196
PARTISAN REVIEW
ing over to the hissing wharf: and then to see, the next morning,
though the wharf seemed half destroyed, by God, the Salinas, with
a guilty expression, sneaking slowly and silently back to the refinery
from Port Boden: the cottage on the opposite green bank slowly slid–
ing aft of the bridge, aft of the mainmast, aft of the funnel, as with
her fire-scarred paintwork to starboard she now silently soundlessly
and slowly and wearing that guilty expression approached the re–
finery again, on which wreckage a single hose was still playing like
a distant flickering white line, the Salinas now wearing an expression
like a drunk with a hangover approaching at early morning the pub
from which she has been thrown out the previous night, the necessary
flag pretended to fly on the stunted foremast like a ragged tie tied
with trembling hand, and the American flag at the stern as
if
her
shirt tail were hanging out drooping aft in the windless gloomy
air
of seven bells in the morning, obviously half wanting to give the re–
finery a wide berth, but just as obviously having to pass it (and as
obviously wanting to stop in) invested as it was for her with her
abhorrence and like some subdued roguish Don Quixote-because of
excesses there, which she did not know or could not remember but
in any case would probably be blamed, tip-toeing past the refinery,
but next moment-and by God she had guts, she had character to
brave the irate and weary oiltender this morning-as large as life,
as
if
propped on elbow against the ravaged and wrecked bar of the
refinery, in exactly the same place as the day before ...
"As
I was
saying, fellow, when we were so rudely interrupted...." And that
evening, hours and hours later, with a shameless but unmistakably
rakish raffish list to starboard toward the wharf, in exactly the same
place, as if talking her head off. And then-so much for symbols
and presciences of disaster !-the next morning dawning blue and
clean and fresh, with white horses running past the refinery wharf,
that now looked completely undamaged, and the Salinas gone, to be
plunging innocently somewhere in the blue Pacific, her hangover
washed away and the fire gone, and the smell and noise and sirens
gone, and the fresh green of the forest, the blowing blue and white
smoke of sawmills against the green hills, and the maniacal sky gone
and the mountains high and the sea blue and cold and clean and an
innocent sun over
all. . . .
"Where there is-a too much religion, is perdition-white, red
