1
HE had decided to write—what, he did not know yet: and it did not
matter: something, anything, a play, a poem, a story—whatever came into
his head, good or bad. It would occupy his time.
He spent a happy evening buying the materials of writing at a stationery
store. He bought a dozen penholders, a quantity of his favourite stub
pens, two bottles of a thick black indelible ink, half a ream of good
thin bond paper, a great blotting-pad and a whole stack of small
blotters. That afternoon he had bought a copy of Roget’s “Thesaurus,”
without which the literary life is mere vexation; and a good, fat,
reliable little dictionary with “derivations.” Going to his room, he
lighted the gas, arranged these materials on his little table, gazed at
them with pleasure—and realized that he had forgotten to buy an
eyeshade. He went back to the stationery store, and returned with a
half-dozen eyeshades of the best pattern, the kind that do not saw the
ears or get tangled in the hair. It appeared to him also that the
gas-light really would not do; he must get a kerosene student’s lamp; it
would be a nuisance to keep it filled and trimmed, and the chimney
clean—but the literary life has its inevitable penalties.... He would
get a student’s lamp and a gallon can of kerosene tomorrow.
He sat down again at the little table, fitted a stub pen into his
penholder, lighted a match, and held the steel point in the blaze, to
burn off the oil and take out the temper, making it soft and flexible
and easy to write with. He uncorked the ink, wiped out the neck of the
bottle with a blotter, and dipped his pen in. Yes, the pen held a full
sentence’s-worth of ink, as it should. There was nothing the matter with
the pen. He took a sheaf of paper from the great pile on the back of the
desk, laid it at the proper angle, adjusted his chair, dipped the pen
again, poised it above the virgin paper—and remembered that he had only
two cigarettes left in the box. One cannot do a good night’s writing
without plenty of cigarettes. He went down to the cigar store and
returned with five boxes.
Once more he dipped his pen, lifted it ...
An hour later he roused himself from the vague waking dream in which his
mind had been immersed. The sheet of paper was covered with lines and
circles, stars, geometrical figures, childish pictures of houses with
smoke coming out of the chimneys, illegible words, his own initials, and
crude attempts to draw the outline of a girl’s arm; and amidst all this,
carefully obliterated, so that he could hardly recognize it himself, the
name—_Rose-Ann_, _Rose-Ann_, _Rose-Ann_....
He tore the sheet into tiny fragments, brushed them to the floor, and
then got down on his hands and knees and carefully picked them up. He
must remember to buy a wastebasket for his room tomorrow. He looked at
his watch. It was twelve o’clock. He would go in and see Roger and Don;
if they were staying up late, they might offer him some coffee.
Roger was lying on the couch reading Flaubert’s “La Tentation de la
Saint Antoine,” and Don was sitting in an easy chair reading Flaubert’s
“Bouvard et Pecuchet.” They looked up, bade him come in, and went on
calmly with their reading. Felix took down a book from the shelf—one of
the later works of Henry James—and yawned over it.... Perhaps he had
better go to bed after all.
At that moment there was a stumbling up the stairs, and a loud banging
at the door.
“That’s Eddie Silver,” said Roger, in a resigned tone.
Felix jumped up and opened the door, and Eddie Silver entered, shouting,
“Hello!”—at the same time playfully thrusting against Felix’s stomach an
automatic revolver made of tin. But Felix did not know that it was a
toy.
He stepped back hastily, with a queer feeling in the pit of his stomach.
“The fool’s got a revolver!” said Roger.
“Here, give me that,” said Don, going over and trying to snatch it.
“Let him alone——he’s drunk,” said Roger.
“No——not drunk!” protested Eddie Silver. “Don’t say I’m drunk!” He
tearfully extended his hands in pleading, with the revolver dangling
from a finger. “But—” and he beamed at them suddenly——“going to _get_
drunk! Going——” He noticed the revolver, put it carefully in one
overcoat pocket, and took out of the other a quart bottle. “Get some
glasses, Rojjie!” And taking off his overcoat, with the revolver still
in its pocket, he bundled it up and tossed it over into the corner of
the room.
