1
HIS kindly neighbors, who lived in the big room at the back next to his
own, were Roger Sully and Don Carew, so he learned from the inscription
on their mail-box in the entrance. He went in that evening after dinner
to thank them.
He was surprised to find, in this dingy building, so charming a
room—strikingly in contrast to his own bare and cheerless one. Across
one wall a blazing splash of colour—some kind of foreign-looking
dyed-stuff—and a few brilliant cushions on the couch, warmed the place
and made him forget what seemed the bleak chill of all the rest of the
world.
Roger, it appeared, was the fat little man with the air of distinction,
who was making coffee in a glass bulb over an alcohol lamp. Don, a long
and bony youth, was stretched at ease in a big chair.
“Have some coffee with us,” said Roger. “It will be good coffee, I
promise you. And good coffee,” he went on in his gently modulated voice,
“is one of the few really important things in life.”
“And a cigarette,” said Don, rising to offer him a box of queer-looking
Russian things with long pasteboard mouthpieces. As he offered the
cigarettes with one hand, he raised the other and ran his long fingers
through his fair tousled hair, reducing it to a state of more
picturesque disorder. He made this gesture continually, not in mere
nervousness but as if he were caressing something he liked.
The coffee was very good, and Felix drank it gratefully. The two hosts
drank it as though it were a rite, Felix observed, a veritable and
solemn ceremonial. They smoked cigarettes the same way—slowly, as if
tasting each inhalation with a devout palate. And aside from these
rather solemn sensory enthusiasms, they maintained a slightly bored air.
They referred to the incident of the night before as if it had happened
a thousand years ago. It did not appear to interest them in the least,
and Felix found it difficult to identify them with the delightedly
chattering companions who had escorted him home—until something that was
said seemed to break the spell, and Roger leaned forward eagerly and
demanded:
“Yes—now _why_ did you call him McFish? Have you any idea?”
“Yes—why?” echoed Don, also alert.
Felix did not know, and could not imagine why anybody should care to
probe the secret of a mere drunken mistake in nomenclature.... The
McFish incident reminded them of some equally esoteric mistake made upon
some similar occasion, and they spent an hour in a quite excited
discussion of psychic revelations which seemed to Felix both immaterial
and irrelevant. He went away feeling as though he had stepped by
inadvertence into a chapter by Henry James, and he decided not to come
again.
But he did drop in a few evenings later, in sheer boredom, and drank
their coffee, and found that upon occasion they could tell a really
amusing story—or was it rather that he had begun to understand the point
of view from which they found things amusing?
One phrase in their talk, solemnly uttered, caught his fancy. He had
seen it in books, but as used by them it seemed to have a special
significance.
“The detached attitude?” he repeated inquiringly.
They smiled a little pityingly at him, and explained. The detached
attitude was the proper state of mind for an artist. It was an attitude
toward life which painters had learned, but which writers generally had
forgotten and must re-learn if they were ever to make writing a true art
again. The Greeks had the detached attitude. Flaubert had it.... And
obviously Don and Roger also had it.
Felix suspected that it might be simply another name for boredom, but he
did not venture to say so.
The artist, they went on—one taking up the argument languidly where the
other left off—should strictly avoid personal experience. He should hold
himself austerely aloof from participation in human affairs....
“But I thought,” said Felix, “that what the artist was supposed to need
was experience!”
“A vulgar error,” said Roger scornfully.
“What an artist needs,” said Don, “is _background_.”
And _background_, Felix gathered from their further explanations, was
something one got by being in many different places without ever
settling down and belonging to any one place—by merely being there and,
as Roger put it, “looking on disinterestedly while other people
passionately and ridiculously did things.”
