WE HAD been dining together at the Hotel Ansonia, and as we walked up
the shining breezy channel of Broadwhat is the commonest phrase of the
detectives? To put two and two together. What else, I ask you, is the
poet doing all the time but putting two and two together--two rhymes,
and then two rhymes more, and making a quatrain.
He swung his stick, puffed strongly at his cigar, and amorously surveyed
the deep blue of the night, against which the huge blocks of apartment
houses spread their random patterns of lighted windows. Between these
granolithic cliffs flowed a racing stream of bright motors, like the
rapids of a river of light hurrying downward to the whirlpool of Times
Square.
My friend Dove Dulcet (the well-known poet and literary agent)
vigorously expounded a theorem which I afterward had occasion to
remember.
“There is every reason,” he cried, “why a poet should be the best of
detectives! My boy, there is a rhyme in events as well as in words. When
you see two separate and apparently unconnected happenings that seem (as
one might say) to rhyme together, you begin to suspect one author behind
them both. It is the function of the poet to have a quick and tender
apprehension of similarities. The root of poetry is nothing else than
describing things as being like other apparently quite different things.
The lady who compared herself to a bird in a gilded cage was chaffed for
her opulent and spendthrift imagination; but in that lively simile she
showed an understanding of the poetic principle. Look here:
“Either for a poet or for a detective,” he said, gaily, “this seems to
me the ideal region. I tell you, I walk about here suspecting the
most glorious crimes. When I see the number of banana splits that are
consumed in these glittering drugstores, I feel sure that somewhere,
in the purple silences of the night, hideous consequences must follow.
Those who feed so violently on that brutalizing mixture of banana,
chocolate ice cream, cherry syrup, and whipped marshmallow, must
certainly be gruesome at heart. I look out of my window late at night
toward the scattered lights of that vast pile of apartments, always
thinking to see them blaze some great golden symbol or letter into the
darkness, some terrible or obscene code that means death and terror.”
“Your analogy seems to have some sense,” I said. “Certainly the minor
poet, like the law breaker, loves to linger about the scene of his
rhyme, or crime.”
“You are an amateur of puns,” he replied. “Then let me tell you the
motto I have coined to express the spirit of this Little White Way--_Ein
feste bourgeois ist unser Gott_. This is the proud kingdom of the
triumphant middle class. It is a perilous country for a poet. If he were
found out, he would be martyred at the nearest subway station. But how
I love it! See how the quiet side streets cut across highways so richly
contrasting: West End Avenue, leafy, expensive, and genteel; Broadway,
so gloriously cruel and artificial; Amsterdam Avenue, so honestly and
poignantly real. My club is the Hartford Lunch Room, where they call an
omelet an _omulet_, and where the mystic word _Combo_ resounds through
the hatchway to the fat man in the kitchen. My church is the St. Agnes
branch of the Public Library, over on Amsterdam Avenue. In those
cool, quiet rooms, when I watch the pensive readers, I have a sense
of treading near an artery of fine human idealism. In all this various
neighbourhood I have a cheerful conviction that almost anything might
happen. In the late afternoons, when the crosswise streets end on a
glimpse of the Jersey bluffs that glow like smoky blue opals, and smell
like rotten apples, I feel myself on the very doorsill of the most
stunning outrages.”
We both laughed, and turned off on Seventy-seventh Street to the small
apartment house where Dulcet had a comfortable suite of two rooms and
bath. In his book-lined sitting room we lit our pipes and sat down for a
gossip.
We had been talking at dinner of the extraordinary number of grievous
deaths of well-known authors that had happened that year. As it is
almost unnecessary to remind you, there was Dunraven Bleak, the humorous
essayist, who was found stark (in both senses) in his bathtub; and
Cynthia Carboy, the famous writer of bedtime stories, who fell down the
elevator shaft. In the case of Mrs. Carboy, the police were distracted
because her body was found at the top of the building, and the detective
bureau insisted that in some unexplainable manner she must have fallen
_up_ the shaft; but as Dulcet pointed out at the time of the Authors'
League inquiry, the body might have been carried upstairs after the
accident. Then there was Andrew Baffle, the psychological novelist,
whose end was peculiarly atrocious and miserable, because it seemed that
he had contracted tetanus from handling a typewriter ribbon that showed
signs of having been poisoned. Frank Lebanon, the brilliant short-story
writer, was stabbed in the fulness of his powers; and there were others
whom I do not recall at the moment. Mr. Dulcet had suffered severely by
these sad occurrences, for a number of these authors were his clients,
and the loss of the commissions on the sale of their works was a serious
item. The secret of these tragedies had never been discovered, and there
had been something of a panic among members of the Authors' League. The
rumour of a pogrom among bestselling writers was tactfully hushed.
