III

I SAW THEM, I SAW THEM

“When I was a little lad
With folly on my lips,
Fain was I for journeying
O’er the seas in ships …”

Guess thass just about my fav’rite piece.” Jo wound her Victrola dreamily. “You wasen’ ever on that ship down here in the river, was you? Gee, iss old jail ship— they took folks on it when they were crim’nals from England, awful long time ago—and that song makes me think of it so much….”

It would lull him half asleep, as he lay on the bed with his head stiff and sore after the removal of stitches. No hurry about getting well, now; no hurry about that job. Not when Wise had stuffed $400 in his coat pocket…. $400 for a broken head! He’d go into the business, maybe. Money was free in Chicago, if you knew how to get it…. Of course, there was always the chance that you’d return a pocketbook to some Wise, and he’d snatch it inside, closing the door on a terse, “Much obliged.”

If Jo guessed whence came his temporary rise of fortune, she did not mention it. She seemed content to run home from the bus and stroll slowly with him to their conversational dinner at the Homewood, where his bandaged head attracted the attention of gossipy customers. They’d come back home, both tired, and read the little blue books or play poker downstairs with Henderson and a circle of elderly insurance salesmen and Boston widows.

Jo drumming pink nails in meditative silence as she scowled at her hand.

“You staying, Ruska?” The chirp of a thin woman who tuned harps for a musical instrument factory.

“Gee, I donnow…. Poker’s funny. I donnow whether to keep this or this. Awful of me to hold up the game,” while men shifted impatiently.

She had gone “up to Bun’s” two nights—one of which Marry spent with Dr. James Carrington, a plate of crackers and cheese, and a discussion of evolution. Since they agreed on the subject, there seemed few grounds for debate, but that was Dr. Carrington….

“The chicken first, or the egg? Dull-witted persons stumble at that. They are hard put, my friend, hard put—”

Spence Sailor claimed the other evening. He sat hugging his knees and coughing seldom, while Marry perused a huge scrapbook of clippings—Spence Sailor arrested, Spence Sailor acquitted, Spence Sailor honored by the Department of Justice. There were photographs of him in uniform when he wore a tin hat and whistle; snaps of Bernice hugging a boyfriend at a picnic; snaps of a bull pup which ended its career beneath the wheels of a truck after once saving Spence from a sudden but possibly more agreeable death by burning in his mattress.

“ … I wrapped Beans in some of my old mother’s linen lunch clothes, and buried him in the sweet william bed back of the pump. Yes, whenever I see that little dog’s grave, I take off my hat and stand there crying like a God damn baby! Don’t tell me dogs haven’t got souls!—”

Marry would find Josephine in his room, feigning sleep after a noisy movie with Bun. Once she had been drinking— “Juss a friend of Bun’s, we was over to her apartment after the show and had some gin. I don’ like gin so well.”

They shared his room most of the time, the girl giving her chamber an air of day and night occupancy by a systematic creation of disorder—shoes scattered, pillows wrinkled, dresses spread out. If Logan suspected, he cracked his gum no louder than ever.

In one brief letter to George Luce, Javlyn blared his new life with defiant, foolish pride.

… What did you tell me to do, anyway? Meet gunmen, cook for them, get half-killed for them? All right, I did…. What was I supposed to do? Find a slender pigeon blowing along the hard streets, and let her coo comfortingly against me—keep her here with me, never fretting but sinking into immoral stupefaction? … All right, I have.

Luce had not replied; Marry liked to visualize the old man pondering for a suitable and cutting retort.

Meanwhile, there were dozens of others to catch his wide curiosity during the hours when Josephine Ruska sat at a red switchboard, chanting in her studied correctness—”Yes, Mis-tur Kol-man, I will ring them for you…. Calling Ind-dee-yan-ap-o-liss, Surk-ell Wun-Wun Seex.”

He kept his door wide open, sitting in shirt sleeves between Jo’s Victrola and Sailor’s magazines, and let the animal crackers drift in to him as they would.

Dr. Carrington, halting precisely in the doorway. “Good afternoon. I found this little volume in a shop near the library—’Results and Beauty’—the title intrigued me and I bought it for a quarter. Would you enjoy sketching through it? You are entirely welcome, my friend, entirely welcome!”

Mrs. Henderson had ceased to worry about rent which might accumulate during his disability. Mr. Javlyn always had such big bills to change—twenties and things! She heard that he had been a newspaper reporter, and confused him in her mind with fortunate writers of fiction who, she had heard, led the lives of plutocrats…. “Well, all I can say is you was pretty lucky. Believe me, thass terrible thing to have happen here. Me an’ Dave had this building for years an’ nothing ever happened here like that before. Believe me, if all the police would juss plug those hoboes whenever they see ‘em, this town ‘d be a lot better off. My, you sure looked white when they took you to the hospital! Logan, he juss had to scrub an’ soak that rug in the kitchenette to get the blood out…. “ Pain was terrible, she went on to say. Her feet just hurt her so much, she didn’t know sometimes how much longer she could stand it.

The French girls, he learned, were seamstresses in a Michigan Avenue shop. They exchanged kimonos for livid cretonne coats in the morning, and cretonne coats for livid kimonos at night, pounding past his open door with never a curious glance inside. If the building were burned, he surmised that they would still dwell happily amid the ruins, providing that the bathrooms were left intact. From nine until five, you could wash, but beyond that span you had to reckon with the French…. “Annette, m’entrez vous!” and the Turkish towels waving ominously.

A Yellow cabdriver who stalked about with a military swagger of puttees and banded cap; a thin cashier, biologically a woman, who was forever calling East Chicago and talking to Wayne…. “H’lo. Lemme talk to Wayne…. H’lo Wayne, yuh know who this is? Ah-huh, Sure, I did too. Sure. Ah-huh” … Marry’s soul fell asleep, listening to her dismal syllables. There was an ancient Scotchman who went to walk regularly at three P.M. bearing a knotted cane with a bone handle, and there were two orchestral scullions who swayed by in baggy trousers, with suitcases and instrument boxes. “Ha-ya, ole man. Heard ya got shot.”

Cleo Henderson limped briskly ahead of prospective lodgers with her keys. “We got a nice side room with double bed. Here, how’s this? Mrs. Morvick, she had this room lass, and she always said to me it was the cooless room in the house for summer…. What? Oh, we certainly do. On chilly days. Yes ma’ am, firss thing in the fall we have steam on. We never have no complaints on the cold—”

A honeymoon couple, scuffiing merrily in hallways, had rented the kitchenette vacated by Wise. They were said to have been perturbed by the rumor that a man was shot there, but after reassuring peeps at Marry they decided to take it, especially since the hole in the plastering was repapered…. “Gee, they’re goofy,” whispered Jo, “I heard her calling him ‘angel face.’ Thass silly. I wooden call any man ‘angel face.’ Sounds juss crazy.”

Abe Wise came once during Marry’s convalescence, and two philosophic gentlemen waited in a Cadillac while he made his call. Steve Gold had been formally arrested, released within an hour on bond, and a succession of continuances had begun. A Cicero gangster had been found in a forest preserve, partly blistered by fire and wholly rotting, and this joyful topic pushed the murder of Patch and Conny from the newspapers.

“How you making it, kid? Head hurt much? Well, you haven’t got anything to worry about. Still got that note? Use it soon as you feel like it….” He scribbled a telephone number on the flap torn from an envelope and warned Marry to save it for future reference. “That’s the kid brother. He’ll know where to get me if you want to, anytime. Just ask for Abe.” Stricken by the contemplation of what he knew of the smoky brawn controlled by this modish baboon Javlyn could murmur but trite pleasantries. “How are things going?” he attempted to inquire with tingling tongue.

“Oh, pretty good. I can’t kick. I don’t worry.” The big lips grinned, the deep eyes laughed, and Marry felt himself dismissed long before Wise slammed the door of his car.

As Marry gained strength during the next week, he explored the neighborhood, strolling aimlessly up Broadway to Barry, over to Sheridan Road and south to Deming Place, There were old houses with granite porticos and solid black railings, crumbling before the onslaughts of denim wreckers; he’d sit against brick piles and watch the dusty figures stabbing at floors where once the waltzes of another age had been timed by eager feet…. He dozed beside Altgeld’s statue in the park, feeling a late summer sun roll its smoky warmth across his shaven neck, and wondering at meandering old gardeners who hunted so lazily for tiny flakes of paper in the shrubbery.

West along Diversey, past the juicy Tempter where he had bought lunches for Wise, and the cigar store where he bought Josephine’s Pall Malls and his own Buckingham. Past Clark Street, narrowing mysterious and unexplored in the northwest, and past the doctor’s office where he had his wound examined every other day.

“Good tissue there; it’ll all be closed before long.”

Marry fancied himself with a streak of silver through his hair, and didn’t wish the illusion spoiled….

“Scar? Of course. Probably turn from pink to white afterwhile. No, hair isn’t apt to grow in when they’re that deep. That’ll be scar tissue; not scalp.”

A pink slice from his left temple to his crown. Horrible! A captain in the Fourteenth had one, a memento of some obscure tropical battle. Looked like hell.

West of Clark Street…. two boys shrieking past him, one rattling in a coaster wagon, one clattering on roller skates. “Poom! Poom!” in ear-splitting viciousness. Wave of a toy gun, and the coaster banged against a young elm tree on the parking, its occupant dramatically slain and turning somersaults. Marry noticed that the elm tree was scarred, bark freshly torn from its side, and that there was a sprinkling of glass on the sundered turf.

“Is this where those men were killed the other night?” he asked the boys.

“I’ll say it is!” screamed Roller Skates, “We was juss actin’ it out. I heard the shots, too. I’ll say. Bang, bang, bang—like that. I—”

“My brother was out here,” howled Coaster Wagon, glad to contribute further testimony, “He got here about the first of anybody. He saw all the blood an’ bullets an’ everything—”

Roller Skates seized the resurrected gunman’s arm. He squinted impudently at Marry. “He’s got his head tied up…. “ They followed him with wary glances as he walked on.

Charioteers cracking their reins through the whine of your dizzy night, bursting meaty veins to loll and die before the hut of your slaves, 0 chieftains of Goth and Inca, you may spit and shiver as you huddle by your fires, but the stems of the lilies are toughened—the lampreys gloat beneath their waiting, lemon pools….

Must write that stuff, tear it out of his guts and fling it across the universe. But how? … A weak voice, a feeble echo of trumpeters who hurled their echoes from pinnacles he had never seen.

“It’s got me,” he thought, “All this.” Shabby frame houses and shabbier flat buildings, the littered gutter, the droning stream of gas that shot forever by his side…. People talked of erasing the past. His past…. The All-American Café, the profane UP operator, the memory of Mrs. Dorset cooking a floating island pudding for their supper—all wiped out in the swift smear of a nauseous sponge.

Many things puzzled him: why Spence Sailor had known or pretended to know so much about the shooting— why Jo never asked where Marry got the money to pay for their meals (she was still paying her own room rent), and what he was doing lodged with this fanciful crew.

J.R.P. had told him to come to the Elvina hotel on a Tuesday night, and two Tuesdays had passed since that time….

Well, he ended his stroll by passing a green harbor where paraffin figures drew mechanically at long oars of a racing shell—he watched the ripples of their passing, and knew that Josephine might be coming on the next bus. He felt the scab tightening beneath its layer of gauze, and decided to take Wise’s note to the county building in the morning…. This was the third Tuesday. He would find J. R. P. this very night.

