But they do not replace the steps. There are thousands and thousands of old-fashioned, broken, unhinged, and unpainted storm shutters on the windows, drooping with missing slats. Most of them nailed shut so that no light will ever enter. There are shack houses high on stilts, with dogs and children playing underneath on the bare earth and ground seashells, among the jungle of exposed tree roots that run everywhere.

There are the negro blocks that speak of poverty, and the Mexican blocks that give the impression of camping out, as though all the people had moved in yesterday and would move out tomorrow. This is because they have so much furniture in the yards — chairs and beds and tables. Many of them, having no fans for cooling, sleep outside on the warm nights, and live outside in the daytime.

Dotty knew many of the Mexicans. Some went to her school, some traded at the Parisi grocery story, which carried their staples. Besides, Dotty was now a Latin by adoption and felt an affinity for them.

The negroes were harder to know, being more shy of intrusion. But Dot was acquainted with one ancient couple and often ate with them in their kitchen.

“I have wondered about the dirt floor here,” Dotty said. “Then I happened to notice it from the outside. It is wooden below the dirt. How could it be dirt on top of the wood?”

“It was the tidal wave that did it. It deposited eight inches of mud here. I've been meaning to clean it out, but I've been busy with one thing and another. I'll do it next week sure. I've been promising Martha, here, to do it.”

“The tidal wave? But that was fifty years ago.”

“Was it that long, Martha?”

“Right at it. Maybe longer.”

“Well, I guess it was. It doesn't seem like that long. I shouldn't put things off so much. But I'll clean it out next week, sure. And there's a board in the floor I've meaning to fix before it was covered over. I'll do that, too.”

There was a new captain on the sight-seeing boat. He would no longer let anybody ride free. She had been riding the sight-seeing boat once or twice a week for several years. She even gave the spiel over the loudspeaker sometimes. She was good at it. To be denied free entry on such an old friend was cruel.

Then there was the time that Dotty spent all of her time with the bunch from school. All but Dotty had just been graduated. She cultivated and was cultivated by those a little older than herself. There was Betsy Mish, Hugh McDonald, Felix Cassell, Miriam LeBlanc, Victor Hambledon, Catherine Collins. They lived almost entirely on the beach that summer. Having loved it through their childhood, and feeling that the years to come might give them less opportunity for it, they wanted to enjoy it as much as they could.

These were the young people whose parents looked down on Mary and Nicki Parisi. They were the solid old Catholic families. All of them had money, and Dotty had money too. She worked at various jobs at odd hours, hours that many people do not know exist. She had a well-developed talent for making money.

They lived like royalty. A lot of kids spend very little and are not welcome in the places. But these had one large party. By eight o'clock they were on the beach for their first swim. Then they would drive up to East Beach for breakfast at one of the swell places where they could rub elbows and knees with the well-heeled visitors. Or they would drive to West Beach, down beyond the end of the Sea Wall till there was no longer any habitation and they were the only ones left in the world, on the finest beach of the Gulf.

They had an ice chest. They had a dressing tent. Catherine Collins played her concertina and danced on the beach like a sunburned Gypsy. Betsy, who was small, swam with hardly a ripple; swam like a freckled fish. Miriam, in dark glasses, read books under a yellow umbrella. They drank beer and wine and malts and ice water, and ate crab meal and ham and cheese and white pork. They set up a spirit stove and made hamburgers and shisks and corn dogs. They ate snow cones and sundaes from the ice chest, and Victor Hambledon explained to them what they were doing.

“Should a Samoan scholar write a monogram, ‘Coming of Age on the Texas Riviera’, he could not leave us out. He would have much of our rites: The Mystique of the Malt, and the Symbolism of the Open-Top Convertible, the wandering up and down, now seeking the crowds, now seeking seclusion. He would write of the Crab Totem and the Shrimp Totem and the Oyster Totem, and the gathering in the semi-public houses of those Totems where such were ritually prepared and served. He would write of the blatant sun-worship, and the cult of the aromatic body oils and unguents, of the sacrificial casting of bread to the gulls from high places. He would note the meaning of, and the fable behind, the wearing of dark glasses. And he would be puzzled by the custom of dressing and dancing in the evenings in darkened cool rooms, and moving with the eyes half-closed in such a stylized manner.”

For they did dress and dance every night in cool darkened rooms to music that was clear gone over the edge: that of Jeannie at the Hop Hut, that of George Dushane and Anabella, and that of Dotty Parisi herself (or Dorothy Paris as she became when they let her take the piano). And in the big ball room down on the pleasure pier they would often have name bands, and there might be a thousand couples there.

Hugh McDonald was in love with Dotty that summer. But it had an adverse effect on him. He had been not only the nicest — he was still that — but also the wittiest and liveliest boy of the bunch; an athlete and a good-looking clown. Now he was reduced to a stuttering idiot. He gaped, he gasped, he swallowed air, he shook. When he took Dotty's hand he trembled. When he put his arm lightly around her shoulder he quivered; nor could she get him over it.

“Look, Hugh boy, this is me, Dotty. We're friends, fellow arms of the same octopus, kindred souls in the never-say-die club. Why are you nervous with me? I would never be chilly to you, of all people.”

“Oh, Dotty! You just don't understand.”

“Don't understand what? That you have a case on me? Of course you do. I wonder why everybody hasn't. I've developed into one cute kid. But why should that make you nervous?”

“But I am serious, Dotty. I just don't know what to do about it.”

“It is a problem, since you're a very good boy, and I'm a pretty good girl. I think the best thing is just to do nothing about it.”

“But it will be several years before I can say my mind. I have to go to college. I have to get myself established, and you are even younger than I am. What if you were drawn to someone else first? It would kill me.”

“I've only heard of one person who died of a broken heart, and that was complicated by pneumonia. There are better fish in the Gulf than were ever taken by number four lure or shrimp bait.”

“No. There are not. You are the only one.”

“I the only fish? I tell you what: If, when you are ready, I am already taken or unwilling, I will give you my greatly qualified word that I will find you a better girl twice as good. And I'll make her love you it I have to beat in her little blue eyes to do it. Now, what better surety for a happy life can you have than that?”

“There can never be anyone but you, and I don't know how to tell you.”

“You have told me, and I have told you. Why don't you fall in love with Mish? She's pensive and lonesome and I'm worried about her.”

“I am worried about her, too. But she is in love with Victor and I am in love with you.”

“Why don't you fall in love with Catherine. She isn't as pretty as I am but she has a better disposition.”

“I know she has. But she is like a sister to me.”

“I intended to play the sister role myself. I have been displaced.”

There didn't seem to be any way to get him over it and to restore his old personality. He wasn't a clown now. He was even a little dull, as are all whose love is unreciprocated. At night, Dotty would have to take his face between her hands and kiss him goodnight or the thing would never have been done, what with all the stuttering and gulping. He did have a bad case.

Towards the end of summer the group fell apart a little. Betsy Mish withdrew and acted queerly. She began seven novenas: to St. Anthony, to the Sacred Heart, to the Immaculate Conception, to St. Jude, to St. Joseph, and to a couple of those German saints that nobody ever heard of except the Germans, but who are said to be very effectual. She accompanied Dotty to six-thirty mass every morning. She would burn a dozen candles a day in church.

Since she had to talk to somebody in her great tribulation, she finally talked to Dotty.

“I will make a vow. If it doesn't happen, I will promise to be a Sister. I will be a Missionary Sister, a Nursing Sister. If it doesn't happen, I will devote all the rest of my life to good works. I will never sin again in any way. If it doesn't happen I will dedicate myself completely. I will have no further thoughts of my own pleasure in all this world.”

“I am an old hand at making vows,” said Dotty, “so let me give you some advice. Never make a vow, even to God, for more than one year's duration. There might be a change in circumstances and you would be trapped. And never make a vow without an escape clause in it. That's important. Better still, never make a vow at all; you aren't the type. Now then, we will just go to a doctor right now and see if you have anything to make a vow about. I am not going to have you worried like this.”

“Oh, Dotty, I couldn't. I'd be too ashamed. I'd perish.”

“You can't shock a doctor. They were all medical students first, and I know what medical students are like.”

“Oh, I'd die. Dotty. Anything but that.”

“Then come to mama. She's Italian so she knows everything. She will be able to help.”

“But she doesn't like me. She thinks I'm a fluff.”

“You are a fluff. But she likes almost everyone, and she will be able to tell.”

They went to Mary Parisi and she examined Betsy Mish. She looked at the moons and ridges on her fingernails. She darkened the room and held a candle to Betsy's eyes. She made her eat half a lemon with pepper on it, and held fingers to the spot just below her ears while she swallowed.

“Positively not,” said Mary Parisi. “You are not with child. What is more, I doubt if you will ever be. Too narrow in the pelvic girdle, too light in many places, of a too-wan color which even the sun cannot disguise. You will never be so blessed. It is a tragedy that you will have to live with. I am so denied myself.”

“Then you are sure that I am not?”

“Would I say positively if I were not sure? Now then, Betsy, your mother bad-mouths me and calls me a saloon-keeper, and I don't even know the woman. But she has been remiss in one thing, and I will have to lend a hand there. And I do mean a hand. I am not in the business of helping people halfway.”

“No! No! You have no right. Not if you mean what I'm thinking. I'm grown. I'm graduated from high school.”

“When was the last time you were spanked, Betsy?”

“Never. They don't do it anymore. It isn't the way. It's medieval.”

“So am I. Stop wiggling.”

“You can't spank me! I'm seventeen years old! Dotty, help me!”

But Dotty wasn't about to help her. It was loud, long, and painful. But finally it was over.

“Do not believe,” said Mary Parisi, “the lies that parents used to tell that it hurts them worse. That hurt me not at all, but I hope it hurt you devilishly.”

Betsy went away tearfully, but she was cured of her troubles and she never to make any of those binding vows. The cure was permanent. She was as good youngster as she had ever been and remained so till she was married two years later.

In spite of that, however, she had not much more to do with the Parisis. They knew her secret and she would always be shy with them.

The mixed nuts still kept up their pressure.

“It rather dated you to call them nuts,” Dotty told Mary, her foster mother. “The word is antediluvian.”

“It may come back.”

“Besides, it was never of universal application. Did you know that with the British the word nut meant a dude, a flashy dresser?”

“I did not know it. I am uninformed. These at least do not dress well.”

Karl Zaleski always took the lead.

“It would seem that Christ is quite weak to be prostrated by an arched eyebrow, a crooked smile,” he said.

“And when was He ever so prostrated?” asked Dotty.

“In his followers, and every day. We practice the technique of the subtle sneer and the gentle exclusion. The gentle exclusion defeats them every time. We have a few believers who enter medical school. We soon teach them to cringe. We no longer attack. It is childish to attack that which is not worthy of attack. But no mention is ever made, and there will come a time when the believer questions. And when he questions he is chilled. The gentle exclusion is not too gentle. There is the frosty silence, the pitying change of subject. And if he questions again, there is the depreciating dismissal, the subtle sneer that is really too dignified to be a sneer. And of such little things they come to cringe.”

“I cannot believe that there are not some with more in them than that,” said Dotty.

“Oh, there are a few fire-brands, but they do not last long. Soon they are no longer in school.”

“Then they are deliberately failed out because they are believers?”

“No. It is not so simple as that. They receive justice but not mercy. The courses are difficult, not for all in the same places. Even the most brilliant graduate had moments when he remained in school only by the mercy of the instructors and examiners. For each of them was a time, most often an early time, when he could have been dropped in perfect justice; when only a careful weighing of his possible future worth was used to extenuate his present failings. But a believer, due to the natural shackling of his mind, would have little future worth and could hardly gain continuance by such an appraisal.”

“I see.”

“It is so in nearly every field. In law possibly less than in medicine; in the physical and speculative sciences more than any, though in straight engineering not so much. Somebody must fill the lower echelons, and it might as well be the believers.”

“Aren't there professors who are believers?”

“Some. Most of them are extremely brilliant. They had to be to get through. But they do not rise as they otherwise would, and they are relegated where they can do no harm.”

“Why doesn't everybody throw your kind of jokers out?”

“Because we are the natural rulers, and natural rulers are never thrown out. History to the contrary, there has never been a revolt of the people. There has been factionalism among the natural rulers that has gone by the name of revolution. But real revolution there has not been since the beginning. We rule this world, and we have decreed that there is no world but this one.”

“And if there is no world but this one, how do you explain the occurrence and resurgence of Faith?”

“How do you explain the occurrence and resurgence of weeds? But we keep them down as much as needed, and we find new weed-killers when they become too noxious. You are devoted to a very uneven battle. Dotty. You cannot win. If ever one of your faith (I agree with you that the other faiths are pitiful middle-grounders of no consequence — not even good weeds), if one of your faith should rise very high, look at him closely. He may really be one of ours. We infiltrate when necessary; we start back-fires; we set up puppets to prevent your setting up a man. The straw man is nearly as effective as the gentle exclusion. All the great men of the past had one thing in common: they belonged to the party of Lucifer and not that of Michael.”

“That may be. He is the prince of the world. But with the world we are not particularly concerned.”

“That is your ultimate delusion and blindness. Yet we do not destroy it completely. If it keeps you cattle and pigs peaceful then we will let you believe a little that you live again after you are eaten.”

“Without that belief there is no sanction for behavior.”

“Other than the limitations of our own appetite. The hangover applies to many fields. I do not stay drunken all the time; I merely stay mellow all the time. I do not sleep with seven different girls on the nights of the week; I sleep only with three or four. I do not cheat enough to endanger my chances of success. I cheat only enough to make my way a little easier. I do not steal enough to get myself beaten and confined. I steal only enough to keep my pockets full, and I do it carefully. When I torture I do it mentally, not physically, for I fear physical revenge. One should not wear out a pleasure. There are hardly enough to return to as it is.”’

“When you bury your conscience do you forego throwing that last spadeful of dirt so it may be revived for killing again?”

“No. There is no conscience. But the emotions of a person follow a cycle and a tide, and we cannot always be sure of evading despondency. That is why we keep so many despondency-killers on hand.”

All of the reprobates had minds like that, though with their individual coloration. Except Cora English who was in perpetual torture.

“This is the way it is, Dotty. If I could only doubt, I could have ease. I have prayed for doubt to come, and it will not come. I have been down into every pit and still I cannot find it. Why should He keep a string on me after I have repelled Him?”

“It may be that you will come back to Him.”

“No! Never! We have quarreled irrevocably.”

Dotty had a letter from her mother, Mary Theresa, by a circuitous route.

I have been told that I can write to you, though I cannot know where you are. I am told that you are in doubtful hands and circumstances, but that it could be worse. Oh Dotty, I wish you could see things my way and come back to me. You, and the required change in you, are all that I need for a perfect life. We have found the key of happiness and wish to share it with others. I have a perfect husband. You were so wrong about him. And I have the perfect orientation. You see, Dotty, the Church in which we were raised was not the wrong church; but it was an incomplete church, that which served for the childhood faith of the western races. But now it has been completed. There is a new recension, a mature faith which as yet can be understood by only a few. But with your intelligence I am sure that you would be able to understand and accept it, if you could get over that first hurdle.

We are well, well-disposed, and quite prosperous. This summer is a little oppressive, but it may only be that I am getting older. It has always been said that this is the cleanest city in America, with no coal burned, and the best air by test, with the purest water, and all the buildings looking as though they were only finished yesterday. Now, however, there seems to be a film over everything, though it cannot be seen. Our home has filters, air conditioning, dehumidifiers, and there is no visible dust or dirt of any sort. I bathe four times a day. Yet I always feel dirty.

You are almost grown up now. Come and live with your mother and learn about the new mature way of life.

“I will just be damned if I do,” said Dotty. Dotty didn't bathe very often herself, no more than once or twice a week. She bathed only to get the salt out of her hair and ears from swimming in the Gulf. But she didn't feel dirty all the time. Sometimes she did, but not all the time.

“Now I will explain about music to you,” said Dotty to Jeannie, one afternoon, “now you have taught me the trick, which is to play the instruments themselves. Music was thought by the Hellenes to be the purest of the arts because they believed that it was not material. Sound did not seem material to them. Where was it? What was it? There were the instruments, of course, and the notations. But when a melody comes into my head as it does now, where is it anyhow? It comes from nowhere to my mind. It is immaterial. It is the only form of art indulged by the spirits who are eyeless and without tactile feeling. It is the oldest of the arts as it was before the world; and, being primordial, it partakes of the duality of all primordial things. There was the Celestial Chorus, we still have the echoes in the Adoration of the Lamb.

“And there was the Goat Song.

“Notes of both are always with us. But after the Redemption, the Goat Song went into eclipse. They drove Pan into a valley in Arcadia, and rolled rocks before the entrance. Still he played that damned goat song, and it could be heard outside as notes from it kept seeping into the ballads. So it was for centuries. What's that you are dinging there, Jeannie? Yes, those are goat notes. That old animal gets into the music and makes your hair rise up where you didn't know you had any hair. There is no use being fancy about it. There is just a lot of lust in those goat notes. You can find it in sugar ballads and blue music and old jazz.

“Well, the way it spread after it was partly halted was this: Pan broke out of his valley. I don't know the date. It was right at the start of the High Middle Ages. He got away from his valley and to the shore. He took up with the seamen, and they have been corrupted ever since. He came ashore in South France and there his thing flourished. It spread through Provence. There has been discussion about what the Troubadors were. Why, they were followers of that old goat, and they were nothing else. It came swinging up the road from Langue D'Oc and conquered the West. It took over the façade of Chivalry, and the music behind it was goat music. It still is.

“You can feel it in any hot trombone, in most of the winds. And it's in the piano. When I am playing there are notes that creep in that are not my own.”

“Like this. Dot, like this.”

“You know it is. You are one of Pan's widows, Jeannie. Oh, why did they ever let him out of that valley?”

One day Dotty felt a jolt as of a slight earth tremor. But nothing tinkled, nothing shook. The jolt was in herself. She was full of fear and apprehension and she ran to the outer room.

“Mama, who just went by in the street?”

“I wasn't noticing, Dotty,” said Mary Parisi. “Why do you ask? Go and see.”

Dotty came back pale and shaken.

“Who was it. Dotty? Who was it?”

“There was nobody there. When I got there he was gone.”

“But what is the matter with you? And how do you know that anybody went by? And what if they did? We are on the street. Thousands pass.”

“I have to know who went by in the street,” said Dotty.

CHAPTER XI

She felt the jolt again about an hour later, but it was not so severe. She may have expected it. A man came in and she was curiously interested. He could not haw been the cause, he who went by in the street. But if not he, then who? She didn't even know him, though surely she had seen him before.

“Is that little Dotty still around here?”

“Yes, I am still Dotty. I am on the verge of remembering you but I cannot quite bring it off.”

“Are the ‘Dotty Specials’ still in effect?”

“What? Oh, no. They have been discontinued for a long time.”

“But why did you give up such a good idea?”

“It tended to lead to rough stuff. And then they were parodied. Even the girls down on Post Office Street took them up. Their versions were filthy I'm told but funny. They made the originals seem pale by comparison.”

“Then perhaps I should go down to Post Office Street. I do hate the comparatively pale.”

“If your taste is in that direction you are better off there.”

“You still have your illogic. My tastes are low, and I would not be better off where they lead me.”

Mary Parisi came in.

“Have you broken any good noses lately?” she asked the man.

“Let me tell you about one of them. It looked like a door knocker.”

“Oh, I remember you now,” said Dotty. “You are the one who broke Karl Zaleski's nose for saying crazy things.”

“No. I did it for saying true things that I did not want to be true.”

“Your name is Joe Smith. I remember now. And you lettered the Dotty Specials with a little brush.”

“Let us revive them. I have a nickel. Give me a nose rub.”

“Now I would have to get at least seven cents for one, and at that price I could hardly break even. Everything has gone up. But the Specials are gone forever. They were dynamite. You have no idea how hard it is to stop a man once you let him get started.”

“How long did you keep them?”

“About a week.”

“And how much did you make?”

“I collected about eleven dollars. I figure that several thousand are owing to me, but I cannot count on that.”

“Had you ever any occasion to charge the five percent surtax?”

“Indeed I did. Several times.”

So that was all there was to it. He couldn't have been the one who caused the jolt in her. He was just Joe Smith, an itinerant commercial artist who had been in once, a long time ago and who had started a fight. She hadn't even known him at first. He could not have had such an effect on her.

“But where are you going?” she cried suddenly as he started to leave.

“I am going to make certain trivial arrangements. In half an hour I will be back. I walked past just a little while ago, but I wasn't sure of the place. The town seems turned around to me. I will be here for two weeks. I have waited two years for it. I intend to monopolize most of your time. Mrs. Parisi, will you arrange it so that Dotty can be free? Her hours are likely to be most unpredictable.”

“Dotty can make her own arrangements,” said Mary Parisi.

After he had left she said, “I am not sure that I like him, Dotty. It is true that he broke Karl's nose, but is the enemy of an enemy necessarily a friend?”

“I did not say that I would go out with him.”

“But you are getting ready to go out. Do you remember what he said to you two years ago, Dotty?”

“No.”

“Try to remember, Dotty. It worries me.”

She went out with him a little while that day, and the next and the next. She did not spend all her time with him, but he spent all his time with her; which is to say that he spent all his hours at the Parisi place when he could not get Dotty to leave with him.

Where Karl had used the Gentle Exclusion, Joe used the Leading Understatement and the Insidious Assumption. He also used the Nostalgic Recall and the Immediacy of Experience Play. He had a technique; he had a hatful of them.

It was hard to tell how old Joe was: twenty-five surely, possibly thirty-five. It was also hard to tell how tall he was: six foot surely, six-two — he may have been taller. He was slim; but he had long, muscular hands and wrists, and a spring to his motions that is common to the sons of Pan. It is to Dotty's credit that she knew from the first what it was. The cloven hoof was there, and it does give a resiliency to the whole frame which flat-footed mortals do not possess.

He was browned and crisp, and moved rapidly when he moved. He looked a little like a seaman; a little like a bum; a little like an artist. He was an artist. The lettering and sign painting were only for coffee and beer money.

There were about him several signs of careless poverty. He did not wear socks. He had only a black T-sweater that served both as a shirt and undershirt, and in which apparently he also slept. His pants were multicolor from the wiping of brushes on them. Originally they had been tan. His pack, which was almost a part of him, had straps for both shoulder-carry and hand-carry, like a grip.

It contained artist's supplies, books, several leather portfolios stuffed with papers, a small quantity of whisky, an old straight razor, a .45, an old surf-net and a little fish line, an ancient army mess kit (Canadian or Australian, not American), loose dollar bills but nothing of a larger denomination, a roll of green velvet, a half-dozen decks of cards, old and new, a collection of dice, a pig-sticker knife, a flip-blade batangas knife, four pipes and several pounds of tobacco that he liked, a piano-tuner's pitch whistle, a short bamboo flute, several packs of odd brand cigarettes, a coil of nylon rope and several bridle clips and attachments, a hatchet, a pantograph, and a slide rule. But no clothes, apparently.

He fumbled through all of it to bring out certain sketching supplies. Dotty, who had lately been stricken with the book disease, pulled all the volumes from the pack and lined them up on the bar. There were Lyall's Languages of Europe, Volume IV of the Biblia Sacra (The Vulgate Latin and the Greek of the New Testament on facing pages), the Electrical Engineers' Handbook, Nouveau Petit Larousse, Les Contes Drolatiques, a One Volume Shakespeare, Montaigne in the Pleiade edition, Chaucer in the Modern Library, Das Kapital, and an anthology of poetry which may have been Van Doren's and may have been another. Dotty no longer remembers.

“Ten,” said Dotty, “the unmagical number. Have you anticipated the conversation-opener of our ancestors as to what ten you would take to a desert island?”

