IT WAS A LOW RED-BRICK HOUSE with a white door, a brass knob and brass name-plates, and new green-and-white awnings and green window-boxes: the sort of place which, in those days, downtown, seemed particularly smart. We rang, and, after a moment, the electric clicking began—with its quick and ready profusion, plucking distinctly the string of excitement which could still be set vibrating for me at the prospect of meeting new people in Greenwich Village.
They were Hugo Bamman’s friends: I had never met them. Rita Cavanagh, the poet, was to be there—and other persons reputed to possess genius or to whom I vaguely attributed romance. The stairs were soft-carpeted in green. The host, tall and smiling, in a dinner jacket, met us at the door. The rooms were very bright and well-kept: I saw lettuce-green cocktail glasses, a bruised-mulberry batik behind a divan and, on the wall, a set of framed designs for the costumes of some ballet, vivid tinselly golds, blues and purples. And there were girls, like the colored sketches, in the brightest make-ups and clothes, with red silk roses of Cuban shawls and silver turbans and red hair and black arching Russian eyebrows beautifully penciled on.
The host waylaid the hostess, who had a cocktail glass in each hand and appeared preoccupied. I thought her adorable—she was quite short and had very small gold slippers and Buster Brown blond bobbed hair. “Oh, how do you do!” she said, stopping. “How about putting down the glasses and shaking hands?” said Ray Coleman. “Here, you take this, then,” she said, making him hold one of the glasses: I thought he looked a little severe as he stood with the cocktail in his hand. “There’s so much traffic,” she remarked, “that it’s hard to receive people right.” She smiled charmingly with a little mauve-rouged, moist and lovely American mouth. Her hand, which she gave me now, was fragile and small, and, with her thin round bare arm, seemed like some soft little tentacle. “What a nice apartment!” I said. “It’s the apple of our eye,” she replied. That wasn’t quite right either, but, as it evidently was the apple of Coleman’s, he smiled with satisfaction as he demurred that they were “a little cramped for space.”
A bulky woman in green—the one with the silver turban—blazed upon my vision. She recognized me and we shook hands. She was one of those plain elderly ladies who do something or other and whom we meet at parties, but whose names we have difficulty in remembering. I had a drink, which Mrs. Coleman had given me, and I asked the lady with the silver turban whether I couldn’t get her one. She said: “A little of that Scotch—straight,” and we sat down, at her suggestion, on a large ottoman in front of the fireplace. She had the hearty manners and broad speech of an old vivandière—an old vivandière of the social revolution, I thought, and approached her with a special respect.
“What we have in America,” she declared—we had arrived, through Prohibition, at politics—“is government by headlines! What’s the actual explanation of these booms for Cox and Wood? Neither one has the brains of a rabbit. But their names are one-syllable words. They’re one-syllable words! I’m a newspaper woman and I know!” “So is Debs,” I suggested. “Yes,” she replied, “but he’s out.” I felt that I had said something stupid. I had let her see that I was only an outsider.
My whole point of view at this period was still largely taken over from my old school-friend, Hugo Bamman: he had come, after the War, to live in Greenwich Village, and I had been brought there by his example. It was Hugo who had taken me around and who had told me what to think of what I saw; and I had seen through Hugo’s eyes. The people whom Hugo thought important seemed important to me, too: he and they, I believed, were leaders, leaders of the true social idealism which cut under capitalistic politics. To them the social revolution seemed as real as their love affairs; and I had often a guilty consciousness that it was not quite real enough to me. This plain-spoken woman, for example, to whom I presumed to talk of politics, might, for all I knew, have just returned from Russia—might have fought on the barricades. Her bad language and her great bare chest might represent the heroic braveries of some heart-breaking campaign—the devotion to some anarchist lover, deported or sent to prison; the shouldering of some burden of poverty; or perhaps some point-blank vindication of basic human rights in the teeth of the mounted police and the mob.
In that company I had always felt humble: beyond publishing a few satiric verses in a radical magazine, I had never myself struck any blow in the war for humanity (Hugo Bamman was a free lance and a Communist, whereas I professed no political faith and had a tame and respectable job in a publisher’s office); but, like Hugo, I had served in the other war, and had served as an enlisted man, and after seeing all the nations of the West temporarily scrambled together and the social order turned upside down, I had come away with a new conviction of the necessity of human solidarity. Ten Days That Shook the World—they had given me pause when I had read about them one morning, among the inanities of the Paris Herald, after a night spent sleeping in a puddle. In college, I had read of the Russia of the Tsars as one reads about the Middle Ages; but now I had been forced to recognize, even among Americans, and as one of the strongest instincts of society, that horrifying contempt of a dominating class for the lives of those they dominate. So that, by the time I had got out of the Army, I had acquired a scorn for the pursuit of money, position or rank: the people who cared for such things seemed now to me sinister or childish. It appeared impossible ever again to accept conventional values complacently, to acquiesce in the prosperous inertia and the provincial ignorance of America. One could never go back again now to living indifferently or trivially; one was afraid of lending oneself to some offense against that unhappy humanity which one shared with other men.
“Yes, of course,” I replied, “he’s out.—And Wood is such a gentlemanly fellow!—he hasn’t any of the Regular Army mannerisms—he’s surprising in that way. You think he’s going to be awful, and then he turns out to be quite a relief after listening to the regular West Point line. You can perfectly see why Roosevelt got on with him. Neither one was an ordinary ruffian. Yet both, at bottom, were stupid men. Roosevelt was only just civilized enough to know and remember more facts than his neighbors. But all his imagination was good for was habitually to make a melodrama out of the most serious affairs of the world—a melodrama with himself as hero.”
Her eye had strayed, she hailed a young man with a slit-eyed impassive gaze, who, his hands in his trousers-pockets, had stationed himself near us. I felt abashed—what I had said had betrayed me as a young bourgeois trying to play up to her: it had given me away as never having been at the barricades!—“Oh, Bobby!” she exclaimed, “your ballet was marvellous! Those divine Chinese whites!” The young man accepted the compliment, with no attempt to turn it off or to pretend embarrassment. He seemed serious and complacent: I wondered whether he were Jewish—he was blond, but had a hooked nose. He replied without change of expression and bending over with his hands in his pockets: “It’s the first time, so far as I know, that Chinese white has been used in the theater. I have two different kinds of white contrasted.” “How did you ever do it?” said Sue Borglum (that, it turned out, was my companion’s name). “I was experimenting for two years,” he replied. I could tell from his accent that he was Scotch; and his eyes remained narrow and solemn, when a Jew, no matter how serious, no matter how relentlessly preoccupied with the importance of his own activities, would have veiled with some irony of politeness his human and earth-bound ambitions in this Valley of the Shadow under the eye of a Jealous God. “I don’t see,” she protested, emphatically, “how people ever have the patience to go on experimenting for effects they may never be able to get! In the newspaper game, it’s different: we never experiment—we know how to get our effects and we get them right off, the same day. And they’re forgotten the same day!” He answered, without smiling: “There’s going to be a photograph of my set in Bradley Foster’s book on the ballet.” He looked around as someone grasped his arm.
Daisy Coleman was talking in a corner with an anomalous slight little man; they were drinking the cocktails she had been carrying. She seemed appetizing in her lobster-bisque dress, her paler flesh-colored stockings and her little gold slippers. She was talking over the back of a chair, with one knee on the seat and with both hands clasping the top, like a little girl at school, chatting between classes; the conversation was accompanied with sympathetic movements of the elevated foot. As I watched her, I saw Ray Coleman, smiling in a curious fixed way at nobody in particular, go over, interrupt the conversation, detach Daisy from the little tadpole and launch her again on the company at large. She came forward rather blankly and, it seemed to me, a little sullenly.
Ray Coleman had left Hugo Bamman standing huddled against the mantelpiece and staring out through his thick myopic lenses; and it occurred to me at once that he could talk better than I to Sue Borglum. He would be sure to have the right tone—and besides, he never seemed to care whether women were young or old, attractive or plain. “Ah, there he is!” I cried—I disloyally used to kid him—“Bamman: The People’s Friend!” He looked about, smiling vaguely, then, locating us, craned forward, and bubbled and beamed over Sue. I got up and intercepted Daisy.
She began by making an earnest effort to discharge her obligations as hostess, but I could see that her heart wasn’t in it. “Don’t you want another cocktail?” she suggested. “I’m afraid the one you got was all water. Ray has just made some new ones.”
“You were in Patsy, weren’t you?” I asked: I knew that she had been a chorus girl. “I think that that was about the best musical show I’ve ever seen—I went to it four times!” “Well, we couldn’t complain,” she said (it had had a phenomenal run). “Which one were you? I don’t recognize you.” “Oh, I was just in the chorus,” she said. “And then I was one of the pages that came down the steps with the candles in the Honeymoon Moon number.” “Oh, were you one of those pages?” I exclaimed. “You were awfully cute! I remember you well!—and that set with the lavender drop and the orange moon was marvellous! Do you ever miss the stage?” “I’m beginning to now. Of course, it’s an awful lot of work—so you don’t get very much fun out of it.” With the intention of documenting myself—in those days I shared Hugo’s enthusiasm for sociological documentation—I questioned her about the theatre. I was delighted by her candor. “By the time the show opens,” she told me, “everybody is groggy. When we were rehearsing for Patsy, I drank so so much to keep myself going that I finally got some kind of d.t.’s: I saw a horse sitting beside my bed.” I expressed interest. “It was sitting by my bed with its hoofs on its knees—this way: like hands—it’s hoofs were painted blue. It was sitting there leering at me.” “Were you able to go on?” “Yes, the doctor gave me a great big drink of something bitter and I went to sleep and slept it off.” “It must be a terrific thing to rehearse one of those shows!” “It’s a lot of work to be beautiful—especially when you aren’t,” she added. “Oh, come!” I replied, “I was just thinking that you were one of the very few actresses I had seen who were as pretty on the stage as off!” She made a gesture of burlesque demureness, putting a finger in her mouth. I inquired about the hardships of the stage. “Once, at the Winter Garden,” she told me, “I was in one of those living curtains: they left us up there for an hour and we nearly got roasted with the lights. When they let us down again, half the girls fainted.—Oh, yes; us girls,” she concluded, parodying us girls, “us girls has our trials!” I found her interesting, attractive, amusing, and profoundly sympathetic. “What a lovely color your hair is!” I told her. “Just the color of honey!” “Mm-Mm!” said Daisy. “More! I eat that stuff up!”
Ray Coleman, smiling, came up behind her and put his arms about her, with his hands over her breasts. “Don’t you think he looks like Ned Grover?” Daisy inquired of her husband. “No: not a bit,” replied Coleman. He explained to me humorously: “She always has these insane ideas about people looking like each other—and there’s never the faintest resemblance!” I seemed to make out that Ned Grover raised an issue.
“Won’t you let me fill your glass?” he suggested. “I’ve got some real bonded rye over here that I’ve only just opened. I thought at first I wouldn’t open it tonight, because when you have a lot of people like this, anything special is lost on them—you might just as well give them plain bootlegger’s stuff.” “I thought your cocktails were splendid!” “Well, I know you’ll appreciate this rye: it’s the real Old Overholt, bottled in bond.”
“Is Rita Cavanagh here?” I asked over the glass-topped drinking caddy. “Yes: she’s here somewhere”—it gave him pleasure to feel himself master of a company among whom distinguished names might be casually mislaid. “Haven’t you seen her?” “I’ve never met her.” “I’ll introduce you to her.” He lifted his tall amber glass with an air. I saw that his dark eyebrows, which he was always raising in conversation with the air of a man of the world, nearly met above his nose.
He led me over to the divan. Rita Cavanagh was a sharp-nosed little thing with mousy bobbed hair; she wore a shabby black dress. She was so small that I hadn’t noticed her. But, as I shook hands with her, she gave me, from eyes of a greenish uncertain color, a curious alert intent look, as of a fox peering out from covert. She was curled up in the middle of the divan and evidently the center of its company. I told her how much I had liked her poems.
Ray Coleman, with smiling politeness, requested her to recite. “Did you know I’d been asked to read in public?” she said. She spoke in a rather dry staccato voice, and with something like a British accent, which seemed to me artificial.—“Where is that?” inquired Ray Coleman. “At the Poets’ League.”—“Well, you’re going to do it, aren’t you?” said a young man who looked like a baseball player. “Well, would you? Do you think it’s the thing to do?” She took a brief puff at her cigarette—staccato and precise. “Do they offer you money?” asked the man. “Yes.” “Then do it!” “But they come up and talk to you afterwards, and you’re supposed to answer their questions. What would you say to them?” “Say to them?” said the young man. “What did Shakespeare say to the horses? Whoa! Get over there! Back up!” She laughed, puckering her eyes, and again raised the cigarette.
This young man, I felt, was a good fellow—his hulking frame, his jutting brow and his prognathous jaw seemed to mask some gentleness and modesty—but I had the impression that he was jealous of Rita and was straining toward her with a maximum of nervous effort, was almost, in fact, on the point of seizing her; and I felt that all the three other men about her were bent in the same direction; and that I myself, though I had only just met her, was about to become involved in the competition. And, since I had told her that I liked her poems and since she had turned to me, acknowledging my compliments, as if they had gratified her especially, I began to find that I myself was resenting the other men almost as rivals.
She laughed—on distinct, impish, economized notes: “I might take an apple with me,” she said, “or a lump of sugar.” “Couldn’t you rehearse a little for us?” Ray Coleman suggested, inclining and smiling again. “You’ll find us an appreciative audience!” “This is one that I wrote today,” she said, taking a last puff at her cigarette “—This very day!” And, sitting back against the wall behind the couch, straightening her neck and throwing up her head, she began to recite.
The effect was, at first, to embarrass me: it was a little as if a Shakespearean actor were suddenly, off the stage, to begin expressing private emotions with the intonations of the play. The only girl I had ever known who had been able to write respectable poetry had been in the habit of reading aloud—when she read aloud at all—as if her poems had been compositions which she had never seen before, poems written by some other person and by someone of whom she disapproved. But in the gradual silence of the room, amid the respect with which all seemed to turn toward her, those deep sonorities of sorrow and wonder began to move me as much as a play. I had admired, in reading her lyrics, the uncounterfeitable force of sincerity which, in dealing with classic themes—themes in other hands commonplace—the longing for home, the shortness of life, the transience of love—with an effect both of boldness and austerity, had not hesitated to clothe them in an imagery drawn directly from ordinary life. But I had not known, till I heard her recite, to what music these things had been tuned: all her art was in her ear; her words had little color for the eye. Now, in the poem which she had told us she had just written, she described a bonfire built on the beach, which shut out for those around it the empty weight of the waters and the desolate litter of the shore, where a poor disfeatured corpse lay, worried by unresting waves, among the seaweed, bleached boards and dead dogfish—as the joy which we know to be doomed may seem yet to overflow the moment. And in a second poem, the sight of two children—one blotted from birth in face and mind, the other creeping on wry spider legs—yet dressed and fed and sent out every morning by the mothers of wretched streets to play with the other children, was made to shake us with that despair—the damned anguish of our own frustration—which, in the presence of some pitiful human failure may overcome us with the sudden conviction that no satisfaction can be real beside the humiliations of life. And on her lips, the barrenness of the shore, the dingy images of the streets, were a kind of song.
In the pause after the second poem, dramatically tense and distinct as every syllable she had spoken, a smooth-faced and girlish boy, whom if my attitude toward all the company had not been so much one of respect, I should certainly have considered a fool, said, “That does something to me—that last one!” The baseball player shook his head and said: “Gosh! that’s a knockout!” Rita said, “Yes: I’ve written that one since I’ve seen you! You haven’t heard that one! I’m so glad that you like it!”
Somebody suddenly turned on the phonograph, which began jigging a popular fox-trot. Ray Coleman went over and stopped it, and I saw him engaged with his wife in what looked like a restrained altercation. Then he returned to us, bringing Daisy. “I’m sorry,” he explained, smiling—his smile was beginning to get on my nerves. “Daisy has the phonograph habit: it’s like a drug—she can’t keep away from it! It was unpardonable to jar on those lovely poems!”
“Yes,” said Daisy, “I hope you’ll forgive me, but I thought you were all through.” “We had hoped that you weren’t,” insisted Ray. “I wish you’d let us hear some more!” Rita replied, puckering up her eyes, “Oh, I think that’s quite enough of me for one evening!”
“How sweet she looks in pink!” said Sue Borglum: Daisy had been standing by like a bad little child reproved. “She looks like one of those big pink bonbons on the top of a box of candy.” “Melt in your mouth,” said Daisy, with her frank and charming grin. “Speaking of clothes,” said Rita, “has anybody seen Myra Busch since she got back from Paris?” “Have I?” returned Sue Borglum. “She says she bought it all with what she got from writing for McMoony’s, but if she did, McMoony’s must pay her a damn sight more than they ever paid me. She’s so wide-eyed about it, too! I asked her if she hadn’t been able to find a night to go with that lace nightgown.” “Oh, Myra Busch is a pushover!” said Daisy, a little snappishly. “She’s got round heels!”
Sue Borglum’s pleasantry had been in the vein of the Village; Daisy’s was in the taste of Broadway—I do not know which, at that period, enchanted me the more. Since I had come back to America from France, I had been noticing with a new attention the way the Americans talked. I had read, with astonished gratification, the first books of those American writers who seemed to be making a new kind of literature out of that sprawling square-syllabled speech where the words had been like colorless frame-houses on the outskirts of an American town, a language fit only, it had seemed, for the uses of a prosaic trade or of a plebeian extravagance and irony. And I noted American slang with an interest self-conscious and pedantic.
I felt, however, that Daisy’s husband disapproved of her coarseness and sharpness, and I resented his failure to appreciate her.
“I understand you caught a thief,” said Sue Borglum, addressing Ray. “Yes,” said Ray, with satisfaction. “Caught him, convicted him and sent him where he’ll do no more thieving.” “Burglar or sneak-thief?” asked Sue Borglum. “All kinds of a thief!” replied Ray. “He got into the house in broad daylight. Somebody rang the bell last Sunday afternoon, and I pressed the button to open the door, but nobody came up. Now, I always make it a rule, whenever that happens, to go down and find out what’s up!”
I had often in my own apartment responded to these false alarms, but checking up on them, I reflected, was like Crainquebille’s prison stool chained to the leg of the bed—an idea which would never have occurred to me.
“I went down,” Ray Coleman continued, following Daisy with his eyes, as she quietly detached herself from the group and went back in the direction of the phonograph, “but there was nobody in the hall—and nobody on the floor below. Then I went to all the other apartments and asked whether anybody had just come in, and they all said that nobody had. Then I went back and got a gun and a flashlight, and I went down into the basement. I held the flashlight out to one side, so that if he fired he wouldn’t hit me. And lo and behold! there was Mr. Thief hiding in the coalbin! I covered him with the gun and asked him what he was up to, and he began telling me a long sob-story about how he hadn’t any place to sleep and had just come in to spend the night.” Smiling steadily, he gazed at Daisy, who had gone back to the corner again to talk to the anomalous little man with the dark amusing eyes, the natty blue suit and the belling sailor’s trousers. “I said, ‘Well, you just wait here awhile till we find out a little more about that story,’ and I locked him in the basement and telephoned the police. When we searched him we found all the jewelry hidden away in his shoes!—two stickpins, a ring and a wristwatch, and five dollars in bills and change. He’d stolen them from a man in Eleventh Street!” “Oh, they weren’t your things, then!” said Rita, who had been listening with that odd tension with which she seemed to react to everything, whether, as I thought, of intrinsic interest or not.
“Oh, no,” Ray heartily reassured her. “He didn’t get anything of ours. He didn’t have any chance! I’ve got some etchings and some valuable firsts—so I can’t afford to take risks. And Daisy has an ostrich-feather evening wrap that’s worth three hundred dollars. The fellow on Eleventh Street had missed a lot of other things, too; but they couldn’t get the little bastard to tell them what had become of them. They beat him up at the station, but they couldn’t get him to tell—he was just sullen. A West Indian boy. We ought to have some way of keeping such scum out of the country. If they’d only do with all the criminals”—he spoke with a sort of exaltation and his eyes were rapt away to Daisy—“if they’d only do with all the criminals what they do with the regular gunmen! They’re not supposed to beat a man up more than just so much, you know—but the way that they get around that in the case of the big thugs is to send them around from one police station to the other. As soon as they get done with them in one place, they just send them along to another—so that the men in any one station can always say they haven’t beaten ’em up more than just so much, and yet they can give ’em all they want. If they’d been able to do that with my West Indian friend, we might have found out about the silk bathrobe that he’d stolen from the man on Eleventh Street.”
“Yes,” said Hugo, whose eyes, behind his spectacles, I had felt beginning to glow with antagonism. “They might even have made him confess to stealing the towers of Notre Dame!” ‘What do you mean?” asked Ray. “I mean, if you torture anybody long enough, you can make them confess to anything. That was what the Inquisition did, wasn’t it?”
I perceived that, although Ray Coleman enjoyed entertaining poets and radical journalists, he was far from sharing the humanitarian feeling which at that epoch pervaded the Village. I had thought, when I first came in, that his dinner jacket struck for the Village an unfamiliar and incongruous note; and I was growing more and more sympathetic with Daisy. I began to concoct an ironic short story, something rather in the vein of Crainquebille or of Maupassant’s Boule de Suif, in which a vulgar but charming little wife was to be patronized and bullied by her husband—who would be editor of a popular newspaper. One day when the husband had gone out, the wife was to find in the basement a poor starving tailor’s boy, who would tell her of the petty tyrannies of the presser for whom he had worked. And, remembering her life on the stage—the cruelties of the living curtain; remembering the harshness of her husband—all that money-grubbing anti-human world in which she had always found her own life so harassed—she would listen to the boy with sympathy, and would be just on the point of offering him some clothes and something to eat, when the husband would appear with the police; the boy would turn out to be a thief whom the husband had caught and locked up!—But there would have to be something more to it—I would think about that later.
In the meantime, Hugo’s skirmish with Ray had ended in an evasion, emphatically disguised, as Ray became aware that his attitude toward criminals might be considered bad form in the Village. I inquired of Hugo, aside, where Daisy Coleman came from. “From Pittsburgh, I think,” he replied—then still chafing with repressed resentment over his argument with Ray, he added: “You never seem to be able to take people for granted!—you always want to know where they come from!” I answered that those things interested me.
And I brooded a little on Pittsburgh—I had been there as a boy—my mother had had a school-friend who had married and gone to live there, and we had visited them once. They had lived in a massive and formidable house, with dingy Ionic pillars, and with blue and green stained-glass windows which, far from adorning the interior, had seemed to me at the time merely somber, forbidding and blind. There had been a boy about my age called Junior, and he had a great many expensive toys; an Indian costume and a military costume (which I had thought a good deal of a bore) and the most elaborate toy railroad that I had ever seen outside a toy store—a labyrinth of signals, switches, turntables and tunnels; it had covered the floors of several rooms and rendered them uninhabitable. This boy had also had fencing foils; a real rifle; a thing that he told you to look through but which squirted water into your eye; and a device of rubber tubes and bulbs, which made plates jump up and down on the table. These luxuries had strongly impressed me and they now presented themselves to my mind—as well as Junior’s egoism and arrogance, the arrogance of an over-indulged child, which had kept me from quite getting on with him. Now, as I remembered it for the first time in years, I found that I detested that household. There had been a Pennsylvania Dutch father, who had made money in the coke business and whose domineering silences had oppressed the dining table; and there had been a mother who had been always playing the piano, and singing, with inexhaustible vivacity, the scores of old musical comedies—from The Sultan of Sulu to Forty-five Minutes from Broadway—which she had heard on visits to New York. I had, at the time I came to live in the Village, developed something of that inverted snobbishness which, in Hugo’s case, had impelled him to go to all the garment-workers’ balls at the same time that he would grimly decline a dinner where he knew he would be expected to dress; and I had at that moment the kind of emotions which I thought Hugo would probably have in connection with a large heavy house inhabited by a Pittsburgh capitalist. Thank heaven! I said to myself, spurred no doubt by Hugo’s rebuke, if I ever go to Pittsburgh again, I shan’t have to be visiting there! Here, in Daisy, is the real vital Pittsburgh: frank, humorous, vulgar, human!
“She married some fellow from Pittsburgh, I think, before she married Ray Coleman,” added Hugo, after a moment during which he had gulped his drink, self-consciously and hurriedly—he was excessively sensitive and so haunted by the fear of hurting people’s feelings that his sharpness was invariably followed by a spasm of special affability. “They made a honeymoon trip on a motorcycle from Pittsburgh to Atlantic City. They had all kinds of fantastic accidents. She told me about it once. It must have been awfully fine!” I, too, thought that it must have been fine. That was the real, the live America—where our bravery and freedom lay! I drank my highball up. I saw them, skidding breathtakingly in the ditches—skinned, bruised and mud-beplastered! Dodging motors and trucks, shaking off towns and cities, like twigs that had been caught in their wheels and had scraped the mud-guard a little, and had then been whipped away!—masters of that new and American and almost superhuman sense—the sense of motor traffic! Till, at last, after boiling hot baths, they had lain clean in Atlantic City, in their clean-sheeted hotel bed, with the ice water in the pitcher and the room as warm as a hothouse. In the morning, they would have breakfast in bed!
