ECLIPs-E
587
all but with no particular feeling toward any of them although she
rather wished she had. Intent on pursuing certain values once bright
and unfailing but which had become shadowed-since periods arise,
Mrs. Herrick knew, wherein something lost cries Find me! Find me!
-nonetheless these values ducked and eluded and even blacked out
in the anonymous scene, as good as any other, where their chase had
led; but what and where were they? What values, and she glanced
about, what lights could be uncovered here? There was a Mrs.
Phipps whose blue eyes twinkled like pebbles washed clean by the
sea and whose late husband had for years been professor at some
university, she looked as if there were more to her than to the others
and Mrs. Herrick nodded gratefully when she stopped for a moment
to observe, "Well, the papers say we're to have an eclipse soon, at
nine." It was all very soothing, dull of course but soothing. Decent
but dull. Because of despising the dullness one might almost a little
include the decency. The level of sound in the dining room was
usually this murmur through which clinking of dishes replaced con–
versation. But today the new men had made a change. Their voices
rang out unabashed. "Yeah," drawled the one with a cigar stuck in
his bull moose mouth, "I cleaned up a hundred thousand on that
deal. That bunch in Johannesburg, they're slick, but they learned I
was a smooth operator."
It was impossible not to hear. Mrs. Herrick shuddered and sipped
her demi-tasse. "Pay dirt in rubber."-"Made a killing."-"Singa–
pore? Brother, quite a town!-Mexico.-Don't need language, I
never learned a word of none of 'em. You snap your fingers and
they understand, they know who you are. Right?" At lunch it had
been the same. Dollars and pounds and francs and black markets,
the rewards of victors and tacticians, had been shooting out as if
from a cannon. The second man had a floppy silver mane and a
floppy candy-red face, some kind of charlatan or imposter, Mrs.
Herrick decided. It was one thing for her to be objectively interested
in strangers, another not to be able to escape them, and she tried
to concentrate on her own thoughts. The eclipse of the moon, an
unlikely episode no matter how science explained it. And this spot,
this world remote from world, the folk who were its habitues, these
smooth-fitting cogs, round pegs in snug round holes, herself here,
that was unlikely too. Her fellow guests seemed scarcely to live yet