The idea rather appealed to Felix.... He secretly wished he had stood by
and looked on while the others got drunk that night. He regretted his
participation in that scene—regretted it in spite of the absence of any
of the traditional unpleasant after-effects. He wished he had remained
austerely aloof from the human activities of that occasion. What, after
all, was the use of passionately hitting somebody in the face if you
couldn’t remember afterward what it was all about?... He was inclined to
think that Roger and Don were right; it was not the meaningless raw
material of experience that one needed, but some calm, fixed point of
view from which to look on and understand it.
Did they have such a point of view? He began to respect and envy them.
2
It was strange—he said to himself—that he should continue to be so upset
by Rose-Ann’s absence! He realized grudgingly and unwillingly how much
the centre of his Chicago she had been. Without her companionship, his
life seemed to have lost its significance.
His class at Community House had come to seem a nuisance, his newspaper
work mere empty trickery. And there was nothing in the outside world to
turn to, no cause that seemed worth serving. Socialism—it was too
Utopian. Social reform—perhaps that was not Utopian enough. The art of
writing—no, he must not think of that.... He found in his life nothing
to give it meaning.
Rose-Ann’s letters increased his sense of futility. They were friendly
letters, telling of her mother’s illness, which it seemed was
sufficiently real this time, and of her encounters with a family of
aggressively brotherly brothers; and to these letters he had responded
in equally friendly terms.
That was the trouble. He did not want to write friendly letters.... He
wanted to write angry letters. He wanted to tell her to stop writing to
him—to let him alone, and let him forget her, as she would soon forget
him. He wanted to say: “You know, and I know, that your moment of
freedom, and all it promised, is over for good now. Springfield has got
you, you belong to your family again, you will never come back except as
the wife of some fat Springfield manufacturer, to see the sights, or go
to the theater with him and show off your new gowns, and—yes, you will
come to Community House, and visit your old class, and as you go away
you will say to your husband, ‘I used to know such a quaint and
interesting boy here—I wonder what has become of him!’ And your fat
husband will put his fat cigar into the other corner of his fat mouth,
and say, ‘Yes, I suppose it’s a good thing your folks got you back to
Springfield when they did!’ But he will be wrong, at that; Springfield
is your natural habitat, you would have gone back there anyway....”
He wanted to write absurd things like that to her. Instead, he wrote
friendly letters, “frank” and comradely and cool, in the tone in which
their whole relationship had been couched from the first, up to that
insane moment on the station platform....
He was ashamed of himself for thinking so much about her. Of course he
was not in love with her! He was merely lonely.
Clive was still preoccupied with that troublesome girl to whom he had
darkly and allusively referred in their infrequent luncheons together.
He needed other friends. He called on Roger and Don one Sunday
afternoon, and they were primping to go out to a tea, and urged him to
come along. “It’s at Doris’s—you know Doris, don’t you? Doris Pelman.
You’ll like her.”
Doris Pelman’s apartment, somewhere on the north side, was like Don’s
and Roger’s in having a certain impressive charm which consisted
precisely in its being un-homelike. It was meant, somehow, to be looked
at, rather than lived in. The chairs were thin-legged and rickety, but
doubtless genuine antiques; the rugs were hung on the walls instead of
on the floor; and on the walls, too, were dim Chinese paintings to whose
beauty Felix was dense; yet altogether the place had an effect of being
somewhere quite out of the world, and Felix liked it for that.
He was introduced at once to half-a-dozen young men and women, and in
the course of the afternoon to half-a-dozen more. The young men greeted
Don and Roger with a languid enthusiasm, and the young women with a sort
of boisterous camaraderie. Felix was struck by something at once
delicate and artificial about these young men, something which he had at
first noted and then became oblivious to in Roger and Don. Among them,
he felt somehow coarse and brutal.... He had an impulse to swear, or
spit on the floor.
Don and Roger and two other young men were talking about travel. A
nostalgia for foreign parts seemed to afflict them all. They had, it
seemed, been everywhere in Europe; and most of them knew, with an
especial and fond intimacy, the geography of France, Italy, and Spain.
