I thought of Daisy

By Edmund Wilson

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Title: I thought of Daisy

Author: Edmund Wilson


        
Release date: May 30, 2026 [eBook #78785]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78785

Credits: Sean (@parchmentglow)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK I THOUGHT OF DAISY ***


                              I THOUGHT OF
                                  DAISY

                                   BY
                              EDMUND WILSON


                                NEW YORK
                         CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
                                  1929




                           COPYRIGHT, 1929, BY
                         CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

                 Printed in the United States of America




                                   I


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 was still capable of vibrating in my breast 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 pencilled 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 put in 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 freelance 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
Czars 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 theatre. 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: besides, his
eyes remained narrow and solemn, and 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 some one 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 a
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 that I
ever saw--I went to see 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 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--its 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 to 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 to-night, 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 mousey 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 centre 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
rather a dry staccato voice, and with something like an English 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 jealously straining
toward Rita 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 myself 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 to-day,” 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
Shakespearian 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 some one 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 passing 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 dammed anguish of our own
frustration--which, in the presence of some pitiful human failure may
overcome us with the sudden conviction that no satisfactions 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
push-over!” 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 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
stick-pins, a ring and a wrist-watch, 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 which she seemed to apply to everything, whether of
absorbing interest or not.

“Oh, no,” Ray heartily reassured her. “He didn’t get anything of
ours. He didn’t get the 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 return
with the police; the boy would turn out to be a thief whom the husband
had caught and locked up!--There would have to be something more to it,
though--I would think about it later.

In the meantime, Hugo’s skirmish with Ray had ended in an emphatically
disguised evasion on the latter’s part as he had become aware that
his attitude toward criminals might be considered intellectual bad
form. 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 sombre, forbidding and blind--there had been a
boy about my age called Junior, and he had 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 in 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, vulgar,
humorous, 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 motor-cycle 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 super-human 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 theatre, 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 every one 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 the 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 signalled 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 replied--her voice had the tautness, the distinctness
and the metallic quality of wire--though of a wire which 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
passionate 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 represented 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 so 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 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 rôle 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 Thursday, and that I shan’t wake
her from sleep to-night, 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!”

Some originality I felt in her having so entered into the old woman,
who seemed to have nothing to do with the plumed hat which her partner
was pretending to doff, 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 be
interested in the comedy which Rita and her friend were acting, 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 up-state 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
freshened by tenderest green. When I had gone to meet Hugo at the
Brevoort, I had seen a pale peach-silver sun dissolving the light
tree-fringes at the corner of the Avenue. Now these wonders had
sprung from 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 fresh
freedom.

Rita was looking out the window with her same strange trancèd
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-freshened 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 which 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 stock-broker, who keeps a wife just as he keeps a car!--The
stock-broker 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 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 to-night
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 to-night!” “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
marvellous party!--I’ve been having such a marvellous time that I’ve
stayed much too late!” I made my apologies, also, and got Rita’s coat
out of the bedroom and helped her on with it. “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-by 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 went on. “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 each other!” 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 for me on the sidewalk while I was paying the driver: her little
face seemed narrow and thin--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 she would see at
once--if she had not already guessed--that I was really not 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 quickly and interestedly
about her. There was a little 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
producing a bottle of peach brandy, as I had seen her drinking whiskey
straight at the Colemans’ 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 to-night, 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 liked 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 wonder then--her old dress, her mother’s
sewing-machine, her wide gamine’s grin, her formidable dignity 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, as she recited, 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 now also 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 meagre
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.

For I have not, in speaking of these poems, in any adequate way
described them: they were poems about love, and in them what was true
of love was true not of love only. And even now, in this part of what
I write, which deals with feelings and thoughts most remote from me,
least real to the mind that writes--at the memory of that music, I halt
and lose my way.

In another poem, which I had never seen, and which she had also
recently written, she had some image of a swift up-country 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 flower).
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 up-state 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 extraordinarily 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 and 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 deepen. 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 didn’t try 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 escaped as soon as the wife opened
the door.

When I came back to my rooms again, they seemed no longer, through the
drowsy eyes of day, my own familiar husk: there was the couch where 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 Dante out 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 scarcely paying attention to the words, I pushed the book
back to the table and turned over on my cheek. Something or other I had
come for, I had found.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was characteristic of Hugo Bamman--with whom I had gone to 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 a sudden 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 the evening I have described, after his
argument with Ray Coleman. And when he once had his hat in his hands,
it was impossible to keep him. It was at the same time as if he had
suddenly become 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 appeared also to repudiate 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 fear 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 that my account of his experience in the Army is derived largely
from the well-known novel which he afterward wrote on the subject
and which seemed such a striking contrast to the rather 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 during 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 endurance
and courage. 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 watched with
horror 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, to his surprise, picked up by the Military
Police, put under arrest, court-martialled 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 commanding officer.
At the end of three weeks, however, Hugo was finally released through
the intervention of his elder brother, who was already a major in the
Adjutant-General’s department and to whom Hugo had managed to send a
letter before he had left his unit.

Hugo’s further participation in the War was of rather a half-hearted
character. Now, it was no longer the Germans who were the enemy, but
the governing classes of the world.

By the time he had been 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 almost 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 stweet--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 travelled with a suit-case, 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
a eulogy 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 in a certain way by the former, appeared indistinguishable.
These visits were further embarrassed by the apprehensions of Hugo’s
sister-in-law: she seemed always on edge for fear Hugo, whose manners
were excellent, might advance, in the presence of the Dean’s or the
President’s wife, with whom she was closely allied, some subversive
opinion.

Another bugaboo which pursued 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 the effect of leaving them merely demoralized and
dispirited, writing fragmentary learned poetry, full of gall and
resignation, in imitation of T. S. Eliot. These friends 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 himself would have been the last person to call their
attention to his merits. Since the War, the discussion of literature
had affected him like his memories of college, and the spectre 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 spectre
of the æsthetic undergraduate. Though he had in his youth been
full of literary enthusiasms, he now habitually treated the great
writers--including those whom he most admired, from Plato to James
Joyce--in a manner cavalier almost to the point of hysteria. 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
book-worms and hacks, 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--eager at first to attend their parties. But
he soon divined the pit of ashes at the bottom of the gin-bottle, and
shied off as he had done from his family and from the companions of
his college days; and 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 objecting, 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 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 an appropriate situation arose
for playing a rôle in some woman’s life, 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, where 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 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.

And so he 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, his aunt’s nap 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 with 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 violently jostled by a young man in a blue suit and
bone-rimmed spectacles, who was 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 remained 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 the 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 in the homely and hollow
plain-spokenness of the self-made industrial master; 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 æsthetic problems of
the time; even in the best of the theatre, 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, theatre, 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-by and get
away.




                                   II


We worked in silence, dismantling the walls and packing Rita’s
belongings.

Rita herself had left us: some one 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 decisive, rapid 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 each other. Duff Burdan,
the young man whom at Ray Coleman’s I had taken for a baseball player,
but who had turned out to be actually a painter, was laboring over
Rita’s suit-case, 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 to-day: 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, melodious and remote--in the late afternoon
shadow; or at night, when the rumorous hum of summer came in through
the open windows, when the summer world, which had already been
sleeping gently by day, seemed scarcely to slumber at night: 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 her 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 meagre and battered, it was true; the
damaged electric heater; the little wooden cot, 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
glimpse of the face of her companion: he was an undistinguished, thin
and dingy-eyed young man, 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 round. “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
suit-case, 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 round. “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 standing 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 some one
else--as I descended them this afternoon, it was not without relief at
the thought that I should never have to climb them after to-day.

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 school-girls returning from school
were prettier than any school-girls had seemed to me for many
months. I compared one of them with Rita, to the advantage of the
school-girl--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 as beautiful forever!

Back in the apartment, I found that a new visitor had arrived to
say good-by to Rita. It was a young man from Columbus, Ohio, whom
I remembered having met with Rita one evening when we had gone to
the theatre. He was one of those curious Westerners who dress like
Westerners, but who speak like Philadelphians. The night Rita had
recognized him at the theatre, she had seemed disquietingly glad to see
him, and my first instinct had been to identify him as the admirer in
Santa Fé who had sent her the corn-dance and the cactus, and of whose
arrival I lived in dread. When he had turned out not to be this person,
I had been exceedingly relieved, and as Rita had never afterward
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 theatre, 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 particularly 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-by. The
Westerner, with unctuous heartiness, was all for seeing her off, but
she explained that that was my prerogative--and she kissed him a second
time. I felt suddenly that it was an impudence for her to have divided
with such scrupulous fairness, between Duff Burdan and me, the honor of
seeing her off and the honor of storing her furniture.--Yes: she had
certainly got out of an engagement with me a very short time after
that night when we had met the Ohioan at the theatre!

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 make me now so
glum!

Rita had decided overnight to leave New York. One of her aunts, who
still lived in the little up-state 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, sitting amidst packets of old letters on the day-bed, and
passionately preoccupied with the idea of returning to her native
place, sustaining the old age of her aunt, and consecrating herself in
solitude to the composition of a play in verse. I saw, to my annoyance,
that she had been crying. And at the _Rosenkavalier_ she had relapsed
into that punctual responsiveness, with its effect of deliberate
polite effort, which I had noted in her the night I had first met
her, 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 town, which I had
applauded with insincerity, would evaporate like any other of those
suddenly excited desires--to go West, to go to Paris, to return to the
stage again--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 succeeded in
getting an advance from the editor (who was also wildly in love with
her), on the strength of a promise of more 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 appropriate reply, conscientious and devoid of
conviction; but I saw now that we were already at the Waldorf, where,
with the traffic cut 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, staring and
pinched. 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 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 the traffic terrified her)--though
all my conscious feelings were of horror that some one 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 Kaufmann 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 that 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 been
lately 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 motor-cars 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 up-town
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 properly 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 at
once to her place on Forty-fourth Street--I could ask her to dinner
to-night! 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 suit-case to a porter.

“Don’t you want him to carry that?” I asked, nodding toward 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-by, most of all. I sat
down in the train for a moment, and told her what an excellent thing I
thought it 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 news-stand--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 for so long been 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 always hated them, and had insisted on signing 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 sceptical 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 had nearly succeeded. 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 decided to
move to Watertown and teach music; but a last brother, who kept the
general store in the little town where they lived, had been disabled
by a paralytic 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 local 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 she had come down with a bad case of
pleurisy, and was unable to work at all.

And Rita, brooding 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, weaving an indelible watermark of beauty in the air of
the cramped little parlor behind 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 always sober, style of her
poetry; and I have thought since that they were perhaps the only thing
which I ever knew of Rita as she had been in her girlhood.

For Rita, too, had spent long years in the little up-state 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 Gautier when she could not pronounce their
names. And before she had finally gone to college on the scholarship
which 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 put on when she woke every morning, like some
cursed indestructible dress of girlhood, too worn, too soiled, too
small.

Yet, I never heard her speak with resentment of her early environment:
it was herself, and not the place or its people, which, when she told
me of her youth, she made me see. When Sinclair Lewis wrote his famous
novel, in its own way so intense, he made one feel that the American
small town had rendered the whole of American 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 outside the common
world. She had described to me once, for example, how, lying late awake
at night, she had heard some drunkard, returning from the town, singing
clearly in the empty country road, dark-and-clear with the autumn moon:

  “I wooed her in the summer-time
    And in the winter, too;
  And all night long I held her in my arms,
    Just to shield her from the foggy, foggy dew!”

To-day, when I can sort out the drunkard, the song which every one
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 a 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 was always trying to identify
accents. I had noted, in this way, in Rita, the Irish fickle-mindedness
and sharpness; the traces of the superior person in the small
provincial community; of the bold and original personality in the
community of college girls, who had, however, learned the language of
the rest--that savorless language of young segregated women constantly
dosed by older women with the highest feminine ideals; the intonations
of the American actress of English light comedy; and, finally,
dominating all, her rôle 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 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 steel-silver and tight-strung soul--so she had
compelled 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 which 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 color
or the shape--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 some
one 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 celebrities or
types: 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 rôles 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, their longings 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 to-day--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 asphalt windings and dark walls,
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 and which she had described
to me with her brief telling eloquence on the very afternoon in Bank
Street when I had counted on finding eloquence myself to persuade her
to marry me--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 Rita my
indifferent verses, she would always afterwards take them from me and
go through them intently herself, repeating aloud the lines which
pleased her, so that they had the sound, brought to life by her voice,
of being a great deal better than they were; and, at the time, I
never remembered that she had also a knack of reading certain poems
by Coventry Patmore and Arthur Henry 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 really 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 extremity of preying
on one another. Rita had added: “Yes, 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 poor men starve; so
I had been obliged 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 every one else, always have been willing to admit both these
truths: they would, in fact, have seemed to me platitudes. But I had
had to learn them both from 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 dramatic every relation,
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, bedevilled 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, even
at the time I had denounced her in the cab, it was my consciousness
of this strength which 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 have the instinct to admire what is admirable,
we must also have 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 to-night! 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 I had lately gone so rarely--I
found that I could still peer with interest at the photographs in front
of the theatres and at the faces of the passing women, who seemed
sometimes, with their theatrical make-ups, as miraculously, ideally
pretty as women 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 débris 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, several tumblers with the stale remains of drinks, and an empty
gin-bottle. 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
bathroom 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--I 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 hold the paper on. 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 remained 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 any one 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 where 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 moulded 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 in an ash-tray,
under the débris of 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 began to feel that turning on the phonograph would be like applying
to myself 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 began.

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 stainings
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
to-morrow!”

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 explained. “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 any one 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 chiselled
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, reached 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 looked a good deal rosier and 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 table-cloths and the smell of a butcher-shop, where very large
sour pickles were served with every order, on the side.

“What sort of a fellow is Pete Bird?” I inquired. “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 attached in New York to the
spending of large sums of money, I felt a little that she was evading
my question, but I didn’t 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
metum 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 bellboys 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 these 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 deadbeats,
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 in 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 that 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
marvellous 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 something funny.--I’m so glad you came
to-night! I’ve been beginning to feel like a twirp. If I keep getting
plastered like I have been, 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 with accelerations
of gin and with my normal masculine self-assurance, which Rita had
done so much to demoralize, now gratifyingly re-enforced by Daisy’s
feminine confession of helplessness and distress--it seemed to me at
that moment that I occupied a position of unchallengeable supremacy--it
seemed to me now that it had 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: an American Railway Express truck; a
woman with a German police dog; other scuttling and inferior taxis.
Rita 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
render his studio uninhabitable.

In the darkened moving-picture house, we found the news-reel passing
before us like a gray inconsecutive dream, and its images, as I
watched them, seemed to swell with the significance of dreams.--A
handsome buxom 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
beneath the 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
brave filled the air 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 aeroplane 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 hand which,
with the fingertips 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 councillors,”
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 woman
swimmers--they turned along the sweet lengthened rhythms of _All Alone
with the Telephone_, curving wonderfully through the air in moulded
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.--Jo 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 revisited by the feeling that I had behaved badly
with Rita in the taxi.--Bishop Manning, to the firm exaltation of 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 cool and friendly.--A Chimpanzee Chauffeur: roguish
monkey music: _Yes, We Have No Bananas_; but I had fallen to reflecting
that, like some hero of a mediæval legend--the _Pilgrim’s Chorus_ and
the pastoral staff had made me see myself in that image--I had, for
a dreamlike space escaping 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 joy, 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 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 sombre chords--Rita could have done something
with this--something bitter about the fatuity of the twentieth-century
traveller 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 traveller 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 suddenly and rapidly out--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 waxed-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
draft.

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
head-first and remains at the bottom stunned: the firemen who follow
fall over him and pile up like a football scrimmage. We laughed at
this; and, 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 motor-cycle 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 goggling 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 to-night 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 Hugo’s intransigeance in matters of this kind: 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
to-night 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, despite 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, oblivious of the film, taken to meditating so exaltedly on the
vanity of people’s opinions beside 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,
and had picked it up and bitten it 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 ginger-ale 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 a 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 out of 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
arm-pits--and it’s not just because you want to sleep with somebody
either.--You know the real reason that 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.




                                  III


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
vowed in solitude to her play, I applied myself to reading Sophocles,
who at college had always 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 mightn’t perhaps be able to 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.

When I dropped my suit-case 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 for ever disconnected when Rita had moved out of Twelfth Street,
but which I found now 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: it fell in the waste-basket 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 to 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 faraway, 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-by!” 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, 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 meagrest pretense 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 some 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, dismal, and uncouth,
resigned to drop out of the world, hoping only to be noticed by no
one; and I was repelled by his strange trunklike snout: my own nose,
I remembered, was bulbous, and, as I mounted the narrow staircase, it
seemed to me more bulbous than ever.

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 negligé 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.

Some one 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 daze. 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
been originally 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 disaffected and aghast. 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 and
smartness.

In that atmosphere clouded by drunkenness, I glanced instinctively
about for a drink, and saw nothing but empty bottles and a débris 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, anyway?” 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 bookcase 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-by to Larry,” suggested Pete Bird. “I wouldn’t say
good-by 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 out 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.
“To-night 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 to-night 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 theatre, 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 to-night
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 goddam 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 had seen
it, had fired before him point-blank at the little plaster cast: 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-by 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 moments’ 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 up-town!” (Sue Borglum, who knew every one, more or
less, had taken Bobby McIlvaine up soon after the night that I had met
them at Ray Coleman’s, and had smoothed his way among the managers
and 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 stage-hands 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 drug-store. There
were all those pop-eyed 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 to me again. “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 merely
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 sub-let 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 about. 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 up-stairs 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 had arrived at the foot of the stairs: we
stopped at the water-cooler and drew 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 mouldings and the sombre maroon wall-paper.--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 amid 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,
to be engagingly shy, and sometimes to possess personal charm to a
degree almost cloying; the pretty Jewesses with thick red lips and
glossy black bobbed hair; the austere and handsome woman managers of
theatres 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 any one
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 to-day when everybody wears these horn-rimmed glasses!”

I wondered whether it mightn’t 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 _Sketch!_”
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 had 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 easily,” I
replied. “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 replied, and 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-Despatch_ for the city desk of
the _Daily Sketch_, 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. Rita invited Larry Mickler to sit down, and he took
the stool on the other side of the fireplace. 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 advertising 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 marvellous 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 English 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 gamine--nor did she hesitate
to bite down on a hard up-country r, when some special situation--a
sundae at the soda-fountain or a hammock on a porch--had suggested to
her versatile spirit the rôle 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 had been 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, to-day 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 filled,
not with the relief I hoped for and in which I tried to believe, but
with 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 now 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 advertising 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
_Sketch_? They’re written by Ted Mahony in the office--you know Ted, a
big husky Irishman who’s always half-stewed. You know that installment
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 puffs 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 goggles, 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 to me that he had been going to a new
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 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
some one 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 sub-let 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 so short a 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
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 school-days 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 into contact and, what was worse, since my difficulties with
Rita, less confidence in myself. And I found now that--despite Hugo’s
stern rejection of everything he had been taught in his youth--I was
aware to-night principally of his good manners, his integrity and 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, on one occasion 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 had 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 Cæsar_, he had embarked
upon a discussion of Shakespeare very different from any I had heard
in my English classes: what especially impressed me was the 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 amazing comprehension of
political life, of the eternal universal types of his historical plays;
to my surprise, he compared Coriolanus to Benedict Arnold; 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 any
one 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, Hugo Bamman’s father,
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 to 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 that reality--soon, at that age,
to coagulate from what we see, what we read of or are told, and what we
experience within ourselves--which finally supplies so astonishing a
connection between the private emotions and thoughts, 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 both about 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 having fallen short of
his father’s standard. Now it was as if Hugo’s liberated gaze had been
accompanied by some new freedom of expression. But I was sorry, 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 had the
whole household so that it was just like some kind of 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 used to 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 bitterest, that when it actually came to a show-down, 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 a while, 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 that 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 wather 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 witten anything lately?” asked Hugo, with one of those veritable
hemorrhages of kindliness which, when he feared he had hurt some one’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
Squarcillupi!--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 to-night,”--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 think 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 boy-friend’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 bitterness. “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 pencilled 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
make-up, after my indifference of 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 practise 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 ice-box, a glass gallon-container of cocktails. She
threw her 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 hold-ups!” 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 letum--I’ll just tellum,
no soap!” I asked her what sort of a fellow Larry Mickler was. “Oh,
he’s just a fool,” she replied.

“I’m sorry about to-night,” 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 hair-cut 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, must be the “little surprising moonbeam violins” of Pete
Bird’s poem.

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
group, 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
than 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 become useful and happy--even likable, perhaps! So
he might finally justify his calling: he could buy Rita security and
comfort!

As we danced past the door into the hall, I glanced across to the
couch where I had left Rita, and the sight of the group which thronged
about it irritated me suddenly in the same way as the pathetic and
exasperating obstinacy of phototropic bugs. “Well,” I remarked to
Daisy, smiling, “Ray seems to be having himself a time with Rita
Cavanagh!” “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 herself, and how she would presently 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 _Sketch_ seems almost like a promotion from
the morgue to the pound!” “If the boys on the _Sketch_,” replied Daisy,
“are any worse than the boys on the _Dispatch_, I’m glad I made my
getaway in time!”

“Let’s go up-stairs 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 sombre
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 up-stairs 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 back yard, 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 the 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 tediously mechanical
and repetitive. 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, even 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 among 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 up-town. 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 side-street 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 to-night, 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 school-boy: 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 to-night 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 encyclopædic
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 where, in our generation, he had
found it possible for him to work.

I seemed to see that, behind the mask of the outlaw, he had finally
gravitated to a position exactly similar to his father’s, 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, despite his rôle 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 to-night: 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 meagre 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 whiskey 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 suppose 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 leapt 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 as against Rita’s perversities and
caprices. 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, when I remembered 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 myself had played Ray Coleman’s part. I remembered that
spiteful scene which I myself had provoked with Rita, in the taxi, and
the scenes which for weeks had preceded it. Now it was as if the rôles
had been reversed: now 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
to-night when I had tried to talk to her--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 that 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
the blank part off 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.

       *       *       *       *       *

Larry Mickler, with his revolver and his passion for Dostoevsky, had
made upon me an unpleasant impression. I had come to connect him
obscurely with my impulse to smash the peach-brandy bottle, when I
had felt myself so helpless with Rita, and I found that I disliked
Dostoevsky, because Larry Mickler admired him. I remembered--as I went
back in the taxi to my own apartment in Bank Street--Dostoevsky’s
sadistic manias, his complaisance in self-degradation, his extravagant
vanity; I began to feel, after meeting Mickler, that the masterpieces
of such a man of genius were a doubtful compensation on paper for
the moral bankruptcy of a life. Were not the purity of Dostoevsky’s
tenderness, the flights of his Christian idealism, to be measured
precisely by his perversity, the sub-human depths of his indifference?
Were not the Svidrigailovs and the Stavrogins--those malignant growths
which seemed to sprout and, almost without the author’s intention, to
swell to such monstrous proportions, in Dostoevsky’s novels--were they
not the price which one had to pay for the Myshkins and the Alyoshas?

True, it was quite unfair to Dostoevsky to identify him with Larry
Mickler; it was the triumph, at least, of the great artist that, by
dint of terrific effort, he had, if only in the world of his novels,
succeeded in restoring a moral balance to that universe which he had
once felt reeling with the world of his own soul; whereas, in the case
of Larry Mickler, who had merely to read Dostoevsky’s books, all that
desperate idealism, that victory of moral passion, would, it seemed
to me at that moment, go principally to give him a good conscience in
licking his chops over the cruelties and perversities, and to leave him
with the gratified conviction that there was no kind of discreditable
behavior which imagination might not redeem.

And Pete Bird, with his charming wistful verses and his swindle of the
liverwurst sandwiches! And Rita--without that _mêlée_ in which her
varying passions had involved her, that possession by all the devils of
all the human desires at once, all that panic and anarchy and anguish
and deceit of her daily life, would she ever without all this have been
compelled to the noble severity, the firm and harmonious form, the
bravery of candor, of her verse?

And those poets of whom Rita and I had talked the first night I had
known her in Bank Street! To-night, the curses and groans of Catullus
only filled me with the same disgust for his abasement at the feet
of Lesbia as did my own preoccupation with Rita.--And Verlaine,
in his prison cell, with his imbecile alternations between piety
and pornography--if he had published his religious poems, as he
had originally intended to do, sandwiched in between his poems of
lechery, he would have furnished a perfect example, an example forever
ludicrous, of the disorder of the poet’s mind.

Even Dante, of whom I had once thought, of whom I thought still, as the
supreme poet of Europe, who had possessed together the fiercest passion
and the most powerful intellect, who had been able to apply to one work
all man’s highest faculties at once--what stiff-necked, what stupid
obstinacy, what fanatic self-confidence, going against all common
sense, must have lain back of all that subtlety and feeling! Had not
Dante’s indignation with his neighbors, as Professor Grosbeake had once
suggested, been based upon an utter incapacity for understanding the
realities of his time? Yet he had been spurred by such a passion to be
_right_, that, balked and exiled in the real world, he had gone to live
in the world of his poem, where, passing over both Emperor and Pope, he
had sat in the place of God himself!