“I am on a desert island, in spite of present company. These ten I have taken, though accidentally. Let the question be answered forever. The number remains always very close to ten. I lend books to chance cronies and do not recover them. And I steal about an equal number.”

He set up a triptych, three medium-sized canvasses, and began to draw on them in outline.

“You know of the Clothed Maja and the Naked Maja. I will go beyond that.”

He began to outline three figures which were the same figure: Dotty in a simple dress. Dotty without a simple dress, and a third Dotty whose qualities could so far only be guessed. “Do the eerie students still come in at night?” .

“They still come in,” said Dotty.

“I may need their help a little, in the third panel. For, while I once took anatomy and dissection, I completed nothing. Nor have I had much practice on it of late years; a sheep, a prairie dog, a cat that I chanced on — no more. I have had only one human subject since leaving (being dismissed from) medical school. He was an old time hobo I had picked up and he was near the end of his line when we met. He died about a week later from natural disabilities.

“Since I knew he would not mind, I spent a pleasant half-day taking him apart, and renewed for myself the magic of arrangement and coloration and careful pacing that comprise us all. We are wonderfully made, Dotty.”

“I have heard that we are.”

“I left him there, as he always liked to sleep in the open. I did not attempt to reassemble him. It would have been beyond my power.

“A week or so later, I reached a city, and found that the discovery of him was in the newspapers, and that accounts of the thing made it seem other than it was. It was described as the most sadistic murder of the decade. It was not that at all. He wouldn't have minded the dissection, since he knew that I was interested in such things. He would have found it interesting to watch himself.”

“Perhaps he did watch.”

“Dorotea mia, can you still be a believer — two years after I saw you last? It is not possible.”

Yes, the third canvass was identical in outline to the other two. It would be an anatomical Dotty, a visceral Dotty, cutaway Dotty totally exposing brain, lung, bowel, vein and vermiform.

“You are left-handed, Dotty, or were before you were retaught?”

“Yes.”

“It is a legend that the heart of a left-handed is on the right, as that of a right-handed is on the left. Actually in both, the heart is very near the center only slightly to the left. But with the left-handed it is even nearer the center and has less of a tilt.”

Joe never worked more than an hour at a time. He had a theory that the world would be a happier place if nobody ever worked more than an hour at a time. As it was still quite young in the morning this day, and the labor of art already done for a while, they called Mary to watch the place and went to the beach.

Joe had a strong and intricate voice, larger it seemed, than his frame, which was not small. People would sometimes turn to be sure that it was he talking — it did not sound like him. There are stage actors with voices as strong and flexible but few of these have that roughness. Yet Joe always spoke gently, and always as though it were an exception to do so. It was like a roaring mariner talking softly to a small kitten. Yet Dotty had never heard him roar; she only assumed that a roar was natural.

“I have been living rather frugally just before returning here,” said Joe. “My total expenses for a three month period was three dollars.”

“That's over three cents a day,” said Dotty. “Couldn't you have cut down?”

“Possibly, but only with discomfort. I went up into some baby mountains in a neighboring state, but before I started the trek I bought a hundred pound sack of wheat for three dollars. I was robbed — I should have had it for two dollars and eighty-eight cents. I think he charged me for the sack too. But he was the only farmer who had wheat sacked. Then I went up in the toy mountains and found the place I was born to inhabit. There was a stream through it, and a cascade above and below. I seined out handfuls of minnows which I ate like peanuts. I fished a half-hour mornings and evenings, and my hook seldom came out light. I ate wheat boiled for a basic food, and added to it poke salad and such greens as seemed best. I found a bee tree on the edge of a foothill meadow and took thirty pounds of honey for thirty stings, a fair exchange. I killed a big-horned sheep. I did not say a Bighorn sheep. It was a simple farm ram with big horns, and it came too near to where I lay in wait. I had wild grapes and mountain berries, which were all good except one species which prostrated me for three days. I painted three masterpieces while I was there. It was a paradise, and I discovered that there was only one thing missing.”

“What?”

“You. So I came here at once. And here I am for you.”

“You say this was the three months just passed?”

“Yes.”

This was right at the beginning of summer, and Dotty knew that in no neighboring state had there been wild grapes in the three months past. There would hardly be any till August or September. But one can't go criticising people just because they have holes in their stories.

“And where are the three masterpieces?”

“I left them with a dealer in Houston. The Oil Rich buy Oils. I rather count on hearing from him in the coming week. I have particular need for money next week.”

“You won't need much money if you can live on a dollar a month.”

“But I could hardly ask you to live on so little.”

Now that is the Insidious Assumption. He was full of such.

This was another day, but he was still after her.

“I will be had in only one way,” said Dotty. One might just as well get the thing on a working basis.

“You can put on all the conditions that you want. Dotty. I will fulfill them.”

“This is Saturday. We should go now to the priest if we are going to have banns read tomorrow. They have to read three Sundays before we're married.”

She was kidding when she said that. Lots of people kid about getting married. He thought that he was kidding too when they left the beach and went into town. They went directly to the Rectory. She would bluff as long as Joe did. She introduced him to the priest. No, she did no such thing, she only started to. They had met the priest before. They were on first name basis.

Joe talked to him for half an hour. Joe was a good talker. Dotty said nothing. She sat in amazement. It was arranged that the first reading of the banns would take place the next day and that the wedding would be three weeks from the next Monday. She was in complete wonderment of herself.

“I did not say that I would marry you, Joe,” she murmured when they were once more outside.

“You said that you would be had in only one way. Wasn't that your meaning?”

“That was my meaning. But I didn't say that I would be had by you at all.”

“You can back out of it. You can challenge the banns yourself. Or you can turn and walk away and never see me again.”

“No. It is just that you do things too suddenly. I need a little time to think about this. I am not sure that three weeks is enough.”

It was the Insidious Assumption working in his favor again. Then she became very angry.

“You are nothing special,” she said, “It could be anyone as well as you. It could be any man. I thought I was so smart and it's come to me like this! If I were to fall into this it would mean that you and Karl and Kitty and all the other brainless ones were right.”

“But we are right, no matter what you fall into. It is just that some make a little more issue about falling into it the first time.”

“Just a damned animal! That's the only jolt I felt. I thought it was something special. It was only Pan.”

“His pipes do have a sonic boom. They give a jolt. And I have been called Pan before.”

“Just a damned animal! And I always thought myself so high!”

“Take it easy, Dotty. I'm not really an animal. I never acted to you like one. I have meant everything I said or did.”

“You? I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about me.”

“But, Dotty. I'm sincere. I would never take advantage.”

“Oh, shut up. We're not even talking about the same thing.”

She turned suddenly into one of the Clubs. It was a downtown place where she was hardly known, and the men were talking politics or something.

“I do not say that I voted right,” intoned a florid man. “And I do not say that I voted wrong. But it would not have mattered, as it turned out, which way I voted.”

“There is only one way to tell if your vote was honest,” said Dotty. “Mister, are you listening to me?”

“Yes, girl, I am listening to you.”

“Just ask this: Would I still have voted the way I did if everyone also voted the other way? Would you have?”

“No. I would not have, girl.”

“Then you voted dishonestly, and you are a dishonest man. You cast a craven vote to be with the majority. What was the vote about, anyhow?”

“It concerned our Association. We are chicken farmers. It concerns Poultry. It is quite technical.”

“Oh.” She went out and Joe Smith followed her.

“Who was that girl?” asked the florid man after they left.

“From the Beach. They call her Dotty. I don't know whether because it's her name, or because she is a little bit.”

Dot was still angry with the whole world and everyone in it. She went back to Beach Boulevard and Joe followed her. She stopped in at all the clubs and had fast drinks.

George Dushane was playing the piano at the Little Oyster. He didn't work there then. He was just in there playing with the piano in the daytime.

“Stop that,” said Dotty. “Stop that right now!”

“But I was only running a few notes, Dotty.”

“You were not. You were playing filthy music. You can go to Hell for playing like that.”

“Only if they have not made their quota for the month, Dot; only if the recruitment has been very slow. When their quota is in sight, and I understand they have it by the 20th this month, then they don't put you in Hell for playing like this. I always play like this. What's the matter with this tune?”

“It has hair on it.”

His hand ran along the keyboard like a snake. It seemed not to be a part of him. Dotty felt the hair rise where she did not know she had hair.

The little blonde dice girl from the Chatterbox Club was there. She sang or hummed softly with the music. But was she really singing, or did the sound come from somewhere else? And was she actually the girl from the Chatterbox? Dotty saw her every day — sometimes several times a day. How could she not know if it was the same girl?

Dot reached out and touched her arm. It was like touching a snake. The girl smiled at Dotty, but as a very despondent snake smiles, kindly but sadly. It was the same girl externally. But whatever was inside her today?

And what was she singing? ‘Ne creit Dieu le Fil Sainte Maria’ — was that possible? She was a little square-head girl from Sugarland, Texas. How could she be singing Old French? ‘Plus est isnels que n'est oisels ki volet’ — Was she really singing that? No, of course not! But for a moment it seemed as though she were singing one of those hairy goat songs that came up the road from Langue D'Oc eight hundred years ago.

The little blonde girl was really singing in English, but of some boogie beat. Still it was a goat song in one of its guises, filthy and vital; not in words but in beat.

That Frenchman George Dushane left the horns and hooves on when he played. The last of the troubadors, he called himself, as what musician does not? But he may have been the first of them. He had goat glands in him that made him live so long.

Then Joe Smith was ratting around the edges of the melody with a trombone that belonged to one of the night musicians. The flesh nearly crawled off of Dotty's bones.

It wasn't true that there were only four of them there. Why, the room was full of rutting animals.

She took a taxi and went off, and Joe took another one and followed her. All those ideas back there were just fanciful. It wasn't the background and it wasn't the music. It was herself. Dotty had decided to do something. She had skirted the edge of the pit often. Now she decided to see what it was really like.

She got out at the end of the Sea Wall and walked and then ran down the sand for mile after mile, burning up with anger and evil.

“You are in a terrible uproar, Dotty,” called Joe, “and I don't understand it at all.”

“You aren't supposed to understand it. You are only incidental to it.”

“I have never seen anyone so changeable.”

“I am not changeable. I will change only once.”

She began to run then as though she would run till she dropped. The beach was nearly empty. Joe tackled her and threw her down and sat on her till she was quiet.

“It was much the same time of day that they did it the first time,” said Dotty. “And later it was in the cool of the afternoon that the Lord came looking for them. And right at sunset they were put out of the place.”

“I hadn't thought the time of day was mentioned. Or are we talking about the same two people?”

“We are talking of the same two. I wonder why they did it?”

“Curiosity, Dotty. And Passion. But you have every choice, Dotty, or you don't have to make a choice at all. I have been sincere about all this.”

“No. You wouldn't even know what it was. And you'll be gone tomorrow in any case. One way or another, I'll see you gone. And I do have to make a choice — a life or death choice — an ultimate choice right now. Maybe you are the one who wants to run away before it happens. Maybe you are the one who will be despoiled. You are now afraid of me, you — the rough one.”

“No. I was never the rough one. And I am afraid of you, Dotty. But I will not run away.”

“Not till later. Not till tomorrow.”

It was her choice, not his. He hadn't wanted it that way. He had been sincere. But it was she who took it and offered it. And he was still a son of Pan.

And for such little things souls are lost.

CHAPTER XII

It was as had been said: the loss of Faith comes at once with the smirching. We become like gods, and what sorry gods we become. The light has gone out of the world, and there comes a doubt that there was ever a light. Everything drops into place in a perfect system of logic, like spadesful of dirt falling on the lid of a coffin. And soon it will be leveled over and the grass will start to grow once more. But a meaner grass from a meaner soil.

Once there was a white sheen in the air between the water and the sky. Now the blue of the sky was nothing but light reflected from nitrogen molecules or some such nonsense. There used to be an invisible world as well as a visible one. And there was a high excitement in running from one to the other. Now there was nothing but Immediacy, Practicality, the Dialectic, Humanism, Liberalism, Pragmatism. Words for a world with the light gone out of it.

The pig people had been right. The pig people ruled the world. There was no world but theirs, and Dotty had become one of the pig people.

“I have traded a kingdom for a mudhole,” said Dotty. “I have made myself an animal when I was not entirely so before. I must no longer think so flowery. There is nothing flowery left in the world. Yet I had been warned. When first they left it and they turned back to look, it was no longer there. I wonder why I did it? And if regret will ever grow tired? Have pigs regret after they have settled down to being pigs?”

She went around very early on Sunday morning and told Father not to have the banns read, that there would be no wedding, that it had all been a bitter joke. She was distraught and would not explain further, nor stay to talk to him.

All the malformed people had been right, the rooters, the clay-eaters. There was nothing higher than the clay. The old serpent had been cursed to eat dirt and crawl on his belly. But who had the last word? For the curser disappeared with the curse, and the belief in him faded with the taking of the fruit.

The implications were staggering. Augustine was wrong, Petronius was right. Aquinas was wrong, Voltaire was right. Christ was wrong, Calvin was right. Francis was wrong, Marx was right. Hegel, Nietzsche were right, theirs was the only world. One must learn to live in it without retching. More was wrong, Roosevelt was right. Freud was right, Lenin, Karl Zaleski, Kitty Kark — all the little mice were right, all the toads and night crawlers, all the wenchers and liars and thieves and politicians. All others were hypocrites and fools, bubble chasers.

Well, it was a depressing thought. It made the World a worse place than Purgatory where there was at least hope; almost a worse place than Hell, when Hell still obtained.

Does a pig long remember the time before he was a pig? Does the slug remember? This is to be locked in a foul jail and told that there is no outside. By a new geometry there is an inside but no outside. Only a fool would think of an outside. Joyce was right. Good God! (to speak in the past tense), every empty-headed one of them had been right. Filth is the only diversion worthwhile. What is deceit without truth? What is treason without allegiance? What is to be said against the queers and hop-heads — can they be judged without a standard? By what right is the sadist denied satisfaction? Or the child molester his joy? Who shall abridge the freedom to own slaves? Why deny the racist the right to rule? What is subversion if we are all born subverted? What is murder but the action of matter on matter? What Heaven will avenge the killing of the unborn, since Heaven ended yesterday? What if the minister of the sects preach and recommend mortal sin as a standard? Why is it not as good a standard as any other?

Is it possible to be in Hell and not know it? Are Earth and Hell of the same location, and the latter be entered with the end of belief? Yes, every last crybaby and whiner of them had been right. Damnation! The pinkos had been right, the spit-lickers, the tainted court justices and the senators.

What is wrong with being tainted if the idea of the spotless no longer exists? What is wrong with being a spit-licker? Is spit not as good a food as any, if the bread of life is not?

Dotty told Mary Parisi that she was going to get an apartment of her own.

“I wish you wouldn't, Dotty. You will be in a period of despondency now that you have done this thing. It hits the good girls harder. I will be worried about you if you are not with me for the next few days.”

“What is worry since there is not even a promise of peace? And what thing have I done that you know about?”

“I am not blind. I see at once the change in you. Have you also lost your Faith?”

“I have lost everything. I am as you see me in that third picture there, the visceral Dotty, and not even completed at that.”

Dotty went around to see how many hot checks Joe Smith had passed. He had cashed more than twenty — over a thousand dollars worth. The people had cashed them because he was a close friend of Dotty. They trusted even a friend of a friend when such a friend was Dotty.

Most had not yet been deposited. It was Sunday, and they had been written late Friday or Saturday. She gathered them together and tore them up. She signed notes and I.O.U.s in place of them. Several of the business people were a little sour over the whole thing, so she gave them cash for them — about two hundred and fifty dollars.

A word must be said about Joe Smith. Within a week he was back to make restitution. He really had had money coming. He'd have covered them all before they were called on Monday if he had not fled in confusion. Mary Parisi had to straighten out this part of it. Dotty was not to be found by him. He had, though he said it to the point of nausea, been sincere. He hadn't intended it that way at all. It was the woman who had tempted him. But if it hadn't been Joe Smith, it would have been another at that time.

Dotty was sixteen (seventeen in the fall). She was out of high school. She was her own woman. She started all over.

She could have continued to live with the Parisis, but she could not have brought men to her room there, and she was considering this as a source of income. She took a room across the street, about a block down. She could work at almost any place on the beach, or anywhere downtown, for that matter. She tried to lose herself in work. She went to work at the Smelly Goat. That is not its right name; if you do not know it already you will not find it here. The place is not physically smelly; it is quite clean. Still it deserved its name.

The unbelieving students followed her to the Goat and hung out there instead of at Parisis. They brought the unfinished triptych of Dotty that Joe Smith had roughed in. They tried to get other artists to finish it. They tried to get Finnegan to do it, but he would not. Instead, he did a small portrait of a very beautiful Dotty who had been before. He had hardly known her before. How could he have done it?

Still there was a lot of conversation with the soulless students at night. It is not true that the loss of conversation is one of the deprivations of Hell. There is much conversation there, some of it quite witty. And all is not pitch dark. There is still a gray light, the monochrome after the spectrum is gone.

Catherine Collins came to see her once. How did she know that there was anything to come see her about? How did anyone know that there had been a change, since she kept it to herself?

“It isn't like you to be whipped so easily, Dotty. There was always more to you than to any of us. And it is such a little thing to get back; you can do it in fifteen minutes. That is what Confession is for.”

“What makes you think that I have anything to confess?”

Catherine gave Mary Parisi's answer: “I am not blind.”

Then she said, “I even knew when it happened. I felt that Dotty was in terrible danger. But it is so easy to come back. Come right now. A half-hour from now you will be as good as new.”

“I can't. I have lost my faith.”

“But how could you? I've known people who lost everything else and didn't lose that, however they abused it.”

“So have I. I'm not one of them. I lost mine through pride and curiosity. I listened to the smart talk when I thought it wouldn't hurt me. Nor could it have till I lost my Lorica (didn't I used to use fancy words?), my breastplate (didn't I used to have fancy notions?).”

“But if you lost it really, then you're no better than they. I don't even know what to call them.”

“I call them the pig people, and now I am one of them. Isn't it ironic that they were right all the time? Now I live in a desert. I used to live in a mirage.”

“How terrible, Dotty! You were always the best of us. You went to communion every morning.”

“Perhaps I was a morning type. I notice that most of them are. It irks them to stay in bed in the mornings, and the church is one of the few places open. I don't know what I will do in the early mornings now. In the winter it will be worse. What to do between wakening and daylight? It will be ghoulish.”

“But can't you see the illogic of your position?”

“No, nor is there any. Even when I still had my faith I knew that the position I now hold was one of the two possible logical positions, for there are only two possible. Either there is a world of the spirit, or there is not. If there is, then I was right before. It there is not, then I am right now. But both positions are maintained with perfect logic.

“I used to despise the middle-grounders. But are there really so many of them? Most are down in the ditch with us. There is no agnosticism. To doubt is to disbelieve. There is no unknowing like that. You know one way. Or you know the other. Or you are less than nothing. I do not even despise the sects any longer. What is wrong with the milk-toast Christianity if the living-bread Christianity is seen to be nonexistent? They are only worse than you for choosing a tasteless mirage instead of a beautiful one.”

“I hope I never fall into your state.”

“I hope not, Catherine. Do be careful of it, though. I love you, even though I know there is no such thing. There aren't many of you odd ones left, and I wouldn't diminish you.”

“I pray you again be as odd, Dotty.”

Catherine Collins had always been very intelligent. It was peculiar that she didn't see what even the dirt-eaters saw.

But Dotty didn't stay glum. It was just that now she had to work harder at being cheerful than before, when it was natural. But think of the people who have had to work hard at it so much longer. Always there was a sort of refrain going through her mind.

“How disgusting. Even the lice on the mice were right all the time. Imagine their being right when fine people are still deluded. Even the warts on the pigs were right. All the little scribblers. All the slanted commentators. But what is slanted when there is no straight? The eggheads and the animated monkeys were right. Tired Old Baldy was right. Cigarette is right. Old Homespun is right. Pathos and Rumble-Voice are right. Who is a phoney when nothing is genuine?”

Dotty took a couple of men but found it disgusting and gave it up. She had won the name of being depraved but she didn't follow through with it. She read a lot now. There seemed to be much more time for such than there had been before. She reread Freud and Marx and found them despairingly sound. Russell, Irwin, Hegel — all silly — but all of them right. God was wrong, Balzac was right. After all, they couldn't both be right in their conception of the Human Comedy. Their creations were mutually exclusive.

“There is a bit of mystery about the modern mind,” said Karl Zaleski, “even the modern emancipated mind. It will accept poltergeists but deny spirits. It is sentimental, and yet it is without feeling. It adopts new mythologies sillier than the old. Though dedicated to pleasure it achieves misery; while an older mind dedicated to other-worldliness often achieved pleasure in this world. The untrammeled modern mind accepts charlatans who would have been laughed out of school by the old chained minds.

“Does this mean, perhaps, that our premises are wrong? By no means. It only indicates that adolescence is often sillier than childhood, and that a bridge may be more shaky than either shore.”

But when Dotty listened to them she felt little implications following on big implications.

“By any standard, if there were any standards, it gets sillier and sillier. It means that Francis Bacon was right and Roger was wrong. The intelligence boggles there, but perhaps it is normal for it to boggle. Julian was right, Gregory was wrong. Gibbon, Carlyle, Symonds were right. Kingsley was right. Cramner, Cromwell were right. Wells was right. Macauley was right when he was wrong and wrong when he was right. The Puritans were right. Why not set up the Devil as God? There is some evidence that he at least exists.”

“Yes,” said Simon, “he is the more logical myth. He at least was able to see through all the trimming, to know the world as it is, to put it on a working basis. We owe him a great debt, whoever he was, the heart of the legends.”

Simon and Veronica and Hazel were another group of collegians, not medical students, however. They had not followed Dotty from the Parisis to the Smelly Goat. A little of that talk is all right, but none of them were people who talked only a little. Dotty used to leave them and drink with the inarticulate lechers and punchies, and muse that the world was more simple before it was made so simple.

Hugh McDonald had been looking for Dotty. Mary Parisi told her that he had been looking for her.

“I didn't tell him where you were — not because you said to tell no one (I don't feel myself obliged by that at all) — but because I think he's too nice a boy to be chasing you in your present state of mind.”

Catherine Collins also told Dotty that Hugh had been looking for her.

“I told him long ago that he could do better with you,” said Dotty.

“Well, I know that, and you half-know it, Dot. But Hugh doesn't know it. Half of the people in the world would be better off with someone else. But then inclinations do not always incline according to reason. Or do you believe in inclinations any more?”

“I don't know what I believe nowadays, Catherine. Stop ragging me.”

Dotty had been in jail briefly. She had never been in jail before, except for escapades. This time she was caught flat in a con game. There was a beefy and amorous visitor in town, and she picked him out for it. She got him woozy; she got herself woozy. She brought him, not to her room, but to another room. Then when she had him drooling, she was supposed to scream. Dotty had never tried to scream before. She thought a thing like that would need no practice. But it sounded like a bird chirping.

It did the trick though. Her husband and her brother rushed in indignantly to save her. These two in mundane life were known as Arthur Braden and Karl Zaleski. Arthur, the husband, was going to kill the pleasure-seeker. The pleasure-seeker was named Wesley Fitzcannon and he said it was all a mistake. He had thought that Dotty was a pleasure girl. She had given him that impression, and she had invited him to her room.

“How could I possibly have given him such an impression? He said that he was lonesome, and I invited him up for a cup of coffee. And then he assaulted me. I may have been indiscreet, but who could possibly have taken me for that kind of girl? How humiliating!”

Like screaming, Dotty had thought that acting would come natural to her. It didn't. It was hellish hard. She knew that she was not convincing.