Up in Wisconsin, Doris Halt remembered a rail fence weathered as veteran bones, jutting up the hillside across a lane from her father’s dairy farm. The fence was backed with strong strands of wire, preserved by a neighbor who loved the elderly beauties, and it hedged soft feathers of anemones, and in June, a few pink roses…. Doris Halt cordially hated that rail fence.

She was neither leaden-eyed nor deaf to the blowing of fairy bugles. The fence typified her dreamy, broken world, from which she imagined she groped like a marble goddess emerging from mud.

Now, in her gloomy rooms on Superior Street, She had three China dogs, a fairly decent copy of “The Golden Helmet,” and several cloisonné cigarette boxes…. All given her, together with batik scarves and chiffon hose, through the will of her butter-and-egg grandfather who died after asthmatic years of retirement and handed his farms to a dryly coughing son. There was five thousand dollars for Doris and five thousand dollars for her older brother, who declared his intention of buying a battery station in Burlington.

Grimly she finished her term of teaching in the consolidated school; she folded her underthings in new suitcases, hammered a few books into boxes, and coldly kissed her mother before her father drove her to the train. The wet spring rain blew in through torn side curtains, and they were stuck twice in a dreary slough near the old Laffin place before she could put Wisconsin behind her.

Now, she compiled droll statistics about bonds and investments in the commercial service offices of the Western Trust Bank. But at noon there was the Russian Tea Room, where she could squint critically at hammered samovars as she trailed the smoke of a lazy cigarette…. And if there were percentages in the afternoon, at least there was La Boheme at night, where big Giovanni guided her to a corner table near the mural harlots, and beamingly awaited a two-bit tip.

“Of course,” Doris would write, “Michael Arlen is interesting. A Red Cross worker’s reminiscences of Asia Minor could never compare favorably with an Armenian’s pose through Mayfair. Or a Londoner’s. (Striking thought!) Fancy a Londoner in Mayfair! … For after all, what is Mayfair but a pose?”

J.R.P. printed these transparent gingers, not because he liked them or considered them worth understanding, but because one cult of his readers gratefully lapped up any vague censure of existing dilemmas. Doris Halt herself posed through the parade of his contributors, slouching in his deep davenport, half-closing her blue eyes to muse on the world’s stupidity.

“Damn snob,” he would mutter to his crippled protégé, a young war veteran who wrote for the Weekly Nickle Thrillers, “Damn snob—but by God, she certainly gives the place an air. Opera singers, New York playwrights, London correspondents. All go wild over Doris. Beautiful—oh yes, grant you she’s beautiful, but the damn blonde knows it!” And he would shake his head doubtfully toward the corner where she sat with her tinted fingers clutching a copy of Hecht or Cabell.

Nobody knew where she had come from, and Doris was very careful that they shouldn’t. Bewitch the brains of Rush Street, when you came from a dairy farm? … Usually she left a group of them yelling goodbye from a taxi, and hurried mysteriously into the pigeon-splattered pile where she hid her Wisconsin history from the racketing world. Lone escorts were never invited past the door. She hungered, often enough, for the crush of warm arms about her body and the smell of pipes behind her velvet drapes, but always she had been afraid…. And on five thousand dollars, plus a salary of a hundred and ten, how long could she manage it? The rent for the dilapidated glory of her studio was half her monthly wage—and dinners at the Russian Tea Room or La Boheme do not come at thirty cents per plate.

Doris wound her tall form in shabby serges and madeover silks, drew tattered felts over her electric hair, and slid along the avenue in a make-up of careless artistry. People wouldn’t expect eccentric girls of literary aspirations to be figures from Harper’s Bazaar. To tone her array, occasionally she purchased expensive bags, shoes of alligator skin, or silver chains to girdle her graceful hips …. Some day, there would be a man with money and not too strong a will, who would be invited past the oak door. Then lazy marriage—not pleasant but at least individual.

This was Tuesday night when the clan of J.R.P. gathered to crowd his littered rooms, drink Canadian liquor, and chant the Messenger chorus. This was Tuesday night—a mad break in her loneliness—a bootlegged plunge from the haunts that hemmed her life.

She dressed in voluptuous black lingerie, not because the eyes of any man would feast on her inviting slenderness, but because such clothes gave her an assurance she had never felt in the days of plain linen and Algebra. She slid into a careless gown of gray silk crepe, that toned her gold hair to glittering piles of perfumed shadows, and caught a white coat, aristocratically soiled at the collar, around her high shoulders…. This was Tuesday night, when the lions thundered and the brushes danced on smoky canvas.

Eight o’clock. Mustn’t arrive on time, for that would shake her spell of mystery. Doris Halt locked her studio door and listened through the gas–lit hall, where dowagers of an early day had fretted under the joyful burden of soirees. From rooms at the end of the cloister came highpitched voices of noisy women: the medium who lived there must have another hysterical caller. And across the hall was the doleful whine of a mouth organ playing, “Jesse James.” Doris opened the opposite door…. Abruptness was a part of her assumed character.

A bald man was sprawled across a three-legged tapestry chair, shrouded in a lumberjack shirt and squeaking nasally into the nickel plaything he held in his hand.

“This song was made
By Billy Gashade
As soon as the news did arrive—”

“Rea!” Doris cut in, snatching the mouth organ and flinging it toward a corner. “‘That’s fearful. Fairly gives me pains!”

The downy head twisted toward her. “Well, so do you—give me pains. Bursting in here like a mad bull. Mad cow, I mean…. Ow! Quit! Dor, go and get it, that’s a dear girl.”

“Lazy!” she fumed, glaring down at him, “I wish I’d thrown it out the window!”

“I’m not so lazy.” Rea shook himself in satisfaction. “I finished that Follhart portrait today. Get paid Friday, and if you were decent, I’d take you out to eat.”

Doris drew the wrap closer and stared with pretended anger…. Rea was a good boy, but he never needed to think that she would love him or let him love her. “Last time, you wanted to take me to Thompson’s. Ugh! And have oatmeal in an armchair where someone had eaten frankfurters.”

“That was breakfast, Dor. Friday, I’d take you to the Cave. Or Frascati’s.” He lounged across the long room to the dark corner where she had thrown his toy—his shoulders were good, but Doris had realized long before that he was past thirty and would soon be fat. And later, too fat.

Still, she could be at ease with him and sometimes spill a thin juice of maternal desire over his soul, though he was ten years her senior. “You’ll be good while I’m gone, then? I’m going to Gyp’s for the evening, and tomorrow I may promise to let you buy my dinner at Frascati’s Friday.”

He stood with the retrieved mouth organ in his hand, pounding saliva from the reeds, nodding with disgust. “—And to think of the people who’d jump at the chance to go out to dinner with me!”

Rea’s voice was flat and rather tuneless; people might have whispered hints of homosexuality about him merely because of his voice, had his past record not been spattered with many contrary and notorious liaisons. But with Doris Halt, he’d never tried to advance. Blondes did not interest him. They swam together often, and drank Sunday morning coffee in his studio; once they had stood at her window for two hours, clad in dressing gown and negligee as they watched a midnight conflagration in the west. But of love there was nothing…. Rea was uninterested, while Doris thought him awed.

“Good evening, chappy,” she flung back from the door, “Don’t try to improve on that Follhart portrait. I haven’t seen it, but I know that her double chins are perfect, so let them stand.”

“Flop, you should have said,” Rea called as she ran down the dirty carpeted stairs.

Doris saw her figure melt to cream in the deep glass of a haunted mirror; then she was gone past the creaking Superior Street door and down worn steps into the whooping boulevard…. This was her life—the material dust that drifted by her couch: an unkempt artist, dim gas, and a rusty grenadier to guard her stairway. No one would ever know that she had wiped blackboards for the offspring of dairymen. No one would guess, this minute, that she was a bank clerk and not a debutante of interesting seasons just past.

People turned to stare favorably at her; pale young men loafing by the Allerton drugstore; avenue strollers and girls envious of her legs. The antique shops she gestured by as a familiar story, though as yet she wasn’t certain what constituted a Windsor or a Queen Anne…. You couldn’t learn it all in ten months.

She walked leisurely after she had crossed the Drive, snobbishly ignoring the homes of Rush Street McCormicks and Carpenters. She was going to Gyp’s! She had entree to the sainted realm for which so many thousands struggled in vain. An Oxford graduate would pour her coffee, a V.C. would open the door for her, a Russian baron might bring her home…. This was her life, although so very near Wisconsin…. Yes, she had time to be lonely.

The Elvina lobby, dotted with statuary of a defunct Gold Coast house, shuffled by Negro boys in cherryred uniforms. The ivory clerk nodding politely as she climbed a curving flight of marble steps to the second floor. People whose initials were in the social register lived there—women who made yawning trips to Naples and Yokohama, men whose names meant syndicate bylines or electric globes.

Beyond a locked shutter, she could hear a bubbling room of laughter. “The little ball goes round and round, and fortunes—” Doris tapped at the screen and a freckled man, teetering on an artificial leg, opened it a moment later.

“Well, here’s Dora DeVille—” He smiled appealingly, but cripples made her feel embarrassed and spooky.

“Good evening, Maris. There seems to be a crowd.”

He lifted the white coat from her shoulders as she tried not to cringe. Had she been a sweating nurse, and seen them carry him in after the massacre at La Bassee, she might not have cringed….

“Dora Devil!” crowed somebody from an inner room, “Lo, Devil. Evening, Dora.” They waved merrily from a circle in the middle of the floor.

J.R.P. squeezed her fingers dutifully and patted her shoulder. “Pretty kid. Glad to see you. Lookit who’s here. New man. You remember big cavalry poem we had—no, she wouldn’t, Jav-e-lin, cavalry’s not in her line—well anyway, this is Jav-e-lin, Dora, the guy with the busted head. His wife hit him with a poker, crowned him with a vase, something. He claims burglars … Don’t you believe it, Dora DeVille. Wife, wife—”

She felt the new man’s eyes scorching slowly over her as J.R.P. limped back to the circle on the floor. Brown eyes, laughing a little; wide mouth, full lips and tanned skin. Like Richard Barthelmess, more nearly. Or—no, the mouth—Ricardo—but no, she had told them all she never saw movies…. For after all, what are movies but a pose? … She might tell him he was Candide.

“Probably you never read mine, but I read yours often,” he said. “They’re terrible. I mean, they’re good but I don’t like them.”

She pretended to ignore his observation, while she scanned the white bandage on his head. “Oh indeed, dreadful, quite! And was it your wife? Or someone’s else wife?”

He rubbed his head apologetically. “If you keep questioning me, I’ll beat it. I didn’t come here to sit as exhibit in a clinic.”

“I suppose, next, that you will be explaining how you came up for the sole purpose of meeting me—”

“Do they often do that?”

She grimaced. (One which she had practiced in secret mirror sessions.) “What is it, roulette?”

“I think so,” Marry replied, “Or else spin-the-platter. They don’t have roulette where I came from.”

“Tennessee, I suppose.” Thinking to pack him in ice for a brief period, she joined the roulette game, while Javlyn roamed the apartment, examining bolo knives and dusty forests of books.

He thought he had never seen such an arrangement of books. Eight tiers high, riding the four walls, they were stuffed into crevices with neckties, cartridges, bottles, and a million unexplainable trinkets. A briefcase covered with a tottering pyramid of late novels; a radio loudspeaker hemmed with torn encyclopedias. Roughing It and These Charming People crowded by a box of fishing flies.

