The Steam-Driven Boy Read Online Free

is also the only brewmistress on this continent. He loves only Glinda Cook, a thin, pale Southern girl with a dreamy manner, mouse-brown hair and crooked teeth.
    Glinda is not, it is true, happy with her husband, Van Cook the popular columnist. But if anyone is captain of her heart, it is the effeminate, smirking hagiographer, Dick Hand.
    That evening at dinner, Van Cook recklessly declares that he loves Mrs Rand, and challenges Dick to a duel. Dick laughingly suggests water pistols of ink and bathing suits.
    ‘Done!’ Cook cries fiercely.
    The duel takes place on the hotel terrace after dinner. Far down the beach can be heard the plaintive notes of Etta’s English horn (a professional musician, she has wandered off by herself to practice). Each of the combatants is given a water pistol loaded with ink the same colour as his own bathing trunks: Cook has red, Hand has washable black. The winner is to be decided by Dolly Hand, a large, raw-boned woman of fifty, said to have once been a drum majorette. Dolly seems utterly uninterested.
    Cook fouls intentionally, clinching and squirting red ink in Hand’s eyes. Dick is somewhat of a coward, and fails to score a hit on hisopponent. After a few futile sallies, he contents himself with squirting his ink at Adrian, who is attired in a white dinner jacket. Hand makes several such passes before timekeeper Glinda calls a halt.
    When the fight is over, Cook’s fouling becomes evident. He has been hitting in the clinches, and the red ink until now has hidden the blood. Glinda begins to tenderly wipe Dick’s battered face, but he pulls away from her and, giggling, squirts more black ink at Adrian. The architect, angry, leaps to his feet.
    ‘See here now!’ he cries. Then his face grows ashen as he looks down at the black stain on his jacket.
    The others demand to know who won – but Dolly, the referee, cannot be found! She has slipped away during the fight, and someone reports seeing her white-booted figure dragging another woman away down the beach. The sound of Etta’s horn has stopped.
    The stains on Adrian’s jacket form letters, spelling ‘I LOVE Y’.
    Book Two:
Theda
    In his languorous and elliptic style, the sloe-eyed brewmaster reveals that all that has gone before is a lie. Adrian Warner is a bitch and a liar. She has lied about the sex of everyone.
    First of all it is she, not her husband Etta, who loves the lady foundry exec, Farmer Bill. Yesterday Adrian pretended affection for him, Theda, only until she persuaded him to fall for her. But today, as Theda puts it, the truth outs.
    Passing the grape arbour this morning, on his way to the summer house, Theda hears Adrian confess her love for Farmer Bill. Bill rejects this love, declaring in turn that she loves only the manly Etta. Yesterday Etta seemed to love her too, but today, since his night with Dolly on the beach, Etta seems oddly distracted.
    Theda is in a hopelessly false position now, sick with love for a confirmed lesbian. Another surprise awaits him as he enters the summer house. Someone throws arms about Theda and kisses him toughly – it is Etta!
    ‘Careful you don’t ruin your lip,’ says Theda, squirming away. Etta laughs heartily at his ignorance of music. Confessing that he has been converted the previous night from heterosexuality by Dolly, Etta invites Theda to spend tonight alone on the beach. Sickened, the brewmaster refuses.
    Coquettish Van Cook still pursues Dolly, but the big drum major kicks her in the eye at lunch. He appears to flirt instead with her husband, Glinda, a shy Southern boy. Glinda passes Dick Hand a note protesting that he still loves her, and chiding her for her silly infatuation with Van Cook. Theda, who delivers the note, asks her about this.
    ‘It’s true,’ Dick sighs. ‘I’m a hagiographress, you know. I’ve even offered to prove a saint in her ancestry – anything – but she refuses to even speak to me. Sometimes I wish Dolly and I could change sex. …’
    The