Arthur, her husband, said that he was going to kill the pleasure-seeker, and what is more, he had a gun to do it with. But Karl, the cooler head, prevailed. He persuaded Arthur to settle on the spot, and with only a mild pistol whipping instead of killing Wesley. They settled for everything Wesley had in his wallet, which was a little over four hundred dollars. Then they whipped the fat man some more, dragged him downstairs, and threw him out in the alley. They themselves, Arthur, Karl, and Dotty, left by the street door. They had rented the room only by the hour.

The boys told Dotty had bad she was in the part.

“We will have to go back to Ginger. She understands these things. She is convincing. We shouldn't have done it with someone who couldn't handle her part.”

“I can learn the part. I can learn any part. Never in my life have I failed at something I really wanted to learn.”

“Then practice in private. That was a scream? That? It sounded like a sick turtle.”

“It wasn't supposed to carry to the street. It was only supposed to unnerve him.”

“There is an art to the repressed scream. I doubt if you can learn it.”

Fat Wesley Fitzcannon, however, had only been feigning unconsciousness to save himself a worse beating. He wasn't badly hurt, nor was he a complete dummy. He pushed himself off and went for the cops. He found Tommy Katt and Mossback McCarty, and they went to the room, which was empty as they knew it would be. But Wesley had a vivid gift of description. The two police, who knew everybody on the beach, found it easy to identify them.

Naturally, they were not together. Arthur was watching the Rip Tide Revels. Karl was playing cards in the little room off the big room at the Smelly Goat. And Dotty was upstairs at the Little Oyster.

But they were brought together soon enough and identified and sworn to. At this point Dotty showed a basic weakness which, if the two students had recognized it, would have precluded her selection as a partner. Dotty could never lie when confronted. It was a weakness of which she was never able to rid herself. And here it was the clincher.

Mary Parisi came to make bail for Dotty.

“I don't know who sent for you,” said Dotty. “I know I didn't. I bet it was Old Mossback himself who told you what I was in. Well, I don't need help from anyone.”

“Oh shut, Dotty. I bet you're the last daughter I ever adopt. You break my heart.”

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to talk to you like that. You're the only one it hurts me to hurt.”

So they got her out of that one, but she was a little more sullied. From then on, Mossback, the old patrolman, kept after her much closer.

“I won't have you breaking the law, Dotty. I've been pretty tolerant of you and your wolf pack. But I'll persecute you. I'll persecute the legs right off you. I love you like a father, but I won't be tolerant when you keep getting into real trouble. I have a lot of influence and you're still underage. You wouldn't like it in a correction home.”

“I don't like it very much anywhere any more.”

“You may have your problems. You made them yourself. But your woman wiles aren't going to get you through all this brainlessness. You are a mess, Dotty.”

“Who is to say what is a mess when there is no such thing as order?”

“There hell-take-it is such a thing as order. And you are going to come back to see it whether you like it or not. You're as sweet a little stinker as there is on the beach. But you get hard and you'll look like a hag before you're thirty. I've seen it happen to hundreds.”

“How about Angel-Face Hogan? How about Cora Carter? And Little Dotty Nesbitt? They don't look like hags.”

“You didn't know them ten years ago, Dotty. I did. Compared to what they were, they are hags. There is no real light in them.”

“I used to be able to tell when people were in Grace,” said Dotty. “Now I can't tell. Maybe because I know now that there is no such thing.”

“Maybe it's because you have fallen from it yourself. There are some of us who can still tell.”

Hugh McDonald was still looking for her, and she could not hide from him forever.

“Dotty,” he called after her. She did not turn.

“Dotty.” He ran after her and caught her arm. “Dotty.”

“Hello, mister. How did you know my name?”

“But Dotty, I'm Hugh.”

“Oh, that doesn't matter. I never ask their names. I don't care what names they give me. Were you looking for a girl, sonny?”

“But Dotty, I'm Hugh McDonald. I'm in love with you. You surely haven't forgotten me.”

“Oh, I suppose not. You're one of the children I used to go to school with. There were a lot of them. I seldom see them now. Did you want a girl?”

“But Dotty, only you.”

“Come along then. You do have money, don't you?”

“Money?”

“You've heard of it. It's made out of paper and people use it for different things. But I believe this was the first use made of it. I'll check the next time I'm in the library.”

“Dotty, you can't mean that.”

“Do you think I'm in business for the fun of it? A lot of times it isn't even fun. But if you're broke, I'll let you go for free. I'm charitable tonight.”

“You horrify me.”

“Why? You said you wanted me. I said all right. Why does that horrify you?”

“But, Dotty, I don't want you like that.”

“Then tell me how you do want me. Each man has his own style. I try to be amenable with all.”

“Dotty, I want to talk to you.”

“Well come along then. But I like them better when they don't like to talk.”

They went to her room.

“Do you really live by that, Dotty?”

“No, as a matter of fact, I don't. I was just twisting the knife in you. But I have to melt when I see you so miserable. I tried it that way for a little while. I found it so distasteful that I couldn't continue. I guess I'm not fully emancipated yet.”

“Emancipated? Do you call the free-wheelers emancipated? Dotty, you are in bondage now.”

“I suspect so. But you are also, and you don't know it.”

“I am in bondage to you. But for all that, I'm free. I will do what I think I should do. And if you believe that I'm stilted, why then you will believe it. But I suffer a lot for not having you.”

“I told you that you could have me.”

“Oh, stop that silly mouthing. You didn't used to be a total fool.”

“I was never more than a partial fool. I'm no more than that now.”

“Well, I don't know what's the matter with you. I thought once that I would be the one for you. And when I came looking for you I thought that I'd be able to straighten you out. I guess I'm not the one.”

“No. You will never be the one. You're a nice boy. Nice but never obnoxiously nice. That's from Don Marquis, dear. He was before our time. But you won't stay nice if you keep chasing Dotty.”

“I will chase you no more then. People don't get over things, that is a joke. And I won't get over you. But I'll learn to relegate you somewhere so I can go on living.”

“Gee, I wonder where you'll relegate me to?”

“I don't know, Dotty. But listen to me for a minute, if only with half an ear. With only a little effort you could put your life together again.”

“Did you ever try to put a bubble together again?”

“No. Was it only a bubble?”

“Only a bubble. I was duped. Now I am unduped.”

“Do you think you are better so?”

“Oh no. I was better before. But it can't be regained.”

He left her then. They were still friends, but painful friends.

A lot of people had been leaving her lately. Almost all the dupes had left her. She was alone in the desert with only the free souls for company. But what is a free soul when there is no soul? Only a manner of speaking.

And in such ways did a couple of years go by.

CHAPTER XIII

“I washed glasses today till I was blue in the face,” said Dotty to the stony world.

“An odd effect,” said the seaman.

“Why how droll you are!” said Dotty. The drollest thing was that the seaman was called Frenchie and spoke no English.

This was the first time they ever met, and it was a case of understanding at first encounter. Yet it couldn't have been the first time they met or Dotty wouldn't have known that he was called Frenchie. Dotty never met anyone for the first time; always she had met people dimly before.

“You are a fake,” said Dotty. “When I met you another time you couldn't talk English. Why?”

“Ignorance. And you never met me before.”

“I saw you before, and your name is Frenchie. Where and when did I see you?”

“My name is no more Frenchie than your name is Tex. It will be two weeks this evening, and it was in the Jetsam room. You were the jetsam.”

“Was I blind? Yes, I imagine I was. But why did you pretend then that you spoke no English?”

“Because I did not. I had not spoken it since school, four years, and that not American. I had arrived in port only that morning. But what I had, came back quickly, and I added to it in rapid fashion. There is something to be said for being clever.”

“Yes, it's an advantage to be smarter than anyone else. It leaves time for other things, Frenchie.”

“Is that the case with you, Dot?”

“That is the case. And how did you know that I was Dot? And have you a name, since I may not call you Frenchie?”

“Everybody knows you are Dotty. But not everyone knows that my name is Charles Peisson.”

“Charley, honey, we have quite good muscatel. That red wine you are drinking is sorry stuff. Frenchmen should know good wine.”

“You served me wordlessly when I came in, and you have kept my glass filled. Since you seemed distraught I didn't want to interfere.”

“Well, now we will always give you the best of everything. Are you a sot, Charley?”

“Am I sot? Dull, you mean? I hope not.”

“No. No. I mean are you a rumdum, an alkie, a fish?”

“Not at all. It is just that in a strange port the easiest companionship is found in bars.”

“I have some interesting friends. I would like you to meet them.”

“I have observed your interesting friends, and to me they are not so. They are twisted children always looking for something new.”

“Aren't we all looking for something new?”

“No, Dotty. Only a few peculiar people for whom the world is stale are looking for something new. They are the sawdust people. Do not be one of them. When things are right even old things are always new.”

“Have you any money, Charles?”

“I am quite poor. The pay on our ships is not so high as on yours. I have one more week in port and I will barely make it.”

“I was hoping you'd take me out a few times, since I've come to like you.”

“I will meet you here this afternoon, Dotty, as soon as you're off. Is it at four?”

“Yes. At four. It will be fun to be made love to by a Frenchman. I never had a Frenchman. They say they are good at it.”

“I'm sure I would be if I tried it. But I have no idea of making love to you. I am quite virtuous.”

“You're kidding. Or has the word a little different shading with the French?”

“A little. Not much. And I am not kidding.”

“Nobody could use a word like that without kidding. Nobody but you. I will meet you, but I'm a little doubtful.”

“Then be you doubtful, Dotty. But it is possible to have fun on even such an eerie basis. It has been done.”

“You remind me of someone from a long time ago. You remind me of myself from a long time ago. Gee, was I a snit! But it's hard to place someone out of context. Are you a swell? In French, are you a swell?”

“No. Not at all.”

“Are you of farmers?”

“Fish farmers. We farm the sea. It is the land of the poor.”

“But what part are you from? Me, I'm an Okie.”

“Of course you are. What else could you be? I am a Breton. Isn't it odd that the meanest states should produce the best people?”

“It isn't a mean state. Well yes, it is a little. But sometimes I wish I were back there. This is a far meaner state; the mainland, not the island. And I am not best people. You may be. I am not.”

“Oh yes, Dotty. We are the best, the salt of the earth.”

“If they depended on me there'd be a lot of it unsalted. But if you're Breton, then you're not really French. You're a little bit Irish.”

“Everybody is a little bit Irish, Dotty. Otherwise there'd be no point in the world at all. We are fellow Celts, plague take us both. We are the ragged people of the world, the urchin people. But we're wonderful folk. Ma gaffe, Dotty, but we are wonderful.”

“Yes, I know it now. I had forgotten how wonderful I was, what with the ditch I had fallen into lately. But now you begin to set me to rights.”

“Ah well, I will get you out of your fossé, or maybe I won't. I might just leave you down there and push dirt in on you.”

“I don't care. Everyone else does. But it isn't a fossé, it's an abîme. Will I have to teach you French too, Charles? It's a big ditch, not a little ditch.”

“So I will cover you up deeper. Or I will more excel at getting you out. And I will meet you at four o'clock with rope and peton.”

“Wait! As you stand there in the door I can tell that you are in Grace.”

“God over my head, I should hope so, Dotty!”

“I can still tell sometimes. Part of my power is back.”

Dotty ran around with Charles Peisson for a couple of days, or nights rather. She thought at first to shield him from the wolves. Then she thought of shielding the wolves from him. She was of the wolves now, and it seemed disloyal to allow them to be slaughtered by one of the deluded lambs. She would argue sometimes on the side of the wolves. Then she would fall silent. Later she would catch herself arguing, though silently, on the side of the lambs: arguing much as she had when she was still one of the dupes.

“It isn't that you are all especially stupid,” said Charles when he was with the rootless wonders one night. “In point of fact, only three of you are that, and if you are curious I will name names. Two others of you are of a qualified stupidity and four of you could pass for sane on a dark night. It is simply that you are unpracticed in controversy. You are pitifully inadequate. One almost wants to help you in your helplessness. Now in France there are (Believe me there are; I am not simply trying to pull an everything-better-at-home foreigner line on you) amazingly intelligent atheists who confound, challenge, reason, all but convince. They break your lances like cure-dents. What is that in English?”

“Toothpicks,” said Kitty Kark.

“Is that so? What an odd word. Drawing on that strongest of created intelligences which they know how to tap, they use the spirit world to disprove the spirit world. They have cisterns so like the living water as to deceive all but the most astute. And there are millions of them, the keenest minds in the world. When one has lived with their shadow for a few centuries he learns what the thing is.

“You are like children. You have none of their intelligence and confrontation. You are only little eroding gutter-runs. You are none of that black river. You have none of their cleverness. Only their hate.”

If he had been anyone else they would have disliked him for his pointed remarks. But Peisson had charm. Charm, and the directness of a hornet.

“It has been said by one who was an angrier critic of you than I am that you (you who have been taught to call yourself ‘liberal’ by those who operate you) have no analogy on Heaven or on Earth, and only the most dim one in Limbo; that you have almost proved your points in yourselves: that man is no more than dirt, by being only dirt yourselves; that man is soulless, by being yourselves without souls; that there is no spirit, by being yourselves unspirited; you in this somewhat unique — How does one end a sentence in English? Had I a verb, Dotty? Did I use one?”

“I think so. I am not sure.”

“And yet there is precedent for you. There is the Golem, the artificial man manufactured by tenth-century Jews of the Persian Gulf for slaves; there is the obligated Genii of the more southerly Arabians; there is the Zombie of Africa and the Indies. And there is the robot of legend and science fiction.

“Even the institution of black slavery has a parallel in you. You are the ideal of which it failed: total submissiveness and soullessness. For the essence of the Golem, the Zombie, is that he be both obedient and predictable. Now there are none so predictable as you. You scratch in unison and you bleat together. To a stimulus you have a reaction as definite as a natural law.

“Suppose that an honest and intelligent man, and there are such, of enough prominence to merit press mention should allude to a fundamental truth, and clothe it favorably in a fresh and new-minted guise. Every angry scream of every little piglet is predictable. We know which five of your senators will whine first and in the wiliest fashion. We know what three of the magazines will first bring their littleness to bear. We know what dishonest churchmen of which externally dignified creed will add their dismal drone, reiterating their only dogma, that certain of the entrenched mortal sins of mankind should continue their sovereignty, and that any touch of truth should be treated as a deadly virus.”

“Do all drone, Charles?” asked Simon.

“All of that sort drone. There is the ministerial drone, there is the senatorial drone, there is the demagogic drone. Do you know what the voice of the Devil is like? You must have heard it, since you all heed it. It is just that same drone as all his children use.

“That was the beginning of his troubles. In the celestial choir his tunelessness stuck out like a sore pinion. He couldn't sing; he of the bright intelligence could not sing; he was not in tune with the spheres. He couldn't chant; he couldn't carry a tune in a corbeille. He was told by the choir director to stand silent and worship while the celestial music rolled in tribute to the Creator.

“To stand silent! The heavens reeled at the very suggestion. They have not stopped reeling yet. How could the master droner ever stand silent? It was more than spirit and ectoplasm could bear. For that he revolted; he and the smaller sound-offs of less shining intelligence. It wasn't for pride that they revolted. It was for their inability to stand silent. That inability they have yet. It is always the mark of them. I tell you that I do hate a talkative man.”

“I was just beginning to like one,” said Cora English.

“But you digress, Charles,” said Dotty.

“A little. But to continue the digression. There is a serum that they use to counteract their drone. They take a little snake venom which they have always on hand, for many of them exude it themselves, and they mix it with a great quantity of unction, unholy unction. With this they butter and baste the old devil drone, and name it Silver Tongued. In the present century there has been, in nearly every nation, one silver-tongued serpent who deceived the people. And it was he in your own country who in best opinion most dubiously excelled.”

“You are bitter about this,” said Kitty Kark. “Or are you? You don't sound bitter, and I'm not sure but what you're having fun with us. But it is no wonder you can predict reactions. From the things you say, it would appear that you are used to provoking strong reactions.”

The girls liked him though, Kitty and Cora, and Veronica and Hazel, and Estelle. Had it not been for their interest in him, Dotty might not have been so interested. She would not let anything be taken away from her. Not that she was a dog in a manger.

“Isn't manger a funny word?” asked Dotty aloud. “For the first time in my life it came to me just how funny it is. Whoever heard of a word like manger?”

“Are you out of your head?” asked Karl Zaleski. “What made you all at once think of a word like that, and think that it was funny?”

“It occurs in two fables, and as far as I know, no longer anywhere else in the world. And it is funny,” said Dotty.

“The root is still in French,” said Charles. “To eat. It is only an eating trough. And this is something that nobody in the world knows except myself. The dog in the manger had the mange, from the self-same root, a disease eating at his hide. It is that which made him so cranky. Otherwise he would have been willing enough to move and let the ox feed. “

“And whenever I see a disposition to crankiness in those of your persuasion, (it is commoner in those of your persuasion) I am charitable and say to myself, ‘Perhaps the fellow has the mange.’ I look, and it is so: invariably mangy through the hide and pericarp, mangy to the core.”

“Do not look at me like that, Charlie,” said Arthur Braden. “I am not mangy.”

“Little scabrous brother, you are mangy. You should all of you see an apothecary. He may have a preparation to ease you.”

But the response was not really predictable. Charles was wrong there. They took him in good spirit and with much interest. Karl Zaleski was the only one who ever became irritated with him. Charles was always unimpressed by the Distinguished Association Device, and this was a main trick of Karl's. It puzzled him that anyone would be unimpressed by it, and he persisted:

“What makes you think you are smarter than all the great minds? For almost all of them are on our side. Do you think you're smarter than Einstein?” asked Karl.

“Certainly — setting aside much posthumous knowledge as he may have acquired, I hope not the hard way — I would hope to heaven I were smarter than he. As a philosopher he was pitiful, absolutely childish, pathetic. Politically his naïvete was fantastic, and his capacity for assimilating error almost unequaled. He did have a talent for speculative abstract physics (not for mathematics, that is not the same as abstract physics, he had no trace of talent for mathematics); but even this one talent of his had only as every man should have one talent. His speculations were stimulating, but not unusual, and often wrong. He was not impressive as a man. A mythology was built up about him by the half-people. They tried to make him in their own image. He was better than that, of course; better than the character given him by the liberati and journalists. But he had no more license on account of his one talent to pontificate on Religion and Philosophy and Politics than a plumber or a lottery winner has; no more, and no less.”

“The witness is too longer-winded,” said Karl. “He will confine himself to yes and no answers. Do you consider yourself smarter than the researchers for the Funds who invariably report for our side?”

“Yes.”

“Do you believe yourself smarter than ADA, Unesco, the great liberal publications, the majority (almost the totality) of literary criticism, the senatorial voices and those of the great labor statesmen who are almost all on our side?”

“Yes. I believe that I am smarter than they.”

“It must make you very proud to be so smart. Don't you tremble just a little from the grandeur of your position?”

“A little. There is some danger of pride, even though the position is, as it were, inherited, and has to be more maintained than acquired. It may be that we are given powers beyond our virtues, and we do fail, in large measure, to maintain the position that we were born with. Yet we should not overly talk ourselves down, lest we seem to talk down our truth. As the Great English Poet said:

‘It is something to be wiser than the world,
It is something to be older than the sky’ ”

“Wiser than the world you do claim. But how older than the sky?”

“I don't know, Karl. I never understood that line myself. But it has a majesty to it.”

Charles Peisson was of a physical type that has been in fashion several times. Those who do not like it may call it the bouncing monkey type. He was a short man, and not bulky. He was a gymnast, a private athlete, a brindled cat. Mexicans sometimes have that power of motion of the little man who is not little. And Japanese, and Puerto Ricans, and as here, a Frenchman. He looked like a circus tumbler. He looked like a fisherman. He wasn't dark, he could still sunburn. A gray-eyed Frenchman, or Breton, rather. He said he was twenty-two. He may have been a year younger. The French often name the year they are in, not the one they have completed.

Charles Peisson got Dotty to go to the Wooden Ship. She was known there, but it had not been one of her hangouts. Charles liked it better than either the Little Oyster or the Smelly Goat. Actually it was smellier than the Goat, and its patrons, most of them, poorer and dirtier. But it was the hangout of that other French Charles in town, Charles Le Marin, and Peisson sought his company.

One day a Yankee reporter, searching with his finger for the pulse of the times, came into the Wooden Ship.

“Have you any racial prejudice?” he boldly asked Aloysius McGivern.

“Indeed I have,” said Aloysius. “I am the most prejudiced man you are likely to find in a long day's ride. I am absolutely eaten up with it.”

“Good. You are just the man I want to talk to. Do you believe they should be segregated?”

“Segregated? They should be slaughtered, strung up, hacked to pieces, drawn and quartered. It would be a happier world if they were all nine feet under.”

“Do you believe — I have found two today of that opinion — that they should be sent back to the land of their origin?”

“No. T'would be too difficult. It is but impossible to put the venom back into the snake. I say kill them where you find them. Mercy in their case is misplaced.”

“Yours are quite the strongest opinions I have encountered. Even the most Prejudiced I have met would at least allow the negro some sort of life.”

“Negro? Are you mad, man? They are our brothers in Christ. How could we follow the precepts of Holy Mother the Church and discriminate against a man because of his color? The Church is color-blind. To her all souls are golden.”

“But you just said — ”

“Man, I wasn't talking about the negro. I was talking about the Englishman. I hate an Englishman and I can't abide a Scotchman. I say kill the bastards where you find them.”

“I can't use words like that on the news service.”

“Slaughter the seven letter abominations. They are a blight on the earth.”

“Is this also the opinion of your Holy Mother the Church?”

“It is my own opinion, coldly expressed, and concurred in by all too few. We will leave the Church out of this. To my sorrow she has never taken a stand against this offensiveness.”

“I don't like Germans,” said Charles Le Marin. “Put that down. I don't like Swedes, either. I was whipped by a Swede only last month. He was a big Swede. But the next time I meet a little Swede there may be a different outcome. Why don't you write it down. Aren't you interested in racial prejudice?”

“Well yes, but this isn't what I had in mind.”

“I have a special prejudice against Texans,” said Dotty. “All good Okies have a prejudice against Texans. Or it may not be a prejudice at all. I believe it is just good sound judgment to be against Texans.”

“I hate a Yankee,” said Jaime Prescott. “There was never an honest one; there was never a decent one. They are liars and cheats and thieves. They are stupid, lazy, dishonest, and moreover they are not courteous to women. I never saw one who measured up to my idea of a man. You're a Yankee, aren't you?”

“I believe that I have all the information I can get here,” said the reporter.

“You will write down that we're a remarkably prejudiced people, won't you?” asked Dotty.

“I certainly will,” said the reporter, and left.

“Have fun,” called Dotty.

“Do you have a spot lantern, Lazarus?” Jaime Prescott asked the proprietor.

“I have.”

“I'd like to borrow it. I already have a frog sticker and a gunny sack. I may just go frog hunting tonight. I like frog legs for breakfast.”

“Oh, not for breakfast,” interposed Charles Peisson. “They are for supper. Some rub them lightly with lemon before frying, but I use white wine. I'd be glad to fix them for you.”

“What does a frog know about frog legs?”

“Oh, you mean you might go hunting for us? Well, get your sticker and your lantern. We will be out tonight.”

But most of them at the Old Wooden Ship liked the Frenchmen.

One day Charles Peisson said to Dotty: “I've signed on. They'll finish loading today. I'll have to leave in the morning.”

“Leave? How can you leave? Where will you go?”

“Rio, and São Paulo. It's a load of sulphur. They use a lot of it there. They're industrializing.”

“But how can you leave? I've just discovered that I don't want you to go. You might get another girl.”

“Well, I hope so. I like girls.”

“But I didn't know till just now that I wanted to be your girl. Can we write to each other?”