Hugo had turned away to bubble, giggle and gasp to a radical journalist with a harsh western accent and extraordinary personal charm. I rose to talk to the theatrical designer, who, with deep-lodged slit-eyed self-satisfaction, stood near me, his arms folded, unmoved by what went on about him. “Are you doing any shows,” I asked, “this spring?” “Just the ballet in the Merry-Go-Round,” he answered. “Next year,” he went on to explain, “I want to stage the Iliad and the Odyssey.” “The Iliad and the Odyssey?” I repeated a little blankly. “I want to do them in a cycle,” he said—“something like Wagner’s Ring.” “How long would it take?” I inquired. “Not more than a week,” he replied. “I shan’t try to have everything, of course. I’ll have to leave out a good many incidents—though I believe that, when the public have been interested, I’ll be able to put it on in an outdoor stadium and do it on a bigger scale—there would be a week for each. My production next fall would be an experiment with that in view.” “That would be awfully interesting,” I said: the air then, especially in the theater, was so full of high novelty and striving that no project seemed impossible. “What sort of text are you going to use?” “Fritz Fishbein is making an adaptation of Butcher and Lang—it’s in a sort of free verse that will be chanted to music. Boulomé is working out the old Greek modes, so that we’ll have music that will be really Greek.” “That sounds extremely interesting,” I repeated.—“Come in here,” he said, “and I’ll show you the drawings.”
He led me into a little study with a desk, a window-seat and some bookcases, and opened on the desk a large portfolio—I don’t know how he happened to have it there. “How,” I asked, “are you going to do the clangor of Apollo’s silver bow?” “I’m not going to do it,” he said, “that is, I’m not going to make the attempt to reproduce the sound. I’m not going to do anything realistically. There’ll be no sound at all. You’ll just see Apollo off on a hill—just a little silhouette, perfectly black but awful, you know—with a bow in his hands. And then everyone will cover their ears and sink down to the ground, and the stage will turn green-black, and then everything will be black.” I turned over the water-color drawings, so beautifully and lovingly covered with large clinging sheets of tissue paper. “What’s this one?” I asked. “That’s the slaying of the suitors in the Odyssey.” “They look a little like white rats,” I commented. “Yes; I meant to give that suggestion—those are masks that they’re to wear throughout the play.” I had never heard before of using masks.
Rita Cavanagh had come up behind us, and I made room for her to look at the drawings. I had been aware of her voice in the next room saying: “Oh, Bobby McIlvaine’s showing his Homer designs!—I want to see them!”
“Oh, what a beautiful Pallas Athena!” she cried, as she stood over the portfolio beside me. I noticed again how shabby her black dress was: she must be very poor, I thought. “Almost like a man!” she continued. It was a figure all in silver-gray, spare, upstanding and clean, like some male heroic woman of the Village—with a helmet that shaded its eyes and with an owl perched on its shoulder—rather an odd-looking owl, I thought: thin and long, like Athena herself, but like her, austere and impressive. And I found myself delighted—especially now that Rita Cavanagh was admiring them—with McIlvaine’s designs for Homer. I seemed to see that, for all their eccentricity, they were closer to the spirit of the poems than the sobriety and smoothness of conventional representations: they had something of the unclassical stiffness of archaic Greek sculpture. Rita Cavanagh smiled, and I smiled, at Venus caught in the net with Mars, her little rose-dotted breasts a charming pink behind gold meshes.
Hugo suddenly blundered into the room in his purblind big-booted way and took down his old felt hat from the bookcase—where he had carefully put it, I realized, in order to get at it quickly and without searching among the other hats. I wondered how he could bring himself to leave so enchanting a party so soon. He signaled to me a friendly, but detached and remote, farewell—stooping, stuttered and bubbled good nights over Rita and Bobby McIlvaine—and abruptly was gone. I heard him ask in the next room: “Where’s Daisy?” and the host reply, as if with humorous frankness: “I don’t know where she is!”
“Oh, what lovely browns and grays!” breathed Rita, before the autumnal smock of Eumæus. “I never saw such lovely browns!” Her italicized “lovely” was not gushing, but had a sort of disinterested and passionate conviction. That was the sort of thing that impressed me about her. She seemed to feast upon the color, eating it with her eyes. I should myself have stopped at something brighter, and I felt guiltily that I should have been wrong. But she lingered over Eumæus: “Like the leaves in October!” she went on. “Like the leaves in the autumn mud! Such delicacy and such color standing out against something neutral—and common!”
The baseball player, or whatever he was, whom I had noticed on the divan, was now standing in the doorway, with his hat in his hand. “I’m going along, Rita,” he said. “Take you over if you’re ready to go!” I saw that he was unsure and self-conscious. “I’m not going for a long time yet,” she answered—her voice had the tautness, the distinctness and the metallic quality of wire—though of a wire that twanged with the vibrations of some strong and superior temper; yet she tried at the same time to smile at him with a definite effect of good-will, at once elfin and sharply registered, as she added for his consolation: “I don’t want to be taken home to-night, anyway. I came alone, and I want to go home alone! I’m an independent woman, I am!” “Well, go ahead and have your old single standard!” he met her, putting humorously his best face on it, and disappeared from the doorway.
She turned over to a group of nymphs, the wild girls of some northern loch. “Some people think they’re not graceful enough for nymphs,” said McIlvaine, without expression. “People who say they’re not graceful,” said Rita, “don’t know anything about grace!” She spoke with a heated vehemence which seemed to me rather excessive—yet I felt something of the awe of the infidel who overhears the prayer of the believer. “They think that grace has something to do with round bodies and Greek dancing! These nymphs of yours are beautiful—they have the natural beauty of country girls—they’re graceful even when they’re gawky and awkward!”
The pretty boy—the one who had asserted that Rita’s poem had “done something” to him—glided behind her in a sinuous newtish way and slid one arm about her waist. His hair was glossy and parted in the middle, and he was scarcely taller than she: his tapering and shapely hand, which I saw—and saw with distaste—lying against her black dress, would have seemed too small for a man’s if her own hands had not been so tiny—not with the American thinness of Daisy’s, but with a miniature complete beauty, at once childlike and mature, as of some muse or magic being. He did not speak at once, but looked with her. The next picture presented Penelope, who had an unexpected proud angularity.
“Won’t Ulysses get hell,” said the boy, “when he comes back home from his trip!” “No,” said Rita, “she’s noble!” “Yes,” the boy acquiesced at once, “she’s beautifully done! Great austerity! Great restraint!”
She had come to the blank cover at the back and slowly turned it over, almost as if with reverence. “I think they’re beautiful!” she said, “beautiful!” I had heard people say that the flowers were beautiful, or that the front room was beautiful, or even that the view of the Hudson or the painting of Renoir was beautiful—but I had never before heard it said with such authority and such simple intensity. Though still shy of her unconvincing accent and suspicious of a pose, I was, in regions just beneath the surface, excited by this authority and intensity—I found myself heated, too, by the fire which the drawings had seemed to kindle in her. Bobby McIlvaine accepted her tribute in silence distended by pride and tied up the strings of the portfolio. I said: “I must go to see your ballet!” “It’s not really much,” he replied, “but the white is something to see.”
“Well, Princess,” said Rita’s friend, the boy with the insinuating hands, “are you ready to sail away?” I realized that her role of princess was a part of some romance which they had spun together, and I divined, in another moment, that it was a romance of which she was tired. “No,” she said, “I want to stay a little longer,” and added, with her elfin smile: “Send the boatman back at twelve!”—He swept low an invisible plumed hat.—“Leave the outside bolts open: I can push the door myself!”—He bowed again and backed away, and, as he retreated, she became more amusing, entering more willingly into the spirit of the legend which they had evidently elaborated, which they had perhaps lived, together.—“But shut the watchdogs in their kennels, so that they won’t bay at me when I come. Tell the old woman who makes the fires that she shall have her snuff on Thursdays, and that I shan’t wake her from sleep tonight, when she’s dreaming of the little stony river of her girlhood in the North.—Tell her to mind the fire, though,” she added, giving good measure to her friend, who now impressed me rather disconcertingly as perhaps not a boy at all, but a man of mature years whose coquetry was wearing stale.—“Though sleep is sweet, the sparks are always flying, even after the faggot is dead!”
I felt that an original imagination had led her to create this old woman, who seemed to have nothing to do with the plumed hat which her partner was pretending to doff, and this interested me and made me like her, just when I was beginning to be rather sickened by this business about the princess and the boatman.
I could hear the voice of her admirer, as he left, just outside the study door, saying good night to Ray Coleman and asking him where Daisy was, and Coleman’s voice replying, as if in frank humorous confession, disclaiming all responsibility: “I don’t know! I haven’t the slightest idea!”—Bobby McIlvaine, who had put away his drawings, and, having finished his own performance, was not disposed to attend to the comedy which Rita and her friend were enacting, had also gone out of the room.
“That river your old woman dreams about,” I began, hoping to keep Rita there, “sounds like something in upstate New York.” She looked up at me in her unaccountable, quick, nervous, searching way: “Do you come from there?” she asked. “No,” I said, “but I’ve been there a good deal.” She had a way of scrupulously following, of checking up with a special exactitude which suggested anxious conscious effort, all the moves of social intercourse, at the same time that she seemed always preoccupied with something different and more absorbing; she now nodded and lifted a moment a brief interested stare.
“Let’s sit down here, shall we?” she proposed, moving toward the window-seat. She curled up in one of the corners. “Do turn away that light—it’s so bright!” I turned aside the adjustable desk light which was the only illumination in the room so that it lit only the farther wall; then I sat down on the window-seat, leaning up against the opposite corner.
Below the window lay Washington Square: it was still smooth and gleaming with wet. When I had come home before dinner to dress, idle, happy and vaguely expectant, breathing in the rainy sidewalks of the last day of May, I had seen the sky, above the bulk of office buildings, high-piled with white banks of solid light, and in the Square, had found the pavements swimming with milky pallors and lightened by tenderest green. When I had gone to the Brevoort to meet Hugo, I had seen a pale peach-silver sun dissolving the light tree-fringes at the corner of the Avenue. Now new wonders were springing out of that delight—so long and so varied the days were! It was dark—there were the lamps and the taxis with their impudent brisk honking—spinning away through rainy May in the wet relieved freshened freedom.
Rita was looking out the window with her same strange tranced seriousness. I asked: “Don’t you like the city just after it’s been raining? Hear how happy the taxis sound!” She smiled and said simply, “Yes.” I wondered whether she were still thinking of the drawings of which I was almost becoming jealous. “Don’t you feel a little, though,” I ventured, “that it robs Homer of his own kind of subtlety to deliberately make him exotic by translating him into terms of the Russian ballet?” “Why—I hadn’t thought of that,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of the Russian ballet. I thought those drawings were beautiful in themselves—quite apart from Homer perhaps.” Then she added, after a pause: “That figure of Pallas Athena—so slender—so strong—so grave—so lightly built—as strong and yet as light as her spear! No man could ever combine that power and that lightness!” “Yes,” I said, “that’s true, isn’t it?” “And then they talk,” she went on, “about women never having done anything really important! When the Greeks made the goddess of wisdom a woman! And just as important a woman goddess as the goddess of love!” I tried to assure her that I understood: “Yes, I know,” I replied. “Men are always expecting the wrong things of women, aren’t they?”—while before my mind there aligned themselves, in the guise of long slender javelins, the long slender sentences of John Stuart Mill on the Subjection of Women. “It’s so false of them,” she went on. “You know, some people who pretend to admire independence in women really want to prevent them from doing things! They think that a woman’s work is something she can put aside, as if she were laying down her knitting—or her embroidery! Whatever they may say, they can’t really believe in their hearts that her work is the thing she lives for, that she puts above everything and everybody!”
I assented briefly, but with earnest emphasis: the generous flow of my feeling had been perhaps a moment impeded by the “above everything and everybody”; my mounting moral exaltation lapsed for a space into a brooding happiness which hovered outside the window over the rain-refreshed Square—those romantic lamps that burned all night, while all night the speeding taxis, plying in happy privacy to a thousand dark addresses, took people, took lovers, home. To that part of my mind, however—the part that had been talking to Rita—from which my attention had been withdrawn, there presented itself a stupid remark: “I have read John Stuart Mill on the Subjection of Women!”
But it was Rita who, after a silence, went on with the conversation: “I’m so tired of people”—she spoke with violence—“who pretend to understand what women feel about things!—and then behave like any stupid stockbroker, who keeps a wife just as he keeps a car!—The stockbroker would really be more sensible, because he’d expect to give his wife certain things in return for what she gave him—she’d at least be paid in comfort and money for what she lost in independence!” The figure of the baseball player rose in my imagination: a good fellow, no doubt, but dull and boorish, with no subtlety and no high honor, no doubt, in his relations with women—quite unworthy of Rita! I was all on Rita’s side now. How I could share her fierceness against fools!—“I don’t believe any man can understand!” But this seemed to shut me out again, and again I gazed out into the Square.
I was, however, after a moment, on the point of attempting to convince her that she might find that I understood, when of a sudden, so peremptory and clear that we looked at each other startled, we heard from the next room, which we now became aware had been silent, the voice of Ray Coleman demanding: “Well, what have you got to say?”—and then Daisy Coleman, replying in a voice which sounded constrained, “Where’s all the party gone to?” “You can see for yourself they’ve all gone home: I suppose they saw that the hostess had left and decided that they didn’t want to stay!” “We weren’t gone so long, were we?” said Daisy. “I just went around the corner with Pete to get a glass of beer.” “You’ve been gone for an hour and a half!—And you!” he went on vehemently, evidently addressing Daisy’s late companion—the little man with the large eyes, I imagined. “You weren’t invited here tonight and you can leave right away!” “I invited him,” said Daisy. “Well, I asked you not to invite him!—Now, get out of here right away! No: your things are not in there!—There’s your coat in the fireplace!—and there’s your stick in pieces over there!—and I threw your hat out the window! Maybe you can find it in the street!—Now, don’t stand there staring at me like that, but get out!” We heard him slam the door.
Rita and I got up quickly from the window seat, but the tirade which followed checked us. “You humiliate me in my house!”—now that Ray Coleman had Daisy alone, he opened upon her his fiercest fire. “You drive my friends away! You send C.O.D. packages home!” “I had to have some stockings for tonight!” “Well, why didn’t you ask me for them? I won’t have you running up bills!” “Well, I can’t see what’s the idea of this big third act!” “I told you not to bring that little rat here!” “Well, you have all your friends—I don’t see why I shouldn’t have mine!” “You sat in there on the window seat and let him see your legs!” “We were just telling jokes in there—Gus Dunbar was in there, too.” “I don’t mind having Gus see your legs—he’s a friend of the family, but—” “Well, will you just let me have a list of all the family friends that you’re willing to have see my legs?” “Don’t be vulgar!” he replied.
Rita determinedly and swiftly broke into the lighted room, and I followed her. “I must really go,” she said. “It’s been such a marvelous party! I’ve been having such a marvelous time that I’ve stayed much too late!” I made my apologies, too, and got Rita’s coat out of the bedroom. “Why, it’s not late at all,” said Ray Coleman. “I’m afraid it’s we who haven’t been very entertaining!” When we said good-bye to Daisy, she merely met us with a pale drunken gaze, and remarked: “Well, I opened cold!”
Outside, I caught a taxi and asked Rita where she lived. “Oh, dear,” she demurred, “I don’t think I want to go home. I think I’ll go to somebody’s house—let’s see, whose house shall I go to!” I asked her if she wouldn’t come to my house. “But you want to go to bed, don’t you?” I assured her that I didn’t, for hours.
“Pretty painful scene that was!” I remarked when we had started in the taxi. “I shouldn’t think she’d stay with him.” “No,” said Rita, but assenting, it struck me, from some different point of view than mine. “She’s such a dear, isn’t she?” I added. “Yes,” she said. “She’s so beautifully made, isn’t she?—her ankles and wrists.” I thought of Daisy under the guise of Bobby McIlvaine’s little blond Venus caught in the net with Mars. “What do you make of him?” I asked. “He’s pretty poisonous, isn’t he?” She looked up at me with a little appreciative smile, as if my saying that Coleman was poisonous had been an original deliberate joke instead of a familiar cliché. Then, “He’s very jealous of her,” she said; and then: “Yes, he is poisonous!” Her way of agreeing that he was poisonous made it neither a cliché nor a joke, but something convinced and bitter. “All jealousy is poisonous: it poisons the woman as well as the man—it makes both of them suspicious of all that has ever been between them—and even when they want to be nice, they sound hateful to one another!” I remembered some novel of Wells in which the hero had overcome jealousy along with a number of other ignoble and anti-social emotions; I reflected that it was very foolish and very base to be jealous. However: “I suppose,” I said, “that working for the Telegram-Dispatch makes him hate himself, and so makes him awfully irritable. How can people who are really sensitive and intelligent—as I have no doubt he is—but who are obliged to spend all their working hours feeding the public libels and lies—how can they possibly be amiable at home?” “Yes,” she said, “such lies they print!—such cowardly lies! And even if the facts are true, they cheapen the emotions behind them—and to cheapen human passion, human suffering, is to lie! Like poor Lina Lemberg’s letters.” (Lina Lemberg was a young Polish girl, who had recently murdered her husband, and been much on the front page.) “They may have been illiterate and clumsy, but they meant something real. To tear people’s hearts to pieces for all the grinning crowd to see—and pick up a bit of it and finger it, and perhaps wish they had one, too, and hate the people who have—and then throw it back in the gutter again!” Her passion had not ceased to surprise me. She still seemed a little theatrical, but I had never heard a woman speak so eloquently. “Yes: that’s just what happens,” I said—it was all that I could say: I felt that I could never express myself so well nor feel what I said so intensely.
I lived in Bank Street then, and the taxi had stopped at my door. Rita waited on the sidewalk while I paid the driver: her little face seemed thin and narrow—almost nunlike.
When we had climbed to my apartment and I had turned on the light, I was ashamed of the prospect disclosed. There were a large and comfortable couch, sets of books in glass-doored bookcases, Whistler’s Battersea Bridge and a drawing by Leonardo, which I had brought up with me from college, a small mahogany desk, a green carpet and a French clock. Besides, the maid had been there that morning and everything was swept and neat. I was afraid that Rita would see at once—if she had not already guessed—that I was not really one of them, that I had never paid their price. The luxurious couch seemed vulgar; the sets in the bookcases pedantic; the pictures unbearably banal; and the little mahogany desk appropriate kindling wood for the social revolution. I attempted to call attention to the only feature of the place which might be considered Bohemian and raffish: “That’s not the right time,” I pointed out. “That clock hasn’t gone for years!”
“Oh, isn’t this nice!” she exclaimed, looking searchingly and quickly about her. There was an alcove off the sitting-room which I used as a study, and she stood looking into it, as if entranced. “Do you work in there?” she exclaimed. “What a wonderful place to work!” She came back and sat down on the couch: “Oh, it’s so nice here!—so nice!” She smiled in an ecstatic childlike way.
I felt at any rate that she meant it, and that I possessed an unexpected advantage. None the less, I was a little diffident about offering her some peach brandy, as I had seen her drinking whisky straight at the Coleman’s party. I brought out both liqueur and Scotch, and deprecatingly remarked that I didn’t suppose she’d care for the former. “I’d love some!” she said.—“What a lovely label! It looks like lace, doesn’t it?—like lace made out of wire!”
“You know,” she went on, “I have no place of my own to work in now—and I miss it so! I’m living with my mother and sister, and the apartment is so small! I have to write with the sewing machine going in the next room,” “Oh, what a pity!” I said, “I should think it would drive you crazy. I know how nervous it makes you to have something going on to a different kind of rhythm from the one you’re writing to!” “Do you write?” she asked. “I try to write poetry—but I’m not any good.” “I’d like to hear your poems,” she said, looking up with an intent gaze which seemed to pierce the politeness of her remark. “No,” I replied. “After hearing yours tonight, I wouldn’t have the nerve to show you mine. I don’t suppose you’d recite again the ones that you recited at the party.” “I’m so glad that you like them,” she said, again with that incongruous intensity which gave sincerity and significance to even her formulas of courtesy. “I just wrote them, and I like them myself,” she smiled with her funny grin, which left her as serious and as strangely pressing as before. She sat back against the couch, dropped her cigarette to her lap and recited the poems again—more beautifully, it seemed to me, than the first time: her voice, in the silent room, sounded lonely, and I was stirred and awed to be alone with this living voice of poetry.
All to me was a marvel then—her old dress, her mother’s sewing machine, her formidable dignity, her wide gamine’s grin and her feverish preoccupation with some unexplained disturbing reality which I was coming more and more to feel underlay everything she did. It was, I came to see, the same thing—a kind of moral agony, unremitting and exalted—which made it possible for her, in her poetry, to deal with commonplace ideas—as she worked often with the tritest figures, the old debased currency of verse, which poets had then begun to pride themselves on ceasing to try to pass—making them carry whatever passion and whatever strangeness she chose.
Her cheeks were fiery now—all her face was suffused with fierce pink, and I saw that there was red in her hair. I saw now for the first time that she was beautiful. Her brow was very high and wide, and the resonant voice with which she recited—so different from her quick dry speech, a mere pizzicato of those strings—seemed the full-toned and proper music of what I saw also now for the first time was a long and lovely throat of a solidity and complexity of symmetry, like some harmoniously swollen musical instrument, almost incongruous with her tiny body—and through which now the lonely beach, beyond the meager moment of fire, and the futile devotion of the mother to the blemished and dim-witted child, sounded the chords of some mode of feeling more profound than our human sadness, some ground-tone where human emotion becomes merely the process of life, of life in its labor through the universe. I knew, what I had never really felt in my intercourse with friends who had written, that literature could be reality—as natural as conversation, yet as deep as life itself.
In another poem, which I had never seen, and which she had also recently written, she had some image of a swift upcountry river lacerated by rapids, where a smooth and lovely flock of stones forever tumbled and crashed into splinters the black-silver mirror of its deeps, dismissing it, fiercer at first, then thin, querulous and shredded, divided in the threads of feebler streams that drip at last over slimy mossy banks among the last orange drops of the jewel-weed, and lose themselves in the fields. I have turned it all into ordinary literature, over-animating the water, describing the jewel-weed too exactly (it is I who supply the drops: she had only named the flowers). I have used too many adjectives; she had only the barest verbs and nouns, but she woke through them the resonant ache of the throaty sound of the river, so noble in its dwindled fall. And I, knowing enough of literature to enjoy the consummate art, but not yet enough of life to assent with my heart to the terror, the terror mastered by the mind, and clutched and wrenched into beauty, which I could only half divine, but which troubled me and made me solemn, could only tell her how wonderful I thought it, as if it had been merely a dress she had been wearing or a garden she had grown. And I sounded even sillier and lamer when I added: “I’ve seen those upstate rivers: I know exactly what you mean!” “Yes, I knew you did,” she replied, “when you said that something I said this evening sounded like a New York State river. I come from up there, you know, and I’ve been getting homesick lately. That was why I was talking about rivers—and why I wrote that poem.”
I was silent, and she looked beyond the lamp, through the little dark study, to where the moon seemed imbedded in the pane like a flaw of pearl in dark blue glass. “How lovely the moon is!” she exclaimed in her nervous alert way. I looked out and answered: “Yes: it looks like a bubble in the glass.” She noted the accuracy of this, checking it up: “Yes, it does exactly!”—so emphatically that I felt pleased at having said something clever. We stared at the moon without speaking—I thinking, a little dazedly, of the perfect felicity of the moment, full of brightness and freedom and peace—of the beauty of stony rivers, of the pearly moon in the pane, of intoxicating coldness and poetry—of stones, of lovely globes of a lunar fluidity of yolks, lodged unbroken below the translucence of a limpid vitreous stream.
Then I recalled my wandering senses and suggested another drink. “Oh, if I have another drink, I’ll be drunk!” she said, screwing herself down in her corner and with a sudden rictus of her grin which transmogrified her grossly in a strange tense glee.
But I could talk to her only of poetry—of those terrific images of the commonplace by which the greatest poets can move us and which her own poems had brought to my mind—the Roman street corners of Catullus, the prison window of Verlaine, the race for the green flag at Verona which Dante remembers in Hell. She had read very widely for a woman, and she talked about the poets as only a master can talk of the masters of his craft and with the fierceness with which only a woman, when woman’s narrow concentration has been displaced from its ordinary objects, can concern itself with art—isolating in familiar poems phrases I had never thought of: some armor-joint of a preposition which rang with a solid sound or some unobtrusive adjective which troubled the whole line.
It was cold: she put on her cloak and I wrapped her legs in a blanket—but still we talked, and drank the peach brandy sip by sip. At last, as I was gazing toward the window, I became aware of an indigo deepness which deeply delighted me, like some full triumphant staining of emotion and thought. It was the blue of dawning June, through which presently, as brooding I watched it, green and red began darkly to appear. The blue brightened and now was translucent, now limpid, now dissolved. And, still talking of poetry, still quoting, still eager and glowing with the images of that life of literature which rejects or suppresses nothing that goes to make our common life, but where all is passionate, noble and rich, I saw, as it were with incredulity, that the brightening green and red were the rain-revived trees and brick walls of my own backyards in Bank Street. Now even the poor soiled yellows of the downtown tenement houses, the leaves of the flaccid ailanthus swaying their fingery clusters in the stir of morning air, through that first distinct light of day were seen washed with libations of light—till it seemed to me that I had waked—or rather that, without sleeping, I had passed—to the happier, more living hues of a different world. And I knew, and knew with amazement, that we had talked the night through, and only sunk deeper in spring.
“Good gracious! it’s morning!” she cried. “Oh, no: it’s not so late,” I assured her. “The nights are getting shorter.” She laughed and put out a cigarette. “I must go home!’ she said, springing up.
