The sea was calm on the surface, but there appeared a movement below, so vast and unhurried, that it was like some planetary function. There seemed a draw of the depths southward, an under-movement toward the Pole. At times a cloud of purple would rise from far beneath and shut off his peering, like the movement of blueing in a laundry-tub before it is well-diffused. It came to him that this was but a denser cloud-land—an ocean of condensed clouds, moved not by winds alone, but the stirring of the earth’s mysterious inner attractions, which in their turn were determined by the sun and moon and stars. It was all orderly, but he, Bellair, was out of order. And such a little thing—a quart of cool water, and any one of the thousands of meals he had thoughtlessly, gratelessly bought and paid for—thousands consumed with a book at hand, or a paper to keep his mind off the perfunctory routine of feeding himself. Hundreds of meals he had taken, because it was the hour, and a cigar was more pleasurable afterward; meals in his room—paper packages of food, pails of ice, chilled bottles with a mist forming on them; saloon lunches, plates of colored sausages, creamy-rose slices of ham, tailored radishes and herring pickled in onions.... There was not a fish in the sea, not a movement but the blueing, and that slide of the under-ocean river to the Pole.
Yet there was something in there—an end to this disorder. It would take all he had left—the good air. It was like a knife or a gun or a poison-pill.... The movement below was so strong that it would grip him, shut him from the air, and leave him slithering along toward the Pole, sometimes sinking sideways, and then rising, forever seeking his balance ... not forever. He pictured himself in a school of herring, thousands of bright lidless eyes, thousands of bubbles, like eyes, from their mouths opening and shutting—he slithering sideways—his hands moving in the tugs and pressures. They would cease to dart from his movements, understanding them as the ground-birds know the wind in the grass. Lips and eye-lids and nostrils—they would have food. Food was the great event of the day to all things—except men. Men ate by the clock, ate to smoke, ate to soften the hearts of women ... yet after all food was food.... Or one big fish.... Or two fighting for him.... Or one finding him lying still, a slow fanning of fins against the purple pressures, watching to be sure—then the strike.... Once he had examined a minnow after the strike of a bass.... Where would he be in that strike—or in that herring school-room—not that slithering sideways thing—but he? Would he be watching humorously, or back in the cage with Mr. Sproxley, or in Bessie’s bedroom? Was it all a myth about that other he? It seemed a myth with his stomach sinking, tightening like a dripping rag between a pair of mighty elbows. In the centre of the rag was a compressed cork, and in the cork, a screw was twisting.
Cork—that made him think of the whiskey. He turned from the water to the coat under the seat, his eyes blinking. His bare foot moved painfully to the coat and along the breast to the pocket, to the hard hump of the bottle.
His eyes suddenly filled with the figure of Stackhouse, whose attitudes were an endless series of death tableaus, as his stories had also pictured. His face had broken out into more beard, his eyes glazed, body shapeless, like clothing stuffed with hair. His hands held the primal significance of birth and death. They lay upon his limbs, the thumbs drawn into the palms, the first and little fingers of each pointing straight down. Bellair thought of how death contracts the thumb, and how infants come with their thumbs in-drawn.
Also his mind was played upon by two distinct series of emotions—Stackhouse representing one set; Fleury and the Faraway Woman signifying the other. He swung from power to power. Then his concern and fascination for Stackhouse changed from loathing and the visible tragedy, to a queer passage of conjecture regarding the worldwide processes which had nourished that huge body to its fall. In fact, Bellair’s favourite restaurants returned to mind like a pageant; the little inns on the Sound that he used to go summer Saturday afternoons; the one place in Staten where there were corn-cakes and a view of the shipping; the myriad eating and drinking places of New York; and from them all, one shop of chop and chicken-broils where the miracles were done on wood-embers, so that even the smoke that filled the place was seasoned nutriment.
“They certainly knew how to buy,” he muttered aloud.
It was a kind of moan, and he added quickly: “I beg your pardon.”
Fleury and the woman regarded him with silent kindness.
“I was just thinking of a man I knew—a buyer of canned goods,” he explained hastily. “The bargains in canned-goods he had a way of pulling off! There wasn’t a man in New York who could bring in lines of stuff at the figure he copped—a little runt of a man named Blath, who knew his business——”
Fleury leaned back as if reaching for support, his quiet smile not a little tender. His two browned hands came forward to Bellair’s knees, and he said with a devoted smile: