wont make big revolution.... Too busy fighting. So Guillaume and
Viviani and l’Empereur d’Autriche and Krupp and Rothschild and Morgan
they say let’s have a war.... You know the first thing they do? They
shoot Jaures, because he socialiste. The socialists are traitors to the
International but all de samee....”
“But how can they make people fight if they dont want to?”
“In Europe people are slaves for thousands of years. Not like ’ere....
But I’ve seen war. Very funny. I tended bar in Port Arthur, nutten but
a kid den. It was very funny.”
“Gee I wish I could get a job as warcorrespondent.”
“I might go as a Red Cross nurse.”
“Correspondent very good ting.... Always drunk in American bar very far
from battlefield.”
They laughed.
“But arent we rather far from the battlefield, Herf?”
“All right let’s dance. You must forgive me if I dance very badly.”
“I’ll kick you if you do anything wrong.”
His arm was like plaster when he put it round her to dance with her.
High ashy walls broke and crackled within him. He was soaring like a
fireballoon on the smell of her hair.
“Get up on your toes and walk in time to the music.... Move in straight
lines that’s the whole trick.” Her voice cut the quick coldly like a
tiny flexible sharp metalsaw. Elbows joggling, faces set, gollywog
eyes, fat men and thin women, thin women and fat men rotated densely
about them. He was crumbling plaster with something that rattled
achingly in his chest, she was an intricate machine of sawtooth steel
whitebright bluebright copperbright in his arms. When they stopped her
breast and the side of her body and her thigh came against him. He was
suddenly full of blood steaming with sweat like a runaway horse. A
breeze through an open door hustled the tobaccosmoke and the clotted
pink air of the restaurant.
“Herf I want to go down to see the murder cottage; please take me.”
“As if I hadn’t seen enough of X’s marking the spot where the crime was
committed.”
In the hall George Baldwin stepped in front of them. He was pale as
chalk, his black tie was crooked, the nostrils of his thin nose were
dilated and marked with little veins of red.
“Hello George.”
His voice croaked tartly like a klaxon. “Elaine I’ve been looking for
you. I must speak to you.... Maybe you think I’m joking. I never joke.”
“Herf excuse me a minute.... Now what is the matter George? Come back
to the table.”
“George I was not joking either.... Herf do you mind ordering me a
taxi?”
Baldwin grabbed hold of her wrist. “You’ve been playing with me long
enough, do you hear me? Some day some man’s going to take a gun
and shoot you. You think you can play me like all the other little
sniveling fools.... You’re no better than a common prostitute.”
“Herf I told you to go get me a taxi.”
Jimmy bit his lip and went out the front door.
“Elaine what are you going to do?”
“George I will not be bullied.”
Something nickel flashed in Baldwin’s hand. Gus McNiel stepped forward
and gripped his wrist with a big red hand.
“Gimme that George.... For God’s sake man pull yourself together.” He
shoved the revolver into his pocket. Baldwin tottered to the wall in
front of him. The trigger finger of his right hand was bleeding.
“Here’s a taxi,” said Herf looking from one to another of the taut
white faces.
“All right you take the girl home.... No harm done, just a little
nervous attack, see? No cause for alarm,” McNiel was shouting in
the voice of a man speaking from a soapbox. The headwaiter and the
coatgirl were looking at each other uneasily. “Didn’t nutten happen....
Gentleman’s a little nervous ... overwork you understand,” McNiel
brought his voice down to a reassuring purr. “You just forget it.”
As they were getting into the taxi Ellen suddenly said in a little
child’s voice: “I forgot we were going down to see the murder
cottage.... Let’s make him wait. I’d like to walk up and down in the
air for a minute.” There was a smell of saltmarshes. The night was
marbled with clouds and moonlight. The toads in the ditches sounded
like sleighbells.
“Is it far?” she asked.
“No it’s right down at the corner.”
Their feet crackled on gravel then ground softly on macadam. A
headlight blinded them, they stopped to let the car whir by; the
exhaust filled their nostrils, faded into the smell of saltmarshes
again.
It was a peaked gray house with a small porch facing the road screened
with broken lattice. A big locust shaded it from behind. A policeman
walked to and fro in front of it whistling gently to himself. A
mildewed scrap of moon came out from behind the clouds for a minute,
made tinfoil of a bit of broken glass in a gaping window, picked out
the little rounded leaves of the locust and rolled like a lost dime
into a crack in the clouds.
Neither of them said anything. They walked back towards the roadhouse.
“Honestly Herf havent you seen Stan?”
“No I havent an idea where he could be hiding himself.”
“If you see him tell him I want him to call me up at once.... Herf
what were those women called who followed the armies in the French
Revolution?”
“Let’s think. Was it cantonnières?”
“Something like that ... I’d like to do that.”
An electric train whistled far to the right of them, rattled nearer and
faded into whining distance.
Dripping with a tango the roadhouse melted pink like a block of
icecream. Jimmy was following her into the taxicab.
“No I want to be alone, Herf.”
“But I’d like very much to take you home.... I dont like the idea of
letting you go all alone.”
“Please as a friend I ask you.”
They didnt shake hands. The taxi kicked dust and a rasp of burnt
gasoline in his face. He stood on the steps reluctant to go back into
the noise and fume.
* * * * *
Nellie McNiel was alone at the table. In front of her was the chair
pushed back with his napkin on the back of it where her husband had
sat. She was staring straight ahead of her; the dancers passed like
shadows across her eyes. At the other end of the room she saw George
Baldwin, pale and lean, walk slowly like a sick man to his table. He
stood beside the table examining his check carefully, paid it and stood
looking distractedly round the room. He was going to look at her. The
waiter brought the change on a plate and bowed low. Baldwin swept the
faces of the dancers with a black glance, turned his back square and
walked out. Remembering the insupportable sweetness of Chinese lilies,
she felt her eyes filling with tears. She took her engagement book out
of her silver mesh bag and went through it hurriedly, marking carets
with a silver pencil. She looked up after a little while, the tired
skin of her face in a pucker of spite, and beckoned to a waiter. “Will
you please tell Mr. McNiel that Mrs. McNiel wants to speak to him? He’s
in the bar.”
“Sarajevo, Sarajevo; that’s the place that set the wires on fire,”
Bullock was shouting at the frieze of faces and glasses along the bar.
“Say bo,” said Joe O’Keefe confidentially to no one in particular, “a
guy works in a telegraph office told me there’d been a big seabattle
off St. John’s, Newfoundland and the Britishers had sunk the German
fleet of forty battleships.”
“Jiminy that’d stop the war right there.”
“But they aint declared war yet.”
“How do you know? The cables are so choked up you cant get any news
through.”
“Did you see there were four more failures on Wall Street?”
“Tell me Chicago wheat pit’s gone crazy.”
“They ought to close all the exchanges till this blows over.”
“Well maybe when the Germans have licked the pants off her England’ll
give Ireland her freedom.”
“But they are.... Stock market wont be open tomorrow.”
“If a man’s got the capital to cover and could keep his head this here
would be the time to clean up.”
“Well Bullock old man I’m going home,” said Jimmy. “This is my night of
rest and I ought to be getting after it.”
Bullock winked one eye and waved a drunken hand. The voices in Jimmy’s
ears were throbbing elastic roar, near, far, near, far. Dies like a
dog, march on he said. He’d spent all his money but a quarter. Shot
at sunrise. Declaration of war. Commencement of hostilities. And they
left him alone in his glory. Leipzig, the Wilderness, Waterloo, where
the embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard round ... Cant
take a taxi, want to walk anyway. Ultimatum. Trooptrains singing to the
shambles with flowers on their ears. And shame on the false Etruscan
who lingers in his home when....
As he was walking down the gravel drive to the road an arm hooked in
his.
“Do you mind if I come along? I dont want to stay here.”
“Sure come ahead Tony I’m going to walk.”
Herf walked with a long stride, looking straight ahead of him.
Clouds had darkened the sky where remained the faintest milkiness of
moonlight. To the right and left there was outside of the violetgray
cones of occasional arclights black pricked by few lights, ahead the
glare of streets rose in blurred cliffs yellow and ruddy.
“You dont like me do you?” said Tony Hunter breathlessly after a few
minutes.
Herf slowed his pace. “Why I dont know you very well. You seem to me a
very pleasant person....”
“Dont lie; there’s no reason why you should.... I think I’m going to
kill myself tonight.”
“Heavens! dont do that.... What’s the matter?”
“You have no right to tell me not to kill myself. You dont know
anything about me. If I was a woman you wouldnt be so indifferent.”
“What’s eating you anyway?”
“I’m going crazy that’s all, everything’s so horrible. When I first met
you with Ruth one evening I thought we were going to be friends, Herf.
You seemed so sympathetic and understanding.... I thought you were like
me, but now you’re getting so callous.”
“I guess it’s the _Times_.... I’ll get fired soon, don’t worry.”
“I’m tired of being poor; I want to make a hit.”
“Well you’re young yet; you must be younger than I am.” Tony didnt
answer.
They were walking down a broad avenue between two rows of blackened
frame houses. A streetcar long and yellow hissed rasping past.