“What is your friend Kenelm Digby writing nowadays?” I asked, as I
looked along Dulcet's shelves. Digby, the brilliant novelist, was
probably Dulcet's most distinguished client, an eccentric fellow who, in
spite of his excellent royalties, lived a solitary and modest existence
in a boardinghouse somewhere in that part of the West Side. Outside his
own circle of intimates Dulcet was almost the only man whom Digby saw
much of, and many of us, who admired the novelist's work, had our only
knowledge of his person from hearing the agent talk of him.
“By George, I'm glad you reminded me,” said Dulcet. “Why, he has just
finished a story, and he telephoned me this afternoon asking me to stop
over at his house this evening to get the manuscript. He never has any
dealings with the editors on his own hook--likes me to attend to all
his business arrangements for him. I said I'd run over there about ten
o'clock.”
“That last book of his was a great piece of work,” I said. “I've been
following his stuff for over ten years, and he looks to me about the
most promising fellow we've got. He has something of the Barrie touch,
it seems to me.”
“Yes, he's the real thing,” said Dulcet, blowing a blue cloud of his
Cartesian Mixture. “I only wish he were not quite so eccentric. He lives
like a hermit-crab, over in a lodging-house near the Park. Even I, who
know him as well as most people, never feel like intruding on him except
when he asks me to. I can't help thinking it would be good for him to
get out more and see something of other men in his line of work. I tried
to get him to join The Snails, but he says that Amsterdam Avenue is his
only amusement. And Central Park seems to be his country club. I wonder
if you've noticed that in his tales whenever he wants to describe a bit
of country he takes it right out of the Park. I sometimes suspect that's
the only scenery he knows.”
“He has attained a very unusual status among writers,” I said. “In my
rambles among bookshops I have noticed that his first editions bring
quite a good price. It's very seldom that a writer--at any rate an
American--gets 'collected' during his lifetime.”
“Did you ever see any of his manuscript?” asked Dulcet; and on my
shaking my head, he took out a thick packet of foolscap from a cabinet.
“This is the original of 'Girlhood',” he explained. “Digby gave it to
me. It'll be worth a lot some day.”
I looked with interest at the neatly written sheets, thickly covered
with a small, beautiful, and rather crabbed penmanship.
“Worth a lot!” I exclaimed. “Well, I should say so! Why the other day I
was browsing round in a bookshop and I found a lot of his first editions
marked at $15 each. It struck me as a very high price for I know I have
seen them listed for three or four dollars in catalogues.”
“Exorbitantly high,” Dulcet said. “I'm afraid your bookseller is
profiteering. I admire Digby as much as any one, but that is an
artificial price. The firsts aren't rare enough to warrant any such
price as that. Still, I'm glad to know about it as it's a sign of
growing recognition. I remember the time when it was all I could do to
get any editors to look at his things. I'll have to tell him about that,
it will please him mightily.”
We sat for a while chatting about this and that and then Dulcet got up
and put on his hat.
“Look here, old man,” he said. “You squat here and be comfortable while
I run round to Digby. It won't take me more than a few minutes--he lives
on Eighty-second Street. I'll be back right speedily, and we can go on
with our talk.” I heard him go down in the elevator, and then I refit my
pipe, and picked out a book from one of his shelves. I remember that it
was Brillat-Savarin's amusing “Gastronomy as a Fine Art”. I smiled
at finding this in Dulcet's library, for I knew that the agent rather
prided himself on being something of a gourmet, and I was reading the
essays of the jovial French epicure with a good deal of relish when the
telephone rang. I went to it with that slight feeling of embarrassment
one always has in answering someone else's phone.
To my surprise, it was Dulcet's voice.
“Hullo?” he said. “That you, Ben? Listen, I want you to come round to
Digby's right away,” and he gave the address.
Thinking he had arranged a chance for me to meet Digby (I had long
wanted to do so), I felt hesitant about intruding; but he repeated
his message rather sharply. “Please come at once,” he said. “It's
important.” Again he gave the street number, made me promise to come
immediately, and rang off.
It was nearly half-past ten, and the streets were fairly quiet as I
walked briskly along. The house was one of a row of old cocoa-coloured
stone dwellings, and evidently someone was watching for me, for while I
was trying to read the numbers a door opened and from a dark hall an arm
beckoned to me. I went up the tall steps and a stout woman, who seemed
to be in some agitation, whispered my name interrogatively. “Is this Mr.
Trovato?” she murmured.
“Yes,” I said, puzzled.
“Third floor front,” she said, and I creaked quietly up the stairs.