had been strung on it in hard knobs like beads on a string. Knocking
woke him. He sat up in bed with a lurch and found Stan Emery, his
face gray with dust, his hands in the pockets of a red leather coat,
standing at the foot of the bed. He was laughing swaying back and forth
on the balls of his feet.
“Gosh what time is it?” Jimmy sat up in bed digging his knuckles
into his eyes. He yawned and looked about with bitter dislike, at
the wallpaper the dead green of Poland Water bottles, at the split
green shade that let in a long trickle of sunlight, at the marble
fireplace blocked up by an enameled tin plate painted with scaly roses,
at the frayed blue bathrobe on the foot of the bed, at the mashed
cigarette-butts in the mauve glass ashtray.
Stan’s face was red and brown and laughing under the chalky mask of
dust. “Eleven thirty,” he was saying.
“Let’s see that’s six hours and a half. I guess that’ll do. But Stan
what the hell are you doing here?”
“You havent got a little nip of liquor anywhere have you Herf? Dingo
and I are extraordinarily thirsty. We came all the way from Boston and
only stopped once for gas and water. I havent been to bed for two days.
I want to see if I can last out the week.”
“Kerist I wish I could last out the week in bed.”
“What you need’s a job on a newspaper to keep you busy Herfy.”
“What’s going to happen to you Stan ...” Jimmy twisted himself round so
that he was sitting on the edge of the bed “... is that you’re going to
wake up one morning and find yourself on a marble slab at the morgue.”
The bathroom smelled of other people’s toothpaste and of chloride
disinfectant. The bathmat was wet and Jimmy folded it into a small
square before he stepped gingerly out of his slippers. The cold water
set the blood jolting through him. He ducked his head under and jumped
out and stood shaking himself like a dog, the water streaming into his
eyes and ears. Then he put on his bathrobe and lathered his face.
Flow river flow
Down to the sea,
he hummed off key as he scraped his chin with the safety-razor. Mr.
Grover I’m afraid I’m going to have to give up the job after next
week. Yes I’m going abroad; I’m going to do foreign correspondent work
for the A. P. To Mexico for the U. P. To Jericho more likely, Halifax
Correspondent of the Mudturtle Gazette. _It was Christmas in the harem
and the eunuchs all were there._
... from the banks of the Seine
To the banks of the Saskatchewan.
He doused his face with listerine, bundled his toilet things into his
wet towel and smarting ran back up a flight of greencarpeted cabbagy
stairs and down the hall to his bedroom. Halfway he passed the landlady
dumpy in a mob cap who stopped her carpet sweeper to give an icy look
at his skinny bare legs under the blue bathrobe.
“Good morning Mrs. Maginnis.”
“It’s goin to be powerful hot today, Mr. Herf.”
“I guess it is all right.”
Stan was lying on the bed reading _La Revolte des Anges_. “Darn it, I
wish I knew some languages the way you do Herfy.”
“Oh I dont know any French any more. I forget em so much quicker than I
learn em.”
“By the way I’m fired from college.”
“How’s that?”
“Dean told me he thought it advisable I shouldnt come back next year
... felt that there were other fields of activity where my activities
could be more actively active. You know the crap.”
“That’s a darn shame.”
“No it isnt; I’m tickled to death. I asked him why he hadnt fired me
before if he felt that way. Father’ll be sore as a crab ... but I’ve
got enough cash on me not to go home for a week. I dont give a damn
anyway. Honest havent you got any liquor?”
“Now Stan how’s a poor wageslave like myself going to have a cellar on
thirty dollars a week?”
“This is a pretty lousy room.... You ought to have been born a
capitalist like me.”
“Room’s not so bad.... What drives me crazy is that paranoiac alarm
across the street that rings all night.”
“That’s a burglar alarm isn’t it?”
“There cant be any burglars because the place is vacant. The wires must
get crossed or something. I dont know when it stopped but it certainly
drove me wild when I went to bed this morning.”