We found a taxi in Greenwich Avenue. She gave the directions to the driver in her precise and compelling fashion. I invited her, in the taxi, to come with me to see McIlvaine’s ballet. “I’d love to!” she replied. We made an engagement for Tuesday (it was Sunday morning). Then, with hesitation, I explained that I was never at home in the daytime, and that if she needed a place to work, I should be glad to have her use my apartment. She demurred, but I thought not unpersuadably.
I left her at an incredible address beyond the Ninth Avenue Elevated—on Twelfth Street, almost at the docks—one of two or three red-brick houses among warehouses and sordid saloons. We parted, she quite tired and pale, but with a queer tense final vibration even as I left her in the doorway, just before, quickly closing the door, she seemed to disappear in a flash.
It was day. I walked home through a little open square—Abingdon Square, I saw with surprise: I had never heard of it before, though it lay almost around the corner from where I lived. I gazed vaguely at a statue of a man in a little triangular park and wondered who it was—some legislator or some patriot, perhaps—some patriot in the old style, like Garibaldi in Washington Square—some great man I had never heard of in that region I had never discovered. Farther on, I became aware of a kind of monumental stone pergola—it seemed to me then to be in marble—which I didn’t understand and which in my weariness, my happy weariness, I made no effort to. Some downtown equivalent of Grant’s Tomb—but who was buried in it? It was almost like a temple. I was still moving in that strange daytime world into which, by staying up all night, I seemed to have been translated. Now the Village was at last revealed to me; it had that day come alive about me, and I felt myself part of its life. I, like them, had turned my back on all that world of mediocre aims and prosaic compromises; and at that price—what brave spirit would not pay it?—I had been set free to follow poetry!
In Bank Street, as I passed a presser’s shop, it occurred to me that it would be, after all, a difficulty about the story which I had had the idea of writing when I had heard about Ray Coleman’s thief, that the presser’s boy would probably have got away as soon as the wife opened the door.
When I climbed to my rooms again, they seemed no longer, through the drowsy eyes of day, my own familiar husk. There was the couch upon which she had sat—there was the ash-tray full of ashes—there were the glasses from which we had drunk. I poured out the last sweet dregs of peach brandy.
It was Sunday—I did not have to work. I dumped the Sunday paper on the couch. I pulled down the shades in my bedroom—the sun made them glow dull orange. I pulled out the Divine Comedy and read the lines about the green flag at Verona—and the scene with Beatrice that began, “Dante, perchè Virgilio se ne vada—grieve not, thou needst must grieve for another wound!”—but, having hardly paid attention to the words, I pushed the book away on a table and turned over on the pillow on my cheek. Something or other I had come for, I had found.
It was characteristic of Hugo Bamman—whom I had early known at prep school (though we had afterwards gone to different colleges), and whose point of view, up to the night I met Rita, had, as I say, so much influenced my own—that, at the height of a convivial evening, he should take an abrupt and determined departure. Even at parties in Greenwich Village, with which he was in principle more nearly sympathetic than with parties anywhere else, he would carefully isolate his hat or hang it up in some specially conspicuous place. He was never sure, even in the Village, when he might not feel that it was urgently needed, as had been the case on that evening, after his argument with Ray Coleman. And when he once had his hat in his hands, it was impossible to make him stay. It was at the same time as if he had become suddenly frightened, and as if he were under some obligation of reporting for duty elsewhere.
And it was true that he did become frightened, and that he was, in a certain sense, at the orders of a higher obligation. Hugo’s father had been a well-to-do lawyer of a Philadelphia Quaker family; his mother, a Bostonian. The elder Bamman, after serving with distinction through three administrations at Washington as Solicitor General, had been dislodged by the advent of the Democrats; and had thereupon retired from public life and occupied himself with writing books. He knew Shakespeare and Milton by heart and was given to quoting them in conversation, and he already had a reputation for unconventional political views; but nobody had been quite prepared for the opinions which he now made public. His first book, which was called Representative Government, and the Way and the Light, began with an extremely realistic, and even cynical, discussion of American public life and ended, with quotations from Isaiah, on an unexpected note of religious clairvoyance.
It was said sometimes that Mr. Bamman had been embittered by his enforced retirement; sometimes, that he was insane. It was not that he had prophesied good of the Democrats: on the contrary, he had predicted the worst; but he had also discredited the Republicans. He had asserted that, between the two parties, there was not a pin to choose—that both were lost in corruption and error; and, what was worse, that one could hope for nothing better from the society which accepted their leadership and from the religion which allowed them to survive. The book excited a certain amount of interest, was made the subject of editorials; then was completely forgotten by everybody. If I had not happened to know Hugo, I should never have looked it up and read it. Thereafter—his wife having died and his sons gone away to school—Mr. Bamman left Washington altogether and secluded himself on a lonely island in an Adirondack lake, where he lived on fish and game, cooked all his own meals and struck off another book even more realistically pungent and even more apocalyptic than the first. He had vowed to stay the winter out in his cabin, but in February he caught a bad cold which developed into pneumonia, and, despite his protests, he had to be removed to a town where he could have medical attention. His sons were telegraphed at their school; and Hugo, blinking at his sudden release from the agonizing life of prep school, where the boys made fun of his ebullient stuttering, his inability to pronounce r, his stiff intractable black hair, and his clothes, which were bought for him by an aunt and which always looked too young for him, lifted his goggles from the frozen ground and gazed about him with singular relief at the ice ponds and white houses of the north; read nervously half a chapter of Meredith; and, at last, heard his father, dying, mingle texts from Isaiah and Ezekiel with anxious queries about the pump at his camp, which he seemed to be afraid was irremediably frozen, and with the names of his sisters and his wife.
Hugo Bamman, after his father’s death, had spent his vacations with the aunt in Philadelphia who had selected his neckties and suits, and he had rebelled against her so violently that he soon found himself under suspicion of having inherited his father’s “queerness.” But the more the aunt, who was an admirable person and felt her responsibility acutely, tried to inculcate sound principles in Hugo, the more resentfully did he shy away from them. Save for an occasional peevish outbreak, however, he remained generally docile; and his own docility increased his resentment. While he was still at school and college, his heresies were mostly confined to matters of literature and of minor social convention. But during the third year of the War, though he was to graduate the following spring, he suddenly left college and enlisted in the American Ambulance. In spite of his Quaker tradition, he was at that time full of romantic enthusiasm for the cause of the Allies, and had composed, for the college magazine, an eloquent editorial which began with Joan of Arc and ended with Villiers de L’Isle-Adam. When America joined the Allies, he went over to an American medical unit. Hugo served throughout the War; but he came out with different emotions from those which had carried him in. He never told me much about his adventures, and never indeed, at this time, talked much about himself, so my account of his experience in the Army is mainly derived from the well-known novel which he afterwards wrote on the subject and which seemed such a striking contrast with the precious and exotic little poems, reminiscent of the eighteen-nineties, which he had published in the college magazine.
From Hugo’s novel, then, it would appear that through the first months of his ambulance-driving, he was still sustained by his romantic faith and preoccupied with proving to himself his own capacity for courage and endurance. He tells us of the hero of his novel that though most of the wounded men he had been carrying turned out to have died on the way, he had never felt so happy in his life as after successfully bringing his ambulance through the craters and geysers of a bombardment. At that time, after his first physical sinkings of nausea and fear, he had been able to line up corpses on the floor of the field hospital with less emotion than he had once arranged books on the shelves of his bookcases at college, and had incinerated amputated legs with less of real regret than he had once burnt discarded manuscripts.
But after America had entered the War, Hugo enlisted in the American Army and found himself posted, with the rank of sergeant, during the dull and disheartened winter of 1917, at an American base hospital in the Vosges, some distance behind the lines. One afternoon, he had gone for a walk in the hills and come out finally in the public square of a tiny mountain village. A circle of people were standing about the body of a wild sow which had been killed by a hunter and which, bristled like the piny ridges of her northern forests and with her jaws asnarl in death, lay flat, her belly ripped open and her little ones, brightly striped and in a day or two to have been farrowed, stretched out limp beside her on the ground, while the hunter bargained over the carcasses and the dogs sniffed at the blood. A deep tenderness and sadness overwhelmed him for the little wild pigs; and he looked on with horror at the nonchalance of the hunter; he began to rage within himself against the violators of life. Then he was chilled with self-contempt. He took refuge in a little café and fortified himself with brandy. Then he went back to the base hospital.
There was a major of the medical corps who kicked and cuffed his patients, and who was in the habit of amusing himself, on his evening rounds of the wards, by tearing the zinc-oxide bandages off the raw and running wounds of the gas cases. Hugo complained of this major to the commanding officer of the unit. He had always feared his superiors more than any amount of shell-fire.
Soon thereafter, returning in the morning, just before reveille, from the local château, where he often went to dinner and sometimes, by private understanding with the other sergeants and the guards, was able to spend the night, he was picked up, to his surprise, by the military police, put under arrest, court-martialed and convicted, and sent off under guard to a prison camp. As a sergeant he had been lax with his men; and, at the court-martial, he was accused of having abetted all their misdeeds. Of these misdeeds he had never even known, but when he tried to explain this to the court-martial, the effect was equally unhappy.
On his arrival in the prison camp, all his belongings, including private letters, his money and his watch, were taken from him. He saw the photograph of another man’s sweetheart torn up before his face. The first morning, when he was led out in lockstep with the other prisoners, the ranks fell into disorder, and the sergeants set upon the men and clubbed them with what were known as “dizzy-sticks” while the officers looked on. This was repeated every morning, and Hugo learned that the confusion in the ranks was brought about by the sergeants themselves: the sergeant at the head of the line would order the prisoners to hurry up while the sergeant at the end would order them to slow down. Hugo was struck in the mouth one day and two of his teeth knocked out (he had the scar across his lips all his life). After this ceremony, which the sergeants called “morning exercise,” the prisoners were drilled before machine-guns.
The food was scant bread and thin soup; and on the third day of Hugo’s imprisonment, two colored boys got into the kitchen and tried to steal something to eat. One of the boys was caught, blackjacked, beaten and dragged bleeding to solitary confinement. When he had sufficiently recovered, an attempt was made, by order of the officer in command, to induce him to reveal the name of his accomplice. The boy was chained for four hours to a wall, while the sergeants threatened and cursed him, beat him on the soles of his feet and singed off most of his hair. In the meantime, however, the accomplice had cut his own throat with a razor blade. Two days afterwards, a big Texan, who had tried to strike one of the guards when the latter had assailed him with a blackjack, was shot down, in the presence of the men, by the camp’s commanding officer. At the end of three weeks, however, Hugo was finally released through the intervention of his elder brother, who was a major in the adjutant general’s department and with whom Hugo had managed to communicate before he had left his unit.
The participation of Hugo in the War then came to an embittered end. It was no longer now the Germans who were the enemies of civilization, but the governing classes of the world that were frustrating human progress.
By the time that Hugo was discharged from the service, he had become a social revolutionist; and his reaction against the complacent and conventional, the capitalistic world from which he came, reached lengths that were in some ways grotesque. He hated this world because he feared it, and he feared it because he knew how much of it there was still left in himself. He was haunted by veritable hobgoblins which wore the aspect of doubles of himself. A visit to any of the members of his family was enough to throw him into a panic. He would afterwards describe it in terms which would almost have been excessive on the part of one resuscitated from drowning. “On a Sunday afternoon in Washington,” he would gasp, “you go out into the street—and you see all those little bwick houses—and the weather is suffocating—and you look at the people on the stweet and they don’t seem to be going anywhere—and you think that, if you stayed there long yourself, you’d probably get like that, too—and yet you haven’t got the mowal stwength to leave!” Or, “I was staying with a cousin of mine at Cambwidge—my cousin is being gwoomed for some big job at Harvard, and it weduced me to such a state of depwession! Did you ever know any of these young men who are being gwoomed for big jobs? Well, first their hair falls out—then they have to buy glasses—then they have to appear at certain times and places wearing a silk hat—then their teeth go and they get false teeth—false teeth are almost as important as a silk hat, and it isn’t everybody who can make his teeth drop out just by auto-suggestion—if they can do that, they’ve got the stuff! I’d said I was coming back to Cambwidge, one night after I’d gone in to have dinner in Boston, but I couldn’t face it! I couldn’t get a berth at the station, so I sat up all night in the day coach!” (This sort of thing was possible for Hugo, because he purposely never traveled with a suitcase, but only with an old musette bag, which he had brought back from France.) Yet I have heard him, when Boston was disparaged, unexpectedly come to its defense with eulogies of Thoreau and Garrison.
Whenever he introduced into his novels representatives of the “cultivated” class to which he himself belonged, he would never allow them to figure save in hideous caricature—the result of his having discerned, seized upon and isolated in them, those ignoble middle-class qualities which they shared with the families of the nouveaux riches manufacturers and railroad magnates whom they ridiculed. And, on these occasions of visiting his relatives, by the very force of his fixed intense belief in their incurable perversity and prejudice, he had a faculty for trapping them into absurdities which did not at all represent their real views. These Hugo would make careful note of, as he returned to New York on the train, leaving the cousins and uncles a little blank. His aunt in Philadelphia, for example, with whom Hugo had spent so much of his boyhood, had been, by reason of her Quaker tradition, strongly disposed to admire his war book, though she was offended by the bad language of the characters; it always appeared, however, when she attempted to talk to him about it, that, in deploring this particular feature, she was damning the whole book.
Hugo’s elder brother, especially, though, unlike the other members of the family, he did himself profess progressive views, affected Hugo in a fatal way. This elder brother had studied for the ministry, but had found himself unable to accept the doctrines of the Episcopal Church save in a highly rationalized form: as a consequence, he had gone in for sociology, and, after the War, had become a professor of sociology in a small New England college. When Hugo went to visit his brother, the latter would remonstrate with him severely and unremittingly. He would, for example, point out to Hugo the serious impropriety of the latter’s having published certain scurrilous verses in a radical magazine. He would argue along lines of social responsibility: the real purport of the objectionable metaphors would be understood by very few readers, whereas the rest would see only obscenity and unpatriotic sentiments; this would hurt Hugo’s reputation and weaken his influence as a publicist, etc., etc. Such discussions infuriated Hugo all the more because his brother always went on the assumption that he recognized the same evils with which Hugo was so passionately preoccupied and that he had it as much at heart to discover the proper way of remedying them: Hugo’s brother’s social ideas and Hugo’s, when stated by the former in a certain way, appeared to be indistinguishable. These visits were further embarrassed by the apprehensions of Hugo’s sister-in-law: she seemed always on edge for fear Hugo might advance, in the presence of the faculty wives, with whom she was closely allied, some indignant and shocking opinion.
Another bugaboo which lurked behind Hugo—another monster which he lived in terror of allowing to swallow him up—was the college dilettante—that is to say, the superior undergraduate who takes tea with the snobbish Latin professor, plays Debussy at the club after the girls from the house party have left, and goes about with a small group of friends who gossip over the politics of the dramatic club and giggle over the mustache of the brunette who waits on the counter at the pastry shop where they buy cinnamon buns. These friends, like Hugo himself, had been affected by their experience in the War; but, in their case, it had had usually left them, not rebellious but merely dispirited, writing fragmentary learned poetry, full of resignation and gall, in imitation of T. S. Eliot. They used to make fun of Hugo for the obstinate persistence with which—inordinately fastidious and shy—he had trained himself to speak in public (overcoming his tendency to stutter, though not his inability to pronounce r), and had even attained a certain reputation as an orator at strikers’ meetings and demonstrations for civil liberty. Hugo’s friends, as a rule, disparaged the admirable literary gifts—the logic, the solid imagination and the feeling for pungent language—which were disguised by the deliberate plainness and the colloquial carelessness of Hugo’s novels, pamphlets and appeals.
And Hugo would himself have been the last person to call any attention to his merits. Since the War, the discussion of literature had affected him like his memories of college, and the specter of the modern literary man, whom he had encountered at New York parties and in Paris cafés, came to accompany, and to merge with, the specter of the aesthetic undergraduate. Though in his youth he had been carried away by literary enthusiasms, he now habitually treated the great writers—including those whom he most admired, from Plato to James Joyce—in a manner almost flippantly cavalier. It was partly, I suppose, that Hugo had never forgotten young country boys from Arkansas and Georgia who could neither read nor write, bewilderedly drafted into the army and pitted against young Germans who had studied Goethe in the gymnasia—the accumulated masterpieces of literature having apparently not in any way affected the fates of either. But it was also that he continually tended, by some natural gravitation which enraged him, to find himself comfortably at home among the sallow-faced reviewers and the review-writing poets and novelists who relieved the mediocrity of their days by the gin drinking and ribaldry of their evenings. At these gatherings, they were able to convince themselves that they were not merely dreary hacks and bookworms, but men of taste and wit, citizens of the world; and it was partly this anti-academic pose which made Hugo—himself violently anti-academic—at first eager to attend their parties. But he soon divined the pit of ashes at the bottom of the bootleg gin, and shied off as he had done from his family and from the companions of his college days; and this kind of literary society was soon added to his index of phobias.
When Hugo put himself into a novel, it was always in caricature—as the little Johnny Boston-Beans of the comic papers of his youth, or as some incredibly fatuous and inept young college intellectual who died of tuberculosis or fell into a subway construction. I have seen him shudder at the sight of a handful of volumes of Max Beerbohm, whom he had himself enjoyed reading at college, which I was unpacking in a new apartment; and I have rarely heard him use bad language (though he admired it on the part of others) save when the name of Henry James was mentioned. This continual shying away made Hugo a little difficult, since he was constantly flaring up to object, not merely to what you had said, but to what he thought you were going to say. Thus, if you remarked to him of W. Z. Foster that Foster had the barren rigid strength of a piston in a steel mill, he would interrupt you with, “Well, I’d rather see an effective and hard-hitting machine like Foster than a jerry-built ornamental bank building in a phony classical style, like Harding!”—and so plunge into a spirited tirade against the industrial system, which you vainly tried to avert with explanations that you did not admire Harding, that you did admire Foster, etc. Or if you were going out to dinner with him and complained that the sentimental Yiddish soloist at Zincovitz’s restaurant was beginning to get on your nerves, he would be off with, “Well, I can’t stand those little tea-rooms where they have copies of Town and Country lying around!”—little tea-rooms of whose existence you had never even known.
He was rather afraid of women, and seemed never to fall in love. I suppose he regarded women as the most dangerous representatives of those forces of conservatism and inertia against which his whole life was a protest; but I am convinced that he cherished, in his heart, the most romantic expectations. I believe that he was always hoping for some straight, dark, spare realistic girl revolutionist, who would be to him a comrade and a partner; but that in fact, he was invariably alienated from the types of emancipated women whom he now encountered in the Village, by an unconfessed but ineradicable instinct which rejected them as not being ladies. He would, of course, shy away from this instinct and overwhelm them with politeness, with sympathy, with determined good-fellowship; but this effusion masked a retreat. I think he was affected, in this connection, by the same peculiar and incurable isolation which had made him seem to himself, during the War, almost indifferent to the sufferings of the soldiers till he found himself brimming with tears at the sight of a slaughtered sow. So he would flee from even parties in the Village, when any situation arose which seemed to suggest a love affair, and go home to write with passion, almost with amorous feeling, of some girl bandit who had been harshly sentenced and brutally denounced by a stupid judge—of whom he had read in his evening paper.
For Hugo was really on close terms with no one. As soon as he had sampled the conversation and caught the social flavor of a household or a group, he would simply go straight away and bottle a specimen for his books, in which he would assign it to its proper place in the economic structure. He distrusted his family and his early associates, because he believed that they had sold their souls to capitalist institutions; but though he chose to live exclusively with outlaws, in whom he was always discovering qualities heroic and picturesque to the point of allegory, he never managed really to be one of them and perhaps never trusted them, either. So tough remained the insulation between himself and the rest of humanity—the insulation of his Puritan temperament and his genteel American breeding, reinforced by his artist’s detachment and his special situation. Hugo once told me as if with pain of an illiterate Arkansas boy, lying wounded in a field hospital, who, thinking Hugo a superior person, had been unwilling to ask him to write a letter, and who had finally had to beg the favor of another wounded man nearly as helpless as himself.
So Hugo walked among us like a human penance for the shortcomings of a whole class and culture—of the society which, in America, had paralyzed in his friends and himself half the normal responses to life; which had sterilized its women with refinement; which had lived on industrial investments and washed its hands of the corruption of politics; which had outlawed its men of genius or intimidated them with taboos; which so strangely had driven his father to his Adirondack lake and, on the rare and brief occasions when he returned for a wedding or a funeral, had seemed to Hugo’s eyes to sadden him, as, to the latter’s heartiness and wit, the other members of the family had returned only so much that was energetically arid, so much that was self-confidently timid and so much that was cheerfully cold; and which had desolated Hugo’s own soul, when, through empty afternoons of boyhood, he had wondered why he seemed so impotent to break the spell of his tutoring in the morning, the nap of his aunt after lunch, the people for tea in the afternoon and his late luxurious reading in bed, to work on a paper, to ship on a whaler or to live on a ranch in the West; and which had finally inflicted on him the shame of that day when he had found the crippled Arkansan dictating his letter to his wife to a man half-flayed with mustard-gas—the shame of knowing that a fellow sufferer and one who had suffered more than he, had been afraid to ask him to render what was perhaps the only service for which his education had fitted him.
I have said, a whole class and culture; but Hugo had one other memory of his father, which was afterwards, he told me once, to take on for him a special significance. They had been lunching at the New York club of the university from which his father had graduated and to which Hugo was soon to go, and the elder Bamman had commented during lunch with humorous disapproval and imperturbable surprise on the inferior quality of the men whom he observed in the dining-room about him. On their way out, as Mr. Bamman was getting into his coat, he had been disconcertingly jostled by a young man in a blue suit and bone glasses, who was evidently in a great hurry, but who hurriedly apologized. Mr. Bamman was broad-shouldered and well set-up, and he still wore a fine Olympian beard and one of those flat-crowned derbies which were fashionable in the eighties (he continued to be something of a dandy even after he had become a recluse); but, at the moment of the impact, as Mr. Bamman looked dazedly around, Hugo had caught on his father’s face the shadow of feebleness and pain. And he had realized then for the first time that his father had no longer the prestige of an acknowledged leader of any community, nor even of a distinguished person: he was a figure of isolation, bewilderment and fatigue.
In the America where Hugo came to manhood, there was, in a sense, only a single class and a single culture; one found it behind every façade, one felt it through every uniform—and not merely among those members of society whom it had already become fashionable to ridicule: the small business man, the hired reformer, the windbag politician—but in the cramped mind of the clever lawyer, for whom intellectual dignity and freedom had been forbidden by the interests which he served; in the grandeur of the medical specialist’s waiting-room and the impoverishment of science which it masked; in the educated clergyman turned evangelist and vying with the mountebanks of Methodism; alike in the silk hat of the labor leader and the homely and hollow plain-spokenness of the self-made industrial boss; and even in the universities, with their presidents held in subjection by millionaire trustees, with their middle-class timidity about raising, in class or conversation, the real political, moral or aesthetic problems implied by the conditions of the time; even in the best of the theater, where incompetence and indifference almost invariably betrayed the beauty of the noblest text; even in literature, where an ignorant criticism was ready to declare every apprentice a master; in that whole machine of interrelated interests, which kept literature, theater, learning, church, medicine, politics and law, all fixed in their mediocre functions, all constrained by the fear of their neighbors, all intent on their bank accounts—all that appalling susceptibility to regimentation by “business” and that incapacity for discipline of self, all that voracity for physical comfort, all that pervading commonness of mind, which, even in those sections of society from which Hugo’s father had come and which had at least produced a few men like him, now debased their distinction to luxury and made cowards of their leaders. It was, perhaps, after all, hardly necessary to find special explanations for Hugo’s fear of committing himself, of giving hostages to any group—which moved beside him like Pascal’s abyss. It was, perhaps, after all, not unnatural that there should come a moment, in every company, when Hugo would want to snatch his hat, to say good-bye and get away.
WE WORKED IN SILENCE, dismantling the walls and packing Rita’s belongings.
Rita herself had left us: someone had knocked at the door, and she had gone into the front room. We had heard her receive a male caller and carry on a rapid decisive conversation. And she had now been away so long that, deprived of her peremptory commands and made uneasy by the presence of the visitor, we no longer spoke to one another. Duff Burdan, the young man whom at Ray Coleman’s I had taken for a baseball player but who had turned out to be a painter, was laboring over Rita’s suitcase, in the broken strap of which, with a great air of masculine effectiveness, he was gouging extra holes with a nail-file. The young Jew was taking down the pictures and wrapping them carefully in newspapers. We had only rarely seen him at Rita’s and had not expected to see him today. He was very quiet, polite and well-dressed, and we resented as complacency his modest amiability. But Duff Burdan and I were also resenting each other.
And in the stillness which had ensued on hammering down the last boards of a packing-case, I heard the moaning of boat whistles from the harbor, and my heart horribly sank. So we had used to hear them in summer—their sobbing, remote and melodious—in the late afternoon shadow; or at night, when the rumorous hum of summer came in through the open windows; their trombone and oboe notes. So one night she had imagined Stokowski conducting a symphony of river noises from the top of the Singer Building.
