The Firing Line | Page 4

breaking again on
his lips--"I'm afraid you don't care whether I tell you or not. Do you?"
"If you ask me--I really don't," she said. "And, by the way, do you
know that if you turned around properly and faced the stern you could
make better progress with your oars?"
"By 'better' do you mean quicker progress?" he asked, so naïvely that
she concluded he was a trifle stupid. The best-looking ones were
usually stupid.

"Yes, of course," she said, impatient. "It's all very well to push a punt
across a mill-pond that way, but it's not treating the Atlantic with very
much respect."
"You were not particularly respectful toward the Atlantic Ocean when
you started to swim across it."
But again the echo of amusement in his voice found no response in her
unsmiling silence.
He thought to himself: "Is she a prude, or merely stupid! The pity of
it!--with her eyes of a thinking goddess!--and no ideas behind them!
What she understands is the commonplace. Let us offer her the
obvious."
And, aloud, fatuously: "This is a rarely beautiful scene--"
"What?" crisply.
And feeling mildly wicked he continued:
--"Soft skies, a sea of Ionian azure; one might almost expect to see a
triareme heading up yonder out of the south, festooned with the golden
fleece. This is just the sort of a scene for a triareme; don't you think
so?"
Her reply was the slightest possible nod.
He looked at her meanly amused:
"It's really very classical," he said, "like the voyage of Ulysses; I,
Ulysses, you the water nymph Calypso, drifting in that golden ship of
Romance--"
"Calypso was a land nymph," she observed, absently, "if accuracy
interests you as much as your monologue."
Checked and surprised, he began to laugh at his own discomfiture; and
she, elbow on the gunwale, small hand cupping her chin, watched him

with an expressionless directness that very soon extinguished his
amusement and left him awkward in the silence.
"I've tried my very best to be civil and agreeable," he said after a
moment. "Is it really such an effort for you to talk to a man?"
"Not if I am interested," she said quietly.
He felt that his ears were growing red; she noticed it, too, and added: "I
do not mean to be too rude; and I am quite sure you do not either."
"Of course not," he said; "only I couldn't help seeing the humour of
romance in our ocean encounter. I think anybody would--except you--"
"What?"
The crisp, quick question which, with her, usually seemed like an
exclamation, always startled him into temporary silence; then he began
more carefully:
"There was one chance in a million of your finding my boat in the fog.
If you hadn't found it--" He shook his head. "And so I wish you might
recognise in our encounter something amusing, humourous"--he looked
cautiously at her--"even mildly romantic--ah--enough to--to--"
"To what?"
"Why--to say--to do something characteristically--ah--"
"What?"
"--Human!" he ventured--quite prepared to see her rise wrathfully and
go overboard.
Instead she remained motionless, those clear, disconcerting eyes fixed
steadily on him. Once or twice he thought that her upper lip quivered;
that some delicate demon of laughter was trying to look out at him
under the lashes; but not a lid twitched; the vivid lips rested gravely
upon each other. After a silence she said:

"What is it, human, that you expect me to do? Flirt with you?"
"Good Lord, no!" he said, stampeded.
She was now paying him the compliment of her full attention; he felt
the dubious flattery, although it slightly scared him.
"Why is it," she asked, "that a man is eternally occupied in thinking
about the effect he produces on woman--whether or not he knows
her--that seems to make no difference at all? Why is it?"
He turned redder; she sat curled up, nursing both ankles, and
contemplating him with impersonal and searching curiosity.
"Tell me," she said; "is there any earthly reason why you and I should
be interested in each other--enough, I mean, to make any effort toward
civility beyond the bounds of ordinary convention?"
He did not answer.
"Because," she added, "if there is not, any such effort on your part
borders rather closely on the offensive. And I am quite sure you do not
intend that."
He was indignant now, but utterly incapable of retort.
"Is there anything romantic in it because a chance swimmer rests a few
moments in somebody's boat?" she asked. "Is that chance swimmer
superhuman or inhuman or ultra-human because she is not consciously,
and simperingly, preoccupied with the fact that there happens to be a
man in her vicinity?"
"Good heavens!" he broke out, "do you think I'm that sort of noodle--"
"But I _don't_ think about you at all," she interrupted; "there