“Anything that will pass through the mails.”

“When will you be back?”

“In the natural course of shipping I might get to this port every four or five years.”

“Then take an unnatural course. Get back here quickly.”

“I will try. I'll make an effort to find ships to this destination.”

“Charles, we never got around to anything. We never got around to talking about things. But I'm not really a tramp.”

“You come quite close, Dotty.”

“But I needn't be always.”

“You said that you were now unduped, and that you were beginning to like it in the ditch.”

“Oh, I lied, I lied. I really don't like it. I'll change, it's impossible, but I'll change.”

“Don't panic, Dotty. You will find other fellows. I will find other girls. There are some things that just can't be brought off.”

“Oh, Charles, don't leave me now.”

“But you told me you were as tough as old boots, and that you loved nobody but yourself, and her not very much.”

“Old boots wear out. And I'm such a liar you should know better than to believe me. I'll perish if you leave me.”

“Then you will have to perish a little. It's hardly ever fatal. And because I've had a good time here, I'll sign back this way. With luck I will make it in eight or ten weeks.”

“I'll count the days, the hours, the seconds.”

“Make yourself a handy table then, Dotty. There are 86,400 seconds in a day 604,800 in a week, 2,592,000 in a thirty-day month, and 2,678,400 in a thirty-day month. I will be back before February, so there is no need to work it out for a twenty-eight day month.”

“Oh, thank you, Charles. You don't know what a comfort it will be. And I'll set my watch. I haven't set it for two years. It's an hour and ten minutes slow and I haven't even cared. And Charles, about those girls in São Paulo — ”

“What about the girls in São Paulo, Dotty?”

“Anything they can do I can do better. You remember that.”

CHAPTER XIV

Dotty had often, in her own way, been able to talk to the Lord, and she did so now.

“You and I have made two bargains. You broke one, and I broke one. Oh, it's all right to say that the bargains were unilateral ones and that I had no concurrence from You. But I, at least, was in good faith.

“Now we have a further complication. I no longer believe in you. And You, I am afraid, do not believe in me. But there is something I must ask. Can I have him? Can I have him?”

She waited for a long time but there was no answer. It was late afternoon in the Church. It was not a confession evening, but an old priest was puttering around. He came by.

“Do you want to go to confession, Dotty?”

“O hell no! You know I don't go any more. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to say that. But this evening, at least, I am not ready, Father.” He went away.

“You thought You could trick me that time. What an obvious maneuver. But I am not so easily tricked. You want it all Your way. I have very little to trade, and You have everything. Can I not have him? I know that I come as a cripple. I am maimed and I shall never be well. I think I am blighted from birth. Oh well, he knows that and You know that.”

There was no answer. There was nothing like an answer.

“Be You not silent with me lest I be like those in the pit.” Was that the way it went?

“Deus meus, ne sileas a me; nequando taceas a me, et assimilabor descendentibus in lacum. O my God, be not Thou silent to me, lest if Thou be silent to me, I become like them that go down into the pit.

“I will pledge You; I will pledge without any strings. I will try to remake what I broke, to put the bubble together again. Like a spider I will start a new web. I will be a weaving woman.

“I cannot say credo. I can only say utinam possem credire. You are surely used to bad Latin. There may be nobody who has been the object of so much bad Latin as Yourself.

“Well, can I have him for a year if I pledge for life and forever? Will you not answer me? It costs me everything. Nobody knows if it ever costs You anything. Can I have him for a year?”

She waited for a long time. There was no answer within or without.

“A year isn't very long. You have more years than You can use. Nobody has so many years. ‘In the beginning, in the brightness of the saints, before the Day Star.’ You have the advantage of us. Lend me one of the years that went before the Day Star. I am only on the Day Star for a little while. Lend me one of the years You lavished on the pterodactyl; they had eons on end. Give me one of the millions that You allowed the king-sauroi. You gave Behemoth time to mate and thrive. You were good to Whales and Dragons. You provide for Sparrows. I am worth many sparrows: You Yourself said that I was. You made a green jungle especially for the Sloth. You made rivers for the Catfish and mesas for the Pumas. You powdered the earth for the Worms to eat, and built box-elder trees for the Red Squirrels. All I'm asking is one year with him. If I were God, I'd give freely. If I were God and You were Dotty, You'd see an outpouring of kindness that would put new juice in the old planet. If I were God I'd do things for a hundred different people this very night.”

There is a living silence in a Catholic Church just after it gets dark, when the only light is the red one at the tabernacle, and the white candles in the alcove by the Blessed Virgin's altar. It is never a question of being alone there. A dog who wanders in will know that there is someone there. A person can often feel a presence when, being alone, another approaches, though unheard. A person can always feel that presence here.

“I know now that You are there. But You will not answer me. I am assuming that you answer once more. While You have not answered You have not said no. I will go to work again. I will be a weaving woman. I will make myself another garment. I pray that You find it worthy.”

This was the period of the first widowhood of Dotty. She sat one afternoon in the Old Wooden Ship and wrote a letter to Charles Peisson.

Now I am going to scare you off completely. I will lose you and perish. You say that it is seldom fatal. Well, comparatively it is. And comparatively I have been dead for a week. But the prey should be warned. I knew a hunter once who blew a whistle when he had a deer lined up. He would always give it a chance to break.

I have blown my whistle. You are warned. I will marry you if I can, even though I have the feeling that we are spooked from the start. My state still is not good. I am crippled in soul. I am not beautiful there. I have talked this over with God and with several of His servants. They are the most indefinite bunch that one ever tried to get satisfaction from. It is easy to get the reputation for Holy Wisdom if you don't have to solve mundane problems. The big stuff is easy.

There is no great trick to making a mountain or lining up a constellation. I could do it myself with a T-square and one of those things that seamen use with a sighter and an arc scale and a lead bobble on it. It isn't hard to set a comet in course. You just have to understand the principal of the parabola and of mass and its equivalency in electrical charge. And there's a formula for it if you forget how. It isn't any harder to make an elephant than it is to make a hen — if you have the proper workshop for it.

But can He do the hard things? Can He solve Dotty's problems? I hope that He can. You are most of Dotty's problems, Charles.

“Dotty is crying,” said one of the customers. “She is writing a letter and crying at the same time. It will be a salty letter. Are you crying for your Frenchman, Dotty?”

“Yes.”

“A Frenchman isn't worth crying about. Now I know a man who is worth crying about. He is three-eighths Irish, and an eighth Mexican; and a quarter English, and an eighth Muskogee Indian, and an eighth German. That is the kind of man who is worth crying about or laughing with. Not only that, but he has a car and an extra rod and reel and a bucket of bait. And he has heard a report today that they are biting at the bayou. He is willing to drive there and rent a boat and try the report. Isn't that more fun than crying for a Frenchman?”

“It may be. But this is the day I must cry.”

She wrote some more in her letter to Charles Peisson.

You are warned. You can avoid this port like a plague port. I am the plague. I told you about the girls at São Paulo, that I could do anything better than they could. I was uninformed. I have since talked to a man who is an expert on those girls. He says that they are the best in the world; that I would be hooted off the street there. Do you have a Carioca? Don't get a Carioca, Charles. Come home and marry Dotty. She loves you. What there is of her that isn't maimed, she loves you.

She wrote other pages. She even wrote a page in French, though Ouida had to go over it and put the accents on the vowels.

“They won't be right, but they will be better than nothing,” Ouida told her. Then Dotty wrote another page and sealed it and mailed it off. She looked up a seaman who was going to Rio and instructed him to find Charles wherever he was and tell him how much she loved him.

We weren't very well acquainted with Charles Peisson that first time. He was in town only a short while, and most of us paid little attention to him.

What did he look like? Well, there is a painting by a painter whose name we do not know, though others may know it well enough. It is of Tobias and the Angel Raphael and a fish. Well, Charles looked a little bit like Tobias. He looked a little bit like the Angel. And damned if he didn't look a little bit like the fish. This may not give you the correct idea. The best way is to have seen him yourself. But to Dotty he was everything.

Dotty in this, her first widowhood, became a weaving woman, as she had promised and tried to fashion a new garment for herself. In this she was aided by Soft-Talk Susie Kutz. The real identity and secret of Soft-Talk Susie Kutz will not be given here. It strains credulity, and strained credulity is poor fare for those needing nourishment.

In the World, Susie worked at the Old Wooden Ship, and she had a heart of gold set with sapphires and those other stones, the little blue ones. Dotty began to accompany Susie every morning to early mass, though as yet she had not returned to the sacraments. She worked every day now and hard (Dotty, that is; Soft-Talk Susie had always done so). She was kind to strangers and even to friends. She read a lot and she meditated at the beach. She began a new web like a bridal spider starting her home. She spun fine silk and launched it, still with no real promise of hope, but with the beginnings of joy. And she bought a house.

It isn't very hard to buy a house. If you have a thousand dollars you can start to buy one. It has been done with less. Dotty bought a house. It was a terrible house, but from the kitchen window one could see the Gulf.

It hadn't been painted since the time of the Flood. In quasi-scripture there are two floods, that of Deucalion and that of Noah, and these are believed to have been the same. In clear history there are also two floods, that of Noah, and that of Galveston at the time of the tidal wave. These are not the same, but the latter is a type of the former.

There are cities that have never been punished by God. Galveston is not one of them. It was once destroyed like Sodom and Lisbon and Port Royal. It was destroyed — this on the authority of an old negro preacher who may be the wisest man in town — because of the goings on on Old Tremont Avenue and Post Office Street. The goings on have largely returned. There may be a special destiny for the towns that God has destroyed. At least they were not beneath His notice. But the house that Dotty bought had had its back broken in that old flood fifty years before.

Dotty could not find the color the house had been before. She wanted it to be the same color. She thought that the original color must have had the wisdom to blend with its surroundings. But she could not find even the roots of the paint. It was all gone.

An old negro — old negroes have better memories than old white men — told her that when he was a boy the house was light gray and the shutters were blue. It was a pretty house, though not a new one, even then. She took him to the paint store and he selected the colors from old memory.

Dotty wire-brushed the place. It took her the off-hours of three weeks. Then she carpentered it up, replacing all bad boards and making it tight. That took a month.

“It still is not seaworthy,” said one of her friends, a ship's carpenter of whom she had asked advice. “It would leak. It would not ride out a squall. But as long as you stay on land with it you should be safe.”

“This is a house, not a ship,” said Dotty.

“Well, I am a ship's carpenter. I don't know anything about houses. Only don't try to put to sea in the thing.”

She roofed it then and put on new shutters. She painted it. With the help of friends she put in a bathroom. It was an old-fashioned house and had not before been so appointed.

A friend gave her a coffee maker that had once been in a ship's galley. It would hold two hundred cups. Dotty always liked to have plenty of coffee if people came in.

She borrowed a coaster wagon from a little boy and made several dozen trips with it. Then she told all the neighbors not to throw their beer bottles in her yard any more. She was going to try to keep it clean.

There had once been a courtyard and a path of oleanders. After the weeds were cleared, the oleanders were still there. There were two hideous palm trees in the yard. She climbed up on a big ladder with a saw and cut off the dead fronds. She chased out the rats that were living in the tops, and tore up their nests.

She put an old iron table and chairs in the courtyard. She put up an old ship's lantern and a ding-bat bell on posts, in case he should ever get lonesome for the sea. She spaded up the sidewalk and got a truckload of fresh new-crushed clam shells and raked them shining smooth.

It was the best-looking house in town, except for the fine houses, and these which had more to go with. Well, it was the best house that had ever had its back broken and had stood derelict for half a century. You can't make a silk purse out of sows' ears, it has been lamely said. Whoever said that knew neither silk nor sow.

It is all in the way you slit them when you skin the animal.

Dotty had become reconciled with the Parisis. She had become reconciled with many people. And she had been dropped by the unduped students. They showed little inclination to follow her from the Goat to the Old Wooden Ship.

She was not much in the company of vicious people at the Ship, nor were there many of them there. The vices still practiced by some of the patrons in their weakness were the old-fashioned ones. There were no hop-heads there, no deviates or queers or pinkos; no atheists, no shriveled or pig people. And they also had their virtues: generosity in all things, even money, ungrudging friendship; and the most damnation-open-handed heartiness you are likely to meet along the whole beach.

The Ship was also the house of champions. The best checker, chess, and domino players in town played there; the best poker and pitch players; the best at cribbage and pinochle.

The Ship was only half a block from the Big Oyster, half a block from the Raviola Inn, half from the Salt Water Chop House, half from Barbecue Ben's. There is no other bar anywhere within half a block of four of the most famous eating places in the world. It is not likely that there ever will be. And there is no other bar which has, from both front and side windows, such an excellent view of the sea.

Moreover, you will find a sort of people here that you are unlikely to encounter in the plusher places in New York and Miami Beach. One reason for this was given by Sour John (John Sourwine) who travels much. He said that some of those places are now so choosy that they will no longer serve a man in his undershirt.

It is their loss. They will never see Indian-Given Gavin or Hard-Shell Pugsley, nor know Dry-Gulch Gavaldos.

They call him that because every time he comes in, if he comes in twenty times a day (and he does) he will clutch his throat and protrude his tongue and hang onto the bar like one dying of thirst while he bangs on the bar with his other hand. He does this till they bring him a beer. It is all put on, he is never as thirsty as all that, nor is the service so slow that one could die of thirst before being served.

They will not know Kidney-Stone Stenton nor Buffalo-Chips Dugan, nor William J. Forsythe Jr.

William J. is a girl, and that is not her name. Mossback McCarty had once been on the way of arresting her for hustling. She had not been hustling, she said, she had just been asking different men for a light. Well, why did she have to ask nine different men within two minutes? Well, her cigarette kept going out was why. Then Mossback asked her for identification. She brought out the wrong thing. It was a gold cigarette lighter with the name of William J. Forsythe Jr. on it. It was not her own, she had stolen it. ‘Well, William J., with such a lighter you have no need to solicit nine different men for a light within two minutes. You had better give up the practice,’ Mossback told her. They still call her William J., and have forgotten her real name.

There was Copper-Bottom Cody and Sulphur-Bottom Sullivan. And there was Gun Boat Thompson. Gun Boat was a dog, not a man. And when Gun Boat lies down on the floor you walk around him. Don't try to make him move. It is as much as life and leg are worth to try to make him move.

In the Wooden Ship were found the prettiest girls in town: Kitty Coyle, Vivian Gillam, Catherine Cadensus, Angel-Cake Argal, Mercedes Morrero, Ouida. Dotty herself was a real ravisher. And Soft-Talk Susie Kutz could not be described without lying.

There were three rather odd men who sometimes came there: Alexey Ivanovich, Herman the German, and Wentworth Arbutnoth. These three were gamblers, the most dedicated gamblers in town. Sometimes they were successful gamblers. But when they came to the Old Ship they had been unsuccessful and wanted to borrow two dollars, five, a dollar to get back in a game. But they almost always paid their debts, and often, when they had money, they treated.

Once in Roulettenburg, Alexey had won — in a single night — one hundred thousand florins. But that had been a long time ago. Herman had won ninety-four thousand rubles on a single card from Chekalinsky. But that, too, had been a long time ago.

And Wentworth had won three mule loads of gold dust at the old Faro House in Rimrock. It isn't there any more.

Now the oddity of these three was that they always dressed in the costumes of another century. Moreover, each had the mark of his profession on him. Alexey had an old bullet wound in his temple, self-inflicted after a disastrous evening long ago. Herman was quite mad, though quietly so. And Wentworth had no thumbs. They had been removed many decades before by angry opponents because of his cheating at cards.

These played at the Bonanza Room, at the Treasure Island, at the , at the Fat Chance, at the Chatterbox. They had played more years than anyone could remember. When they were down to their last coin it was likely to be an odd one, like a Marie-Theresa Thaler, or a Friedrich D'or.

Dotty and Soft-Talk Susie Kutz pulled the two shifts at the Old Wooden Ship. When Dotty was not working at the Ship she worked on her house.

Then it was finished, and the term of her first widowhood was now drawing to a close. There was a chance, a gambler's chance that she could pull the thing off.

CHAPTER XV

Perfection is nearly always impossible, but it is never difficult. Which is to say that if there is any difficulty to it, any lack of ease, then it has already failed of perfection. All perfect things are easy. But they are not frequent.

The married life of Charles Peisson and Dotty was perfect. From the moment that Charles returned to town, everything was perfect. The mark of perfection is its very simplicity. Charles had a knack for untying knots, for resolving difficulties. The knack does not consist of ignoring the difficulties nor in skirting them. It doesn't even consist of facing them and conquering them in the old copy-book fashion, though apparently they are faced and conquered in another fashion. Or some of them are never conquered at all. Part of the idea is just not to be difficult about difficulties.

If the rest of the idea were understood, then everyone would have perfection; and they do not.

Their house was not built on rock. It was built on sand and cockleburs and crushed clam shells. But their building it so was not so foolish as a misreading of scripture would indicate. It is not there indicated that the highest ideal is to have a house built on rock, or even to have a house at all. The Son of Man had nowhere to rest his head. And the Children of Light, when they were still so, needed a second shirt. The house (we haven't been talking of the physical one, of course) of Charles and Dotty was really part flying machine and part tent in the desert. But for them it was perfect.

‘Sufficient unto the day’, and ‘All else will be added’ were elements of it, and ‘He knows you have need of these things.’

It may seem that this is a fanciful description of the basis of their marriage, with the real elements ignored. It is no such thing. It is a description of the real elements, with the fanciful given the unimportance they deserve. Planning and saving are of importance, but not of first importance. Position and prestige are of none at all. Pride has better meanings than to be applied to the luggage of the world.

However, it all had a time and place. They were married in 1950 probably, or a year very near to it, in the summer. July, as a month, would not be far wrong. It is all written down at the Church. You can go and see it in the records.

Dotty was out of the ditch. Charles was right. It had been a fossé, it had not been an abîme. It was quite a shallow ditch; there should never have been any real difficulty about getting out of it.

Where do people go for a honeymoon when they are already in Galveston, the only real place for one? Since it is necessary to travel, and the second-best place in the world is New Orleans, there was little choice.

They were not unsupplied. Charles believed that it showed a mean spirit to refuse money kindly given. There was money from the Parisis. There was quite a fine sum from Colonel Keen, Dotty's foster father. Dotty of old would probably have returned it with a cruel note. Dotty as reconstituted by Charles Peisson did not.

“We are told that it is more blessed to give than to receive,” said Charles. “But we should not underrate the blessings of receiving. There is a real glow to it. It is surely the second most wonderful thing in the world.”

Little Dutch Eckel lent them his car. Ouida Garrard said she would phone her aunt (no, not her aunt, her cousin; not that either, her mother's cousin) to fix up rooms for them. She had a lot of rooms. Soft-Talk Susie told them people to see there. Tippio told them people to see, and so did Basin Street Becaud. George Hearn told them places to have fun, and Finnegan told them where they could sure have fun.

The Saint Noire would be in port there. Peisson had shipped on it before and as it happened he would again. He had many friends among its men.

Then, with a minimum of fuss, they went away. There was a reception given for them at the Parisis. There was another one at the Old Wooden Ship. It is still going on there in a way. For some of the people who came for it never left, nor stopped celebrating. It is just that they have forgotten the occasion of it.

But Dotty and Charles left quickly after the wedding mass, and for several weeks were seen no more. It is true that Little Dutch Eckel could not, or pretended that he could not, find the keys to the car he was lending them. But Charles was mechanically inclined, and they left in the car without keys.

The only thing they missed were the parties given in their honor, and Dotty hated to miss a party.

On a certain morning, not the next and not yet the next after that, they arrived in New Orleans quite early, eager and lively, and with the edge by no means off their adventure. They didn't know the town. Charles, however, did something that does not occur to one person in twenty. Yet it was so simple and plainly to the point as to be the only thing to do. He bought a map of the City. That shows the kind of mind he had and the way he handled difficulties.

The aunt, (no the cousin, no, the cousin of the mother of Ouida) lived at 1224 Epernay. They found Epernay and began the count-down, but there was no number 1224. Charles had written it down. And Ouida had written it in her own hand in Dotty's address book. But there was no building where that address should have been. There were only weeds. There were a few bricks in the weeds, and there were signs of an old fire. But there was no building there.

They went across the street to a house which bore the sign, Apartment to Let. It was a graceful old house, and it was a graceful old lady who received them.

“I wonder,” asked Dotty, “if you know the address of Miss Amelia Garrard? We seem to be mistaken in it.”

“Where she is I know, that wonderful woman, but not the exact address of it. It is not given us to know the address.”

“What do you mean?”

“There are many mansions there, young lady. You see, she has been dead for four years.”

“Oh, what an odd thing! But Ouida did not know.”

“Ouida? The lost niece? But surely she is dead, too.”

“No. She is quite lively, or was several days ago.”

“Amelia Garrard died in the fire there across the street four years ago. The niece had been staying with her. It was not known that she had left, but only one body was found in the ruins. Still, it would have been possible for a body to be consumed entirely. She was advertised for. Any heir was advertised for. The estate was considerable.”

“What estate?”

“That of Amelia Garrard, between eight and ten million. Since no heir has appeared within four years the estate will go to the State of Louisiana and that within the present week. If you young people are looking for a place to stay I have quite nice apartments. For those just married and wishing to see the town it is ideal. We are within the quarter, though barely, and within walking distance of absolutely everything. You can leave your car right where it is. You have managed to acquire the last available parking place in the City.”

“How did you know we were just married? Let's take it, Charles, and then call Ouida.”

“What in the world for? I mean Ouida. Certainly we will take the apartment.”

“Why, we will call Ouida and tell her she is rich is she hurries.”

“She always says that she can't spend all the money she makes now. Money would spoil her.”

“Nothing would spoil her. Oh, you call her, Mrs. Landlady. Here's the number. It's the number of the Old Wooden Ship. You do know Ouida?”

“From childhood. Hers, not mine. Bring your things into your new home and I will try to call the lost niece.”

In a few minutes, when they were ready to go out and see the town, the lady said that the niece had been reported out, but that they would have her call.

“I will take the call. I am always here. She will be happy to hear of her new wealth, though sad to learn of the death of her aunt. She really should have written in four years. The French are an odd people.”

“Quite odd,” said Dotty.

There is no town in which it is so much fun to spend money, or at least to have money to spend. Actually Charles was quite French about spending money. He had a liberal heart but a careful hand. It is a perfect combination. Being neither insecure nor a snob he had not the need to tip lavishly. By placing no great importance on money he was left free to argue about prices unashamedly.

There is a lot to see down in the shade of the quarter. There is a lot to buy — to have crated and shipped home. A young couple there, for a day or two at least, eat and drink more than anywhere in the world. There was an antique touch to all of it that Dotty had never met before.

So the first day went by without event. Except for the appearance of Charles' two wives, from Rio, and from St. Malo.

“You have to trust me, Dotty,” said Charles. “I tell you that to the best of my knowledge I have never seen this woman before.”

“But I do trust you, dear. Whenever did I not? I am just so startled when she says she is your wife from Rio. I only wish I knew Portuguese or she knew better English. I'd like to find out more about this.

“My English — nonpareil,” said the lady. “I'm schoolteacher. Teach English, Spanish, French. Teach kids stuff like that. You should be so accomplished. But I like my husband back, blondie. I like the boy.”

“But he's my husband,” said Dotty. “Not yours.”

“Possibly both. But I take him now. A loura like you won't have any trouble getting another.”

“I don't know what a loura is,” said Dotty, “but if it's anything like — ”

“A loura is only a blonde, Dotty,” said Charles. “I learned that much down there.”

“So you learned the word for blonde? It seems to me you're very calm for being married to two women.”

“An uncalm man would have no business doing it. It would wreck him. But I am only married to you, Dotty. I do not know this pretty lady.”