I stood up and tried not to hear them—tried to level on the objects about me a prosaic disenchanted gaze, as if by force of will I could insulate them and, impervious to the aromatic smell of perfume and cigarettes—the odor of Rita’s hair—so put myself out of reach of that current which had charged them with feeling and which still gave them the power to shock me. They were meager and battered it was true; the damaged electric heater; the day-bed, with the strip of batik above it; the sewing machine; the potted cactus; the water-color of an Indian corn dance, with its delicate red-and-black figures distinct against egg-shell white (it had been sent her, like the cactus, I never failed to remember, by an unforgotten admirer who had gone for his health to New Mexico and who was always on the point of coming back); the purple abstract painting of an eggplant taking shape amid a maelstrom of female membranes (which had been given her by another admirer about whom I had always wondered, but whose identity she had never revealed); the bookcase, with its rubbed and broken volumes, so fantastically miscellaneous, in which one could read, as in geological strata, the so various interests and tastes of the men whom Rita had known.
I looked away, and my eyes involuntarily sought the half-open door to the sitting-room. There I could see them standing at last by the door which led out to the staircase. Rita was half turned away, but I had a brief glimpse of the face of her companion: he was a thin, undistinguished and dingy-eyed young man, very commonly dressed. I saw him take some bills from Rita and put them away in his pocket.
When she came back, she gave a sharp look around. “Where’s my little Buddha?” she demanded. I told her I had packed it in the box. “Well, you just get it right out again! I didn’t want it packed! It will be smashed to bits!” I assured her I had packed it carefully. “No: it’ll be broken in that box, just as sure as sure! I think I’ll take it with me—I’ll carry it myself.”
“I’ll carry it over separately, when the other things go, if you want me to,” Duff Burdan volunteered. “Will you promise not to break it? No, I think I’d better take it myself.” “What do you think I am—a smasher of images?” She laughed on her precise little notes: “You promise not to let it get broken?—promise! If I come back and find that Buddha broken, I’ll never speak to you again! Oh, don’t pack that Indian corn dance with the other pictures!” she interrupted young Kaufmann. “I do want to take that with me! Can you get it in the suitcase, Duff—or couldn’t you strap it some way on the outside?”
Duff Burdan dealt with this problem. “Everything here is to go, is it?” he asked, looking around. “Yes, everything,” she replied. “Are you sure you’ll have room for it all?” “Sure: I’m throwing out a whole lot of my own junk.” “It’s so sweet of you to offer to keep it for me! Don’t let anybody borrow my books!” she admonished him, the moment after.
I looked at my watch and announced that it was time to get a taxi. Duff Burdan was storing her furniture, but I was to see her off.
Those stairs which I had climbed so many times to find, at the top, her little figure, intense and sharp even in the doorway and dark against the light of the door, so that it seemed sometimes like a knife on which I was running—those stairs where too often lately I had felt that, in answering the doorbell, she had been hoping for someone else. As I descended them this afternoon, it was not without relief at the thought that I should never have to climb them after today.
And was that he, that sloppily-dressed reporter, that fellow from some insurance office, to whom Rita had been giving money—was that the visitor she had been always expecting, whom she would rather have seen than myself? I was glad of a new reason for disgust, of a new pretext for hating those stairs—and yet that hatred, as I knew, was only fear, the fear of remembering how much I had loved them. And such bitterness was ignoble, I knew—for houses were things to put away, like worn-out clothes, with the phases of our life, with the emotions with which life was clothed. And was not emotion here worn out?—on my side as well as on Rita’s—had I not come myself to dislike the cold house, the sordid staircase, the saloon with its hanging blinds, the oppressive tunnel of the El, the bleak stony waste of the docks, where late one night I had walked so leadenly, not finding Rita at home? Had I not said to myself that afternoon, on my way to Rita’s house for the last time: “Well, thank God, I’ll never have to come back to this damned address again! I’ll be out of prison at last!”
And now I could see that the winter sun was bright on a colored cigarette poster, and that the schoolgirls returning from school were prettier than any schoolgirls had seemed to me for many months. I compared one of them with Rita, to the advantage of the schoolgirl—Rita had lately been looking rather badly. I should be free to love another girl now! I thought of Daisy, whom I had seen the night before and who had seemed to me unexpectedly desirable. If I could only keep up my spirit—if I could only play the game according to the sportsman’s code which Rita had been trying to teach me so gravely and so sweetly—if I could only, I told myself, do that, then in the long run, all might be right between us—because I had not nagged her or wearied her, because I had proved myself her peer, as prompt to offer all for love and as brave to bear its passing. If I could only remember that the days were not bricks to be laid row on row, to be built into a solid house, where one might dwell in safety and peace, but only food for the fires of the heart, the fires which keep the poet alive as the citizen never lives, but which burn all the roofs of security! Be glad, be proud, to end so well—before that music of the harbor—I could hear it now again, as I came back to Rita’s with the taxi—before that music had lost its beauty—for so one could hear it for ever!
When I returned to the apartment, I found that a new visitor had arrived to say good-bye to Rita. It was a young man from Columbus, Ohio, whom I remembered having met with her one evening when we had gone to the theater. He was one of those curious Westerners who dress like Westerners, but who speak like Philadelphians. The night Rita had recognized him at the theater, she had seemed disquietingly glad to see him, and my first instinct had been to identify him as the admirer in Santa Fe who had sent her the corn dance and the cactus, and of whose arrival I had lived in dread. When he had turned out not to be this person, I had been exceedingly relieved, and as Rita had never afterwards mentioned him, I had forgotten him completely. Now, however, his presence seemed ominous: it was evident that Rita had been seeing him. I remembered that, when we had met him at the theater, he had said that he was soon going West, and that, I calculated now, had been at least a month ago. It had, it seemed to me, been just about a month that things had been going badly between Rita and me.
She was hurried but gay with the partings—I thought that she had become more good-natured since the arrival of the new admirer. Just before she got into the taxi, she kissed everybody good-bye. The Westerner, with unctuous heartiness, was all for seeing her off, but she explained that this was my prerogative—and she kissed him a second time. I felt suddenly that it was an impudence for Rita to have divided with such scrupulous fairness, between Duff Burdan and me, the honor of seeing her off and the honor of storing her furnitue. Yes, I remembered now, she had certainly got out of an engagement with me very soon after that night at the theater when we had happened to run into the Ohian.
I saw, as I helped her into the taxi, that she was carrying the little potted cactus, to which I had taken an intense dislike: it had a stubby and prickled stalk, and it had with time come to wear to my eyes a significance all too plainly phallic.
In the taxi, I at first said nothing: we had both become, together, so tense. But when we had turned into Seventh Avenue, I looked at her and smiled and said, “Well!” She puckered her eyes and mouth in one of her ecstatic grins and spasmodically threw back her head in the movement which had once made me feel that she was lifting me into her ecstasy, but which now seemed to draw her away from me: “Oh, it’s so wonderful to be going away where I won’t have to see any more people!”
Yes, she had left me already—long ago. She would not let me come with her to that world. I must return to the common world—and what should I do there now? Those qualities of desperate independence and of intellectual passion which had once exalted me so, could only make me now terribly glum!
She had decided overnight to leave New York. One of her aunts, who still lived in the little upstate town where Rita had been born, had lately fallen ill, and Rita’s mother, with whom Rita shared her rooms, had gone to stay with her sister. One evening, when I came to get Rita to take her out to the opera, I had found her, not even dressed for dinner, but sitting among packets of old letters spread out around her on the day-bed passionately preoccupied with the idea of returning to her native place, taking care of her invalid aunt and consecrating herself in solitude to the writing of a play in verse. To my annoyance, I saw she had been crying. And at the Rosenkavalier she had relapsed into that punctual responsiveness, with its effect of polite deliberate effort, which I had noted in her the night I had met her first, but which she had dropped when I had got to know her better. She had intimated, on the way home in the taxi, that she considered the Rosenkavalier a little cheap. And I had expected her to like it so much!
I had hoped then that her intention to leave New York, which I had applauded with insincerity, would evaporate like any other of those suddenly excited desires—to go to the Coast, to go to Paris, to return to the stage—which she would as suddenly forget; and I was dismayed when I found that she persisted in it. She had sat down and written half a dozen stories for a popular magazine, and had got an advance from the editor (who was also wildly in love with her), on the strength of a promise of further stories. She had then paid her arrears of rent and had persuaded the Italian landlord to allow her to break her lease.
I had made to Rita’s sigh of relief, in the taxi on our way to the station, some appropriately sympathetic reply. I saw now that we were already at the Waldorf, where, with the traffic cutting across us, we stopped.
I looked toward her and saw that her face, with her old fur collar close about her neck, was pale and demoralized and ill, pinched and staring. For the first time since that night in Bank Street, when her cheeks had flushed a hot pink and, leaning back against my couch, she had revealed her long Muse’s throat, her face seemed sharp-featured and tarnished. And though I knew well enough, even then, that, if all I had once so adored in that face—passion, intelligence, daring—seemed now to have disappeared, it was strained nerves and hard living which had killed them—her poverty which had put her at the mercy of all that importunate pack—myself among them—who had been forever ringing her doorbell, and all that alien life of the city which had taxed her almost to dementia (the crosstown traffic stopped; our own commenced to move: she had told me once that traffic terrified her)—though all my conscious feelings were of horror that someone I so honored should be injured, that I should ever come to find unlovely a being I had once so loved; yet that savagery of the human animal which makes us fall upon our wounded fellows, especially those whom we have feared, impelled me to say cuttingly and abruptly: “You have no faith!”
“What do you mean—religious faith?” she asked, as if she had been talking to a stranger—but I cut her short with, “No: the other kind—good faith, I mean!”
“You know very well,” she replied, suddenly speaking to me directly, “you know very well that I know what sort of person I am—but if I wasn’t that sort of person, I shouldn’t be the sort of person who would do what I did with you.… I was cruel to other people then.”
“Yes,” I said, “I know—but when I see some of the people you care about, you can’t blame me if I take it a little hard!”
“What do you mean?” she demanded.
“I was thinking of this afternoon.”
“Duff Burdan and Max Kaufman are both nice boys—I thought you liked them. And I’m not in love with either of them, if that’s what you mean!”
“I wasn’t thinking about them—I think they’re all right.”
“I hadn’t seen Max Kaufmann for months,” she went on. “He came around to see me just because he heard that I was going away. It was nice of him to come.”
“Who was that fellow who needed a shave?”
“Who do you mean?” Her wonder made me angry. “You don’t mean my brother?” she added, after a moment.
“Was that your brother?” I pretended to be amused by my own jealous suspicions. I had forgotten she had a brother, though she had told me about him once.
“Yes,” she answered. “My brother came in this afternoon.”
“What does your brother do?” I inquired.
“He drinks,” she said bitterly, without humor.
As I remembered the visitor’s face, dim-eyed and devoid of personality, I could see now in it Rita’s sharp nose and her eyes of indefinite color. And my first feeling was one of relief that the shabby nonentity I had seen, to whom Rita had given money, was merely Rita’s brother. But the discovery, as I found in a moment, had the effect of increasing my resentment: if my worst suspicions had been justified, I could at least, to that extent, have despised her, could even perhaps have washed my hands of her. But now I knew that if it was not the unknown visitor, as unconsciously I must have hoped, with whom Rita had lately been preoccupied, it must have been the young man from Columbus, who was obviously attractive and eligible.
“At least,” I brought out after a pause, “this big-hearted guy from the West isn’t a relation of yours?”
She was silent. Then she began, with her effect of dramatic sincerity which I had come to resent and dread: “It’s so false of you to nag me and scold me like this. You ought to understand how I feel! You ought to be able to see what I’ve been going through. If you really loved me, you wouldn’t want to say hateful things to me! But I don’t care now—I don’t care about any of you!”
“I know: I do understand,” I replied. “I hope that you get a lot of work done.” But I wanted to say, “That’s nonsense, and disingenuous besides, to say that my being jealous means that I don’t love you enough. And then you accuse me of being ‘false’!”
I stared out at the motorcars and taxis which were mounting the enormous driveway of the viaduct that girds the Grand Central. They had still, I found, the power to stir in me, like those taxis I had heard from the window the night I had first met Rita, the excitement and hope of the city. They were urgent and expectant now, crowding uptown along their private gallery, to dinners in apartments and hotels, where romances and adventures were beginning, where people were drinking cocktails and becoming amusing and gay (as I had not been able to be for so long)—to parties, to night-clubs, to plays, to the theatrical iridescent Forties, which I had never really explored and where I knew that Daisy was living.
“Did you know Daisy had left Ray Coleman and gone back to the stage?” I asked.
“No,” said Rita. I could see that her hands were quivering with tenseness.
“I think it’s probably a darn good thing, don’t you?” By approving of Daisy’s vagaries, I perhaps hoped to make reparation for my harshness about her own.
“Yes,” she answered, “I suppose it is.”
“I like her so much,” I continued. “I saw her at Sue Borglum’s last night. She has a wonderful sort of good-natured frankness. I really think, in fact, that she’s one of the girls I know that I like best.”
I hoped, no doubt, to make Rita believe that I had been happy the night before without her. She had told me—what seemed to me improbable—that she wanted to be left alone, that it always made her nervous to have people around while she was packing. I tried to fix my mind on Daisy as I had seen her at Sue Borglum’s party: with bare arms in a girlish black evening gown, with her candid American smile and her continual spark of wisecracks. And it occurred to me now in the taxi that, as soon as I had seen Rita off—I had never hitherto been able to think beyond that event—I should be free to cultivate Daisy. I could go straight to her place on Forty-fourth Street—I could ask her to dinner tonight! And this realization sustained me.
We had been silent, but now Rita began again: “It’s so false of you to talk to me like that! You used to understand things so well! You know that the first time I met you, you said that Ray Coleman was bitter because he hated his newspaper work, and that that had made him harsh with Daisy. Well, don’t you think that my life makes me bitter? Don’t you think I hate the way I’ve been living?”
“I know: I’m sorry,” I replied, and I took her hand and pressed it without tenderness or warmth.
We had stopped at the station door. I gave Rita’s suitcase to a porter.
“Don’t you want him to carry that?” I asked, nodding towards the cactus.
“Oh, no!” she guarded it, grinning. “I wouldn’t trust it to anybody—I’m afraid that something might happen to it!”
All the rest was mechanical—when we kissed good-bye, most of all. I sat down in the train for a moment, and told her how exciting I thought it was for her to go away alone and write: I hoped that she would accomplish a great deal. “You must produce a masterpiece,” I said. “Let me see it when it’s done, won’t you?”
I plunged out into the hurrying concourse and made straight for the door to Forty-fourth Street.
On my way—as I was passing a newsstand—at the sight of a bright red magazine cover, I found myself shocked by that terrible current of which the furniture and pictures of Twelfth Street, of which everything connected with Rita, had been for so long such active conductors. It was the second-rate fiction magazine for which Rita had written the stories that had enabled her to leave New York. She had never been willing to sign them—I remembered that now—though they were really not at all discreditable: she was incapable of writing badly. But as she had never taken them seriously, as she had written them merely to make money, she had hated them and had signed them with a pseudonym, though she could have gotten a far better price for them by publishing them over her own name.
I turned suddenly back toward the train, as if I could still have redeemed our farewell from the memory of my bitterness and spite—but the man was taking down the sign.
The news of her aunt’s illness had deeply affected Rita; and though I was skeptical and suspicious at the time, I see now that it had really preoccupied her to the exclusion of everything else. Aunt Sarah, who was always called “Aunt Sadie,” had been the artistic member of the family; and Rita had originally been named for her. But when Rita had first come to New York, and had acted for a short time on the stage, she had substituted “Rita” for her real name, and she had never afterwards been able to bring herself to be known as Sarah again. Her first poems had been published over her stage name. And now she tortured herself with the fear that this might have hurt Aunt Sadie’s feelings. With her passionate concentration, she had talked to me of that extraordinary little woman with the birdlike nose and neck, and the square enormous brow, which Rita had inherited.
Aunt Sadie had, in her youth, been the organist in the church and the gay getter-up of church “sociables”; she had wanted to go to Paris to study music, and she had almost succeeded in this, but the men of Aunt Sadie’s family—like Rita’s brother—had not made life easy for the women: some drank; some had broken down; some had simply disappeared. When she had found she could not go to Paris, Aunt Sadie had moved to Watertown and taught music; but a last brother, who kept the general store in the little town where she had lived, had been disabled by a stroke, and Aunt Sadie had had to take care of him and help with the store, for which she presently found herself assuming the whole responsibility. But as she had always been hopelessly perplexed by the problems of supply and demand, she was gradually deprived of her trade by a newer and more modern store, which had a soda fountain with tables. Now, in one of their terrible winters, she had come down with a bad case of pleurisy, and, even after recovering from it, was no longer able to work at all.
And Rita, brooding now on the slow extinction of Aunt Sadie’s personality, tragically reproached herself for having suppressed Aunt Sadie’s name. She talked to me about Aunt Sadie till I could see the chipped and yellow keys of her little upright piano, and the elegantly engrossed scrolleries of the old-fashioned black and white music covers, more clearly than the objects in the room in which we were, and could hear those other scrolleries, both elegant and noble, of the voices of the fugue, interweaving a watermark of beauty in the air of the cramped little parlor above the general store. Aunt Sadie had taught Rita to play; and Rita still remembered some fragments of Handel and Bach, which sometimes tumbled out without warning when she found herself beside a piano, all rumpled, as it were, but still fresh, from the disordered wardrobe of her mind. These gusts of music surprised me at first: they were so spontaneous, light-hearted and lovely—so different from the sometimes tight, and nearly always sober, style of her poetry; and I have since thought that they were perhaps all I ever knew of Rita as she had been in her girlhood.
For Rita, too, had spent long years in the little upcountry town; had sung in the church choir and known all the hymns by heart; had studied French from the book, where there was no one to teach her to speak it, and had read Baudelaire and Rimbaud when she could not pronounce their names correctly. And before she had gone to college on the scholarship she had won by fierce solitary effort, she had almost, she told me, abandoned the hope of ever sloughing off that life of the small American town, which she had seemed to put on every morning, like some cursed indestructible dress of girlhood, too worn and too soiled and too small.
Yet, I never heard Rita speak with resentment of her early environment: it was herself, and not the place or its people, which, in telling of her youth, she had made me see. When Sinclair Lewis wrote his famous novel, in its different way so intense, he made one feel that the American small town had rendered the whole of our life unpalatable, had flavored it with a rank flat taste, like some minute organism which spoils the drinking water. But my impression of the town from which Rita had come was made up merely of those moments in Rita’s life which she had told me of passing there and which seemed to me, like everything else about her, to have taken place in a world where there was nothing common. She had described to me once, for example, how, lying awake at night, she had heard some drunkard, returning from the town, singing clearly in the empty country road, dark and clear under the autumn moon:
“I wooed her in the summertime
And in the winter, too;
And all night long I held her in my arms,
Just to shield her from the foggy foggy dew!”
Today, when I can sort out the drunkard, the song which everyone knows, the little New York state town, the girl who wants to get away—though I summon all the drunkards, all the bawdy songs, all the discontented girls, all the towns, that I have ever known—I can see nothing but that moment of Rita’s girlhood, of her girlhood too long detained, which seemed to hang half clear black and half turbid crystal, in the radiant-dark country night, like a drop of foggy dew—I see all through the eyes of the poet, to whom our social history is invisible.
I made differences between New York and Paris; between New Orleans and New York. I had wondered, at Ray Coleman’s party, whether McIlvaine were a Scotchman or a Jew; I had insisted on finding out from Hugo in what city Daisy was born. And though I did not, like Hugo, compute incomes nor peg out the people I encountered in the economic web, I marked degrees of education and tried to identify accents. I had noted, in this way, in Rita, the Irish fickle-mindedness and sharpness; the signs of the superior person in the small provincial community; of the original and bold personality in the community of college girls, who had, however, learned the language of the rest—that savorless language of young segregated women to whom older unmarried women preach the loftier feminine ideals; the intonations of the American actress of English light comedy; and, finally, dominating all, her role of princess and rake of the Village. But it made no difference how she talked, where she had been, what she wore, where she lived, what boors she caught up in her life, what threadbare images she used—the being who filled my mind had little relation to all this. I had first learned from Rita that the importance, the significance, of what we see, is supplied by the mind which perceives them—that the power which creates, through imagination and passion, never stops to appraise the value of the materials with which it works, but itself assigns them value.
And just as, despite the fact that Aunt Sadie presented herself as an obstacle to my happiness, that I was by no means, at the time of which I write, in a mood to share Rita’s anguish for the muted and dying vibrations of that tight-strung steel-silver soul—so she had forced me, against my taste and interest, to accept all her friends and admirers at the value she put upon them herself. These friends, when I came to meet them, almost always impressed me at first as quite unlike what I had heard about them from Rita—as insipid, ineffective or underbred. And I used at first to find my jealousy allayed at discovering that Rita’s swans were geese—though I suppose that I still felt, in the case of the Greenwich Villagers proper, a sort of jealousy at their having participated with Rita in the braver exploits of an earlier day—a day that I myself had come too late for. I had the sense that even the worst of Rita’s friends had at least “fired one ringing shot and passed.” But young journalists cheapened by their work; pottering young writers, like myself; debauched or epicene young poets, with neither genius nor self-respect; mediocre middle-aged literary men, with bald heads and stale reputations; and all that odd mixed company of lawyers, contractors and brokers—I was obliged to grant even to these each his gift or his special distinction—and, even then, I could never be sure how far they were distinctions or gifts which Rita herself had lent them. So constant and so acute was her need to intensify experience that, just as she would cherish the timbre of certain boat-whistles which she heard from her apartment in Twelfth Street, just as she would sometimes keep for days a tangerine or an apple which she had bought at the grocer’s on the corner, but of which, when she had brought it home, she had become fascinated by the shape or the color—so she had the faculty of endowing her admirers with qualities which they themselves may hardly have hoped to possess. With Rita, the vagabond poet would prove to have an interesting temperament; the journalist, an honest conviction; the obsolete editor or essayist, something of the grace of a man of the world; and those bewitched business men and brokers who so furiously pursued her seemed to have caught from Rita’s own imagination some disturbing conception of themselves which they were straining to realize—she told me once how a man who had seen her on but a single occasion and whom she had afterwards succeeded in evading had recognized her again, after years, merely from hearing her voice over the telephone, when he had by mistake been connected with a wire on which Rita was talking to someone else.
But it was not merely that Rita disregarded all those social and moral considerations which occupy so large a place in the minds of ordinary people. It was not merely that she was free from prejudices; but that character itself, in the sense in which it may amuse us, stimulate our curiosity or appear to us picturesque, did not interest her. She was not at all the sort of woman who enjoys collecting types or celebrities; gossip did not entertain her; she had little taste for novels. In her own stories and plays, there were no characters, but merely situations and emotions. And so, not seeing at all in her friends what most of them saw in each other, she made it possible for them, in their relation to her, to play roles for which the world would never have cast them. It was as if, in their contacts with Rita, they had become somehow facets of herself, as if their desires had been given body by Rita’s imagination and their vitality doubled by her force. They had become aspects of her own personality; and so wear for me even today—the middle-western journalist with the Abraham Lincoln voice, the snow and quiet of the diamond winter night when she had spoken to me, after he had left, of the purity and peace of his spirit of which she suggested that the longings were yet so poignant; the international vagabond, the muffled vagueness of the August dusk when we had carried him part way up Fifth Avenue in the victoria in which we were riding, and she had afterwards, in Central Park, among the dark walls and asphalt windings, where the lovers embraced mute on their benches, sung some Spanish songs he had taught her; and the man in New Mexico, alas! the sweet pathos of the short days she had known him, of which she told me with her brief telling eloquence on the very afternoon in Bank Street when I had counted on finding eloquence myself in order to persuade her to marry me; and the bare two days and a half she had spent with that tubercular landscape painter whom she had loved, she said, the best of all!
I myself had good cause to be grateful: when I had read to Rita my indifferent poems, she would afterwards take them from me and go through them intently herself, reading aloud some line that pleased her, so that it sounded, brought to life by her voice, a good deal better than it actually was; and, at the time, I would never remember that she had also a knack of reading certain poems by Coventry Patmore and Arthur Hugh Clough, poets whom I detested, so that they sounded as if she had written them herself.—Even during our last conversation when I had scolded and complained in the taxi, she had appealed to a generosity for which I was by no means remarkable by reminding me of those excuses, perfunctory and largely hypocritical, which I had made long ago for Ray Coleman.
In any case, we swarmed to her apartment, devoured her time and her force, and finally, at the period of which I write, had rendered her life intolerable. I had told her once of something that Hugo had said of literary people together, as one saw them in New York or Paris—that they were like the leeches in a druggist’s jar: dependent for nourishment on blood, but reduced to the desperate necessity of preying on one another. “Yes,” said Rita. “And I’m the druggist when he puts his hand in the jar!”
So I had learned in half a year from Rita that from another point of view than Hugo’s, the world may present quite different values and give rise to quite different problems. But I had learned something else from Rita, which it had cost me more pain to learn. When I had taken her to task in the taxi, reproaching her for lack of “faith,” she had forced me to confront a principle which, since I had known her, had haunted and tormented me, but which I had hitherto tried to evade; and even she, who must have lived with it so long, was reluctant to confess it to me: she had pretended for a moment to mistake what I meant. As Hugo had learned from his weeks in the prison camp that men who are beaten become brutalized and that men without food starve; so I had had to learn from Rita that any great strength or excellence of character must be, by its very nature, incompatible with qualities of other kinds—that it carries with it weaknesses and ignominies inseparable from excellence and strength. I should, I dare say, like everyone else, always have been willing to admit both these truths; they would, in fact, have seemed to me platitudes. But I had to come to both through experience and once I had felt their reality, it had seemed to me that all our social and moral conventions had been based on the opposite assumptions—that a person who had had either revelation—either Rita’s revelation or Hugo’s—and who uncompromisingly met life on that basis, must, like Hugo or Rita, be a rebel, and, in consequence, an enemy of society.
