ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
525
Of course, murder is never simple for old thieves. Old thieves
have tired balls, and if Marion Faye often thought with distant pride
that he was one of the few to have climbed beyond the killing preci–
pice of manners, morals, the sense of sin and the fear of germs, he
knew how much he had paid-yes, he had lost a part of his gift,
he had drained the more extraordinary pleasures of his balls, dulled
the finer knives of his brain, and left himself prey to such inertias
of exhaustion as he was experiencing in these weeks before he sent
out the invitation to the party in the old house at Provincetown, the
party which was properly to come off in calculated murder.
3.
It is time now to say a little about this house and where it is
situated. The peninsula of Cape Cod is perhaps eighty miles long,
and bent in its middle like the knotty, no longer agreeable arm of an
old man who once was strong. To the forearm and hand of this
coast)s given the name of The Upper Cape, and it is pleasant land
if
one's humor is mournful-wind-swept, with barren moors, lonely
dunes, deserted ponds and stunted trees; its colors are gray and dun
and the foliage is a dull green. Off the arterial highway with its
savage excremental architecture of gas stations, chromium panelled
diners, souvenir traps, fruit stands, motels, blinker lights, salt-eroded
billboards, all in cruel vision-blunting pigments, in contrast to this
arterial highway garish in its petrifactions of the over-extended Amer–
ican will, the side roads are quiet, hardly more than lanes, with small
mouse-grey salt-box houses inhabited for the most part by retired
Protestants, decent, lean, spare and stingy, grey themselves for the
most part with a mouse grey.
There is no excess of life in the fall and winter, and it is country
which can be recommended for the solitary-the lonely walks on
sandy trails pass by cranberry bogs whose thorny undergrowth is
violet in color against the lavender hues of the dunes when the sky
is gray. Near Provincetown there are a few miles of empty sand be–
tween the bay and the ocean which have the sweep of the desert–
the dunes rise into small hills and fall away to valleys where one
could believe oneself lost in the Sahara-I have heard of people who
wandered about in circles over one dune and down another, never
reaching the ocean and never finding the bay, at least not for hours.