“See here, he doesn't know you, and you don't know him.”

“Not know Charles boy? Oh, how you talk! But let us not argue in the street. We will go into the Flannel-Mouthed Irishman's here. I am told that he has good vino rosso.”

They went into Flannel-Mouth's and were served.

“Now you just tell me what this is all about. You are no more married to him than anything,” said Dotty.

“But here is the atestado,” said the dark lady. “I am, by the way, Patricia. Read it. You will see that I have the law on my side.”

“But I can't read it. It's written in Portuguese.”

“Why certainly. We were married in Portuguese. Now you go away at once, menina, or I will have the law on you.”

“I will not go away,” said Dotty. “He belongs to me. Charles, why don't you say something? Charles?”

“Until I think of something to say I had better be quiet.”

“Well, if he's your husband how did you let him get away?” asked Dotty. “I won't let him get away.”

“He but went out to get some cigarettes one night,” said Patricia, “but infelicidade he did not return. I am prostrate with grief.”

“Then why did you just have to suppress a giggle?”

“Giggle, menina? That is the sign of a wounded soul.”

“Charles, you tell me right now if you know this little brown girl. And she's not so little, either.”

“And you tell me right, Charley boy, if you prefer me to this state-side corn-flower,” said Patricia.

“It isn't an easy decision, but I will have to take the corn-flower.”

“Why Charles, how can you say that it isn't an easy decision?”

“I am prostrate,” said Patricia. “I am desolate. I will suicide me. But first will Mr. Flannel-Mouth bring us three more of the lovely vino rosso.”

“That did it,” said Charles. “Something snapped into place.”

“Oh, so now you remember your other wife?” asked Dotty. But something snapped into place for Dotty also, when Flannel-Mouth said, “Three coming up, Patty.”

“We have been taken,” said Dot. “It's those bedamned practical jokers from back home put you up to this. Who are you, Patricia?”

“But I am the poor deserted carioca wife. I shall die. Oh, miserable me.”

“I thought you were not so dark as you were painted,” said Charles.

“And in Rio they would say Vino Tinto, not Vino Rosso, though it is still good red wine. But if I ever need another wife I will marry you. Where can I find you?”

“Oh miserable me that even my husband should joke at me! I will die. You will read in the paper tonight that I am drowned.”

“Which paper?” asked Dotty. But Patricia went away in her agony and grief.

When she came back half an hour later, they hardly knew her, she was so changed.

“Where are you the wife from now?” asked Dotty.

“St. Malo.”

“But that's where you're really from, Charles.”

“Of course, that is where he's from. We were childhood lovers. He married me and then went to sea. And when he did not return I followed him here. Oh my husband, come home with me now and leave this evil woman in this strange land.”

“How did you know I was an evil woman?” asked Dotty. “And why do you have two routines?”

“I hadn't decided which one to use.”

“But who are you?”

“That I'll never tell.”

“But how did you know us? And who put you up to it?”

“Nobody has to put me up to my mischief.”

“What was that brown stuff you had on your face the first time?”

“I will tell you none of my secrets.”

“But somebody had to put you up to it,” said Charles. “You know about us from somewhere.”

“From Rio, Charles boy, or from St. Malo? You not remember lovely Patricia?”

“Lovely Patricia reminds me of someone I know,” said Charles. “And I'm going to think of it in a minute.”

“Please don't. You wouldn't skim all the cream off and leave the poor milk. Let me still be the other wife, Dotty.”

“But we have to know the practical joker behind this or we'll never sleep again.”

“Then lose your sleep. You double your life when you do not sleep. There is no joker but myself. But I was asked to help you have a good time when you were in the City, if I could find you. You were easily found. He sketched a sketch of the two of you so I'd know you when I saw you. Everyone is afraid that people on a honeymoon will not be able to have a good time without help. Could you have?”

“We were having a wonderful time, Patricia,” said Dotty.

“Then shall I leave you?”

“No, never. We love you, whoever you are. I don't know anyone I'd rather have along on our honeymoon.”

So that was the way they met Patricia, whoever she was. She wasn't about to tell them who she was.

They had a long day, a very generous day. A day is a period of twenty-four hours; it is a mistake to limit it to the light hours.

In the afternoon they went out to the lake. Patricia had materialized a car. They got acquainted with the shrimpers on the redoubt. They swam a while. They drank beer and danced. They went back to town and made the places. They made them all evening and all night.

There was an incredible amount of noise in many of the spots. Some of the people must have liked it, since so many of them crowded in. Even Patricia was fascinated by it. She would close her eyes and sway with the rhythm. How could she pick out the rhythm? It was always a mixed noise of horn, howler, string, piano, and bongo drum.

“This is the real cool jazz here,” said Patricia. “You can't get it anywhere else. There is no other.”

“We can thank our favorite saint for that,” said Charley boy.

“It does something to me,” said Patricia. “There is nothing so cool as hot jazz. I go way out with it. I don't care if I ever come back. Did you ever hear anything like it?”

“I heard a camel die once,” said Charles, “that was much like that clarinet. At some of the little ports they bring cargo by camel-load direct to the dock. And this camel somehow got herself got torn open by a cargo hook, and she sounded like that as she expired. And once I was in a Red Sea port on Devil Day. There the Devil comes to town only once a year. The people make a great noise with wailing and banging on metal and exploding small bombs to scare him away. The Devil suffered ruptured eardrums that day and they still bother him. Yet the noise was nowhere near as overwhelming as this. As for the piano, well, we had a ghost back in St. Malo who would come out at night and play a piano in an old house. Nobody will live in that house again. They aren't afraid of the ghost, but they abominate his playing.”

“Why don't they throw out the piano?” asked Dotty.

“It was a ghost piano. You couldn't see it. But how you could hear it! It curdled milk at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers. This is true. It was once written up in the Paris-Soir. But it wasn't as extreme as this.”

“No. I imagine it was quite beautiful,” said Patricia. “But for the real old jazz you have to come to New Orleans. There is nothing like it anywhere. It's just lovely. In an area covering only three blocks there are about five hundred of these places. Some of them have big generous strippers, or little skinny strippers. Some of them have comics. There are dignified, dingy bars for the serious drinkers. But mostly it is just this unrhythmed, uninspired, cacophony of the grand old jazz played by dedicated zombies with empty eyes.”

“We have music at home,” said Dotty. “The place is full of music. We have good jazz at the Little Oyster and a lot of other places. We have New Orleans musicians who, after they have been there a week or so, begin to play passably. All of them can, if they want to. But you could build a decibel-wrecker machine to do what they are doing here. And you really like this?”

But Patty was too far out to hear.

At one place Dotty forcibly took control of the piano to instruct the people. After a short start she had to quiet the other musicians who kept trying to intrude.

“Please stop that hellish racket! How can anybody play a piano with that kind of noise going on?”

She played wonderfully. She was the best of her type. Some of them listened and looked at her with awe, as though half-remembering something that had once been possible. But it may be that the City is lost in this and can never be restored. It is doubtful that she made a single convert, for they go in trends, and were too far gone to recover. The brasher of them called her a little cube, which she was not. It was discouraging.

Then, as do all really fine people in that City (and there may be anywhere from fifteen to twenty-five of them at one time) they finished up the night at the Flannel-Mouthed Irishman's.

Flannel-Mouth was unhappy. He had tried that evening, for the first time, to charge a cover charge. But he had not collected a single nickel cover charge.

“It is only a dollar I tried to put on. All the other owners charge it. All the rest are rich and I am poor. Most of the people would not miss a dollar. Tonight I tried to collect it from two hundred and fifty-three different people, and that would be as many dollars — all profit. A man can live on that much a day, but the way prices are, he can hardly live on less. But do you know, I have been told ‘Oh go to hell!’ more than two hundred and forty times? All the rest just give me a withering look.

“I have my signs up. They say the cover charge is one dollar. Why do people all tell me to go to hell? They don't tell the other owners to go to hell.”

“I guess there is just something in your personality that makes people want to tell you to go to hell,” said Charles.

“I guess so. Well, I'll try just one more time. If it doesn't work this time, I'll take down my signs and resign myself. Now, then, you three have been spending like rain — all day and night — and you have given it to worse men than me. I will have three dollars cover charge from each of you or by St. Dennis himself, I'll pitch you out in the street this minute.”

“Oh go to hell,” said Patricia.

“Yes, do,” said Dotty.

And Charles just gave him that withering look.

“Oh well, I guess I was not meant to be rich,” sighed Flannel-Mouth, and he took down his cover charge signs.

“It is a question,” said Leo Hanrahan, “just how deeply a man can get into the mud without being befouled. To the knees, do you think? To the withers? To the chest of him? To the gullet? To the eyebrows? What would you say, Frenchman?”

“You have just come in,” said Charles, “and I have not opened my mouth. How did you know I was a Frenchman?”

“I was taught by my father to recognize simple objects. ‘This is a block of wood,’ he would say. ‘That is a house, the other thing is a tree. This, look you, is a streetcar, and that is a Frenchman.’ Did not your own father teach you the plain objects of the world? When would you say that a man is soiled?”

“When he is in up to the eyebrows, then surely he is soiled a little bit,” said Charles.

“Unless he is in upside down,” said Dotty.

“We are all in this thing upside down,” said Leo. “I am a philosopher and that is my philosophy. I will tell you how I became one. I am a dock worker. It was four years ago that I went on my present schedule of six in the evening till two in the morning. But there is one difficulty. My wife is afraid of burglars and rapists and murderers and such things. When she locks the door at night she will not open it till daylight. I tried at two o'clock, for a week, to get in. ‘Maranatha, it's me, Leo, home from work,’ I would say. ‘Unlock the door and let me in.’ ‘How do I know you are Leo?’ she would answer. ‘You may be just some rapist imitating his voice.’ ‘But turn on the light and look at me.’ ‘How do I know you're not just some low molester got up to look like my Leo? You come back after daylight when my husband is home and you'll be properly dealt with.’ ‘But Maranatha, I am your husband; till about one minute ago I was your loving husband. Now open the door or I'll have to break the damned thing down.’ ‘Go way, you rapist, or I'll shoot right through the door with my shotgun.’ She would have, too.

“But it had one happy result. In the four years since then I have sat here from two till six in the morning. By musing on all sorts of things I have become what you see me now, a philosopher with an inquiring mind.”

“Had you any previous background or qualification for it?” asked Dotty.

“I had the hereditary foundation. My forebears were all from Letterkenny, Donegal, from whence have issued more philosophers than from Greece and India and Araby combined. But mostly, I have formed myself by sitting here and flexing and unflexing my mind. Now then, would you say that a man is soiled if he is in the mud up to his eyebrows?”

“Yes, it seems that he would be soiled.”

“But if only to his ankles, what then?”

“Possibly not if he has a good pair of boots.”

“I tell you that you are wrong. You cannot trust to boots. I tell you that a man is soiled when he first hears the name of mud — when he first walks the world of which it is a part. To unsoil himself he must make himself a spirit and put off his body like a dirty shirt. There are ways to do it, but they are not easy. You can stare at a point in infinity and so be absorbed and shuffle off the mortal coil. Or the Buddhists stare at their navels (so I've been told, I think it is a lie) until they become a part of infinity. I have tried that. I did it for three hours, and Maranatha had to rub my neck with horse liniment for a week. Due to what I can only call my own paunchiness, I find it difficult to stare at my navel without craning my neck.

“But this is what I do now. I stare at a point just below the level of the drink in my glass, and I watch it descend till it is a part of the bottom of the glass. Then I say, ‘I have passed through the first concentric crystal sphere of the dome of infinity.’ Then I try it by picking another point in the next glass and watching it decline. I pass through the spheres of the sun and the moon and all the planets. It used to be said that there were only seven spheres, later nine. But I have often passed through more — ten, a dozen, fifteen, eighteen. By that time I have always shuffled off the mortal coil, and am then a pure spirit.”

“By that time you must be one drunk little dockey,” said Patricia.

“Please lady, I would not have said that about you. My intoxication is always a celestial one. But for neophytes I would suggest something easier. Simply select a point in infinity and stare at it till you become disembodied.”

“Every spot is a spot in infinity,” said Dotty.

“Exactly. You have taken the first step. You could also be a philosopher. Come live with me and let me be your mentor for a few years. You would be surprised at the way you would grow in philosophy.”

“I have already learned a little philosophy of that sort,” said Dotty.

When they got back to their house it was seven in the morning. Charles fumbled with the key in the front door, but it was opened from the inside by a lady. She was almost, but not quite, the lady of the day before. However, she began to scream when they tried to enter.

“But we live here,” said Dotty. “We have rooms upstairs.”

“This is a private home,” said the lady. “I have no rooms. Be off, be off, you are drunken.”

“But only yesterday we paid for a week here. The rooms are ours. All our things are in them.”

“Here yesterday you did not. This is a private house, not a lodging house. Be off or I'll call the police.”

“Aren't you the lady we rented from? No, you aren't, but you lack very little of being. She must have been your sister, she looked so much like you. Where is your sister? She'll let us in.”

“I have no kith, kin, or kitten. Be gone.”

“But this is the place. We parked our car in front of it.”

“Many park here. Which is your car?”

It was not there. Other cars of other people were there. Theirs was not. “But that is the same vacant lot across the street,” said Charles.

“There may be other vacant lots and other houses,” said the lady. “But you did not take rooms in my house yesterday, or any day. Now please be gone.”

“But all our money, except what we have with us, is in our rooms,” said Dotty. “And our clothes.”

“I hope you find them. But this is not the place. Be gone.”

“Come home with me and have some sleep,” said Patricia. “After that you may remember where you left your house and car.”

At Patricia's house Dotty stared at the number on the door.

“Is that really your number above the door, Patricia?”

“Why, of course. I do not nail up other people's numbers on my house.”

“But it's the oddest thing I ever saw. I will have to remember what it means.”

“It is not odd at all. The houses are numbered in sequence and this is mine. You had better get some sleep.”

At Patricia's they slept for quite a few hours, but uneasily. It is an inconvenience to lose a house and a car when neither of them belong to you. It is an inconvenience to lose your wits and be at the mercy of circumstance. And it is difficult to sleep when you are worried, even though you are tired and boozy.

It was about five in the afternoon when Patricia woke them up.

“Up and at 'em,” she said, her very words. “You haven't seen nearly all the places yet. Since your clothes are lost I have a dress that will fit Dotty. I also have one that will fit Charley boy, though I doubt that he will wear it, men are such creatures of custom.”

“We just got to sleep,” said Dotty.

“You've been sleeping for nearly ten hours,” said Patty. “It's time to be up and doing.”

“Did you sleep well yourself, Patty?”

“No. I have been to work. Yesterday was my day off, but today I had to work. It is one of the debts against the mortal coil. Come on, let's get with it. And when we round it out tonight, we'll have coffee at the French Market after we have breakfast at Flannel-Mouth's. Everybody does it.”

“And can you go another night without sleep?”

“Of course I can. New Orleans people never sleep. What few beds they have are used for immoral purposes. Not mine, however. Come on, we have to hurry. It's only fourteen hours till breakfast time.”

“I would first like to see if our car and house have come back,” said Charles.

The house was still there.

“It might be embarrassing for you to be rebuffed again,” said Patricia. “I'll go to the door and see if I can find out anything at all about this mysterious business.”

She was at the door a long time. She talked to the lady of that morning, not the lady of the morning before.

“No, it's no use,” said Patty when she returned. “You are simply mistaken in the house. We may come on it in our walks around town.”

“I believe that I will report the car stolen,” said Charles. “If it is still somewhere on the street the police will find it. And if we are mistaken in all this they may find it in front of the house where we really took rooms.”

“No, we are not mistaken,” said Dotty. “This is the house.”

They went to the station.

“I wish to report a car stolen,” said Charles.

“Make?” asked the sergeant.

“What do you mean?”

“What is the make, manufacture, the brand of the car?”

“I don't know. I don't know different American cars. What is it, Dotty?”

“It's either a Plymouth or a Pontiac. Or perhaps it isn't. About three years old.”

“License?”

“Texas, I think, isn't it, Dotty?”

“I don't know. He travels a lot. I think it's either a Texas or Arkansas or Louisiana license. Why don't you write that down, sergeant? You're not writing any of it down.”

“I just don't have the heart, lady. Do you know the number of the license? I wonder why I ask.”

“No.”

“Oh no.”

“Where is your title or certificate of ownership?”

“We don't have any,” said Dot. “We borrowed the car.”

“From whom?”

“Dutch. Little Dutch.”

“Surname?”

“I forget. You've got me flustered or I'd remember.”

“Where does Little Dutch live?”

“I think he really lives in either Texas City or High Island. But in Galveston he drinks at the Old Wooden Ship.”

“Was the car locked?”

“Indeed it was. We have no key to it. Charles always has to start it with a piece of wire and some clips.”

“Have either of you a driver's license?”

“I sure haven't,” said Dotty.

“I had no idea that a man needed a license to drive a car,” said Charles. “It will soon be that a man needs a license to drink a cup of coffee. I never saw such a country.”

“How did the car become stolen or lost?”

“We parked it in front of a house. When we came back the car was gone. The house was gone, too.”

“Patty, are these two lost geese friends of yours?”

“The best.”

“Blood could be running in the streets while I try to ravel this out. Tell me now if it's a joke, Pat.”

“No. A lost car and house is no joke. And in your precinct it looks bad.”

“Well, I have gotten to the bottom of things with less to go on. And I'll try to have your house and car back for you within twenty-four hours. But I am not promising anything.”

That night they went to the Big Hotels and places on Canal Street, the French Casino and the Monkey Bar. They went to the Quarter, to places like the Cat and Fiddle, the Three-Four-Five Club, the Old Absinthe House, the Harbor Lights, Piccones. They did not go much to the places where the cool jazz boiled. Perhaps Patty had taken the parable of the devil and his broken eardrums to heart.

Patty had a seaman, an Englishman, a bloody heretic, a limey — all but a cockney, a member of the lowest race on Earth. It happened, which may come as a shock to the serious anthropologists, that he was not a bad fellow at all. His name was Philip Sherrington and he wanted to marry Patricia and take her back to Liverpool with him.

But he was dogmatic.

“The English are the only true seamen,” he said. “Oh, the French and others may go to sea a little and piddle around in it, but the English are the only seamen.”

“The English are the most land-locked people in the world,” said Charles. “The proof of it is that they do not really fish, and their children do not truly love the surf. You went to sea to patrol the Empire and to haul the cargo from your black towns. And those of you who go to sea are not Englishmen at all. Your crews are full of Portuguese and Goanese and Scandinavians and Dutch. You yourself, from England, are not English. The hairs on the back of your hands are red. No real Englishman had red hairs there. You are Dutch or Norse, but not English.”

“Why they are red! I never noticed that before. And I'm not English then? Perhaps I'm a Viking. What a rum idea.”

Philip was dogmatic, but only till contradicted. Then he changed sides and became dogmatic in the opposite opinion.

“The thing I marvel at in America is that they still believe in magic,” said Philip. “Not material magic — we have all achieved that long since. But in emotional magic. They will come to places like the Quarter here, and they come looking for magic. A child could know that every taxi driver is a pimp, every barker a fake, every girl a b-girl and every b-girl a tart. They are made drunken and rolled and robbed. The public places are call houses without the adequate decor of even a good call house. The music is vile, the entertainment worthless, the drinks inferior and dangerous, the food ptomaine. What magic are they looking for?”

“It is not only the American who looks for magic,” said Charles. “Many of us look for it. It is the magic of pleasure without perdition. Those of us who are young enough to remember when we had it the first time, in that pleasure park in Mesopotamia, will still look for it. It is the magic of drinking without drunkedness, or exhilaration with no low aftermath, of women like angels naturally wifed to one and enjoyed, of just ambling in a pleasure park. Dammit, the first amusement park was the Garden of Eden, and the first nightclub district was also there. The park had its zoo, but the animals were uncaged. It had the first roller coaster, the Cosmic Dip. It had a Planetary Swing better than any giant swing, and a ferris wheel bigger than the giant wheel in Vienna. The merry-go-round, or the giddy-go-round, as it is called in your island, was of live animals, ibixes and antelopes and winged horses and lions. There was cotton candy bursting like blossoms from the bushes. And there was music. And what clubs there were in the lighted center of that park! See that awning canopy over the bar and the back bar there? It is a memory of the pavilions pitched in the Garden. That memory has never died out. And what drinks they had! Everything that can be distilled or fermented or brewed from the vines, fruits, grains and canes. Intoxication without depravity; women discovered without sin; lights and music without end. Now we follow it for as many hours as we can, remembering the time when we were able to follow it forever without sleep, as Patricia is still able to do. Then the b-girls were genuine angels, and we are still looking for them. Then we never got old.”

“Is that the magic? But we will never find it.”

“How do you know, Philip? We may find it in the very next bar. We will hurry and see. I had almost found it in this one.”

“I know who you are, Patty,” said Dot a little later.

“Well, who am I then, for I don't know.”

“If we could find our house again, my address book is in my other handbag there. And you are in it with your name. I knew your number and street were familiar. When I find it, I'll know. You are one of the people we were supposed to look up.”

“Then why didn't you?”

“Because we lost our house and our things. And you found us first.”

But it was only a half-magic. It may have been an intoxication without depravity, but it was not without tipsiness. Nor could they follow it forever without sleep. They were quite weary by dawn.

But one real miracle was the outcome of it. When they went by to see if their house and car had returned, their car was there. And this so emboldened and encouraged them that they went up to the house. The lady who met them at the door was the first lady, not the second lady who so resembled her.

“I have been so worried about you,” she said. “When you were gone for two days and nights I didn't know what had happened to you.”

“When we came yesterday,” said Dotty, “our car was gone, and you said that you had never seen us before.”

“I said that? How could I have said a thing like that?”

“Well, it wasn't exactly you. But it was almost you.”

Anyhow, they had their house and their car back, and there is no use trying to unravel old mysteries or old jokes. They enjoyed the rest of their visit with a town full of people who at least had some affinity with those of the garden.

After a couple of days they grew used to seeing the first lady and the second lady, so like her, together in the house. They were clearly sisters.

There was evidence that the aunt (or mother's cousin) of Ouida, was not one but two, and that they were she. For the mail that came to the house was mostly for Amelia and Mellicent Garrard. Moreover, there was to be found a small picture of Ouida herself in the house, if you prowled through enough rooms. And Dotty did prowl.

“But to think that those old doddies could be part of such a joke,” said Dotty, “and never give it away yet. It was Amelia herself, who said, ‘Amelia Garrard, that wonderful woman, has been dead four years.’ But Ouida isn't rich. They are still alive. She can't inherit from them yet, and if they had eight or ten million they would not be taking in lodgers.”

Charles ran around a little with the seamen from the Saint Noire. They were a bunch of rowdies, but they all loved Dotty.

Then their time was up and they had to go back home and get down to the business of living.

“Did you find your address book, Dotty?” Charles asked when they got to the Texas line.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“Who is — ?”

“Yes, who is — ?”

“Patricia?”

“Yes, Patricia.”

“Finnegan's sister.”

“I always thought he was a Martian. I had no idea he had kindred on this world.”

CHAPTER XVI

Charles bounced her out of bed every time he turned over. First of all it was not a new bed. Who can afford a new bed with everything the way it is? It was a broken-back, spring-sprung bed. But to make up for it, it had two mattresses on it which made it high and humpbacked. It was live and very bouncy.

Now most of the ships Charles had sailed on were poor ships and they had hammocks instead of bunks for the men. And there is this to be said about most of those ships' hammocks: you cannot turn over in them normally or you will not be in them; you will have rolled out on deck. Many of them are little more than a taut ribbon on which you balance in your sleep.