For Rita, who exalted every impulse and made every relation dramatic, neither happiness nor drama could endure. I taunted her once, in those later days, with Wilde’s saying that, “He who lives more lives than one, more deaths than one must die.” But it was not deaths of the body that she suffered: it was the deaths of all those human relations—it was her rejection, day after day and year after year, of all the natural bonds and understandings which make up the greater part of human life—comfort, security, children, the protection and devotion of a husband, even simple comradeship and affection—so that she was still, at the time of which I write, an outlaw living from hand to mouth, always poor and often ill, bedeviled day and night by all the persons she no longer had the energy to excite to her own pitch of incandescence. And even at the time I had taunted her in the cab, it was my consciousness of this strength that had continued to keep me in subjection. For I knew now, in spite of all my pain, in spite of all my complaints and indignation, that if we are moved to admire what is admirable, we must also maintain the courage, and must not rage against—nor even try to minimize—that which makes it possible and mars it.
Outside the light had grown cold; but the white and orange power of the lamps was beginning to dominate the town. The day seemed hardly now to have been serious: it was withdrawing, by arrangement with the city, which had so much to do at night. The taxis on Vanderbilt Avenue were wedging, honking and hitching, in their efforts to turn and to pass; but I dodged energetically through them and headed west.
If I could only find Daisy home! If only she were free tonight! I had refrained from telephoning on purpose: I wanted so desperately to see her, even if she were going out.
I could still feel the thrill of Fifth Avenue—I scarcely glanced a second time at a face which looked a little like Rita’s. And that fascinating region of the Forties, where lately I had gone so rarely—I found that I could still peer with interest at the photographs in front of the theaters and at the faces of the passing women, who seemed sometimes, with their theatrical make-up, as miraculously, ideally pretty as the women one saw on the stage.
The apartment house where Daisy lived was narrow and very plain: there was merely a bare hall, with a telephone man, who also opened the door and ran the elevator.
He took me up to her floor, and I knocked at her room, but no one answered; then, as the door had been left half-open, I went inside. The lights had also been left on, and the chairs and the floor were littered with a debris of stockings and chemises, as surprisingly slight and as sordid as the shreds of exploded balloons. On the table stood an empty spaghetti can, two plates gummed with cold tomato sauce, an empty gin bottle and several tumblers with the stale remains of drinks. It seemed to me, from the contents of the tumblers, that they had begun by drinking gin and ginger ale, fallen back on gin and water, and probably ended up with raw gin.
It would be hours now, no doubt, before her rehearsal was over. I had come far too early, had better go away and come back. I looked about the room, and then searched in my pockets for paper to write her a note, but could find nothing except a letter from a distinguished professor of philosophy whom I had greatly admired at college and to whom I had sent a book of Rita’s poems. He had written me, thanking me for the poems and inviting me to come to see him. I had thrown the envelope away, but my respect for the professor had been so strong that I had never destroyed his letter though my preoccupation with Rita had prevented my answering it.
But now, as I could find nothing else—finally reflecting that colleges, after all, were places where poets were put to sleep—tore off part of the back page of the letter, just below the signature, and sitting down in a mission morris chair, I wrote a note to Daisy.
When I had finished the note, however, I turned over the pages of the magazine—it was a movie magazine called Photo-Life—which I had picked up to back the paper. Suddenly becalmed in that abandoned apartment, high aloft on that inaccessible floor, with the elevator between me and the street, I found that I had dropped into a pocket of inertia and lassitude. When I had exhausted Photo-Life, I looked carefully, with the same serious interest, through Zit’s Weekly, the Cosmopolitan and a tabloid of two days before. Then, with the magazines in my lap, I sat blank and incapable of rising. I apprehended the onset of despair. What motive had I for moving? I could no longer go to see Rita, and was there anyone else in New York whom I really desired to see? It was as if the emptiness of Daisy’s room had represented the emptiness of the world in which I had been left by Rita’s departure. I had not slept much for several nights, and I felt that my joints were heavy. The telephone rang: I did not answer it.
There was a phonograph beside me on the table: it was a small cheap portable one. I regarded it with hebetude. Without Daisy, it seemed as depressing as the glasses, as the garments, as the magazines. But involuntarily grasping at a last resource against despair, I picked up the heap of phonograph records, lying half-shuffled, like a battered pack of cards. Scrupulously I pushed them even and ran through them, reading all the titles: With You in Paradise, from Pretty Kitty, sung by Bee Brewster; Ben Bolt, by John McCormack; Chanson Hindoue, Saxophone Solo; So’s Your Old Man, Fox Trot, by Fred Casey and His Burglar-Alarm Boys; La Forza del Destino, Red Seal, Duet by Caruso and Scotti; Mamie Rose, Fox Trot, by Jake King and His Eight Kentucky Mocking Birds. I remembered that Mamie Rose was the fox-trot which Daisy had so offended by playing, the night of Ray Coleman’s party, when Rita had been reciting her poems. I got up and put it on the machine.
The record, I noted, as I wound the crank, had been made by the American Melody Company. It was a pale and unpleasant brown and seemed to have been molded in river mud. Remembering the handsome victrola which I had seen at Ray Coleman’s apartment, I pitied Daisy a little; yet she had had the right sort of bravery, the bravery to go free when love had passed! The only needles I could find were buried in an ash-tray under cigarette butts and burnt matches, and it was impossible to tell the used from the new. The first I tried began with a blurt, a hideous stuttering blur. Still dominated by Rita’s tastes, I felt that turning on the phonograph would be like drilling with a dental engine: Rita had not cared for popular music—had thought lightly of even the Rosenkavalier!
The second needle turned out no better, but I let it go; and presently Mamie Rose emerged as a kind of fiendish jig, running itself off at impossible speed: too fast, too nasal, too shrill. I made an effort to regulate it and only effected a harrowing descent of pitch, like the gasping and discordant howl of some demon inside the machine crying out in intolerable agony at being compressed from one tempo to another. I listened for the first night I had met Daisy, but merely succeeded in having my heart wrung by the first night I had heard Rita’s poems. The spring of the little phonograph held only for a single winding, so that the record began too fast and was already running down before it came to the end; but, what was worse, it had no horn, so that the demon inside the box, beating in its cramped black prison like a panic-stricken bat, had to squeeze out, as it were, through a crack—the little aperture at the base of the “arm.” No wonder it chittered and squealed so thinly, like an unwinding wire of sound, like a wire, rusted, wry and eaten, worn away so that it seemed almost snapping, or so rough that it would stick and stammer over some echolaliac phrase! So completely had the music been robbed of resonance that it seemed a mere memorandum of music, as if some writer in sound had scribbled down the skeleton of an orchestration, with the brasses brief tin-whistle blasts and raspings, the strings a jotted jingle of cicada chirpings, and the tympani scored as tiny explosions and echoless crashes of glass. And the “vocal refrain,” when it suddenly began, had as little in common with the human voice as the noises of the instruments had with music: it gave the effect of some mere momentary modulation in the quick mechanical jigging of a railroad train—it was simply a sharper shrillness, a more insistent iteration: There she goes—Mamie Rose—She—loves—me!—Don’t seem to show it!—How do I know it?—It’s A.B.C.!—She’s— a crackle of high-pitched syllables ending with aggravatin’—But when I want a little lovin’ she don’t keep me waitin’!—She’s proud and snooty—But she’s my cutie!—She tells me—a second slip of dulled and driven cogs—That’s how I knows—Mamie Rose!—She—loves—me! The jazz departed, with redoubled violence and complexities of deformation, into a last frantic charivari—then, after a brief unpleasing flourish, was bitten off as abruptly as it had begun.
I lifted the needle, clicked the little catch and went over to the window. Outside gaped a blank abyss: several buildings had just been demolished and the vacuum of vacancy they had left seemed to be sucking with its blind raw walls for some structure to rush in and fill it. I felt again the horrible imminence of despair, and I tried to summon against that blank outlook and against the mechanical voice of the phonograph—those negations of flesh and blood—an intensified vision of Daisy: her alert little yellow head, with its deep staining of Irish rust, her lips still moist through carnation rouge, and the robust little organism of her body, which made its home among those stone and metal cells, not merely resilient to their surface, but making their grindings quicken and feed it.—Then a sudden voice said, “Hello!” and with a start I turned round and saw her.
I asked her to come to dinner with me. She had on a dark blue street dress, and she looked tired. I had been imagining her animated and hearty, but it seemed to me now that she was frail: her eyes, a lighter green than Rita’s, looked colorless and dim.—“Why—I’d like to,” she demurred, “but I’ve got a sort of a date.”
The telephone rang again and she answered it. I heard her begging off with her little-girl-like “Well, I don’t think I will—I’m so tired—I just got back from rehearsal—I think I’ll go to bed—well, I don’t think I will—you go—well, I don’t want to—all right, see you tomorrow!”
And I felt not merely flattered, but also reassured, to find that Daisy seemed to think it natural to set aside her previous engagements in favor of those higher obligations—of which I had learned the importance from Rita—of following one’s own inclination.
“I’m glad you came,” she exclaimed. “I didn’t want to go to that party and if you hadn’t come, I would have gone.” “Where was it?” I asked. “At Myra Busch’s.” “Are her parties any fun?” She shook her head contemptuously: “No: she just has a lot of twirps.—I can’t stand ’em!”
“How cute you sounded talking over the telephone!” “Yes: strong men weep!” “No, really: you’re awfully cute!” “You don’t mean it really, do you? It’s a panic, isn’t it?” “No: I do mean it! You sounded cute.” (Now that I had to renew my assurances, I began to feel insincere—I had so long praised no one but Rita, and had praised her with such passionate conviction, that I found now that it cost me an effort to compliment anyone else.) “Ray Coleman used to say that I had the world’s worst voice on the telephone—he said I sounded like some awful whining cash-girl.” Another proof of Ray’s stupidity! I could see what he meant, but there was about Daisy’s speech something finely chiseled like her features, so that I had scarcely been aware of her voice; and my resentment at Ray’s stupid taste imparted to my compliments a new fervor.
“Shall I go out and get a drink?” I suggested. “That would be fine!” said Daisy, brightening, and with the humorous consciousness of brightening, that irony of the city I so liked in her. “As the English actor said, when the girl said, ‘How about twenty-five dollars?’—‘That would be a godsend!’—I’ll be getting dressed while you’re gone.”
When I came back she was still in the bathroom, and called out to me: “You might pass me a drink in here, if you don’t mind.” I poured the dregs out of one of the glasses and handed in some gin and ginger ale: her little naked arm, reaching out from behind the door, had the prettiness of a child’s. “Now, you turn on the phonograph,” she called to me, “so you won’t hear me use the what-not!” I started Mamie Rose again and poured out a drink for myself: the music seemed almost gay, and when the record had come to an end, I put on another record.
When she came out, she had a rosier color and looked extremely clean: she was dressed in a light blue dress, with a blue scarf dappled with white, and wore straw-colored stockings. “How nice you look in your blond clothes!” I told her. “Oh, this is just an old rag!” she squeaked in a burlesque hen’s voice. “Well,” I insisted, “you look sweet!” “I probably look like the Collapse of Western Civilization!” she replied—but with a particularly charming smile.
She turned off the phonograph, which had been gibbering like an imbecile over a single unintelligible phrase. “That phonograph’s a delight, isn’t it?” she said. “I took it with me when I left Ray, because it was one of the only things I had left that had belonged to me before I lived withum. Phil gave it to me on our honeymoon. Some of those records are Ray’s, though, I guess.” I remembered Rita’s bookcase.
“Phil was your first husband, was he?” “Yes: he’s my ex,” she said. She went on, after a moment: “Did you think I was really married to Ray?” “Yes,” I said, “I did.” “I guess a good many people really did. But we weren’t. It was a lucky thing, too; if I’d marriedum, it would have been harder to leavum.” “Did you have a pretty trying time?” I asked. “He wouldn’t let me do anything or go any place. If I went out with anybody else, he’d burn up one of my dresses—he was great on burning things up—I used to tellum that if he’d lived a little longer ago, he’d have been burning witches. He’d say that he didn’t buy me clothes to have me go out with other men. And then when I did stay home withum, I’d just have to listen to-um read to me out of the Oxford Book of English Verse.—Finally, one night I got reckless and stayed out for two days with Pete Bird”—(Pete Bird was the little man with whom I had seen her talking at Ray Coleman’s and in whose company I had found her the night before)—“and when I came back, he wouldn’t let me in, so there was nothing to do but go looping again—I was plastered for a week. Finally Gus Dunbar offered to let me stay here—it was awfully decent ofum and he just did it out of friendliness. He helped me get a job, too. I understand that Myra Busch is telling it around the Village that I’m having a love-affair with Gus—but that’s just absurd—he’s my oldest friend in New York: I knew him back in Pittsburgh. He’s just my yes-man. He lets me sleep in the bed and he sleeps on the couch. And besides, he’s sick!—He’s gone out of town and I’m going to get a good rest. Oh, how I’m going to rest!”
We continued the conversation in a chop house, with red-and-white checked tablecloths and the smell of a butcher shop, where very large sour pickles were served with every order.
“What sort of a fellow is Pete Bird?” I asked. “Isn’t he more or less of a twirp?” “Well,” she said, “he did pretty well the other night: he spent about a hundred and thirty dollars.” Even allowing for the tremendous prestige which always attaches in New York to the spending of large sums of money, I felt that she was evading my question, but I did not pursue the matter further: I seemed to divine that Pete Bird was the man with whom she had broken her engagement to go to Myra Busch’s that night.
I asked Daisy how she had ever happened to run away with Ray. “I mettum in the Ritz Bar in Paris,” she explained. “Phil and I didn’t care anything about each other, by that time—Phil was in love with a French girl. I didn’t resent his having affairs with other women, but he used to give her my clothes. Besides, I didn’t want to have people saying: ‘That poor little Mrs. Meissner, sitting around crying her eyes out, while her husband goes with other women!’ Besides, Phil and I had just been thrown out of our hotel. Phil had a lot of money when I marriedum, but we spent it all. Ray came along and he seemed to be pretty affluent at that time, and I was so tired of not paying any bills. I will say about Phil, though, that he did everything with a grand air. Ray would get worried if a bill ran for as much as a week—whereas Phil never thought of paying a bill, even if he had the money. It was funny: when you were with Phil, you felt that you were swell, even though you didn’t have a cent—but when you were with Ray, even though everything was paid for and all the bell boys and everybody tipped, you felt you were only trying to be swell.”
I asked what Phil did. “He was a photographer,” she replied. “Not an ordinary photographer, but one of those super-photographers. He only took a picture about once every two months—he’d charge a hundred and fifty dollars for a sitting. At least that’s what he did when he did anything. He had money—at least, he did till his family wouldn’t givum any more—so he didn’t really have to do anything. He composed songs, too. But what he really worked hardest at was getting up practical jokes. He’d spend hours sending out invitations to all the worst bums in Paris, asking them to come to dinner at the house of one of the social leaders of the American colony.” “What happened?” I asked. “Well, they all showed up—all the dope fiends and dead-beats, and all the old drunken bozos that hang around the bars—all the most undesirable Americans in Paris—and Mrs. Tilford was furious and almost gottum arrested. Then another time, when he had to have lunch with some friends of his family’s from Pittsburgh, he put camphorated oil on the seats of all their chairs—well, camphorated oil makes you feel as if you were freezing—so they all had to sit there at the table with their fannies freezing and not knowing what was the trouble.”
I laughed. “Well, that sort of thing,” she explained, “can get to be pretty tiresome, if you live with it all the time. And I was his wife, so I felt partly responsible. When some guest almost broke his back on a chair that flattened out when you sat on it, I’d feel pretty humiliated. And then he’d work his gags on me. One day he left a note for me, saying that he’d committed suicide. And I suppose he thought it was a joke when he took half my clothes away and told me he was sending them to the devastated regions, and then gave ’em to-uz little French twirp!”
We had ordered ginger ale, and had had some more gin: “You really look marvelous in blue!” I said. She knocked herself under the chin: “That sets me all up,” she said, meeting my gaze without blinking. Then she dropped her eyes and added: “Phil really had a lot of charm, though.”
“What shall we do after dinner?” I asked. “Take me to the movies!” she said, smiling. “I’ve had a yen to see some movies all day. I want to do something restful.—Take me to some picture that’s funny.—I’m so glad you came tonight! I’ve been beginning to feel like a twirp. If I keep on getting plastered, I’ll lose my job.—It’s so long since I’ve been alone or had any place where I could go and be by myself. It seems to me I haven’t done anything for weeks but sit around and be funny for people I didn’t really care about.—Gee, I don’t know what to do! When I begin to get paid, I can live on what I make. But I’ve been afraid to sober up, because then I’d have to face the future.” (She always gave to all her clichés—“facing the future,” etc.—a special ironic emphasis.) “I can’t think of anybody I care about—I haven’t even got a girl friend any more: all the ones that I had are off me now because Ray wouldn’t let me have ’em around. So I haven’t even got anybody to laugh about things with.—Business of twisting handkerchief.—Let’s go, before I have you in tears!”
We had a reckless taxi-driver; but to me, strong now with accelerations of gin and with my normal masculine self-assurance, which Rita had done so much to demoralize, now gratifyingly reinforced by Daisy’s feminine confession of helplessness and distress—I had the illusion at that moment that I occupied a position of unchallengeable supremacy—it seemed that it had now become possible for our taxi, at its exhilarating giddy speed, to plunge through every opposition, to make every obstruction give way. I marked with intensest vision the objects which we seemed to ride down: a Railway Express truck; a woman who was walking a German police dog; other scuttling and inferior taxis. Rita, when driving in taxis, had always been nervous about El posts; but, as we ripped our way through the traffic, Daisy merely remarked: “Madcap Joe, the Demon Driver!”—and as we erupted into Broadway: “You better stop him or he’ll drive into the lobby!”
I thought scornfully of Duff Burdan, who had been barking so long on Rita’s doorstep, and who, for the privilege of storing Rita’s furniture, for the certainty of seeing her again, had been willing to clutter up his studio.
In the darkened moving-picture house, we found the newsreel passing before us like a gray inconsecutive dream, and its images, as I watched them, seemed to swell with the significance of dreams. A buxom and good-looking Sixteen-Year-Old Girl winning a Florida yacht-race in a bathing suit to the blaring triumphant pace of a red-white-and-blue Sousa march. “She’s cute,” whispered Daisy, “isn’t she?” Yes: there was the real native American poetry!—my spirit flashed again at the thought of it—it had the daring and excitement of a poem!—and such a spirit, which abandoned itself to the water and the wind, to the speed of the flying yacht, would she not give herself also to love under the soft nights of Southern waters! Mayor Hylan—East Side, West Side—making a speech in New York: the flat-faced official visage, the senseless savorless words of the American public figure—while the bravest spoke with words of fire or slashed with white sails and tanned arms the deep blue of Florida seas!—free America that flew above those drones, that never paused for a thought of Mayor Hylan and his imbecile servile speeches. In our eagerness, our taut attention, stimulated more by the drinks than the film, Daisy and I were sitting forward and our arms were pressing each other. An airplane wafted by a waltz—I had missed the title, my mind ablaze with the beauty of poetry and sportsmanship—below, the city, flat as a map, a plane shifted, not haphazardly, but with some underlying harmony and balance, to a jerky succession of angles.—Laddy Boy’s Rival, a husky brought to Washington, to the gallop of some lolloping dog music, by one of Harding’s Secret Service Men—I whispered, “I believe that that husky would make good presidential timber!” I glanced aside at Daisy and saw her profile pale and clear as porcelain in the pale light from the film, in which her pert little nose and chin showed a fineness and purity of outline—an outline prolonged by the frail little hand which, with the finger-tips lifted to the chin, received also, along fingers and wrist, a pale porcelain border of light.—Members of the Municipal Council at Baka, Japan, to the tune of We’re Gentlemen of Japan, visit the city’s reservoir; they jump in and catch carp with their hands: “I should think it would be bad enough,” whispered Daisy, “to have to drink the carp, without drinking the municipal councilors,” and I so threw myself forward in laughing at this that Daisy became self-conscious about the pressure of our arms on the seat, and drew a little away.—A slow-motion diving picture of champion women swimmers—they turned along the sweet lengthened rhythms of All Alone with the Telephone, curving wonderfully through the air in molded recumbent postures and sending up, when they had slipped into the water, a slowly condensing cloud of spray—how Rita would have loved those slow parabolas, stripped clean of the flashiness of speed, as tight-strung as the curve of a bow—she would have exclaimed of the cloud of spray, “It’s like some lovely sort of punctuation—as if you could punctuate a statue with some solid effect of light!”—The Prince of Wales—It’s a Long Way to Tipperary—joking with a paralyzed soldier—I wondered whether Rita would find the Prince of Wales attractive, then reflected that, on the contrary, she would probably be just perverse enough to prefer the paralyzed soldier—it occurred to me now to consider that I was becoming too much preoccupied with Rita and not paying enough attention to Daisy, so I moved my arm back against hers.—Joe LeBlanc, Head of the New Central Ticket Office, playing tennis to the jigging tune of Tea for Two and Two for Tea, to decide who shall pay the religious expenses of one hundred Jewish children to aid the Jewish Education Association Drive—“I bet the other man loses, don’t you?” Daisy remarked. I wondered whether perhaps, after all, I hadn’t been unfair to Max Kaufman—whether, perhaps, what I had taken for complacency hadn’t been, after all, merely modesty—I had a pang as I was pricked by the feeling that I had behaved rather badly with Rita in the taxi.—Bishop Manning, to the Pilgrim’s Chorus, receiving an emblematic pastoral staff, a huge encrusted crozier, from the Chaplain of the House of Commons—Daisy and I thought that Bishop Manning had the look of a priggish baby being handed an enormous rattle: I put my hand gently over Daisy’s which lay beneath it friendly and cool.—A Chimpanzee Chauffeur: roguish monkey music: Yes, We Have No Bananas; but I had fallen to reflecting that, like some hero of a medieval legend—the Pilgrim’s Chorus and the pastoral staff had made me see myself in that image—I had, for a dreamlike space escaping human measure, been shut away with Venus under the hill, or, like Oisin, with some goddess of fairyland—that I had been gone from the world of men, and only now, still blinking from the Venusberg, still with the music of fairyland in my ears, still knowing how the ache for the ideal may torture us like the ache for a drug of which we have been deprived, beheld with bewildered relief the vision of Senator Oscar W. Underwood, who—to the rousing music of Dixie—was making a speech at a Monster Barbecue in Montgomery, Alabama—and found myself almost safe again in that folksy familiar American world, heterogeneous and absurd, which had ceased for so long to seem real to me, of which I had never for so long been aware save to repudiate it with scorn and impatience.—The Oldest Human Remains, a Skeleton of the Stone Age Discovered in an Oyster Bed: black bones embedded in oysters: dull somber chords—Rita could have done something with this—something bitter about the fatuity of the twentieth-century traveler who was pointing at the bones with his stick—or better—what I could never have done: it was I who would have made easy capital out of the traveler with the spectacles and the stick!—something simple, troubling and hard about the bare black bones themselves.
And the smoothly revolving globe, supported by a kneeling goddess and scrolling out suddenly and rapidly—as if in the burst of an exciting revelation—the title of the comedy that followed—affected me, in a drop equally sudden, as idiotic and insupportable. Now that I had been brooding on those blackened bones, I had become impatient with everything again—and I crushed my way across to the aisle, over overcoats, seats and knees. I got some wax-paper cups from the smoking-room, and Daisy and I, in the half-darkness, had a drink of water and gin. The paper cups leaked, and we had to get it down at a draught.
On the screen, a dough-faced comedian with goggling horn-rimmed glasses was enlisting in a fire-brigade.—An alarm!—he is the first to respond—he rushes headlong for the fire-house pole, slides down it headfirst and remains at the bottom stunned—the firemen who follow fall over him and pile up like a football scrimmage. We laughed at this. On the way to the fire, the long hook-and-ladder truck, whisking briskly around a corner with impossible nimbleness, caused Daisy to laugh so violently that I thought again, as I had done on the night when I had heard about her motorcycle honeymoon, of that American sense of motor traffic which we had developed to such an extraordinary degree—and which was now further played upon, in the film, when the hero, in horn-rimmed innocence, allowed his hook-and-ladder attachment to swing around at right-angles to the truck, so that it swept the boulevard like a scythe, mowing the tops off all the Fords, and never failing at every disaster to make Daisy laugh with delight.—On the scene of the burning building, the hero was contending with the hose, which enmeshed him like a boa-constrictor. The owner of the building appeared, a pompous and imposing dignitary, in a frock-coat and silk hat. “Oh, I hope he turns the hose on his hat, don’t you?” whispered Daisy. And in a moment, just as the dignitary was denouncing the clumsiness of the hero, an unexpected leak in the hose cleanly squirted off the silk hat, which landed on an organ-grinder’s monkey and gave rise to a fantastic chase.