There was a moment in which everybody—except Eddie—held himself tense in
expectation of a bullet. Then Don started across the room toward the
overcoat.
“No, Don—no!——You le’ tha’ o’co’ ’lone. ’S my bes’ o’co’!” And then,
very clearly enunciated, “Hurry up with those glasses!”
Felix followed Roger over behind the screen which masked their simple
culinary arrangements. “We’ve got to get him drunk enough to get that
gun away from him,” whispered Roger.
It took another bottle of whiskey, procured by Don and paid for by
Felix, and four hours of time, to kill Eddie Silver’s jealous
watchfulness of that overcoat in the corner. Eddie, with a maudlin
efficiency, divided his attention between the overcoat and the whiskey.
His conversation for the last three of the four hours consisted of a
promise to tell them something. “Wo’n’ tell ’nybo’ ’n worl’ ’cep’ you,”
he kept saying.
It appeared to have to do with himself and some girl——but whether it was
in the nature of a crime or a joke they could not tell, because
sometimes he laughed and again he cried about it. But as often as he
started to tell what it was, he became diverted, and told instead about
somebody else and somebody else’s girl. He confessed many follies that
night, but not his own.
At three o’clock, just when he seemed to be really on the point of
making that long-delayed confession, he suddenly commenced to laugh.
“’Minds me Cli’ Bangs!” he said. “Know Cli’ Bangs?” And becoming
articulate again he went on, “I’ll tell you a funny story about him.
He’s got a—(come on, everybody have another little drink!)—house out in
the country. I te’ you ’bou’ tha’ h-house!”
And with vague relapses into the muffled speech of drunkenness, and
startling recoveries of clearness, but always with a thread of
coherence, he told the story of Clive Bangs’ house. At times Roger,
watchfully listening, had to serve as official interpreter; Roger
understood the locutions of drunken speech as if they were a foreign
language in which he was versed. And Felix, half-ashamed to listen, but
curious, heard it to the end.
It seemed that Clive had built—or rebuilt—that house in Woods Point for
a girl he was in love with at the time, years ago, five or six or seven
years ago. But, said Eddie Silver, he had neglected to tell the girl
that he was in love with her. And so, about the time the house was
finished, she married somebody else. Or at least, became engaged to some
one else, whom she eventually did marry. The point of this story—to
Eddie it was an exquisitely funny story—was that Clive Bangs had kept
the house a secret from her, because he wanted it to be a surprise. And
it was this secrecy of his which had convinced her that he had another
sweetheart; so that, in pique, she became engaged to the other man.
“Cli’s li’l’ secret!” said Eddie Silver, infinitely amused. “Do’ pay to
have se-secrets. Tha’s why I go’ tell my li’l’ secret.”
But again he wandered from the point, much to Don’s and Roger’s
disappointment.
This painful story about his friend stirred Felix deeply. He felt that
it was true—true in essence, however fabricated in detail; it seemed to
him indecent to have this stolen glimpse into the secret of Clive Bangs’
heart—and yet he was glad he had heard the story. Yes, it must be true.
Rose-Ann had put it in a phrase: “Some girl has hurt him.” And this—this
ridiculous and pathetic incident, too ridiculous ever to confess, a
secret that must be buried deep and forgotten—was the reason for Clive’s
being what he was.... And suddenly Felix understood why that story had
moved him so:—for had he not been as ridiculously, as pathetically hurt,
in his own episode of moon-calf-love back in Port Royal? And was that
incident, too, to affect his whole life, remaining untold, unconfessed,
poisoning his courage and his faith?
He jumped up, went to his room, altogether wide awake, and commenced to
write—the story of his folly in Port Royal. He commenced it as a letter
to Rose-Ann. He did not consider whether he would ever dare to send it
to her. He only knew that it must be written so.
An hour later he paused, tired out—and remembered Eddie Silver’s
revolver. After all, that was perhaps a life-and-death matter, and this
wasn’t. He went back to Don’s and Roger’s room.... Eddie Silver’s
confession was again on the point of becoming definite.
“Tell you all about it,” said Eddie. “Lis’n!”
They leaned forward to hear, but Eddie’s head dropped on his arms, and
he was asleep.