“These Charming People,” indeed! That fellow who opened the door for him was “Canuck” of the column, who wrote for the big magazines and was said to be J.R.P.’s best friend. “Juniper Jed,” the little fellow with glasses and tawny hair, was betting side by side with “The Tattered Countess,” who wore a diamond ring worth Marry’s last year’s salary…. They said that little dark girl was “Era”— wrote blistering religious sarcasms—and “Colonel Tortoise” was the plump man squatting beside her…. Their names were names to conjure for two million daily readers. They had published books for which the shops were mobbed on the first day of sale; they had broadcast a dozen times at the Messenger station and been cheered from Newfoundland to Nogales…. And now, this coldblonde creature, Dora DeVille of the superior criticism. You knew that she’d have such a voice.

The one-legged man joined him and together they stood on the outskirts of the game which had begun early and was drawing to a close. “Last time around,” moaned the professorish croupier, “Last trip for the little marble. Then that’s all there is—”

“Red? Is it red for you, Grace? Me too.” … The chips dancing on green felt…. Ought and double-ought, must come! And seven and thirteen, for no reason at all…. They all pry closer, breathing down at the wheel. Third dozen, it’s been twice and—

Must be betting tremendous stakes. Marry was glad he wasn’t in it—he’d go home broke, and rent due before he could get his job.

The House redeemed all chips in pennies and nickels: “How much, Ted? Seventeen cents, right. Thirty-four to Era—you’re big winner tonight, kid—”

They jostled to their feet, straying out to rouge their lips or tighten wrinkled hose, or drawing water from a bathroom tap for the coffee percolator enthroned on trunks in the next littered room…. Cocktails swimming all around you, with a fruitish shimmer in the raw glare of ornate chandeliers. J.R.P. growling, “No hard liquor. No! None tonight for anybody! Cocktails—nice, ladylike booze—” … Each lived only for the column. There might be babies at home or a sweetheart who’d call in an hour, but for them the world was plastered with brevier type and torn contributions. Behind every turn of the little wheel, there had been a sulking heart or a brave pen point.

“J.R.P.,” thought Marry. “He was a shepherd. Herding brown lambs and lemon ones, chasing them up to a granite mountain where the ink flowed sweet and sluggishly; wading with his crook into snarling torrents to drag out the weak, and often as not kicking some bad lamb under….”

He watched him, sitting with his gray head bent between the flax of Juniper Jed and the shingle bob of homely Era, studying a book of old dramatic prints. The smoke of so many wars had burned his netted skin into husky wrinkles and saddled a hump on his back.

“Are you stupefied or merely reclusive?” Doris seated herself by Marry on the couch, and let her expensive powder scent the air near his nostrils.

“Just thinking. Do you ever?”

She smiled grimly and shook the piles of unbobbed gold that were her hair. “Impertinence is permissible very seldom here.”

“Only in the column, and by you!”

Her weary clamminess was fascinating, she knew. “My God, Javelin, do you think we lead those lives all of us? … Perhaps I do at that—I’m much happier, sneering.

… Yes, I like pipes with good tobacco in them. Light it from my cigarette. I’ve wanted, always, to have someone light a pipe from my cigarette. It is difficult, they say.”

He snubbed her by striking a match, but she quickly blew it out, and it was a full minute before he succeeded in catching a spark from the pale tip she presented him.

“I live mine,” Marry declared. “Of course I’ve had only two in the column, but once in awhile I do some more.”

“Subjective, I suppose?”

“Don’t know what you mean by that. I don’t know much about poetry. Those terms can’t convey anything to me, for high school was all the further I went through the educational swamps.”

Not because she cared, Doris told herself…. “Well then, what are they about?”

“Ghosts, some. And dogs, peonies, red leather, celery foam, Indians, and cows with sateen udders.”

“What is celery foam?”

“I’m not altogether sure. Your hair, that would be taffy and ashes of violet, melted softly together.”

Doris explored cautiously with her hand. “I like the ashes of violet. But taffy—”

“You’d call it toffee, and say you never ate any.”

Somebody yelled from the next room, “Coffee, coffee, coffee!” which sounded like “toffee” and made Marry turn in surprise. His conversation with Dora DeVille seemed to be over. Canuck was waving at him to come and carry cups and plates…. He lugged white Wedgewood dutifully for ten minutes—some burdened with coffee and more with cake from which he shooed a cockroach directly into the lap of the Tattered Countess. Then he was placed between a dean of theology and a stenographer, both of whom wrote excellent verse, and with them he discussed golf until the lights winked out and candles were left shimmering their green silver over an old piano and a fat boy who weighted on the bench, playing a Gavotte.

Later, they were chanting—”The Sidewalks of New York,” “Goodbye, My Lover” and popular hits of the week. Dora DeVille faded to an elegant blur in the corner, pointed with one bright dot of orange where her Chesterfield burned a hole through the dusk. J.R.P. slid lower and lower in his chair, feet crossed and humped shoulders swaying forward; people breathed softer all about as the music became more poignant, and quite suddenly Marry wanted to sob….

Canuck was singing; a hoarse baritone knifing bitterly above the pathos of piano chords.

“If you wanta know where the corp’rals are,
I’ll tell you where they are:
Cutting the barb-ed wire…. ”

You couldn’t see his face in the gloom—only the awkward figure resting in the doorway—the artificial leg jutting mechanically against the droop of his trousers. Arms motionless … singing …

“I saw them, I saw them
Cutting the barb-ed wire—
I saw them …”

Sometime after that, when he was walking with Dora DeVille through the midnight of Rush Street, Marry asked about Canuck.

“Nobody knows, except Gyp.”

“Why do they say Gyp?”

“Rom is gypsy, you know. They say he’s a quarterblood Romany; no one knows.”

He watched the dignity of her proud height, chiseled there beside him. “And what are you? Does anyone know?”

“You will know, for yourself, more than anyone. I’m going to invite you up to my studio—something I’ve never done before.”

Why she said that, she could not tell. Was it his wide, warm mouth, or his talk about red leather and celery foam? It never worried her; only she was certain that she should not let him kiss her—on the lips, at least.

They plunged through ranting smoke of cars as the red light battered intermittent traffic into a pause. The old house waited mustily to receive them; its white-spotted steps cushioned with the tread of long decades and its big door stubbornly swinging against a wheezy valve. Marry had never been in such a weird place, he was sure, with its high walls and vacant mirrors prying at them as they went up the inner stair.

“D. Halt” was typed on a white card tacked against the girl’s studio entrance.

“Who’s this?” Javlyn asked.

She shrugged in defeat. “I should have taken it down. Now you know too much—more than the rest of the column crowd.”

“D. is Dora, then?”

“Doris…. No one uses christened names over there. Jed, I have heard, came from a tribe of MacDonalds, and Era is unbelievably Rose Solomon, but those are all I know. Professor Bernard, of course—everyone knows him. But the poor cripple—the Countess—mystic creatures…. ”

She possessed a wide black couch draped with velvet like a bier for an empress, with “The Golden Helmet” glaring opposite above the charred fireplace, and a deep chair squatting in the glow of a scarf-draped lamp by the Michigan Avenue window. Her China dogs were perched in lolling phalanx on the mantel and her teacups littered a spinet desk with mended legs, near the bathroom door. The walls were sleepy shadows above the baseboard, and the carpet was stained with rose from the lamp and butter from leisurely midnight luncheons.

“You must sit under the light, and I shall lie on the couch and listen to you read. Will it be the Rubiyat or De La Mare?”

Marry lounged gratefully into the seat and stuffed his pipe. (Far away—ten thousand leagues across asphalt and sorrow—there was a dingy place—of poker and vulgar parlance called the Henderson.) “Do you think that any poet, however ineffectual and unnoticed, enjoys being made a poet? My hair is trimmed and oiled, Dora DeVille.”

“Like a useful lamp,” she sighed behind her match. “And what of poor critics in the outer darkness?”

“Very well. Where are your books?”

“Books are beastly. Have you no memory?”

“For ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ and ‘A Child’s Garden of Verses.’ All the Rubiyat I know is ‘some buried Caesar.’”

Doris slipped her palm between the velvet of her chin and the velvet of the couch, watching him slyly. “Do you have to be begged? One of your own poems, Javelin?”

Naturally, he was proud of the eager drama in his voice, and on this night…. He moved through it like a muted bugle, with the memory of one-legged Canuck watching him tearfully from the walls.

“Ride out, O dismal hosts,
From caverns in the wilderness …
Nail on your helmets, strap your swords,
And bear him thence to other barracks
Behind the mountains, where the winds
Are marching!”

The girl had gone over to the fireplace and was staring at the painted face above it. “I’ll bet he’s seen so many wars,” she gestured, “and you have not, but they scarred you too…. Where, may I ask, was that published? Not by the Gray Lady of Erie Street, I’ll wager.”

“I insist,” declared Marry, “that I’m unknown. Still buried. The column printed the only one. And I’ve heard that if I were in the column, I would be damned before Erie Street.”

“True enough, Javelin. You must spend money for postage stamps! The Chicago Messenger has only two million readers…. I’ve got some Scotch, somewhere in my closet. The artist across the hall gave it to me for Christmas. Excuse me and I’ll find it…. There. You must drink it from a teacup.”

He didn’t like Scotch, but with the avenue moaning behind him and Doris Halt bending to pour from the square bottle, he could never refuse…. Could this be Scotch? Pure fire!

They sipped in silence for a lifetime.

“How did you hurt your head?”

“Got shot.”

Though burning with curiosity, she could not ask him how. Ashes of violet…. She’d show him she could model in even colder clay.

“What would you call that outside, Javelin?”

“What outside?”

“This.” She drew curtains wide from the open window, to frame a gray well where pairs of blasting lights sighed along—one—one, two—a flock of several—one—a pause of barren silence—one more—always one pair coming soon to mark the line of pavement.

Marry watched it, pondering. The liquor was numbing his lips, but quickening his thought already. “A jeweled parade …” If she wanted him as a poet, all right. Rapidly he realized that he was wanting her—not as a critic of icy glass—but as a woman.

“That wasn’t so good. You can have another drink, though, if you’ll promise to be decent about it and not ask any questions.” The bottle quivered as she lifted it, but as yet there was no unsteadiness in her voice.

“I don’t ask many questions,” said Javlyn, “though I want to. You never answer ‘em.”

Doris slipped to the couch again. “Maybe I would.”

“Well, it may offend you—”

“I’m rhinoceros-plated, being a critic.”

Thin, feverish drinks mellowing him deeper and deeper. “It isn’t so much a question as an observation.”

“Oh, say it. I’m sleepy…. “Her frosty-yellow head slid to the velvet cover.

“All right. It is my belief that you are a gigantic sham.”

He had poured again—the bottle was within reach. The room was foaming away in grotesque silences. He heard her wailing faintly, “Why, Javelin? Why?”

“You are not packed of hard snow.” Lord, he had never lived at the Henderson…. Somewhere he met a drawling girl with sweet green eyes, but she had slipped into painful oblivion. “You aren’t sharpened metal—only soft. Taffy, I said awhile ago.”

He stood up. Was it the Scotch and the cocktails at J.R.P.’s, or his head again? “I must go, Dora DeVille. I’m afraid I shouldn’t have taken even one drink.”