“Now James Herf you dont mean me to infer that you come home sober
every night?”
“A man’d have to be deaf not to hear that damn thing, drunk or sober.”
“Well in my capacity of bloated bondholder I want you to come out and
eat lunch. Do you realize that you’ve been playing round with your
toilet for exactly one hour by the clock?”
They went down the stairs that smelled of shavingsoap and then of
brasspolish and then of bacon and then of singed hair and then of
garbage and coalgas.
“You’re damn lucky Herfy, never to have gone to college.”
“Didnt I graduate from Columbia you big cheese, that’s more than you
could do?”
The sunlight swooped tingling in Jimmy’s face when he opened the door.
“That doesnt count.”
“God I like sun,” cried Jimmy, “I wish it’d been real Colombia....”
“Do you mean Hail Columbia?”
“No I mean Bogota and the Orinoco and all that sort of thing.”
“I knew a darn good feller went down to Bogota. Had to drink himself to
death to escape dying of elephantiasis.”
“I’d be willing to risk elephantiasis and bubonic plague and spotted
fever to get out of this hole.”
“City of orgies walks and joys ...”
“Orgies nutten, as we say at a hun’an toitytoird street.... Do you
realize that I’ve lived all my life in this goddam town except four
years when I was little and that I was born here and that I’m likely to
die here?... I’ve a great mind to join the navy and see the world.”
“How do you like Dingo in her new coat of paint?”
“Pretty nifty, looks like a regular Mercedes under the dust.”
“I wanted to paint her red like a fire engine, but the garageman
finally persuaded me to paint her blue like a cop.... Do you mind going
to Mouquin’s and having an absinthe cocktail.”
“Absinthe for breakfast.... Good Lord.”
They drove west along Twenty-third Street that shone with sheets
of reflected light off windows, oblong glints off delivery wagons,
figureeight-shaped flash of nickel fittings.
“How’s Ruth, Jimmy?”
“She’s all right. She hasnt got a job yet.”
“Look there’s a Daimlier.”
Jimmy grunted vaguely. As they turned up Sixth Avenue a policeman
stopped them.
“Your cut out,” he yelled.
“I’m on my way to the garage to get it fixed. Muffler’s coming off.”
“Better had.... Get a ticket another time.”
“Gee you get away with murder Stan ... in everything,” said Jimmy. “I
never can get away with a thing even if I am three years older than
you.”
“It’s a gift.”
The restaurant smelled merrily of fried potatoes and cocktails and
cigars and cocktails. It was hot and full of talking and sweaty faces.
“But Stan dont roll your eyes romantically when you ask about Ruth and
me.... We’re just very good friends.”
“Honestly I didnt mean anything, but I’m sorry to hear it all the same.
I think it’s terrible.”
“Ruth doesn’t care about anything but her acting. She’s so crazy to
succeed, she cuts out everything else.”
“Why the hell does everybody want to succeed? I’d like to meet somebody
who wanted to fail. That’s the only sublime thing.”
“It’s all right if you have a comfortable income.”
“That’s all bunk.... Golly this is some cocktail. Herfy I think you’re
the only sensible person in this town. You have no ambitions.”
“How do you know I havent?”
“But what can you do with success when you get it? You cant eat it or
drink it. Of course I understand that people who havent enough money
to feed their faces and all that should scurry round and get it. But
success ...”
“The trouble with me is I cant decide what I want most, so my motion is
circular, helpless and confoundedly discouraging.”
“Oh but God decided that for you. You know all the time, but you wont
admit it to yourself.”
“I imagine what I want most is to get out of this town, preferably
first setting off a bomb under the Times Building.”
“Well why don’t you do it? It’s just one foot after another.”
“But you have to know which direction to step.”
“That’s the last thing that’s of any importance.”
“Then there’s money.”
“Why money’s the easiest thing in the world to get.”
“For the eldest son of Emery and Emery.”
“Now Herf it’s not fair to cast my father’s iniquities in my face. You
know I hate that stuff as much as you do.”