And even the philosopher and the saint! When I thought now of Professor
Grosbeake, it was with a certain sentiment of scorn for the domesticity
in which he seemed buried, and with misgivings as to whether his
metaphysics were not merely a monstrous hypertrophy, arising, first,
from a certain ineptitude at dealing with the affairs of the practical
world, and fostered, later, by his practical wife, who had taken
possession of him and securely immured him in a life where nothing but
contemplation was possible. And had I not just learned that Hugo’s
father, from whom I had caught for the first time in my boyhood the
sense of the unity of life--had I not just heard that he had fed his
vision with the dead wood of some area of his nature of which he had
never ceased to feel the lack, and that his ringing arraignment of the
Congressmen for their failure to search their hearts in a spirit of
Christian humility had been purchased at the expense of the tyrannic
subjection of his household! And in the case of Hugo himself, it now
appeared to me--what I had never understood before--that his ideas had
been given their direction by his early revolt against his father,
which had made him, not, as his father had been, the prophet of a new
moral discipline, but primarily a champion of the oppressed who still
resented and feared the oppressor.

But these reflections began to sicken me (I was at once hungry, nervous
and weary): I had succeeded in accounting for all these people,
who were precisely the people I most admired, as the victims of
deficiencies and derangements; and I now felt that I had been deriving
an ignoble satisfaction from knowing the secret of every one’s disease.
While I was changing my clothes in Bank Street, I began to remember
Dostoevsky’s miseries: the neurotic family given over to its manias and
collapsing after the mother’s death; the boy neglected by the drunken
father and left without money at his school; the elder Dostoevsky
murdered by his peasants; Dostoevsky sentenced to death for plotting
against the Czar,--taken out and tied to a stake to be shot, and
reprieved only at the last moment; his four years of imprisonment in
Siberia, wearing the fetters with murderers and thieves, hauling bricks
and pounding alabaster; his later years of servitude as a soldier;
his persecution by his brother’s creditors; and the epilepsy which had
accompanied all from that first day, when, a boy at school, he had
heard the news of the murder of his father. Where was there place for
ironic patronage in the contemplation of such a life or of the writings
which had been its products?

And I remembered how Hugo, too, had suffered in his prison-camp in
France. No wonder he hated discipline and authority! It was true that
prison had made of Hugo an uncompromising revolutionist, whereas it had
made of Dostoevsky an equally uncompromising conservative: Hugo himself
was naturally good, and it seemed to him, in consequence, that all the
evil which he encountered must be the product of institutions somehow
imposed on humanity against their wish; whereas, in Dostoevsky’s case,
his inescapable sense of his own guilt, of the evil in his own heart,
seemed at last to have reduced him to feeling that, though he had
been punished for a political offense only, his punishment had been
somehow deserved, and that he had actually been expiating crimes of
which he had never been accused. He had come to believe in the badness
of humanity; and mere political readjustments, in consequence, no
longer appeared to him important. Yet the effect of the ordeal in each
case--in Hugo’s and in Dostoevsky’s--had been essentially the same: as
Dostoevsky’s years in Siberia had caused him so deeply to distrust even
the liberalism of educated Russians, so Hugo’s weeks in the prison-camp
had made it impossible for him to accept, even in their most genial
guise, the complacency and comfort of America. Both had been forced to
live at close quarters with the basic contentions and discords, the
basic horrifying anomalies, of our common life. And both were always
afterwards to look with the eyes of strangers and exiles upon even the
most conscientious, even the most intelligent, even the most amiable of
their fellows who had never recognized those realities.

Hugo and Dostoevsky alike had attempted to explain them, to resolve
them, those contentions, anomalies and discords.--And were not these
the prime provokers of literature?--not encountered in prisons only,
but in all treachery, violence, frustration, all the outbreaks of our
barbarous nature and the unlooked-for disasters which befell us at
the mercy of unknown forces. Such disasters and outbreaks alone could
rouse us from our normal existence of non-thinking and non-feeling,
the laziness of bodily processes inertly fulfilling their functions,
of the consciousness inertly drifting among random and meaningless
images--memories and anticipations--with unconscious but cunning
instinct steering clear of problems and tasks. What were literature and
art but the by-products of these collisions with the uncomprehended
reality--collisions whose repercussions, when we had withdrawn into
the shelter of ourselves, we attempted to palliate, to harmonize, to
account for, to subdue to a smoother rhythm in the current of our
thought, now resuming, which for a moment had been troubled or torn?
And was it not true that the individual artist--the greatest master
even: Dante himself--no matter how detached his intelligence, how
rich his imagination, how comprehensive his range, was never able to
escape from the instinct which made him justify his own life? If the
poet wrote about himself, or identified himself with his hero, the hero
must emerge victorious; or if the hero were allowed to be beaten, he
must at least be made to triumph morally; or if the writer confessed to
sin or ignominy, the confession itself must be a merit; or if he wrote
neither of himself nor of a hero, the historian, the economist or the
philosopher, in defending certain values, made them play the hero’s
rôle. Like the instinct which made us blink our eyes when anything was
brought near them, the instinct to produce a work of art (so I somberly
reflected to-night in that room where, so short a time before, as I had
heard Rita reciting her poems, the language of literature had seemed
to me something at once natural and noble)--the instinct to produce
a work of art was merely a self-protective reflex like another. Were
not imagination and reason like the phagocytes of our physical nature,
which, as soon as an infection occurs, rush to mass themselves at the
breach, where they ingest the disturbing intruders and put a stop to
the progress of the disease?--with this difference, that the work of
art, unlike the dead and discharged phagocytes, for some time and under
certain conditions, may retain a certain efficacy for others.

For the harmony, the justification, provided by a successful piece of
literature was accepted by the reader as valid. Yet the writer had
falsified life, because he had pretended to harmonize something of
which he was conscious chiefly as chaos, and to explain what he was
aware, all too well, he could not fully understand. So, when I had
written a sequence of sonnets about the night of my first meeting with
Rita, I had not mentioned, as I have not mentioned in my description
of that evening, the drunken friend who had kept calling me up and
interrupting our conversation; the agonized cries of cats; the howling
and sobbing of a baby; the sore throat which, toward the end of the
evening, I had begun to find very uncomfortable and which, afterwards,
during the days when I had been falling in love with Rita, had
developed into a bad cold. So I had also deliberately left out all that
uncertain and egoistic side of Rita’s character, of which I had already
become aware and which was already making me anxious.

A work of art was, then, an imposture. But the reader, himself balked
and bewildered, received naïvely the artist’s picture as a true diagram
of the world. The artist, who had been disconcerted and spurred to
compose a work of art by his failure to discover in the universe
either harmony or logic, supplied the logic and harmony himself; and
the reader, who had also been hungering for harmony or logic, accepted
with joyful reassurance what the artist gave him, and assumed that
the artist’s makeshift was a certified revelation, and the artist an
oracle. The reader leaned upon the writer: what for the latter was a
vague, a confused, or an approximate form of expression, the former
applied literally. All that part of literature which dealt directly
with current events--editorial-writing, pamphleteering, history, much
novel and play-writing--was but the painting of the thinnest varnish of
a comforting reason and art over earthquakes which actually took place,
not in the world of art and reason, but in the barbarous animal world,
bloody, uncontrollable, ignoble--and all the writer could hope for,
at best, was to divert the attention of his fellows, like a bystander
at a street accident who, when the rest of the crowd are only gaping,
insists upon the removal of the body, or like an actor in a burning
theatre who, by eloquence or jest, tries to avert a panic and stampede.
Yet the public, remembering the catchwords, the incantations, of their
leaders, attempted to enforce them as laws; and a flourish of rhetoric,
under pressure of a desperate crisis, would be imposed as a practical
programme or developed as a philosophic system.

Or the public got to the point of behaving as if every feature of the
artist’s work were something premeditated--writing, for example, after
the author was dead, “It was about this period that X, in his attempt
to understand his own time, decided that it would first be necessary to
understand the career of James G. Blaine, and, finding no satisfactory
book on the subject, he set out to write one himself,” or, “It was
in the course of his travels in the tropics that the necessity first
appeared to Y of a new and chaster form of expression,”--when the truth
was that the life of Blaine had been merely a piece of hackwork for a
publisher, suggested by the publisher himself, and that the baldness
of Y’s prose had been simply the result of enervation caused by the
tropical heat. Or some work, which had represented for the writer a
furious effort at completeness of understanding, at impersonality
of projection--an effort obstructed, to the writer’s dismay, by his
personal obsessions and mannerisms, his family habits, his organic
defects, the limitations of his nation and race, which pursued and
exasperated him, like a can tied to a dog’s tail--to the public, who
knew nothing of his aim, it was precisely the writer’s personality
which they savored and glorified, descending with gratified complacency
those very lines of least resistance against which the artist had
struggled to mount, and delighting in those very stigmata which the
artist had strained to efface. So posterity would piously cherish a
distinguished writer’s roughest notes, though these might be merely
irrelevant excretions, under the pressure of emotions and interests
not commemorated in them at all--productions which derived their only
vividness from the acuteness of the writer’s need to turn his mind away
from his troubles of the body, the heart or the purse, toward something
indifferent and remote--or they might be meaningless mechanical notes,
the merest rudimentary twitchings of the literary temperament, made in
moments of drunkenness or fatigue, but hungrily saved by the writer’s
admirers for their infinitesimal drops of some peculiar personal color,
no more significant or precious in itself than the color of his hair
or his eyes. From these notes, the writer’s disciples might end by
constructing a system which would have filled the writer with horror,
but which now carried the credit of his name--just as in the case of
ancient poetry, where the text was corrupt or fragmentary, Æschylus
seemed to us all the more awful and all the more oracular because, not
knowing precisely what he wrote, we did not know precisely what he
meant; and Sappho all the more a goddess because there was so little of
her left.

Nor were the public readers merely: they were also writers who imitated
the author. One had had a vision of movements in literature sweeping
over the minds of humanity like the wind that makes waves in the wheat;
but would it not, I now reflected, be more accurate to liken such
movements simply to the collapse of a row of dominoes, of which only
the first has felt the shock, the shock from the unknown reality, and
the others have merely toppled over, receiving it at second-hand? Till,
at last, the original composer of the symphony, the original inventor
of the system, would catch back from the minds of the public themselves
(who had merely taken it from him), a new belief in the all-embracing,
the all-satisfying character of that pattern, in the finality of those
conclusions, which, at the time he had first conceived them, he had
never himself regarded as complete.--Some day, like a fool, I should
myself read those poems I had written about Rita, and I should be
convinced that it had really been like that! Not content with deceiving
others, I should finally deceive myself!

But, in the long run, if my sonnets had become famous, the public would
have found them out. When the readers had got used to a writer--when
our first delight in his peculiar color, his peculiar music or flavor,
had commenced to wear thin--then the familiar malaise assailed us:
we began fatally to detect once again, beneath the novel or alluring
surface, the presence of all those grievances, those diseases and
insane preoccupations of the straining, incomplete human being--all
those anomalies, discords, and contentions from which, in seeking the
support of literature, we had hoped to be set free. And in the end, the
public of readers, when they had found out the weaknesses and falsities
of the system which it had once accepted--when they had perhaps tried
to put into practice some vision, like the morality of Nietzsche
(another favorite of Larry Mickler’s), which the writer had imagined in
his bed--they would turn against the writer and repudiate him.

Yet beyond the work of the individual artist, there was the concerted
general effort, the gigantic universal imposture, of literature itself!

I remembered the big volumes of Jebb in which, with the hope of
tranquillizing my spirit, I had lately been reading Sophocles. _There_
was perhaps the supreme achievement of the organized imposture of
literature! How many times had one seen the calmness and the sobriety
of Sophocles played off against the harshness or the cynicism of some
modern tragic writer! These plays had become the unchallenged example
of classic moderation and wisdom, the touchstone for modern turbulence.
Yet in what work of a modern dramatist had the harshness of Sophocles
been surpassed? I remembered the unruly tempers of the family of
Œdipus: the foolish quarrel of Œdipus with his father over a casual
encounter on the road; his harshness with Tiresias; the passionate
directness of all his gestures. Did one find even in the Œdipus of
Colonus that spirit of peace and resignation with which Victorian
critics sometimes credited it? Was the exiled and embittered king a
figure of mellow clemency? Surely his final cursing of his sons was
one of the most shocking scenes in literature!--nor did the species
of divine electrocution with which Sophocles finally disposed of him
strike precisely a note of tranquillity. And those sons who quarrel for
the kingdom and who finally slaughter each other! And the passionate
obstinacy of Creon, so like the passionate obstinacy of Œdipus--and
the passionate obstinacy of Antigone! The mother and daughter, in
_Electra_, bandying the most brutal abuse! These people were, in
their way, and even on the occasions when they were animated by some
passionate fanatical loyalty, as narrowly egoistic as the characters of
Ibsen, but more quarrelsome and more virulent!

Was there, indeed, I suddenly asked myself, from the point of view
of barbarous behavior, very much to choose between Sophocles and
Dostoevsky himself? There they were, the old hideous discords--Œdipus
killing his father, the old Karamazov murdered by his sons--that cruel
inevitable turning upon the beings who have given us life! I remembered
how Hugo had just told me that, rebelling against his father, he had
come to hate even those poets whom his father had loved--and how Rita,
in leaving behind her all that dull and homely life which for so long
had hobbled her youth, had discarded the name of Aunt Sadie, who
had taught her to play Handel and Bach.--And were not the horrors of
Dostoevsky--Myshkin’s epilepsy, Zossima’s putrefaction and Stavrogin’s
rape--quite matched by Philoctetes’s ulcer, by the unburied corpse of
Polyneices and by the incest of Œdipus? If even the form of Sophocles
were more chastened than the form of Dostoevsky, his spirit was more
astringent!

I remembered the story about Sophocles in Plato--how he had been asked
whether old age had made him impotent, and how he had replied that
growing old was like deliverance from a mad and cruel master. Was this
the saying of a calm and gentle nature? And what of the tranquillity
of even those later years?--I remembered in the second _Œdipus_, the
terrible description of old age--“unfriended, feeble, chided, unfit for
company, the crowning ill of all--not to be born is best, but once we
have seen the light it is better to go soon!” How did Matthew Arnold
know that “from first youth tested up to extreme old age,” “passion”
had never made Sophocles “wild”?

Yet so great was the need of humanity to believe in a human intellect
all-self-controlled and all-wise that there had been superimposed on
the plays of that great master of hatred and horror a legend which now
disguised them--and the solemn impassive don, laboring day after day
at his desk, explaining, interpreting, translating, every word of the
poet’s text--sometimes altering his words--had pared Sophocles down,
had sapped his power, ironing out to marmoreal smoothness a style
rather nodulous and tough, congealing angry cataracts of consonants
to colorless pediments of prose, and reducing the weighty rhythm, with
its urgent pulse of blood, tiding along from one line to another the
contractions of swift-spoken speech, to a tongue which could never
have been spoken--the British don, after centuries of critics, had
supplied us with what men of letters, what all mankind, had desired:
a writer super-human and humanly impossible, a writer who could never
have existed--a Master, of impeccable technique and imperturbable moral
balance, a writer who could never be supplanted and never be outgrown,
a writer unassailable, a classic!

So we had established the myth of the classics: from the written
remains of humanity, of beings outraged and wondering like ourselves,
we had created the illusion of a fortress of absolute beauty and
wisdom, into which educated men might retreat, upon whose invulnerable
strength they might rely.

And I thought, also, of those other efforts, those efforts more
characteristic of our time, which aimed, also, at an absolute
beauty, at an art wholly independent of the appetites and agonies of
men--paintings which represented nothing, “pure poetry” devoid of
ideas: both, in reality, mere assimilations on the part of literature
and painting to the pattern and rhythm of music--which itself had been
piously striving--in those composers who named their productions after
trigonometrical figures and the integral calculus--to assimilate itself
to mathematics.

How senseless such attempts seemed to-night! How could there be
anything absolute or pure about such exercises as the arts, which
were but pleasing arrangements of sensations, and which, therefore,
were inextricably dependent on the senses we had clumsily evolved to
meet our needs and to find our way through the jungle of nature! And
if the art which derived from our hearing seemed to us purer than the
others, it was merely because we experienced, in the region of sound
divorced from speech, sensations less complex and complete than through
images or words. These crude games, so much the play of our bodies,
of our primary animal life, that neither stories, visions, drama, nor
music--not argumentation even, not Euclid’s geometry itself, which
comes to a climax, like a Greek play, with the proposition of the
square on the hypotenuse--had been able to liberate themselves from the
type of our reproductive processes--so that one had always either, as
in Greek plays, to work up to a climax toward the end and then gently
and briefly subside, or, as in our modern ones, to reach a climax and
then abruptly cease. I thought of the heat of Catullus and Keats, of
the mounting excitement of Dante; of the even unimpassioned glow of
purely homosexual writers like Plato and André Gide; of the blank
stretches where the climaxes should be, in the novels of Henry James.

And I reflected, also, that between the sexes--Rita’s poetry and
Catullus’s--there was no real common norm of judgment in matters of
literature or art--men and women were each tied to their stakes: they
could only turn in circles about them. What critic could really
pretend to judge the work of men and women side by side?--or, for that
matter, the work of different races, or even of different nations--of
different periods, generations, each with its own adjustment to make to
the world which pursued and pressed it, each with its own particular
disasters, its own particular discords and conflicts, which, to be
easy, it must resolve? Or even of different individuals!

What a discrepancy--worst of all--what a gulf between the self which
experiences and the self which writes! What was the sense, I asked
myself, in that room where I had once brought Rita and where we had
talked the night through and seen the blue of June on the glass--what
was the comfort of “moments of emotion recollected in tranquillity”?
As if there could ever be a common denominator, as if there could ever
be a fusion or union, between those moments of tranquillity and our
moments of pain!

       *       *       *       *       *

As I went out to buy a bottle of gin at a near-by Italian restaurant, I
resolved to disgorge all these ideas in a gigantic destructive essay.
But I found now that I was getting a headache: my mind was still going
on at a furious fatiguing rate--with slashed and deflated tires,
running rackingly on its rims--and I wanted now to make it stop. I
had been feeling rather faint with hunger, and, while the waiter was
wrapping up the bottle, I ate some bread and drank a highball.

I tried to shift my thoughts to Daisy, as I expected to find her when
I should call for her--in her pretty black evening-gown, and much
beautified and refreshed.--After the highball, and a second highball,
I found myself full of enthusiasm for the night-club.

When I arrived at Forty-fourth Street, however, the door of Daisy’s
apartment was opened by Pete Bird, and I saw Daisy sitting on the
edge of the bed, with the same old rowdy plaid dress and the same
demoralized countenance, now unnaturally pale. Pete said, “Oh, hello!”
and both stared at me. I saw that Daisy had been crying: she had a
bandage around her wrist.

I inquired what had happened. “Daisy cut her wrist,” said Pete. “I was
trying to open a spaghetti can,” said Daisy, without expression. “Good
Heavens!” I exclaimed. “Don’t you think you ought to have a doctor?”
“We’ve had one,” said Pete. “He’s just gone.” Daisy continued to stare
up at me, without speaking, with watery, swollen eyes.

I felt a deep disgust with them both. I protested that she should have
waited, that I had planned to get dinner at the night-club. “Just
didn’t want to wait,” she replied--then added, after a moment’s pause:
“I had some spaghetti here, and I thought I might as well eat it!”

“I don’t suppose you want to do any more looping, then,” I said. She
answered shortly: “Not to-night.”

Pete Bird had sat down on the bed beside her, and put one arm around
her: he looked like a faithful dog. She looked like a wounded owlet:
I was astonished to observe that her nose, in the centre of her pale
round face, could appear like a little beak. She had through suffering
and fatigue reached one of those moments when women seem completely
dispossessed of their sex, and it occurs to us as a surprise that they
probably resemble their fathers.

I asked whether she wouldn’t like a drink. “You might leave some here,”
said Daisy. I felt that Pete regarded me with coldness, that he had
assumed complete proprietorship of Daisy, so I gave them the bottle
and took my leave. “I’m sorry,” said Daisy, without feeling, “that I
couldn’t go out.”

I directed the taxi-driver to take me to Sue Borglum’s.--I was
irritated by Daisy’s clumsiness in cutting her wrist on the spaghetti
can; and I resented the presence of Pete Bird. I did not particularly
want to see any more of Sue Borglum’s party--in fact, the thought
of returning was repugnant to me. But I had got to the bottom of
everything--nothing really mattered to-night. Going back to my
apartment alone was the most intolerable prospect of all.

In the cab, I fell to wondering, in my discouragement with art and
literature, whether it might not perhaps be possible to find a deeper,
more austere satisfaction in scientific writing and research: my mind
had been haunted that evening by ideas from my recent scientific
reading. In the sciences, at least, one was dealing with ruthless
reality itself: _there_ one did not pretend to justify; _there_ one’s
work was accomplished in indifference as to whether it solaced men’s
minds. I regretted now that I had never had the foresight to study
physics and biology at college. And in an attempt to exercise, at
least, that gift of scientific observation upon which I had rather
prided myself, I asked the taxi-driver, as I was paying him, whether
he had not been born in Alabama. But he replied that he had been born
in New York, and had lived there all his life.

I was struck, when I re-entered Sue Borglum’s, by a certain
demoralization which seemed to have taken place since I left. In the
room where people were dancing, a little baldish man with spectacles
was playing on a set of trap-drums: he was apparently under the
impression that he was contributing to the pleasure of the dancers; but
as his drumming made the phonograph inaudible, they were endeavoring
to restrain him. He was complacently smiling to himself, and when any
one remonstrated with him, only glanced up and smiled more happily,
deafened by his own drums. From time to time, he blew a kazoo.

On the couch in the room across the hall--the couch on which Rita had
been sitting--there lay a man (though he might almost have been a
woman of the taller more aquiline type) in a green and orange kimono,
from which protruded lean bare shanks and feet. He made me pause in
horror when I first saw him: his eyes, which had mascara on them, were
cadaverously closed, and his unnaturally narrow face had almost the
pinched look of the dead.

In the room where the refreshments had been served, there was nothing
left now but a sandwich which some one had bitten into, and the
purplish dregs of the punch. Bobby McIlvaine was leaning against the
mantel: his straight mouth and his narrow eyes seemed to have shut up,
at the intimation of danger, like a turtle’s shell. Sue Borglum was
vehemently haranguing him, while a girl with lustreless complexion
and lips painted a heavy magenta was expostulating tearfully with Sue
in an endeavor to justify herself for having just thrown a punch glass
at another girl, who, in her turn, feminine and frail in a fashion
rather wispy and washy, was half-hiding, like a frightened chick,
behind a species of woman doctor. This last person, who was broad
and well-tailored, with white cuffs and a black masculine dress, was
herself defying and deriding the first girl--the one who was appealing
to Sue Borglum--with robustious male taunts and chuckles, which served
to convey female malice.

Sue received me with a violent gust of welcome, evidently forgetting
that she had seen me before--no doubt my changing my clothes had misled
her--and immediately called me as a witness against Bobby McIlvaine:
“Now, tell him--tell him frankly!” she shouted. “I want him to know
what people really think of his sets! Did you ever see anything more
terrible in your life than the first act of _April Showers_? I tell
him that as a snug little cottage, it would make a good annex to the
Public Library!” I said that it was a great pity that the scene hadn’t
taken place in a palace, because Bobby was so good at palaces. “It’ll
take place in Cain’s palace soon!” Sue Borglum breathlessly went on.
“Palace! The trouble with him is that his style has gotten vulgar! It’s
vulgar, that’s what it is! Palace! It looks like a movie palace! It
looks like some movie man’s idea of a palatial ladies’ lavatory!”

I drifted on, after a little, to the kitchen: perhaps I wanted to be
sure that Rita had really gone--perhaps I still hoped to speak to her
alone and to break down that constraint between us of which I carried
the consciousness everywhere, like an ache at the back of my head.

In the kitchen, I found a little group waiting around the bathroom
door. One of the men was remonstrating with the others. In those
days, in Greenwich Village, there was always a man in a dinner-jacket
who was present on all major social occasions: he was some sort of a
bond-salesman or broker who took an interest in the arts. When, as in
the case of Sue Borglum’s Thursday evenings, these occasions became a
little more formal and many people wore dinner-jackets, he began to
appear in a dress-suit. Thus costumed, he was now leaning against the
sink, with his hands in his trousers pockets--his regular equine face
expressionless and almost distinguished--protesting with good-humored
gentlemanliness against the vigorous measures proposed by certain other
members of the group for inducing the occupants of the bathroom, who,
it appeared, had been in there a long time, to give somebody else a
chance. It was also suggested that the people inside might actually
be ill, that they might even have committed suicide, and that one
really ought to find out. “No,” said the gentleman in the dress-suit.
“I don’t think they’ve bumped themselves off. A little while ago I
heard somebody laughing.” “Maybe one of them’s bumped the other off,”
suggested somebody in the group, “and it’s the one that’s alive that’s
laughing.” “I don’t think so,” replied the arbiter. “I know them
both.--I want to get in,” he added, “just as badly as you do, but I
think we ought to be discreet.”

