The liquor flowed; the duel of decibels or battle of the amplifiers continued as we circuited the dusky lower lake and headed back by starlight for the upper. Prinz and Ambrose, therefore Bea, put by their partying (if not the latter two their drinking) to improvise an episode out of the situation. Ambrose briefed Prinz on the characters and plot of your Goat-Boy novel, consulting my more recent if incomplete memory thereof; the object became to lure our Bray into playing yours. For reasons unclear to me, Bea was pressed into service to pantomime a moth or butterfly in distress: to the strains of the pas de deux from Swan Lake, a tape of which fortuitously appeared and was substituted for the rock music, she fluttered fetchingly about the foredeck, in full view of the wheelhouse. Prinz went into his Batman/Count Dracula act to menace her, with much baring of teeth and flapping of arms; Ambrose into his Giles-cum-Siegfried antics, loping about in postures of attempted rescue or countermenace.
Well, the woman is not without talent; ditto Prinz. My lover’s abilities lie elsewhere than in ballet-pantomime. The Baratarians fell to, some pressing the ship’s lights into service, others manning the camera and microphones, still others miming outraged or horrified bystanders. At length the poor hapless Whatever-She-Was was caught: to no avail her pathetic wing-beats; her averted face only exposed the more her slender throat to Prinz’s fangs, which now with great rollings of his eyes to the wheelhouse he made ready to have at her with, maugre the bleats and caperings of her would-be saviour (who stands en garde with fountain-pen for foil). The music soars. We repass the car ferry, reenter the S-shaped narrows.
Now, I myself had a drop or two in, depressed and anxious over Ambrose’s late behaviour, the whole unswallowable “Casteene” business, my frustrating attempts to communicate with you. But if what I and the others saw next was the effect of some common delirium tremens, the camera shared and recorded it. From the wheelhouse suddenly sprang—sailed, flew, whatever! — Captain Bray: an astonishing feat, as if his Phantom-of-the-Opera cloak were the wing membranes of a flying squirrel. With a frightful buzz that carried through Tchaikovsky like the artillery at the end of his 1812 Overture, the man traversed as if in one bound the half-dozen metres from wheel to foredeck. Prinz was knocked heels over head, his eyeglasses were sent flying; Ambrose stood open-mouthed in mid-caper; the Baratarians’ consternation was no longer feigned. For by some second marvellous gymnastic our mad captain rebounded from the deck to the forward railing with Bea Golden under one arm, drew his cloak about her, and stood holding onto the bow flagstaff and threatening us with further sound effects from his repertoire. Incroyable!
All this in three seconds, John, by when Poor Butterfly got her breath and, far from doing a Fay Wray faint, screamed bloody murder and laid into her fetcher-off with proper hysteria. Confused, he set her down; backed off a step (I mean up, onto the rail again) when valiant Ambrose hurried to her rescue—i.e., snatched her arm and yanked her away from there.
Who is piloting Gadfly III this tumultuous while? Why, no one at all: Joe College stands agape with the rest of us, and having traversed, during the above, the nether bend of the S, with no one to swing her to port our craft ploughs now smack into Long Point, where the state park is. I mean literally into the point, which must have considerable water right up to shore. There is a mighty bump; now we all go pitching forward, with shouts and shrieks and tinkle of gin-and-tonic glasses. We are a miniature Titanic—but in lieu of iceberg chips there are maple leaves fluttering to the deck, from the trees into which our bow has driven as into an arbor; and instead of sinking we are as hard aground as if dry-docked, or beached like that ferryboat restaurant in which, a century ago, my Ambrose initiated this miserable “4th Stage” of our affair.
Bar and buffet are all over the decks. In creepy silence we pick ourselves up out of Swedish meatballs and spilt soda water: the fall has cut Tchaikovsky off in mid-climax; the ship’s engines gurgle to a stop when the crewboy finally betakes himself to the throttles. There are exclamations among the passengers regaining their feet, some cries from far down shore (the state park is closed at night: the only such depopulated stretch around the lake, I think), the whine of a couple of outboard-motor boats — determined fishermen — heading our way. Otherwise silence, echoed as it were by the absolute motionlessness of the ship and made spookier by the illuminated leafy canopy over our bow.