“I’m not blaming you Stan; you’re a damn lucky kid, that’s all. Of
course I’m lucky too, a hell of a lot luckier than most. My mother’s
leftover money supported me until I was twentytwo and I still have a
few hundreds stowed away for that famous rainy day, and my uncle, curse
his soul, gets me new jobs when I get fired.”
“Baa baa black sheep.”
“I guess I’m really afraid of my uncles and aunts.... You ought to see
my cousin James Merivale. Has done everything he was told all his life
and flourished like a green bay tree.... The perfect wise virgin.”
“Ah guess youse one o dem dere foolish virgins.”
“Stan you’re feeling your liquor, you’re beginning to talk niggertalk.”
“Baa baa.” Stan put down his napkin and leaned back laughing in his
throat.
The smell of absinthe sicklytingling grew up like the magician’s
rosebush out of Jimmy’s glass. He sipped it wrinkling his nose. “As a
moralist I protest,” he said. “Whee it’s amazing.”
“What I need is a whiskey and soda to settle those cocktails.”
“I’ll watch you. I’m a working man. I must be able to tell between the
news that’s fit and the news that’s not fit.... God I dont want to
start talking about that. It’s all so criminally silly.... I’ll say
that this cocktail sure does knock you for a loop.”
“You neednt think you’re going to do anything else but drink this
afternoon. There’s somebody I want to introduce you to.”
“And I was going to sit down righteously and write an article.”
“What’s that?”
“Oh a dodaddle called Confessions of a Cub Reporter.”
“Look is this Thursday?”
“Yare.”
“Then I know where she’ll be.”
“I’m going to light out of it all,” said Jimmy somberly, “and go to
Mexico and make my fortune.... I’m losing all the best part of my life
rotting in New York.”
“How’ll you make your fortune?”
“Oil, gold, highway robbery, anything so long as it’s not newspaper
work.”
“Baa baa black sheep baa baa.”
“You quit baaing at me.”
“Let’s get the hell out of here and take Dingo to have her muffler
fastened.”
Jimmy stood waiting in the door of the reeking garage. The dusty
afternoon sunlight squirmed in bright worms of heat on his face and
hands. Brownstone, redbrick, asphalt flickering with red and green
letters of signs, with bits of paper in the gutter rotated in a slow
haze about him. Two carwashers talking behind him:
“Yep I was making good money until I went after that lousy broad.”
“I’ll say she’s a goodlooker, Charley. I should worry.... Dont make no
difference after the first week.”
Stan came up behind him and ran him along the street by the shoulders.
“Car wont be fixed until five o’clock. Let’s taxi.... Hotel
Lafayette,” he shouted at the driver and slapped Jimmy on the knee.
“Well Herfy old fossil, you know what the Governor of North Carolina
said to the Governor of South Carolina.”
“No.”
“It’s a long time between drinks.”
“Baa, baa,” Stan was bleating under his breath as they stormed into
the café. “Ellie here are the black sheep,” he shouted laughing. His
face froze suddenly stiff. Opposite Ellen at the table sat her husband,
one eyebrow lifted very high and the other almost merging with the
eyelashes. A teapot sat impudently between them.
“Hello Stan, sit down,” she said quietly. Then she continued smiling
into Oglethorpe’s face. “Isnt that wonderful Jojo?”
“Ellie this is Mr. Herf,” said Stan gruffly.
“Oh I’m so glad to meet you. I used to hear about you up at Mrs.
Sunderland’s.”
They were silent. Oglethorpe was tapping on the table with his spoon.
“Why heow deo you deo Mr. Herf,” he said with sudden unction. “Dont you
remember how we met?”
“By the way how’s everything up there Jojo?”
“Just topping thanks. Cassahndrah’s beau has left her and there’s been
the most appalling scandal about that Costello creature. It seems
that she came home foxed the other night, to the ears my deah, and
tried to take the taxi driver into her room with her, and the poor boy
protesting all the time that all he wanted was his fare.... It was
appalling.”