“Well, I’m damned if I do!” declared emphatically a little chunky
Hungarian, one of the editors of a communist paper. “Whatever they’ve
been doing in there, they’ve been doing it long enough!” “Yes,” said a
furtive-eyed poet, who wore a khaki shirt. “It’s time the workers got
a break!” The Hungarian’s companion, a chunky and pretty young Jewess,
smiled a little uneasily, in awe of the communist, but impressed by the
man in the dress-suit.

The Hungarian marched to the door and knocked resolutely and clearly.
“Look here, old chap!” said the man in the dress-suit, going forward
and taking him by the shoulder, though without violence or heat.
“Better lay off! Let’s be tactful!” “Get away, you animal cracker!”
the communist retorted. “Don’t try to high-hat me! There are other
gentlemen and ladies in the world besides you and your friends in the
bathroom!”

The door opened suddenly and widely, and Larry Mickler came out. He
was followed by a tall plain blonde, very much flushed and evidently
angry. They made their way through the group about the door, looking
fixedly straight ahead of them. But when Mickler came up to me--I was
the farthest from the bathroom--he stopped and let the girl leave the
kitchen alone.

“Well, old-timer!” he greeted me genially--with the exaggerated
heartiness of one who has failed to commend himself elsewhere. I
asked him whether Rita had gone. “I don’t know,” he replied, reaching
for the bottle of Scotch. “She was in the other room a little while
ago.--_There’s_ a woman who’s not afraid to be herself!--These
women are all afraid of themselves--they’re afraid to say _Yea_ to
life! Village and college girls, one’s just as bad as the other in
this goddam country of ours!--Like that rope-haired blonde girl, for
instance--she wants it and yet she’s afraid of it--when it comes to the
point, she’s afraid! She pretends to be scandalized, when she’s really
only sore at herself!--Well, let’s drink to Rita Cavanagh, the woman
who’s not afraid!”

“I’m all for Rita Cavanagh,” I said, “but I’ve drunk enough toasts
to-night!” “That’s right!” replied Larry Mickler, immediately directing
his resentment at me. “Say _Nay_, like all the rest! I’m not surprised
you’re in the publishing business. The publishers are all _Nay_-sayers!
I wouldn’t be writing ads, instead of novels, if the publishers
said _Yea_ to life!--Why, if the whole tribe of publishers--and
editors!--and critics!--were combined in one attack, they wouldn’t be
enough to make a Dostoevsky scratch the bite!” I repressed an impulse
to answer, “To hell with Dostoevsky!”--but replied, “I never heard that
Dostoevsky had any trouble getting published.” I left him glaring,
before he had retorted, and went back into the dining-room.

In the dining-room, the girl with the lustreless skin had broken down
and was weeping on a chair, while Sue Borglum, her own eyes leaking
tears, was making an effort to console her. Sue was saying: “Never
mind, Claudette--you can’t win! you can’t win!” Bobby McIlvaine, who
was standing alone, his face locked against the scene which confronted
him, produced two theatre-ticket stubs from his pocket and dropped them
into the dregs of the punch. He remarked to me: “That’s a combination
that I’ve always wanted to try in the theatre--mauve and blue!”

In the front room, to which I immediately returned, I was just in
time to witness an arrival which made upon me a curious impression. I
could hardly at first believe my eyes: there had appeared suddenly,
under the escort of Tony Scallopino, the proprietor of one of those
Greenwich Village restaurants which were beginning, at that period,
to be transformed into small but increasingly expensive night-clubs,
two young women who, even among that company where one was not
ordinarily surprised at anything, astonished and jarred upon me, like
some incongruous image of a dream, remembered after we wake, some
image which owes its strangeness, its power obscurely to worry us, to
the fact that it has been transferred from its surroundings in the
waking world to surroundings which do not fit it. They were strangely
conspicuous, these girls--more conspicuous, even, in their way, than
the man in the orange kimono or the woman with the stiff white cuffs.
In the first place, they were very brightly dressed, one in blue, the
other in red--and I saw, at a second glance, that their dresses, though
gay and even smart, were flimsy and cheap. Neither was bad-looking; and
when they first came in, I thought they were attractive. The small one,
the one in blue, had blue eyes and looked a little like a fish; but the
other, the one in red, was quite handsome; she had rich brown hair,
large brown eyes, full cheeks, fleshy lips, rather a creamy complexion
and a nice thick nose. But their cheeks glowed with a heightening
of color, and their eyes were starred with a black radiation, which,
among all the varied make-ups of the party, seemed improper and out of
place; such faces were not meant for the lighting of ordinary private
houses, but for the pink-shaded lights-in-darkness of Tony Scallopino’s
night-club. And in their eyes I saw that public stare, the stare of the
prostitute, which, like the jockey’s bowed legs, the tailor’s peering
eyes, the courtroom intonations of the lawyer, the military officer’s
curtness, is the universal sign of the profession--that stare which
must be always watching, which must meet all the world without winking,
without demurring or veiling itself--that stare which sometimes looks
amazed, sometimes panic-stricken, sometimes resentful and sullen, and
sometimes insane, but which seems always to have robbed the face of
some essential element of personality, and therefore of humanity itself.

I gazed at these girls, and, in an instant, the brunette had become
aware of my gaze and was welcoming it, with smiling eyes. I approached
her, and she began at once, before I had even spoken: “I think this
is the most delightful old house! What a lovely old mirror over the
mantel!” We discussed the house, the weather, the theatre: she had
opinions about the plays that were being given in the little Village
theatres: I was surprised to hear her make conversation so cleverly
and with such a good manner, but I was shocked to see her ply her
trade--she made no pretense of anything else--so brazenly and so
promptly.

I was made uneasy, as we talked of other things, to meet nothing in
her large fine eyes but a look of sly, humorous complicity. Those
eyes, for all their intelligence, had been glazed against the warmth
of frankness, the expression of personal feeling, as much as those of
any streetwalker’s who makes off to the streets again the moment her
transaction is finished. And this troubled me--I hated and resented it:
to-night I had felt myself estranged, first, from Rita, and then, from
Daisy--I had felt cut off beyond even communication. And I now exerted
myself to make a contact with the brown-eyed girl in red--to force her
to meet my friendliness.

But as she saw that I was refusing to do business, she soon passed on
to the man in the dress-suit, who happened to be standing near us.
Without excuse or explanation, without hesitation or resentment, like
some salesman of carpet-sweepers, who, rejected at one door where he
has knocked, immediately passes on to the next, she assailed him with
her shameless patter.

I wondered how Tony Scallopino had ever dared to bring these women
here, and I was aroused to disgusted anger. (I found out afterwards
that Sue herself, in her morbid and hysterical fear lest her party
should be ill-attended, had telephoned to Tony to bring any one still
at his place--meaning, of course, any of his regular patrons.) I
remembered how Tony Scallopino, in the days before his advent to the
Village, had been an I. W. W. agitator and how, in the course of the
long Italian dinners, in his former and cheaper restaurant, he had
often sat down at our table and talked about politics with us; I had
at that time always rather liked him, but it seemed to me to-night
that Tony had become Manhattanized and cynical. It did not occur to me
that, from Tony’s point of view, the girls were working-people like
himself, and that in bringing them to Sue Borglum’s party he might be
merely endeavoring to make it up to them for a night of bad business at
his night-club; I might have guessed, from their technique of hungry
wolves, that they were desperately badly off. But I only felt that Tony
had somehow become a traitor.

The fish-faced blonde approached me in her turn, hoping to succeed
where the other had failed, but I let her see that I was disaffected.
She passed on to the creature on the couch, the man in the orange
kimono, and by some playful overture, awoke him. But he, nervously
starting up, regarded her with surprise and indignation, and exclaimed,
in a high peevish voice: “I want to lie down here, please! I’ve got a
perfectly terrible headache!”

Sue Borglum and Bobby McIlvaine had, in the meantime, appeared from the
dining-room; and Sue, beholding the girl in red, who had not long been
detained by the dress-suit, address herself immediately to Bobby as if
she already knew him, had concluded at once that she was some flame of
his, whom Bobby had invited without consulting her. And, in a moment,
learning that Sue was the hostess, the newcomer had turned to her
enthusiastically, exclaiming over the beauty of the old house, the old
mirror, the quiet charm of the neighborhood, the delightfulness of the
occasion: “But I’m so sorry to miss seeing Rita Cavanagh: I admire her
poetry so much! I was so excited when Tony told me she was going to be
here to-night, and then we missed her--she left before we came!”

I made my way to the hall again, where, in the manner of Larry Mickler,
I drew and drank rapidly several cocktails from the lemon-cloudy lees
of the water-cooler. Then, feeling that these drinks were weak--they
consisted principally of melted ice--with a vision of a den of drug
addicts gathered together, with gruesome merriment, to dose themselves
with alcohol, I drank what was left of a bottle of whiskey, which
turned out to be excessively bad, stinging my tongue and constricting
my gullet.

Now I began to ask myself whether it were the revolver Larry Mickler
was carrying which had made me break off with him so quickly and leave
the room without waiting for his reply.

Through a door which led into the dining-room and which opened
behind me from the hall, I could hear Sue, who had left the
sitting-room--retreating, as was by no means characteristic of her, at
the advance of the outrageous guests, whom she still believed to be
friends of Bobby’s--pouring out, to the equally unfortunate Claudette,
in a shrill, strained, and grating voice, her grievances against Bobby:
“It isn’t as if I’d ever been anything to him--I never was! I never
wanted to do anything but help him. Some women would have tried to
get a hold on him!”--etc., etc. At that moment, it seemed to me that
Sue--whom I found that I now somehow identified with the woman with
the dyed red hair and the slatternly lacy dressing-gown, whom I had
seen at the beginning of the evening in the house where Larry Mickler
lived--that Sue Borglum was the ugliest and most odious woman whom I
had ever known, and that she possessed the most horrible voice. Yet it
was not really her voice which made me hate her, but the fact that she
was lonely and in pain.

In the room where the phonograph was playing, the dancers had abandoned
the floor, driven off by the man with the drums, who, however, still
sat trancedly drumming. They sat or lay on the couches and chairs,
which had been moved back against the sides of the room--as if washed
up, I said to myself, in what I thought was a felicitous fancy, like
driftwood, dead fish, and seaweed left behind by the tide on the shore.
Then I remembered Rita’s poem, the poem about the beach-fire and the
darkness: it seemed to me that my own image had been caught from it,
and I felt that I had been travestying it foolishly.

With an impulse of irritation, I broke in upon the imbecile with the
drums, interrupting him in a loud clear voice and inquiring whether he
knew the time. “I don’t know the time,” he replied, with his abstracted
fatuous smile--“but,” he added, after a moment, when he had come to
the end of a spasm of drumming, “I’ve got something else that’s just
as good!” He produced a pint flask from his back pocket: “And a darn
sight better!” he added. He offered me a drink, which I accepted. I sat
down on a chair beside him. “This is something,” he further observed,
after taking a swig himself, “which makes time unnecessary!” He had
the conviction of quiet humor of a very stupid person. “If you carry a
little flask,” he continued, after a brief pause--he had begun softly
drumming again--“you don’t need to carry a watch!”

I asked him whether he knew Larry Mickler, and when he shook his head,
always smiling, I expressed the extreme distaste I felt for the admirer
of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. “Why, he’s a fellow,” I protested, “who
smashes the statue of the Winged Victory that his wife brings home from
college--a perfectly nice little college girl! He tries to neck other
girls in the Jap’s room--in the bathroom!--He threatens them with a
gun! He’s the most objectionable man I’ve ever known!”

And I reflected to the tune of the fox-trot and to the subdued
rat-a-tat of the drum, that what I had said was literally true: Larry
Mickler was, without any question, the most obnoxious man I had ever
known--and I had failed to put him properly in his place! I had been
afraid of his damned revolver! Here there had come to me an opportunity
to stand up to Evil itself: it might be that such a moment as this,
such a moment that tested a man, came but once to a man in his life!
And I had quailed at the thought of a gun! Yet to stand up to Larry
Mickler would be finally to vindicate one’s honor against the horror,
the shame, the despair, of that terrible house! They themselves, I felt
sure, would thank me for it!

I decided to seek him out. I should find him slinking about the
rooms--I remembered his dirty complexion and his furtive, ill-natured
eye, his cockily waxed mustache. He would ask me to drink to
Dostoevsky, and I should reply: “To hell with Dostoevsky! What’s the
good of a Dostoevsky to nourish such worms as you? The world would be
more decent without him!--the world would be better off if it were rid
of all the cripples and defectives who find their only justification in
reading and writing books!”

And I was steadied with a deep satisfaction, a perfect self-assurance:
I took on a new authority. With the most affable friendliness, I
complimented the man with the spectacles on his mastery of the traps,
and asked him whether he had taken lessons. He said, no: that he
had just picked it up, and added some quiet pleasantry, at which I
uproariously laughed, but to which I had paid no attention, as I had
been thinking of the classical statue which Larry Mickler had smashed
on the mantelpiece and which now presented itself to my mind in the
guise of a silver-gray Athena as slender as her spear--and this vision,
in the glimpse of a second, had dragged with it all the fresh bright
beauty of the portfolio of drawings for Homer which Bobby McIlvaine had
shown Rita and me that May night in University Place.

I arose and thanked the drummer for his drink, which I extravagantly
commended with a condescension almost regal. He offered me another,
which I took.

Walking composedly from room to room, I began scouring the house for
Larry Mickler: with a keen and arrogant glance, I scrutinized the
groups one by one.--I told myself that, once Mickler was disposed of,
I should carry off the pretty brunette, who had come to seem to me
very desirable--I should meet her at first on her professional basis,
and then I should compel her to be human with me--she should drop that
horrible manner and mask, she should share with me her feelings and her
thoughts!--She should become my companion--she should love me!

But I could find Larry Mickler nowhere, and when at last I began to
inquire, nobody seemed to know what had become of him. In the front
room, I was taken aback to discover that the girl with the brown
eyes had already reached an understanding with a clownish-looking
elderly man, who wore a heavy black ribbon on his eye-glasses. He was
pressing her to leave with him at once; and she was explaining that
she would have to wait until her “girl-friend” was ready to go. The
little fish-faced blonde, for her part, had, in the meantime, been
taken in the toils of one of the licensed Greenwich Village lunatics,
who, without a penny in his pocket, was exerting the active and ironic
intelligence of which his derangement had never deprived him to
convince her of the seriousness of his intentions.

I went up to Tony Scallopino, who greeted me with a broad, sunny smile,
and asked him whether he had seen Larry Mickler. “I just see him go,”
he replied.

I stood for a moment without speaking. Then, “What’s the idea,” I
began, “of bringing these girls here to-night?” “They’re just two
little girls,” he explained, “who come to my place to dance. They’ve
had hard luck and they have to earn a little money. They’re two very
nice girls.” He had said this with a smiling eye in which I thought I
detected insolence: I found myself glaring at him. “Well, I think that
it was a great mistake to bring them here to-night!” I declared.

His grin was for a second obscured by a blink, like the shutter
of a camera: he began to say something more, I don’t know what.
I only stared into his face: his eyes were wide open but shrewd;
he still smiled--he had the habitual tactfulness of the Italian
restaurant-proprietor, but his obsequiousness was gone: he was raising
his heavy black eyebrows, as if in protest and surprise. I felt that
he thought me drunk, that he considered my objections tactless: was
Tony Scallopino not himself an independent Villager? had he not been
invited to the party? had he not sometimes loaned money to the lunatic
who was attempting to impose on the blond girl? had he not talked like
a brother to Hugo of the trials and aspirations of the workers? had he
not cashed my checks?

My lips opened, without my having planned it, and, despite the gummy
tongue of drunkenness, I heard myself suddenly interrupt him: “You used
to be a Wobbly! You used to talk about justice to the workers! Well,
it seems to me that now you’re betraying the workers! You’re trying
to give the Greenwich Villagers a taste for leisure-class luxuries!
You’ve turned your old Italian restaurant into an expensive up-town
night-club!--and you charge us high prices for bad liquor! And you have
the nerve to bring these girls--” He tried to slip away, but I seized
him by the arms and pinioned him against the wall: “You used to talk
about the social revolution--well, if there’s ever a social revolution,
you proletarians who run night-clubs will be the first to get the
axe!--When I first came down to Greenwich Village----”

He was angry and tried to pull away--I thought I heard him say, “You
must be drunk!” and saw him give me a black malign look. With a
powerful movement of his arms, he lifted them and pushed me away with
such force that I staggered backward and almost fell.--I struck him in
the jaw with my fist--and the next moment was looking at the room from
a different point of view, and knew that I was lying on the floor.




                                   IV


In the bright warm room, so alive inside the bleak November dark,
before the fire burning briskly and stoutly, Professor Grosbeake’s
three beautiful daughters gave me tea, in their parents’ absence. Among
the elegant and slender spindles of the legs and rungs of the English
furniture, which seemed blacker and stronger-sinewed, as if they had
been brought to a sharper focus, than American mahogany--which, as in
the case of the Queen Anne secretary, with its narrow shape, its dark
dense grain, its close-laid shelves above, hooded with a double-loaf
top, and its close-packed drawers below, diminishing in thickness
toward the bottom, its air of having always contained sealed letters
and legal papers, all safely and neatly locked away, seemed designed
for a tighter, compacter, and more downright civilization; among the
late pale autumnal flowers, the roses and the bowl of white cosmos; the
white ruffle-bordered curtains against the black of the winter panes
and the patches of confused pink and green made by the modest modernist
paintings--Magda, Frieda, and Rosamond, themselves in fresh light
frocks like the flowers, enchanted me with their loveliness and candor.

They were all very smooth and blond; they had never bobbed their hair,
and Frieda and Magda wore theirs brushed abundantly down their backs,
like Alice in the Alice books. Rosamond, who was older than the twins,
had hers up: it was parted in the middle and tightly wound behind in a
blond and young-womanly knot, so that, if one thought only of her hair,
she seemed like a young German fräulein (Mrs. Grosbeake was German),
whereas, if one thought of her blue eyes, her straight nose, her long
oval face and her long and graceful neck, she seemed like an English
girl. She served the tea with nice shy manners. Rosamond was dressed in
pale blue; and one of the twins, Magda, wore white, and Frieda, a kind
of lilac, with stockings a kind of lavender, lighter than the frock.
The twins seemed rather German than English: they had plump round
cheeks and round noses, and were maturely developed for fourteen.

Frieda had golden-red hair, which gave a singular effect of richness as
it came down over her purple dress; Magda was more heavily built and
slower-moving and slower-thinking than her sister: she was the blondest
of all--her hair was the palest, purest flaxen I had ever seen. And her
blondness made me think of Daisy, whom I expected to see the next day.

(I had lately come back from abroad. My aunt had left me a small
legacy, and very soon after the night at Sue Borglum’s, I had gone to
Europe and had stayed there till fall. When I had returned, I had been
eager to see Grosbeake, one of whose books I had bought in England and
had been reading on the boat, and in whom I now felt a new interest. I
had also planned to visit Daisy and Pete Bird, who had left New York,
even before I had, and were now living together in the country, not far
out of my way back to town. Since I had been back, I had written to
Daisy, and she had invited me to come to see them.)

I liked the English voices of the young Grosbeakes: they had a soft
flurried way of speaking, and a maidenly innocence of timbre, quite
unlike young American girls (though the twins were beginning already
to acquire American slang). “I don’t like this kind of crackers,” said
Magda. “We couldn’t get the regular biscuits,” Rosamond explained.
“The grocer’s all out of them.--I’m sorry,” she went on seriously to
me. “I’m afraid they’re not very good!” “You always say ‘biscuits,’”
said Frieda, “and Magda always says ‘crackers.’ I think we all ought
to say the same thing!” “What do you say?” queried Magda. “Sometimes
I say one,” said Frieda, “and sometimes I say the other. But I like
‘biscuits’ best!” “I think these are really crackers,” said Rosamond,
who did not want my feelings hurt by a discrimination in favor of
‘biscuits,’ “because they crackle so when you break them.” “That’s why
I think ‘biscuits’ is better,” insisted Frieda, “--because ‘crackers’
sounds as if they _all_ crackled--but _some_ biscuits just bend, you
know!” “They’re not biscuits,” said Rosamond. “They’re cakes.--Won’t
you have some more tea?” she urged me. “No,” said Frieda, “you know
those little soft ones that we had in the country last summer, that you
can almost bend in two!” “They were little cakes,” said Rosamond.--We
heard some one come in at the front door. “There’s Father,” Magda
announced.

I could see Grosbeake taking off his black coat and his low-crowned
black hat and setting his stick in the stand, before he appeared in the
doorway. He had the rounded back of the scholar, a back, indeed, almost
humped--of which I always used to feel that the exceptional extent
to which it was bowed was an index to the degree of the difficulty
of his researches. But Grosbeake, beyond this, had nothing of the
physical deficiency--the weak eyes or the feeble figure--ordinarily
attributed to the scholar. On the contrary, he seemed to have sprung
from some tough ruddy-cheeked English stock which not even a lifetime
of universities could enervate or fade. Despite the fineness of his
features, he had something of Mr. Pickwick and even something of
Mr. Punch. And upon an American who had been living in New York, he
produced a curious and gratifying impression: it was as if one were
surprised and rejoiced, after seeing a horde of depersonalized masks,
at finding some one who possessed a face. With his fair cheeks flushed
rosy by the cold, his salient nose and chin, his slanting Henry VIII
eyes and his look of having been carved by hand out of some very sound
kind of wood by a wood-carver of the days before machinery, he gave
the impression of being a product, by way of the generations which had
preceded him, of a constant hand-to-hand encounter with the turbulence
of the elements and with the occasions of human life. He wore black
English clothes and his stiff white cuffs were very white: his collar
and his cravat, and his white locks which came down over his collar,
seemed to me very old-fashioned. He always carried a thickish dark
stick, with a brass top of interlocked apes, which a brother had
brought him from India.

He greeted me with his charming courtesy and peered up at me with
wise and subtle bird-lidded eyes. “I’m sorry,” he explained, “not to
have been able to be here for tea. But there was a meeting of the
examination committee at precisely a quarter to five--something which
would be unthinkable in England, you know.” He lifted sparse old
eyebrows in a smile. “Rather than make the dons miss their tea, they’d
allow the examination to be prepared without adequate consultation!--I
had proposed holding the meeting in a tea-room, but they didn’t seem
to care for the suggestion--or to take the hint!” He spoke slowly and
very deliberately, and his voice had fine up-and-down inflections of
sweetness and irony: his nostrils had inflections, too, and vibrated
while he spoke.

“I’m afraid the tea’s cold,” said Rosamond. “I’ll have some fresh
made.” “No: never mind!” said Grosbeake. He stood before the fire, his
hands clasped just above his stomach. “I think we shall have snow,”
he announced. “I think we shall have snow!--The Dean was very sure we
shouldn’t--but I believe that we shall!” I remarked that we had had no
frost and that the afternoon had been warm. “That was what the Dean
pointed out,” he replied. “He even insisted on making a bet with me.
He bet me a bottle of Scotch whiskey against a bottle of my sherry. I
think he’ll get the better of the bargain: the sherry is very good:
it was given me by a friend in the Embassy, who had the privilege of
bringing it in!”

He took the cup of tepid tea from Rosamond and sat down in an arm-chair
before the fire. He asked me about myself and what I had been writing.
I was ashamed to be obliged to tell him that, even while I had been
abroad, I had really not written anything--I said that my literary
morale had been low, or something equally silly.

“I was just thinking,” he replied, “in the Dean’s room, in looking
at the portraits of the college presidents there--that it may be
from certain points of view as much of a misfortune to have too much
character, too well-sustained a morale, as to have too little. When
I looked at the early presidents, especially the seventeenth-century
ones, I said to myself, ‘There are men whose character has been
overdeveloped!’ It’s a very special combination of qualities, you know,
that’s required for a mind capable of original work. A man mustn’t have
his character too vigorously developed, because he must be able to
experiment with ideas. It’s like going to buy a hat, you know--first
you try one on and wear it for a bit to see how it goes, and then you
try on another. But a man with a strongly developed character is unable
to do that.--But, on the other hand, of course, he must still have
character enough not simply to drift about without preferring one idea
to another.”

Grosbeake had a curious irony, which was always at the same time
benign. It was the irony--one sees it seldom--of a mind which is at
once innocent and subtle, and which has, in consequence, something
divine about it: an irony without malice. He had a touch perhaps of
the vanity, or rather, of the dandyism, of the modern mathematical
philosopher, who finds himself provided with paradoxes at once so
surprising, so attractive and so sound. I have heard him comment with
his calm amusement on the mistakes of unmathematical philosophers when
they attempted to invoke mathematics: “It’s curious,” he would say,
“how peculiarly unfortunate they are in their choice of mathematical
examples! They always seem to hit upon something which isn’t
necessarily true at all--which might quite as well be the other way,
you know! Bradley, for example, in his _Logic_, when he wants to give
an illustration of a particularly indisputable truth--something we must
accept as self-evident--that, if B is to the left of C, and if A is to
the left of B, then A must be to the left of C, also--when, of course,
that’s not true at all!--if you prolong a straight line indefinitely,
you come back on the other side!” Though, when Bradley’s _Logic_ was
written, non-Euclidean geometry could hardly have been widely known.
(There may have entered, also, into Grosbeake’s attitude, in this
particular instance, some traditional opposition between the points of
view of Cambridge and Oxford.)

