When Peter reached the corner he found that it was only half-past
twelve. It was much too early to get drunk. Daylight drinking had always
seemed to him disgusting. As a matter of fact, he was contemplating the
spree merely as a means to an end. In order to forget Maria he must
think of someone else and it would suit his purpose that the other
person should be someone rowdy and degraded. He would rub himself with
mud to ease the numbness of his spirit. He knew that he could never do
it without drinking. First many gates must be unlocked. Maria had been
right when she said that Peter was afraid of sex. When he was quite a
small boy somebody had told him about flowers and it meant nothing to
him. It had seemed merely a fairy story rather more dull than usual.
Much later a red-haired boy who lived five houses away had talked to
Peter and frightened and disgusted him. After that he had run away when
other boys tried to tell him anything about these mysteries. Of course
his squeamishness had been marked and he became the butt of every
youngster with any talent for smut. Finding that flight was useless
Peter adopted a new system and fought fiercely with anyone who taunted
him. He was bigger and stronger than most of the other boys and he soon
piled up an imposing list of victims to his prowess. He fought so well
that his ignorance remained almost unimpaired. Once when he was in the
act of belaboring a companion who had tried to outline for him the plot
of a book called "Only A Boy," a woman passing by had interrupted the
fight. She wanted to know if Peter was not ashamed of himself.
Defensively he answered that the other boy had been "talking dirty."
Immediately the passerby deluged Peter with admiration. She took down
his name and address and later he received by mail a Bible, leather
bound, and on the flyleaf was the inscription "To a young Sir Galahad."
Peter never took any particular pride in this gift.
He knew in his heart that his purity rested solidly on fear. He burned
with curiosity. At times he actually invited lewd confidences though
making every pretence of anger when they were imparted to him. Respite
came to him for a year or two before he went to college because
athletics became his god. He excelled all competitors in school and was
generally rated the best right-handed pitcher in the metropolitan
district. Baseball filled all his thoughts waking and sleeping, and in
the autumn it was football, although in this branch of sport he was by
no means as proficient. Indeed when he went to Harvard at the age of
seventeen he was dropped from the varsity squad in the first cut and
later from the freshmen.
At this particular time, when he was much more foot-loose than usual,
the annual medical lecture to the Freshmen was delivered. It was known
in unofficial circles as Smut One and attendance was compulsory. Very
gravely and severely the old doctor unfolded his tale of horrors. The
spirit was not unlike that of a traditional hell-fire sermon. Peter
heard the man half through and then fainted, toppling over from his seat
across an aisle. He was carried downstairs into the fresh air and did
not come back. But he had heard enough to be convinced that this sex
business was even worse than it had seemed in the crude and rowdy
flashes which had come to him from his companions. And yet the fact that
it was horrible by no means served to keep his thoughts clear of the
subject. The doctor had talked entirely of the dangers and disgraces of
immorality. Peter could not escape the only partially conscious surmise
that unspeakable delights and wonders must lie within this circle of
leaping flames. This impression was confirmed when he happened in the
college library to come across a poem by Carew called "The Rapture." Sex
seemed to him now by far the most romantic and adventurous thing in
life. The fact that there were monsters and dragons to be dared made it
all the more a piece with the unforgotten tales of childhood concerning
giant killers and knights-errant.
Peter was no longer satisfied to be Galahad. He wanted to be Launcelot.
And still he was afraid. He found out that Columbus Avenue in Boston was
a street largely given over to women and night after night he used to
slink about dark corners hoping and dreading that somebody would speak
to him. Whenever a "Hello dearie" came to him out of the darkness Peter
trembled. "No," he would say, "I'm sorry. I've got a very important
engagement. I've got to go right along. I must go right along. Sure,
I'll be here at this same time tomorrow night."
Often he would carry on some such dialogue a dozen times in an evening
and then one night a woman, more stalwart and audacious than any he had
yet encountered, seized him by the arm. "Sonny," she said, "I'm not
going to let you waste my time. You're not going any place except with
me. Now march along."
Peter marched. That was why he told Maria Algarez that he was not quite
a good man himself.
For a time disillusion supplanted turmoil in the mind of Peter. He found
that the romanticists were just as fraudulent as the moralists. Don Juan
seemed to him as great a fake as Galahad. Besides in the spring the call
for baseball candidates came along and Peter surprised the college world
by being the only Freshman to win a place on the varsity nine. He
pitched the second game against Yale and won by a score of 2 to 0. Life
meant something after all. Bending a third strike across the knees of a
man with a Y on his chest gave a dignity to existence which it had never
before possessed. Peter was done with hot thoughts and cold ones.