There is only one way to turn over in them without falling out: you jump straight up in the air and come down in the same place lying on the other side. This is the way that Charles had learned to turn over in his sleep, and this is the way he did it now. But every blamed time he did it, he bounced Dotty out on the floor.

The noise often woke him up, and something certainly woke her up.

“I am contrite,” he would say. “But you have to admit it's pretty funny.”

“It's like a joke. It may be funny through the fourth or fifth telling, but afterwards it is less so. It begins to seem as though you had heard it before. But it you never do anything worse to me I'll be happy.”

“Well, it isn't very far to fall, and you're pretty well-padded. Maybe we should sleep on the floor.”

“No, we will continue to sleep in bed like other people. Maybe I can learn to bounce up and down with the shock instead of bouncing out of bed.”

“I can't afford to change my own instinct for turning over in sleep. Otherwise I'd be rolling out on deck on the ship.”

“Oh no, it's much better this way.”

They didn't quarrel about that or about anything. It wouldn't have been possible for them to quarrel with each other, not about anything, under any conditions. It is not generally known, or at least not generally admitted (for it is against all the beliefs of the time and a sacrilege against the sacred clichés), but there are many married couples who do not quarrel at all. They did not.

Charles stayed at home as much as he could, even though the inaction and the short voyages cut into his income. He sailed mostly on three ships: The Saint Noire, the Spogelset (the ghost), and Der Rochen. They did not sail far — to Cuba and the Islands, to Central America, sometimes to Rio. He made one trip back to France to receive the blessings of his family. But he employed short trips and long layovers at home as much as he could.

“Sometimes I think I will have to drive that man to sea with a stick,” said Dotty. But she liked him home and they made plans that he would someday get a shore job. They always had a lot of friends, but now they began to make another sort of friends: other young couples who did not spend all their time in the bars sloshing it up — who even set a little money aside, though without being fanatics about it, who were interested in the Church or the parish as well as the eschatological basis; and who believed that some understanding of city and state government and economics was necessary before a complete geopolitical understanding could be achieved.

Dotty took a real interest in these things. She resolved that as soon as she was of age she would register so as to be in a position to vote should an honest and intelligent candidate ever make his appearance. She learned about ad valorem and mill rates and such, for now they were property owners. She made Charles take out his first papers. She joined study clubs. She found that, while she had read more than most, she had not read all rightly, and could learn from many of them. She rediscovered her own heritage and found that she was really less of an orphan than the children of the world.

She even joined the Altar Society. She had thought it was a bunch of old biddies. Now she found that there were also young biddies in it. She was enrolled in the Third Order. She became a churchy, a plain unmitigated churchy. And she had Charles.

“I will have to put sideboards on my cup,” said Dot.

“This I don't understand.”

“It is running over.”

There are people who still don't know how remarkable Charles was. He didn't look remarkable; nice but not remarkable. He didn't talk remarkable; sensible sometimes, that was all. But he may have been the kindest and easiest to get along with man who ever lived. Dotty thought he was remarkable. And she was the only one who was married to him.

She had one other joy.

“I wonder that nobody else has noticed how much fun it is to be pregnant,” she said to Soft-Talk Susie Kutz. “Why don't you try it?”

“Could I do so licitly, I would. But I have other commitments. Is it really so much fun? I had heard that it was sometimes uncomfortable.”

“Oh no. It's wonderful. Every part of it; the anticipation, the fulfillment in all senses of the word. Even the glorious nausea.”

“Nobody but you would call that glorious.”

“But it is. I'll tell the other girls how much fun it is. Maybe they will want to try it.”

“Yes, you might start a fad. But we should recommend that they keep it within legal limits.”

“It's a touch-stone, too. I can tell what kind people are by the way they look at me now. All the pig people (you remember my old friends, the pig people) look at me with loathing. How they hate the idea of it! They would do away with every piece of life there is. But a man shook my hand in the street today. I never saw him before, but I love him. And a lot of people are looking at me better than they used to.”

“It has been done before, Dotty.”

“No it hasn't. This is unique.”

She went to tell another friend about it.

“You think You are the only one who can make things. But You have collaboration on almost every project. What could You do in this without me? He will have three billion cells, more than there are people in the world, all of them different. And Soft-Talk Susie says it's been done before. It has not been done before.

“I enjoy making things, and I suspect that You do too. You make so many of them. This being so, let me call a few things to Your attention that others have been afraid to mention. There is a grandeur to much of Your work that defies comparison, but there are also flaws in Your creations and Your poetry. The land that You made in Jack Oak County was badly made. It was land without substance, like bricks without straw. It was thin land and it turned easily back to dust. That part of Your poetry was as sterile and uninspired as the worst, or the best, of Wordsworth. How can you expect earthly poets to excel when You Yourself do inferior stuff? And some of Your rivers are a disgrace: the Arkansas, the Red, the Missouri — sick snakes that bite themselves and writhe in the sand, as aimless as something of Elliott. And in Louisiana there are places where You forgot to bottom the land. This made marshes, salinity lost from the sea and grown foul. And this swampiness is a sample of Your poetry? The floundering of a MacLeash could hardly be worse. Did You do this on purpose? And were You trying to tell us something when You did it?

“I am told that You do good work on mountains and islands. There is a coast of Brittany that I intend to see, and a lake in Ireland. We will see some of Your better work there. When the boy is old enough we will travel and see more of what You have done. Your protection on the three of us You have half-promised. A silence is half a promise.”

Days or weeks when Charles was home he often wrote letters. But he did not mail them. He put them in envelopes, numbered them, and banded them around with Scotch tape.

“They are all to you, Dotty,” he said, “except several to my mother and one to my father, and one to an old salty dog with instructions.”

“But why, Charles, and when?”

“For my own reasons, and never, I hope. But if ever anything happens to me, they will come to you one by one, so that you can hear from me for a while. So I can talk to you a little after I am dead.”

“Jesu Christo, Charles, do not talk like that. What a horrible thought! Burn them all at once.”

“No. I have to do this. I worry what might happen to you. You could easily come unhinged.”

But the letters he wrote her for while he was still alive were fine enough. There is no doubt that he loved his wife all the time. He sent her presents from all the sugar and banana ports. Often he beat them home. Their house began to look like a small Caribbean museum.

Charles' mother began to write to Dotty from France. Dotty could read most of the letters. If they had been typed she could have read all of them. Handwriting in another language is harder. Ouida helped her write the answers.

Dotty now wrote to her own mother who was in a state of doubtful ineffectuality and perhaps could not be helped. Almost every day she saw her other, her mama mia, Mary Parisi.

So she lived there on the shore island of sun and oleanders which, as a piece of poetry, is not at all contemptible.

Dotty lost her child. That is really all that can be said about it. Charles was home at the time. It would have been much worse if he had not been there. Dotty did not revolt. She grieved, but she did not revolt. It was the first time she had not revolted when she had been hurt greatly.

She was knocked down by a car.

“It was all my fault. I was skylarking. I was walking on air. Tell that gibbering little man it wasn't his fault. I stepped right in front of him. I believe he feels badly about it.”

She was in the hospital for a week. She was never left alone. All kinds of friends were with her, and it took all her ingenuity to put them at their ease. They seemed not to know what to say to her, except Soft-Talk Susie who always knew what to say. She just soft-talked her as she did everyone.

Kids like Betsy Mish and Catherine Collins whom she hadn't seen for a while came. Men from the Old Wooden Ship came. Some of them were admitted only after protest. The nurse thought them unsavory.

Charles sat with her all day and at night slept on a couch in the little sun-room at the end of the hall. He felt the loss very deeply.

And one other had to be consulted about it. She couldn't let it go by with no protest at all.

“I wonder just what You had in mind this time,” said Dotty. “You could so easily have sent that car down another street, or called me out of my daydreaming. Why were You in such a hurry to take that little embryo? Somebody will have to investigate that limbo place of Yours and see if it is run right. And You act in wrath? And why were You wrathy? I have done remarkably little wrong in these last months, and Charles none at all. Well, You will not answer, and I shall have to be patient with You. You have a plan, mama used to say. Well, but what is Your plan for her? We build our own blunders, but where did I blunder here — outside of, for a minute, being light-hearted in my joy? Is this just to give substance to some anti-jaywalking campaign of the safety council? You should be better employed.

“Very well, I will have to play it Your way since You have all the checkers. It is easy to be inscrutable when You haven't any face.

“Oh, I didn't mean it! I didn't mean any of it! Anything I have is Yours. Don't leave me now! Oh, don't leave me now!”

But time heals all wounds. That is a proverb, an untrue proverb. There are wounds unhealed by time enough to fill every lazare from the beginning. All time can do is to give a little time, to achieve composure, to make a mask. You build it out of textured wax, and if you are skillful it looks just like your face, just like your face will look ten years from now. But it doesn't fit right. You never saw one that fit right.

But the world goes on. That's another thing that people say. It doesn't. It jolts a little bit and bumps; and then it comes to a stop. The scenery unrolls backwards and gives the impression that the world goes on. But it does not go.

“But I still have a number of children to bear,” said Dotty. “I have to go on, though this first one I will never forget.”

This time Charles stayed on land so long that she really did have to drive him to sea. He was clearly worried about her. He wrote to her from all sorts of little places with a kind of merriment that made her sorry for him.

“I didn't think about him enough. He lost everything that I lost, and besides that he had to worry about me. And I hardly thought to worry about him.”

Dotty stopped working at the Wooden Ship except Saturdays. In the daytime she cared for the children of women who worked. She had eight or nine of them. But she didn't keep them at home all the time. Children like to have fun, and in a year or two they would be old enough for school and the fun would be over.

She would take them to the Parisis where they could wander among the fruits and cheeses and pickles. An Italian grocery store is not like other grocery stores; it has real groceries. She would drive them to the harbor where they could usually find a friend to take them boatriding, often for hours. She cleaned them up from their seasickness. She even convinced them it was fun to be seasick. Early in the mornings she took them to the amusement park and dragged Charleyhorse Heckel out of a bar and made him start up every machine, one by one, and give them all free rides.

“You can consider it an equipment check,” she would say. “The equipment doesn't need checking, and I don't get paid for anything before noon.”

He grumbled, but he ran the rides for them. She would flirt with old friends among the town rounders and make them buy ice cream and corn dogs for the little bunch of children. They would go to the park where it was always cool, or cross the boulevard to the beach. She took them swimming at least once a day and taught them bravery in the surf. It takes bravery when the waves are nine feet tall and you are only three.

“The children are yours, lady?”

“Yes, all mine.”

“All nine of them? How old is the oldest?”

“Five.”

“Then there are twins or triplets?”

“No. All singletons.”

“But that is impossible.”

“I am a medical phenomenon. The doctors at Seeley are studying me. They give me all my expenses and have started a small annuity for each of the children. I have been written up in all the medical journals. I have been translated into Russian and Japanese. The Chronicle is doing a piece on me this week. Be sure and look it up in the Sunday Supplement.”

“I most certainly shall. I never heard of such a thing in all my life.”

Sometimes they would drive to East Beach and have a picnic lunch on the tables. Often they would go to West Beach and have lunch on the sand. She taught the urchins about Sea Urchins and Calico Crabs and Sand Dollars.

She borrowed poles and took them to the fishing piers. She would put two or three of them on one pole for ballast, in case they caught (they always caught fish, Dotty never in her life went fishing without catching fish) they took to the Old Wooden Ship where Daniel cleaned them. Then Soft-Talk Susie Kutz fried them in butter and oil. With these they fed the world, or all the world that came into the Wooden Ship. It wasn't miraculous; it was just that they always caught a lot of fish.

The children liked to be left at Dotty's house. They had fun with her. Dotty didn't make any money out of this. She lost money. She spent more on the children than she took in from the mothers. Most of the mothers were poor and had been deserted with the children. None of them could pay Dotty very much. There has always been much real poverty in the city of the island, though it has been overlooked and played down.

When Charles was in town they really had a time. He wore a curly beard now and Dotty told the children that he was a pirate and had a wooden leg. But he wouldn't let them see his wooden leg; anything else but that.

“Now be good, kids,” Dotty would say. “Don't try to see it. Leave his pants alone. If you had a wooden leg would you want people to see it?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“Yes, let us see it. It isn't wooden at all.”

“It's the other one. Now you let him alone.”

“The other time you said the other one was the other one.”

But they never did get to see his wooden leg.

Once Dotty loaded them all in the car and they went to Beaumont to pick up Charles who had landed there, and bring him home. Once they drove down to Palacios in the morning and watched the Mexicans bring in shrimp; and saw the Round House, and had dinner on sea food where you could almost reach out and touch the boats. They drove home again that afternoon.

“I do not believe that Matagordos Bay has even been completely explored,” said Charles.

They had just come to a town where nobody had been before. There was no road. They drove to it over salt sand flats, and once were bogged down. A man came with a primordial animal and pulled them out. It was remotely like the mules that appeared later in history, but only remotely like. There were about a dozen shacks, and six or seven beached boats. They had been there forever. The people talked part Spanish and part English, but that was only for show. When there were no intruders they spoke a primordial language.

There are at least a dozen places like that on Matagordos. It would do with some exploring.

“When we are rich, or when Charles is able to get his papers and get a job on shore, we are going to have a small boat and explore both bays,” Dotty told Soft-Talk Susie. “We will take a car some summer and follow the way of Esteban and Cabeza de Vaca. We already know the spot where they were shipwrecked here on the island. We know where they crossed to the mainland. Then, by a mixture of instinct and topography and geology, we will be able to track them all the way. They followed down coast only a few miles inland. They stopped at the Brazos just above Freeport. They went on down coast till they struck the Colorado and they followed it the several miles to its mouth. They were the first ones ever to see Matagordos Bay. They went back up the Colorado then. They went up it for four years. They were captured twice. They went to where it branches in Concho County. Then which branch do you think they took?”

“I don't know, Dotty.”

“They took the South — I will prove it — out past the present town of San Angelo, and on West. They did not take the North Branch the Big Spring way. They never went up Mustang Draw. They were nowhere near it.”

“I never said they did. Dotty.”

“But it has been said. And where do you think they came into New Mexico? Red Bluff on the Pecos.”

“Oh.”

“They did not come in the Humble City way.”

“Oh, and again Oh!”

“There's a world of things to see in the world. Another summer we will drive to Florida the coast road all the way. After we have a little put by, and the children are grown up enough to travel and enjoy it, we are going to go to France and to Ireland.”

“Dotty, please don't count your chickens. Mother Cary's chickens are precarious.”

“Do you know who Mother Cary is? She is Mater Cara, the Dear Mother, the Dear Mother, the Blessed Virgin. The English seamen were devoted to her before England was heretic. Another year we will go to the Orient. That will be after we have quite a lot put by, and Charles is perhaps the owner of a shipping company, and the oldest children at least, are near grown.”

“Don't talk of it, Dotty. You will be so sad if none of it comes to pass.”

Dotty was worried that she did not become pregnant again. She scolded Charles about it.

“You did it before. Why can't you do it now?”

“I try Dotty, I try.”

Dotty told Charles' itinerary to nobody, not even to Soft-Talk Susie. That is why nobody knew he was on the Saint Noire. He still shipped mostly on the Spogelset which was a tanker, or Der Rochen, a banana and fruit boat, and on the Saint Noire which was a tramp and would hold any cargo.

Dotty was the only one who knew that he was on the Saint Noire when it left Caracas for New Orleans. Though many worried when it was seen that Ernestine was no joke — for they all knew seamen on some ship — yet Dotty was the only one who worried about Charles on the Saint Noire.

She heard that the ship was in trouble from the hurricane. Then she would not read any dispatches nor listen to any more broadcasts.

When the cablegram came in she did not read it. She did not open it. She has not opened it till this day. But she knew what was in it.

None of them at the Old Wooden Ship was ever sure what had happened to Charles Peisson, or when. One does not ask questions of a clam, not of an angry clam.

Except of course Soft-Talk Susie, who always knew what had happened, but remained silent.

Dotty turned her fury on Him who had been her friend.

“Now You have done it. You drowned him in cold blood. And You didn't even have to break Your bargain. I begged You to give him to me for a year, and You gave him longer. But You have killed him. I will break every bargain I ever made. You want all the blood and all the flesh. I read what You were before, but I didn't understand it. You are that Old Jew from the beginning. I beg pardon of all the good Jews. You are that old note-caller, that debt-caller who has to be paid with the last drop of blood. You have collected all that I have. What will You sate yourself on now? What will You do after You have devoured the last flesh?

“The fable was backwards. We were deceived. You are the Old Serpent who lives on blood. You did not lose. You won. It is You who have been reigning when we thought it was another. You are that Old Serpent from the beginning.”

CHAPTER XVII

Lazarus Reilly had the sadness of the very fat. There has never been a cheerful fat man. It is true that he sometimes went from the dour to the merry, and he could be hilarious when the mood was on him. But that was different. He was never cheerful.

Nor was he now. He was deeply concerned. Neither doctor nor priest commonly exhibit such concern for body or soul. He covered Dotty's two hands with his own and guided the glass to her lips. His own throat ached as she attempted to swallow. When she shuddered, it quaked his own bulk.

It was just six in the morning, the hour of the dog as it was anciently called. For the curs were on the streets running in vicious packs. There is a grotesqueness and meanness about them when they believe that they have the new day to themselves. Theirs is the noisy menace of the true craven.

“Are you broke?” Lazarus asked her.

Dot shook her head. She was never broke. She was sick and could neither speak nor swallow. She managed one sip, and another. The trembling stopped except for erratic shudders. She took one more sip. Then Lazarus lowered the glass for her to the bar.

“Are you hurt?”

Dot shook her head. She was never hurt, though plainly she had been beaten.

Dot tried to lift her glass and could not. She only spilled a quantity of the drink. Lazarus poured it full again, and she sipped it off the level top. She wrinkled her nose and breathed with a queer gasping.

“Do you want to tell me something?”

Dot nodded that she did. Lazarus gave her paper and pencil. She held the pencil in both hands and printed great, weird, square letters as a child might. But she could not write a cogent message. She put her head down on the bar and started to cry.

The negro clean-up boy came in. “That good old Dot? Good old Dot been there all night?”

“She only came in a minute ago, Daniel, though earlier she was here quite late. Dot is chastened this morning.”

“I know something for that chastened feeling, Mr. Reilly. You take a chicken and cut it open alive. Then you take out a cupful of blood. You slice an onion in it, and put in a double shot of corn whisky, and drink it hot. It'll make a new man out of Dot in a minute.”

“Shall we try it, Dotty? I'll send Daniel to go get a chicken.”

Dot shook her head. She put her nose into the glass and took another swallow. Then she was able to tip it with her hands, and swallowed again.

“All right now. Now I can talk. Don't kill chicken. Chicken blood not what I need. Good morning, Lazarus. Good morning, Daniel. Is it morning? I always feel better after I can swallow and talk. In a little while I'll be able to use my hands, and then I'll be all right.”

“You wanted to say something a while ago before you could talk and before you could write.”

“No. What I wanted to say is better left unsaid. Another morning maybe I will use that chicken blood. And maybe I'll say it then.”

Dot's face was a box of bones, white stark bones; and there was straw coming out of the top of the box. Dot had been beautiful a few hours before. And in another few hours she would be beautiful again. But now her face was a box of bones, and yet in a way attractive; a nobleness of nasal, the aspiring sweep of the lempora, a dignity in the delineating of the palatine.

“The most beautiful curve in nature,” said Aloysius McGivern as he entered, “is the juncture of the inferior turbinates and the maxillary.”

Aloysius had just entered for his first drink. He always talked like that, and nobody was ever sure what he was talking about. But Dotty knew that he was talking about her.

Silent people came into the bar like ghosts or werewolves, tossed down quick shots, and became human once more. At six-thirty the domino game began at one of the window tables. It would continue for twenty hours. The people would change shape, size, age, and sex, but they would not stop playing. They would play draw; they could play moon; they would play whatever else you play with dominoes. But they would not stop playing for twenty hours.

At seven o'clock a distraught young man came in.

“Has anybody here seen that cute little Dotty?”

“Which Dotty?”

“I don't know her name. The one that was having so much fun last night.”

“Do you see her here?”

“No. If I saw her here I wouldn't have to ask. Do you know where she went?” asked Dotty.

“She is mislaid. She will be here later.”

“You know her? Were you here last night? I seem to remember something about you. We sure had us a time last night.”

“I was here, dear, and there was a time had. I am glad you are looking so well.”

“Is she something to you? You remind me of her. Is she your daughter?”

“No, dear, only my problem child.”

“Are you sure she will be in later?”

“Yes, dear, she will be back this afternoon. Come in then. She will be here.”

The young man patted her on the arm and left.

“Which Dotty was he looking for, Dot?”

“He was looking for me. But he didn't know me. I look so different in the morning. I've had people not know me before.”

The face of Dotty was still a box of bones, but now it began to soften. Here and there was a sheen of flesh, and for all we know the blood may have started to flow within. The straw sticking out of the top of the box was in reality hair, and now that she had the use of her hands she began to arrange it. It was nice hair. And Dotty was a nice girl. It was just that when she had been blind drunk it took her several hours to recover. During that period her appearance was not of the best.

At seven o'clock the pitch game began at another window table. This also would continue for nearly twenty hours. At this hour also the fishermen came in and carried out cases of beer and jugs of wine. These they stashed with their gear outside, but they did not leave. Instead, they came back into the bar and drank. But had the bar been struck by morning lightning and all the bottles destroyed, at least they would have been prepared. From seven-thirty till eight numbers of people came, took a fast drink, and vanished again. They were working people, all of them highly nervous folk, and spiritually incapable of eating breakfast. These small drinks they took in the morning to get them started. They were to them what coffee is to another and weirder sort of folks.

Dot looked much better. Her face was now fully fleshed, smooth and pale, and almost serene. Something was happening to her mouth. Dotty was a rogue. You wouldn't have known it before. But now you could tell by her mouth.

Shrimp Boat Gorden came in. He held her wrist for an instant. Lazarus Reilly raised his eyebrows questioningly, and Shrimp Boat nodded. There was an unmistakeable pulse beat. Dotty was alive.

Ouida Garrard entered. She had a shoe in one hand. She went to Dotty and put it on her foot.

“Oh, la pauvre Cendrillon,” she said and kissed her. Nobody else had noticed that Dotty was wearing only one shoe. There were too many other things wrong with her to notice the loss of one shoe. But she looked better for it. She looked better by the minute.

Something was happening to the eyes of Dotty. They had come to life. When a dead person comes to life the last thing to appear is always the sparkle in the eyes. Notice it sometimes. Now they snapped like happy blue flames. Dotty was a double rogue after her eyes came to life.

Aloysius McGivern went to her and kissed her at the junction of the inferior turbinate and the maxillary, the most beautiful curve in nature. Dotty emptied her purse on the bar and gave Aloysius a horribly misused dollar bill which he badly needed. Then, as she had others nearly as disreputable, she stood drinks for the house to be rid of the things.

She had also a plenitude of small silver which she arranged in little piles, a button that said Go Man Go, another that said 23rd Plenary Convention of the American Fluvifabricatori Society, a blue hair ribbon, a small rubber ball with a long rubber wringer, half a playing card, the Queen of Hearts torn diagonally, a little tin horn that still tootled (she tootled it), three little bone-shaped dog biscuits, a pair of dice (no, not a pair, one was much smaller than the other), some fish hooks, poker chips, Mexican jumping beans, and a tiny live turtle named Rubenstein.

“Everything I'll ever need, packed for a journey. But where was I going?”

The lost young man came in again.

“Did that little Dotty ever show up? Oh hello. The old woman who was here said Dotty would be in later. You look like Dotty. Are you her sister?”

“Under the skin, dear, under the skin.”

“Do you know when Dotty will come?”