But no one could have been farther than Grosbeake from the essential
triviality of mind which academic arrogance or complacency so often
tries to disguise. For if Hugo Bamman and his father were the modern
type of saints, Grosbeake was a modern type of sage, who taught wisdom
in casual conversation and virtue only by example. I had felt his
influence even in college, at a time when I as yet knew nothing of his
philosophical ideas. For Grosbeake had the most comprehensive mind,
at home in the most varied fields, with which I had ever come into
contact. For him, philosophy was an attempt to take account of all the
aspects of the universe, and to find in them coherence and a meaning;
so that Grosbeake’s comment on any subject had a special significance
and value, and, despite the fact that he never made an effort to
expostulate or convert, was likely to present itself long afterwards
as something to be seriously considered in making up one’s own mind on
the subject. And though he detested every sort of preaching (Mr. Bamman
had been a born preacher), and though even the study of Ethics was
inconceivable to him, he had the effect, more than any one else I had
known, of making moral distinction attractive. I remember his saying
once of some student, a student of whose abilities he thought well, but
who, as punishment for some escapade, had had his chapel cuts taken
away from him, so that he couldn’t go out of town over Sundays, that it
would “do him good,” because he would now work during the week-ends.
“So you do believe in doing people good!” some one present had caught
him up. “I thought you didn’t believe in that!” “That’s an object,”
Grosbeake had replied, a little taken aback, “which I believe is best
promoted indirectly.”

Mrs. Grosbeake came in before dinner: she was a broad, handsome, placid
German woman, very thoroughly educated and very practical. One always
felt that she was a kind of base upon which Grosbeake’s metaphysics
rested; for he was more sensitive and nervous than he appeared, and,
although intellectually imperturbable, was in other ways easily
disorganized.

We had dinner in the white-walled dining-room--it was a solid and
attractive Colonial house. The Grosbeakes had brought over their own
silver, as well as their own furniture, and the pieces had always
seemed to me to possess plainly discernible personalities, even
physiognomies: there was a squarish silver tea-pot which squatted
flat upon the table and had a very sharp emphatic spout that jutted
straight out from the base and was balanced on the other side by a long
straight high-cocked handle. And the cream-pitcher, the sauce-boat, and
even the little salt-cellars straddled sturdily on three tiny legs,
like some sort of blunt-beaked beetles, or rather, it occurred to me
to-night, like the snouted and potbellied demons of Bruegel or Callot.
Even the color and substance of the food seemed to have a special
richness and density, as if they had been painted in a still-life: the
bread and the boiled potatoes looked particularly white and firm, the
mound of currant jelly particularly lucent and red, and the beefsteak
particularly vivid in its contrasts of red and brown. The Ambassador’s
sherry was delicious. In spite, however, of the satisfaction which
Grosbeake had seemed to feel in it, his epicurean tastes were really
indulged almost exclusively in the things of the intellect, so that I
have heard him relish a page of Hume as if it had been a wine, whereas
food and drink themselves, as well as other material comforts, he
usually disregarded. Now he dominated the table, talking tranquilly
and blandly; and in the presence of their father and mother, the three
lovely Grosbeake girls--unlike young American girls, who usually
dominate their parents--were entirely in abeyance, with only an
occasional low rapid interchange between the twins, who were sitting
together.

“I’ve been reading Sinclair Lewis’s _Babbitt_,” Grosbeake remarked. I
asked him what he thought of it. “Oh, very good,” he replied. “Though
a little unfair to Babbitt, I think. Of course, I know very little
about the American cities of the Middle West--I can’t pretend to speak.
But from the students from the West whom I’ve had in my courses, I
get rather a different impression. They’re very alert, you know--very
eager to learn. And they do well: they grasp things very quickly. So I
don’t think that the families they come from can be quite so uniformly
benighted as Lewis represents them in _Babbitt_.--And I feel, in
reading your friend Hugo Bamman, that he paints a little too sombre a
picture of the business men and their families in much the same way.

“It seems to me rather a mistake, you know, to hold the business men up
to ridicule for their Rotary Clubs and their fraternal organizations.
Under conditions of that kind, where the city is quite new and
the people have no institutions, they have to create some sort of
institutions in order to hold the community together. Rotary Clubs
and societies of that sort, imperfect as they may be, fulfil a very
necessary function.

“It seems to me that, from some points of view, the most unfortunate
feature of American business is its failure to provide real leaders.
Professor Pittinger, who has been making a study of the subject, tells
me that it has become impossible, for example, for the president or one
of the directors of a large corporation to leave a controlling interest
to his son. He can only leave him an investment, and the son can spend
the money as he pleases; but he inherits no responsibility and no
power, and the surviving officers of the company don’t recognize his
right to any. That seems to me unfortunate, because where the father
has to make his own way, largely without advantages, to a position of
importance, the son, who has had the advantages, finds himself with no
power. You often find in England that the squire who has lived in the
country, and has had to deal at first-hand with his tenants, and with
his animals and land, has a far stronger sense of realities than the
more enlightened Londoner.”

“But he sometimes mistreats his tenants and mismanages his estate
abominably,” Mrs. Grosbeake interjected.

“If he does,” continued Grosbeake, “he knows better what he’s doing,
nevertheless, than the average Liberal member of Parliament, say, who
has the best intentions in the world, but who lives between his club,
and certain houses to which he goes, and the House of Commons--always
seeing the same people, who are all people of precisely his way of
thinking, who are living in precisely the same way--so that he never
at any point really comes into contact with realities--and so never
really knows what he is talking about. Even Morley was a little like
that.

“I wonder whether it mightn’t be an advantage, both to the sons of
business men and to the businesses themselves, if the second generation
could take over some responsibility in connection with their fathers’
work. They seem to me very intelligent--so far as I’ve been able to
judge from those I meet in my classes--and the effect on trade and
industry of even one generation of such men might, I should think, be
enormous. In that event, the Rotary Clubs might become very important
institutions--they might provide the moral leadership for business.”

I had so long been taking it for granted that no good could come out of
business, that this idea of Grosbeake’s seemed to me a very queer and
foreign one; but I reflected on what he had said.

I always listened with interest and respect to Grosbeake’s opinions
on American matters. He had studied American affairs with the
attention, at once sympathetic and detached, which he applied to
everything, and he often succeeded in illumining them with that
uncanny divination which he displayed in all sorts of fields quite
outside his special province. At that time, it had become the custom
for Englishmen who visited America--we encouraged it, of course,
ourselves--to edify us with generalizations about American life and
institutions--generalizations often based on a round of cocktail
parties in New York, or, at most, on a lecture tour. So many of the
prizes in America always went to the third and second-rate, that
we had become, especially since the War, a paradise for British
mediocrities--poets, novelists, and universal critics, who had often
great success as lecturers. They went about patronizing the Americans
with a gusto and a giddy elation which suggested that they might
themselves have been patronized at home; and they would sometimes
tour the country from coast to coast and return again and again. It
was, therefore, peculiarly gratifying for an American to discover in
Grosbeake those qualities of toughness, richness, eccentricity, and
independence which one had admired in English literature and history,
but of which one had so often been disappointed in the English
celebrities who visited us.

After dinner, we sat before the fire. Mrs. Grosbeake seemed to
contribute a ground-tone of infinite repose: she made one feel that the
body of humanity was invulnerably solid and sound, and that it was deep
and contained many treasures which had never been brought to birth. She
sat with her feet side by side, resting squarely on the floor, and she
wore some sort of leather sandals, with very wide blunt toes. These
sandals, like the modernist paintings (which Grosbeake had bought from
a former student, in financial difficulties), were one of the odd notes
of unconventionality in the tranquil conventional household; and they
surprised me in the same unwarranted way as when one found Grosbeake,
in certain of his writings, carrying his philosophical principles
through morals into the field of political criticism and bringing in an
indictment against nationalism or capitalism.

I had never, as an undergraduate, read anything which Grosbeake had
written, and I had never taken any of his courses. I had, however, in
my senior year, sometimes gone to his house. After meeting him once
or twice at teas, I had run into him one day in the hallway of one of
the recitation buildings: he had recognized me and had talked to me
about an article which I had just written for the college magazine,
and which had aroused a certain amount of controversy. I had attacked
wholesale, as a sinister conspiracy against freedom of action and
thought, the policy of the English Department, the administration of
the Dean’s office, football mass-meetings, compulsory chapel, and the
custom of compelling freshmen to wear little black caps; and I was
surprised and rather embarrassed by Grosbeake’s expression of friendly
interest. I replied almost apologetically--I had been dismayed by
the rumpus I had roused--that I seemed to have laid myself open to a
good deal of adverse criticism. “Ah, well,” Grosbeake had reassured
me, “one can’t take up any position, can one? without doing that.” My
complaints had been made in resentment, and they had been answered
with resentment by the faculty, the alumni, the editors of the college
daily, the officers of the athletic association, and some of the more
ardent and articulate freshmen, who insisted that they asked nothing
better than to pay homage to the college tradition by continuing to
wear their little black caps: it had never occurred to me, at the
time, that I was engaged in doing anything so dignified as taking up
a position, and I had felt that I must be careful, in the future, to
conduct the controversy with more scrupulousness and sobriety, that I
must remember my intellectual responsibilities. And half my bitterness
and indignation against the college authorities was gone at finding an
elderly and important professor willing to consider without heat what I
had said.

He had invited me then to his house, and I used to go there on Sunday
evenings, when the Grosbeakes received faculty and students. I rarely
heard him talk about his subject, and did not understand him when
he did: I had only the vaguest notion what it was. I figured him as
eternally occupied with solving the same sort of problems with which
I had struggled in Trigonometry and Permutations and Combinations.
I did not know that those strings of puzzles were not the whole
of mathematics, but merely multiplied illustrations of general
mathematical laws, in which no one had attempted to interest us. And
still less did I realize that Grosbeake had passed beyond Mathematics
proper to Symbolic Logic (it was principally the fact that we had in
our faculty another of the small but infatuated band of the students
of Symbolic Logic--a man with whom he wished to collaborate--which
had brought him to the United States and which had kept him there so
long). I did not know that Symbolic Logic was an attempt to provide
a universal language for all the branches of science, and that this
attempt to formulate relations common to different departments of
thought was itself a deeper expression of the same genius which had
given rise to Grosbeake’s interest in such varied fields of human
activity, and of his extraordinary instinct for tracing their
inter-relations. Aside from his personal distinction and charm, it was
this gift which had fascinated me: he had usually talked to me about
literature, but, aside from his appreciation of poetry, plays, and
novels as such--which was in itself remarkable--he had also a brilliant
faculty for reading into them social and moral history and revealing
their philosophic implications. He was the first person, since Hugo’s
father, who had helped me toward the kind of education which I had
begun when Mr. Bamman had talked to me at school about Shakespeare.

I had, however, never guessed at Grosbeake’s real importance--and
indeed his importance outside his special field had never really
appeared until a year or two before the War, when he had turned
from mathematics to philosophy. When I came to read his books, I
was astonished. First of all, Grosbeake’s tone and style, in his
philosophical writings, were not at all what I should have expected.
His manner in conversation was rather urbane, dispassionate, and
dry: he seemed, as I have said, to approach ideas with a certain
epicureanism of the intellect. But his writing had a close tough grain:
it was crystalline, in the sense that it gave an effect of the hardness
and clarity of crystals rather than of the limpidity of crystal; it
had a peculiar earnestness and intensity, and a kind of incandescence.
But what had surprised me most--I had already had some idea of the
universal scope of his mind--were the power of his imagination and the
boldness and stoutness of his spirit.

Grosbeake was one of the first modern philosophers, really competent to
understand the new physics of relativity and quantum theory, who had
made an attempt, on the full scale, to trace the consequences of these
discoveries for the concepts of general philosophy, and to construct
a system which should admit them. This had brought him to a drastic
rejection of the philosophical assumptions of old-fashioned mechanistic
science.

Since my recent encounters with the world in New York, which had made
me feel my own weakness and baseness, I had myself been haunted and
oppressed, as on the night of Sue Borglum’s party, by the thought that
humanity, after all, was merely another race of animals, whose behavior
was fixed by their environment, and by the cells which they had had
from their parents, and that the earth and all its creatures was only
a complicated interaction of hard little particles like bullets. I now
learned that it had lately become possible, in the light of scientific
research--that it had even become inevitable (though I was far from
being able to follow all Grosbeake’s arguments) to regard the universe,
not as a machine, which had once been wound up and was still running,
but as an organism in course of development. The unit was no longer
a bullet, but something called an event; and the world was a flux of
events. The relativity of time and space and the anomalous behavior
of electrons, in undermining the “iron laws” of nature, had opened
flood-gates of speculation which the ordinary reasonable mind, the kind
of mind which respected science without examining its assumptions or
attempting to force them to their consequences, had long tended to
regard as closed. And despite the surprise and disapproval of other
mathematicians who, capable of practising only one trade, prided
themselves on sticking to their lasts, Professor Grosbeake had late in
his career emerged as a metaphysician.

I wanted to make him talk on this subject, and I inquired vaguely
about the congress of a scientific association which he had attended
the summer before. He told me briefly of some of its proceedings, then
added, after a pause, with his bland and serious irony: “If you want
to see the sort of men that the mediæval church must have been made
up of, you should study an assemblage of modern scientists. I thought
about them last summer that they must be very like the mediæval
doctors. They’re all more or less internationally minded, you know,
and they’re men of strong character and conviction--and they’re all
authoritarians: they subscribe to a body of dogma and they won’t
countenance any heresy. If a scientist has evolved an hypothesis
which runs counter to the established hypothesis, they won’t give it
a serious hearing--if he’s performed an experiment, you know, which
conflicts with accepted experiments, they refuse to look at it!”----

At this point in the conversation, Magda and Frieda, who had to go
to bed, came in to say good-night. They kissed their mother, who
spoke to them in a low voice, but they hesitated about kissing their
father--in the midst of solemn discourse and with a visitor present.
Magda hung back by her mother’s couch, but Frieda cut the knot by
dashing forward, diving for his bald brow--I saw her own beautiful
hair over her shoulders, like some spilling of gold by the gods--and
running abruptly out of the room. “Oh, good-night, my dear!” said
Grosbeake.--“They have never executed any one,” he continued--Magda
kissed him on the cheek, more diffidently: “Good-night, my dear!--But
there are other methods of suppression even more expedient and
effective; for burning calls attention to the victim.”

His criticism of contemporary science soon led him into
metaphysics.--The entrance of those gold and white girls--the
offspring, so late in life, of that old bald round-shouldered man who
had spent long years in the obstinate plumbing (by means of formulas so
difficult and abstract that they excluded even ideas of number, so far
beyond the ordinary reaches of even scientific minds that they dismayed
even mathematicians) of that mysterious reality which is at once
what we find outside us and what we think about it--the entrance of
Grosbeake’s lovely daughters had had the effect on me of a revelation
of the human vitality, the creative force of flesh and blood, which is
embodied in abstract thought. It was as if my imagination had fully
conceived for the first time that the logician’s chain of propositions,
no less than the astronomer’s systems and the physicist’s analysis of
the invisible, was as much the ripened fruit of rich natures as the
poetry of Shakespeare and Dante, or as those beautiful long-limbed
children, the breed of the Kentish seas and of the forests of the
Rhineland, who had brusquely embraced their father.

He talked to me about the book he was writing. All that I had ever
learned at college of philosophy had been a conception of the external
world as a colorless and soundless wilderness whose true nature one
could never know, which one could not even imagine--but which I did,
none the less, imagine as a vast landscape of polar spaces in whose
eternal twilight one wandered, preoccupied and deluded by a flicker
of magic-lantern pictures which danced inside one’s mind and forever
remained private to oneself. I had now learned, however, from Grosbeake
that since, for example, the high flush of Rita’s cheeks and the sound
of her voice reciting poetry had so radically affected my behavior,
they must belong as much to reality, to that Nature which was no
longer outside one, as the blood corpuscles and the light-waves, the
sound-waves and the vocal organs which were assumed to have produced
them. And it now appeared that Grosbeake admitted as belonging, also,
to reality those æsthetic values which, for example, had made Rita,
when she wrote her poems, feel that the pavements of the Village were
harsh and the sound of the river musical. And so, finally, he told me,
moral values, which he identified with æsthetic values, must be equally
a part of that reality which he found it impossible to split into two
divisions of mind and matter, body and soul. Those moral judgments,
then, I reflected, which had given rise to my disgust and despair the
night of Sue Borghum’s party had been, after all, as real, as much to
be taken seriously, as the biological and neurological processes to
which I had tended to reduce them.

What astonished me most, however, was that Grosbeake now crowned his
system with a new conception of God: he brought God back into the
universe of science, under what appeared to me at first an unfamiliar
form. For Grosbeake’s God was as different as possible from the
tolerant and moderate Great Spirit, the enlightened parliamentary
monarch, of the modern liberal theologian. God, for Grosbeake, was the
ultimate harmony implied by the æsthetic and moral values of which
men were aware in the universe; and our moments of divine revelation
were simply those when we realized most indubitably the necessity
of this harmony and order, when we became most acutely conscious of
this creative purpose of God. And it was, then, this creative purpose
which, in the interest of the ultimate harmony, determined which
possibilities, among the infinite possibilities of the constant flux
of events--the development of the universal organism--should make
themselves actual.

I listened to Grosbeake with excitement. He seemed to me at that moment
to justify to me those instincts and those beliefs which--suspicious of
all the world and uncertain of myself most of all--I had lately come to
doubt. And I was moved by what seemed to me the greatness of his mind
and the boldness of his spirit amidst the modesty and mildness of his
home.--I mustn’t keep him up, then, and tire him: Mrs. Grosbeake had
already gone to bed.

I said that I must go, and he got up and brought a bowl of nuts, which
we cracked in front of the fire. He told me some Victorian anecdote
about Gladstone and Disraeli, whom he always called “Dizzy.”

As I finally came out of the warm house into the white-framed
glass-sided porch which enclosed the front door, I felt a tinge of
crispness in the air, as when the first ice-splinters web a pond, and
I caught the chilly fragrance of the roses and the white and daisylike
cosmos, which had been set out in vases for the night--and as I took
leave of Grosbeake--gazing out through the glass at the pavement
lightly dappled with leaves and the dark grass glittering with wet--my
mind bemused with a vision of God as a vast crystal fixing its symmetry
from a liquefied universe--I felt a delicious delicacy of iciness,
glossy fall-leaf slivers and black rain-glinting glass.

“It’s beginning to snow,” said Grosbeake. It was true: it was not
raining, but snowing. A great flake alighted on my sleeve. “So I win
my bet with the Dean,” he said. “I shall have his Scotch whiskey and
not he my sherry!--You know, the weather’s the only subject on which
I really regard myself as infallible. It comes from being bred on the
Kentish coast--learning about one’s weather from the narrow seas! What
does Dean Mosely know of the weather?--coming from an inland city like
Indianapolis!”

Grosbeake stood in the outside door and regarded the large flakes with
satisfaction. “Dean Mosely kept insisting,” he continued, “that there
were none of the signs of snow--and when he came to enumerate them, I
saw that it was true: there were none of the signs. But I knew it was
going to snow!”

       *       *       *       *       *

It was a heavy snowstorm for November. It had snowed, and then rained,
and then frozen: on the train, the next afternoon, when I scraped a
peep-hole in the frost-glazed window, I disclosed a vignette of fences,
strung with wires of ice, and tree-branches decked with crystals, like
glittering chandeliers.

But it was late when I arrived at my station: the falling darkness and
the cold lay heavy on the little town. I finally succeeded in getting
a taxi, which had no cushions on the seat and which bucked over the
frozen ruts. There were nice white houses on the road and all the
people seemed to be inside them: the windows were orange against the
snow, which was bluing and graying with the night.

To the east, when we had left behind the town, an army of corn-stacks
in the grayness were frozen to their posts; and to the west, the skies
were split across with the tragic gold and black of a late November
sunset. The grandeur of the winter landscape--since Grosbeake had
predicted the snowfall--had associated itself in my mind with the
grandeur of the philosophic mind; and as I gazed at those last gigantic
cracks of a light beyond human skies, I remembered the fiery walls of
the world of which Lucretius had said that the thinker, in sending his
intellect beyond them, had broken Nature’s locks and won the freedom of
the universe: they seemed to speak to me of bold and lonely thought.

The house, when we finally pulled in to it, was so low that it seemed
sunk in the snow--deep-embedded in the winter ground, which held it
fast: there was a single yellow square of light.

Pete Bird hurried cordially out--I could see Daisy standing in the
doorway. Pete insisted on my not paying for the taxi: “Just put it on
my bill!” he told the man.

Inside, I found Daisy transformed: she greeted me with her frank
American smile, but it was this time unmistakably the smile of the
young American girls of my boyhood, who had never used lipstick or
rouge. I was surprised to see her wholly without make-up: her lips were
a pale coral-pink and her hair, which at Sue Borglum’s party had been
mongrel, muddy and dull, was now an even flaxen yellow. She was wearing
a neat white apron over a pretty blue dress, and looked exactly like
some model little housewife in a bright-colored American advertisement,
smiling sunnily over the lightness of a new kind of pancake-flour or
the flavor of a can of baked beans.

She apologized for the apron--she was just getting dinner, she
said--and I thought that she knew she looked well in it. I told her
how healthy and lovely she looked. “Just feel this!” she invited me,
hooking up her little short-sleeved elbow: I found it studded with
solid bulging muscles. “Good Heavens!” I exclaimed. “How did you ever
get like that?” “Just working!” Daisy explained. “We fixed the place
all up ourselves. When we came, it was just a dump!”

Pete himself, to my surprise, with his slight erect figure, seemed
wiry, effective and hardy. He wore a khaki shirt with a smartly tied
navy-blue tie, which gave to his old gray trousers and his old Norfolk
jacket which did not match them, a gentlemanly air of roughing it.

Daisy amiably excused herself and went to attend to the dinner on the
stove. Pete Bird--a casual and cordial host--invited me in before the
fire.

The hall had been a little nondescript, a cross between a work-shed
and a hall-closet; but the living-room was orderly and cheerful. There
was a bright rag-rug on the floor, and there were bright prints and
maps on the walls--Pete was a great hand at making maps--and lamps with
warmly glowing lampshades, also the work of Pete. And there was a large
old-fashioned fireplace, where big logs were roaring and snapping on
tall black old-fashioned andirons, still stiff-necked, though lame and
leaning crooked.

I expressed my enthusiasm for the fire, and admired the fireplace and
the room. Pete received my compliments with the easy nod and brief word
of the owner of an Adirondack camp: he made one feel that the spacious
fireplace was something he had had specially built, and evoked a vision
of moose-horns and bear-heads under heavy darkling rafters.

“That black log’s not burning well,” he announced. “Either it’s frozen
in the cracks or it’s cranky!” He hooked it and wrenched it with a
poker and an old rickety pair of tongs which did not come together: he
had a master’s way with the logs. “Get over there, you old alligator!”
he commanded. “You _will_ be hard-boiled, _will_ you!”

“I’m sorry,” he remarked, as he stood up in front of the mantelpiece,
which was almost as high as his head, and invited me to sit down before
the fire--“I’m sorry that I can’t offer you a drink--but the only
things you can get around here are apple and alcohol, and both of them
are vile. We’ve finally come to the conclusion that it’s really more
considerate to the guests not to offer them anything at all!”--“We
hoped you might bring something with you,” said Daisy, looking up with
her sweet candid smile: she was dealing out white plates around a table
in the middle of the room. I apologized for not having thought of it.
“We never think of it ourselves--if you can believe me,” Pete insisted.
“It’s almost impossible now to get any kind of decent liquor, in New
York or anywhere else--and the kind of drinks that you _can_ get just
don’t interest me!” I agreed with him heartily, and added that the
trouble with New York was that everybody there drank far too much bad
liquor. “That’s why we came to the country,” said Daisy. “We decided
that it was that or the drunkard’s home!”

“Now, good people!” Daisy invited us, mimicking the kind of women who
say, “Now good people!”--“The dinner is all ready!--if you’ll just sit
down and fly at it!”

The dinner was an admirable pot-roast, with onions, potatoes and
carrots. We all ate a great deal and did very little talking while we
ate.

The table was thick-legged and long: it seemed that Pete had made it
himself--and that he had also made or made over most of the other
pieces of furniture. When they had moved in, the place had been
desolate--full of rubbish, mould and rats. It had taken them all
summer to make it habitable: Pete had rummaged in old barns and houses
and unearthed many mutilated antiques, which he had then, with great
patience, repaired. He seemed to know a great deal about antiques.
The principal prize was a comb-backed rocking-chair, for which Pete
had himself supplied new rockers; but they warned me not to try to sit
in it, because it always went over backwards. I told Pete about the
Grosbeakes’ furniture, and he remembered that there was a Queen Anne
secretary something like the one I was describing, in the Metropolitan
Museum.