Still she lay, a gleaming gray shadow. “Nor I.” But never lifting her cheek from the velvet.

Marry found his hat on the spinet desk and set it judiciously over the stiff bandage. “I’ve got to go. It’s late. I’m coming back—some night—tonight, maybe—”

“Tonight?”

“Tonight. I think it’s getting on toward morning.” He laughed in silly cadence. “I looked at the Wrigley clock a while ago, but honest—I’ve forgotten…. Was that really Scotch? It didn’t taste like it.”

“It hits one like—like—l’m sorry.” Slowly she raised herself on her hands and sat upright at the edge of the black mass. “I’ve got—at eight-thirty I have an appointment—”

Marry heard himself laughing, “So you do work?” as he floated toward the door.

Doris was there beside him, somehow, struggling quietly with the knob. “Yes, I do. I don’t care. You won’t tell, will you, Javelin? … But I’m not ashamed…. It was a square bottle with no label. I—I thought most stuff that color was Scotch. But it wasn’t—it hit so hard—”

The glass woman, frozen hard and smooth. She lived in a black house and slept in a black bed. Inside, she might be soft…. Oh, her soul would be softer, softer.

She was nodding, still twisting at the dogged latch, and all the shadows mocking her. Her body was only a few inches away….

“Ashes of violet,” Marry whispered slowly, and with a foggy hand he touched the hair. Clinging, like beaten tendrils. Doris nodded against him, so tall and slim; he felt that she had murmured, “Oh, why are you—oh, Javelin—” and he buried both his hands in her hair, brushing it steadily round in a weaving circle until it loosed with Rhinish swirls to her waist. He touched her naked neck—it was warm and some hidden vein was throbbing beneath the skin…. He had his face in it, lips charring the satin; her hair was in his eyes and her arms gripped blindly across his back … sinking … sinking….

Then he knew that he was on the curb, with wide-eyed dogs speeding by at odd moments. “Yellow!” he called weakly again and again, “Yellow!” They hissed sneeringly past him. “Yellow, all Yellow….”

A boy in a white shirt was near him, then, hand on his arm. “Wanta get home, brother?”

Ashes of violet, in the glass woman’s heart. “Yes,” Marry insisted. “Yes! Go home—”

“Know where you live?”

“Sure. Go home—oh, Yellow!”

White Shirt laughed delightedly and whistled like a calliope. “Musta been some party, brother.” A door opened ahead of Marry and he sank on smooth leather with White Shirt chuckling outside.

“It’s Cambridge Avenue, see? Avenue. Twenny-eightfifty-seven Cambridge, please—”

“You bet.” A buzzing, and lights flashing away, away. He heard the waves of the lake fall in regular licks against the sand beyond him…. Someone had his arm. Taxi-man.

“They work you—hard?” Javlyn inquired feebly.

“Notsa hard.” Laughed again. “A dollar-fifteen. You gave me a dollar an’ half. Is that right? Thanks, buddy…. Got your key? That’s right, ole boy. In you go. G’night—”

Jo must have heard him stumbling about the room. She switched on the light and sat up in bed, the lace of her thin nightgown gleaming on pale pink skin. “Marry, you got drunk down there with those Messenger folks? Oh, Marry … “

He slid into bed, his brain swelling evil and damp. “I didn’t want to. But, I got—home. I got—”

“Marry!” The light winking into gasping darkness and her shoulder was kissing his neck. “Now you better go to sleep, dear. Marry—do you know? You’re juss stewed.”

Rea was coming from the street when Doris rushed down the stairs at 8:10 in the morning. “Ha, girlfriend. What of the night?”

“Let me past, you hound. I’ll be tardy at school.” His pale eyes grinned catishly. “You don’t care to tell?—”

“Please Rea, open the door for me. I’ll be late. And I hate you!”

“Hate me? The innocent neighbor of nearly a year!”

“That damnable stuff you gave me for Christmas— Don’t laugh! It wasn’t decent not to tell me!”

His chuckling echoed in early dreariness of the hallway. “I can’t remember, Dor. Absinthe, I think. Or benedictine. Or cognac. I can’t remember. But it was worth a fortune, dear girl.”

“Pure hell, it was. And I despise you! I hate everybody—”

No studied pettishness, but a reptilian hiss. The artist pondered as he watched her through the spotted glass, skipping toward a brown bus. She hadn’t taken the bottle with her, the evening before…. And he had been out since eleven o’clock…. Doris entertaining! It seemed odd. Too odd.

Always she should be there, curled beneath a satin quilt in her chair, reading English novels and smoking idle cigarettes. When he tapped at her door before midnight, she should be there—alone—to call, “No, you can’t come in!” or “Bring me some grapes and pears. Please, Rea!”

With a faint groan, he slammed the door of his studio. “I’ll drill him, the God damn rat, whoever—”

Then he sighed and spun his hat to the rusty point of an antique shield…. Once he had painted the portrait of an olive woman with eyes like sweet pits of burning tar…. He was pulpy, now, and toothless. But in Paris, so many years before….

His hands, flapping like tender fins. To hold a brush, that was all. Bayonets! Who’d ever think—

Rea was humming faintly, “Charlotte, the Harlot,” all the time he washed.

People crowding Marry on the hot elevator, people going up to make wills and break them, to become married and divorced, to hunt jobs and hunt money, to hold positions and soppy cigars. To be crammed in hotter offices or to echo in lonely footfalls through the eerie corridors. People from Bohemia and Wales and Mombassa—from the 8th or 27th or 42nd wards. Pursy men and coppertoothed women, all mauling him with their sweating hips…. “Up! Going up! …” To heaven for a few and hell for many.

He felt that perhaps he was one of the few. Wise’s note was folded in his pocketcase, buttoned tightly against his chest, and the gauze cap had been removed from his head to leave a padded strip of dressing and tape in his hair. Marry was ready for work.

Red lights glaring through the shade of a marble hall, and an elderly man in shirt sleeves pushing a button on the wall. “Down! Going down!” Though Marry didn’t want to go down yet—not until he had run through these smooth white spaces and seen the creatures who lived there.

Outside a swinging gate, he awaited Mr. Eidle’s leisure. The note of introduction, folded in another envelope, he had passed across the barrier to a patriarch in a black office coat, who presented it to a girl in flowered crepe, who in turn entrusted it to a fleshy Billiken. Billiken had rapped at a distant door and been mysteriously closeted.

Near Javlyn’s knees, a shabby woman bent against the gate and gesticulated appealingly to anyone who would listen.

“Say,” voices called, “that’s the same one who was up here yesterday. Throw her out!” Laughter resounded lazily behind other desks. “Naw, go over an’ kiss her, Jake. She don’t know what she wants.”

All the time the shabby voice reiterated. “My Pete. He git hurt, so. An’ lady says here it fix all oop. Well! I know. I see boss, ay! Boss. Pete say see boss. Lady tell me fix all oop.”

Someone near at hand needed a bath badly, and Marry edged further on the polished bench…. Poor, fat thing. Her shoes were so ragged and a white stocking gaped miserably through a split seam. He ought to help her. But what could he say?

Billiken, even, came lumbering over to bawl at her. “You gotta go down and see the guard in the hall, and he’ll tell you where you belong. You don’t belong here. No. No, I don’t know Pete. I ain’t the boss…. I tell you, no! I don’t know nothing about it, missis. Now you better get out. We can’t work here with you yelling around.”

The girl in flowered crepe beckoned Marry past the stockade. “Just go right in.”

Mr. Eidle had a brief, button nose with heavy spectacles weighting it down against his lip. “Close the door, Mr.—ah, Javlyn. Now—I read this letter—guess it can be fixed up all right. I gave the stenographer a letter to Haggerty and you get it soon as she’s done typing. Take it to the fifth floor…. Ah-uh—cooler today. Yes?”

He seemed very anxious to be pleasant. Marry reflected aloud that it must be somewhat cooler, at which Mr. Eidle smiled with disarming geniality and excused himself. “Got to pardon me. Too much to do today. Ah— uh—one thing. You want to be very careful not to talk to other employees about your sponsor. That is, how you got the job. Don’t mention that it came through this office. Political complications, see? … Stenographer’s just outside. ‘Bye.”

She had the envelope sealed already, so Javlyn could only speculate on the contents as he carried it down to the fifth floor. There he wedged into a wide anteroom tenanted by shuffling persons somewhat better dressed than the woman who had been in Eidle’s office. Through this patient mass, flashy men were rudely shouldering their way. Beyond another polished fence, a side office was a turmoil of typewriters, telephone buzzers, and gossiping persons who dangled their legs from vacant desks and laughed importantly…. Well, he was as important as some of these! Meek foreigners grudgingly yielded room as he pushed his way forward.

A bored creature—she must be a woman, because her hair was marcelled—glanced across the barrier at him, tore the envelope with a ruthless hand and scowled at the letter.

“Mamie!” she shrieked, whirling away.

From an inner room, a hoarse masculine voice hissed, “Oh, dose rotten op-o-ray-tors!” and a squat man with tumbled, stringy hair came limping out.

“What is it now, uh?”

Sotto voce. “ ‘S man from Eidle.”

“Oh, my Jesus! My God, what does he wan’ now?” Blue, birdy eyes sprayed Marry from belt to bandage, “Uh.” He read the letter slowly, his lips shaping the words and half-muttering them. Beside Javlyn, the shabby herd pushed closer with dumb gaze glued on the little man called Mamie.

His head went up with a quick jerk. “All right, Mis’ Stark.” To Marry, “All right, Mis-ter Jalver, come inside.”

“Mamie,” people whispered over the wall, “You remember me, Mamie. I’m from Verachek…. I wanna see you, mister…. Remember, you tole me to come back—”

Thick hands sliced the air in an ecstasy of nerves. “Remember? I don’t remember nothin’! I’m very, very busy! Please let me have my peace a moment—an’—an’ young lady will wait on you—” He disappeared ahead of Marry into a bright room at the side.

“What’s his name?” Javlyn motioned to an out-coming clerk.

The girl stared wide-eyed. “Him? Mamie? Doncha know—he’s Mamenberg, secretary to the president.”

“Oh. Thanks.” President of what? The United States of America, most likely. So busy….

Fat, aspirate talkers lined the huge office through which Mamie led the way. Javlyn had time to observe three windows of unbelievable width against the street grayness, a pair of skis in the corner, and a wall littered with scribbled photographs; then they were in a narrow den crowded with wide tables and blue cigar smoke. A cherry-faced gentleman, stained straw hat pushed back over his mildewed hair, was signing letters for a waiting girl.

“Mis-ter Haggerty,” said Mamie, “here’s a man from Eidle.” They withdrew beyond the corner of a desk, Mamie whispering emphatically. Marry watched the straw hat bobbing as if in denial…. The stenographer glared at him for interrupting her autographs. Political jobs were embarrassing….

The cherry man came over to mutter discouraging lines, as if he did the same thing frequently in a religious rite. “You better come back again. There isn’t anything open now; all loaded up. But— “

“Well … “ Marry began, turning away.

They misconstrued his monosyllable as a threat. “You tell Eidle—Say, what’s that plaster on your head. Bump into a door?”

“I got shot.” It was his usual cryptic explanation.