“Why we must be in Flatbush.”
“Herf I used to think you were like me, but now I never see you except
with some woman.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve never told anybody in the world.... By God if you tell
anybody.... When I was a child I was horribly oversexed, when I was
about ten or eleven or thirteen.” He was sobbing. As they passed under
an arclight, Jimmy caught the glisten of the tears on his cheeks. “I
wouldn’t tell you this if I wasnt drunk.”
“But things like that happened to almost everybody when they were
kids.... You oughtnt to worry about that.”
“But I’m that way now, that’s what’s so horrible. I cant like women.
I’ve tried and tried.... You see I was caught. I was so ashamed I
wouldn’t go to school for weeks. My mother cried and cried. I’m so
ashamed. I’m so afraid people will find out about it. I’m always
fighting to keep it hidden, to hide my feelings.”
“But it all may be an idea. You may be able to get over it. Go to a
psychoanalyist.”
“I cant talk to anybody. It’s just that tonight I’m drunk. I’ve tried
to look it up in the encyclopædia.... It’s not even in the dictionary.”
He stopped and leaned against a lamppost with his face in his hands.
“It’s not even in the dictionary.”
Jimmy Herf patted him on the back. “Buck up for Heaven’s sake. They’re
lots of people in the same boat. The stage is full of them.”
“I hate them all.... It’s not people like that I fall in love with. I
hate myself. I suppose you’ll hate me after tonight.”
“What nonsense. It’s no business of mine.”
“Now you know why I want to kill myself.... Oh it’s not fair Herf, it’s
not fair.... I’ve had no luck in my life. I started earning my living
as soon as I got out of highschool. I used to be bellhop in summer
hotels. My mother lived in Lakewood and I used to send her everything
I earned. I’ve worked so hard to get where I am. If it were known, if
there were a scandal and it all came out I’d be ruined.”
“But everybody says that of all juveniles and nobody lets it worry
them.”
“Whenever I fail to get a part I think it’s on account of that. I hate
and despise all that kind of men.... I dont want to be a juvenile. I
want to act. Oh it’s hell.... It’s hell.”
“But you’re rehearsing now aren’t you?”
“A fool show that’ll never get beyond Stamford. Now when you hear that
I’ve done it you wont be surprised.”
“Done what?”
“Killed myself.”
They walked without speaking. It had started to rain. Down the street
behind the low greenblack shoebox houses there was an occasional
mothpink flutter of lightning. A wet dusty smell came up from the
asphalt beaten by the big plunking drops.
“There ought to be a subway station near.... Isn’t that a blue light
down there? Let’s hurry or we’ll get soaked.”
“Oh hell Tony I’d just as soon get soaked as not.” Jimmy took off his
felt hat and swung it in one hand. The raindrops were cool on his
forehead, the smell of the rain, of roofs and mud and asphalt, took the
biting taste of whiskey and cigarettes out of his mouth.
“Gosh it’s horrible,” he shouted suddenly.
“What?”
“All the hushdope about sex. I’d never realized it before tonight, the
full extent of the agony. God you must have a rotten time.... We all of
us have a rotten time. In your case it’s just luck, hellish bad luck.
Martin used to say: Everything would be so much better if suddenly a
bell rang and everybody told everybody else honestly what they did
about it, how they lived, how they loved. It’s hiding things makes
them putrefy. By God it’s horrible. As if life wasn’t difficult enough
without that.”
“Well I’m going down into this subway station.”
“You’ll have to wait hours for a train.”
“I cant help it I’m tired and I dont want to get wet.”
“Well good night.”
“Good night Herf.”
There was a long rolling thunderclap. It began to rain hard. Jimmy
rammed his hat down on his head and yanked his coatcollar up. He wanted
to run along yelling sonsobitches at the top of his lungs. Lightning
flickered along the staring rows of dead windows. The rain seethed
along the pavements, against storewindows, on brownstone steps. His
knees were wet, a slow trickle started down his back, there were chilly
cascades off his sleeves onto his wrists, his whole body itched and
tingled. He walked on through Brooklyn. Obsession of all the beds in
all the pigeonhole bedrooms, tangled sleepers twisted and strangled
like the roots of potbound plants. Obsession of feet creaking on the
stairs of lodginghouses, hands fumbling at doorknobs. Obsession of
pounding temples and solitary bodies rigid on their beds.
J’ai fait trois fois le tour du monde
Vive le sang, vive le sang....
Moi monsieur je suis anarchiste.... _And three times round went our
gallant ship, and three times round went_ ... goddam it between that
and money ... _and she sank to the bottom of the sea_ ... we’re in a
treadmill for fair.