For dessert, we ate golden canned peaches, and we drank a great deal of
black coffee. “Now, don’t worry about the dishes,” said Pete to Daisy.
“Just stack them in the kitchen, and I’ll do them later myself!” “If
that doesn’t mean,” replied Daisy, “that _I_’ll have to do them in the
morning, when they’re all greasy and cold.” “Don’t be silly!” said
Pete, indignantly.

After dinner, we sat around the fire. I asked them what they did in the
evenings. “We just do this!” said Pete. “We read aloud,” supplemented
Daisy. “We’ve read Bulwer-Lytton’s novels almost entirely through.”
“Is he any good?” I inquired. “Fine,” said Daisy. “Besides, he’s the
only novelist that they’ve got in the village library.” I was amazed
at the idea of Daisy spending long winter evenings over Bulwer-Lytton;
but as I had talked to her, I soon discovered that she had always been
addicted to novel-reading and had excellent sense and taste--it had
apparently been only Ray Coleman’s reading aloud to her out of the
_Oxford Book of English Verse_ that she hadn’t been able to stand.

I saw now that her ordinary vocabulary was partly literary, and that it
was the combination of literary words with slang which gave her speech
its peculiar charm--as when she had said, at the time I had first
talked to her, that the horse she had seen in her delirium had been
“leering” at her, or when she had told me that Ray Coleman in Paris had
seemed “pretty affluent.”

I asked her what writers she liked best. “Well,” she said, “when I
was a girl at school, I used to think that Compton Mackenzie was the
swellest thing in the world--I thought that that was what life ought to
be like--that was what I thought Phil and I were like, when we ran away
from Pittsburgh. But I soon found out that the old racket was more like
a Russian novel!”

Russian novels reminded me of Larry Mickler, and I asked Pete and
Daisy about him. I had never seen him before or since the night of
Sue Borglum’s party, and I had never been able to explain him: he
had come to seem to me--like the elephantine creature whom I had
encountered in the doorway on Thirty-fourth Street--a sort of demon who
had fleetingly materialized out of the infernal fumes of the evening.
“Oh,” said Daisy, “he’s perfectly harmless--he’s just a fool, that’s
all. He’s usually controlled by Alice, his wife. He was just acting up
that night because Alice wasn’t along. He’s always threatening to do
something desperate, but he usually ends up with Alice administering
triple-bromides.” I asked what Alice was like. “She’s just a clean
stalwart college girl,” said Daisy. “She doesn’t know quite what a
genius is,” Pete Bird contributed, “but she thinks that Larry is a
genius. He wrote a novel once which he was never able to get published,
and he’s always threatening to write another. In the meantime, he’s in
the advertising business, which he says he can never respect.”

“I don’t like Larry Mickler,” Pete added, after a pause. “He cheats at
limericks!” I asked him what he meant. “Why, he gets you to play this
game where you both have to take the same first line and make up a
limerick to fit it. But he’s got the limericks all made up beforehand.
When I finally got wise and supplied the first line myself, he couldn’t
do a thing--he got sullen and wouldn’t play. Our relations have never
been cordial since.--That’s why he tried to make out that I gypped him
on those liverwurst sandwiches.”

I had been watching Daisy follow the talk with a childlike seriousness
and candor. Though it was cold, she wore no stockings--for reasons
of economy, she said--and she shifted her slim and pretty legs, with
their straw-colored sharp-toed slippers, in the movements of a good
little girl listening restlessly but attentively to the conversation
of her elders. As we spoke humorously or gravely, told limericks or
deplored the demoralizing effects of the city, she would respond with
gravity or humor, turning her eyes from one speaker to the other. She
seemed sober-minded, shy and nice: I felt that some of the limericks
embarrassed her: I came to think of her almost as a _jeune fille_
and vaguely confused her in my mind with Grosbeake’s golden-haired
daughters.

Like all people who live in the country, they commenced about ten to
yawn: when I suggested that they must be tired they confessed it with
little protestation.

“Now,” said Pete, “we have a guest-room which is always at the disposal
of the guests--but it’s as cold as a fiddler’s bitch to-night, and if
you really want to keep warm, you’d better sleep here on the couch.”
“But what about you?” I asked. “If you can stand the cold, I can.”
“Oh, we sleep in here!” replied Pete--and opening the door into the
next room, which had the aspect of a store-room--barren as an attic
and littered with all kinds of junk--he produced a gigantic set of
bed-springs, which he manœuvred through the door with nonchalance and
set out on a pair of trestles.

I explored the regions beyond: there was a bedroom behind the
living-room, like a plunge into a cold black lake. Through the little
low square-paned window, I saw the moon, cut in brightest coldest
silver over the lonely and frozen fields. There had been something
almost miraculous about Grosbeake’s predicting the snowfall--as if
Nature had admitted him to her secrets!

I returned to the smell of wood-smoke and the yellow-shaded lamps of
the living-room, and announced that I would sleep on the couch.

How jolly it was, I reflected, back amid the warmth again, to go to bed
in front of a fire, in the country, in the winter-time, in the house of
friends! And as I undressed in the dark and grisly store-room, which
evidently represented the house as they had originally found it--before
they had taken it in hand--I was moved by admiration for what seemed
to me their pioneering heroism. They had established, with no help and
little money, in the midst of that hard rural wilderness--if but in a
single room--these amenities and decencies--this core of civilization!

And they were right! Who should know it by this time--all the more
since my visit to Grosbeake!--better than I? All that dignified
mankind, all that kept them from the brawling and the squalor which,
the night of Sue Borglum’s party, had seemed to me the universal fate,
had been built up through endurance and patience, through steadiness
of purpose and good faith, through property well administered, through
families standing together, through lovers true to their pledges!
How had I ever been taken in by that foolish and shallow philosophy
of living only for the moment?--that philosophy I had learned from a
woman, which was possible only for a woman, given up, by her woman’s
nature, to her impulses, passions and moods! I remembered how I had
once used to wonder at Rita’s constant preoccupation with death, both
in her poetry and in conversation, and I could see now how such a life
as Rita’s, looking always upon the image of itself, must be ridden by
the terror of death, because death meant for it the end of the world.

When Daisy was in bed, Pete Bird summoned me back into the living-room,
and I wrapped myself up in blankets and lay down before the fire on the
couch. But the coffee had made us wakeful and we went on talking in
bed. At first, we told funny stories, till we had obviously exhausted
our best and had begun to fall back on second-rate ones. Then Pete
regaled me with reminiscences of eccentric Greenwich Village characters
who had flourished before my day--there had been one uncompromising
prophet, who had made a practice of robbing fur-stores: he would hide
himself among the furs at the back, till the shop had been closed for
the night, then climb out with his booty, through a window: he had,
however, never profited by these activities, but had given everything
he stole to the poor, and had lived himself in the direst privation.

We agreed that the great days were passing. I tried to remember some
of the songs which Bobby Edwards had used to sing in the restaurants.
Pete, it turned out, knew them all by heart and could sing them from
beginning to end. We agreed that there had been something remarkable
about Bobby Edwards. I said it was the curious prestige which very
clever people sometimes acquire by pretending to be stupid. Pete said
that this was not quite it, because Bobby Edwards did not look stupid:
the thing was that he never changed his face and consequently had
everybody buffaloed.

These songs led to other songs: Pete and I finally got to the point
of singing _My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean_ and _There Is a Tavern in
the Town_. “I suppose this burns you up,” I said to Daisy, who had for
some time been lying silent. “I suppose you want to go to sleep.” “Oh,
I guess I can bear it!” she answered--then added, after a pause: “_My
Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean_ always reminds me of when I was a girl in
Yarmouth--in Canada. My uncle used to sing it.--And he used to sing
_The Girl I Left Behind Me_, too. I used to love to hearum sing that!”
Her voice, as she lay in the darkness, divested of the emphasis of day,
had almost the timbre of a child’s--and it moved me with the charming
pathos of young girls’ voices, the pathos of frailness and freshness.
“Did you come from Canada?” I asked. “I thought you came from
Pittsburgh!” “My mother came from there,” she explained. “My aunt still
lives up there. I used to be up there a lot when I was a kid.--Yes, I’m
really just a country girl!” she said, burlesquing herself. “That’s why
I take so easily to living out here. My other aunt,” she went on, after
a moment’s recollection, “married some kind of a nobleman.--I always
thought there must have been something wrong withum--he must have had
syphilis or something. But he was a real nobleman, it seemed!”

When we were tired of singing ballads, we experimented with hymns: I
rendered, with what I felt at the time was an impressive solemnity and
resonance, _Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past_, and _The Starry Firmament
on High_.--But the second of these was met by silence--I received
no response from the bed. And when Pete and Daisy replied to my
good-night, it was plain they had been asleep.

Those magnificent hymns! I went on thinking. What a first-rate poet
Watts had been! And that grandeur of the universe, of the moral
principle it implied--did one not feel it, also, even, in the calm
complacent firmament of Addison?

Perhaps the effect on my imagination of Grosbeake’s religious ideas
had been, in recreating my conception of God, to revive for me a
vision of the Devil; but at any rate, my recent image of Larry Mickler
as a species of hobgoblin combined itself with my assimilation of
the gravy-boat and cream-pitcher at the Grosbeakes’ to the demons of
Bruegel and Callot, to inspire me with the idea of a satire in which
I should ascribe to a race of demons all those anti-social views and
habits which had come lately to seem to me so sinister.

My mind, laying hold upon this, worked for a time with great clarity
and speed: I even framed sentences and paragraphs: “The attitude of
the demons toward each other is entirely devoid of the amenity and
dignity characteristic of human behavior. In their amorous relations,
they are neither romantic nor faithful. Many of the demons do not
function sexually, but among those that do--notably the succubæ and
incubi--their matings are wholly physical and transient, and involve
neither responsibility nor affection. A human being who has seen
the demons at close range is not perhaps disposed to consider this
unnatural. The more hideous and monstrous types have died out, like the
larger and more powerful: the bat’s ears, pig’s snout and ape’s mug
appear only in modified forms; and such a bestial and complex mask as
that worn, for example, by Dürer’s Satan would probably be impossible
to-day. Yet the devils which have endured to our own time are still
sufficiently unsightly and grotesque, and in a sufficient variety of
ways, to appear repulsive to human taste as objects of amorous desire,
and impracticable even for each other. We do not wonder when a female
demon, coming straight from the embraces of a male, makes no scruple of
spitting and jeering at him in the presence of other female demons, or
in the presence of another male; or when a male, who has been mating
with a female, makes her the victim of one of those practical jokes to
which the devils are so inveterately addicted--impaling her in a public
place or hacking off her arms and legs and leaving her on a crowded
thoroughfare. We should, however, be quite wrong in supposing that the
devils resent each other’s ugliness: being entirely without ideas of
beauty, they are, in consequence, impervious to ugliness, and do not
even, as has sometimes been supposed, esteem it for its own sake. The
demons exchange, in their amorous intercourse, in a manner not unlike
ours, pledges of lasting affection and epithets of tender endearment;
but these expressions are simple reflexes involved in the physical
process itself and as involuntary as it; they attach no significance
to them and we should wrong them in supposing they do. The devils are
sterile, and unable, or unwilling, to reproduce their kind.

“The fiends have a highly developed literature, which reflects their
habits and ideas. It is mostly printed on crude loose sheets which are
passed around from hand to hand; and it consists chiefly of obscene
anecdotes and stories of atrocious crime. We must, however, bear in
mind, in connection with this literature, that to the demons, whose
point of view is so incomprehensible from our own, a scandal is not a
scandal, nor a crime, a crime: the former they enjoy as a farce, and
the latter as a practical joke. They have an interesting school of
poetry, of which the leader is Blashtalatshk. I have met Blashtalatshk
and found him a devil of high intelligence. His horns are rudimentary
and his lower jaw is lacking: but his enormous dark eyes are among
the most sensitive and glowing that I have ever seen. His poetry and
that of his fellows is, of course, devoid of the moral ideas and of
the ennobling emotions which distinguish human poetry to-day: it is
exclusively occupied with the mere representation of sights, sounds,
smells and other sensations, which the demons have a genius for
recreating with vividness and precision, though occasionally with so
much complexity as to produce an effect of incoherence.”...

At this point, however, I dropped it: I found that my satire was boring
me, and that it also went against my conscience. My portrait of the
demon poet had been a caricature of Pete Bird, and I had no desire to
caricature Pete: on the contrary, I liked him. I found that I did not
want to write a satire: to satirize humanity was to slander it, and
I no longer thought so ill of humanity. Pete and Daisy and the rest,
after all--even Larry Mickler himself--were not really base: they had
disliked their lives as much as I had. If I had disliked them and found
them base, it was because I myself had been tarred with the same stick.
Moral problems, I now saw, were too complicated, and human nature too
delicate a matter, to be hacked by the axe of satire. So, regretting
the emphatic prose style with which a simple moral conviction may
supply us and which I now found myself obliged to sacrifice, I decided
to be scrupulous of the truth.

Still I could not sleep: I sat up against the arm of the couch, and
saw the round cold winter moon, of which I had before had a glimpse
on the other side of the house, now studding with its white blinding
pearl the pane of the room where I lay. When had I seen it before,
setting so, but the moon of summer then, embedded in the morning
glass? I thought of Rita, in Paris now. I had been wrong about her
and Ray Coleman: Rita had merely, at the time when I had seen her and
she had seemed to me evasive about her address, gone to stay at Duff
Burdan’s studio--all the rest had been a gruesome fantasy of my jealous
imagination and my shaken self-confidence. She had gone abroad for
the first time, by herself, at just about the time I was returning,
and I had had a letter from her the day before: it had come just as I
was leaving town for the country. She was staying, she wrote me, in
a little Left Bank hotel, and had as yet seen nobody. But the early
morning market-trucks, she said, which rumbled through the Rue du Four
and made the walls of her bedroom vibrate, though they kept her awake
after midnight, made her feel that she was “really a part of Paris.” I
seemed to divine behind her letter an aching loneliness--the loneliness
of all Americans when they first try to live in Europe; and I imagined
about her, as she wrote, the dark brownish walls of the room, the
dispiriting wash-basin and slop-jar, the stuffy and musty French bed.
It was partly the fact that I could pity Rita, and that at last she
had written to me, as well as the spectacle of Grosbeake’s equanimity,
which made it possible for me to think well of humanity.

Not that her letter was plaintive or effusive: it was, on the contrary,
dry and brief; but the fact that she had written me at all--she very
rarely wrote letters--seemed to me to imply, on her part, an unusual
degree of desolation; and the two poems which she enclosed in her
letter--she told me she had composed them at night when she could not
sleep on account of the trucks--were the palest things of hers I had
seen. The first was meagre, terse and wistful: it ticked off, in three
brief stanzas, three images from that countryside of her youth--a lone
elm, a gray stone fence, a pond athrob with frogs at nightfall--and I
recognized in their phantom faintness--so unlike the stinging actuality
which she usually gave to such things--that dim aspect which, to the
traveller abroad, even the best loved and known sights of home come to
wear in alien places, as if they had perhaps never existed, but were
the receding images of a dream.

The other poem was a sonnet; and when I first saw it, I did not know
what to make of it. It seemed very unlike Rita: in the first place,
she never wrote sonnets; and my first thought, when I commenced to
read it, was one of solicitude: I felt distressed that her isolation
should so disastrously have affected her poetry. Then it dawned on
me, after I had finished it, that it was supposed to be addressed to
myself. I reread it with attention: it was the first time she had ever
written me a poem. Then I became aware of the true situation: the
trouble here with Rita’s style was simply that, for the moment, she
had become infected with mine. It was I who was addicted to sonnets;
and I could recognize in this one of Rita’s, my own forcible-feeble
rhetoric and my adjectives in monotonous pairs--all those unavailing
devices with which I had muffed the kind of effects that she would
clinch with a single short verb or a commonplace idiom. I had never
thought myself much of a poet, but now that Rita seemed to be talking
my jargon, seemed to be trying to reply to me in the language in which
I had been apostrophizing her, I found that I was sickened by it. And
I was horrified to observe that even the banal imagery with which Rita
could usually perform miracles remained, in this ill-inspired sonnet,
irredeemably banal.

My first feeling had been one of depression, the result partly of
wounded _amour-propre_--because Rita, having written me a poem,
should have written me such an indifferent one--and partly of pained
concern that she should have sacrificed a poem for my sake. I had been
embarrassed as to what I should write her: I wanted to urge her to
suppress the poem, but, as it had been written in an effort to be nice
to me, it was impossible to be so ungracious.

Now, as I lay staring into the fire, I thought of the sonnet again,
and ran over it in my mind. It had been a memory of our first days
together, when we had talked about poetry; and now suddenly, for the
first time, I was touched that she should have remembered those days
and should have tried to let me know it. I had thought only of the
artistic sincerity which she had sacrificed for her subject! Now I
was able to take account of the sincerity of some personal sort which
must, after all, have come into play to induce her to sacrifice it.
In her dismal Paris hotel--so cold and dark in November--had she been
trying to recall, to reaffirm, in spite of all our quarrels and
failures (and she had known then, as I had not known, how life undoes
the soundest of our reasons and depreciates the dearest of our hopes),
those moments of common understanding and common enthusiasm of the days
when we had first talked freely together--when we had both, for that
moment, found a language for those deepest unspoken convictions, for
those deepest realities, of such different lives!--And I began even to
wonder at last--a possibility I had never admitted--whether, that night
at Sue Borglum’s house, when I had met Rita with my freezing, blank
looks and my tiresome disapproval and when, reminding me of the poem
which I had so loved when I had been in love with her, she had tried
to describe to me the river all lined with sword-blades of ice,--and
when I had listened only with contempt--I wondered now whether, after
all, she had not herself been glad to think of the hours--how rare in
the world they must be!--when poetry had burned with love. Had not the
river itself been the symbol of the breaking and fraying of passion,
of the dispersal of the torrents of the heart?--and had she not, when
she had told me, at Sue Borglum’s, of the river alive in winter, for
all the frozen countryside about it and though cramped by the ice of
its banks--had she not tried to tell me something more, to speak again
to the old comrade and admirer, over the head of the angry lover--to
establish again that contact--which I now chose to make impossible--but
which had brought once, if only for those moments, that common light
into a world which, for her as well as for me--it occurred to me now
for the first time--must be chiefly a world of darkness?

The last log had a comforting beauty--all woody, rosy luminosity--but
I saw that it must soon crumble. I put on another log, trying not to
wake Pete and Daisy. I glanced over toward their bed--they had turned
to each other in sleep. The log smoked, and then caught fire: it sent
up little tongues of flame. What a pity that I couldn’t write a satire,
making use of my wide knowledge of demonology, for lack of misanthropic
conviction! The log began to crackle and blaze.

I looked for the moon, but it was gone: I craned around the side of the
couch and saw it low, vaporish and gray, as if dissolving in the ichor
of dawn. So I had watched it set so many times, on guard at night, in
France--in that terrible, dull, dead hour when night is over and day
not begun, when one must either make verses or be dull, be dead, as the
earth and sky, as the soldiers in their deepest sleep--I had run into
Hugo in Toul--I had not seen him since the beginning of the War and we
had only had a chance for half an hour’s talk in a café--he had been
so funny about his unit, so funny and so good-natured, that unit which
was soon to condemn him to the horrors of the prison-camp--what a great
fellow he really was, in spite of the fact that, as Grosbeake said, he
did caricature American business men too grimly--how few there were
like him!--that France where Rita had never been till she arrived in
that dreary hotel, where the market-trucks kept her awake!--I rolled
over and went to sleep.

But I had scarcely closed my eyes, it seemed, when persistent coughs,
steps, and bumpings compelled me to open them again: it was Pete, in
the gray, early light, getting into his pants and khaki shirt; he was
rolling up his sleeves before the window.

I tore myself out of my blanket-cocoon and--though he begged me not to
get up--I blinkingly pulled on my clothes, and followed him out into
the cold undersea of the early morning ocean. He had gone into the
shed to chop some wood: I had used up the last log during the night,
and he wanted to make the room warm for Daisy. He begged me again not
to bother; but with eager, if incompetent, helpfulness, I hacked up a
large crooked limb, as well as several of the planks of the floor.

After this, we went in and had some coffee--Daisy was still asleep. We
talked about literature and drinks: Pete had volumes of Shelley and
Keats, and a treatise on French wines, which he said were the only
books he had not sold when he had come away to the country. Sitting
close against the stove, I examined the wine book with interest. “Never
buy 1916 Burgundy,” Pete admonished me, with an air of independent
knowledge. “From 1910 to 1914 are all good years--and 1915 is fair. But
you have to go back to 1904 to get really A-1 Burgundy!”

I had to leave before noon--it was a long way into the town and a
long way back to New York. We talked a little about a taxi; but as it
was already growing late and as the nearest telephone was at a farm
some distance away, I decided that I would undertake to walk, and
Daisy offered to go with me. Pete had promised to call on a farmer
and examine his grandfather’s clock--putting clocks in order, it
appeared, was one of his curious useless aptitudes--in return for which
service, he explained to us, he hoped to be able to induce the farmer
to make him a present of a crippled lowboy which was being used as a
kitchen-table.

“I can supply the handles,” he assured us. “Nothing easier in the
world! Just take them off that old bureau in the store-room. But I
_don’t_ see how I can supply that missing leg without a lathe.--But,
after all, why not have a lathe?” he went on, with the liberal
enthusiasm of a thoroughly practical man. “Think of all we could
do with one! We could make regular tables and chairs!--Why, I’d be
turning out table-legs so voluptuous that all the local oafs would be
trampling over one another to buy them!” “I suppose,” said Daisy, “that
you’re going to buy the lathe with the money we owe the grocer.” “My
dear child,” Pete retorted, like a millionaire who takes pleasure in
explaining that he always saves money on his clothes by having them
made when he is in London, “you can get a lathe from Sears Roebuck for
ten dollars! You simply say that you want to buy it on instalments, and
they send you the lathe. Then you don’t pay them anything more--and
by the time they’ve sent a man for the money and he’s gotten way out
here, you’ve had time to turn out a whole dining-room set, enough legs
and rungs for several dining-room sets, and you’ve sold the sets and
ordered another lathe from another mail-order company, paying the first
instalment out of what you get for the sets--so that by the time the
first lathe is taken away, another one is just arriving, and the work
goes merrily on!”

We set out--Daisy and I--on a hard crust of frozen snow, which broke
through at every step and let us down into powdered depths. Daisy
was dressed in high laced leather boots, a white sweater under a tan
leather jacket and a round knitted white cap. I had never liked her so
much: a certain strength and independence of character, which I had
felt in her even at the period when she had seemed most demoralized,
had now fully come into its own. Her frankness and her common-sense
jokes, which I had once thought the typical products of Pittsburgh and
New York, now seemed to me the wisdom of the country, which the false
values of the city couldn’t fool.--I began to think--it had already
occurred to me--how delightful it would be to live with Daisy in a
solitary farmhouse in the country, to chop wood to keep her warm, to
sit with her at night before the fire, to read Bulwer-Lytton’s novels
aloud. I thought wistfully of Bulwer Lytton, whom it seemed to me I
should like to read.

I congratulated her on leaving New York: “I began to feel before I
left,” I said, “as if the Village were a cage of wild animals--I began
to feel that it might be just as well to make good your escape in
time.” “I certainly felt that way,” said Daisy, “but I didn’t know
anybody else did.--I thought everybody ate it up but me.--I got so I
felt that I couldn’t trust anybody!”

We strode, plodding, through the snow. “You know, Pete and I,” she went
on, “just after that last time I saw you--we got on a train with our
last money”--(the money, no doubt, from Pete’s books)--“and got off
at the first town that looked good to us out of the train-window. We
went to the real-estate office and asked for the cheapest thing there
was--and we finally got this old hell-hole. The owner said that, if
we’d fix it up, they’d give it to us free.” The idea of this exploit
enchanted me, and I envied Pete more than ever.

I told Daisy how much I liked Pete--what a relief I thought she must
find him after living with Ray Coleman. “To tell the truth,” she
replied, “I don’t notice much difference. The only thing is that I
get along much better with Pete. We can sit around and wisecrack for
hours.--The time that we had that party--the first time that I ever
met you--I’d only seenum a few times, but I said to-um, ‘I get along
with you better than with anybody else I know.’” “What did he say?” I
inquired. “He just grinned,” said Daisy. I remembered how I had felt
myself when it had first burst upon me that Rita, instead of scorning
my apartment, enjoyed it. “So,” Daisy continued, “we went out and went
to Julius’s bar together--and here we are now!”

I told her how wise I thought them to have left New York for the
country--how glad I had been to go abroad--what a fool I had made of
myself the night of Sue Borglum’s party. “As far as I’m concerned,”
she replied, “that night was about the worst I remember--about the
worst sunk I’ve ever been.”