“Uh.” They surveyed him thoughtfully, the girl staring, too. He had come from Eidle; he had been shot, he said; Eidle was known to be—

There came an important flurry of papers. “Send him up to Verachek…. No, the Extension…. That’s it.” To Marry again. “Right away the girl will give you a letter, Mis-ter Jalvey. How’s you spell your name? Mar-gar-et, you—” The rest was lost in a haze of whispers and souring smoke.

He emerged into the cool corridor of the fifth floor, County Building, with another letter clasped in his hand…. He found the port to which they had directed him-an office very like the realm of Mr. Eidle, with the inevitable gate and guard, deserted desks, wide tables with people sorting slips of paper, and an outer line of semi-partitioned, ground-glass offices like cells along the bullpen of a jail. Guard to a pale woman, and pale woman to bleak, untenanted office, Marry and his letter passed with bored routine…. Slaty pigeons pressed against the glass to beckon and coo above the hissing rattle which was Randolph Street; through a window of the Hotel Sherman across the chasm, he could watch a little girl setting candy boxes in piles on some table or radiator. Pink, yellow, white—the odd-sized cubes were piled again and again by the distant hands; then, distressingly, a long arm shot past the stagnant curtain and jerked the child away….

Not yet were his Loop directions familiar. He was gazing north, but somewhere behind all that muck and masonry, poor little Jo would be threading the snakes of her switchboard and hoping for one o’clock, when she could hurry to a cafeteria, buy her spaghetti and eclairs, and window-shop for twenty minutes. So many other Jos, too, all typing and grinding back of their coarse walls…. So many Marrys, he realized with startling surprise, all wondering and longing for vague mists that clung to El platforms and wreathed the areaways above coughing meat trucks or florists’ deliveries.

He was very tired, then—hating himself for drunken kisses of those midnight hours—and hating the gruesome wealth of blonde hair or violets.” Jo was his woman; they shared each other and had never quarreled. Playing square before last night … now he was no better than an adulterer. Ugly word! … But what would a minister say? Damn ministers! … He went to church to hear organ music, when he went.

Why was he there? Out in Clay City, the drowse and promise of early autumn prairies, sweeping dusky incense through the narrow street—distant lumber yards fading yellow under an Indian sun, and sunburnt men in denim coats striding past. This sort of a day, he would be lounging in the telephone booth, his ear glued to twelve miles of singing cornfields “What’s that, Mr. Olafson? Yes, a Ford tractor … You got out all your hogs, yes. And how many bushels of oats? Insurance, yes … What started it—lightning or defective wiring? ….”

The ground-glass door behind him slammed precipitately. A dough-countenance, with brilliant red necktie folded beneath, and a white powder of cigar ashes on the protruding stomach of his dark suit. “I’m Spatz. You wanna see me? … Uh, From Mamie, I s’pose.” He took the letter with scant courtesy and sighed heavily into a swivel chair before he read it.

There was considerable solo muttering, while Spatz opened various drawers to hunt for a small white card on which Marry’s name, age, ward, rating and salary were inscribed. “Take this out to Munek. He’s up in that door at the other end. Got a match? Uh.”

Javlyn felt himself dismissed. He stole one quick glance at the white card after he had closed the door. Eight-eighty per day. Gosh, that was—let’s see, 48 and 6 times 8, made $52.80 per week. But what could he do to earn that? Or did he do anything?

Mr. Munek was snatching his hat, bound for lunch. He was young and shiekish as to appearance, and his careful grammar was a distinct surprise. “Hello. New man, are you? Excuse me for a moment.” He examined the card carefully…. “Well, here is the sheet on this table. Did you ever sign a sheet? I’ll put your name down…. Be sure to mark an X in these squares each morning and afternoon. Nine o’clock until five. One hour for lunch. If I were you, I’d mark it now for today, and report first thing in the morning. That way you’ll get credit….” He went out, whistling softly. They came so often, like that.

So Marry was employed by the County of Cook, State of Illinois, at a salary larger than he had ever commanded before. No person had inquired as to his qualifications, and no person had told him his duties. It was dangerously fascinating…. That money must come from somewhere. And for what?

The office chairs were deserted—folks gone to lunch— when he came away. The elderly doorman moved toward the gate, but Marry waved him aside and the old fellow gave a comprehensive nod. He was one of them, now. He was in the public pay.

Meeting Marry in the light of decency, shadowed by a mortal chaperone, Josephine Ruska would have consented willingly to marriage by a justice of the peace, even though Catholic confessionals had heard her whispered ejaculations when she was younger.

The fear that she might lose Marry gnawed with all the dread of visions which had haunted her in earlier years—dismissal from her job, appendicitis, disfiguring scars—vague worries that made her envy Jennie Mascowitz, if indeed Jennie were still to be envied.

No other girl would tempt him away, she was sure…. Soon he’d have money; she thought he was of the sort who found it in broad daylight where the sales of unnoticing herds had spurned it. In charmeuse and clinging chiffon, she could rate with Marie Prevost or Irene Castle, she knew. Hadn’t men been after her, always, trying to batter down the reserve of her eager body? Few had succeeded before Marry. She had not gone to him as a virgin, but never thought to be ashamed. She lived in a trying age.

Sometimes she went over them painstakingly in her mind: the curly, yellow boy who called himself Billy and who used to take her to roadhouses when she was very young, working at Bluch’s store. One night she drank more than her brain could assimilate…. She was sleepy before they left the Indian Inn, and she curled against Billy in his dark coupe. He didn’t take her home until five o’clock, and she wept in the restroom at Bluch’s most of the next day…. That frightened her. So young….

Then Lester. He was a salesman, and she first saw him fuming over a long distance call which he declared she had bungled. No idle boy with his father’s car, like Billy, but a good businessman and war veteran. He liked to dance, and they danced, intoxicated with each other, through the gaiety of early winter evenings before he came to her room. They were to be married, so Lester said, after January 1st; Jo bought several aprons and a new nightgown for their intended honeymoon, but Lester was transferred to another territory on Christmas Eve and explained in a hasty phone message that he would write at once…. He never did, and later Josephine discovered that he had a wife and two babies in Milwaukee. She did not care much about Christmas Eve, yet.

George and Gerald were brief adventures of the year before Marry came, and their passing had manacled her in chains of cynicism and suddenly assumed chastity. She was violent when a man acquaintance had been too friendly, the week before Marry walked into Wise’s apartment. But so young, again, and so anxious to love….

With a strange heat behind her hard eyes, she imagined him often during the mechanical day…. Cross-legged on the foot of the bed, lean in his yellow pajamas, reading the morning paper at eleven P.M. His pipe scenting the room with brown sweetness…. Frowning into the mirror as he brushed his smooth hair—his profile clear and illumined, like reminiscent flashes of John Barrymore or some other misty actor—straight nose, clean chin and arched brows glinting gold over his pure tan. The thought of his muscular forearms, that rested tenderly across her shoulders when he fondled her—it was a light that burned into her brain as steadily as the lamps on her switchboard, and far more electrically.

The night when he had been shot. Hurried cans up and down the hallways, the tramp of feet as she threw her corduroy robe about her, wondering if it were a fire…. And Marry, prone on his side across the mottled rug, with blood in a small, wet pool against his neck. Henderson and the others fussed with much lamentation and frenzy, lifting him to the couch, chirruping wildly of emergency ambulances—meanwhile examining his pockets to see if he had the price of such expensive succor. And she, Jo, who had pressed kisses on his chest a few short hours before, could only huddle with a nest of common roomers in the doorway and murmur, “Gee … God, thass terrible!”

Their present existence was becoming more inconvenient, though. They ate dinner together, occupied the evening hours together, slept together. Always that quick stealth at the crucial moment—Jo coming from the bathroom—no one in sight—Marry’s door half, ajar, ready for a rapid slam. Sometimes there’d be unexpected steps on the stair, and then she would pass, towel-laden and rose-robed, to the north hall where she waited for the corridors to clear…. In the morning, same way. They couldn’t go on like that forever. Logan would tell, perhaps, after finding a pair of hose under the rumpled spread, or a shower of hairpins on the dresser. Or would he tell? But they had to be so careful….

Marry didn’t say anything about a change—marriage, or moving. She’d be willing to go with him somewhere else and be Mr. and Mrs. to everybody. If only she could have him forever…. Oh, she couldn’t lose him now!

True, he talked of love so seldom. “I want to love you,” on Pruitts’ ugly porch, or that brief, “I love you,” the afternoon before he was shot. But he must love her. He waited on her solicitously at times, insisting that restaurant food be fried to her taste, hunting for the most recent copies of Liberty or Collier’s for which she had expressed a preference; even bringing her little presents at unexpected moments. Hose, too large, and Fannie May candies.

He had offered her money, with insistent generosity. “Jo, there’s probably a lot of things you need. You go ahead and get them.”

Habit of years was too powerful; she couldn’t take it. Somehow … well, after all, it wasn’t as if they were married, or even honestly living together behind the same walls. “Marry, I don’ wanta take that. No. Iss nice of you. But I can’, honess.”

“Well, look here. I’ve got more than I did have. I had it coming, beautiful; I didn’t steal it. It’s mine, now. And you know you’re welcome.”

“No, Marry, I cooden.”

Last week, she’d seen a little fall coat in the window of a Clark Street shop, and involuntarily she had paused with an exclamation of discovery. Her own satin coat was so worn, and kept dropping monkey-fur which Marry declared was horsehair, all over town.

“Jo, you need that. It’s going to be chilly soon. And twenty dollars is a bargain.”

“Twenny-two fifty, it says.”

“All the same. What’s two dollars and a half?”

Back of her eyes there was a fierce, emerald gleam. “I’m not going to be a gold digger. Gee, I hate girls that always try to get—” She checked herself abruptly.

She saw him really angry, insulted. “Oh, all right! Have it your way, Jo. I’m just one of the boys, am I—”

“Marry, you know …”

“If I hadn’t wanted to get it for you, I wouldn’t have suggested it. But that’s all right!”

So she whirled him around on the sidewalk. “I’m juss so crazy. I’d—thass beautiful little coat—I’d love to have it!”

They went into the shop as a supreme adventure. “Doesn’t that just fit your little wife, though?” crowed the delighted saleswoman. The fabric hung in chic, tan lines from Jo’s slim hips; they laughed as they watched her reflection in dark shop windows along Diversey, and Mrs. Henderson moaned the next evening, “Well, well! Sure is classy. All you girls get new things, rather ‘n eat. But it sure looks swell on you.”

Mrs. Bellamy thought it looked swell, too. But Mrs. Bellamy didn’t say, “Swell.” People like Mrs. Bellamy didn’t use such words…. Jo tried to recall whether Marry had ever said, “Swell.”

Mrs. Bellamy had brown hair, unbobbed, and modestly streaked with pewter lights above her pink forehead. She sat in upright dignity and simple white waists behind a desk on which a bronze plate declared to the patrons of Patterson, Howells, and Niefeldt, that this clear-eyed woman was “R. Bellamy, Industrial Secretary.” From the clicking electric kingdom, Jo watched her pass on business or personal errands, and each time worshipped profoundly. So proud and calm—so—rude-voiced typists hushed their bickering and smiled engagingly when plumply tailored Mrs. Bellamy came tripping among them…. “Well, Genevieve, did you enjoy it at Lake Geneva? …” “Arlene, how is your father today? Oh, I’m so sorry!”