Stan got stiffly to his feet and walked out.
The three of them sat without speaking. Jimmy tried to keep from
fidgeting in his chair. He was about to get up when something
velvetsoft in her eyes stopped him.
“Has Ruth got a job yet, Mr. Herf?” she asked.
“No she hasnt.”
“It’s the rottenest luck.”
“Oh it’s a darn shame. I know she can act. The trouble is she has too
much sense of humor to play up to managers and people.”
“Oh the stage is a nasty dirty game, isn’t it Jojo?”
“The nawstiest, my deah.”
Jimmy couldn’t keep his eyes off her; her small squarely shaped hands,
her neck molded with a gold sheen between the great coil of coppery
hair and the bright blue dress.
“Well my deah ...” Oglethorpe got to his feet.
“Jojo I’m going to sit here a little longer.”
Jimmy was staring at the thin triangles of patent leather that stuck
out from Oglethorpe’s pink buff spats. Cant be feet in them. He stood
up suddenly.
“Now Mr. Herf couldnt you keep me company for fifteen minutes? I’ve got
to leave here at six and I forgot to bring a book and I cant walk in
these shoes.”
Jimmy blushed and sat down again stammering: “Why of course I’d be
delighted.... Suppose we drink something.”
“I’ll finish my tea, but why dont you have a gin fizz? I love to see
people drink gin fizzes. It makes me feel that I’m in the tropics
sitting in a jujube grove waiting for the riverboat to take us up some
ridiculous melodramatic river all set about with fevertrees.”
“Waiter I want a gin fizz please.”
* * * * *
Joe Harland had slumped down in his chair until his head rested on
his arms. Between his grimestiff hands his eyes followed uneasily the
lines in the marbletop table. The gutted lunchroom was silent under the
sparse glower of two bulbs hanging over the counter where remained a
few pies under a bellglass, and a man in a white coat nodding on a tall
stool. Now and then the eyes in his gray doughy face flicked open and
he grunted and looked about. At the last table over were the hunched
shoulders of men asleep, faces crumpled like old newspapers pillowed
on arms. Joe Harland sat up straight and yawned. A woman blobby under
a raincoat with a face red and purplish streaked like rancid meat was
asking for a cup of coffee at the counter. Carrying the mug carefully
between her two hands she brought it over to the table and sat down
opposite him. Joe Harland let his head down onto his arms again.
“Hay yous how about a little soivice?” The woman’s voice shrilled in
Harland’s ears like the screech of chalk on a blackboard.
“Well what d’ye want?” snarled the man behind the counter. The woman
started sobbing. “He asts me what I want.... I aint used to bein talked
to brutal.”
“Well if there’s anythin you want you kin juss come an git it....
Soivice at this toime o night!”
Harland could smell her whiskey breath as she sobbed. He raised his
head and stared at her. She twisted her flabby mouth into a smile and
bobbed her head towards him.
“Mister I aint accustomed to bein treated brutal. If my husband was
aloive he wouldn’t have the noive. Who’s the loikes o him to say what
toime o night a lady ought to have soivice, the little shriveled up
shrimp.” She threw back her head and laughed so that her hat fell off
backwards. “That’s what he is, a little shriveled up shrimp, insultin a
lady with his toime o night.”
Some strands of gray hair with traces of henna at the tips had fallen
down about her face. The man in the white coat walked over to the table.
“Look here Mother McCree I’ll trow ye out o here if you raise any more
distoirbance.... What do you want?”
“A nickel’s woirt o doughnuts,” she sniveled with a sidelong leer at
Harland.
Joe Harland shoved his face into the hollow of his arm again and tried
to go to sleep. He heard the plate set down followed by her toothless
nibbling and an occasional sucking noise when she drank the coffee. A
new customer had come in and was talking across the counter in a low
growling voice.
“Mister, mister aint it terrible to want a drink?” He raised his head
again and found her eyes the blurred blue of watered milk looking into
his. “What ye goin to do now darlin?”