“You know,” she added, after a pause, “I cut my wrist that night--you
knew that, didn’t you?” “Good Heavens!” I exclaimed, “Why did you do
that?” “Why, because I’d lost my job, I suppose,” she said, “--and
because I got tired of the traffic going in and out of Gus Dunbar’s
rooms--and I’d been drinking so much that I didn’t know what I was
doing anyway.--I felt like such a tramp--that I’d been so inconsiderate
of other people, and just gotten myself into a worse mess than
before.--I cut my wrist,” she went on, “with Gus Dunbar’s razor-blade.
I never saw anything spurt the way the blood did--it seemed as if all
the blood in my body must be just in my wrist--it spurted clear across
the bathroom. I just stood there and looked at it--the only thing I
could think of was the leak in the hose, in that movie that you and I
went to--don’t you remember?--a little while before. If Pete hadn’t
come in just then, I’d probably have bled to death. But he arrived and
called a doctor and put a tourniquet on my wrist: he certainly stopped
it in short order--it seems he knows all about tourniquets.”

“Oh, my dear,” I said, “did you do that?--Is it really all right now?”
“Yes,” she said. “The doctor said that I really ought to have an
operation, but I’m almost all right again now without one.”

I made her take off her gauntlet: I saw that she could hardly move
the fingers of that hand which Pete had once described as a “little
surprising moonbeam violin”--they were as stiff as the fingers of a
doll which a child tries to make hold a broom.--“Why don’t you get them
operated on?” I asked. “It probably isn’t a very serious operation.”
“Can’t afford to,” she replied.

“What had happened, anyway,” I asked, “before I came to get you that
night?” “Oh, it was horrible!” said Daisy. “I’d gone around to Larry
Mickler’s to see Larry about getting Pete a job--he was a friend of
Gus Dunbar’s.--When I’d called him up on the telephone and suggested
sending Pete around, he’d said for me to come--but I told Pete to drop
in after I’d been there a while. I could see what Larry wanted, but I
thought that I’d jolly him along a little if Pete could get anything
out of it. I thought that I could fix it all up and get back in time to
have dinner with you. Well, when I got there, he made me drink and then
he tried to grab me. And then before Pete arrived, his wife came in. It
was awful: that was really one reason that I cut my wrist, I guess--I
was so disgusted with everybody!”

I thought with pitying superiority of Larry Mickler. I felt to-day that
I myself was so very far from being capable of behaving in such a way
as to make a young girl lose faith in life!

We marched on--we were in wagon-ruts now: there was a long, rising road
before us, with a straight row of trees on each side. We climbed the
hill--there was a farmhouse at the top--we started down the slope of
snow.

“Our favorite yokels live in there,” she said. “You ought to see me
giving parties for the yokels--I have the time of my life--and so do
they: they think I’m swell--they never saw anything like me before!”
“It must be nice to live in the country,” I said--I felt envious
of the yokels. “It must be nice to know your neighbors--which you
never do in New York.” “Yes,” said Daisy, “I get to take positive
pride in competing with the other housewives to see who can have the
best-looking kitchen. You know how sloppy Gus Dunbar’s looked?--I think
it was that as much as anything that discouraged me with life that
time--well, when I came down here to the country, the first farmhouse
kitchen that I saw brought out a suppressed housewife’s complex,”--I
remembered her remark, at Sue Borglum’s, on the neatness of Sue
Borglum’s kitchen--“and I used to feel ashamed unless our kitchen was
just shining!”

There was still a stretch at the bottom of the hill. What a marvellous
walker she was!--And she had felt as I had done, that life without
honor was horrible! But where Rita could save her self-respect with a
poem, where even I could imagine a satire, Daisy could only cut her
wrist!

We walked on for a time in silence. I could be so happy with Daisy, I
thought--taking long walks in the snow in silence!

“I was in a pretty bad way myself,” I presently remarked. “That night
that we went to the movies, you really saved my life! You don’t know
how sweet you were!” “Well,” she replied with amiability, “you weren’t
so sour yourself!”

We were coming now into the town: we had reached the first white
houses. I was cheered by a sudden inspiration: “Look,” I said, “we
couldn’t get a drink, could we?--Isn’t there some kind of a bootlegger
in town?--I’ve got plenty of time before the train.” “We might go to
Ned Lovejoy’s,” she said thoughtfully.

It was just a room in a private house: there was an oil-cloth-covered
table; a stove--which was pleasant after the cold; some “cabinet-size”
photographs of members of the family, paralyzed in family groups;
and an old-fashioned tinted picture of a little beribboned girl,
smiling innocently and sweetly upon a sweet-natured cat and dog who
ate amicably out of the same bowl. I don’t know which was worse--the
gin or the ginger-ale. Ned Lovejoy was inclined to converse, but we
discouraged him and he left.

“You don’t think that Pete and I are getting to look alike, do you?”
asked Daisy: I assured her that they weren’t in the least. “That’s what
Gus Dunbar said when he was out here a couple of weeks ago: he said we
were getting alike. They say that people who live together do get to
look alike.”

I began to tell her again how much I approved of her course; how I
had come to detest New York. I explained that I was going away, and
intended to stay away as long as I possibly could. When I had returned
in the fall from abroad, I hadn’t been able to get back my job; and I
had decided that, before looking for another, I might as well go on
squandering my legacy, to the extent of a trip to New Orleans: I wanted
to be there for the Mardi Gras.

Against the cold, sunny light of the window, her sharp nose, pale eyes,
and blond hair looked almost Scandinavian. I told her how much I had
enjoyed myself--how fine it was to have seen her again--how much I
wished I were living in the country. “Why do you go to New Orleans,
then?” she asked. I replied, not without a touch of wistfulness, that
I had nowhere in the country to go. I tried to summon another drink;
but Ned Lovejoy was absorbed by his radio, of which we could hear the
sepulchral buzzing--and there was a long, rather stupid silence. I went
and found him, and got him to bring us some more ginger-ale and gin, of
which I had almost ceased to notice the taste.

I told her how splendid she looked with her outdoor complexion and
clothes; and how much I liked and admired her.--She said suddenly:
“Take me to New Orleans!” “Come along!” I replied. “I’m sailing
just after Christmas.” “Take me away from all this!” she went on,
burlesquing a woman in a play saying “Take me away from all this!”--but
it seemed to me, and shocked me a little, that she was partly in
earnest. “Pete can’t go on like this!” she said. “He’ll have to go
back to the city and get some kind of a job. We owe everybody in town!
I get panicky about it sometimes. Living with Pete like this is just
like living with another woman--you just live on your wits from day to
day--you don’t dare to think ahead.--You know: you can keep yourself on
the go and keep using your vitality up, just so you won’t mind things
so much--but every now and then I begin to think about the situation
and then I don’t know what to do!--I never thought I’d be living like
this--I never thought I’d be with anybody the way I’ve been with Pete
and Ray!”...

I remembered how, suddenly one night, she had left Ray Coleman for
Pete, and had never come back--and I remembered how she had begged Hugo
to take her to Afghanistan. What if I could really get her away from
Pete! I wanted a mistress now, and I liked Daisy so much--I desired her
so much. But I couldn’t flatter myself that she cared about me, she
merely wanted to get away--and all that treachery, that promiscuity,
that stealing of other men’s girls, had come by this time to seem to me
detestable: I had known Pete Bird through his poems, and had stayed in
his house and read his books, drunk his coffee and eaten his food--and
I remembered how bitter _I_ had been when Rita had not scrupled to
betray me, poetry, devotion and all, for that fellow from Columbus (or
whoever it had been: I never knew; if it was not merely some image of
herself, that self which could not mate with others, because it had
already, in one body, made a union of female with male).--Pete Bird
had, as it were, built his house with his own hands, and he possessed
no legacy.--I did not even doubt now that he had, as he said, been
slandered by Larry Mickler in the matter of the liverwurst sandwiches.

The cold light on the cold road where I was looking, early as it was
in the day, was already beginning to darken; and I had a consciousness
of stoic fortitude at the thought that, if the sun was short, I could
endure the closing-down of night.--I spoke to Daisy of the sad
imperfection inherent in all human relations, and of the necessity for
loyalty and faith in a world where love was sure to fail us. “But,” I
warmly and earnestly broke off, “you know all about that better than
anybody! You know all about everything better than anybody! You’re one
of the most intelligent girls I know!” And I told her again how much I
liked her and how well she deserved of life.--It was time for me to go.

At the station, I tried to get some gum for her out of a solitary
slot-machine, but it was apparently frozen up. There were some country
people standing about, and I was a little shy of kissing her good-by;
but we kissed, as I was getting on the train: I touched her coral lips
for an instant. It was deliciously cold, moist and light, like that
moment of ice and winter flowers inside the glass of Grosbeake’s porch.




                                   V


In that asphalt sky of August, the summer sun burnt a blunt point of
light, like the blinding violet-livid torch with which a worker on city
mains gashes through a tough piece of pipe. A gray haze blurred the
vistas of Fifth Avenue and dulled the too full-blown bushes and trees
which one saw beyond Washington Arch, as if the buildings and pavements
themselves, under the action of the terrible heat, were vaporizing and
fogging the air.

Down a side-street, an old white truck-horse stood sleeping and
stupefied, its head lowered like a lizard’s and its eyelids closed,
while the driver, sluggish and sweating, piled a mountain of boxes on
the dray. And farther over, on Seventh Avenue, I saw a barefoot ragged
boy, who had flung himself down on his stomach above the grating that
ventilates the subway, and whose coat was blown up violently behind
him, like the streamers of an electric fan, by the warm, sudden gust
from the trains.

My handkerchief was sopped with sweat, and I was refreshed by an
unexpected breeze which washed over the butt of the island the hot,
bilgy river-smell, as if, now that the people of the Village had
abandoned the Village for the summer, the waterside were invading the
town. I saw nobody anywhere that I knew. On the corner of Twelfth
Street, where Rita had lived, the obsolete beer-saloon still bore its
discolored blue Pilsener sign.

It occurred to me to examine, as I passed them, those landmarks of
Abingdon Square which, the morning of my first meeting with Rita,
when I had been drunk with peach-brandy and poetry, had seemed to me
impressive and romantic, but which I had afterward passed so many times
without ever observing them closely. I now found that what I had taken
for a statue of some interesting celebrity of the quarter was merely a
monument to the soldiers of the ward who had died in the European War;
and that the object which had figured to my fancy as a temple or a tomb
was simply a disused band-stand.

Daisy and Pete had come recently to town. Gus Dunbar, who was now in
Boston, had, at Daisy’s instigation, taken steps toward getting Pete a
job there; and Pete had gone on to see about it, leaving Daisy for a
few days in New York. She had called me up the day before, and, with
the idea of getting away from the heat, I had suggested our going to
Coney Island.

She was to meet me at the pier. I had not been to Coney Island since my
childhood, and for some reason, I supposed that the boat left from the
foot of Christopher Street. At the docks, I learned otherwise, and took
a taxi down to the Battery, along the wide cobbled avenue that runs
along beside the wharves.

There was the funny high yellow façade, built of wood but with an
aspect of pasteboard: it had precisely, I remembered, the quality of
the amusement-places of my boyhood, and it looked faded and flimsy now.

Daisy was waiting in the cavernous anteroom. In a corner of the high,
darkish space, she showed charmingly neat, small and clear. In spite
of the roundness of her hips and the smartness of her clothes--her
white dress and her tight _cloche_ hat--she might almost have been
mistaken for a child. How cute and how chic she looked in those short,
tight skirts that cut off her slim legs just above the knees! “Well,”
she greeted me with her unblinking smile, “the first twenty years of
my life I spent waiting for the Coney Island boat!” I apologized and
explained. “But why didn’t you find out first?” she protested. “It’s
a good thing you didn’t think it left from the foot of Forty-second
Street!”

“Well, how do you feel?” I inquired, as we climbed the flight of steps.
“I feel pretty sassy!” she said.

I had of course missed the four-o’clock boat, and now we should have to
wait for the five-o’clock one. But up-stairs, the gray-timbered shadow
of the low-roofed leaving-place was tranquillizing and cool: through a
low narrow opening that ran along the side, one had a glimpse of the
crude, unshadowed blocks of the enormous downtown buildings, where only
one sheer green roof and a steep crane, on a float that was green,
broke the cliffs of colorlessness.

I had brought some gin, and I bought some ginger-ale at the refreshment
stand. “I must tell you my joke,” she said, as we drank that impossible
concoction--at once too bitter and too sickeningly sweet--for which I
had acquired a certain affection, because I had come to associate it
with Daisy. “I’ve made up an idea for a joke. There’ll be a caption
that says ‘Striking a Happy Medium’--and then there’ll be a picture
of a medium--you know, a spiritualistic medium--with a big piece of
bogus ectoplasm coming out of her mouth and a grin of satisfaction on
her face, and a man with his arm all raised, just ready to smack her
down.--Don’t you think that’s pretty good?” I told her that I thought
it was terrible.

There was a large, old, slot-machine phonograph standing against the
wall: it was lyre-shaped and had a mirror in its belly, and seemed
stationed as an outpost and siren for the frivolities and gaieties
beyond. We put a nickel in and started it playing an antiquated
xylophone record of the _American Patrol_: its patriotic gallop,
half-stifled behind the glass and losing itself in the wide, gray
waiting-room, woke in my heart a happy response as if to Fourth-of-July
bands of my boyhood.

Then the boat was in; the doors were opened; we went down and stepped
over the side. Assailed by the sunlight, we were dazed: in the
brightness, we seemed merely to enter a smell of white boat-paint and
to ascend to a brisk and merry tinkling of some pretty antique tune.

I pulled camp-stools beside a rail on an upper deck.--Sea and shore
were rawest gray and the sky a raw, pale blue--it was not that the blue
was pale, but rather that blue was lacking. The sun streaked the water
to the west with a bright glaze of zinc.--I got some more ginger-ale
and a couple of paper cups from the little soft-drink bar below.

On one side, as we left the dock, we looked out at the Statue of
Liberty, a solid, dull slug of gray against a colorless, burning sky;
and on the other, at the old red fort, round and full of holes like a
mouse-trap, with its rusty and abandoned barracks.

The thin strains of linkéd sweetness, with now and then a note frailly
sour, of the harp and violin--some old musical-comedy tune I remembered
from my college days--seemed to me even in this false and elfin echo
to keep more that was human and charming than the pace of the newer
dance-music had ever allowed it to possess; and as I glanced at Daisy,
gazing out like a charming, good-natured child, at the sights of the
passing shore, I was touched with sentimental revery.

Then the music was blotted out by the vehement snoring of a steamer and
the pert sput-sputtering of a tug.

She seemed unusually carefree to-day, and I saw that her lips were
rouged an unusually pretty mauve. I told her how pretty she looked, and
she replied by complimenting me on the harmony of my clothes: “With
most people,” she said, “their socks, for instance, haven’t anything
to do with the rest of their clothes--but your socks match your suit.”
My socks, which were a grayish blue, had been given me as a Christmas
present and I had worn them only by accident on the same day as a gray
summer suit. “But you have the worst-looking nails I ever saw!” she
went on. “They look just like mechanics’ nails, except that mechanics’
nails are dirty.” I explained that I always cut them with a pair of
library shears, implying that I regarded any other method as effeminate.

I now decided to speak to Daisy of a matter which had been worrying me
since I had met her at the pier. I said, “I think you’ve got some egg
or something on this cheek.” She took out her little mirror: “That’s
just a streak of cold-cream,” she replied. “It always does that when
I leave some on and the powder sticks.” She rubbed it off. In the
stunning sun of that windless, unshaded day, we were dumb for a time.

Governor’s Island, the harbor in summer, the old patriotic tune, the
statue of the soldier in the park, had brought back to me another
vision which for some moments loomed bright in my mind.

Once--it seemed to me long ago--on a morning in early July, I had
come back to Governor’s Island when it had been green with trees and
grass, and when the barracks had been low, white houses: there had been
soldiers in khaki grooming horses or standing at the water’s edge, in
white shirts.

I remembered how, the afternoon before, though we had not yet been in
sight of land, the empty horizons of those waters had held already the
presence of home. The hours had seemed to run more smoothly with the
homing ship--and in that calm summer evening, the sea had scarcely
breathed. The silver sun had dipped, had sent its silver path along the
blue, and had sunk at the end of its path--spreading yellows and reds,
which the night took.

Then at last the yellow star of a lighthouse had been winking in the
black--it did not seem like the play of a machine, but a deliberate
human signal; and then a lightship spangled with stars. A quarantine
tug had presently come out to us from the still invisible shore, and
sent out some men in a boat: they transacted their business quickly,
rowed quickly back to the launch and were pulled up in their boat with
such promptness that it seemed to leap over the side. One had heard
American voices: that was the American way of doing things!

Then a bed of lights on the water: after nearly two years of France,
Coney Island had seemed incredible!

Then land on either side: there had been trees and lawns on the shore,
and large, white American houses, with here and there a lighted window,
set along on a little hill that sloped down to the water--and each of
the houses had its boathouse and its little pier. Now soon one was to
walk in such houses!--to play one’s part again in that life hidden
there behind those lighted windows, in that life grown now so strange
and yet the life of home!

There had come to us a sudden sweet smell through the quiet summer
night: trees and flowers; the summer grass; the luxuriance and rankness
of America. And then, as the ship passed on, a smell even more
unmistakable, a smell even more of home, surrounded and saturated us:
it was the rotten smell of the river, which, when to-day I had smelt it
again in the Greenwich Village streets, had made me think of the salt
bilge-water of the harbor, but which had breathed then the grease, the
sour heat and the smoke of the factories, of the city. Dark chimneys
were disturbing the darkness with their noiseless eruptions of red.
That evening, on Riverside Drive, the benches would be full of couples,
and all would be soaked from the Jersey bank by the glue-factories’
hot, heavy fumes.

Then suddenly I had almost caught my breath--I had been curiously
moved by the sight of a single, solitary street-lamp on the Staten
Island shore. It had merely shed a loose and whitish radiance over
a few feet of the baldish road of some dark, thinly settled suburb.
Above it, there had loomed an abundant and disorderly tree. But there
was America, I had felt with emotion--there under that lonely suburban
street-lamp, there in that raw and livid light!

Then, from somewhere behind those shadowy lawns, one heard the moan of
an American train, and then its faint bell, and the swift, shuffling
sounds of its progress. It was speeding away with eagerness and
sureness to American cities at night--far, perhaps--to the farthest
reaches of a continent without frontiers! There had been a petulance
and a sadness in the piping of the French locomotives--they had spoken
always of the dead hours of dawn and the carloads of wounded men. But
these trains were bringing soldiers home--and far away from Europe--at
night!

In the morning, off South Brooklyn, at anchor, we had seen the smoky
rose of dawn come up over the black roofs of the city, and we had
listened to the river-traffic waking with soft puffs and toots. The
colors had begun to come out on the vermilion smoke-stacks of steamers.
The gray sides of a battle-ship were clear: it was soon trimmed with
live figures in white suits. We had put down a motor-boat, which
sprang away, when it touched the water, as if the water had given
it life: a blue sailor, standing at the tiller, and negligently and
gracefully leaning to balance the tilt of the boat, was guiding it in
bold easy curves.

Now the varied craft of the harbor were coughing and sneezing all
about us, fully waked-up for the day: squat shouldering ferry-boats
and tugs; a tiny motor-boat darting like a waterbug; railroad barges,
floating freight-cars--Delaware and Lackawanna; New York, New Haven and
Hartford--all those dear, square names of home!

Then the shore was moving: to the left, the docks had begun to bristle
with the first thickets of the forest of masts. In a moment, the
sky would be crowded, and one would behold, above the docks and the
shipping, the tremendous towers of the town!

At that moment, on our way to Coney Island, the freshness of that other
summer day, when I had come back to the United States with what seemed
infinite freedom before me, was recreated in my mind so vividly that
I tried to describe it to Daisy. But for Daisy, the things which had
delighted me--the boat leaping into the tug, the sound of the train in
the dark, the sailor guiding the boat, had no special significance or
point, because they were things which she took for granted, and which
seemed perfectly commonplace. I felt that she kept waiting for these
incidents to develop into anecdotes, in which something entertaining
should happen.

When I had finally given it up, she put her hand over the middle of my
face and regarded me attentively. “You’d be very good-looking,” she
said, “if it wasn’t for your nose.” I said, “I know I’ve got a terrible
nose!” “No,” she reassured me. “It’s cute. But it interferes with any
Adonis-like beauty that you might otherwise have had.”

In the harbor, the harbor of the August day which was actually about
us, the lowering of the zinc-bright colorless sun had made of the water
to the west a gleaming sheet of zinc; and to the east, it had begun
to blue. A bell-buoy clanged and bathed. Before us, we could see the
steamers moving out toward the open sea, their smoke trailing back
from seaward. A fresh, easier, breezy sea-smell reached us--it was a
lightening of the load of life.

“Doesn’t that feel nice, though!” said Daisy. “I think I’m going to
enjoy this trip!”

I asked her about Pete and his job. “I’m so glad we’re going to
Boston,” she said. “I’m tired of the country, but I don’t want to live
in New York! I think New York is terrible!”

Sea Gate--and beaches rank with bathers; little brummagen summer
bungalows with green or red roofs.

Then a monumental buff hotel with a blunt obelisk tower rose alone
from a level shore--where, however, we could presently make out the
skeletons of roller-coasters and the squirrel-cages of ferris-wheels.

Now, more quickly than in our bemusement we had expected, the boat
was pulling in toward the boardwalk: we could see a row of improbable
objects--the sails of a bright-red Dutch windmill; the teeth of a
gigantic grinning mask; a rocking full-size Noah’s Ark, with animals
sticking their heads out the windows and with curious half-clownlike
figures, which made the spasmodic movements of automata and which
seemed the true unearthly inhabitants of that city of enormous toys.

When the boat stopped, as we stood on deck, waiting to get off, we
suddenly again felt the heat. “The sun makes me reel!” said Daisy. We
walked, dazed, up a little gang-plank and down a very long white pier.
The hotel, which rose now to our left, against the dazzling zinc of the
sky, was a dull and solid slug, as the Statue of Liberty had been. The
sea was now quite blue.

I was enchanted by the Noah’s Ark: there were an ostrich, a giraffe,
and an elephant, wagging their heads out the portholes; a Noah, who,
at regular intervals, threw back his Uncle Josh beard and took a swig
from a bottle of whiskey; and a fisherman who, at similar intervals,
jerked up an old shoe on his hook. There was also a mysterious monster,
labelled “Hank,” half human and half brute, who in paroxysms shook his
window-bars. An urgent and ominous fog-horn sounded at the same short
intervals. I was all for going inside.

“Let’s go in swimming first,” said Daisy, “while we’ve still got the
sun--then we’ll feel fine--then we’ll have another drink. Then we can
go and do things, huh?” She squeezed my arm: she seemed happy.

We floated, on our way, through warm currents: the balm of hot buttered
pop-corn; the fragrance of burnt molasses; the sweet-acrid odor of
orange-peels.

And then, after the close, musky smell, human and marine, of the
damp-and-dry gray boards of the bath-house, I met Daisy in my hired
bathing-suit, and we walked out under the boardwalk to the beach.

She had brought an old bathing-suit of Pete’s which had enormous brown
and white stripes and which was in places much too tight for her. With
her fair skin among the tanned bathers and her hair tucked behind her
ears, she looked like one of the Mack Sennett bathing girls, in the
old-fashioned movie comedies. “I know it looks awful,” she said, when
I kidded her about this, “but I thought it didn’t matter at Coney
Island--and I couldn’t afford to get a new one.”

There were tiny children playing in the surf, in tiny slips of
bathing-suits of yellow, pale green, and red, like the variously
flavored fruit-drops--orange, raspberry, and lime--in the glass jars
we had passed on a candy counter; or like the bottles of colored
soft-drinks--cherry, orange, and lemon soda--which we had seen at a
soft-drink stand--they were splashing in wild delight or fleeing from
the sea with squeals.

Daisy worked, for a few minutes, squinting, in an ineffective
under-water side-stroke. I, still partly bemused by my drinks, flung
myself with abandon to the waves, and swam around a small stone
breakwater in what--although I unexpectedly ran into the breakwater--I
thought was pretty good order.

“That was a marvellous wallow of yours!” said Daisy. “I thought you
were trying to push the breakwater over! I was just going to yell out
and tell you to stop, it was built there on purpose!”

She had brought out of the surf, about her shoulders, a great strip
of glossy gold-brown seaweed, and she wore it as a boa: it went
beautifully with her hair and with the taffy-colored stripes of Pete’s
bathing-suit, both darkened by the wet. Her slim legs below her full
hips looked almost like the legs of a bird.

We lay on the sand for awhile. “Your hair seems a different color,”
I said. “In fact--I don’t know whether it’s just my imagination or
not--but it always seems a different color every time that I see
you.” “It is, I guess,” she replied. “They put white henna on it when
they bleached it for the _Gambols_--and I always used to put peroxide
and lemon-juice on it every so often, but I haven’t been able to
lately. That’s why it’s pink, I guess.” I asked what color it had
originally been. “Oh, Gee: I don’t know,” she said. “It’s so long
ago!--Mouse-color, I guess!”