And when she said “sorry,” you knew that she didn’t mean, “Well, that’s nothing to me; I’m merely trying to he pleasant.” After Arlene’s father had died, and the funeral was over, and Arlene was back at her pale duties, she told Jo that Mrs. Bellamy had called at the home, and consoled her poor old mother with sympathetic tears.

“She says, ‘Mrs. Orloff, these times—the worry, the struggle—I know how it is. Now, it’s supper time. Juss suppose you lie down awhile and let me fix things up.’ And believe me, she did. Put on my apron, and had muffins and baked eggs and things. My, you wooden believe she was such a comfort in the kitchen and such a business woman and all.”

So Mrs. Bellamy admired the coat. “Lovely!” she cried. “Why, Josephine, wherever did you unearth such a bargain?”

If one could learn things from people like that…. She was a true lady; Mr. Niefeldt never swore in her presence—that is, not often; and yet Arlene Orloff insisted that Mrs. Bellamy was right at home in a kitchen. Like a queen doing dishes, Arlene had declared…. Jo thought of the Pruitts, with their beer and precinct politics, and of Bun with her maudlin echoes. Such thoughts worried her all the more.

Worrying all day … Jo’s head felt as if the brain beneath was corrugated into unnatural wrinkles, while she pressed through Adams Street toward the evening bus. She wondered how Marry felt after his drunk of the night before. Newspaper folks drank so much, she had heard. It would be fearful if Marry got to really drinking…. He wouldn’t, though. Gerald, the advertising solicitor with whom she had once established contact—he drank all the time. Not Marry. He wasn’t a beast.

People all around her, hurrying to get home. Perhaps they had men at home whom they were anxious to see. This white-faced girl who waited for a bus beside her— perhaps there was a man waiting for her, too. Immediately Jo warmed nearer her, whispering mentally, “So iss like that with you, too? There’s a Marry for you, girl-on-highheels—someone who’ll walk along the parkway beside you, going to dinner; and walk back with his hand on your arm; and sleep beside you, turning over when you turn?”

Strange thoughts. Absurdly alarming. She’d never experienced them before…. She moved further away from the pale girl with run-over heels.

“Maybe I’m in love. Thass it. In love …” she ventured.

If only she had an honest-to-God home where she’d find him. Jo saw herself before a bright gas stove, concocting fragrant things for him. Like Mrs. Bellamy—a queen in a kitchen. Loving to do such things; making beauty of them. Like an artist painting pictures…. In their apartment, they’d have the softest davenport, and happy blue pictures on the wall—that one you saw so often, of naked figures slouching on a stone porch while the sun hunted against mountains in the distance. They’d have some ferns, maybe, if she could learn to care for them, and oriental rugs. A twisty-oak dining table, and maybe one of those cute little holes-in-the-wall where you ate breakfast, just the two of you…. Later, maybe they’d have a baby.

A kid! And then she’d be a mother. Never thinking of that before; thinking always of cabarets and new shoes, and some one to treat her nice. But—a baby…. Babies on Surf Street, babies on Pine Grove and Diversey, taken out by nurses and mothers—all squawling or cheering from their clean cabs. And older ones trotting in brown harness, tugging at leashes like pet dogs. Gee, they were cute! She remembered the babies of her childhood—all smelly and wailing, with shabby stockings sagging down, and unspeakable blotches across their poor mouths, wallowing in the dreary grime of Twenty-second Street…. Not like that. A clean, friendly baby which you exhibited to congratulating acquaintances. The kind Mrs. Bellamy must have had, if ever she’d had one.

She—and Marry. Getting married. Apartment. Baby.

Jo stared down at her neat lap as she sat on the upper deck of the rumbling coach. Out of her, out of that flesh beneath her clothes—another person springing to life. Like a tree…. There was that in life, too, beside love. Why, some people must actually plan for babies; not plan against them and speak of them as accidents or mistakes when they were due to come. And after.

But maybe he wouldn’t want one. Or even, maybe he’d never want to get married. Just drift along and drift along until some day there was a flash and devilment…. Then it would be over, and she’d still be saving for a muskrat coat and eating breakfast at Kennedy’s, lunch at the Harmony and dinner at the Homewood. And Marry would be off with dim people who wrote the Messenger, getting drunk. Oh God—oh, Mary Mother, not that, not ever that!

How to know? How to probe through the months ahead, and find their fire searing with the blaze of recent weeks? One month before, she’d never seen him, and she supposed that she was happy. One month later, he might have disappeared. How then could she imagine she’d be happy? A night club with Bun and her friends—a party at Pruitts’—a lonely movie in the evening and always Adams Four Seven Nine Five. Ad-amz Fo-ur Sev-un Ny-un Fy-uv. Always and always…. Oh, Mother Mary, not that, not that!

“I cooden kid myself,” she thought achingly, as she stepped from the bus.

Gray clouds overhead and north, piling up behind the Wellington Hotel, ready to swoop down. Yes, there’d be winter again some day, with slush shoveled into mountains along the curb, and tire chains slapping at you…. Who stole my heart away? … Dreams I know can never come true … can never come true. … But they might come true after all. He had said that he loved her. Well then, he’d want to make her happy. And she couldn’t be happy, going on like that. Not after they loved each other—it seemed so cheap and so sad…. Sad. Gray clouds coming closer, and a cold wind from the lake biting along Surf Street behind her. Still summer, with the trees in eastern vacant lots still green, but the wind was cold…. Marry had told her of winter nights in Iowa, with the people where he used to live. The old woman made popcorn— right in her kitchen, she made it, instead of buying it from a Greek—and they sat around in the parlor and read aloud. She’d ask Marry to read aloud, soon; out of Liberty or one of those little blue books—not the one about thoughts and dreams. “Frood. Not that one. But Robinson Crusoe or Robert Looey Stevenson.” In their apartment kitchen, whenever they had one, she’d make divinity fudge for him. And the baby. If babies could eat divinity fudge, and if she could learn to cook it…. Can never come true …

They had moved her Victrola to Javlyn’s room during his convalescence, so no one seemed to think it odd that Marry should be keeping it there. The Duna record was calling softly as Jo came up to her own domain and flung off her new coat, casting it carelessly across the bed, and catching it up in remorse for a careful hanging one moment later…. Marry had bought it for her. She must take care of it.

He had his Corona on the dressing table, humped over to pound out one of his mysterious blurred pages, when she slipped in.

“Hello, beautiful.”

“Marry, you’re juss so white. Did that make you sick?” Kiss.

He frowned. “No. Liquor never makes me sick. Just idiotic as hell…. Well, I’m all set for the county building.”

“Honess?” She sat on the window sill, smiling her best. “What will they make you do, down there?”

Javlyn explained briefly that he did not know…. Worry, like a nest of worms, squeezed within his skull. What to do…. All his life in comparative decency; then he found himself taking money from crooks, holding a crooked job, living with a girl, and weakening his remaining character by caresses of perfidious delirium. Wonder if that shot had—hurt his brain? Made him do queer things. He couldn’t even remember the blonde girl’s face—only her stagey voice, drawling with studied ice…. Perhaps insane, getting worse each day. He’d be a madman, a moron. The city …

“I’m going out to take a walk, Jo.” He crumpled the paper and tossed it aside. “Somehow, I feel rotten—blue.”

Jo’s face appealng. “I’ll comfort you, honess.” It was as if she’d stretched out aching arms.

Not stay there, in the stark grimness of that room they had shared. “Well … I think I’d better get out in the air. I’ve hardly been out today; hurried right over here from the bus.”

“Will you be back for dinner, Marry?”

“Sure. Don’t wait for me, though, if you get hungry.” He kissed her passionately in a gesture of reassurance. She was fingering a magazine as he closed the door.

Walking mistily under the lowering clouds, he had passed the Sheridan Surf Hotel before a taxicab shrilled against the curb beside him, and Spence Sailor waved his arm through the open door.

“Where bound?” clipped Sailor.

He hadn’t known…. .Just walk and walk, across the weeds of vacant lots, below the soft masts of Belmont Harbor, along the lake. “I don’t know. Just walking.”

“For your health, ay. How’s the head?” And without waiting to hear how it was—”I’m going down to see an artist. Want to see an artist? Come on. That’s the reason I stopped.”

The taxicab jolted him into his seat and immediately Sailor demanded matches. “You’re not going to sit for a portrait?” Marry inquired, wondering how those red cheeks would flame on fevered canvas.

“Me? Sit for a portrait? My young friend, do you know how much weight I’ve lost since that day I was at the hospital? Seven pounds. That’s not a lot, but it’s steady. They’ll paint a lovely portrait on my coffin!”

Well, what could you say to a man like that? Knowing he was marked for death, and not caring. You couldn’t mutter condolences, or suggest Arizona, or hope that he would get well. Sailor knew he wouldn’t get well. And didn’t seem to care a lot.

He sat there smoking a black cigarette—imported from Cuba or some West Indian isle he had known once—his dark eyes winking out at the bleak lagoon where waterfowl squatted in the glassy waves. Humming, preoccupied as a professor.

“This artist I’m going to see—know many artists, Javlyn? Well, he’s a queer bloke if there ever was one. I knew him in France; he was an interpreter—speaks French, English, German—took me all around Paris once, for ten days. Great life, Javlyn. You’d have liked it…. Last night, I was covering up out at a roadhouse—prohibition work—had a girl with me, collecting damning evidence. Nice, lovely occupation. But sometimes there’s a thrill … well, what was I saying? Oh yes—”

Coughing a bit before he went on, and winking his heavy brows in grotesque apology.

“He comes batting over to our table and insulted me. I thought he was drunk, so didn’t make a row, but something about him was familiar. Then he told me who he was. Of course I remembered, after that. These people he was with—Gold Coast folks, with whom it was politics for him to stick, so he had to trail off with them. But I got his address and promised him I’d run up today. You’d like to meet him, so it came over me to pick you up when I passed…. Ought to know the artists, my young friend, ought to know the artists.”

They smoked through the early evening traffic toward the lower North Side. Marry had never known before that the Drive could weary him. Just like Fair Street or Dakota Avenue of Clay City—they tired you, made you long for something hiding behind it all further and further away—further than Spence Sailor had been in all his uncertain wanderings.

The Drake again, one buxom mass staring cold gray through the gloom. He remembered that morning (seemed so long ago) when Jo had told him of an uncle who once lived there…. The stony tower of the waterworks…. methodical ranks of traffic lights marching away toward the south….

Then they were wheeling around the block, down Rush Street, and east on Superior again, to cross the avenue and stop before a down-at-the-heels house which rose to glare at Javlyn like a pickled specter. Those steps—he’d gone up with—he’d come down—no, it was haunting in his mind like the snarl of a year ago, but it was only last night—

“I’ll be a son of a—”

“Why?” asked Sailor, paying the driver and cutting across the narrow street toward that dark doorway.

“I know someone who lives here.”

Sailor laughed as he tugged at the grunting door. “I did once, now that you remind me of it. Recognize the place; it’s an old studio hangout…. This one was quite a while ago, but she had a notion for hasheesh jags, so we couldn’t hitch for long…. Not the same one you know?” He led the way to the second floor.

Marry stole one hunted glance at the opposite door as Spence hanged against a gray portal adorned with a placque of oily elves and “ROLAND” in splotched capitals…. She might be in. The transom was curtained with paint, and her little white card stared with accusing candor under the pale light. Then the gray portal was swinging—he heard a lazy call of, “Behold El Capitan!” and a tumble of stacked magazines to the thick carpet. Spence’s black eyes were gloating, his mustache curved into a leery smile as he shook the shoulders of some stranger until the man’s fuzzy skull bobbed like a cork.