Such was our wild exhilaration over this that I reflected as the chase began to flag, how, only half a year ago, if I had gone to the same film with Hugo, I should, in laughing at the ruin of the hat, have been moved by something more than the impulse, the mischievous impulse of a child, which I shared tonight with Daisy. I should have laughed with both savagery and zeal. I should, like Hugo, have taken the silk hat as a symbol; I should have made of its destruction an issue. And now at last I became aware how completely my point of view had changed since I had fallen in love with Rita and ceased to see much of Hugo. Had I not myself, only a few days before, taken out my own silk hat to go with Rita to the Rosenkavalier? I knew now that I no longer cared to imitate the intransigence of Hugo in these matters, his rejection of all the amenities of that civilized life of which he was himself the product; his fixed belief that society was divided into two mutually hostile classes, a proletariat and a bourgeoisie; his unquestioning acceptance of the catchwords of the social revolution, and his hostile and suspicious unwillingness to arrive at a human understanding with people who lived by different catchwords—all this seemed to me tonight the product of a superficial point of view, or, almost, of an arrested development. For Rita, despite the revolt against conventions which all her life implied, despite her long association with radicals, had had really but little interest in politics: her revolt was a revolt of the individual—and I had discovered to my surprise, when I had come to discuss with her the personalities of the Village, her complete lack of interest in, and, in some cases, her positive contempt for, certain of the radical leaders who most generally commanded admiration; and that, in spite of the atmosphere in which she lived, it was actually possible to strike fire from her mind by reactionary or conventional views, if they were delivered with the right ring of bravery. And I had myself now, oblivious of the film, taken to meditating so exaltedly on the vanity of people’s opinions compared to the deeper realities of character, the insignificance of politics compared to clairvoyance and passion, that I began to laugh only belatedly when I had already become aware that Daisy was roaring over one of the captions. The hero with the horn-rimmed spectacles had just been bitten by a small bull-terrier he had picked it up and bitten back—the caption read, “See how you like it yourself!”
“Oh, I’m so glad you took me!” said Daisy. “I think it’s swell! I just wanted to see something funny!” I slipped my hand over hers again with sympathetic affection, and watched the rest of the comedy, leaning toward her and paying closer attention. We followed the picture together, with a lively interchange of comment.
“Well, I suppose you want to go to bed,” I said to Daisy as we walked out into Broadway. I suggested that we might stop at a restaurant and finish up the gin. “No,” she said, “I’m too tired for a restaurant.—Why don’t you come up to my place and we can drink it up there?—‘Should she ask him in?’ If he’s got anything to drink: Yes!”
When we reached the room, the telephone was ringing. Daisy answered it, speaking with some vehemence: “No: I don’t want to come—I’m tired, I’ve gone to bed—well, I went out to get something to eat.—No, I don’t want to come!”
She lay down upon the bed, propping her head on the pillow and crossing her feet: she was wearing lizard-skin shoes, light brown and very small, but quite different-looking, I reflected, from any shoes that Rita wore: Rita’s feet, like everything about her, seemed to manage to be attractive in a curious personal way quite apart from current fashions of prettiness, whereas Daisy’s feet were pretty in an almost perfect ideal way, like the small feet of the girls with slim ankles in the drawings in magazines.
“Well,” yawned Daisy, “this is where Mother takes a long refreshing rest!” I handed her her gin and gingerale and sat down beside her, drinking mine. “But I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to,” she added, after a moment. “That’s why I want to drink.”
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Are you worried?” “No,” she replied. “I’ve just got the heeby-jeebies!” “What’s the matter?” “I think everybody’s a twirp!” “Are you in love?” “No: that’s the trouble.” “You ought to be glad you’re not,” I said. “You have been, haven’t you?” she asked. “Yes.” “You still are, aren’t you?” “No.” I answered—“not any more.” She was trying to kick off her shoes without unbuttoning the straps, and I undid them and lifted them off. “Thanks,” she said. “As soon as I lie down, I’m dead!”
I held her firm little insteps for a moment in my hands: in pale stockings, her tired and sweaty feet were like two little moist cream cheeses encased in covers of cloth. Her body, which seemed now so slight in its pale blue dress, lay as limp as a lettuce leaf soaked by the summer rain.
“No,” I said. “You oughtn’t to be sorry if you’re not in love.” “I know: that’s what I keep saying to myself when I think what damn fools people make of themselves. But sometimes you feel the old aching in the armpits—and it’s not just because you want to sleep with somebody either.—You know the real reason why I asked you to come up here? It was because I knew it would give me the willies to come back alone. As soon as I get alone, everything seems so empty—I begin to get panicky. Of course, it’s just the heeby-jeebies, though—after I’ve had a good night’s sleep, I’ll be all right again.”
A deep tenderness of sympathy seemed to flush my very mind, and I almost felt she must feel its warmth as it brimmed from my soul and bathed her. I put one arm about her shoulders and with the other hand covered her breast—it was low and lapsed a little—Rita, for all her small head, her small hands and feet, had had the bosom of some divine being—and from Ray Coleman’s gesture at the party, when he had put his arms about Daisy, and from McIlvaine’s plump little Venus, I had been imagining Daisy’s breasts as little firm globes. I kissed her on the neck—which was round and short and had no sculptural contours like Rita’s—and she kissed me back on the cheek. It was like the kiss of a little girl, some cousin or playmate from next door, whom, at ten, one decides to marry, and the relief of that human kiss, that embrace of simple comradeship, soothed the strain with which my spirit, with which my body itself, had ached.
I stretched myself beside her. If I had ever had any idea—playing the part I had learned from Rita—of making love to Daisy that night, I knew now that it had never been real, I could not now even conceive it—it was so long since I had heard the boats as they moaned from the harbor in Twelfth Street, and the thought of them no longer moved me, yet to try to love another woman on the day one had parted from Rita! … And there began to take music in my weary, in my half-drunken mind the falling rhythm of a poem, the beginning of a sonnet of which, the night before in my wakefulness, I had with obstinacy fixed in their target the accurate shafts of the end. It took the form of an answer to Daisy, and I found now that what had then been unbearable, because written of myself for myself, now that I could write from the point of departure of another’s fate than mine, now that I could dramatize my fate for another—dignifying, or rather creating, for another person’s mind—another’s mind which I merely imagined, since Daisy, it seemed, hated poetry—a romance which should somehow console me for the wreck and defilement of romance—now I could bear to return to the poem, and to the pain which had stamped its images, putting another between them and me—“Ah, never sigh for love, for love is death!” …
She was asleep—I could hear her breath: it seemed so slight to supply the fuel for that warm body I felt against my arm, that engine of activity and desire. I turned off the electric light, covered Daisy over with a blanket, and lay down myself on the couch—and with the silence of the mind, love was still.
I HAD MADE A DINNER ENGAGEMENT with Daisy for the next evening but one after the night when I had taken her to the movies; but the sudden death of one of my aunts, who had for many years lived with my mother, prevented my keeping it. I was obliged to go down to the country, and for several weeks I commuted between my mother’s house and my work. Sustained by the vision of Rita renouncing the vanities of passion and dedicated in solitude to her tragic play, I applied myself to reading Sophocles, who at college had rather bored me, but of whom I had so often heard it said that he saw life steadily and saw it whole that I wondered whether, in my present situation, I might not perhaps benefit by his wisdom. Rather, however, than risk a first evening alone in my Bank Street apartment, where for so long I had seen no one but Rita, I had asked Daisy to have dinner with me the night of my return to town.
After dropping my suitcase in the darkened sitting-room, with its drawn blinds and its frigid radiator, I felt for a moment, with a shudder, the shock of that current of emotion which I had hoped had been forever disconnected when Rita had moved out of Twelfth Street, but which I now found that my own possessions, themselves saturated with Rita, had also the power of conducting. At the sight of the couch, the Leonardo (which Rita had admired), the Pernod peach brandy bottle on the little marble mantelpiece (I had kept it there ever since the night when Rita had spoken of the label)—my heart sank as it had done in Twelfth Street the day when I had heard the boat-whistles. But I resolutely thought of Daisy—and as gaily as I had ever done, it seemed to me, I took my bath, changed my clothes, picked out an appropriate tie. I threw away the peach-brandy bottle, which the last time I had looked at it on the mantel on the occasion of a ghastly scene with Rita, I had had a violent impulse to smash as an outlet for my exacerbated passion. The bottle fell into the wastebasket with a thud which astounded and routed my nerves. I was throwing in, as if to cover and conceal it, all the circulars which had accumulated during my absence when, on the tightened silence of the room, the telephone suddenly blazed.
It was somebody speaking for Daisy; I was to meet her now, not at Gus Dunbar’s, but somewhere else—I couldn’t make out where: the voice—it was a man’s—kept instructing me just to walk right in and ask for Mr. Somebody’s—he was at once so indistinct and so admirably polite that I concluded he must be drunk. I asked if I could speak to Daisy, and her voice was presently heard through the receiver—she seemed far away, facetious and vague. I tried to find out whether the place I was to go to were a speakeasy or a private apartment—but she only answered, “Yes,” and laughed, and then insisted that I should walk right in and go right up to Somebody-or-other’s. I begged her to spell out the name—and she began with loud-vibrating emphasis: “M for mother—I for ’ighball—C for seasick—K for—Oh, you know K!—L for laryngitis”—she began to laugh again, evidently at some suggestion from somebody else in the room. I tried to check up on the letters which I had already heard, but she broke in: “Just put them all together and they spell love!”—then, with no relation to my further questions: “Yes, ‘Mick’—just ask for Mick! All right!—hurry up! Good-bye!” She hung the receiver up. I had, however, got the address.
The taxi carried me far, too far—beyond Lexington Avenue—along East Thirty-fourth Street. The neighborhood seemed to me sordid. I had hoped to find Daisy all clean from her bath and with her lovely candid smile, as on the night when I had taken her to the movies. I had looked forward to watching her in the light of the little pink table lamp, over the white cloth and yellow wine of a brisk and bright French restaurant.
We drew up at a narrow entrance which the driver located with difficulty between a manufacturer of nasal syphons and a merchant of rebuilt typewriters. It was the meagerest pretence of a doorway: a layer of livid imitation marble, a length of blue-and-white rubber tiles. I looked above the bells in vain for a name which began with Mick; but then, in spite of the grimy little frames, there were not even any cards. I rang one of the nameless bells—but it awakened no responsive click, and I rang another.
A man was coming out of the hallway, and I asked him whether he knew of a Mr. Mickle. I looked into dim and evasive eyes. I was appalled to see that he had no chin, that his nose was an almost elephantine proboscis and that his ears stood out from his head like those of an elephant listening; he wore an old shabby overcoat and a curious gray felt hat, which tended to be conical; his hands were non-prehensile, and trembled. He shook his head without a word, in answer to my question—and passed on like an apparition. I thought: He must live alone!—he must have lived alone for so long that he is numb and can no longer feel loneliness, can no longer feel even irritation at strangers who are looking for friends and who hurriedly break in on his solitude. And I resented such an existence, solitary, uncouth and dismal, resigned to drop out of the world, hoping only to be noticed by no one; and I was repelled by his strange trunk-like snout: my own nose, I feared, was rather bulbous, and, as I mounted the narrow staircase, it seemed to me more bulbous yet.
The stairs turned above the typewriter shop, and I was confronted by the cramped and crowded doors of cheap dentists and real estate offices. I explored the corridor, and found another staircase, and climbed to another and darker hall, where there were no longer, as below, any names painted on the doors. That was evidently where people lived. It was as if the occupants had made their homes in the chinks left by petty business; they seemed as narrowly confined, as discouragingly inaccessible, as the inhabitants of a jail—and they lacked even that common bond, that limited intercommunication; each had stowed himself dumbly away at the bottom of his little slot, in oblivion of the others; each asked only to be let alone at the end of the herded day—behind the locked and anonymous door, presenting a blank to all the rest, as they presented blanks to him.
At random, I rang a bell—and, as if in confutation of my vision of benumbed and sullen recluses, after shuffling precipitate noises within, the door was suddenly flung open and there appeared a lady with bright dyed red hair and a lacy dowdy dressing-gown who, at the barest suggestion of a name which began with M-i-c-k, seemed transported by enthusiasm. Yes: they lived just across the hall—just opposite her own apartment. “Yes: they’re just in now,” she ran on, slopping over with friendly helpfulness and with a simpering ladylike smile. “If you’d come a little later, I don’t think you’d have found them home, because they most always go out to dinner about seven o’clock!” She eagerly crossed the hall in her voluminous négligé and rang the bell herself. I thanked her, but she did not withdraw. She waited, repeating herself and beaming. I thought her a little insane—from loneliness, I supposed.
Someone was hastening from the depths within. Then Pete Bird opened the door and confronted me with a goggling stare. The red-haired woman still lingered in the hall as if she hoped for a little general conversation, but Pete Bird merely asked me in, and shut the door behind us.
We passed through a little dark hallway and emerged into a narrow sitting-room. I saw Daisy in a morris chair with her legs dangling over one arm and her back against the other. She greeted me with an odd unsmiling gaze. And, still charmed by the memory of her paleness when she had lain along the bed like a moonbeam the night that I had taken her to the movies, I was horrified to find her now with touzled muddy hair and a sallow puffy visage, in which the nose was an ignoble little knob, blobbed in candle wax, and the eyes were two protruding gooseberries, scored about with discolored skin. She was wearing a greenish-blackish plaid. I took her hand: it was a cold little claw.
I remarked that she looked quite different, that having her hair done differently had transformed her. I saw now that the ragged effect had originally been intentional. She said: “Yes, and I suppose you’re going to tell me that it looks terrible, too.” “You look like a French whore!” said Pete. “Well, you know what you look like?” said Daisy. “You look like some kind of a goblin that’s been drowned at the bottom of a well!” And it was true: with his gargoyle gaze, his haggard greenish cheeks, the deep furrows in his forehead and the ape-like lines to his wide mouth, he had an aspect half immature and half prematurely old, at once aghast and disaffected. There seemed to have occurred, since I had talked to them on the telephone, some abysmal lapse of hilarity. Yet Pete Bird’s double-breasted jacket, his spats, the handkerchief sticking out of his pocket, and the collar of his blue shirt fastened together by a small gold pin, gave to his appearance and to the whole situation an odd indestructible note of urbanity.
In that atmosphere clouded by drunkenness, I glanced instinctively about for a drink, and saw nothing but empty bottles and debris of the enormous thick crusts of delicatessen sandwiches, with the oiled paper in which they had been wrapped. “There’s nothing to drink,” declared Daisy with what I thought was a note of asperity. “What is this place?” I asked. “Listen to-um!” said Daisy indignantly. “He expects us to tend bar for-um!”
“No,” I explained, “I just meant, who lives here?” “It belongs to Larry Mickler,” she replied, as if she had already, over the telephone, made all this quite clear enough. “Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence Mickler,” said Pete, with the invincible gentlemanly instinct to be informative and agreeable from his grave at the bottom of the well.
I inquired where the host and hostess were. “Well,” said Pete, as if his own extinction, though powerless to impair his politeness, had rendered him uncannily detached toward the catastrophic fates of others, “Mr. Mickler’s in the bathroom, probably unconscious, and Mrs. Mickler’s in the bedroom, sore as a crab.” “I insulted the hostess,” said Daisy. “Well, anyway,” concluded Pete, “that leaves the drawing-room to us!”
The “drawing-room,” like everything else in that place, cooped one up and made one uncomfortable. I saw, at the other end, a contracted fireplace, like a large square-cornered rat-hole, with above it, on the shallow mantelpiece, a plaster cast of the Winged Victory; and between two narrow windows, which looked down on the Thirty-fourth Street car tracks, a book case containing, I noted, volumes of D. H. Lawrence, Cabell, Dunsany, and Shaw; George Moore’s Memoirs of My Dead Life; Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams; Frank Harris’s Oscar Wilde; several volumes of Levy’s Nietzsche and a whole shelf’s array of Dostoevsky.
“Come on,” exclaimed Daisy abruptly, swinging out of the morris chair. “Let’s get out of here right away!” I asked her where she wanted to dine, in the hope that we might now be able to effect a separation from Pete. “I don’t want any dinner!” she replied, as if nothing could have seemed more revolting. “I’ve just had some sandwiches. What I want is a dirty big drink!”
“I’d better say good-bye to Larry,” suggested Pete Bird. “I wouldn’t say good-bye to-um,” said Daisy, “after the way he acted with us.”
Pete went into the little corridor and knocked on the bathroom door. “We had a fight,” Daisy explained. “We would have left before, if we hadn’t been waiting for you. Larry sent Pete to the delicatessen’s to get some sandwiches for supper and gave him a ten-dollar bill—and Pete brought back six sandwiches and Larry didn’t think that Pete had given-um back enough change and accused Pete of keeping the money—when they’d actually cost that much!” We could hear the voice of Pete in the bathroom, pleading with the host on a tone of gentlemanly reasonableness. I asked how the Frolics were going. “Oh, I got canned!” she replied, sullenly and shortly. “I stayed away from too many rehearsals.”
Pete returned with Larry Mickler. He was a young man with dingy skin, a round head and a small dark mustache, very smartly and cockily waxed: he bent forward from the waist when he shook hands with me, and I took an almost immediate dislike to him. He was taller than Pete Bird, but not so tall as I.
Pete was urging Larry Mickler to come out with us, and I seconded him insincerely. “Get Alice out,” Pete insisted, “and make her come along, too!” “Oh, she’s tired,” Larry Mickler perfunctorily assured him—“she doesn’t want to come!”
“I’m not out for any looping,” said Daisy, with what I thought—with what I hoped—was an intention of discouraging this idea. “I think I’ll go home and go to bed.” “You’re not going home yet, little woman,” Pete asserted, with a firm, though humorous, accent of masculine domination. “You’re not going home to bed till you’ve had a little insomnia medicine, a little touch of the magic elixir that causes the lame to see and the tongue-tied to run like rabbits! The old miracle-scattering scamper-juice! Am I right?” he appealed to me.
“Let’s go to Tony Scallopino’s,” suggested Larry Mickler. “Let’s not!” said Daisy promptly. “You see,” Pete Bird explained, with dignity, irony and ease, “Tony raised a check of mine once and I’ve never felt quite the same about him since.” I proposed Harry Heinz’s. “Well, Harry Heinz and I are not quite the best of friends either,” Pete casually replied. “In my opinion, a restaurant is a place where the patrons are supposed to drink while the man who runs the place stays sober. When the guests have to take care of the proprietor and put him under the pump, I consider that the time has arrived to seek recreation elsewhere!”
“Let’s go to Sue Borglum’s!” said Daisy, with a sudden inspiration. “Tonight is Thursday night, and she has a party every Thursday. I saw her the other day and I promised that I’d come.—Oh, I’m so glad I thought of that!” she added, smiling for the first time. “I want to see Sue Borglum!”
“All right: Sue Borglum’s it is!” Pete approved, with rollicking decisiveness. “Come: snap into your coats, ladies and gents! Let’s be off to some place where there’s stimulants!”
I helped Daisy on with her coat, and as I caught a momentary glimpse of her pale watery-yolked poached eyes, it seemed to me—(Rita and I had read some scientific books together: the vision of human futility which she derived from scientific ideas exercised upon her a strong fascination, and threw her back with an exacerbated appetite on the gratification of the moment—and tonight it was these scientific images which rose to my own imagination at the expense of both Sophocles and Rita’s poems themselves)—it seemed to me as if the Daisy whose profile had appeared to me in the theater, so fragile, pale and chaste, whom almost with the tenderness of tears I had covered with a blanket in Forty-fourth Street—as if that Daisy had been merely the spray of which I had happened to catch a glimpse for a moment on a wave of common human colloids, the unstable fluids of the body, continually gluing and ungluing—or a cloud which had for a moment taken symmetry from those atoms of carbon and the other things, but which tonight had been blown awry. I turned Daisy’s collar down carefully.
Larry Mickler had been getting into his coat, a garish rust-red ulster, and Pete Bird had been helping him on with it. Now Mickler pulled up his collar, which completely covered his ears, and slapped on a rakish felt hat, pulling the brim down over his eyes.
“You know that damn statue annoys me!”—he indicated the Winged Victory: I saw that he was drunk. “Alice’s had that goddamn thing ever since we were married: she acquired it at college. It always reminds me of a chicken running around with its head cut off!”
He produced a revolver from his pocket and, almost before we saw it, had fired point-blank at the little plaster statue. It fell from the mantel and lay shattered in chalky fragments and flakes.
“Well,” said Mickler, “so much for Nikky! Alice may miss her at first, but I’m sure it’ll be a splendid thing for her to have to get along without her.—I feel almost,” he added, grinning at us, “as if I’d committed a murder, though! ‘Ad Writer Slays Phi Beta Kappa Girl!’—Well, let’s go! The neighbors may be coming in to find out who’s been shot!”
He turned to me, grinning, and explained, as if in friendly humorous confidence: “No disrespect to the Greeks! I’m a Dionysian myself!—sometimes a Dionysian and sometimes an Apollonian!—it all depends on metabolism!” He began to sing, parodying the popular song:
“Sometimes I’m Dionysian!—Sometimes I’m Apollonian! My disposition depends on metabolism!”
Then, finding me a little unresponsive, he changed his tone and addressed me more earnestly: “I just wanted you to know,” he insisted, “that I don’t mean any disrespect to the Greeks. The Greeks knew what it was all about: they danced with arms and legs—but we lock ourselves up in the bathroom because we’re afraid to face life!”
“Say, listen,” declared Daisy, “if you’re going to go out with us, you’ve got to leave that thing behind! I can face life without it.” “Take it along to protect you!” said Mickler. “Never know who’s going to stick you up nowadays!” “Don’t be a fool,” said Daisy. “I won’t, sweetheart,” he retorted. “Never you worry about that!”
“I’m going to say good-bye to Alice!” said Daisy, as if with a sudden resurgence of sympathy. She went out into the little hallway and knocked at the bedroom door, but there was no reply. “Oh, she’s all right!” insisted Larry Mickler. “She probably thinks I’ve shot myself—let her enjoy a few minutes’ happiness!” Pete and Mickler put their arms around Daisy, propelled her along the little hallway and pushed her out through the apartment door.
Outside, we found the lady in the dressing-gown, who giggled ingratiatingly: “I thought I heard a shot.” “I was just shooting a cat,” said Larry Mickler. “It was keeping my wife awake!”
I finally, standing in the slush, succeeded in capturing a taxi. It couldn’t draw up to the curb, and Daisy got her feet wet. She seemed worried and morose.
“That old hag’ll lie awake all night,” remarked Larry Mickler, with a chuckle, “thinking that I’ve killed Alice!” “Well,” said Pete, “it will doubtless afford her a great deal of entertainment. I’m sure her life is far too tame!” “Yes,” said Mickler, “how they lick their chops in vicarious enjoyment over other people’s murders! How all the world loves a murderer!” “It would take more than that,” said Daisy, “to make me love you!”
“I hear,” said Larry Mickler, changing the subject and evidently attempting to talk more soberly—“I hear that Bobby McIlvaine has given Sue Borglum the air. Is that true?” he inquired of Daisy. “Guess so,” said Daisy. “I don’t know.” “I guess he decided that she’d done all she could for him,” Larry Mickler continued, “and that it was time to move farther uptown!” Sue Borglum, who knew everyone more or less, had taken Bobby McIlvaine up soon after the night that I had met them at Ray Coleman’s, and had done much to smooth his way among the managers and the dramatists. I remarked that I considered Bobby McIlvaine a very gifted fellow, none the less, and that I admired his designs for Homer. “Yes,” said Mickler, “but why not make designs for Wells’s Outline of History? Why not try to produce the World Almanac?—Bobby McIlvaine’s all right on paper, but did you ever see a show that he’d staged that was worth its space in the storehouse? Look at April Showers, for instance. Fritz Fishbein, Al Leiper’s publicity man, blames Bobby for the show being a flop. It seems that Bobby insisted on putting in a trick ballet, where the chorus had to wear papier mâché bodies. Al Leiper wanted to throw it out at dress rehearsal, because the papier mâché bodies took up too much room behind—they could hardly change the scenery. But Bobby hit on the brilliant idea of sending them downstairs in an elevator—it seems they use elevators in Berlin. The first night, the elevator got stuck just before the second act and they couldn’t ring the curtain up—they had to hold it twenty minutes. Finally, Al Leiper sent some stagehands down with great big mallets and zongo! zongo! zongo!—they just smashed in the elevator doors and threw all the papier mâché bodies out in the alley—and then, when that was full, they threw them into Beattie’s drugstore. There were all those popeyed dummies which Bobby had been working on for God knows how long lying around Beattie’s—though I don’t suppose you could have told them from the customers!—What a civilization, eh?” he turned again to me. “Bring slavery back, I say—it never should have been abolished! Bring slavery back and make nine-tenths of the people slaves! Then the superior man would be free to live life like it ought to be lived! As it is, the civilized man has got to black the peasant’s boots!”
We had come to the end of Fifth Avenue, and Daisy, sliding back the glass panel that opened in the front of the cab, directed the driver to turn to the right.