I inquired about a system of vivid blue veins on her thigh. “That’s
my charley-horse,” she explained; “I got it in the first _Gambols_.”
I asked her why she didn’t go back on the stage. “I’m too short,” she
replied, “and my feet are too small for me to dance well--and I don’t
like it, anyway: I always get independent and cut too many rehearsals.
That was why I got fired the last time.”

Beside us, a brown young man had his arm about the shoulders of a
young woman in an old-rose bathing-suit, with large carpet-like
flower-patterns, which richly harmonized with the purple tan of her
skin: she presently slipped a hand beneath the top of her companion’s
bathing-suit and affectionately rubbed his back. A handsome blond girl
in blue, who seemed to have two men in attendance, was pawing the sand
with one foot. Another girl, in a turquoise costume, had stretched out
on her back on the sand, with her shoulders between a man’s knees: he
was passionately stroking her arm.

I watched one really beautiful woman, very blond and rather Germanic:
she wore a pair of red bathing-trunks with an orange stripe down the
side, belted and athletically faded, and a plain white bathing-shirt.
She lay voluptuously, one knee elevated and her head on the knees of
a barrel-shaped man, who wore horn-rimmed spectacles. Her skin was
extremely white, only toasted a little about the shoulders; and she had
smiling darkish brown eyes. I watched her as, presently, she got up
and walked over to the water, and--while her companion bobbed in the
surf--with an easy and graceful crawl, lay voluptuously along the swell.

“This is all artificial sand, you know,” said Daisy,--“Oh, yes: they
spent half a million dollars fixing up this beach. There didn’t used to
be any beach at all. That was the same time they put up the hotel. I
wonder if they’re making money.”

Gray steamers were passing quite close along the gray line of the
water--they made me think of summers in Europe, of coming back from
abroad in the fall--at the age when I had been last to Coney Island,
there had always been uncles and aunts sailing to or from France--there
had been an uncle who brought home from Paris silk stockings for my
cousins and aunts--he had had a bluff and ironical way of retorting,
“You don’t say!” which was precisely the way Daisy said things--it was
the American way.--The Americans went to Paris, and then they came
back again with silk stockings and things they had bought, and that
frank American smile, and that straightforward way of speaking.--The
people who interested me most were, almost all, I reflected, now
abroad: Grosbeake was in England for the summer; Hugo, in spite of
his enthusiasm for the American Middle Western cities, was still in
Afghanistan; and Rita was still in Paris--yet I did not at the moment
seem to miss them and did not want to go abroad myself. What fun we
had had together after all--Rita and I--though we had never been easy
and friendly together, as Daisy and I were to-day: there had been one
evening--we had been drinking raw gin--Rita would never have drunk
the gin and ginger-ale to which Daisy was addicted--when we had told
each other things about ourselves which had seemed at the time to
mean a great deal--I couldn’t quite remember what they were--she had
told me something about her girlhood, it was that night she had sung
me the song about _the foggy, foggy dew_--and I had told her how my
father had died of tuberculosis--and what a rotten time I had had at
boarding-school, and how I intended to write a novel about it. Those
nocturnal drunken conversations which seemed to mean so much!--which
did, no doubt, mean so much. All literature, perhaps--and not poetry
alone, but even the systematized facts of Hugo’s documented novels,
even the formulas of Grosbeake’s logic--was in the nature of a drunken
language, expressing, by certain symbols, sensations and emotions
merely--the readjustments, that would be, of our little corner of
nature to the universe of which we were part--which was forever passing
into new phases and where each phase meant a new adjustment for every
part--where, then, a new art or idea was something more than the mere
compensation for an individual weakness or disaster, it was a necessity
of universal development--I would think it all out some time--the sun
was hot on the sand.

“Well,” said Daisy, “now that we’ve earned that other drink, how about
going in?”

Hot dogs were being roasted twenty at a time, on wide polished iron
slabs: they were crisp, with a delicious stink. At an oilcloth-covered
table, Daisy and I ate one apiece, dabbing them gamboge with a little
long-handled wooden spoon from the common mustard pot.

“I’m ravenous!” said Daisy, biting into the pulp of her roll.

Dim and languid from the swim, I was watching the reflections of girls,
in wide hats and bright summer colors, shine briefly in the silver high
myriad-paned mirror, in the sun that bleached whites whiter and blues
and yellows white.

“Do you want another?” I asked, when she had bolted the last morsel.
“Not now; maybe later,” she replied.

We did the shooting-galleries after this, and the ring-throwing and
ball-rolling games. We were both quite good: we knocked over any number
of moving ducks, which was what we had decided to concentrate on;
and we won a baby-doll in a chemise, a miniature roulette-wheel, an
harmonica, an atomizer and a trick pistol which shot off a snake. Daisy
was so delighted with the snake that she kept shooting it down the
ball-rolling table, so that the Jap had to find it and bring it back.
Every time, with oriental patience, he would stuff it into the pistol,
hand it back to Daisy, and caution her politely with a smile, as he
indicated the trigger: “Now don’t put your finger on that!”--whereupon
Daisy would shoot it off again. I was somehow obscurely reminded of
that horrible night at Sue Borglum’s, and I took a dislike to the Jap
and made Daisy move on.

“Let’s send some goofy post-cards,” said Daisy, in front of a post-card
store. We went inside and selected several with fastidious care. I
sent cards to Hugo and Rita; and Daisy sent cards to Gus Dunbar and
Sue Borglum. “I’m going to be dirty,” she said, putting a cross on a
bathing beauty, and writing, “X marks my room.”

I asked her if she would care for a pin-cushion heavily encrusted
with sea-shells and inscribed, “Souvenir of Coney Island,” or if
there were anything else she would like. “I’d like some moccasins,”
she said. “Very well,” I replied. “Will you really buy me some?” she
asked eagerly. “You great big munificent old thing!--I haven’t got any
slippers now, and I used to keep getting my feet full of splinters and
thumb-tacks in the country.”

It turned out that her feet were so small that the man had to get a
special size out of the stockroom at the back. The woman in the shop,
fat and sharp-eyed, became very friendly with Daisy and, while the man
was looking for the moccasins, tried to engage her in conversation. “Do
you mind my asking what kind of lipstick that is?” the woman inquired
with interest. Rather to my surprise, this seemed to embarrass Daisy:
she explained that it was called “carnation,” but when the woman
asked her how much it cost, Daisy said that she had forgotten, and
became markedly unresponsive. “If they can’t find the right size,”
she presently remarked to me pointedly, “we might as well go!” The
moccasins, however, were forthcoming: they were moccasins for a child
and I did not suppose they could fit her; but they did. She looked down
at her little blunt-toed foot with its border, at the throat, of gray
fur: “That’s all right,” she said shortly.

“That woman certainly took a friendly interest,” I remarked, when we
were out on the boardwalk. “Yes,” said Daisy. “I never know what to do
when people like that get chummy.”

I had been surprised at Daisy’s shrinking from the familiarity of the
woman in the shop, and I was now to be surprised again. I had lingered
in front of a side-show, where there were posters of a Hula-Hula
Dancer, a Dog-faced Boy, a Mermaid, an Hermaphrodite and a Magician,
and I suggested going in. But Daisy evidently did not care to. “My
mother would never let me see any freaks,” she said. “They’re all
fakes, aren’t they?” she asked, a little timidly.

As we walked on, she shot the snake off again, and I had to go and get
it out of an umbrella-stand bristling with pennants and canes.

Then I discovered the Eden Musée--I had forgotten that it had moved
to Coney Island and had thought of it as having perished. I had not
visited it since my childhood, when, coming up to New York with my
father, he had used to take me to see it in the days when it had
still been on Twenty-third Street: there I had seen for the first
time moving-pictures, along with the automatic chess-player and the
manipulator of liquid air. And now here was the same old policeman in
his high obsolete helmet; the same refined widow in black, with the
tight waist of the early nineteen-hundreds; the same old hayseed with
his spectacles, his flopping wide-brimmed straw hat and his flaccid
carpet-bag--but now no longer posed inside, where they could no longer
be mistaken for real people, but set out in front as a guarantee of the
authentic antiquity of the show.

I induced Daisy to go in.--There they were, that awful group of my
youth, though it seemed to me their number was diminished: Jenny Lind,
Mary Queen of Scots, Anna Held, Oliver Cromwell, Beethoven, Brigham
Young, General Grant, Napoleon and Booker T. Washington: I was sorry to
see that Marshall P. Wilder no longer had a place among them.

I did not examine them closely, however, for Daisy, who seemed never to
have seen wax-works before, hurried on to the more dramatic tableaux
set back in compartments along the side. She passed before them, gazing
in silence. The groups were not particularly interesting, but they
presently led us to the “Crypt.” We entered a darkened curving passage.
I was delighted: it was the old “Chamber of Horrors,” which in the
Twenty-third Street days had used to be downstairs in the basement.
We gazed at the Opium Den; the Execution of a Burmese Criminal (it
seemed to me now that the elephant who steps on the criminal’s head
had shrunk since I was a boy); the Cannibal Feast; the Whipping Post,
“still in use in the State of Delaware”; and, the electrocution of poor
Lina Lemberg, who had finally, a few weeks before, been executed for
the murder of her husband. The witnesses, in the Death Chamber, were
regarding the proceedings with simpers, and I wondered whether they
had not been borrowed from an old tableau of a lobster-and-champagne
supper, with Mephistopheles in the background, of which the personnel
of revellers seemed to me, like the Burmese elephant, to have dwindled
since the Twenty-third Street days. I suggested this to Daisy. “I
don’t think this is very exciting,” she replied. She seemed to look at
everything so perfunctorily that I was afraid she was being bored: as
she had never seen the Musée in her childhood, I could not expect her
to share my interest in it.

Several tableaux farther on, I found that I had turned a corner and
left Daisy behind--still staring, no doubt, at Lina Lemberg. I was
before a group of the Spanish Inquisition, and I had a sudden happy
inspiration for enlivening the entertainment for Daisy. I climbed
quickly over the railing, put my straw hat on the head of the presiding
inquisitor--he had a lean and sallow face, and the hat came down over
his eyes--and, with my back to the railing, struck an energetic pose
among the torturers with red-hot irons, myself applying to the victim’s
blood-streaked shoulder the cork-screw I had brought for the gin. In
a moment, I heard distinct light steps, which stopped--then, after an
instant’s pause: “Come on out of there, you old cut-up!” I climbed back
over the railing. “I thought you were real at first,” she said, as we
reached the exit. “You gave me quite a turn!”

On our way out, I caught a glimpse of Roosevelt, the Teddy Roosevelt
of San Juan Hill, who, with his handkerchief knotted about his neck,
his Rough-Rider puttees, his felt hat, his mustache, his glaring teeth
and his eye-glasses, made me think of that younger America which I had
assumed we had forever left behind, but which to-day seemed quite close
to me again. It had been a boy’s America--and not merely because it had
been the America of my boyhood. Roosevelt, who had been so charming
with his children, had become the idol of the Americans of that time
for very much the same reasons--he had been everything that a boy
could imagine: Dan Beard, Old and Young King Brady, Frank Merriwell,
and Stanley in Africa, all rolled into one. I asked Daisy whether she
remembered the time when Roosevelt had been a great hero. She said,
“No,”--and showed so little interest that for a time I relapsed into
silence. Then she let me see what she had been thinking about: “I’ve
never seen a dead person,” she said, “except an aunt of mine that died.”

“By the way,” I asked, after a moment, “what became of that thief that
Ray Coleman caught--the one that didn’t steal anything of yours, but
stole the bathrobe of the man next door, or something?” She was silent.
“Don’t you remember?” “Yes, I remember,” she replied. “But I don’t know
what became of him. I was thinking too much about myself at that time
to pay much attention to anything else.”

“Would you mind taking me to dinner?” she said presently. “I’m
absolutely starved!” I asked her where she wanted to go. “I’d like to
go to the old Seaview, if you don’t mind. I don’t know how the food
there is now--but I’d just like to see the place.--I went there with
Phil Meissner,” she added, “when we first came on from Pittsburgh.”

The Seaview was quite remote--beyond a kind of grassy common,
criss-crossed with bald paths. It was an old-fashioned summer hotel,
of the cupolaed and pillared design of the days before concrete and
brick: like all wooden hotels by the shore, it had a flimsy discolored
look, and seemed peculiarly desolate and dry. The dining-room was
entirely empty: only a few of the tables were set. One side was all
high narrow windows, separated by thin wooden frames, which looked out
on the boardwalk and the sea; and on the other, an old closed piano
stood against the wall, and space had been left for a dance-floor; slim
pillars from floor to roof at intervals threaded the room. We waited,
but no one came. I finally hallo’d; and a waiter appeared from the
pantry. He came forward without inspiration, as if he expected to be
asked for cigarettes or to be asked to direct us to Luna Park. When he
learned that we wanted dinner, his eagerness to serve us was extreme.

“Well,” said Daisy, as we sat down, “the table linen’s nice and clean,
anyway.” It was true: very white large napkins had been folded into
angles and stuck into large clear goblets.

“I’m going to have clams,” said Daisy. “They used to have the most
wonderful clam-cocktails here.” I ordered a melon for myself, and
bluefish for both of us afterwards. I also ordered some ginger-ale and
poured out what was left of the gin. “I don’t think I’ll have any,”
said Daisy, “until after I’ve had something to eat.” She looked a
little pale and was silent for some time, and I hoped that the Chamber
of Horrors hadn’t upset her. She smiled broadly, however, at last, and
proclaimed: “Look out, Food: I’m coming!”

I asked her how she and Phil had ever happened to come to the Seaview.
“Phil knew the manager,” she explained. “The manager gave a party in
my honor--just some of his men friends. We had champagne, and I’d
never had anything to drink before--I was awfully young--I was only
seventeen. I thought it was swell, and I got lit. They kept filling up
my glass with champagne. You know how men are when they’ve got a girl
that’s young and kind of cute, and they’re trying to get her tight. I
had on a little black dress like they wore then, that buttoned up the
back, and the bottom buttons got unbuttoned--and then every man that
danced with me would unbutton another button--so that pretty soon it
was unbuttoned all the way up to the waist. I didn’t know anything
about it and just went on smiling and dancing, and thinking I was
cutting quite a figure, with my legs hanging out all the time!”

I laughed about this.

“I certainly enjoyed those clams!” she said, when all the little
hollows in her plate were empty around the red-splashed glass of sauce.
She smiled: “After all,” she declared, “say what you please--there’s
nothing like a good plate of food!” I asked her if she would like some
more clams. “Yes,” she answered, after a moment’s thought, “I believe
that I would.” I ordered another clam-cocktail.

I asked if it weren’t true, as I had heard from Hugo Bamman, the night
of Ray Coleman’s party, that she and her husband, on their honeymoon,
had ridden on a motor-cycle all the way from Pittsburgh to Atlantic
City: this had seemed to me tremendously romantic. “It wasn’t Atlantic
City,” Daisy explained. “It was here.”

“What was Phil Meissner like?” I inquired. “He had a lot of charm,”
said Daisy, “and a lot of brains, too--but he never did anything with
them except perfectly foolish things. For instance, he’d spend days
inventing something that worked by electricity to make the blinds open
in the morning--he could lie in bed and press a button and make the
water-basin fill, and when it was full, the faucet would turn itself
off, and everything!”

“Were you very much in love with him?” I asked. She shook her head,
as if in scorn. “I didn’t know anything about anything then. He was
the first regular beau I’d ever had: my father wouldn’t let me go with
the boys. I was all excited aboutum at first.--I was so much impressed
withum when I first marriedum that it was just ridiculous! I couldn’t
even go to the drug-store to get a tube of tooth-paste without askingum
what kind to buy. But I wasn’t really in love withum--I didn’t know
what it was all about--and then, by the time I might have been in love,
everything was pretty well wrecked.--My father followed us here and
burst in on us with a detective at four o’clock in the morning. He made
us get up and get married then and there--we hadn’t gotten married
before we left because Phil didn’t want to attract attention. Dad said
I’d either have to marry Phil or go back to Pittsburgh. So we got up
and got married at four o’clock in the morning--it was the night after
the champagne party and we both felt like nobody’s business. Phil was
sore as a crab, because Dad had a Catholic priest marry us, and Phil
wasn’t a Catholic--but Dad threatened to havum arrested for abducting a
minor, and he had the detective right there.

“Things were never quite the same after that. I don’t blame Phil
for being sore: nobody likes to be forced into a thing like
that--especially with a hangover, at four o’clock in the morning!”

I had been thinking: her father from Pittsburgh--why had they named her
Daisy?--I remembered that old song of my boyhood,

  _“Daisy! Daisy!
  Give me your answer true--
  I’m half-crazy!
  All for the love of you!
  It won’t be a stylish marriage--
  I can’t afford a carriage!
  But you’ll look sweet, upon the seat
  Of a bicycle built for two!”_

--that old song of an earlier time to which Daisy’s name seemed to
relate her--and her large hips, too--I had never been aware how round
they were till I had seen her in her bathing-suit--they were the kind
that had been admired at the time when the song had been new--they went
in for slender hips to-day--but I liked Daisy’s none the less--how
bicycles had gone out, too--but she and Phil, appropriately enough, had
spent their honeymoon on a motor-cycle.

“Are you happy now with Pete?” I asked. She shook her head: “I don’t
know if I’ve really ever been happy--but I’ve sworn to go through with
this with Pete: I’m tired of leaving people.” “Are you and Pete married
now?” She shook her head again and grunted negatively, “uh-uh!”

“I know I’m not happy now,” she went on, “because I keep having these
dreams where some kind of a great piece of good fortune is just about
to befall me--and they’re the goofiest dreams!--When Prince Charming
comes along, he’s always just a great, big, strong, clean-limbed
American who gathers me up in his arms. It’s so silly! I feel ashamed
of myself after I wake up.--And I’m always dressed in the costume that
I wore in the first _Gambols_, when I came out in a white old-fashioned
dress, with curls and pantalettes and everything. I loved it--Gus
Dunbar used to say that I looked so sweet and dewy that he wanted to
smack me down. But you know one night the boys from Notre Dame came
and stole my picture in that costume that was on show in front of the
theatre--and they published it in the college paper. They sent me a
copy of the paper: I was tickled to death. That was the only one they
stole!”

I had been watching, through the tall, open windows, the double, white,
pearly globes of the boardwalk lamps, so pale, so chaste and so bright,
hanging gracefully, like lilies-of-the-valley, from their straight,
slender stalks, against the background of the paler blue, now the
cooler blue, of the sea, where a buoy shone ruby-red.

When we came down the steps of the hotel, all was in deep blue dusk,
with the lamps a double rope of moons. “Have you noticed this?” I
asked, waving my hand toward the lamps.--“I suppose the last time I was
happy,” she said, “was back there in the old Seaview dining-room!”

We were confronted, when we turned back toward the amusements, by a
large and very garish electric sign in the form of a gigantic human
foot, on which a red Mephistopheles was standing: by means of alternate
systems of bulbs, the arm of the Mephistopheles was made to jerk back
and forth, prodding energetically with a spear an illuminated corn on
the big toe, which at each jab changed the color of its light, first
blue, then purple, then green. The legend, which flashed on and off,
proclaimed, in contorted, striking letters: “Take a Walk with Clancy’s
Corn Fix. Knocks the Devil Out of Sore Feet.”

“Oh, do you see that sign?” said Daisy. “That was Larry Mickler’s
idea. He’s making a lot of money out of it: they’ve got them all over
the country.” I was glad to know that Larry Mickler, through a truly
Dostoevskian device, had constrained his sadistic instincts to serve
this beneficent end.

“I hope we get somewhere soon!” said Daisy presently. “I’ve got to
go to about eighteen ladies’-rooms!” We had been walking along the
boardwalk and were only just reaching the shops again. Daisy presently
disappeared in a small and rather sordid-looking restaurant.

There was a penny-in-the-slot place next door, and as I walked back
and forth in front of the restaurant, I stopped and looked in. I saw,
standing before me in the doorway, a tall, young man with a stoop,
who had a darkish tooth-brush mustache, which I considered a little
silly, and rather large brown eyes of the kind usually described as
spaniel-like: he was wearing, like everybody else, a straw hat with a
black band, which, it seemed to me, he had pulled too far down on his
forehead. I had a feeling of mild irritation that he should be standing
and staring so innocently, so well-meaningly, and so lackadaisically,
square in the middle of the doorway, where he made it difficult for
people to pass. He was laden down, I saw, with packages: no doubt some
woman had made him carry them.--Then sharply I pulled myself up from
that vague and absent moment: the man was my own reflection in a mirror
opposite the door. On either side were other mirrors which distorted
people’s shapes.

I continued to gaze at myself: how had I ever failed to
recognize--especially after Daisy had remarked on it--my ridiculous
bulbous nose? My eyes, which I had hoped were intelligent, had only
appeared to me canine--and my mustache was unsuccessful. My pockets
were bulging with the atomizer, the mouth-organ, the baby-doll, and the
pistol with the snake; and I was carrying the roulette-wheel and the
moccasins, which had been wrapped up in pasteboard boxes. I seemed to
myself a figure from the funny-papers: Mr. Suburban American, at the
sea-side, with packages and a straw hat.

I went back to the door of the restaurant: Daisy had not yet emerged.
There was a radio playing outside, and for some reason the programme
included some vaudeville or night-club woman soloist singing _Mamie
Rose_, that popular song of several years ago which Daisy had started
on the phonograph when Rita had been reading her poems and which had
desolated me so on the day when I had seen Rita off at the station and
had been waiting for Daisy in her rooms. Now I listened idly for the
words, parts of which, on that horrible record, I had never been able
to catch. The contralto, whose voice was rich and deep, delivered them
with a masterly casual emphasis, in that nondescript dialect--perhaps
the result of Irish actors learning from Jewish comedians how to sing
Negro songs--which has become the language of American jazz:

  _“There she goes,
  Mamie Rose
  She--loves--me!
  Don’t seem to show it!
  How do I know it?
  It’s ABC!
  She’s smart as Satan--
  She’s 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, Fireman, do your duty!”_

_That_ was the line that I’d never been able to hear!--That song, but
a few years old, seemed already to belong to the past, like _Daisy_
and the _American Patrol_, and the old musical-comedy tune which the
musicians had played on the boat, and I found that I had at last come
to feel for it a certain familiar affection. Furthermore, I now thought
it quite good: there was something rather unexpected, something even
quite original about the manipulation of the tune: what was original
and unexpected was the repetition, in some sort of minor, of the
pattern which had just gone before--recommencing, with _She’s proud and
snooty_, what one had thought was entirely finished--and recommencing
it agreeably and queerly, so that for a moment one always paused to
listen. I wondered how the composer had arrived at it. He was a man
named Harry Hirsch, I remembered: I imagined him: a small, young Jew
with very large, intense, black eyes, like motor headlights; after the
success of the musical comedy in which _Mamie Rose_ had been sung, he
had probably taken to wearing spats. He was no doubt the son of a Rabbi
or of the Cantor in a Synagogue: the base of his music was German, and
I imagined some dark room of a stifling apartment on the East Side,
in which his youth had been fed on Schubert and on the light opera of
Vienna and Berlin, cities which his eyes had never seen. But what had
he done to this music?--what had made him repeat those bars of the
sweet German melody with which he had begun, but transforming them
abruptly, by daring what any hack worker in the field would have told
him _a priori_ was impossible, what would have lasted in commonplace
hands impossibly too long? By carrying us beyond expectation, by
breaking into that new accent, half agonized and half thrilling, he had
enchanted the public so completely that not merely had _Mamie Rose_
turned out to be one of the principal factors in the success of the
musical comedy in which it had first appeared (and where, as a matter
of fact, the director had been afraid to feature it), but it had been
heard on every radio and phonograph; at every college prom, at every
Greenwich Village ball; from the most perfunctory chirpings of the
orchestras of restaurants to the jazz-bands de luxe of roof-gardens;
on the vaudeville circuits of small towns and in the scores of feature
moving-pictures; worked up for the Elks summer fair; struck up, with
the words thrown on a screen, during the intermissions of burlesque
shows; ground out at “dancing academies” where, from New York to Los
Angeles, clumsy and inarticulate young men pushed wary and inarticulate
girls about a crowded, monotonous floor--and as I had heard it once,
late at night, sung strangely from a summer street by a child’s voice,
nasal and shrill, following subtly and with marvellous accuracy the
deviating minor strain, and repeating it again and again!

Where had he got it?--from the sounds of the streets? the taxis
creaking to a stop? the interrogatory squeak of a street-car? some
distant and obscure city-sound in which a plaintive high note, bitten
sharp, follows a lower note, strongly clanged and solidly based? Or
had he got it from Schoenberg or Stravinsky?--or simply from his own
nostalgia, among the dark cells and the raspings of New York, for those
orchestras and open squares which his parents had left behind?--or
for the cadence, half-chanted and despairing, of the tongue which the
father had known, but which the child had forgotten and was never to
know again?