Unfortunately he was also done with thoughts about examinations. French
was his most abject failure, but he did badly enough in everything else
to be told that his college days were over.
Still he was bereft of romance for no more than a month. He caught on
with the sporting department of the Bulletin early in August and made an
almost instantaneous hit. Here again he found satisfaction in the gait
and color of life. Women were not rigorously excluded from the scheme of
things, but they were not important. He saw them in the dance halls
where he went after hours and talked to them and drank with them, but
they served merely as minor characters. The talk which animated this
existence for Peter was all of the shop. A reporter from San Francisco,
named Rusk, suddenly discovered to his amazement and delight that here
was a man eager to hear his tales of newspaper work along the waterfront
in the days when the coast towns were still unregenerate. Everybody else
on the Bulletin was in the habit of groaning loudly whenever Rusk began,
"In the old days on the waterfront----," but Peter listened with the
most intense sort of interest to Rusk's entire stock of anecdotes. By
and by Rusk had to make them up. He gave himself a boyhood as a jockey
and also enlisted fictionally in the Spanish American war. Peter
believed everything and liked everything. Four months later Rusk left
the Bulletin in order to try his hand at free lancing for the
magazines. His failure in that field surprised him. He had come to
confuse Peter Neale and the general public.
* * * * *
Peter began his spree by going to the Newspaper Club. He found no one in
the big room except two old men playing chess. One of them did weather
and the other fish on the New York Press. They were not communicative
and neither seemed disposed to be drawn into conversation. And so for a
time Peter watched the game. He found it impossible to work up any
enthusiasm about the issue and departed to practice pool on a table at
the other end of the room. Caring nothing about performance, Peter was
surprised to discover that the most difficult shots all came off.
Nothing was too hard. Even the most fantastically complicated
combinations plopped the required ball into a pocket.
Far from being pleased at this Peter grew angry. He felt that Fate was
ironically evening up things for him by burdening him with luck and
prowess in something which made no difference and withholding its favor
in all the important aspects of life. Testing out his theory he picked
up a straggler, a man he knew but slightly, who happened to wander into
the club at that moment.
"I'll roll you Indian dice," challenged Peter. "A dollar a throw."
Good luck continued to plague him although he knew that its attentions
were not honorable! At the end of three quarters of an hour Peter was
$85 ahead.
"That's enough," he said with irritation.
"You're not going to quit now that you've got me in the hole," protested
his opponent. "Aren't you going to give me a chance to get back?"
"You wouldn't have any chance. If we keep up I'm sure to win hundreds of
dollars from you. Nobody can beat me just now. Look here if you don't
believe me I'll give you a chance. I'll bet you a hundred dollars to ten
on one roll."
"What's the matter with you, Neale?" asked the loser. "Are you soused?"
"Not yet," said Peter. "You're not taking any advantage of me. I tell
you I know. I can't lose. Go ahead and roll."
"All right, if you want to throw money away it's not my fault."
He took the leather cup and rolled a pair of sixes. Peter slammed the
dice down and four aces and a five danced out.
"No more," said Peter. "It's no use. That's $95 you owe me."
"Would you mind if I held you up on that till next week? I'm sort of
busted just now."
"No hurry, anytime'll do."
"Ninety-five, that's right, isn't it? Lend me $5 that'll make it an even
hundred. Easier to remember."
Peter gave him the five. He knew that even in his gambling triumphs
there would be some catch. Wandering over to the bar alone he had two
Martinis and then a Bronx but nothing seemed to happen. Looking at his
watch he found that it was still only a little after three and he went
up town to Fourteenth Street to a burlesque house. The show was called
"Dave Shean's Joy Girls." When Peter came in Shean as a German comedian
with a false stomach and a red wig had just volunteered to take the
place of the bullfighter played by the straight man.
"Do you think you can kill the bull?" asked the straight man.
"I don't know dot I kills him," said Shean, "but I can throw him."
It annoyed Peter that everybody else in the theatre laughed so loudly.
"Yesterday," continued the real toreador, "I killed four bulls in the
arena."
"I had him for breakfast."
"What are you talking about? What did you have for breakfast?"
"Farina."
Peter thought he would go but he waited in the hope that it might get
better. Presently Shean and the tall man got into an argument. The
serious one of the pair contended that Otto Schmaltz, the character
played by Shean, did not have a whole shirt on his back.
"I bet you! I bet you!" shouted Schmaltz dancing about and patting the
other man on the cheek. They came close to the footlights and placed
huge piles of stage money side by side.
"Now," said the big man, "the bet is you haven't got a whole shirt on
your back."