Among those tangled irregular streets to the west of Washington Square, I caught occasionally, from the taxi, a glimpse, almost eighteenth century, of a lampless black-windowed street-end where the street urchins, shrieking in the silence, were stacking up bonfires in the snow—those lost corners of the old provincial city, where the traffic of the upper metropolis no longer gnashed iron teeth, no longer oppressed the pavements with its grindings and its groans—where those soft moans and hoots of the shipping washed the island from the western shore. There they had come, those heroes of my youth, the artists and the prophets of the Village, from the American factories and farms, from the farthest towns and prairies—there they had found it possible to leave behind them the constraints and self-consciousness of their homes, the shame of not making money—there they had lived with their own imaginations and followed their own thought. I did not know that, with the coming of a second race, of which Ray Coleman, without my divining it, had already appeared as one of the forerunners—a mere miscellaneous hiving of New Yorkers like those in any other part of town, with no leisure and no beliefs—I did not know that I was soon to see the whole quarter fall a victim to the landlords and the real estate speculators, who would raise the rents and wreck the old houses—till the sooty peeling fronts of the south side of Washington Square, to whose mysterious studios, when I had first come to live in the Village, I had so much longed some day to be admitted, should be replaced by fresh arty pinks—till the very guardian façades of the north side should be gutted of their ancient grandeurs and crammed tight with economized cells—till the very configuration of the streets should be wiped out, during a few summer months when I had been out of New York on vacation, by the obliteration of whole blocks, whole familiar neighborhoods—and till finally the beauty of the Square, the pattern of the park and the arch, the proportions of everything, should be spoiled by the first peaks of a mountain range of modern apartment houses (with electric refrigerators, uniformed elevator boys and, on the street level, those smartly furnished restaurants in which Hugo was soon to be horrified at finding copies of Town and Country), dominating and crushing the Village, so that at last it seemed to survive as a base for those gigantic featureless mounds, swollen, clumsy, blunt, bleaching dismally with sandy yellow walls that sunlight which once, in the autumn, on the old fronts of the northern side, still the masters of their open plaza—when the shadows of the leafless trees seemed to drift across them like clouds—had warmed their roses to red.
Sue Borglum, at any rate, at the time of which I am writing, had rented the whole of a large old house (of which she sublet the top floor and the basement) in one of the oldest obscurest streets, where the children, deserting their bonfire, came clamoring to open our door, and where the lights and sounds of the party seemed incongruously bright and loud amid the darkness and silence around. There were dark double ogival outer doors and, inside them, another pair of doors, with a design in frosted glass of sphinx-heads and vine-leaf scrolleries.
We pulled a bell, and a Jap let us in. Sue Borglum rushed up boisterously to greet us: she seemed high-keyed and overwrought, and embraced Daisy with cries of “Darling!” In her blatant green evening gown, with a rhinestone aigrette in her hair and on her fingers a large scarab and some diamonds, she seemed to me uglier than ever. Her cheeks were beginning to hang in jowls, her wide mouth was a grotesque gash of lipstick, and the pouches under her eyes were as distinctly shaded off from her cheeks as if they had been drawn by a caricaturist. Behind her, rose the hubbub of the party: the hallway and the rooms were full of people.
We had started upstairs to put our things away when Sue Borglum, gesticulating frantically toward a water cooler in the hall near the staircase, shouted after us: “Cocktails!—Cocktails!—That water cooler’s full of cocktails.—Yes! Isn’t it a grand idea?”
Pete and Daisy came down first, and Sue had already swept them off by the time Larry Mickler and I arrived at the foot of the stairs. We stopped at the water cooler and drew our drinks. Larry Mickler swallowed his at a gulp. “That little bastard, Pete Bird!” he complained. “I gave him ten dollars at my house to get some sandwiches for supper and what do you think he did? He went out and got liverwurst—the cheapest kind there is!—and then had the Christ-Almighty nerve to bring me back four dollars change—six dollars for six sandwiches!” I asked whether he thought that Daisy was pretty fond of Pete. “She hasn’t got the capacity for love,” he replied, shaking his head with a sneer and turning the spigot for another cocktail. “But they’re two of a kind—out for what they can do you for! She’s a cold little proposition that calculates every kiss—and he owes money or he’s passed bad checks in every joint below Fourteenth Street. It’s wonderful how he’s able to get away with it even where they’re cagy! He’s got this soft-spoken wide-eyed way with him.—Well, he can have her!”
We moved on to the door of the front room. Sue Borglum’s front room was spacious and not without a certain grandeur. I could see, above a marble fireplace, the wide sheet of a gilt-framed mirror, which doubled the high white moldings and the somber maroon wallpaper.—Such a house as I had once imagined for Rita and myself to live in! Ah, I should have asked nothing better of life than to have fitted up such a house, to have passed my days alone with Rita in those high quiet rooms, hidden away among those crooked streets, with poetry and love!—But these fancies now seemed to me naïve, and I was ashamed of ever having had them. I stoically dismissed them from my mind, and could still, I found, feel hope and excitement in the variety and gaiety of the Village, so densely intermingling, so vivaciously chattering about me: the Italian and Russian painters; the intelligent amateur actors; the mad baroness who kept a restaurant; the radical journalists and agitators, who, despite the homely forthright style of their writings, not infrequently turned out, when one met them, engagingly shy young men of a personal charm almost cloying; the pretty Jewesses with thick red lips and glossy black bobbed hair; the austere and handsome woman managers of theaters and magazines, with their dignity of Mother Superiors; and the megalomaniac lunatics whom it was the thing rather to like.
Larry Mickler and I, in the doorway, did not at first encounter anyone we knew. “Well,” said Mickler, lifting his cocktail, “here’s to the Seven Deadly Sins! May they never perish from the earth!—Let’s drink to the memory of Dostoevsky—the only goddam genius,” he added, “who ever understood the human soul!” I drank with him to Dostoevsky. “The Seven Deadly Sins!” said Larry Mickler scornfully. “What chance have they got today when everybody wears these horn-rimmed glasses!”
I wondered whether it might not be true that a novelist like Dostoevsky was greater than any lyric poet, even so great a one as Rita—but suppose the play on which Rita was working should turn out to reveal wider gifts?—And, stimulated by my cocktail, I asked myself whether, in spite of everything, I shouldn’t go to see her again, when she eventually came back from her aunt’s: I had behaved so horribly when we had parted, and we had exchanged no letters since she left.
A man who had been leaning over the back of a couch that faced the marble fireplace moved away and let me see the head and neck of a woman who was sitting on the couch and whose bobbed and coppery hair reminded me of Rita’s. What a comfort that it could not be she! Then the woman, turning her head with a staccato birdlike movement, in some gay interchange with the man sitting next to her, revealed her profile and I saw that it was Rita. I could see also that the man was Ray Coleman.
My companion recognized him at the same time: “There’s Ray Coleman over there!” he exclaimed. “He’s just got a new job on the Record!” Larry Mickler made his way across the room. I followed him, and spoke to Rita over the back of the couch, taking care to betray no surprise.
“How long have you been back?” I inquired. “Since last Friday—last Friday night,” she replied, as if by frankness and accuracy to fend off my disapproval.
I asked about her aunt. “She’s much better,” she assured me, smoothing out the creases of her smile and making her eyes, which looked to me now like little hard green pebbles of glass, serious and blank. “The doctor said that she was simply tired out, that all she needed was to rest. My mother is still up there with her.—Do come around and sit down!” I sat down, not beside her on the couch, but on a stool at one side of the fireplace.
“You know, I was thinking about you,” she said, “just before I left!” “What made you do that?” I asked. “I went wading in Stony River one day—in the cold, and everything!—and I thought about you then—because you liked the poem, you know!—You know, it was freezing cold: I almost froze my feet off—but somehow I wanted to do it!”
I asked how she’d got on with her play. She dropped her eyes, which had girlishly puckered over her wading in Stony River: “Well, I haven’t actually written very much, but I’ve thought about it a lot. I know just what I want to write—I’ve got it all blocked out, you know!” And sustained by this triumphant phrase, she lifted earnest eyes to mine.
I said that she looked awfully well—and it was true: she had already been flushed by the excitement of conversation, and when I spoke to her, she had flushed more deeply, so that she burned like a little furnace, as she had done that first night in Bank Street when she and I talked about poetry. She had brought back from the country a complexion refreshed from the tarnish of the city, and the contours of her face had filled out again: again she could challenge the world from the tower of her lovely throat, which gave to her little figure a dignity almost extra-human, like the dignity of a great work of art. “And I feel so well,” she replied. “I went tramping and sleighing and skating! I did all the things that I hadn’t done since I was a little girl! And I tell you, I went wading!—you don’t seem impressed by that, but I assure you it was no tame experience: the water was so cold that it burned! The snow is still on the ground up there, two feet deep—the river banks were all crusted with ice—in some places there were little fragile translucent ledges of ice that came out over the water—just like blades of swords made of ice! You know, I’m going to have a sword that’s made of ice in my play—don’t you think that’s a wonderful idea?” “I should think it would break off easily.” “Not if it was sharp enough!” “Perhaps not.” “Mine will be!” she held her own, grinning briefly. “Well, anyway, I went wading—and it was so thrilling! You haven’t any idea how beautiful a river is in winter till you get right out in the middle of it and see the water still alive like quicksilver in the midst of the dead frozen landscape—running away between the wicked jagged edges! It’s as if the tighter other things froze, the faster the river ran—like a live vein in a paralyzed body!”
Her feeling for Stony River, which had once so completely enchanted me, now irritated me profoundly. I could see plainly in imagination some tall young country boy, panting with desire and only too happy to accompany her on her uncomfortable escapade. He would have carried her, of course, over the bad spots—would, in fact, probably have carried her most of the time—he had ended no doubt by chafing her feet.
“It must have been wonderful.” I turned away to listen to Ray Coleman. Lina Lemberg, the young Polish girl who had been convicted of murdering her husband, had just been sentenced to death; and Ray was describing with enthusiasm how he had pursued the car which was taking her to Sing Sing, and had succeeded in having her photographed from the taxi. (He had just left the Telegram-Dispatch for the city desk of the Daily Record, the most important of the new tabloids.) “I see,” said Larry Mickler, showing small white even teeth, “that she says she wishes Nicky were back with her.” “She’s going to get half her wish,” said Ray—“She’s going to get it fifty-fifty: she’s not going to get Nicky back, but she’s going to go to join him!” Larry Mickler laughed with loud appreciation. “Well,” he remarked, “the murderer has his fun, and he ought to be willing to pay for it! True, he has to pay dearer than most people—but then he has more fun!”
Ray presented Larry Mickler to Rita. He did so with obvious pride—with, it seemed to my jealous eye, something akin to an air of proprietorship. She invited Larry Mickler to sit down, and he took the place on her other side. Ray Coleman inquired affably how Mickler’s own work was going. “It’s just the same old hick-diddling game!” he replied, leaning forward, his hands clasped between his knees. “We still manage to land the suckers!” I thought that he was ashamed of the advertizing business, and was being contemptuous about it for Rita’s benefit. “Our latest masterpiece was putting over Marona—‘Makes the Mouth Safe for Teeth!’ was a product of our fly-paper factory.” “You don’t say!” Ray Coleman exclaimed, raising his almost continuous eyebrows, as if this feat commanded respect. “Is that so?” “You know what it’s made of, don’t you?” “No,” admitted Ray Coleman, “what?” “Horse chestnuts! Nothing but horse chestnuts! Just nothing in the world but plain old buckeyes! Can you beat it? A million and a half people every morning, sitting down to a breakfast of buckeyes, with sugar and cream!” “Don’t you do anything to them?” asked Ray. “Not a blessed thing!—just chop ’em up. We’ve struck such terror into the hearts of the boobs by telling them that ordinary food was soft and ruined their teeth, and that in a few more generations the human race would be toothless, that now there are a million and a half people breaking their jaws every morning over horse chestnuts! ‘Makes the Mouth Safe for Teeth’—they find it irresistible!”
“Say,” said Coleman, humorously, “isn’t it about time that the Osage orange got a break?” “You might sell them for their perfume,” said Rita. “They have a marvelous smell, you know!” “By Jove, that’s a good idea!” said Coleman. “You might have all the women carrying them around!” I doubted whether on ordinary occasions he would have considered this a particularly good idea—it seemed to me all too plain that he had fallen under the spell of Rita and that he thought only of playing up to her. I remembered the night when I had first met them and when Rita had agreed with me that Ray was poisonous. “They’d be a little heavy, I’m afraid, to carry around,” said Rita. “And they wouldn’t be becoming to many people. I might wear one, though—a very little one—on account of the color of my eyes!”
She was gay, and seemed to me so pleased with herself, so sufficient to herself, so remote from me; and I reflected that, while she had been speaking, I had been aware, for the first time since the earliest days of our acquaintance, of her acquired British accent. Not that she always spoke in this way: she had the accent in which she recited her poems and the accent of the Village gamin—nor did she hesitate to bite down on a hard upcountry r, when some special situation—a sundae at the soda fountain or a hammock on a porch—had suggested to her versatile spirit the role of a girl in a small town; but, coming in contact with English actresses during the days when she had been on the stage, her natural disposition toward brittleness and briskness had found their accent a congenial modification, and it was this accent which usually predominated on occasions when she was meeting strangers. Yet how many times since that first night I must have heard her drop into this manner, without ever having been aware of it! And I was sharply forced to take account of the distance between the present and the days when I had first known Rita. Then, I had been in love—and that was what it meant to be in love: so to surround, so to devour, another human being with tenderness, passion, admiration, that their very absurdities and perversities were fused with the rest in the furnace till there was nothing but a white molten glow—till one resented, not merely the hostility, but even the critical detachment of others, because the point of view of a critic was unimaginable from one’s own. But that critical detachment, today it was I who exercised it—and at the thought that I could now meet Rita with a mind which had become so cold that I could note her little affectations. I was now filled, not with the relief I had hoped for and in which I had tried to believe, but with a new kind of horror and fear. She had gone, the creature who had summoned my love—or whom my love itself had created, I hardly now knew which—the being who had commanded the allegiance of mind, imagination and desire—and could I never rejoin her again? Was it true that my love had been destroyed? Could I never retrace my way? Could I never get back across that chasm?
“I declare,” Larry Mickler was saying, “I don’t know where a civilized man can find more hilarious entertainment than in the advertizing game. You’d never believe what the boobs will consume till you actually commence to feed ’em! You can make ’em do anything, buy anything! All you need is a gaudy picture and an idiotic phrase and you can make them do themselves an actual injury! Now, of course, in the case of Marona, for example, horse chestnuts are indigestible—they make the mouth safe for teeth but they ruin the digestion. But that doesn’t discourage the suckers for a minute. If they get sick, it would never occur to them to blame it on the Marona, because Marona, according to the ads, has been endorsed by eminent dentists. Nothing was said about stomach specialists. But then I suppose it’s a desirable thing to provide the peritonitis surgeons with work—they’re usually civilized fellows, the surgeons, and, if they prosper at the expense of the peasantry, that’s quite as it ought to be.—You must have a lot of fun yourself”—he addressed himself to Ray Coleman—“in the newspaper game.”
“Yes,” said Ray. “It’s amazing really. You can’t lay it on too thick—the more maudlin and preposterous it is, the better they seem to like it. Have you been reading Lina Lemberg’s confessions in the Record? They’re written by Ted Mahony in the office—you know Ted, a big husky Irishman who’s always half-stewed. You know that instalment where she tells about the birth of little Annie—well, when he read that aloud in the office just after he’d written it, the other day, he almost broke up the shop!”
I asked Rita where she was living. “Well, I’m not living anywhere exactly,” she answered. “I’ve just been visiting around.” She lifted her eyes quickly. “I’ll let you know when I’m settled.” “You must let me see your play when it’s finished,” I said.
“Don’t you think it’s going to be fine?” Ray Coleman demanded eagerly. “Have you heard about the idea?” I assured him that I had. He turned to Larry Mickler: “She’s got the swellest idea. It’s about this old woman who lives in a tower—”
Larry Mickler leaned forward to listen, with a polite appreciative leer; and Ray Coleman described Rita’s play with an enthusiasm even more emphatic than he had brought to his previous account of the photographing of Lina Lemberg. And it seemed to me that Rita herself was gratified by this enthusiasm.
It had already occurred to me that Coleman must be in love with Rita: everybody, more or less, was. But now, with horror, I remembered that, since Daisy had left him, he must be living alone in his apartment, and that Rita, when I had asked her where she was staying, had seemed evasive about her address. I watched Ray Coleman telling the plot of Rita’s play, and Rita herself, following intently and occasionally prompting or checking up—lifting her eyes briefly to smile or to put in a quick supplementary word when Larry Mickler expressed appreciation, and punctuating the pauses with whiffs at her cigarette.
I felt an urgent need to get away, and, looking up, I saw Hugo Bamman, standing alone like a heron, just back of Rita’s couch, his head thrust forward, his shoulders hunched up, his long arms hugged to his sides and his hands in his trousers pockets, staring out, as I supposed, half-blindly at the people moving about him.
I got up and went around to speak to him: I was glad of a pretext for leaving in the middle of Ray Coleman’s recital.
When Hugo turned at my greeting, I was astounded to find his appearance completely transformed. Instead of regarding me at first for a moment with dubious unrecognizing lenses, he fixed upon me a naked gaze of deep-sunken but piercing black eyes. I asked him what had become of his spectacles, and he explained that he had been going to a different oculist, who had discovered a revolutionary method of treating myopic vision. This oculist made his patients go without glasses and had them exercise the muscles of their eyes. Hugo’s father, to his dying hour, when he had lain sick in his Adirondack camp, had refused to summon a doctor; and Hugo himself was suspicious of doctors, as of all the respectable professions. But in this case, the doctor was himself a heretic and an outlaw; the fact that his methods had been denounced by all the other oculists was enough to convince Hugo of their value. The immediate effects of the treatment were in appearance certainly remarkable: Hugo had now unsheathed from behind his mild round blinders a darkly burning and eagle-like glance, beneath a steep and sharp-jutting brow which reminded me for the first time of his father’s.
And, despite my present scornful point of view toward Hugo’s political opinions, despite the fact that it was so many months since I had made any effort to look him up, I had never been so glad to see him. For one thing, without his glasses, he seemed to have become a more interesting person and a person with whom it was easier to communicate; but for another, I found it somehow a relief to be talking again with someone whom I had known before I had come to Greenwich Village. As there was no place to sit down where we were, and as the back room, where we found a large table with a punch bowl and sandwiches, was crowded even more densely, we made our way on through into the kitchen—which, by one of those freaks of old houses renovated and rented out for apartments, had been installed in a former hallway and was thus located between the dining-room and a bathroom (Sue Borglum had sublet the basement, where the original kitchen had been), so that, in the absence of any other hallway, it had become a thoroughfare for people passing back and forth between the two.
In the kitchen, I was surprised to find Pete Bird, who such a short time before had been displaying so invincible an élan, sitting alone, with his elbow on the sink and his hand propping up his head, his visage chopfallen and greenish almost with the mask of death, and his eyelids as if sealed.
Our entrance did not disturb him, and we perched on the drawers of a china cupboard on the other side of the long narrow room. I spoke to Hugo of a school-friend of ours who had just produced a successful play; and though Hugo’s friendly interest was largely superficial—since he disapproved on principle both of everything connected with his schooldays and of everything connected with Broadway success—I found an unexpected pleasure in returning thus for a moment to that world of our early years upon which we had both turned our backs, a world where, for all its limitations, the ordinary contacts of life had been easier and more agreeable than one usually found them in New York: that world had been conventional, but a common understanding had at least meant a mutual confidence. In the Village, I had felt less and less confidence in the people with whom I came in contact and, what was worse, since my difficulties with Rita, less confidence in myself. And I found now that—in spite of Hugo’s stern rejection of everything he had been taught in his youth—I was aware tonight mainly of his decency, his good manners, his cultivated intelligence. He had been the first of the boys I had known at school who had really interested me, and he had remained almost the only one.
I remembered now how, once in our school days, Hugo’s father had come to see him and had sat down on the bed and talked. I had heard something about Mr. Bamman and, although Hugo rarely spoke of him, I had always been conscious of him, in the background of Hugo’s life, as an important and formidable person. But Mr. Bamman, though his dignity was regal and his Olympian brow and beard almost those of the schoolroom Zeus, had turned out unexpectedly agreeable. He asked me questions about my studies and my reading quite as if I had been a grown-up person, and had listened to my opinions with a deference to which I was entirely unaccustomed. When he had learned that, in our English course, we had been studying Julius Caesar, he had embarked upon a discussion of Shakespeare very different from any that I had heard in my English classes. What especially impressed me was a certain respectful but urbane familiarity with which he dealt with that great name—as if Shakespeare were a man like himself, as if he were, in some sense, Shakespeare’s equal. He spoke of Shakespeare’s comprehension, in his English and Roman historical plays, of the eternal official and political types; to my surprise, he compared Benedict Arnold to Coriolanus; then in a manner both ironic and serious went on to speak of the Senate and the White House, as he had known them in his time. I had never heard anyone talk so before: it was as if the world of Benedict Arnold had for him the same sort of reality as the world of McKinley and Cleveland; and, what was more surprising still, as if Shakespeare belonged to the same world as the United States; as if he, John Ellison Bamman, belonged to the world of history and of literature, and as if he took it for granted that we, since he talked to us as equals, might hope to belong to it, too; as if, in fact, that world were our world! For the first time, I had had the sense of a reality—soon, at that age, to coagulate from what we see, what we read about, what we are told, and what we experience within ourselves—which finally supplies a connection between the private thoughts and emotions, and the names and legends, of youth.
I reminded Hugo now of this incident, and was going on to tell him of my great admiration for his father, when he broke in: “Yes, Shakespeare and Milton: he used to read them to us every night till I got so I hated them like poison! I never really got to like Shakespeare till I read him during the War—and I can’t stand Milton to this day! I dare say it’s not Milton’s fault: it’s probably simply due to the fact that Father and I antagonized each other so.”
This frankness on Hugo’s part surprised me: I had always found him rather reticent about both his family and himself. Whenever he had happened to mention his father since the days when we had been at school together, it had been always with affection and respect, and even sometimes as if with a sense of failure at not having lived up to his father’s standard. But now it was as if Hugo’s liberated gaze had been accompanied by some new freedom to express himself. I was sorry, however, and a little shocked, to hear that his relations with his father had been difficult, and I asked him what had been the matter.
“I don’t know exactly,” he replied, “but we never got along. He was pretty impossible at home, and I suppose I sided with Mother against him. He was nervous and hypochondriacal, and used to shut himself up for days in his room, and refuse to see anybody. Then he would suddenly appear in his dressing-gown and freeze us with wild prophetic looks and announce that the household was ‘hurtling to ruin!’ because he’d just gotten a caterer’s bill or something. He finally reduced the whole household to the state of a sanitarium—the doors were all muffled with felt, and he couldn’t stand to have a light burning or to hear a sound after he’d gone to bed himself. He was never rude or domineering about it, but he would nag us to go to bed in an insincerely amiable way that used to make me furious. Of course, he could be charming and sympathetic when any emergency or crisis arose, and he was able to embarrass us and disarm us so by having recourse to sympathy and charm just when we’d been resenting him at our sourest, that when it actually came to a showdown, we were never able to stand up to him. In any case, he had the effect on me of making me adopt the opposite opinion to whatever his opinion was. We used to have furious arguments about Socrates and Christ: I used to back Socrates. I must have been an unbearable little kid myself. I never really liked him or appreciated him until after he was dead. The trouble was, I suppose, that he’d identified the household with everything that was stodgy and deadly that he’d been coming to loathe more and more as the years went on.
“He’d had a sort of a crush on Adelina Patti, before he married Mother, and I think that somehow all his life, in spite of the fact that he enjoyed Washington for awhile, he was worried by the feeling that he’d really left the great world behind. I remember he got a phonograph record made by Adelina Patti just about the time she was passing out, and when he heard it, he flew into a rage and said it wasn’t like her at all, that it was outrageous to allow such a record to be sold—and then he shut himself up in his room and wrote at something or other for days.
“I think he’d really wanted to be an artist—he had a very fine voice, you know, and loved to sing—but the 1880’s got him—and then, when he found himself snowed under by American respectability, he tried to be a saint. Even before Mother died and he went to live in the Adirondacks, he wanted to carry us all away to the wilderness with him—but Mother wouldn’t let him.”
I had drawn Hugo out about his father with an interest all the more intent because I was trying to keep my mind closed to Rita; but Mr. Bamman and Adelina Patti had opened the fatal abyss, and as Hugo saw me becoming abstracted, he stopped talking and, looking around with eyes which could now see so much farther, he remarked that Pete Bird, who had not moved but was still posed against the sink, looked exactly like a waxwork. “Who is he, anyway?” I inquired. “What does he do?” “Why, I don’t think he does anything,” said Hugo. “He’s just a bum like another. He writes some rather nice little poems occasionally!”
“Yes,” said Pete, not opening his eyes, but speaking with perfect self-possession: “A bum like another—but a poet, nevertheless!” “Have you written anything lately?” asked Hugo, with one of those veritable hemorrhages of kindliness which, when he feared he had hurt someone’s feelings, often followed his bitterest strictures. “I thought that some of your things in Sedition were weally awfully nice!” “I’m not a poet!” said Pete Bird, still without opening his eyes. “Ask Giovanni Squarcialuppi!—ask Mike Kraus!—ask Miriam Fotherwell Finck!”
“You haven’t any manuscripts about you at this moment, have you?” inquired Hugo, who, despite his harsh and contemptuous judgments, had a secret sympathetic instinct for the vanities and aspirations of others. “I feel that I could read a little poetry. These parties seem to be getting less and less stimulating—Sue is getting to be more and more like a wegular Philadelphia hostess!”
Pete fumbled with one hand in his pocket, partially opening his eyes, but still supporting his head on his hand. He finally produced a cough drop: “Here’s a cough drop,” he announced, “if that would do just as well. Eases irritation, just like a poem. Of course, the cough drop’s a little bit fuzzy, but then the poems are a little bit lousy!” “I know,” said Hugo sympathetically, “when you try to find anything in your pocket, you always fish up cough drops and unpaid bills and things!” “Bills!” said Pete Bird. “They don’t even send me bills any more!—I’ve gotten long past that stage!—Here’s a villanelle,”—he said at length—“a little toy of a villanelle!—and here’s an experimental poem—an experiment in multiple metaphors—all of my metaphors are multiple—they have an infinite number of facets—like the eye of a fly!”