“Damn!” whispered Roger.
Felix slipped quietly over to the woolly heap in the corner and reached
into one pocket and then the other. He found something strangely light
to the touch. He pulled it out and gazed at it angrily. A tin revolver!
“F’lix!”
Eddie suddenly awake, was calling to him.
“Go ge’ ’no’er bo’l’ Swinburne!”
Felix looked at his watch. If he went to sleep now, he would never wake
up in the morning in time to go to the office. He might as well keep
awake the rest of the night. “Make some coffee,” he said to Roger, “and
I’ll get some more whiskey for this crazy loon.”
2
That sort of thing—he reflected next evening, when he turned in
immediately after dinner—was not the sort of thing he had expected of
his Canal street home. He had thought of it as being a quiet backwater,
out of reach of the tides of life. And if Eddie Silver was going to come
there!... He fell asleep, only to be awakened by the cry,
“F’lix! Oh you F’lix!” and a pounding on his door. “G’ up! We’re having
li’l’ Swinburne party!”
Felix lighted a match. It was one o’clock. How had that madman got into
the house at this hour? Anyway, there was no sleeping now. Besides, he
had had six hours’ sleep.
He rose and dressed, and went into the other room. “Make me a little
coffee, Roger,” he pleaded.... And an hour later he managed to slip
away, and went back to his room and wrote feverishly on his letter—the
letter which he would never send—to Rose-Ann ... falling asleep with his
head on the table, and only waking in time to get to the office, without
breakfast.
The third evening Eddie Silver came again, and this time Felix felt
himself too tired to write, and drank whiskey with the rest. In the
morning he was apparently none the worse, except that he had no appetite
for anything except a cup of coffee and a cigarette. In the afternoon,
for lack of sufficient sleep, he needed more coffee. And of course, the
more coffee one drank, the less one seemed to need real food, so that
dinner, too, consisted exclusively of coffee. And then he could not
sleep, and sat up half the night writing. Fortunately, Eddie Silver did
not come again for a while, so there was a lull in the fever of
existence. But it took days to get back to normal habits of eating and
sleeping again.
And Felix, in the meantime, had commenced, for the sake of companionship
and good coffee, to take his dinners with Don and Roger in their room,
taking his turn in providing them. These meals were of a delicatessen
sort, sometimes chosen because the ingredients reminded Don and Roger of
Spain or Italy, and sometimes because they made an interesting colour
scheme.
For a while their evenings were quiet. Felix would labour upon that
endless letter to Rose-Ann—who had by now come to seem to him an unreal
figure, an invention of his own fancy; only becoming real again for a
moment, a moment only, when he saw on his desk at the office an envelope
addressed to him in her large undisciplined handwriting. Within that
envelope would be a friendly note, saying nothing; and he would reply in
kind.
One day he dropped in at the little Community Theatre to see how things
were getting on; Rose-Ann in her latest note had expressed some
curiosity about her old class and its new teacher. He found old Mrs.
Perk there.
“It’s pretty bad,” Mrs. Perk whispered. “They don’t like the new one at
all. And they miss you, too.” Which somehow pleased him very much, even
though he suspected it to be only an old woman’s flattery.
“And how do you like your new place? You don’t look very well fed. No,
it’s no use; men can’t keep house by themselves. You’ll have to wait
till Miss Rosy comes back, and be taken care of right!”
“I’m afraid Miss Rosy will never come back,” said Felix.
“Don’t you bother yourself about that!—Here, thread this needle for me,
with your young eyes.... Why, I asked her for a piece of the wedding
cake, the very day she went away so sudden. She’ll be back all right!”
So old Mrs. Perk had been joking with Rose-Ann, too—about him. Felix
wondered how she had taken it....
“No, your bachelor hall won’t last much longer, I can promise you that.”
He laughed and went away, amused at the quaint pseudo-wisdom of the old.
She thought she knew all about him and Rose-Ann. Two young things
hopelessly in love, but too shy to tell each other so! And in this
situation the inconveniences of bachelor’s hall would operate as a _deus
ex machina_, driving him in despair and her in pity into each other’s
arms—and matrimony!
How simple it all seemed to her! And how complex it all was in reality!