J’ai fait trois fois le tour du monde
Dans mes voy ... ages.
Declaration of war ... rumble of drums ... beefeaters march in red
after the flashing baton of a drummajor in a hat like a longhaired
muff, silver knob spins flashing grump, grump, grump ... in the face
of revolution mondiale. Commencement of hostilities in a long parade
through the empty rainlashed streets. Extra, extra, extra. Santa Claus
shoots daughter he has tried to attack. SLAYS SELF WITH SHOTGUN ... put
the gun under his chin and pulled the trigger with his big toe. The
stars look down on Fredericktown. Workers of the world, unite. Vive le
sang, vive le sang.
“Golly I’m wet,” Jimmy Herf said aloud. As far as he could see the
street stretched empty in the rain between ranks of dead windows
studded here and there with violet knobs of arclights. Desperately he
walked on.
VI. Five Statutory Questions
_They pair off hurriedly._ STANDING UP IN CARS STRICTLY
FORBIDDEN. _The climbing chain grates, grips the cogs;
jerkily the car climbs the incline out of the whirring
lights, out of the smell of crowds and steamed corn and
peanuts, up jerkily grating up through the tall night of
September meteors._
_Sea, marshsmell, the lights of an Iron Steamboat leaving
the dock. Across wide violet indigo a lighthouse blinks.
Then the swoop. The sea does a flipflop, the lights soar.
Her hair in his mouth, his hand in her ribs, thighs grind
together._
_The wind of their falling has snatched their yells, they
jerk rattling upwards through the tangled girderstructure.
Swoop. Soar. Bubbling lights in a sandwich of darkness and
sea. Swoop._ KEEP YOUR SEATS FOR THE NEXT RIDE.
“Come on in Joe, I’ll see if the ole lady kin git us some grub.”
“Very kind of you ... er ... I’m not ... er ... exactly dressed to meet
a lady you see.”
“Oh she wont care. She’s just my mother; sit down, I’ll git her.”
Harland sat down on a chair beside the door in the dark kitchen and put
his hands on his knees. He sat staring at his hands; they were red and
dirtgrained and trembling, his tongue was like a nutmeg grater from the
cheap whiskey he had been drinking the last week, his whole body felt
numb and sodden and sour. He stared at his hands.
Joe O’Keefe came back into the kitchen. “She’s loin down. She says
there’s some soup on the back of the stove.... Here ye are. That’ll
make a man of ye.... Joe you ought to been where I was last night.
Went out to this here Seaside Inn to take a message to the chief about
somebody tippin him off that they was going to close the market....
It was the goddamnedest thing you ever saw in your life. This guy
who’s a wellknown lawyer down town was out in the hall bawlin out his
gash about something. Jez he looked hard. And then he had a gun out
an was goin to shoot her or some goddam thing when the chief comes
up cool as you make em limpin on his stick like he does and took the
gun away from him an put it in his pocket before anybody’d half seen
what happened.... This guy Baldwin’s a frien o his see? It was the
goddamnedest thing I ever saw. Then he all crumpled up like....”
“I tell you kid,” said Joe Harland, “it gets em all sooner or later....”
“Hay there eat up strong. You aint eaten enough.”
“I cant eat very well.”
“Sure you can.... Say Joe what’s the dope about this war business?”
“I guess they are in for it this time.... I’ve known it was coming ever
since the Agadir incident.”
“Jez I like to see somebody wallop the pants off England after the way
they wont give home rule to Ireland.”
“We’d have to help em.... Anyway I dont see how this can last long. The
men who control international finance wont allow it. After all it’s the
banker who holds the purse strings.”
“We wouldn’t come to the help of England, no sir, not after the way
they acted in Ireland and in the Revolution and in the Civil War....”
“Joey you’re getting all choked up with that history you’re reading up
in the public library every night.... You follow the stock quotations
and keep on your toes and dont let em fool you with all this newspaper
talk about strikes and upheavals and socialism.... I’d like to see you
make good Joey.... Well I guess I’d better be going.”
“Naw stick around awhile, we’ll open a bottle of glue.” They heard a
heavy stumbling in the passage outside the kitchen.
“Whossat?”
“Zat you Joe?” A big towheaded boy with lumpy shoulders and a square
red face and thickset neck lurched into the room.
“What the hell do you think this is?... This is my kid brother Mike.”
“Well what about it?” Mike stood swaying with his chin on his chest.
His shoulders bulged against the low ceiling of the kitchen.
“Aint he a whale? But for crissake Mike aint I told you not to come
home when you was drinkin?... He’s loible to tear the house down.”