He handed the verses to Hugo: “You read them yourself,” he said—“My eyes are not very good tonight,” and lapsed back into immobility.
The poems were on creased and dog-eared paper, typed in very small type with rather a wavering touch, but, to my surprise, they had a certain charm, in a rose-petally snow-flaky way. I could not, to be sure, distinguish very much difference between the sonnets and villanelles, on the one hand, and the “experimental” poems on the other: Pete Bird’s “multiple metaphors” turned out to be quite easy and mild—his description, for example, of his mistress’s hands as “little surprising moonbeam violins.”
The door into the dining room opened, and Larry Mickler and Daisy appeared.
“Come on, yuh dope!” said Daisy to Pete Bird. “What d’ye thing yuh are, brooding around the kitchen?—a cockroach?” “Get away, yuh dumb cluck!” replied Pete, reluctantly opening his eyes, “and leave me to my meditations!”
“Let’s leave him to his slumbers,” said Larry Mickler, who was evidently drunker than ever. “The boyfriend’s passed out! Too many of those rich liverwurst sandwiches!”
“Come on, Mr. Zilch,” said Daisy, still addressing Pete. “The little woman wants to go home!” “Leave me alone for three minutes!” said Pete Bird,—“only three minutes!—and I’ll rejoin you in the drawing room!” Though he talked quietly and sensibly, he was evidently incapable of moving. “Well, all right,” she replied, with some sharpness. “But if you don’t make it pretty snappy, you’ll find me gone!”
“Come on back and let him have his sleep out,” Larry Mickler pressed her, pulling at her arm.
But Daisy, ignoring Mickler’s importunities as well as Pete’s mildly aggrieved remonstrances, turned to me: “Take me in,” she demanded, “and get me a drink and dance with me!” She had made up again since I had seen her: her eyebrows had been heavily penciled to an effect of moth’s antennæ and her mouth had been heavily rouged, so that her sallow and waxen complexion merely contributed a morbid paleness to an effect of provocative luridity; and as I found myself responding to her makeup, after my lapse of enthusiasm in the earlier evening, I reflected, with dismay rather than cynicism, upon the purely biological basis of the interest which we feel in women, simple animals like ourselves, produced upon a similar model, monotonous and banal, to which only the recurrent brimming over of accumulating spermatozoa imparts a recurrent attraction.
“Very good!” assented Larry Mickler, with a playfulness distinctly malignant. “Then I’ll just practice a little marksmanship!” He retreated to the end of the kitchen and, taking up a stand near the bathroom door, he aimed his revolver at a row of plates: “I wonder if I could pick those off in order!”
“Why don’t you break them with the butt of the gun?” asked Daisy. “This long range marksmanship of yours burns me up! You’ve already won the barbed wire garters for shooting plaster statues at two yards!”
“Listen, Pete,” insisted Larry Mickler, disregarding Daisy, “you go over to the far end of the room and throw up the plates one by one—and we’ll see how many I can pot—like clay pigeons!” “All right!” responded Pete, not moving or opening his eyes. “Oh, don’t be dull!” cried Daisy with disgust.
Sue Borglum burst in with the Jap butler, who produced, at her direction, from the icebox, a glass gallon container of cocktails. She threw an arm around Daisy’s shoulder, and exclaimed in a strained excited shriek which she seemed to have become incapable of moderating: “Oh, you dear child! You were an angel to come! Everybody’s deserted me! Bobby said he’d be here at ten, and it’s almost midnight now. I suppose he’s gone out with his little cutie. I don’t mind his keeping a girl—if he’d only get one that was intelligent, or attractive, or something!—but she’s just a dumb little wench out of the chorus—she can’t even dance!” “I think all chorus girls are dumb,” said Daisy. “I’ve just lost my job, that’s why.” “Stand ’em on their heads and they’re all alike!” said Pete Bird, without opening his eyes. Sue squawked with delighted laughter.
Larry Mickler, since Sue’s arrival, had been amusing himself at a distance by drawing his revolver on an imaginary foe: he would whip it out, declaring loudly: “I’ll teach those damn goldfish to snap at me!”—then leer humorously in our direction; but as nobody paid any attention to him, he finally came over to the group and poured himself a drink of Scotch from a bottle standing on the table. “No wonder there are so many holdups!” he contemptuously remarked to me. “These dubs that we live among are just asking to be knocked on the head and have their pennies taken away from them!” He proposed drinking to Dostoevsky. “We’ve done that already,” I said. “Let’s do it again,” he insisted, with a suggestion of becoming quarrelsome. “Drinking to Dostoevsky is always in order!” bubbled Hugo, with a tiresome recrudescence of his gushing undergraduate enthusiasm.
“Are you going to take me in to dance or aren’t you?” demanded Daisy, turning to me, as Sue Borglum plunged toward the bathroom to greet with effusion another guest who was just emerging from there and whom she seemed not previously to have seen.
Daisy and I left the kitchen together. As we went, Larry Mickler called after me: “So twice is too many times to drink to Dostoevsky, is it?” Pete Bird was still sitting as before, his eyelids dropped in their death-mask and his head propped upon his hand—which, I observed, now that I had read his verses, was finely articulated and long.
“Isn’t it wonderful,” Daisy observed, as we made our way through the dining room, “how clean Sue Borglum keeps her kitchen! Most kitchens would have an awful hangover after a party like this—but I bet hers will be neat as a pin!”
I avoided the large front room and led Daisy around by way of the hall, through a door that opened out of the dining room, to the room on the other side of the house where people were dancing to the phonograph.
Daisy danced well: she was light; and the responsive alacrity of her straight little legs walking backward in the fox-trot had the same prosaic charm as her speech.
“Say, just do me a favor,” she said. “Don’t leave me with Larry Mickler. If he tries to cut in on you, don’t lettum—I’ll just tellum, no soap!” I asked her what sort of fellow Larry Mickler was. “Oh, he’s just a fool,” she replied.
“I’m sorry about tonight,” she went on. “I wanted to have dinner with you, but a whole lot of things happened. I’m awfully sorry.” I told her that her touzled hoodlum haircut went beautifully with her plaid dress, and that the green in the plaid dress went beautifully with the green of her eyes. She said, “Yes, and the green of my eyes goes beautifully with the green of my complexion!”
I held her close. Her lips were slightly open, her eyes partly closed. I wondered whether she were really lapsing into a voluptuous languorous dream or whether she were merely very tired. It occurred to me, as I looked at Daisy’s fingers, pale, brittle-looking and thin, that her hands, which I had never considered among her prettiest features, might very well be the “little surprising moonbeam violins” of Pete Bird’s multiple metaphor.
But now I could stave it off no longer; I could talk no longer against time; I had to think about Rita and Ray! My first feeling had been one of horror that Rita should have been capable of betraying, not another, not me—but herself; then I had made, in my mind, as I quitted the pair, a movement of repudiation which passed even beyond anger; and, at the time I had been talking to Hugo and after, this had lifted me to a sudden elation of lucidity and freedom. But now my need to love and believe in Rita, even stronger than my impulse to reject her, reasserted itself. She must have found, I saw now, in Ray Coleman, with her confounded perverse generosity, some fineness, some crippled aspiration, which she had been able to cherish and feed. Was there not in his persistent desire to meet and entertain artists the inveterate ungratified longing to think and to feel like them? Had I not noted in him an unexpected deference, even in his face something gentle and abashed, when, after he had advanced with his usual assurance some opinion on art or literature, a critic or artist present had expressed contradictory views? And as I had watched him just now, in front of the fire, describing Rita’s play, he had seemed to me more nearly amiable that I had ever known him before. He was happy because he felt himself on intimate terms with Rita—because she had told him about her play, and had allowed him to tell others. That was his destiny, perhaps—his salvation: to praise her, to care for her, to soothe her, to guard her from the pack of suitors who came baying after her like dogs—and so, at last, he might be useful and happy—even, perhaps, likable! So he might finally justify his calling by providing security and comfort to Rita!
As we danced past the door into the hall, I glanced across to the couch where I had left her, and the sight of the group which thronged there suddenly exasperated me as one is annoyed by the pathetic exasperating obstinacy of phototropic bugs. “Well,” I said to Daisy, smiling, “Ray seems to be having himself a time with Rita!” “Yes,” she replied; “I noticed that! He was trying to tell me last week that he was all to pieces about my leavingum—but it doesn’t look much like it!”
I remembered how Daisy had complained of Ray Coleman’s making her stay home and listen to his reading aloud from the Oxford Book of English Verse; and I imagined what a sympathetic audience he must now be finding in Rita: I could see how she would take the book from him and begin to read the poems herself, and how he would then make her recite her own poems—poems, no doubt, which she had written lately, and which I had never heard. He would flatter her without discrimination: I scorned her for accepting such praise!
“I suppose he’s pleased with his new job,” I remarked, “but a promotion from the Dispatch to the Record seems almost like a promotion from the morgue to the pound!” “If the boys on the Record,” replied Daisy, “are any worse than the boys on the Dispatch, I’m glad I made my getaway in time!”
“Let’s go upstairs for a minute, shall we?” Daisy suggested, as a record ended. “I want to give the old cuckoo’s nest a comb.”
On the stairs, I took her arm and steered her up toward the somber upper reaches, through the couples who were sitting on the steps. I gripped her firmly in my preoccupation, as if I had been guiding a child. “The trouble about having your hair done this way,” she remarked, as if talking for other ears, “is that you have to keep fixing it all the time or people think it’s just mussed up!” As we arrived at the top of the stairs, I found that I had gone suddenly hollow, and I remembered that I had eaten no dinner.
Instead of heading, as I expected, for the bedroom where the coats and hats had been left, Daisy went on along the dark upstairs hallway—she seemed to know the house well—to a door at the further end.
It was dark inside. By the light that came in through a single window from the house across the scanty backyard, I could see a cot and a simple bureau—the Jap servant’s room, no doubt. I clawed the air for the chain of a shadeless electric bulb which was hanging above our heads. “Why don’t you try the bathroom?” I suggested. “I don’t see any comb on that bureau.” “Never mind about that comb!” she replied.
I embraced her and pasted my lips on her half-opened mouth. I thought about the mouth and moth’s eyebrows which had aroused me for a moment in the kitchen, but which I could not see now in the dark—and I tried to make up for my stupidity and tardiness by holding Daisy against me very tightly and kissing her again and again—but it was an assault of which I found myself conscious chiefly as a determined physical pressure and a deliberate application of the lips. I felt my arms crushing cartilage and flesh, and my mouth missing its goal against her teeth. It occurred to me that Daisy’s lips were really, despite her make-up, not particularly well-adapted to passionate kissing of this kind. I still thought of them as cool-looking and childlike, as they had seemed to me the night of the movies. And I became aware of the succession of my kisses as something repetitive and tediously mechanical. Fearing Daisy might notice this, too, I broke it up by making her sit down on the bed. I had desired her, and there we were at last! I found myself representing the long stupefied embrace of passion by sheer immobility and weight. I was all too far from being stupefied, I reflected, during the moments when I relaxed my ministrations. Some obstinate unconscious loyalty, in spite of all my efforts, kept me cold. And I was distracted by a variety of ideas. I had a vision of the pilloried frog of a behaviorist moving picture which I had gone to see with Rita. The frog, with its brain removed, had responded with an automatic kick when an acidulated pad had been applied to one of its legs.—And the consciousness that the little bedroom belonged to the Japanese servant reminded me that the Japs did not kiss, that they did not know what kissing was—and I wondered whether they tried to learn kissing when they set out to become Americanized, and whether it took long. I murmured, “Daisy darling!” in a low and secret voice.
We became aware that the door was open: I looked around and saw a small spare figure. His face was half in shadow, and I could not see his eyes. I quickly sat up on the cot, and he suddenly withdrew and slammed the door.
“Who was it?” Daisy asked in a whisper. “It was Pete!” I replied.
She got up. “I don’t care,” she said. “A great help he turned out to be!” She pulled on the electric bulb, went over to the mirror on the bureau, and applied her powder and rouge. When she had finished, she said, without looking at me, putting her powder away in the vanity case, “Take me home, will you?”
We went out and extricated our coats—it was a little like a search in a bad dream—from the avalanche of wraps on the beds; and in silence descended the stairs, looking solemn and matter-of-fact, as we threaded our way through the couples.
So, I told myself, I had not hesitated to wound Pete in his love for Daisy, even after he had shown me his poems, such poems as I had written to Rita, in which his tenderness and his longing had, as it were, been confessed and entrusted to me—to me, another poet! In my glimpse of his face in the doorway, dimly lit by the light from the hall, his pale cheeks and his eyes large with shadow had seemed sensitive and even handsome. Was it Daisy’s indifference, I asked myself, was it jealous suspicions like my own, which had given him that gargoyle’s mask? Yet one had to be hard about these things: love and poetry, as I myself knew, were paid for with danger and pain!
Sue Borglum protested wildly and loudly against Daisy’s leaving so early, and begged me, at any rate, to come back when I had taken Daisy home: she had evidently a morbid fear that her parties were becoming less popular—I felt the cold taste of winter in the vestibule.
After splashing about in the slush of the dark and deserted streets, I finally brought back a taxi. Hugo Bamman came down the steps with Daisy. He was wearing his old limp felt hat, but no overcoat; and he was carrying over his shoulder the musette bag he had had in the Army.
We invited him to come with us in the taxi. When I got in after Hugo and Daisy, I found Hugo planted on one of the little turn-down seats, and it was only with considerable difficulty that Daisy persuaded him to sit beside her.
“The tone of Sue Borglum’s parties,” Hugo began at once to complain, “is certainly getting more and more respectable!—she’ll soon be sending out engwaved invitations!” I asked him what he meant. “Why, you just go and meet people now, and talk to them a little, politely—just like a Washington reception. Things used to be so much fwanker and fweer at Sue Borglum’s! I remember one night when Leo Shatov got up and did a Cossack dance on the dining-room table—and the Baroness von Samstag-Solferino always used to appear wearing a coal scuttle on her head!—And she has these little thin sandwiches, now, made of chopped olives and spiced ham and things. There used to be just a great big cheese, and you gouged out what you wanted with your pocket knife!”
We were about to drop Hugo off at his house, only a block or two from Sue Borglum’s, but he announced that he was sailing at midnight and would, therefore, go further uptown. I forbore to show surprise, but asked him where he was bound for. He explained, with his self-conscious giggle, that he was sailing for Smyrna on a fruit steamer: his ultimate goal was Afghanistan.
We asked why he was going to Afghanistan. “Well, I think that it must really be an awfully fine place!” he replied. “You know, it’s one of the only places in the world that hasn’t been Europeanized—it’s all a European can do to get into Cabul at all. Not a trace of a business man or a missionary or a newspaper! The Amir has electric lighting and European plumbing in his palace, but, instead of sending for European plumbers and electricians to put them in for him, he sends Afghans to Europe to learn how to do it themselves. When they come back, they’re searched for Bibles.—At the same time, they go in for witchcraft and all kinds of entertaining magic!”
He was bubbling now just as he had done at college over the little pastry shop in the sidestreet where he and his friends had bought cinnamon buns.
“Is that where the Afghans come from?” asked Daisy. “Yes: I suppose so,” chortled Hugo. “I suppose that, even though it’s forbidden to bring in any modern textile machinery, a smart Europeanized Afghan might be able to do a little profitable sweating in the Afghan business!”
I asked Hugo what his literary plans were and he explained that, when he came back from Afghanistan, he was going out to the American West to write a novel about one of the big Western cities, either Pittsburgh or Detroit. (He had already done Boston and New York, though he refused to pay Philadelphia even the compliment of exposing it.) “Oh, God!” Daisy exclaimed. “What do you want to go to Pittsburgh for? I spent the best years of my life trying to get away from there!” “Why, I’ve always wanted to see a Pittsburgh millionaire,” Hugo explained, gaily, mildly, sweetly. “Wasn’t it you who were telling me about the man from Pittsburgh who bought ten thousand dollars worth of fireworks and set them off in the Bois de Boulogne, and then committed suicide?” “Yes,” said Daisy, “that was Phil Meissner’s uncle.” “I think Detroit must be awfully fine, too!” Hugo continued. “I’ve always wanted to see a Ford put together. I’ve always thought it must be wather like one of those things in the movies, don’t you know, where the man draws a cat, stwoke by stwoke, and then it suddenly comes alive!”
As I listened to Hugo’s prattle, it occurred to me to suspect for the first time that he was allowing himself to prattle on purpose. His spectacles had had the effect of making him look owlish and juvenile; but now that he no longer wore them, his intent deep-sunken gaze betrayed the silliness of what he said—betrayed, I mean, that he himself was not silly. I became aware that the undergraduate patter from which, formerly and while still an undergraduate, he had so desperately strained to escape by harsh paradoxes and flat contradictions, was now a habit which he had accepted, partly no doubt because it was difficult to break, but also partly because he found it useful as a screen for his real purposes and ideas. His real purposes and ideas, it seemed to me, as I watched him in the taxi tonight, had by this time completely matured and stood firmly on their own feet; and a certain amount of success, which he had never aimed at or expected, had given him a new assurance. Hugo’s novels on the American cities had become almost best-sellers; and he was no longer spurred by the painful necessity of asserting his views in ordinary conversation, but was content to chatter on like a schoolboy: it saved tedious contentious explanations.
There was no chatter about what he wrote: Hugo’s novels were sober, even morose, and were built with a solidity of cement. They were comprehensive reports on human society, industriously and conscientiously drawn up. And as I thought tonight of Hugo’s assiduity, his independence and his sense of responsibility, I seemed to recognize in them those qualities which had for so many years made his father a respected public servant. The son had cut himself off from his family; had even sold, piece by piece, all the furniture and family silver which he had inherited from his mother, and, set by set, his father’s library; and he had done this—to the great consternation of his cousins and his aunts, to whom the sale of mahogany and silver was like a massacre of kin—all in order that he might live poorly in Patchin Place, writing appeals for political prisoners, making speeches for striking garment workers and composing those encyclopedic novels from which he had never hoped to make money. Yet, by the sacrifice of property and family, he had saved the honor of a family tradition which was otherwise largely moribund; he had truly assumed the responsibilities of leadership and shown the disinterestedness of public spirit, in the only fields in which, in our generation, he had found it possible to work.
I seemed to see that, behind the mask of the outlaw, he had finally arrived at a position very similar to that of his father, before his father, in his later erratic years, had withdrawn from public life. For Hugo had applied himself to literature as to one of the old-fashioned professions, Medicine, Law or the Church; and, in spite of his role of eccentric and rebel, had taken on—what set him off at that time from most of the other literary men of the Village—the solid and honorable character of a first-rate professional man. Through the late escapades of the father and the early extravagances of the son, the curve had come round again.
And I envied Hugo tonight: I could think only of his established position as a writer, of the security and the freedom of movement which his royalties had finally brought him, at the same time that he had earned the satisfaction of serious work well done. I myself felt disgusted and gloomy over the aimlessness and uselessness of my life. I had seen clearly, at the funeral of my aunt, that my relations did not think me a success. I was still an underling in a publisher’s office, with no great enthusiasm for my work and with no particular hopes of advancement. And, on the other hand, I was not a writer: I had not made Hugo’s sacrifice and effort. No wonder I had never been able to persuade Rita Cavanagh to marry me! I had offered her merely the meager resources and the questionable future of a young man with vague literary ambitions; and she had already known many such young men—had already, on one or two occasions, embarked on such lives of cramped space and small comfort, without finding them magic carpets. What wonder that she should now prefer Ray Coleman, with his apartment that overlooked the Square, his lettuce-green cocktail glasses, his water-colors of the Russian ballet, and his rye whisky bottled in bond?
Hugo asked us to let him out at the corner of Seventh Avenue and one of the upper Twenties. I asked him where his baggage was. “I’ve got it all here!” he replied, indicating the musette bag on his shoulder. “Haven’t you even got an overcoat?” asked Daisy. “Why, you know, I don’t know why it is,” he replied, with the bogus naïveté with which he masked his stubbornest manias, “but I can’t seem to stand to wear overcoats. They always make me feel so loaded down and sewed up—and they always make me too hot! I always feel, when I get into them, that there isn’t a pin to choose between the modern winter overcoat and the Iron Maiden at Nuremberg.” “I should think you’d get your death!” protested Daisy. “If the people in New York,” he replied, “didn’t wear so many overcoats, they probably wouldn’t catch so many colds! They bundle themselves up in winter overcoats and lower the resistance of their bodies so that the least little change in temperature brings them down with the grippe or the flu!”
“Gee,” said Daisy, with admiration, rather to my surprise, “I wish I was going to Afghanistan! Take me along with you, won’t you?” “I’d love to!” said Hugo. “Come on!”—but he began looking out anxiously for the street. “Oh, will you?” cried Daisy. “Take me! I’m so fed up with it here! I haven’t got any belongings either! I left most of what I had at Ray’s. I could walk right on the boat now and sacrifice practically nothing. You couldn’t really take me, could you?” “Why, yes—come along!” said Hugo, smiling but, I could see, with some uneasiness: he shrank from the possibility of committing himself to a woman—even in gallantry, even in jest—and was nervously watching the street numbers—“if you wouldn’t mind a few tarantulas and scorpions and things that go with the date and fig trade!” “Well, the fruit’s all unloaded here, isn’t it?” Daisy determinedly objected, with a strong grasp of commercial realities. “We don’t export it over there, do we?” “No: of course—it’s all unloaded on us—but the animals may stay behind! I dare say that some of them are regular passengers!” “Well,” said Daisy, “I’ve fought fleas and rats and bedbugs in my time—and Greenwich Village bar-flies—so I guess I could cope with a tarantula!”
Hugo stopped the cab. We were all for taking him to his steamer and seeing him off; but he refused to let us. I think that he was honestly afraid that Daisy would insist upon sailing with him—for he leaped out almost before the taxi had stopped, and his leave-taking was abrupt and expeditious. He opened the door again a moment afterwards and tried to give me some money for the fare, but I pulled his hat down over his ears. He waved at us once with a long spasmodic arm, then marched off in the direction of the docks.
“Gee,” said Daisy, as we drove away, “I’d like to go to Afghanistan!”
We fell silent. Yes, I reflected, Daisy admired Hugo, just as Rita admired Ray—because he had made himself a place in the world, because he was successful and independent!
I was on the point of taking Daisy’s hand when she suddenly snatched the driver’s license out of its isinglass frame opposite her and, without a word of explanation, tore it up, photograph and all. “What made you do that?” I demanded. “I can’t stand his face!” she said tartly. “I’ve been looking at it all the way, and if I had to look at it any more, I’d begin to go half-witted myself!”
I was irritated by Daisy’s gesture: it jarred upon my mood of enthusiasm for Hugo’s sense of social responsibility, and I felt against it the same sort of resentment that was provoked by the perversities and caprices of Rita. But I laughed—with a certain harshness, as if to mock at the respecters of property, and at the poets who succumbed to their bribes—as if Daisy and I alone, now, still stood together against Ray.
Yet, I was thinking the moment after, one couldn’t really blame Ray Coleman for becoming infuriated with Daisy: hadn’t she squandered all his money and then kept having C.O.D. packages sent home? Hadn’t she even complained to me, the night that I had taken her to the movies, of Ray’s too conscientious practice of paying all his bills? I thought of Daisy the night of the party, when I had first met her and Rita. Hadn’t she behaved like a little fiend? Hadn’t she turned on a phonograph record in the middle of Rita’s poems? Hadn’t she humiliated Ray by leaving the party with Pete Bird? I found that I forgave Ray more easily for his violent scene with Daisy, which Rita and I had overheard.
But now, when I recalled that detestable scene, it was no longer as it had seemed to me that evening. That night I had been a spectator looking on at a melodrama, at a melodramatic tableau of jealousy: Ray pointing at Pete’s broken cane; Daisy abashed among the ruins of the party; and I complacently and gallantly helping Rita on with her wrap. Now I had myself played Ray Coleman’s part. I remembered the spiteful scene which I myself had provoked with Rita in the taxi, and the scenes which for weeks had preceded it. It was as if the roles had now been reversed: it was I who was the jealous blackguard and Ray Coleman who was the solid decent citizen! And now those memories must perhaps always stand as a barrier between Rita and me, as they had done at the party tonight—a barrier of coldness and resentment which could never be forgotten now and whose shadow must lie, also, behind on all that had been beautiful before. If I could only just now have said the word which would have caused it to fall away!
“I don’t want to go home!” said Daisy, as we were crossing Forty-second Street. I suggested that we might go to a night club. I did not, as I say, at that moment, particularly care about Daisy, but then, there was nobody else I liked better—least of all did I like myself or want to be alone with myself. “All right. I can’t go in this plaid dress, though. I tell you: you go and get something to drink, and I’ll go and change my clothes.” “I’ll go and change, too,” I said.
The moment after, she had some sort of qualm: “Give me a piece of paper,” she said, “any kind of piece of paper will do.” The only paper I had in my pocket was the letter from H. M. Grosbeake, the professor of philosophy at college to whom I had sent Rita’s poems and who had invited me to come to see him, but to whose letter I had never replied, though I had been carrying it around ever since. I had torn off the blank part in Daisy’s room, the day I had written her the note, and now I gave her what was left, the page with the letter itself. She stuck it into the driver’s license frame behind the isinglass.
I left Daisy at her door.