But the relations between Schoenberg, the taxi-brakes, and the
Synagogue, baffled further speculation.--And, in any case, what
charmed and surprised one, in this as in all works of art, was no
mere combination of elements, however picturesque or novel, but some
distinctive individual quality which the artist himself supplied. Of
all the young Jews in New York who had listened to the service in
the Synagogue or who had been kept awake at night by taxis, how many
had written good music, even good popular music? I thought of that
personal color or rhythm which, the night when I had been dressing in
Bank Street to take Daisy out to a night-club, had seemed to me, in
the work of an artist, as little important or interesting as the color
of his hair or eyes, or his way of mispronouncing certain words; but I
could recognize now that it was precious. And as I recalled my gloomy
meditations of the night of Sue Borglum’s party, I remembered how the
Greeks had given Sophocles the name of “the Attic Bee.”

Yes: I saw it: there it was: it was acrid, but still honey; and it was
something more than beauty of verse. The Greeks’ idea of sweetness had
been as different as possible from Stevenson and the “honey-dripping
style.” I saw it now, not merely in the nightingales and the ivy of
that chorus at Colonus for which the jury had applauded Sophocles, when
his competence to dispose of his property had been called in question
by his son; but in the passionate frankness of Antigone, even in the
asperity of Œdipus, even in the guile of Odysseus. I thought now of
the exquisite proportion, of the style with its unique combination of
modulation and pith, of the strong and sensitive hand placing with so
firm and light an emphasis those culminating scenes where the nobler
instincts of humanity reassert or declare themselves: Electra when she
speaks to the urn which she believes contains her brother’s ashes,
Neoptolemus confessing at last that he cannot act against his nature
to deceive even an outcast who has trusted him--as, in the case of
Dostoevsky, I remembered, no longer the contention and the horror,
but the brightness of the high comic sense which interpenetrates all
that is turbid, which flowers constantly in such charming passages
as that in _The Idiot_, for example, where the young girl buys the
hedgehog from the boys and sends it to the Prince for a peace-offering,
and which makes even of _Crime and Punishment_ a comedy rather than
a tragedy. It was not that the Athenian jury had merely demonstrated
their gratitude for--that the crowds at Dostoevsky’s funeral had
merely regretted being deprived of--a sedative to which they had
become addicted; but that both had been ravished by the taste--and
by it had been partly repaid for the harshness of the common life--of
that miraculous secretion of the mind which there was only one man to
supply. And so every sort of good literature, so every sort of good
art, provided an aliment, a stimulant, as natural and necessary as food
and drink themselves! Even the tannic tincture of Poe, which seemed
to turn the throat to leather and to petrify the taste, had its own
peculiar tonic value, and even from the coarse, used mash of Byron it
was possible to extract a strong brandy--even the writer of popular
music--The radio was hawking and halting; I had already been waiting a
long time--much too long, I began to think. And I suddenly remembered
how Daisy had slit her wrist on the night when I had left her at Gus
Dunbar’s apartment.

I was on the point of going in to look for her when she finally
appeared: I was so much relieved to see her that I did not at first
notice how pale she was. She said that she was sorry to have kept me
waiting, and we walked on for a moment in silence: then I asked her
whether she had been ill. “No: I’m all right,” she replied. “You were
such a long time in there,” I said.--“Are you sure that you’re all
right?” “Yes, I’m all right,” she said again. “You were sick in there,”
I challenged her, stopping. “Did you throw up?” “I’m all right!” she
repeated. “It was just the smell of that place, I guess!”

I made her sit down on a bench: she wouldn’t let me get her anything,
and neither of us spoke for a time. A fresh, fishy breeze was blowing
in: I hoped that it would make her feel better. A lighthouse was
winking punctually; the ocean was grayest blue, and the low waves were
pale as porcelain on the sands of palest buff: the late bathers were
coral limbs. Some children, still playing on the beach, were holding
out into the ocean and the night the brass-bristling frost-crystals of
sparklers.

I asked Daisy presently how she felt. “All right: fine!” she
replied.--I tried to find out whether there were anything seriously
wrong with her. “No,” she said. “To tell the truth, we haven’t had
very much to eat out in the country lately: the grocer and the butcher
in the village wouldn’t give us any more credit, and we had to live
on the things that we already had in the house--which were mostly
corn-flakes--corn-flakes without cream or anything--that was about all
we’d had for a week before we came in. I guess I overdid it with those
clams.”

I said I thought that the gin had been rotten and that the ginger-ale
had been inferior. I began to produce the toys from my pockets. She
took a sudden interest in the harmonica and amused herself by working
out tunes on it: her most conspicuous success, from which she seemed
to derive a good deal of satisfaction, was _Nearer My God to Thee_.
After a while, she said: “Well, let’s go on!” I asked her whether she
wanted to go home. “No,” she declared, “not yet: I want to do some more
things!--don’t you?”

We explored Luna Park--all bright minarets and festoons of white
imitation pearls. I offered to take her on the “Thunderbolt”; the
“Shoot-the-Chutes”; the “Dragon’s Gorge”; but she did not seem very
eager. “Why don’t we try that Noah’s Ark thing?” she suggested, as we
were wandering a little aimlessly, “that thing that you wanted to go
into when we first came.”

We went back to the steamboat pier and found the Noah’s Ark still
rocking and sounding its sombre fog-horn; it was lighted up now with
green ship’s lanterns, which revealed the elephant, the ostrich, and
the giraffe, the fisherman pulling up the shoe, the old patriarch
hitting his bottle, and the monster shaking his bars. “Do you think you
can stand it?” I asked. “Oh, yes,” insisted Daisy, smiling. “I want to
go in, don’t you?”

We bought tickets and mounted the gang-plank. Inside, the Ark was
rather a sell, as there was nothing amusing to see--the animals and the
monster turned out to have been constructed so as to be visible merely
from the outside. We found that we had been let in for an assortment
of banal and disconcerting sensations. We had to walk on a shifting
platform--pass along a wobbly corridor--climb a flight of quaking
stairs. Our hats were almost blown off by a violent blast of air and
when we tried to catch hold of the railing, we received an electric
shock. I was afraid that it might make Daisy sick again, and asked her
whether she wanted to go back: “No, I’m all right,” she replied. We
went through with it to the end, in silence and rather solemnly. I felt
protective and tender toward Daisy, and contrite at having brought her
in: I was only just beginning fully to realize that she had probably,
when we first started out, been faint for lack of food; that she had
been drinking on an empty stomach; that she had been sickened by the
Eden Musée and upset by my stupid joke; and that revisiting the Seaview
Hotel, which had brought back her first days with Phil Meissner, had
finally overcome her. I became acutely aware, too late, that if she had
insisted on going in for the Noah’s Ark, it had been entirely because
she thought I wanted to.--The last stunt was a spiral slide which
landed us on a whirling platform: in my efforts to rescue Daisy, I fell
on the roulette-wheel and broke it.

It was now time to go home, we decided--but as it turned out that the
last boat had left, we were obliged to go back by the bus.

On our way to the place where the buses stopped, we passed the poster
of a spiritualist fortuneteller. “Did I tell you my joke?” asked Daisy.
“About ‘Striking a Happy Medium’?” “Yes,” I said. “I think it’s fine!”

As the bus left Coney Island behind, a cluster of bright, pearly globes
among the vivid red pumps of a filling-station repeated the pearls of
Luna Park and the drooping white lamps of the boardwalk.

Along the boulevard to New York, were aligned little sections of shops,
bright-windowed and built in new concrete: drug-stores; grocery-stores;
automobile show-rooms; a bank.

There were girls in summer dresses, hatless, with bobbed heads and
pink or tan stockings, strolling out, alone or in couples. Down
side-streets, I could see little houses with compact and screened
porches giving way to the wastes of building-lots, where a lonely and
random street-lamp would light untidy bushes and trees. That was
the America to which I had returned when, coming back after the War
from France, I had been greeted by that other suburban street-lamp
on the Staten Island shore! That was the America to which to-night I
felt myself returning again--those neat and new little shops, those
girls wandering out in the evening between the drug-store and the
building-lots--hardly knowing what they expected but half hoping for
some new turn to their lives! Had not Daisy been once such a girl,
walking out in the streets of Pittsburgh--had not Rita, in her up-state
town?

I asked Daisy about her father, of whom she had told me at dinner that
he had not let her go out with boys. “He was Irish,” she explained.
“He lost all his money when we were just kids. But he was determined
that the fact that he’d lost his money shouldn’t make any difference
about our being well brought up--I guess it did all right, though.”
She smiled her candid smile. “That’s one reason they used to send me
to my aunt’s in Nova Scotia so much.” I remembered her timidity about
the freaks, her “independence” about rehearsals, and her coldness with
the woman in the store. “That was one trouble about Phil and me,” she
went on. “Phil’s father and my father had known each other very well
when they first came to Pittsburgh. We used to live next door to the
Meissners, before they made money and moved. And in those days, Dad
had a much more important position than Mr. Meissner: he was one of
the principal men in the Billings Company and Mr. Meissner was just a
clerk in a bank. Then when the Meissners made money and Dad was down
and out, they got snooty about us--and Dad didn’t want me to go with
Phil--Phil had the reputation of being the wildest boy in Pittsburgh.
Dad was fit to be tied when I ran away withum!”

I marked another filling-station: a crowd of great white stars, which
seemed uttered by a rocket’s detonation.

Now we were passing a row of small houses with tapestry-brick façades
and, in front of them, little green lawns enclosed by little hedges.

“Dad was really a bright man, though,” Daisy presently went on. “He
was one of the first people in the country to design certain kinds of
trucks.--He invented all kinds of things--he invented a kind of siren.”

A filling-station where the lights were dimmer and the pumps a duller
red was outshone by the lunar beauty of the radiant white pergola which
followed it.

“Did you ever hear them talk about auto-horns--in a store or
anywhere, I mean?” she asked. “It’s a shout. There’s a _toot-toot_,
and a _beep-beep_--and an _oorah_--and a _blah-blah_, and a
_blurp-blurp_.--Dad’s was a kind of a _oorah_--and it was a humdinger,
too!--it had an authoritative sound and it wasn’t ugly like most
sirens.”

In the show-rooms on either side appeared the present-day glories
of the motor industry: the Lancerd was celebrating its “Silver
Anniversary” with a new model in “distinctive” apple-green, posed with
dignity behind its plate-glass pane, in a white-balconied Colonial
salon.

“It was getting indicted for manslaughter,” Daisy went on, “that really
ruined Dad: he and another man ran into each other as Dad was coming
out of a garage. It was really both’s fault--but the man was killed and
they indicted Dad--though he’d been a month in the hospital himself.
They made him pay a big fine and he lost his job--and he never could
get back after that.--He used to come home drunk and sit down on the
edge of my bed and hold directors’ meetings all by himself--I used to
think it was funny, but my mother used to be so worried!”

I had been brooding on the name of Meissner, which seemed to raise for
me vague associations. “Did they ever call Phil Meissner, ‘Junior’?”
I finally asked. “The family always calledum that,” she answered.
“Why?--did you ever knowum?” “Did they live in a great big house with
green and blue stained-glass windows?” “Yes,” said Daisy. “Why? Did you
ever knowum? They lived on Aylesworth Avenue. That was where they moved
to after they lived next door to us.”

Phil and his family were the people, then, whom I had visited as a
child, when I had gone to Pittsburgh with my mother, and who had
come back into my mind, when Hugo, at Ray Coleman’s party, had said
that Daisy came from Pittsburgh! I told Daisy how much I had envied
Phil Meissner’s elaborate toy railroad and his device for making
dinner-plates jump, but how obnoxious, on the whole, I had thought him.
“He was spoiled to death,” said Daisy. “That was what was the trouble
withum, I guess.”

And this discovery that Daisy had married a boy I had myself known
in my childhood had an effect out of all proportion to its apparent
importance or interest. Hitherto, I now fully took account, I had
regarded Daisy as an alien--first, as a denizen of Broadway, and
afterwards, as a product of the Village. But she seemed now to have
taken her place in the world which I had always known. She was no
longer of a different race--of an exotic glamor or guile: she was
simply an American girl, who had grown up in an American town like
other American towns, lived in a house like other houses, gone to a
school like other schools. I seemed to have been given a new vision
of the fluidity of manners in America, the plasticity of social
position--of the swiftness and adventitiousness of the way in which
such things changed. If Daisy’s family had gone down in the world, the
Meissners had obviously come up. But the human material was the same;
and in the face of its constant fluctuations, attempts to fix social
differences became ludicrous and futile. Americans might turn into
anything!

What, for example, might not be made of Daisy? On each of the occasions
when I had met her, I had seen in her something different, as my own
mind had been differently disposed by my personal situation at the
time and by the influences by which I had been affected--by Hugo,
first; then, by Rita; then, by my disgust and disillusion the night
of Sue Borglum’s party; then, by my evening with the Grosbeakes. And
I could see how she herself had taken the color of each of the men
with whom she had lived since she left Pittsburgh: Phil Meissner’s
extravagant tastes; Ray Coleman’s constrained correctitude; and Pete
Bird’s engaging humor. She had even, I noted, begun lately to talk
exactly like Pete. She had been eager to accept whatever they gave, and
how little they had had to give her! Phil with his inherited money,
his egoism, and his silly jokes; Ray with his substantial salary, his
ignoble employment and his meanness; and Pete with his pennilessness
and uselessness, his gentlemanly hobbies and his charm--they seemed now
to me like figures of comedy for familiar American types.--But what
hope was there for Daisy with any of them?

“I declare,” I said finally aloud, “I don’t see why you haven’t been
able to do better than Pete and Ray! Haven’t you ever found anybody
in the Village that really amounted to something and that you liked
at the same time?” She shook her head, not turning from the window.
Then, after a moment, she turned: “You know the only person,” she
said, “that I ever thought I could get a real crush on was your friend
Hugo Bamman. I actually got all hopped up, that night he was sailing
for Egypt, or wherever it was, about the idea of going away withum. I
think he’s good-looking, too--especially since he’s stopped wearing
spectacles. Some people think that scar spoils his face, but I think
it’s smart-looking.--But he’s certainly cagy about women--Myra Busch
was crazy aboutum, you know.--Either that or he’s afraid of them.--He’s
so sure of himself, too--he knows what he wants to do.--None of the
men I’ve ever lived with were sure of themselves.--You know what you
told me out in the country, about my knowing about everything better
than anybody--well, I wanted to say at the time that that isn’t true at
all. That’s just the trouble: I don’t know what it’s all about. I want
somebody to tell me!”

Daisy’s mentioning Hugo reminded me of the world as I had seen it
through his eyes when I had first come down to Greenwich Village: then,
like him, I had thought myself a rebel against the standards of a
bourgeoisie--that is, in a country like America, where there was really
only one class, or rather, as I had just been reflecting, no classes,
properly speaking, at all, against an abstraction of all the worst
qualities attributable to respectable Americans; then later, when I had
been in love with Rita, all the interests and occupations of the common
life had seemed to me on so low a plane and of so lax an impulse, that
I could feel for them nothing but contempt. Now my trip to Europe since
the War had had the effect of making me more content with America, even
at her worst; and my conversation with Grosbeake _à propos_ of Lewis’s
_Babbitt_, though Grosbeake’s opinions had surprised me at the time,
had in the long run had the effect of helping me to approach America
from a different point of view than the point of view which, at the
time when I had thought like Hugo, had allowed me to take account only
of American mediocrity and timidity. To-day I seemed to have re-entered
that world and to find myself perfectly at home there: now I found that
it no longer inspired either hatred, apprehension, or scorn.

“By the way,” I presently asked, “where did you get that line about
‘the downfall of western civilization’?--You know, that night I took
you to the movies, you said that you probably looked like the downfall
of western civilization.” “Oh,” she said, “that was just something I
picked up at the Ritz Bar in Paris!”

The little tapestry-brick houses had been supplanted by
apartment-buildings, also in tapestry-brick, and with attractive green
or brown awnings at the doorways and windows; but now the awnings came
closer together and the crowded house-fronts were laced by zigzagging
fire-escapes: they got dingier, balder, denser. We were in Brooklyn,
and now Brooklyn Bridge repeated the fire-escape zigzags.

Delancey Street, with its car-tracks and hooded subway entrances; the
Bowery, with its El.

We got out at Astor Place. I asked Daisy what she wanted to do. “I
think I’d like a drink,” she said. “It’s so long since I’ve been
absolutely free, without any housework or anything, that I feel like
making the most of it!” “Have you gotten over your sinking-spell?” I
asked. “Sure,” she replied with conviction. “I feel fine!”

The oppression of summer, again, hung over and hushed the city-streets:
the very taxi horns seemed muted. The greenery in Washington Square,
behind the arc-lights, looked heavy and dark; and the benches
overflowed with Italians, dirty and sweaty, swarming to the air, giving
out the sounds of life, but heavy-footed, slowed down and subdued.

My rooms in Bank Street were stuffy and messy: the colored woman who
took care of them had abandoned me without warning and they had not
been cleaned for a week. I threw open all the windows. In the house
across the court, the people were sitting on the fire-escape in their
undershirts. A baby was howling and sobbing.

I had brought in some ice from a drug-store, and this time we had
Scotch instead of gin. It was pretty good Scotch, as it went, and we
had highballs with mineral water. It was pleasant to relax on the
couch, with the cold misted glasses in our hands, alone, with nowhere
to go, with no buses or boats to catch.

“Who did you say you were staying with?” I asked.

“Sue Borglum,” Daisy replied--and added: “I think she’s going nuts.
Have you seen her lately? She’s turned green!--She’s turned absolutely
green!--But I can’t worry about her!--I’ve got all the worrying I can
do with Pete and myself!”

“Did you ever know Peter Kester?” I asked. “No,” said Daisy, “Who is
he?” “He’s a great friend of Rita Cavanagh’s--she always used to be
telling me about him. I met him yesterday for the first time--he’s
just come back from New Mexico.--He’s just a nice old bozo, who paints
rather mediocre landscapes. He’s just like all the American painters
of that generation that you meet at the Washington Irving Club.--He
wears tortoise-shell-rimmed eye-glasses with a big black ribbon--and he
thinks that Picasso is a clown!”

The electric lights were hot, and I got up to turn one out. “Why don’t
you turn them all out,” said Daisy, “and just turn on that lamp in the
alcove? It would be a lot cooler.” I turned on the table-lamp in my
study and put the others out. I was glad that the things in the room
were obscured by the shadow now: I had been feeling that that Leonardo
was not a particularly suitable picture for New York in the summer time.

When I came back, she had stretched out along the couch, with her head
propped up on a pillow against the arm and her highball clasped in her
hand. “I hope you don’t mind my lying down,” she said. I sat down on
the edge of the couch beside her.

The voice of a radio, dimly muttering or hoarsely warbling, came in to
us from across the back yard. I was reminded of my recent meditations
while I had been waiting for Daisy in front of the restaurant, and I
told her now about looking in the mirror and mistaking myself for some
one else.

“You’re not so bad!” said Daisy. “I think your mustache is all right.
In fact, I’ve always liked the way you look.” I replied, “Well, I’ve
often told you how much I like the way _you_ look!”

Encouraged, I began to describe to her my consoling æsthetic
revelations in connection with the popular song.--I had always thought
of her, I told her, also, ever since that first night I had met her,
whenever I had heard _Mamie Rose_.--I talked on, and even got as far as
the Attic Bee.

But all the time that I was talking, she was looking at me, serious and
flushed, as if I had been making love to her. At last I stopped and
said, “You’re such a darling!” and kissed her. We said little after
that....

When, from the profuse delight of that love, hot, moist, mucilaginous
and melting, I found my thoughts springing up again, they seemed
unfolding like fresh new leaves in an atmosphere of gentleness and
peace.

I thought of Daisy under her different aspects, as she had seemed to me
at different times--and I remembered the literary productions which at
one time or another she had inspired--all so different from my present
vision of her, from our present reality: first, the night that I had
met her at Ray Coleman’s, the cool Gallic short story I had imagined,
with its humanitarian irony--then, the night that we had gone to the
movies, the romantic apostrophe of the sonnet--then, the night that
I was to take her to a night-club, when my alienation from Rita had
had the effect of thrusting away from me all the rest of the world as
well--Daisy along with the others--the desperate exposure of literature
itself, on which my mind had run so furiously and interminably--then,
when I had visited Pete and Daisy in the country, the savage moralistic
satire which the letter I had received from Rita and the spectacle
of Grosbeake’s equanimity had prevented me from writing. I had, in
fact, rejected all these projects--as I had outgrown those phases of
myself of which my successive conceptions of Daisy had been merely the
reflections in another.

And now I felt that I should be content if I could only make some
sketches of Daisy, as I remembered her at different times and
places--if I could only hit off, in prose, her attitudes, her
gestures, her expressions, the intonations of her voice--preserve
them so they should not vanish, as Degas had done for his dancers--as
Toulouse-Lautrec had done for the women of cabarets.... I dreamed a
whole series of Daisy....

So I should perhaps save myself at last from that dreadful isolation
of the artist which had appalled me in Hugo and Rita--both forever, it
seemed to me now, occupying impregnable solitudes with the creation
of impossible worlds--so, by the way of literature itself, I should
break through into the real world--as to-night I had seemed at last,
with Daisy, as if by a simple mutual transfusion, to come so naturally
into contact with life.... Such pictures as I imagined of Daisy would
grow directly and freshly from life. And it seemed to me to-night that
literature was as amiable as writing ballads, as necessary as making
tables--and indeed that, when one came right down to it, there was
really no difference in kind between carpentry and literature.

I bent over Daisy--her head on the pillow had that look--the little
soft round chin and the soft bare throat--of women in those moments
when they have dropped off, along with their garments, all the ruses
and resolutions with which they meet the world--when we see them just
awakened or lying thinking at night, with wide eyes and anxious mouth,
and we realize how gentle they are, how much they wonder, and how
tender toward them we must be.... I wondered whether she would leave
Pete for me....

“Let’s run away together!” I suggested.

“Oh, I couldn’t--now,” she replied. “I told Pete that if he got a job,
I’d stay withum.”

It seemed to me now that I wanted above everything to go away somewhere
with Daisy.

“I’ll take you on a motor-cycle!” I proposed.

“No, you won’t!” she promptly replied. “I’ve done my last motor-cycle
elopement!”

“Still you must have had a lot of fun!”

“I didn’t know whether I was ever going to get there alive. We had
about six accidents.... The real reason for the motor-cycle, I found
out afterwards, was that I was afraid I was pregnant and Phil wanted to
bring me around. He thought that a motor-cycle trip would be just the
thing.... There! I’d told you that we weren’t married! Oh, well--never
mind!” She was silent a moment, then went on: “That’s something that
nobody but Phil would think of--taking a girl on a motor-cycle trip to
bring her around!... He wouldn’t even let me ride in a side-car--he
carried me all the way on the handle-bars!”

I made her turn and embraced her anew, kissing her with pleasure and
compassion. When she told me of the rejection and death of her love,
I recognized the fate of my own. And it was so sweet to include in my
arms that warmth, that solidity, that slenderness--and to feel that she
followed me!...

In the peace and silence again, I could hear that poor child still
crying, and I remembered how once, as a child, I myself had lain awake
with the heat, and suffered and complained.--Then, in a moment, I
remembered, also, how those same children of the Village had figured
in the poem which Rita had recited the night of Ray Coleman’s party
and which she told us she had written that day. On that very day when
she had filled my imagination with the splendor of her genius and her
beauty, when she had seemed to me a goddess or a muse--on that day, her
own mind had been haunted by visions of imbecility and deformity--she
had seen only, among those children of the streets, the most wretched
and the most afflicted, and she had seen in them only the crippling of
the spirit and the clouding of the mind by love....

What relief and what a rebirth, our only real birth into this world,
when from the fears and snobberies of youth, from all our preconceived
ideas, from all those foolish abstractions we learn, all those things
that we think we think, we find at last in these beings who have
crowded, offended, disgusted or fought us, that interest and that value
which we have found only in a few or in one--when, youth’s passion and
anguish spent, we see rising about us that reality of those we have
looked on as strangers, and know that it is our reality--that what is
strange to us is strange to them, that what hurts them hurts us, that
what is good for them is good for us--when we no longer dread the fool
nor hate the one who wounds us, but can sleep in our beds in peace and
in peace face the waking world!...

I kept telling Daisy how smooth her skin was, and she was finally moved
to retort: “Are you used to women with scales?”

“I suppose I ought to go,” she said presently. “I don’t want Sue
Borglum to have it on me that I stayed out all night.”

“I’ve been so happy with you to-day,” I said, “and I’m afraid that you
haven’t been happy.”

“Oh, yes, I have,” she replied. “But I’ve been depressed about the
Boston business. I don’t want to go to Boston, damn it!”

She sat up on the edge of the bed. “Now you go into the other room
while I put on my dress!”

When she came back, her dress wasn’t hung very well, and her lipstick,
newly applied, had a look of fresh paint.

“I don’t care about any of those things,” she said, “except the
mouth-organ and the pistol.”

I couldn’t find the mouth-organ: I looked for it all over in vain.
“Confound it!” I exclaimed, “I must have left the mouth-organ in the
taxi!” “Oh,” she said, “I wanted to show Pete how I could play _Nearer
My God to Thee!_ But I guess that the snake will amuse him!”

                               [The End]



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