And after a while the whisky would dissolve the ceremony, and would come nauseating intimacies.
"We shipped a stewardess in Hull—" or "There was an Irish girl in the steerage, a raving beauty, and when I saw her, I said: Wait. So—"
They were all the same. Give them whisky and time and the talk would come around to easy money and easy women. All were the same, bluff, sentimental, animal, all but the one or two hawk-eyed, close-lipped men who came and went silently, who drank little and drank by themselves. These men made the really big money, but it wasn't easy; they took a chance with their lives, smuggling slaves from Africa for the Argentine plantations, or silver from Chile and Peru. But as for the rest, easy money, easy women!
Well, what was Campbell fussing about? Wasn't he too making easy money, bringing agricultural steel and cotton goods here and taking away his tally of hides?
And as to easy women, wasn't there Hedda Hagen?
§ 4
A ship's master had introduced him to her at a band concert in one of the public squares—a tall Amazonian woman with her hair white as corn, and eyes the strange light blue of ice. Her head was uptilted—a brave woman. The introduction had a smirking ceremony about it that defined Fro̊ken Hagen's position as though in so many words. Her bow was as distant to Shane as his salutation was curt to her. Shane was suddenly annoyed.
The captain of the American boat talked incessantly while the band blared on. Strolling Argentines eyed the woman's blond beauty at a respectful distance. They trotted to and fro. They loped. They postured. She paid no attention. To her they were nonexistent. To the American skipper's conversation she replied only with a flicker of the eyelids, a fleeting smile of her lips. Shane she seemed to ignore. She was so clean, so cool, so damnably self-possessed.
"Fro̊ken Hagen," Campbell ventured, "aren't you sick of all this? Captain Lincoln says you have been here for five years. Aren't you dead tired of it?"