The Crimson Tide Part 54

"I asked you," she added, "because you seem to be quite featureless."

"Oh, I've a few eyes and noses and that sort----"

"I mean psychologically accentless."

"Just plain man?"

"Yes. That is all you are, isn't it?"

"I'm afraid it is," he admitted, quite as much amused as she appeared to be.

"I see. Some crazy girl here is enamoured of you. Otherwise, you scarcely belong among modern intellectuals, you know."

At that he laughed outright.

She said: "You really are delightful. You're just a plain, fighting male, aren't you?"

"Well, I haven't done much fighting----"

"Unimaginative, too! You could have led yourself to believe you had done a lot," she pointed out. "And maybe you could have interested me."

"I'm sorry. But suppose you try to interest _me_?"

"Don't I? I've tried."

"Do your best," he encouraged her cheerfully. "You never can be sure I'm not listening."

At that she laughed: "You nice youth," she said, "if you'd talk that way to your sweetheart she'd sit up and listen.... Which I'm afraid she doesn't, so far."

He felt himself flus.h.i.+ng, but he refused to wince under her amused a.n.a.lysis.

"You've simply got to have imagination, you know," she insisted.

"Otherwise, you don't get anywhere at all. Have you read my smears?"

"Smears?"

"Bacteriologists take a smear of something on a gla.s.s slide and slip it under a microscope. My poems are like that. The words are the bacteria. Few can identify them."

"Are you serious?"

"Entirely."

He maintained his gravity: "Would you be kind enough to take a smear and let me look?" he inquired politely.

"Certainly: the experiment is called 'Unpremeditation.'"

She dropped one thin and silken knee over the other and crossed her hands on it as she recited her poem.

"UNPREMEDITATION."

"In the tube.

Several, With intonation.

Red, red, red.

A square fabric Once white With intention.

Soiled, soiled, soiled.

Six hundred hundred million Swarm like vermin, Without intention.

Redder. Redder.

Drip, drip, drip.

A goes west, B goes east, C goes north, Pink, pink, pink.

Two white squares.

And a coat-sleeve.

Without intention, Intonations.

Pinker. Redder.

Six hundred hundred million.

Billions. Trillions.

A week. Two weeks.

Otherwise?

Eternity."

Jim's features had become a trifle gla.s.sy. "You do skip a few words,"

he said, "don't you?"

"Words are animalculae. Some skip, some gyrate, some sub-divide."

He put a brave face on the matter: "If you're not really guying me,"

he ventured, "would you tell me a little about your poem?"

"Why, yes," she replied amiably. "To put it redundantly, then, I have sketched in my poem a man in the subway, with influenza, which infects others in his vicinity."

She rose, smiled, and sauntered off, leaving him utterly unable to determine whether or not he had been outrageously imposed upon. Palla rescued him, and he went with her, a little wild-eyed, downstairs to the nearly empty and carpetless drawing-room, where a music box was playing and people were already dancing.

Toward midnight, Marya, pa.s.sing Jim on her way to the front door, leaned wide from Vanya's arm:

"Let us at least discuss my rainbow theory," she said, laughing, and her face a shade too close to his; and continued on, still clinging to the sleeve of Vanya's fur-lined coat.

Ilse was the last to leave, with Estridge waiting behind her to hold her wrap.

She came up to Palla, took both her hands in an odd, subdued, wistful way.

After a moment she kissed her, and, close to her ear: "Wait, darling."

Palla did not understand.

Ilse said: "I mean--wait before you ever take any step to--to prove any theory--or belief."

Still Palla did not comprehend.

"With--Jim," said Ilse in a low voice.