“Dotty is in the chrysalis stage now. She will emerge soon. Go away a while and come back. I'm sure she will be here after while.”

The young man went away again.

“He still didn't know you,” said Lazarus.

“No. But he's coming closer.”

Soft-Talk Susie Kutz entered. “Oh, you look hideous,” she said to Dot.

“I do not. Tell her how much hideouser I looked earlier, Lazar. You never get up early enough to see me when I really look hideous.”

Soft-Talk Susie got a hair brush and went to work on Dotty. After only a dozen strokes the hair turned into burnished gold and threw a light over the whole room. After Susie washed Dotty's face she had a true radiance. Then Susie went to work. She was the barmaid.

It was eleven o'clock in the morning and the checker players had started their games in the remaining window tables. They would play for fifteen hours and then shuffle off into the night.

Mr. Garnier came in. He was a gentleman and wore a necktie. Often he was the only necktie that came into the Wooden Ship. He came at eleven-thirty every morning and smiled at the world. He drank a glass of whisky and a glass of water and talked with Lazarus Reilly. Often he talked to Dotty, but more often about her.

“That sweet-looking little girl. Every day when I come in she is sitting there drinking gin. She has such a quiet, child-like, serene sort of beauty, such lively eyes and yet the appearance of tragedy behind her. Has she a sorrow?”

“She has that, Mr. Garnier: a rat that gnaweth and a worm that will not die.”

“She appears to have suffered a great deal. And yet there is a gallant sort of cheerfulness about her.”

“Yes, Dotty suffers. But in a little while she forgets.”

“Good morning, young lady,” said Mr. Garnier as he left.

“Good morning, Mr. Garnier,” said Dotty.

When the postman came, Dotty divined a letter for herself in his sack.

“Just let me get it out and I'll save you a three blocks walk.”

“It will not. I have to go to every house anyhow. It'll lose me half an hour, and I'm behind now.”

“Here's one for Mrs. Schnabel. I'll just take it and keep it for a couple of days before I give it to her. She goes crazy when she doesn't get a letter she's expecting.”

“Leave that alone. You are tampering with the U.S. Mail.”

“I'm a citizen. I can tamper with it if I want to. Here's one for Catherine Cadensus from that little ol' gopher up state.”

“Don't you dare open that. It's a thousand dollar fine.”

“You just try to collect. Oh, there's mine! I knew it! I knew it! How wonderful!” She took the letter to her bosom and rocked it like a baby.

“Well open it,” said Soft-Talk Susie. “You're always so fired up to read other people's mail. Read it or let me read it. You always read my letters before I know they've come.”

“Oh no. This is different. I won't open it. I never open my mail at all. I'd never do a terrible thing like that. I keep them all unopened forever.”

“But how will you know what he's doing when he's gone?” asked Ouida. “If you don't read his letters, why do you like to get them? It isn't fair. We don't even know who he is.”

“I don't want to know what he's doing. When he's gone he's dead to me. And I'm dead. But us spooks have us a time. Only the other night I heard two dead people talking in the graveyard. ‘I'm dead too, can I join you?’ I called. ‘Come on then,’ they said. I went over the fence and joined them. They were two bums with a bottle and they shared it with me. But I never did find out if they were dead bums and just come out of their graves for a little air, or if they were live bums who had picked a quiet spot to drink. You know the two. I brought them in here that night. Were they alive?”

“No. They became lively, but they weren't alive,” said Lazarus. “From the smell I think they had been buried a long time. I doubt if they get out often.”

“But, Lazarus, another night when I got lonesome I went looking for them. I called to them and I knocked on all the gravestones. But nobody came out. So I left the bottle there. ‘It's here if you want it,’ I said. ‘If you wake up and come out for a little air, it'll be here for you.’ So I left it there and went over the fence. And then, just as I dropped on the other side, I heard one call: ‘Thank you, ‘Dotty, that was kind of you.’ Then I saw a hand reach up out of one of the graves and pull it in.”

“Did that really happen, Dotty?” asked Ouida.

“All but the very last part of it, Ouida. The hand is Apochypha. The rest is Gospel. When I went back several nights later the bottle was gone. Let's read Catherine's letter.”

“Oh no. You don't even read your own. You shouldn't read other people's.”

“I always read yours.”

“Oh, I don't mind. But the little gopher is in love with Catherine. His letters are awfully intimate.”

“That's what I like about them. Well, I've got it open. It'd be pretty silly to open a letter and not read it. So just imagine that this is the old gopher. I can do him better than he can do himself. ‘Oh, Catherine, at last I have had a kind word from you. I will be in town Saturday, and perhaps I will see the fruition of all my wishes. This is more than I ever aspired to. I have sold four steers for the trip. I will give you anything you ask for. If you do return with me (as you have indicated that you might) then we will be the happiest couple on earth. I will meet you at the old place where you live, the Crooked Ship, or the snake pit as the people in the town call it. I do not know why you ever chose such an abode. But I will take you away from all this. Till I see you, my most fervent love.’ That's sweet. I wish I had a little old gopher in love with me.”

“But Dotty, you have lots of old gophers in love with you. But I simply can't imagine why Catherine invited him down. She had been trying so hard to get rid of him, painlessly.”

“Oh, she doesn't know that she's invited him down. I never did give her his last letter. As a matter of fact I never gave her his last three letters. I've been answering them for her, the way she would answer them if she were I. I wanted this to be a surprise for her. She becomes so embarrassed when she is surprised like that. She just dies. And this is Saturday. He'll be in today. Gee, will she be surprised.”

“How vile you are, Dotty!”

“Am I not? But someone has to be. How are we going to have any fun if everyone is nice? And this will be fun.”

“What if I read your letters?”

“You may, Ouida. I'll lend them to you. You can read them, but don't tell me what they say.”

“You do not read them? Doesn't he worry when you don't answer his letters?”

Charles Peisson, before he died, as though he had a premonition of it, had written fifty-two letters to his wife, to be mailed one a week by a seaman friend from wherever he was in the world. Charles had told Dotty about this. ‘So I can talk to you a little after I am gone. So you can still hear from me a little.’

But Dotty, as long as she did not open them or read them, did not fully admit that he was dead.

And nobody except Dotty knew what the letters were or whom they were from.

CHAPTER XVIII

The old gopher came to town all right to see Catherine Cadensus. The little old gopher was named Sam Engelbach, and he was from Castroville or Weimar or Schullenberg or one of those German towns in south-middle Texas.

He had been down to Galvez before and had had fun at the Old Wooden Ship. In particular he liked the young lady, Catherine. He wrote to her once and she answered. He wrote to her again and the answer overwhelmed him.

“It's as though she were psychotic,” he said, “as though she were two different girls in one body.”

He continued to write and he continued to be puzzled. For there would be a kind but somewhat stilted letter of the ‘Oh come now, let's be reasonable’ type. ‘You're quite a nice man but let's leave it like that. I have nothing at all against elderly cattle raisers. If you are a sample, I rather like them. But please, please let's not be silly. I'd as soon marry my own grandfather. If you come to town again, don't you dare come with such notions. You be good.’

But the next letter from the girl would be absolutely full of purple passion. “I wonder how a thing like that could go through the mail,” he would say. “It would be bound to scorch someone in the handling.”

Then there would be another ‘Please, please be sensible,’ one, and then there would be another scorcher.

“Yes, the girl is truly psychotic. She has two personalities in one body. There is even a difference in handwriting between the two personalities.”

But it was not until he had received three passionate letters in a row that he made up his mind.

“Damned if it wouldn't be fun to be a little psychotic myself. I will just go down there and have a try at it. I've nothing to lose but my reputation and my money.”

So he wrote that he was coming, and he came.

Catherine Cadensus was probably the prettiest girl who ever came into the Old Wooden Ship. All the girls at the Ship are so pretty that the reigning Miss Universe was once refused admission there as being too much of a crew to come in. This is a fact, it was witnessed. She was refused admittance by Mercedes Morrero in the classic words, ‘Beat it, sweetie, there's enough of us here now.’ So Miss Universe went back to the Little Oyster and is still there. Miss U had never been in a beauty contest, but she is widely known by that name in that part of town; and the fact that she couldn't make the grade at the Old Wooden Ship will give you an idea of the quality of the girls there.

For Catherine was prettier than Dotty at her best, and she was no longer at her best; even prettier than Soft-Talk Susie herself. And she was kind. Others are sticky in their kindness. She was not. It was just that she could not bear to hurt man, woman, child, or old gopher.

But now she was worried. “My old gopher is in town. What will I do? There is something here I don't understand. He sounded wild.”

“Psychotic is the word,” said Dotty.

“How do you know that is the word, Dotty?”

“His own word. He thought that perhaps you were a little.”

“How do you know?”

“His last letter to you. And others. He mentioned it.”

“Did I see them?”

“No. I don't believe I gave them to you.”

“Dotty, have you a finger in this?”

“Up to the elbow.”

“Dot, you are — ”

“Vile is the word. Even Ouida says I am vile, and she loves me.”

“I love you too, Dotty, and I also say you are vile. Your jokes go too far. You will have to get me off the hook.”

“I don't know how. It has a barb in it. It will tear you up if I pull it out.”

“I know it will. And I don't know what to do. How can I bear to hurt that poor man? Whatever did you tell him?”

“Oh, I just imagined that I was you, and I let myself go when I wrote to him.”

But he didn't seem like that poor man when he came in. Nor was he wild, no more than he had always been.

He kissed all the girls, and announced that all drinks would be on him for the duration. But Sam Engelbach always did that. He was a friendly man.

He sent Aloysius McGivern out to find a band or a combo to come and play for them. He dispatched ShotGun Schaeffer to get one thousand oysters and one thousand shrimp for them all.

“You had better take a paper sack, ShotGun. That many will be awkward to carry.”

“All right.”

Dotty phoned Mary Parisi to get her catering service in order, that they had a live one. They began to have a time of it as the mysterious telegraph sent out news that the Wooden Ship would be on full steam tonight, and the people began to come.

Sam Engelbach, the old gopher, was a small, slight man. He was not really a hundred years old, he was hardly two-thirds that. He was a tanned little cattleman who wouldn't have stood shoulder-high to his own bulls. But when he came to town he made a splash.

Dotty had long since recovered from her morning weakness. The distraught young man had returned and known her and loved her. But something more was in the air. The wind began to fill the sails of the whole place.

Aloysius returned with the one thousand oysters and one thousand shrimp. He had not been able to get them all in the paper sack. He was followed by minions bearing hampers and buckets and cans.

Four men carried in a piano from a flat-bed truck. The other musicians carried their own instruments.

“There is something I have to explain to you, Sam Dear,” Catherine said. But Sam, the old gopher, was not listening to her. He was sitting on Vivian's lap, and then on that of Mercedes. He was always one to have fun, but he did not seem to hear Catherine.

The musicians began to coalesce. By that time a barrel of crackers and a gallon of hot sauce had arrived to go with the oysters and the shrimp.

Different people were shucking oysters with long knives and shearing off fingers and thumbs as they did so. People who are fussy about keeping all their fingers should not shuck oysters.

“I fear that I owe you an explanation, Sam dear,” said Catherine. “When you hear it I hope you will laugh and take it all in good spirit. But there is a misunderstanding that should be cleared up.”

But Sam was sitting on Hildegarde's lap and did not hear her at all.

A bartender from the Caribou Bar came in to help them. Two kitchen boys came from the Sea Platter and went to work.

“Did anybody order three hundred pounds of roasted peanuts?” asked a man. “I have them here, but I got to thinking that was quite a few peanuts and maybe the girl made a mistake.”

“No, that is barely enough. This is the place.”

Mossback McCarty came by and told them to keep it discreet, that after all they weren't licensed for a club, only a bar. They told him they would certainly keep it discreet. They told him it so many times that he had to cover his ear. They even made up a song about being discreet, and sang it to the tune of the ‘Old Apple Tree in the Orchard’. They sang it loudly and well and the rousing melody of it carried all over town.

He's sold more than any four steers to come for this trip.

They had rum and whisky and brandy and gin. Mary Parisi brought over a hundred bottles of wine, and Sam Engelbach kissed her as though she was a long-lost cousin.

Sam was now livening up. He was sitting on the lap of that little blonde dice girl from the Chatterbox Club, and later on that of Little Midnight Mulling.

“How will I ever break the news to that nice old man that I'm not in love with him?” asked Catherine.

“I was worried about that too,” said Lazarus Reilly, “but I'm not as worried as I was.”

Some very good barbershop quartets were formed. Buffalo Chips Dugan could sing low down, and Tippio had a fine tenor. The pitch players had given up their game, as there were too many people standing on the tables. So had the pinochle and checker players. Only the domino players continued. You can't interrupt a game of draw just because there is a little something going on.

Mossback McCarty came back. He said there was a report of a riot on his beat. Did any of them know anything about a riot?

“No, but if we see a riot we will call you. We will even help you quell it. We will form a riot-quelling squad,” they told him.

He looked at them sadly. He had meant that they were making a riot but his subtlety was lost on them.

“Sam dear, there has been a horrible mix-up,” said Catherine. “You may have gotten the wrong idea from some letters that you thought were written by me.”

But Sam was sitting on Ouida's lap, and he only winked at Catherine.

“Oh, how will I ever tell that poor old man?” Catherine wailed. “He is such a wistful little fellow and I feel so sorry for him. He's bound to take it hard.”

She tried to tell him again when he was sitting on Soft-Talk Susie's lap, and again when he was sitting on Dotty's. But with all the noise he could not hear her

The hours went by, but full measure was squeezed from every one of them. The thousand oysters were down to one hundred. The shrimp were gone, and the crackers were all but gone. The peanuts had diminished horribly. The whisky was gone, but part of it had been stolen. But there was rum and gin and thirty bottles of wine left.

“Sam dear,” said Catherine, “I will try to make this as easy on you as possible. I cannot marry you. There has been a horrible mix-up.”

But Sam was sitting on Jeannie's lap and had no ears for Catherine.

All in all it was a big night at the Old Wooden Ship. Not as big as the Tuesday before when they had a real dinger. Not as big as the Saturday two weeks before when they made history. But a big night, nevertheless.

It was only when the hour was very late and the party had begun to break up and Sam had come to rest on Catherine's own lap that she had a chance really to talk to him.

“Sam dear, there is something I have to explain to you.”

“What's that, Kate?”

“It's about some letters that you thought I wrote to you.”

“You mean those that Dotty wrote? With a little practice that girl would be a joker. I used to pull things like that myself. Got a man killed once. Was sort of sorry the way it turned out, but it was the funniest joke I ever pulled.”

“But who told you that Dotty wrote them?”

“Why, Vivian told me. And Mercedes told me. And Hildegarde and Ouida and Soft-Talk Susie, and Dotty herself. You can pick up a lot of information sitting on women's laps.”

“Really? I wonder if that's generally known? Then you aren't desolate?”

“Meaning no offense, Catherine, but I was never so relieved in my life. I've been worrying how I'd break the news to you that I didn't want to marry you, now that I know you're not psychotic.”

“If that's what you want, than marry Dotty. She is.”

“That Dotty! I never saw a happier, more carefree person in my life. I had, somehow, an impression that she was tortured.”

“She is. Terribly. In three or four hours she will awake in Hell. She is vivacious. But I believe she is really weaker than the rest of us. I would do anything to help her, but she will not be helped.”

“What happened to her?”

“I don't know. She won't tell. Her husband did not come back. Susie says he is dead. But she still seems to get letters in his hand which she will not open. She is one of our mysteries here.”

“Isn't she a right-hander?”

“Yes, but she has turned against it.”

“Why don't you bring her up to the farm for a couple of weeks? If it does any good I'll be surprised, but we can try it.”

“I'll see if she will go. If she will, I'll arrange to get off, and I'll write you for money for the trip. And now, you little oaf, get right off my lap. You don't even love me. And I bet you sat on a dozen other girls' laps tonight.”

“Eleven. One lady would not let me. She was taken aback at the very suggestion.”

“How unkind of her. To think that there are such persons in the world.”

“Say, are you getting a little bony, Kate?”

“I am not. I have the nicest knees in town.”

They wound it up soon then. After he'd gone to sleep for good, Soft-Talk Susie took the little gopher over her shoulder and carried him up to that little room at the end of the hall on the third floor where they store all the stuff that people have left, and laid him on an old cot there.

Several weeks later Soft-Talk Susie went to the rectory.

“It is the leakage that is horrible,” said Father Knight, “the bleeding to death of the Church, an anemia that is worse than leprosy. What is the gain of all the conversions unless we can staunch the bleeding? While we go to save the one lamb and leave the ninety-nine, we find that nine of them have strayed while we were gone. How can we save the Negro and the unchurched when the good sheep bolt the corrals like mad goats? How can we heal the schism of the Body when the whole part breaks asunder? How can we convince the separated brethren when we cannot make one contrary Irish girl see what she has seen all her life?”

“Oh, she will see,” said Susie. “But working with her is time wasted that could be otherwise spent. There should be an economy about this work in the vineyard. The season will be at an end, and the Master of the Vinyard will want results. That Old Jew, as she calls him.”

“Of course He is. She is clairvoyant in seeing that phase of Him. He does want every ounce of flesh, and every drop of blood. He is jealous and this bleeding to death of the corporate body displeases Him. But I had an opinion once, from one who had been at it nearly as long as I have, that none of this is wasted; that there is created by this leakage through the centuries a penumbra about the Church that is still sympathetic to her; that when the nations return, as Holland is returning and England is beginning to return, they return from this penumbra, this pasture that was once plow-land.”

“Will that also take four hundred years?”

“I don't know. It seems that there are many generations needlessly wasted in it.”

Father Knight had called Soft-Talk Susie to come in and see him on account of one of Dotty's most recent escapades, the most foolish one yet.

She hadn't actually tried to kill herself. But she made herself and everyone else except the experts believe that she had tried to.

She slashed herself about the throat and wrists and bled copiously, and fell into a passable swoon. When Ouida came in answer to her screams they both believed that she was dying. She called for a priest in a pitiful voice and prayed to all the saints to intercede for her — that her life be spared for a few short moments till she could make amends.

So Ouida went wailing in Cajun and commandeered a passing car and went to the rectory.

But Soft-Talk Susie was not fooled. Now Susie would choke up at any misfortune falling to any creature. She was the soul of sympathy.

But Susie had a sharp eye to go with an understanding heart. She saw at once that those skin cuts under the pretty chin weren't meant to reach the main vessel, and that those gory nitches in the soft heels of Dotty's hands would never be mortal.

“You are a little fake, Dotty, a double-dyed fake.”

“Susie, I am dying. How can you maintain such equanimity in the face of my death agony?”

“Equanimity it is not. That is my bed you are bleeding on. That is my best bedspread. How could you be so thoughtless?”

“Susie, I thought you loved me! I am dying! My life is on the brink. My soul is in the balance.”

Moss McCarty, the old cop with a sense of happening, came at once. He could spot a fake every time.

“I'll have to run you in for this, Dot. You have created a disturbance. An attempted suicide, even such a sorry attempt as this, is against the law. You are going to have to pay a pretty stiff fine for this, girl.”

“But I am dying! Will nobody have pity on me?”

Mossback phoned the priest and explained the situation to him to save him a trip. That is the reason for what seemed a weird reception to Ouida when she burst in with the frantic news.

“Dépêchez vous, the poor Dotty is dead.”

“Quite dead, is she? Are you sure?”

“Dying, all but dead! For the love of God come quickly and save her soul. And pray that we are not too late.”

“You go tell that brat that when she wants to get straightened out she can come and stand in the confession line with the rest of the poor sinners.”

“But she is dying, Father! Dying!”

“Now young lady, we both know that she is too mean to die.”

“Do I hear rightly? Are these my own ears that tell me this? Her soul is in danger.”

“I know it is. It will still be in danger tomorrow.”

“You will not come?”

“I will not come. I have to tend to my roses. I have to phone a lady about a recalcitrant son and I have been trying to figure out a line of talk to take. I have three letters to write. I have a clerical guest for dinner, and I must make an appearance at a small meeting later in the evening. I am quite busy.”

“But she is dying, and you neglect your job for your roses?”

“She is not dying. Clement McCarty phoned me that she did only a little harmless whittling on herself.”

“Oh, that little beast! That unsufferable little beast! How could she so fright her friends? She did it only for sympathy?”

“That is right.”

“But she thought she was dying.”

“Not really she didn't.”

“She will get no sympathy from me. Oh, that dirty little clown! I'll never get excited over her again.”

Nor was there any sympathy shown, at least not for a while. Susie was steely with her, though it hurt her to be so. She wouldn't even pay her fine. It was Catherine and Lazarus and Aloysius who had to pay her fine.

As soon as Dotty was patched up, Susie made her scrub out by hand the sheets and the bedspread.

“The next time you do it, do it on your own bed.”

“But I'm sick. I'll wash them tomorrow if I live the night through.”

“You'll wash them right now.”

“Why can't I put them in the washer?”

“I don't want the blood to get on the other things. You will scrub them by hand. And don't play any tricks with those bandages to make yourself bleed again. I am on to you.”

“I'm weak. I will faint.”

“Put a pillow on the floor. You can faint on that.”

This was very chastening for Dotty.

Meanwhile Soft-Talk Susie went to all of them and told them that if they babied that kid any more they would have to answer to her. There were times when Soft-Talk Susie belied her name.

For several days Dotty was heavily swathed in bandages, and she affected a husky voice.

“You know, the vocal cords were completely severed,” she said.

“How clever of you to have learned to talk all over again in two days,” said Mildred Davidson. Dotty had never liked Mildred. Another time Dot said, “I shall be scarred. I shall be horribly scarred all my life.”

“The devil, Dotty,” Ouida told her. “I've been finned worse than that by catfish.”

After the bandages were off and replaced by little pieces of tape she began to toss her head.

“You think I'm a joke. You think I can't do anything. I bet you I can stay sober for a week.”

“What will that prove?” asked Susie.

“Why, it will prove that I can stay sober for a week. You remember the time that Ptolemy said, ‘I can prove that the world is round,’ and that other Greek said, ‘What will that prove?’ ‘Why, it will prove that the world is round,’ he said. You have to prove one thing at a time. Then you prove something else.”

“All right. You prove it. Then you prove something else.”

So she started to prove things.

Dotty went to work for a month for a trucking company when some of the girls were on vacation. She said she could type. She said she run a calculator. She said she could make out manifests. She didn't even know what a manifest was. She asked Ouida the day before she went to work. Ouida didn't know either.

“I think it is a facture.”

“No, that's an invoice, on a bill of lading. Hell, if you only know things in French you're of no help to me.”

She could type pretty well. She had operated a lot of cash registers, and they're about as complicated as a calculator. She was smart. She did the work all right and everybody was helpful.

She had to get a job so she could get a loan to keep her house from being sold for taxes. She hadn't taken any interest in the house for a while, but now she didn't want to lose it. Little Dutch Eckel would lend her the money to pay her taxes, but he wouldn't do it unless she straightened up and got a job. He wouldn't count barmaid jobs because she stayed drunk all the time she was barmaid.

After that she worked two weeks in the office of one of the shipping companies. But she was fired when it was discovered that she had lied about her qualifications. If she could have got by another week she would have caught on well enough to do the job right.

Then she was out of work and dejected.

“Come on,” Catherine said. “You've been a good girl for quite a while. My vacation starts tomorrow. We'll just go visit our old gopher.”

Catherine called him collect and told him to send some money post-haste, whatever that is, so they could come home to visit him. He wired them the money.

Dotty gave the keys of her house to Ouida. She was still made at Soft-Talk Susie for being so hard.

Then she went on vacation with Catherine.

CHAPTER XIX

Dotty had never been in the country much, though she was born in Jack Oak County, Oklahoma. She was small when she left there, and it had been more drifting desert than real country.

