“Berlioz,” repeated Miss Jameson mimicking the other’s tone: “Swedenborg on a French holiday.” Mark Frost stared at his hands on his lap, moving his lips slightly.
“Forget your notebook, Mark?” Fairchild asked quizzically.
“It’s very sad,” the Semitic man said. “Man gets along quite well until that unhappy day on which some one else discovers him thinking. After that, God help him: he doesn’t dare leave home without a notebook. It’s very sad.”
“Mark’s not such an accomplished buccaneer as you and Dawson,” his sister answered quickly. “At least he requires a notebook.”
“My dear girl,” the Semitic man murmured in his lazy voice, “you flatter yourself.”
“So do I,” Fairchild said. “I always—”
“Whom?” the Semitic man asked. “Yourself, or me?”
“What?” said Fairchild, staring at him.
“Nothing. Excuse me: you were saying—?”
“I was saying that I always carry my portfolio with me because it’s the only comfortable thing I ever found to sit on.”
......
Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words. It seemed endless, as though it might go on forever. Ideas, thoughts, became mere sounds to be bandied about until they were dead.
Noon was oppressive as a hand, as the ceaseless blow of a brass hand: a brass blow neither struck nor withheld; brass rushing wings that would not pass. The deck blistered with it, the rail was too hot to touch and the patches of shadow about the deck were heavy and heat soaked as sodden blankets. The water was an unbearable glitter, the forest was a bronze wall cast at a fearful heat and not yet cooled, and no breeze was anywhere under the world’s heaven.
But the unbearable hiatus of noon passed at last and the