They had all been somewhere, if not East of Suez, at least somewhere
exotically remote, last year; and they were going somewhere even more
strange and distant, next year. With Don and Roger the question was,
Tunis or Tahiti?—they could not decide which.
Felix had accepted this travel-mania as part of Don’s and Roger’s
interesting scheme of life. Sometimes he had even envied them, for they
boasted that they did all this travelling “on their wits”; they insisted
that one could go anywhere and live well, without money—and Felix had
felt rather ashamed of his own singular lack of nomadic enterprise. But
today he felt annoyed with them. He remarked to himself that though he
had not ostensibly travelled, he had actually spent his life in changing
his place of habitation, from house to house and from town to town; and
even if these places were only the same middle-western town all over
again each time, yet he felt that he had never stayed long enough to get
really acquainted with it! He observed aloud, challengingly, that he
thought one might stay in a city like Chicago the whole of one’s life
without quite exhausting its interest.
The four young men raised their eyebrows, and uttered impressively the
names of the great capitals of Europe; and even more unctuously the
names of little out-of-the-way foreign towns of which he had never
heard.
“The trouble with writers,” Don remarked—he and Roger paid Felix the
compliment of regarding him as a fellow-writer—“is that they try to
write before they have sufficient background.”
Evidently, Felix reflected, Don and Roger had not made that mistake!
They had been acquiring background for years, according to their own
testimony—Roger for some ten years, and Don for perhaps five. And
neither of them had, so far as he could discover, written anything
yet!... And when would they begin, with so much background still left to
be acquired? Tunis and Tahiti!
He turned impatiently to the young women.... They seemed at first much
more congenial spirits. And yet there was something odd about them,
too—something odd in their very friendliness. His hostess, Doris Pelman,
a strikingly handsome girl, tall and fair, was the one with whom he had
what most nearly resembled a conversation—a thing difficult enough to
achieve at a tea. What immediately impressed him was that she did not
seem at all conscious of her looks—she might, from her behaviour, not
have been possessed of any; or rather, the mysterious barrier across
which two strangers, man and woman, must communicate, seemed not to be
there for her; she was apparently unaware of herself and him, in a way
that even old Mrs. Perk, a grandmother, never could be. There was in her
manner an utter absence of shyness, an apparent perfect ease in this
contact of personalities. But in her easy unembarrassed friendliness
there was something steely and aloof—a fundamental untouchableness. She
talked fluently, about his work and hers—she was an interior decorator,
it appeared,—about the new books and plays, and, with an especial zest,
about people.... A peculiar zest, too: she had a way, which at first
gave him an uncanny feeling, of talking about human beings as though
they were insects. The only things of which she spoke with visible
affection were the fabrics and materials of her profession—and art in
general.
But they were all, he felt, rather like this. The tea had become a kind
of family gathering, in which only Felix felt out of place. Dusk fell,
tall candles were lighted, and everyone became anecdotal. It would seem
that they had spent their lives in collecting these anecdotes, and they
related them and heard them with an inexhaustible relish—each one being
rehearsed at full length with a loving care for the minutest
psychological details. Some of these stories were apparently precious
gems in their collection, worthy of being taken out and enjoyed over and
over again. Other stories they laughed over uproariously, chokingly,
helplessly—though to Felix the point of these seemed frequently rather
obscure, and seldom very funny.
He went away feeling surprised, and not knowing quite whether he was
disappointed or grateful at the absence of any challenge in these new
feminine acquaintanceships. He had never consciously realized, except
now in its absence, that undercurrent of vague questioning, at once
delightful and disconcerting, as to just what there might be in a new
“friendship”—what rich and beautiful possibilities it might hold in
store: all the familiar and foolish day-dreaming that follows the most
casual meeting of masculine with feminine youth. But here there was no
question whatever; imagination took no hold on this extraordinarily
self-possessed, this imperturbable young womanhood.... Here was, indeed,
the “detached attitude”!
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