Mrs. Perk had the old-fashioned-woman’s naïve confidence in the
importance of woman’s cooking; for that matter, how did she know that
Rose-Ann could cook? Most probably she couldn’t! Girls like Rose-Ann
didn’t nowadays.... And besides, how could Mrs. Perk be expected to
understand the pleasures of a man living alone, free, able to keep what
hours he chose—the sheer lazy charm of a masculine establishment,
however inefficient!
Yes, Felix really enjoyed this happy-go-lucky kind of existence. As long
as there was plenty of good coffee, and cigarettes, nothing else
mattered very much—not even Eddie Silver.
He had commenced to come again. At first his visits were welcome as a
relief from the monotony of Canal street life. But he was becoming a
nuisance.... He would come in at all hours, but preferably when they had
just gone to bed—pounding on the doors until they awoke and let him in.
If the hall-door downstairs chanced to be locked, he would stand in the
street and call to them, and throw pebbles—or dollars—against their
front windows.... They would be drifting peacefully into dreams when
something would wrench violently and painfully at their attention—they
would try to ignore it and go on dreaming, but it would come again,
determined, familiar, insistent—and they would reluctantly awake enough
to become conscious of a voice in the street calling out their names.
“Don! Roger! F’li-i-ix!”
“It’s that damned Eddie Silver!” they would groan, and finally somebody,
with a brain aching for sleep, would stumble down the stairs and let him
in.
“Wake up there, F’lix—I brought you nice li’l’ bo’l’ Swinburne!” he
would call, rattling Felix’s doorknob, until he rose and joined in the
festivities.
So strong is the power of association that Felix came to loathe the
poetry of Swinburne—it had the smell of whiskey on it....
It was increasingly hard to keep awake in the afternoons, however much
he drugged himself with coffee. Getting up in the morning became a
tragedy—his whole being cried out for the sleep he could not have.
Sometimes during the day, in the midst of a story, his mind would
suddenly go blank for a minute. His appetite failed, and there were
pains in his stomach that nothing but whiskey would relieve. He caught a
bad cold, and had a cough that would not go away. And then, one morning
in the eighth week of his stay in the Canal street menage, he found
himself too ill to go to the office.
3
Roger and Don ministered to him with hot coffee, and called in a doctor
who lived in the same building. The doctor had long white locks that
fell picturesquely about the collar of his coat. He stuck a thermometer
in Felix’s mouth, took out his watch and held Felix’s wrist, then shook
his head gravely.
“What do you want to do with him?” he asked.
“We can’t very well take care of him here,” said Don.
“Any folks in town?” asked the doctor.
“No.”
“H’m. How about the County Hospital? They’ll look after him all right.”
“I suppose that is the correct thing to do with a sick person,” said
Roger.
“H’m. Yes.... Has to be pretty serious, though, to get him in.”
“Well,” asked Roger, “how serious is it?”
“H’m. Can’t tell just yet. May be very serious—may not be. Better not
take any chances.... Well, what do you want to do? County Hospital?”
Roger and Don looked at each other. Felix tried to get the thermometer
out of his mouth so as to protest, but commenced to cough instead.
“Yes,” said Roger, “County Hospital.”
“All right,” said the doctor cheerfully, pulling his thermometer out of
Felix’s mouth and putting it in his pocket without looking at it, “I’ll
diagnose pneumonia. Where’s the telephone? I’ll call up the hospital
right away, and stay here till they come.”
So Felix was taken to the County Hospital—first addressing to Rose-Ann a
large envelope in which he put his long, unfinished letter, and giving
it to Don to mail.... And at the hospital, after the doctor got round to
him, the night nurse told him that there didn’t seem to be anything the
matter with him except a bad cold, but the doctor thought he ought to
stay in bed a week and rest up.
“He says you need to make up about a month’s sleep, and get some of that
booze out of your system.” She grinned at him sympathetically, “You
ain’t used to it, are you?”
He rather wished, since he wasn’t going to die after all, that he hadn’t
sent Rose-Ann that foolish letter. Still—he didn’t care. He couldn’t
care very much about anything. He was weak, and tired, and very sleepy.
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