“I got to come home sometime aint I? Since you got to be a wardheeler
Joey you been pickin on me worsen the old man. I’m glad I aint goin to
stay round this goddam town long. It’s enough to drive a feller cookoo.
If I can get on some kind of a tub that puts to sea before the _Golden
Gate_ by God I’m going to do it.”
“Hell I dont mind you stayin here. It’s just that I dont like you
raisin hell all the time, see?”
“I’m goin to do what I please, git me?”
“You get outa here, Mike.... Come back home when you’re sober.”
“I’d like to see you put me outa here, git me? I’d like to see you put
me outa here.”
Harland got to his feet. “Well I’m going,” he said. “Got to see if I
can get that job.”
Mike was advancing across the kitchen with his fists clenched. Joey’s
jaw set; he picked up a chair.
“I’ll crown you with it.”
“O saints and martyrs cant a woman have no peace in her own house?” A
small grayhaired woman ran screaming between them; she had lustrous
black eyes set far apart in a face shrunken like a last year’s apple;
she beat the air with worktwisted hands. “Shut yer traps both of ye,
always cursing an fightin round the house like there warnt no God....
Mike you go upstairs an lay down on your bed till yer sober.”
“I was jus tellin him that,” said Joey.
She turned on Harland, her voice like the screech of chalk on a
blackboard. “An you git along outa here. I dont allow no drunken bums
in my house. Git along outa here. I dont care who brought you.”
Harland looked at Joey with a little sour smile, shrugged his shoulders
and went out. “Charwoman,” he muttered as he stumbled with stiff aching
legs along the dusty street of darkfaced brick houses.
The sultry afternoon sun was like a blow on his back. Voices in his
ears of maids, charwomen, cooks, stenographers, secretaries: Yes sir,
Mr. Harland, Thank you sir Mr. Harland. Oh sir thank you sir so much
sir Mr. Harland sir....
* * * * *
Red buzzing in her eyelids the sunlight wakes her, she sinks back
into purpling cottonwool corridors of sleep, wakes again, turns over
yawning, pulls her knees up to her chin to pull the drowsysweet cocoon
tighter about her. A truck jangles shatteringly along the street, the
sun lays hot stripes on her back. She yawns desperately and twists
herself over and lies wide awake with her hands under her head staring
at the ceiling. From far away through streets and housewalls the long
moan of a steamboat whistle penetrates to her like a blunt sprout of
crabgrass nudging through gravel. Ellen sits up shaking her head to get
rid of a fly blundering about her face. The fly flashes and vanishes
in the sunlight, but somewhere in her there lingers a droning pang,
unaccountable, something left over from last night’s bitter thoughts.
But she is happy and wide awake and it’s early. She gets up and wanders
round the room in her nightgown.
Where the sun hits it the hardwood floor is warm to the soles of her
feet. Sparrows chirp on the windowledge. From upstairs comes the sound
of a sewingmachine. When she gets out of the bath her body feels
smoothwhittled and tense; she rubs herself with a towel, telling off
the hours of the long day ahead; take a walk through junky littered
downtown streets to that pier on the East River where they pile the
great beams of mahogany, breakfast all alone at the Lafayette, coffee
and crescent rolls and sweet butter, go shopping at Lord & Taylor’s
early before everything is stuffy and the salesgirls wilted, have lunch
with ... Then the pain that has been teasing all night wells up and
bursts. “Stan, Stan for God’s sake,” she says aloud. She sits before
her mirror staring in the black of her own dilating pupils.
She dresses in a hurry and goes out, walks down Fifth Avenue and
east along Eighth Street without looking to the right or left. The
sun already hot simmers slatily on the pavements, on plateglass, on
dustmarbled enameled signs. Men’s and women’s faces as they pass her
are rumpled and gray like pillows that have been too much slept on.
After crossing Lafayette Street roaring with trucks and delivery wagons
there is a taste of dust in her mouth, particles of grit crunch between
her teeth. Further east she passes pushcarts; men are wiping off the
marble counters of softdrink stands, a grindorgan fills the street with
shiny jostling coils of the _Blue Danube_, acrid pungence spreads from
a picklestand. In Tompkins Square yelling children mill about the soggy
asphalt. At her feet a squirming heap of small boys, dirty torn shirts,
slobbering mouths, punching, biting, scratching; a squalid smell like
moldy bread comes from them. Ellen all of a sudden feels her knees weak
under her. She turns and walks back the way she came.
The sun is heavy like his arm across her back, strokes her bare forearm
the way his fingers stroke her, it’s his breath against her cheek.
* * * * *
“Nothing but the five statutory questions,” said Ellen to the rawboned
man with big sagging eyes like oysters into whose long shirtfront she
was talking.