“Rea! Rea! Old vin rouge Rea! Wouldn’t even stay to say Hello last night—”

The fleshy face quoted something about, “The wicked years go by, go by…. You might introduce your friend,” he added.

“Give me time. Mr. Roland, Mr. Javlyn. He’s fellow lodger and friend of mine—likes to write, I hear, so I brought him along to get inspiration.”

“Glad you came, really.” He sounded so bored, but his cynical eyes were friendly. “And as for you, Spence Sailor—”

Spence curled his eyebrows at Marry as he slouched against the wall with a sigh of relief. “Hear that? Wouldn’t even welcome me. I know too much about him!”

“And no one ever knew how you found it out.” Rea Roland went on drawling, “Here, I’ll move some of this junk so you can sit down on the couch…. You told me you were rather in a bad way. What got you, gas?”

Spence whistled in relaxation on the couch…. “God damn it, I get all tired out…. Gas? Sure. A little gas, some rotten surgery, too much of everything—oh, you’ll live to see me kicking daisies—”

They jerked into the terrific past, flinging cryptic words back and forth like burning coals neither wished to hold for too long. “Albert,” “Major Gurney,” “Those two frogs came down in that jay-bird,” “—And fresh drafts of Territorials next to that National Guard division,” “She said if we could kick the provost out of bed, she’d fix things—”

Marry could only slump on the cushion and watch them: Spence was a hot-headed corpse, protesting against coroners; Roland was a bisque doll all dribbly with cerulean, and his rose madder fingers had crushed so many cigarettes…. Man talk, with shades of J.R.P. and a hundred thousand buried troopers wavering in that studio, where incongruous nudes lolled on the wall. You’d hear such conversation in the non-coms’ clubroom at Fort Des Moines, and through a daze of terse poker games…. And you knew that two walls away, “The Golden Helmet” was snobbing down from lofty wires, watching Doris Halt—the Dora DeVille of myriad column fans— and watching the drunken tracks which Marry had left behind him.

Again his reason swayed. What did she mean to him? Not a damned thing. He could grasp at Rom Pentecost without her fingers stretching in the way.

“ … You had that roll of francs in your pocket all the time, didn’t you? Well, I always thought so.”

It seemed, from their conversation, that Sailor had gone into the line with allied regiments before many American troops were at the front, familiarizing himself with trench warfare along with a herd of other interpreters or liaison sergeants. Roland had been a British officer, later detailed to Paris where his linguistic ability was made to triumph after a wound had disabled him. He had painted there when a boy, and knew every cafe, gallery and brothel worth knowing. Also some people…. Spence, it appeared, had known most of them before Roland was through with him.

Marry drifted about the studio, studying paintings he did not understand and marveling at the cups of brushes, the oblong palettes, the gobs, of blue and crimson on covers of wooden boxes. In the large room where Rea had received them, there were tattered lamps, a fireplace, torn chairs and the couch where Sailor lay with hands beneath his head. Adjoining this was a littered work room with ringed glasses scattered about and canvases turned to the wall, and narrow doorways leading to mysterious closets where the artist washed and slept…. Marry thought he would like to have a studio in that building; only his would be more clean. But perhaps one didn’t really need a studio, to write.

“… Remember Angel? Angel and that M.P. had been laying for me, and then the brunette opened the window and—”

Some one must have knocked on the heavy door, for Roland interrupted Sailor’s recital with, “Come!” and the hinges sighed as Doris Halt stood against the hall light…. Talking about a brunette opening a window, and then a blonde opened a door. Funny … she saw Marry before she saw the others, and caught her breath in surprise.

Spence was a romantic cadaver, bowing before Doris as he took her hand. “And you’re another denizen of this place, Miss Halt? I used to come up here a long time ago—I’m that old—”

Javlyn could take his own cue from the frigid dignity with which the girl awaited his introduction by Rea. He could not remember what banality he uttered.

“I came after that Walpole book, Rea.” She was selfpossessed, including all of them in her glance. “You’ve had it for an age, and probably never opened it. I want to brush up on Jeremy’s relatives again so I can say something ugly, and I was afraid you’d be out when I came back from dinner.”

Rea found the book, buried in newspapers and cigarette ash, and she tucked it under her arm as she turned toward the hall…. Sailor was on his feet again, his right nostril twitching, his eyes pricking out like a Lothario of condors. “This is in the nature of a reunion for Roland and me. I was about to invite the boys to dinner with me—I’ll invite you instead, Miss Halt—and these hombres can trail along—”

He was coarse. But masterful—masterful as Wise. Like the raven man who thundered in the last act of rural mystery dramas at Chase-Lister tents: “Charles Morton and the Masked Wolf are one and the same man!” Marry wanted to snicker at the wintry art with which she would freeze him out…. Why, damn her, she fell for it!

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m going across to the Amber Pie, second floor, and the rest of you may follow when Rea has washed his hands. They’re all cobalt blue, I think…. No, I’ll go on and find the table. You see that Rea washes his hands!”

Sit through a meal—endless cigarettes—fencing chatter, with that dying bull of a Spence Sailor trying to act like an antelope? Not if he knew it…. Head still aching. Somewhere in the back of his soul, Josephine Ruska had turned a pleading glance on him—”Will you be home to dinner, Marry?”

Doris had gone; Rea was splashing at a filthy lavatory opening off the workroom, and Spence was telling Rea how much he knew about art. He knew more about hijackers, the consumptive thug! … Well, better be going. Marry pleaded headache, exhaustion, and nervous disability; was regretfully excused, and hurried off down the dim stairs. He’d come home to dinner, Jo; he’d come—

Thought it was a reflection in the mirror, and then realized that after all, she was a piece of glass, awaiting him at the foot of that dusky flight. The grenadier on the newel-post frowned savagely ahead, unheeding.

“I knew you’d slip away,” said Doris, “and I had something I wanted to say to you first.”

“If it’s to apologize for not recognizing me upstairs,” Marry bluffed, “you don’t need to bother. I’m rhinocerosplated, being a poet.”

She sneered grandly. “So you do remember some things that happened?”

“I remember everything.”

The girl shrugged. “Well, you’d better forget everything. The happenings of last evening won’t be repeated, I am sure.”

“I’m sorry,” said Javlyn. “I thought it was my head, but more justly blamed it on the Scotch. Have you found out yet what that stuff really was?”

“It wasn’t worth investigating.” She glanced toward the upper stairway; Spence and Rea were rollicking in a distant gale of bass chatter.

Marry heard them, also. “That would be embarrassing,” he deliberated, “to have them come down and find you reading a riot act to me—”

“Please don’t talk as if I were a fishwife.” Doris motioned for him to open the door. “You’d better walk around the block with me. I confess to natural curiosities.”

“You talk as if you were the proprietress of a freak museum.” They idled down the outer steps and turned east past the row of ruined mansions. “Spence and Roland will go over to the Amber Pie and find you missing,” added Marry. “Then they’ll be sore…. ”

Doris gave a short laugh. “They can amuse themselves with admiring Amber Belle’s curls…. Do you know why I invited you up last night, Javelin?”

“Not to get me drunk, I hope.”

“A more selfish purpose. I wanted to see how a poet would react to the critical atmosphere.”

Hard. God! He imagined that J.R.P. would have thundered, “Well, you jolly well found out!” But this was the glass woman … ashes of violet. He muttered, “And I turned out to be uncritical—”

She drew away from him and paled in disbelief as they turned north at the corner. “Oh…. Really, you can burn a little! Am I to feel insulted?”

“Not unless my presence in the future will insult you.”

“I’ve stood a lot in my short life.” Their quarrel was mouthing away in the distance and both realized that they were only playing now.

“Who is this man with Rea, who invited me to dinner?” she inquired, after a moment. “He’s an actor, or I’m no judge.”

“You’re just a justice of the peace, then. He’s a freebooter in the holy name of Prohibition, though I’ve heard he was an actor once. He knew Rea during the war.”

Doris was immoderately surprised. “War? Do you mean to say that Rea Roland was in the war?”

“Or else the war was in him. I couldn’t decide from their reminiscences.”

She didn’t speak until they turned at Chicago Avenue. “He never told me. Rea can be so uncommunicative…. Are you coming to Gyp’s next Tuesday night?”

“Yes, and coming to your studio later if I may.” Oh, hell, why had he said that? But she was such a lioness….

“Very well. But there’ll be no liquor, I can promise you that. No doubt there’ll be plenty at the Elvina. His bootlegger disappointed him last night. That might explain our—disaster.”

They had reached the boulevard; Chicago Avenue was a murky arroyo to the west, evening stars paling in the drifted rolls of cloud. Marry paused at the sidewalk intersection, glancing toward the river for sight of a northbound coach. “I’m sorry you call it a disaster. But we’re both so armed.”

“Is that a gesture of truce?” She smiled with lofty assurance; you’d never think that her neck could be so soft, her voice wailing…. “I’ll come unarmored to Gyp’s next Tuesday, if that will please you. I’ve decided to be more agreeable….”

A northbound bus had halted by the red light, and Marry leaped to the platform as it ground under way again. Doris was a hatless statue stepping toward Superior Street through minor mortals…. And he, Marshall Javlyn, was the most fragile fool who’d ever let blonde hair gag his mouth. He slouched on the smoker’s seat, snarling as the coach rocked north.

She had gazed at him with her snippy assurance— wanted to poke him and see what he was made of. Or had she, after all? Wasn’t she lonely and tired of being a critical recluse, warming to more human foibles? … She had him physically shackled, hissing toward the pillar of her throat and purple of her eyes.

If Jo knew…. Well, why shouldn’t she know? It was only decent to tell her. She had given up others for him, and Marry always played square. He took a fiendish pride in imagining himself, playing square. But what about the months and years to come? If his fantasy did lift him beyond Clay City and Chicago and “any other spot like this damn town?” Then Jo would be roping herself in aristocratic pearls and murmuring, “Less go to the movies.” And Doris would—well, would she sneer? He thought not.

You couldn’t take an alley cat and breed Persians from its womb. Jo had told him of her early days Twentysecond Street filled with blowing papers, and Uncle Pete waving his dirty fingernails. Agh! … I saw your little speckled gods— But never could she see them. She’d think J.R.P. was “funny.” She liked the Messenger because of the strip cartoons. She enjoyed parties at the Pruitts’.

He told himself that it would be easier for her, that way. Just come out in the open … be kind, of course. No gradual decomposition of their joyful companionship—just a level goodbye and good luck. If he had made a mistake, it must be rectified. And if he had hurt her, he was sorry.

When Marry jumped from the bus at Surf Street it was raining, cold fingers dripping out of the greasy night. He turned up his collar and hurried through wetness, past lights of lobbied hotels and stark blocks of trite buildings. He hoped that Jo had eaten dinner already; it would be tough, sitting across the table from her tinted face, and knowing that you were going to sting through her skin in an hour.

Face it. Get it over with…. That was the city, prodding against his spine. Tough things to do; well, do them.

Black and warm in his room; Marry’s wet suit smelled like a scurvy dog as he shook rivulets from the hollows and hung the coat from a curtain rod where it could dry decently. Feet were soaking; he drew on his slippers and brushed back his hair over the cumbersome bandage, before he went through the hallways to Jo’s room. A French girl stalked before him, towels swaying slovenly from her arm….