"Ches," replied Schmaltz.
"Why, you poor pusillanimous, transcendental, ossified little shrimp,
you," said the big man. "Of course you haven't got a whole shirt on
your back. Half of it is on the front."
"Ha! Ha! Ha!" he continued sneeringly and kicked the little man
resoundingly while the crowd screamed.
Later Schmaltz bet with somebody else taking the other side of the
contention, but again he lost because when it came time for the tag line
he grew confused and shouted. "Why, you poor pussaliniment,
tramps-on-a-dimple, oysterfied little shrimp, you, half of de back is on
the front." And again the fortune of Schmaltz was swept away and again
he was kicked.
Possibly the three cocktails had begun to have some effect after all or
it may have been something else, but at any rate Peter was no longer
merely bored by all these happenings. His sensation was just as
unpleasant, but it was acute. Somehow or other the story of Schmaltz and
the shirt had made him sad.
"Schmaltz is on me," he thought. "Schmaltz is everybody. Getting fooled
and getting kicked." His musing became more vague. "Half of the back is
on the front," seemed to take form as a tragic complaint against life.
He and Schmaltz they couldn't have it whole because "half of the back
is on the front."
More disturbing moralizing was yet to come from the book of "Dave
Shean's Joy Girls." The next entertainers were the Mulligan Brothers,
female impersonators. One played the part of Clara and the other was
Margie.
"The sailors on that ship was awful," began Clara. "The sailors on that
ship was just awful. The poor girl was sinking there in the water and
they wouldn't let her into the lifeboat. Every time she came up, Margie,
one of the sailors hit her over the head with an oar."
Margie began to laugh stridently.
"What are you laughing for, Margie? Did you hear what I was telling you?
I said every time the poor girl came up a sailor hit her over the head
with an oar."
"Wasn't she the fool to come up," said Margie.
Peter knew that was not a joke. Here was his case against life summed up
in a sentence. Idiots about him were laughing. Couldn't they see the
bitterness of it. "Wasn't she the fool to come up!" That was his folly.
He was going on taking the buffeting of the oars and for no reason. And
yet he knew perfectly well that he would continue to come up no matter
what blows fell about his head and shoulders. There was no use making
any resolve to quit it all. Peter had no facility for suicide. He did
not dare and he tried to justify himself in this unwillingness.
"After all," he thought, "it would be a pretty rotten trick to play on
Kate. I promised her she could have Sunday off."
One piece of positive action he could and did take. He did not wait to
gather any further pessimistic contributions to cosmic philosophy from
"Dave Shean's Joy Girls," but walked out in the middle of Shean's
drunken act. The comedian was pretending that the edge of the stage was
the brass rail along a bar. Now he was swaying far over the orchestra
pit and seemed about to fall into it. A woman in front of Peter
screamed. Shean slowly straightened himself up and shook a reproving
finger at the laughing audience. "My wife's bes' lil' woman in worl',"
he said and did a hiccough. Still he seemed sober enough when Peter
sitting on the aisle in the second row got up and started out of the
theatre.
"Don't you like our show?" he called after him.
Peter flushed and made no answer.
"I guess I'm too natural," said Shean. "He can't stand it. You know how
it is. He's a married man himself."
"Hey, Percy," he shouted after the retreating figure of Peter in a high
falsetto, "you'll find a saloon right around the corner. Tell the
bartender to let you have one on Otto Schmaltz."
Peter conscientiously walked past the saloon mentioned by the
impertinent Shean and went into the next one three blocks farther on. He
began to drink doggedly and consequently with slight effect. He was like
a sleepless person. No blur came over the acuteness of his
consciousness. He might just as well have tried counting sheep jumping
over a fence. "Wasn't she the fool to come up!" recurred in his ears as
if it had been a clock ticking late at night in a big silent house.
Straight whiskey tasted abominably and returned no reward for his
efforts. In the back room somebody was singing "Mother Machree" and
cheating on the high notes. An idea for a newspaper paragraph came to
Peter. Somebody had been conducting an agitation in the Bulletin against
the use of "The Star Spangled Banner" as a national anthem on the ground
that the air was originally that of a drinking song. "We ought to point
out," thought Peter, "that it takes a few drinks to make anybody think
he can get up to 'the rockets' red glare.'"
He wished his mind would stop pelting him with ideas. Thinking ought not
to keep up when he hated it so. Leaving the bar, Peter took his drink
over into the corner and sat down at a table. On the wall to his left
hung a large colored picture labelled "Through the Keyhole." Peter
looked at it and then moved his chair around so that he couldn't see it.
He realized that he must get much drunker.