“God knows.”
“Virgin an Saints it’d be noice to have a bed an a pretty lace shimmy
and a noice feller loike you darlin ... mister.”
“Is that all?”
“Oh mister if my poor husband was aloive, he wouldn’t let em treat me
loike they do. I lost my husband on the _General Slocum_ might ha been
yesterday.”
“He’s not so unlucky.”
“But he doid in his sin without a priest, darlin. It’s terrible to die
in yer sin ...”
“Oh hell I want to sleep.”
Her voice went on in a faint monotonous screech setting his teeth on
edge. “The Saints has been agin me ever since I lost my husband on the
_General Slocum_. I aint been an honest woman.” ... She began to sob
again. “The Virgin and Saints an Martyrs is agin me, everybody’s agin
me.... Oh wont somebody treat me noice.”
“I want to sleep.... Cant you shut up?”
She stooped and fumbled for her hat on the floor. She sat sobbing
rubbing her swollen redgrimed knuckles into her eyes.
“Oh mister dont ye want to treat me noice?”
Joe Harland got to his feet breathing hard. “Goddam you cant you shut
up?” His voice broke into a whine. “Isnt there anywhere you can get a
little peace? There’s nowhere you can get any peace.” He pulled his cap
over his eyes, shoved his hands down into his pockets and shambled out
of the lunchroom. Over Chatham Square the sky was brightening redviolet
through the latticework of elevated tracks. The lights were two rows of
bright brass knobs up the empty Bowery.
A policeman passed swinging his nightstick. Joe Harland felt the
policeman’s eyes on him. He tried to walk fast and briskly as if he
were going somewhere on business.
“Well Miss Oglethorpe how do you like it?”
“Like what?”
“Oh you know ... being a nine days’ wonder.”
“Why I don’t know at all Mr. Goldweiser.”
“Women know everything but they wont let on.”
Ellen sits in a gown of nilegreen silk in a springy armchair at the
end of a long room jingling with talk and twinkle of chandeliers and
jewelry, dotted with the bright moving black of evening clothes and
silveredged colors of women’s dresses. The curve of Harry Goldweiser’s
nose merges directly into the curve of his bald forehead, his big rump
bulges over the edges of a triangular gilt stool, his small brown
eyes measure her face like antennæ as he talks to her. A woman nearby
smells of sandalwood. A woman with orange lips and a chalk face under
an orange turban passes talking to a man with a pointed beard. A
hawk-beaked woman with crimson hair puts her hand on a man’s shoulder
from behind. “Why how do you do, Miss Cruikshank; it’s surprising
isn’t it how everybody in the world is always at the same place at the
same time.” Ellen sits in the armchair drowsily listening, coolness of
powder on her face and arms, fatness of rouge on her lips, her body
just bathed fresh as a violet under the silk dress, under the silk
underclothes; she sits dreamily, drowsily listening. A sudden twinge of
men’s voices knotting about her. She sits up cold white out of reach
like a lighthouse. Men’s hands crawl like bugs on the unbreakable
glass. Men’s looks blunder and flutter against it helpless as moths.
But in deep pitblackness inside something clangs like a fire engine.
* * * * *
George Baldwin stood beside the breakfast table with a copy of the New
York _Times_ folded in his hand. “Now Cecily,” he was saying “we must
be sensible about these things.”
“Cant you see that I’m trying to be sensible?” she said in a jerking
snivelly voice. He stood looking at her without sitting down rolling
a corner of the paper between his finger and thumb. Mrs. Baldwin was
a tall woman with a mass of carefully curled chestnut hair piled on
top of her head. She sat before the silver coffeeservice fingering the
sugarbowl with mushroomwhite fingers that had very sharp pink nails.
“George I cant stand it any more that’s all.” She pressed her quaking
lips hard together.
“But my dear you exaggerate....”
“How exaggerate?... It means our life has been a pack of lies.”
“But Cecily we’re fond of each other.”