The house on Elm Road had been on the edge of the country, but it was actually a town home with a garden. Since she had returned to the Island a second time, she hadn't left it except for short trips with Charles. In a strict sense there is no country on the island. It is a sand-bar thirty-five miles long. There is empty space and dune areas and inlets. But it is not what a farmer or a rancher calls country.

Sam Engelbach was not a cattle rancher. He was a cattle farmer. By his own definition an establishment that is more than one-third under the plow, is a farm, not a ranch. He had six hundred and eleven acres. It would have been six hundred and forty, but part of it was in the middle of the Colorado River, and a corner of the original tract was on the other side. This trans-fluvial part had been sold by the father of Sam Engelbach long ago.

Sam grew clover and row crops in the fields. The just less than two-thirds that remained pasture was rough though beautiful. The house was large, but the inside of it looked like an auctioneer's barn.

“It needs a woman's touch,” sad Catherine.

“You have had your chance, Kate, and let it get away. It will never return. You are both welcome to any part of the rooms in which you can clear a space for yourselves. But don't overdo the cleaning up. Dirt is a natural preservative. A house is like a piece of machinery. If you clean the natural accumulation of oil and dirt from a machine you are taking away its protective coating, and you give it a chance to ruse and disintegrate. It is the same with a house.”

“We will be very careful not to damage it,” said Dotty. “I am a thin-layer-of-dust girl, myself.”

But the three of them were not allowed to batch it in unmitigated comfort. Their comfort was mitigated by Hulda, Sam's half-sister who came over from the neighboring farm to pay her brother a visit of several weeks.

“We are compromised,” said Catherine. “What is the German word for chaperone?”

“Anstandsdame,” said Dotty. There were times that it seemed that Dotty knew everything. Catherine had always admired this in her. If she didn't know an answer she would give another just as good, and none would be the wiser.

However, the girls conquered Hulda with a peculiar brand of honey that is gathered and combed only in the city streets. It is sweeter than anything these clover-belt people ever tasted. They charmed her. They charmed the very pants off her, as Dotty said.

“I am so happy I got to know you,” Hulda said before she had hardly got to know them. “I used to worry about Sam when he went down to Houston and Galveston. When he would refer to his girlfriends in that roguish way of his, I had quite another sort of girl in mind. I see now how wrong I was. I do believe you are the two nicest young ladies I have ever known. Why don't you marry some of the young farmers and settle down here? So many of the young people go to the towns, and they make a mistake by so doing. I would reverse the trend.”

So Hulda let the word get around what real prizes they were, and that Saturday night a pair of very presentable square heads came out and took them to either Weimar or Schullenberg where there was a dance in the hall over the fire station.

But let us fall back and regroup. It is still the Tuesday before that Saturday.

Dotty had never been a sensation on horseback. But Catherine loved to ride and Dotty felt obligated since Sam had two good riding ponies. Dotty rode with her Monday and it was a trial. Tuesday Sam wanted them to ride out with him after a coyote or a swift that had been bothering the geese and chickens. Dotty had never been a sensation with a gun, either. She let them go without her. She said that she was morose and wanted to be alone, so she rode off by herself.

As soon as she was out of sight of the house, however, she told the pony to stop right there by that rock, dammit, so she could get off easily. For the rest of the day she walked.

She took off the bridle. She had always been afraid that bits hurt horses' mouths, though she had been told long ago that this was not so. “It is your opinion that they don't,” she had told her Uncle Tim. “But are you sure it is the horse's opinion?”

Another pony with another companion might have strayed when so loosened, but Ned had formed an attachment for Dotty and followed her to listen to her talk.

“It is much better if we both walk, Neddy,” Dot said. “I am not comfortable when I ride you. And if I carried you, you would be cramped; and it would look silly.”

They went up hill and down dale.

“But conversely it will not work,” said Dot. “You can go down hill, but really now, can you go up dale? You know this country better than I do, Neddy, but do know that?”

Sometimes when they went up long hills she told Ned to go first, and she hung onto his tail. They could see towns from the tops of the hills, but Dotty didn't know them apart.

“There is a little town around here named Flatonia. If I were a town and my mother named me Flatonia, I'd change my name when I grew up. And there is a town named Muldoon. It is the only Irish thing in Little Germany here.”

Texas isn't really ugly at very close range, no more than it is at a long vista. It is only in the middle view that it is ugly. But when you walk it, you are close enough to see its qualities; the intricacy of small growth of short grass and flower-headed weeds; the spongy earth that is neither clay, loam nor lime; the clover that gives a tone to the whole turf, and the low sing of the gramineus insects.

They wandered the country and came back to their own land farther down. There is a stream called Engelback after Sam Engelbach, or his father, or grandfather. Engelback, Angel Brook. It was fringed with cottonwood and runt elms and it ran full.

Dotty felt that the place was haunted, and she had the unaccountable feeling that it was partly haunted by herself. Then she remembered about it from the things that she had thought she had put aside forever. She remembered it, if it is possible to remember something that never happened.

“This is the route we traced. This is where we were going to spend the whole summer following the trail they used; after we had put a little by, and Charles had one to work on land. We were going to drive where we could drive, and walk where we had to walk; and camp on their old camp sites. We would discern them by intuition and geology and topography and research. I have discovered this one by intuition. From the accounts, we know that they followed the West bank of the Colorado here; and at night they would ascend one of the side streams a mile or so, where the water was clearer and they felt safer from the Indians. And Angel Brook is one of their camp sites.

“Right here on this very day of the year, Charles and I would have camped, if he had come back to me. It is on the brook only a mile up from the river. It is a high-banked bend in the brook with a little grass beach; and a fire here would be hidden from all ways. Instead of Charles, I have come here with Neddy who is my friend; but it is not quite the same thing.”

She found the old fire. It appeared to be about a month old, not four hundred years old. She found bits of watermelon and old beer cans.

“Anomalous intrusions,” said Dotty. “That's what the archeologists call them, like when you find a Landon campaign in an Etruscan tomb. They are hard to explain, but they do occur.”

She was plain witched at crossing a bit of the trail that she and Charles had meant to follow in finding out the roots of his new country.

“It was over four hundred years ago that Cabeza de Vaca and Esteban stopped here: the first two white men ever to ascent the Colorado, though one of them, Esteban, was a negro. That's a bull, isn't it, Neddy?

“Esteban was on another expedition later and scouted out in front of them. Hardly anyone knows that the first white man in three different states was a negro.”

After a while she talked to that Old Jew from the Beginning.

“I will have to admit one thing, Your detail work is good. You see it best when you lie down in the grass here. If I were making grass, I would make one stem as well as I could; then I would have a kind of duplicating machine and turn out the rest of them like it. But You have made them all different. You have not scrimped. Well, it was a lot of work; and, as they say, You will get Your reward in the next world. You have a monopoly there. You bought up all the corner lots, and if anyone wants to locate there they have to come down to Your spring to drink.”

When it was dark Neddy nuzzled her to tell her it was time to go home. She mounted him, though painfully, and rode him back to the house without benefit of bit or bridle.

“How am I going to get out of going to Church?” Dotty asked Catherine. It was the Sunday morning after the Saturday night dance in the hall over the fire station.

“Why, you either go, or you don't go. That is all there is to it.”

“But, they're all Catholics here.”

“So, what are we, Zen Buddhists?”

“But I don't believe any more.”

“Then don't go.”

“But what will Hulda think if I don't go?”

“You aren't afraid of God, and you are afraid of what Hulda will think?”

“Yes, that is exactly the way it is.”

“She'll think that you are a brainless spoiled fluff, and too affected even to bother with.”

“Is that what you think of me, Catherine?”

“Often, Dotty, very often.”

“That Old Jew is playing tricks. I don't know who writes his scripts, but they are pretty transparent. Do you know, Catherine, that you are playing a part in a trick so obvious that it's beneath contempt? What will it profit Him to make me go? What if I go to Church to save face with these nice people? Does He think I don't see through Him ?”

“And do you think that He doesn't see through you, Dotty?”

“Well, that Old Serpent has lost dignity in my eyes to engineer me into a situation of this kind.”

“Have Old Serpents dignity?”

“Yes, of a sort.”

Dotty went to mass with the rest of them, but she was sulky to her marrow.

Soft-Talk Susie came on Ouida opening and reading Dotty's letters from Charles. “Just where did you get those?”

“Out of Dotty's house. She left the key with me.”

“And she told you that you could read the letters?”

“Yes. She told me exactly that. She may not have meant it, but I'm doing it.”

“Aren't you ashamed?”

“I was when I started. Now I believe that it's fortunate that I thought of it. If she had been reading them all along she would have missed much of her trouble. He's dead.”

“Yes, I know.”

“But he wrote these letters after he was dead.”

“No, he wrote them before.”

“He says that he writes them after he is dead.”

“That is only a convention, a manner of speaking. He wrote them when he was alive to be mailed after he was dead.”

“He seems to know an awfully lot about things for a man who was still alive when he wrote them.”

“Oh, he always had entrée in both worlds. It is not so rare.”

“How do you know it isn't rare? Sometimes you seem to know a lot about things for one who is still alive. Just who are you, anyhow?”

“Why, Ouida, you have known me for three years. What are you asking?”

“I am asking who you are?”

“I am only Susie as I have always been.”

“I think you are someone else. Do you know what is in these letters ?”

“Yes. Essentially.”

“Well, you can say what you want to. But there are passages here that I know he wrote after he was dead.”

“Put them up now, Ouida. Don't open or read any more of them.”

“If we could get Dotty to read them she would change a little. But they aren't comforting like you would think a man would write to his wife just for love of her. They are so scary you'd be afraid to read them after dark. They are comforting in a way, but they aren't for a kid. Maybe she wouldn't have gone to pieces if she'd read them as they came.”

“Yes. It was only a quirk that she wouldn't read them. She wasn't ready for them. Now give them to me.”

“You said it wasn't too unusual to have entrée in both worlds. Have you?”

“A little bit, Ouida, a little bit.”

Dotty and Catherine stayed up there in Little Germany for two weeks.

“There is something restful about being a German,” said Dotty. “I have been several things, but this is the most restful. They know they are right even when they aren't. That saves worry. Of course they use the antidote of hard work for disquietude, which I believe is medically unsound, and does not appeal to me at all. They are good humored without any humor. That would be impossible with anyone else. When they hurt your feelings you know it is accidental. If they were Irish you would know it was on purpose. Their trouble is that they are serious about the serious things, and flighty about the little things. It should be the other way around. I would prove it by paradox, but it will not, at the moment, come to me.”

“Maybe it is you who should be the other way, Dotty.”

“Oh, no. I work in the right framework. It's just that I've painted such a horrible picture inside it. Everybody should be a little German, about one-eighth. Nobody should be allowed to be any more than that; after that it gets silly. But it would be hard to enforce. The world will have to come to it willingly.”

Dotty had a chance to marry a nice farm. She had a chance to marry a creamery and a feed store. She had a chance to marry a drug and sundry store. Hulda thought that she should marry one of them.

“Like you, I was widowed young. But I dallied and did not remarry. Now nobody has asked me for many years. In time, you also could come to that. I regret it. So may you, someday.”

“I did not say that I was a widow.”

“That barn did not say that it was a barn, Dotty. But what else would you call it?”

It was after mass that second Sunday that Dotty gave Hulda a severe lecture.

“You would not go to a play and bring along your own reading lamp, and read a book while it was going on?”

“What are you trying to say, Dotty?”

“You wouldn't go to an important meeting and then sit in the corner and write private letters while it progressed?”

“Come to the point, Dotty.”

“You wouldn't travel to see a parade and then look the other way while it was going by?”

“Say what you are going to say, Dotty.”

“But you go to Mass, and read out of a little devotional prayer book for a while, and then say your rosary for a while. At Mass you should use the missal.”

“It is hard to follow. I was never taught to use it. We are simple people.”

“A child can use it. It only takes a little patience at first, and it is worth it.”

“But I read English badly, and I have only a simple prayer book in German.”

“When I get back I will find somewhere a German-Latin Missal and send it to you.”

“It will be appreciated.”

“Was that man a cloud that snickered?” asked Dotty. “Oh, You Old Jew, You become cuter and more obvious in Your tricks. You must have been reading in the second-rate applied psychology books. And You think that something like that will work with Dotty? I believe that I am quite free of the Father Complex. Whatever made You think I would be subject to it? You, however, have an incurable Daughter Complex. But this daughter will escape You yet.”

When they got back to the island Dotty asked Soft-Talk Susie where her mail was.

“Ouida brought it all from your house, and what came for you here is with it too, all together in that basket.”

“I see bills and letters to subscribe to magazines. But was there not a letter?”

“What kind of letter?”

“Like I always get once a week.”

“Do you get a letter once a week, Dotty?”

“Oh, Susie, don't be difficult with me. You know the letters I mean.”

“I don't think there will be any more of those, Dotty.”

“Susie, I'll die if I don't get them.”

“But you never even opened them.”

“Susie, you always understood me. If I don't get any letters that means he is really dead forever. What will I do?”

“Well, you have had a year. There were fifty-two letters. He told you there would be, didn't he?”

“Oh, Susie, I don't know what he told me. How can I live when even he has deserted me?”

“Yes, here is a letter, Dotty. Go home and read it. He was a wonderful man, and he feels badly now at the way you have not stood up.”

“Did it just come? Is it the last one?”

“No. It is the first one. I will give them all to you now, or one at a time, if you wish. You were to get them for a year. What matter if it is not the same year.”

“Oh, You perfidious Old Jew, You!”

“I, Dotty.”

“No. You know who I am talking to, Susie.”

Dotty went home and read it with only a little trepidation. But her calm didn't last long. The thing almost scared the hair off her head. Ouida had been right.

Soft-Talk Susie — was it possible? — had been wrong. Charles wrote that after he was dead.

It was no little screed to comfort a wife for such a temporary thing as the loss of a husband. It was from the other side. He wrote from the other side as a ghost. There was not a soft or sentimental word in it.

Then Dotty knew that she was in it; that the battle could not be avoided or side-tracked. That it was never won till the last, and that it could be lost right at the last. That there was a fire between them that would have to be crossed. That the hand she tried to reach out would be open bones before it was fleshed again.

And that the penalty for loss was irrevocable and forever. That there could never be any bargain on it. She knew that she would have to reenter the battle that she had tried to avoid for a while.

CHAPTER XX

That Old Jew had played other tricks. Like the Sunday morning Dotty went to Ouida's to read the funny papers. Ouida took the Chronicle and Dotty took the Post. The funnies were different in them. But Ouida was still in bed.

“Are you sick?”

“No, Dotty, I feel fine.”

“But it's Sunday.”

“I know that much.”

“You hardly have time to get to last Mass.”

“I'm not going to go any more. You don't, and you get along all right. And it's a bother.”

“I do not get along all right. And of course it's a bother. And you are a shifty-eyed weasel. Who put you up to this?”

“Nobody put me up to anything.”

“Yes. He did too. Oh, You Old Jew. You're not even honest Hebrew. You're dialect Yiddish.”

“I am not. I'm Cajun French.”

“Oh shut up, Ouida. I wasn't talking to you.”

“But I'm the only one here.”

“This isn't even good soap opera. You had to pick poor little Ouida for a part! Don't you know she's too honest for such connivance? Ouida, you blamed cotton-picker, get out of that bed. Yes, I will go with you, girl. But if the positions were reversed and I were trying to hornswoggle You, I bet I'd use more finesse.”

“I wasn't trying to hornswoggle you, Dotty. Well yes, I was a little bit.”

“I still wasn't talking to you, Ouida.”

But Dotty was wrong, and she knew it. These little tricks weren't it, they were hardly a part of it. It wasn't soap opera. It was the only live drama, one that split open in the middle of the third act with half the cast falling down into a pit of fire.

It is effective, and nobody else has ever done it.

There may be some puzzlement about the Old Wooden Ship and its crew and passengers. Is it or isn't it? And are they or aren't they? The answer is, no, it isn't. And no, they aren't, except for a few of them now and then.

The Old Ship is not a lupanar, not a bordello, not a cat-house. It is a barroom bordering on respectability. It is the international headquarters for the Beach Draw-Noon And Domino Fraternal Organization; it is the constant meeting place for the Club Ajedrez and for Pitch-Poker and Pinochle United, as well as for the Elbow Benders Beneficent Society. Some of these clubs are named in fun, but that of the domino players is serious.

The three stories above the bar room have no direct connection with it, though most of the lodgers are patrons of the bar. These are cheap rooms, mostly small, but some of them are nice. The lodgers are more poor than otherwise. But the rooms were not rooms of assignation; or if so, they are so privately.

It is not true that the Old Ship was ever the hangout for bums. There are many wandering workmen who winter in Galveston. Being most of them unfamilied, they work only seven or eight months of the year. Many of them frequent the Ship. But they are not bums.

The girls who come into the Ship are none of them tramps. Soft-Talk Susie would not let anyone active in that profession enter. She always knew whether a girl was or not.

But to explain about the girls at the Ship it is necessary first to explain about Soft-Talk Susie Kutz, in as much as she is susceptible of explanation. Lazarus Reilly was not able to explain her. Lazarus was the owner of the Ship, at least he believed himself to be. He was the proprietor, he was the captain and much of the crew. But he was at a loss to explain who or what Susie was, where she came from, or how she happened to be working for him, or he for her.

It was about four years before this complex that Susie appeared. Lazarus went to open his bar one morning and found it already opened. It was being operated by a beautiful girl or woman, he could not tell which. He was unmistakeably reminded of the Valiant Woman of the Book of Wisdom who putest out her hand to strong things, who eateth not her bread idle, and who shall laugh in the latter day.

That was all very well, but he had had the lock on the door changed only three days before on account of some pilfering. He knew that he had the only key; and he had locked the place tightly the night before. Nor had he hired or advertised for a barmaid.

“Good morning, Lazarus,” the girl said. “There was no need for you to arrive so early since I will be here. I will make out a schedule for you later. There will be hours and days when I will have to be elsewhere.”

“How did you get in, Susie?” Lazarus asked. Then he felt himself quite uneasy. How had he known that her name was Susie?

She did not tell him how she got in. She has not told him yet. But from that day till this she locks and unlocks the place when it is her time to do it. Lazarus still has the only key.

Now Lazarus had always handled his own affairs and been his own man. A thing like this does not just slip up on a careful and competent man. In the days that followed he tested the thing once or twice. He told her to do different things. Either she did them, or gave a good reason for not doing them. That was something. She was a reasonable girl.

Lazarus had never sent anyone away thirsty. He had given many a beer, in the name of Christ, to poor strangers. He was both glad and apprehensive to see that Susie was of the same mind. He had always been sorely pressed for money on account of his generosity in many things. He was still sorely pressed, though perhaps not so much as before, even though his liberality had doubled and the place now had to support two of them.

However, Susie was good for business. Now there was a sparkle on the place that fat Lazarus had never been able to give it. There was something else new: the girls who came to shine, and gradually to pass on. There were whispers about most of them when they first came to live with Susie, or in the other rooms; or the places nearby. There was talk that Susie was taking out of circulation some of the most promising as well as the best-proven talent in town.

Briefly, she was changing the unchangeable. She was persuading girls to give up their profession and to go into other lines of work; beach girls, hotel girls, Post Office Street girls. It was impossible, but over the years she did it with many dozens of them. We will not name names. Not all the girls had been such. We will not say that Mercedes had been one. We will not say that Vivian, or Little Midnight Mullens, or Ouida, or Hildegarde, or Jeannie, or even Dotty had been one. We will not say that Catherine had been one. In her special case it wouldn't even have been true.

Some of the girls she helped had been rummies, or had been depressed or nutty, or had just been clear broke. But most of them had been in the profession. Susie got them to go back to their hometowns, or to go to work in the cafés or beach places or downtown. Few of them ever relapsed, except Avril Aaron, and she must have relapsed a thousand times.

There was a whisper that Susie herself had been one where she came from. How did they know where she came from? This was supposed somehow to negate her work. And as lies crushed to earth will rise again while truth withers on the bush, you may even now hear that whisper. Do not believe it.

Yet there was nothing false about her reforming or rebuilding in these fields, though some think that any reforming worked by orthodoxy is false and without dignity. To the true pagan of dignity — and though there are left no more than half-a-dozen of them on earth, they still give a tone to much of the world — this practice of Soft-Talk Susie seemed incredibly tinny, to try to change the most unchangeable of things, the girls of the street. But she was often successful, and that was the unforgivable part.

Of course one or two people cannot reverse a tide. Lazarus Reilly and Soft-Talk Susie Kutz could not. There was more ground lost in a day or night than they could gain back in a month.

But such are never entirely alone. There was Melody Jane Clybourn, a little colored girl downtown who had probably straightened out more girls than Susie, and against heavier odds; for the poverty was more grinding with them. There were others. No matter how many there were, there was more ground lost daily than they could ever gain back.

The sense of order is hard to restore. Order is good. Regimentation is bad. And there are not three people in the world who know the difference.

That year Ouida received an odd penance in confession. It was not prayers, not rosaries, not stations to be said. Instead she was told to plant nine square yards of garden and keep it weeded all summer without help. This was to begin in her a sense of order. It was quite a small garden, and yet it was a devilish penance. The weeds grow at night. They grow before you get up in the morning. You can't just clean them all up and leave them for a while. They are there when you want to go to a party or dancing. They have to be hoed every day. Ouida sometimes wept over her weeds.

Dotty had also come to a grudging admiration of order.

“There is something to be said for people who live in houses,” she said.

“Most do, in one kind or another,” Buffalo Chips Dugan told her, “I mean people who live at home in houses.”

“So do I.”

“I mean people who live at home with families in houses, and work and raise children, and don't holler when they're hit, like we do; and keep at it all the time not just in spates.”

“I suppose there is something to be said for them.”

“I will pick up the pieces of my life and put them in place neatly,” said Dotty. “I will devise a few tricks of my own instead of being contemptuous of other tricks. I will be less all-fired selfish. I am like a child with all her toys scattered. I have to pick them up and put them in a box. Only I won't do them all tonight because I am tired and there are too many of them. But I will put a few of them away now and the rest of them on other days.

The Colonel had put away Dotty's mother, though he provided for her. He wrote to Dotty sometimes. He said that he had often admired her strength.

“If he only knew,” said Dotty, “that this little crippled girl doesn't have any strength.”

The Colonel had a hard way to go. The odds would have been against his making it.

The road takes a little rise about here. From the little rise one can see a middling distance both forward and backward. We will take it here. It is one present, however soon it has become a past.

Dotty had just reached her majority. She was working hard at a respectable job which she disliked. She had returned doggedly to her Faith, but the old sparkle of it had not returned. Whatever was built back would have to be close-grained and hard like a gnarled tree. A bone is broken in a second, but it takes longer to knit.

She has been a pretty good girl for some time and is eminently sociable. But she is no longer the Mayor of Tremont Avenue. She may someday make a good man miserable by reminding him that he isn't even in the same boat with Charles Peisson; but right now she doesn't much think she ever will.

Sometimes at night, she still plays the piano at the Little Oyster. When she does, everyone falls silent; and the word goes out that Dotty is playing, and people begin to come in.

She doesn't go on benders very much; only every couple of months. It's been nearly three months now. But she still makes a little history with them now and then.

She would rather sit in her kitchen with thirty or forty friends, and fire up the old coffee-maker that used to be in a ship's galley. It makes good coffee, and they lace it with brandy or whisky, according to their taste, and talk all night. There aren't a dozen kitchens in that part of town that abound with such salty talk.

Dotty is by no means saved. No more than you are. A practiced gambler like One-Chance Hardwich who owns the Chatterbox Club, and who will bet on anything, would give odds at no more than five to three in her favor.

On yourself he would hardly go even money.