“Marry?”

“Yes.”

She opened the door, standing in faded negligee with yellow light pouring through translucent folds to mellow every bend of her body. “Gee, I thought you was loss, out in the rain…. You can juss hear it drumming and coming down on the skylight. I was sorta worried.”

Worried …

“I met Spence Sailor and was with him a while; that’s the reason I was late.”

“Did you see Bun, too?”

“No.” Somehow the mention of Bun angered him—he saw her grinning eyes in soft checks, like raisins in white bread, and heard her militant confidence. “No, she wasn’t around. Did you eat?”

“Why, Marry, I was waiting for you. I bet you’re hungry. I juss thought I’d put on another dress and shoes, iss raining so.”

Ordinarily the sight of her in graceful lingerie, sliding into a short dress, would have aroused his connubial interest. But now she looked pitiful and skimpy, hurrying around…. So he wouldn’t be hungry too long … oh, good God!

“Marry, you better put on some shoes,” Jo giggled. “You can’ go out to eat in those slippers—”

He changed to another suit, put on his slicker while she was making up, and held her green umbrella silently aloft as they wound their way past sidewalk puddles. Usually Marry inquired with solicitude, “Where shall we eat?” but he seemed to forget, now, gazing at the flooded cement before them. They had crossed Clark Street before he jerked out of his trance to usher Jo into a restaurant.

Ten o’clock.

“Marry, does your head hurt you?”

“Not exactly.” He sat in the rocking chair, gripping an unlighted pipe, while Josephine spread a deck of cards before her. Red queen, red six, seven of spades, deuce of diamonds—

“You don’ talk tonight, so much.” The cards shuffled aimlessly. “Marry, did—did I say something to make you sore? … I never saw you ack so quiet like this.”

… Seemed as far away from her as if he had caught a car and ridden stolidly out of her sight, while she sobbed on the corner. “Well, I’ve been thinking. A lot of things.”

Her hands frozen, holding the jack of clubs.

“We can’t go on like this, Jo.”

Still grasping that card. Maddening silence.

“It isn’t fair to you. You could be having lots of chances—”

Jo dropped the jack of clubs, and her fingers twisted a corner from the paper in her lap. “I donnow what you mean, Marry.”

“Well—you could be meeting a lot of men. Fellows who’d mean more to you—”

“Why … “ Her voice trailed into a sigh. “Gee, I haven’ cared anything about meeting lossa men.”

Marry turned the stem in his pipe; words choking him, a vein pounding frantically at his temple. “You’d have a better chance. We’re not married.”

“You never talked about getting married. I diden know you wanted to get married to me.”

The silence was his—hideous and empty.

“You don’. You never did wanta get married to me. You never cared a bit, yeh?”

He hadn’t thought she would take it so calmly. But her eyes frightened him.

“You juss thought I was nice to sleep with—juss like any guy would want! I bet you met another girl somewhere. You juss got tired of me.”

She was on her feet now, turning mechanically to catch her handkerchief from the dressing table. “Gee, I sure been a little fool, to let some guy put something over on me like you have. Gee…. Iss the lass time that happens. I sure been—”

The handkerchief was a crushed knob in her fist. She drew the toe of her pump across the smug jack of clubs on the floor. “Why don’ you say something? Gee, you’re afraid to talk!”

“I wanted—Jo, I didn’t mean it just that way. You’ve been—”

“I’ve been a God damn fool. Don’ you talk to me! Don’ you dare talk to me! I don’ wanta have anything to do with you. You’re so rotten!—”

She was at the door, and it came over him like a rush of scalding steam that she would run out—one second, and she’d be gone out of that room forever. “I didn’t mean—”

“Please. Don’ talk to me. Don’ look at me, ever again. I been crazy. I—” The door shut with a solid click of the lock.

Then it all became sheer madness, with the honeymoon couple in Wise’s old apartment roaring their radio:

“Twuz in No-vemb-urr
My heart was fulla vodka—”

… He was after her, hurrying through dull lights, gasping, “Jo! Listen, hon—wait—I want to—” Her door slammed ahead of him and he felt the key turn against his coming.

“Jo!” Little pig, little pig, let me come in! No, no, by—

He thought he heard her sob, “Aw, go away—” in a tortured whine.

“You’ve got to! Let me in. Open that door.” Whispering against the panel with a throat dry as hot lead. Croesus. They killed him with—”I’ll pound and tell the whole damn house if you don’t! Please—”

She unlocked the door, her eyes blazing with dry tears and her hair awry. “Whadda you want?”

“Please, dear…. I didn’t mean it like that. It all happened so sudden. I was crazy. I—”

She sat on the bed facing her disordered wardrobe, her hands clutching the spread in merciless knots.

“I know I haven’t treated you right. I’ve taken you and given you nothing.” The girl stared in metallic unresponse. He felt the vein in his temple bursting against his skull. “Can’t you talk? Say something….Oh, God, Josephine—say something! It was my head, my head…. I’m going crazy—”

Then she drew him down beside her. “Oh, Marry.” Her cheek against his neck. “I know. Iss your head. You got all mixed up with Wise, diden you? Those folks shot you and your head hurts yet. I know.”

Pressing him face forward on the bed. Her body so comforting along his side…. “You diden mean that, did you, Marry? You love me. Your head juss got to hurting you. I know…. It juss sorta got you, and you said all those things.” She was crying, now, tears scorching his dry skin—fragrance of cheap perfume crowding his soul. “Dear. You’re juss my dear Marry, aren’t you? I love you, Marry. You love me.”

Gorillas, they are, pushing in cancerous hordes over the raw rooftops, skewering virgins with their spears, and yelling for more to kill…. They’ll get you—cast you into boiling vats and push your body down and down…. You’ll be sundered by their blades—squealing in last agony for the poplar lanes you knew….

“I love you so much, Marry. You cooden say those things to me and mean it. There wasen’ any girl, was there, honey?”

Let him up. Let him up. He couldn’t lie there and let her say that. It slid into him like a greased knife.

“Gee, I never loved anybody before. Not anybody! You don’ care about anybody else, Marry. You don’ want me to go….”

Let him up. Break her arms now. It would hurt her less.

“Say it, Marry. Tell me you juss love me—”

He stumbled to his feet, glaring at the wall. Must say it.

“Jo—I—I didn’t mean to hurt you.

It—” “It was juss your head, Marry? You went sorta crazy for a minute. You diden mean—”

Then it had to come. Tear it out…. “I meant it! Oh, I love you, but I was with another girl last night! I kissed her—I—fondled her—I saw her again tonight. It wasn’t my head. I wasn’t crazy—I knew what I was doing. It was her! I never thought—”

She did not sob, or cry at him. Merely biting her lip and saying, “Go on.”

“—Not before! I loved you. I guess I still do—”

“Guess? … You better go, Marry.” Her voice was brutally soft. “You better go now. I guess you said enough.”

“Jo, would you believe me if—”

“Go on, Marry. Thass all. Get out—”

She closed the door after him; he could feel her breathing beyond the wooden frame, and then the key rasped eternally.

… Long after that—one o’clock—he was walking aimlessly on Broadway, damp stars spinning above him and his useless slicker sagging from his arm. Just walk and walk…. He couldn’t have gone to his bed then, without her. Call it a month. All right; you’d had her three weeks or a month; you’d been married, say, a month—and then pitiless searchlights split your heart, and your mind went clicking smugly like a telegraph key. That was the thing to do: tell her. It would hurt her so much less. A month later, she would be laughing.

Just walk and walk.

A garage where sepulchral lamps glinted far in the arched shadows. Flora May’s Food shop, with orange crates and canned vegetables piled neatly into eerie gloom. A dismal restaurant where one huge bulk gluttoned at a table near the door, mopping up catsup while the proprietor leaned his elbows on the cigar case, waiting to go home. Berths White’s Candy shop—the gumdrop toys smiling in sugared drowsiness out of their black case, and tiny flags waving over fudge trays. Marry didn’t like to pause there for long; he remembered Jo smiling at the little cotton-haired woman who weighed chocolates for them, and insisted fervently that the candy was made that day…. No. It wasn’t pleasant to linger by the fudge shop; he went on past a white bank and stood helplessly on the Y-shaped corner, with a clock glaring back of him and a policeman across the street glancing suspiciously at his idle progress.

Before him went Diversey—still rumbling with its taxicabs and late sedans. The same untidy newsboy moaning in front of the United Cigar store, and the same starter’s whistle shrilling in front of the Rendezvous…. There were the fantastic tracks of Patch Boylano and Conny Welch, doomed to die at the next corner. There was the path along which Abe Wise had sped on the rubber hoofs of Steve Gold—his wide, mouth laughing—a spattering gun in his hand…. One month. Less than one month, it was, and already the sinuous pavement had banded his groaning legs, locking him ever tighter against the redstone cliff.

“I wanted it,” he thought. “I threw that Iowa offer out of the window. I should have known what I was getting into. George Luce said—”

Oh, Christ—George Luce, George Luce, always George Luce! He was a fogey prophet, mouthing broad irrationalisms from his dank rural desk. What was the use of listening to him? What was the good? Show it to Marry JavIyn….

Show it. Show it. His feet keep up a chatter as he went past the brown aura of the Rendezvous, down the incline east on Diversey. Show-the-good, show-the-good-tome-if-you-can … Clock, clock along the barren cement. Von Frantzius’ window with its decoy ducks and hunting caps and polished shotguns—foreign to the sickly silk and patent leather which tramped before it each day…. Show-the-good-to-me …

(She’d be asleep by now, her bare arm stretched across the pillow, her soft hair mussing white hollows. In the morning, she might be willing to talk…. No! No! He’d told her. It was best that way. Couldn’t be wobbling forever.)

He dared not look at his smooth bed when at last he came into the room. Just as if they had been married.

“I’ve been divorced.” With fiendish drollery. “I’m a divorced husband.”

Living alone. Sleeping alone…. Tried to imagine Doris Halt in that bed. No. Doris Halt, clothed in gray webs on her black couch, but not in that bed.

A handkerchief of Jo’s on the floor next to the highboy. Soiled and stiff in its blue crumple. He tossed it to the mirrored dressing table. But then, she wouldn’t be using that dressing table again.

Go to sleep, now. Open windows, and stretch in wide weariness beneath the clean sheets. Outside it might rain, seeping down through the jagged areaway, trickling off sandstone ledges. Go to sleep, now. In the morning—

Nine o’clock, they had said at the county building. And he was up at seven. Afraid to wash—in the further bathroom—he’d have to pass Jo’s room, and she might be in the hall—so he waited until the French had abandoned the lavatory on his side of the house. As Marry came out, Mrs. Henderson was poking for sheets in a wall cupboard.

“Well, I see your girlfriend’s gone.”

“Girlfriend?—”

Snowy cloths, folded in heavy squares. “Sure. Ruska, she went out early. Bout a nour ago in a cab. Dave, he had to get up an’ see after things—she had all her packages an’ trunk an’ suitcase an’ stuff—my, you’d think folks’d use a little sense about the time of day they move! She leff things all messed up an’—”

Left things … all messed up …

“Say, diden she tell you she was goin’? Diden you know nothin’ about it? My, she sure leff in a hurry—”

“Of course. She told me.” He was going up the hall toward his room. The county building at nine o’clock, the county building at nine—

Sure. She told him … good God, she told him—