“You married me for my social position, you know it.... I was fool
enough to fall in love with you. All right, It’s over.”
“It’s not true. I really loved you. Dont you remember how terrible you
thought it was you couldnt really love me?”
“You brute to refer to that.... Oh it’s horrible!”
The maid came in from the pantry with bacon and eggs on a tray. They
sat silent looking at each other. The maid swished out of the room and
closed the door. Mrs. Baldwin put her forehead down on the edge of the
table and began to cry. Baldwin sat staring at the headlines in the
paper. ASSASSINATION OF ARCHDUKE WILL HAVE GRAVE CONSEQUENCES. AUSTRIAN
ARMY MOBILIZED. He went over and put his hand on her crisp hair.
“Poor old Cecily,” he said.
“Dont touch me.”
She ran out of the room with her handkerchief to her face. He sat down,
helped himself to bacon and eggs and toast and began to eat; everything
tasted like paper. He stopped eating to scribble a note on a scratchpad
he kept in his breast pocket behind his handkerchief: See Collins vs.
Arbuthnot, N.Y.S.C. Appel. Div.
The sound of a step in the hall outside caught his ear, the click of
a latch. The elevator had just gone down. He ran four flights down
the steps. Through the glass and wrought-iron doors of the vestibule
downstairs he caught sight of her on the curb, standing tall and stiff,
pulling on her gloves. He rushed out and took her by the hand just as a
taxi drove up. Sweat beaded on his forehead and was prickly under his
collar. He could see himself standing there with the napkin ridiculous
in his hand and the colored doorman grinning and saying, “Good mornin,
Mr. Baldwin, looks like it going to be a fine day.” Gripping her hand
tight, he said in a low voice through his teeth:
“Cecily there’s something I want to talk to you about. Wont you wait
a minute and we’ll go downtown together?... Wait about five minutes
please,” he said to the taxidriver. “We’ll be right down.” Squeezing
her wrist hard he walked back with her to the elevator. When they stood
in the hall of their own apartment, she suddenly looked him straight in
the face with dry blazing eyes.
“Come in here Cecily” he said gently. He closed their bedroom door and
locked it. “Now lets talk this over quietly. Sit down dear.” He put a
chair behind her. She sat down suddenly stiffly like a marionette.
“Now look here Cecily you have no right to talk the way you do about my
friends. Mrs. Oglethorpe is a friend of mine. We occasionally take tea
together in some perfectly public place and that’s all. I would invite
her up here but I’ve been afraid you would be rude to her.... You
cant go on giving away to your insane jealousy like this. I allow you
complete liberty and trust you absolutely. I think I have the right to
expect the same confidence from you.... Cecily do be my sensible little
girl again. You’ve been listening to what a lot of old hags fabricate
out of whole cloth maliciously to make you miserable.”
“She’s not the only one.”
“Cecily I admit frankly there were times soon after we were married ...
when ... But that’s all over years ago.... And who’s fault was it?...
Oh Cecily a woman like you cant understand the physical urgences of a
man like me.”
“Havent I done my best?”
“My dear these things arent anybody’s fault.... I dont blame you.... If
you’d really loved me then ...”
“What do you think I stay in this hell for except for you? Oh you’re
such a brute.” She sat dryeyed staring at her feet in their gray
buckskin slippers, twisting and untwisting in her fingers the wet
string of her handkerchief.
“Look here Cecily a divorce would be very harmful to my situation
downtown just at the moment, but if you really dont want to go on
living with me I’ll see what I can arrange.... But in any event you
must have more confidence in me. You know I’m fond of you. And for
God’s sake dont go to see anybody about it without consulting me. You
dont want a scandal and headlines in the papers, do you?”
“All right ... leave me alone.... I dont care about anything.”
“All right.... I’m pretty late. I’ll go on downtown in that taxi. You
don’t want to come shopping or anything?”
She shook her head. He kissed her on the forehead, took his straw hat
and stick in the hall and hurried out.