Printed in the United States of America

I

It was a low red-brick house with a white door, a brass knob and brass

name-plates, and new green-and-white awnings and green window-boxes:

the sort of place which, in those days, downtown, seemed particularly

smart. We rang, and, after a moment, the electric clicking began--with

its quick and ready profusion, plucking distinctly the string of

excitement which was still capable of vibrating in my breast at the

prospect of meeting new people in Greenwich Village.

They were Hugo Bamman’s friends: I had never met them. Rita Cavanagh,

the poet, was to be there--and other persons reputed to possess genius

or to whom I vaguely attributed romance. The stairs were soft-carpeted

in green. The host, tall and smiling, in a dinner-jacket, met us at the

door. The rooms were very bright and well kept: I saw lettuce-green

cocktail glasses, a bruised-mulberry batik behind a divan and, on the

wall, a set of framed designs for the costumes of some ballet, vivid

tinselly golds, blues and purples. And there were girls, like the

colored sketches, in the brightest make-ups and clothes, with red silk

roses of Cuban shawls, and silver turbans, and red hair, and black

arching Russian eyebrows, beautifully pencilled on.

The host waylaid the hostess, who had a cocktail glass in each hand and

appeared preoccupied. I thought her adorable--she was quite short and

had very small gold slippers and Buster Brown blond bobbed hair. “Oh,

how do you do!” she said, stopping. “How about putting down the glasses

and shaking hands?” said Ray Coleman. “Here, you take this, then,” she

said, making him hold one of the glasses: I thought he looked a little

severe as he stood with the cocktail in his hand. “There’s so much

traffic,” she remarked, “that it’s hard to receive people right.” She

smiled charmingly with a little mauve-rouged, moist and lovely American

mouth. Her hand, which she gave me now, was fragile and small, and,

with her thin round bare arm, seemed like some soft little tentacle.

“What a nice apartment!” I said. “It’s the apple of our eye,” she

replied. That wasn’t quite right either, but, as it evidently was the

apple of Coleman’s, he smiled with satisfaction as he demurred that

they were “a little cramped for space.”

A bulky woman in green--the one with the silver turban--blazed upon

my vision. She recognized me and we shook hands. She was one of those

plain elderly ladies who do something or other and whom we meet at

parties, but whose names we have difficulty in remembering. I had a

drink which Mrs. Coleman had given me and I asked the lady with the

silver turban whether I couldn’t get her one. She said: “A little of

that Scotch--straight,” and we sat down, at her suggestion, on a large

ottoman in front of the fireplace. She had the hearty manners and

broad speech of an old _vivandière_--an old _vivandière_ of the social

revolution, I thought, and approached her with a special respect.

“What we have in America,” she declared--we had arrived, through

Prohibition, at politics--“is government by headlines! What’s the

actual explanation of these booms for Cox and Wood? Neither one has the

brains of a rabbit. But their names are one-syllable words. They’re

one-syllable words! I’m a newspaper woman and I know!” “So is Debs,” I

suggested. “Yes,” she replied, “but he’s out.” I felt that I had said

something stupid. I had let her see that I was only an outsider.

My whole point of view at this period was still largely taken over from

my old school-friend, Hugo Bamman: he had come, after the War, to live

in Greenwich Village, and I had been brought there by his example. It

was Hugo who had taken me around and who had told me what to think of

what I saw; and I had seen through Hugo’s eyes. The people whom Hugo

thought important seemed important to me, too: he and they, I believed,

were leaders, leaders of the true social idealism which cut under

capitalistic politics. To them the social revolution seemed as real as

their love affairs; and I had often a guilty consciousness that it was

not quite real enough to me. This plain-spoken woman, for example, to

whom I presumed to talk of politics, might, for all I knew, have just

returned from Russia--might have fought on the barricades. Her bad

language and her great bare chest might represent the heroic braveries

of some heart-breaking campaign--the devotion to some anarchist lover,

deported or put in prison; the shouldering of some burden of poverty;

or perhaps some point-blank vindication of basic human rights in the

teeth of the mounted police and the mob.

In that company I had always felt humble: beyond publishing a few

satiric verses in a radical magazine, I had never myself struck

any blow in the war for humanity (Hugo Bamman was a freelance and

a communist, whereas I professed no political faith and had a tame

and respectable job in a publisher’s office); but, like Hugo, I had

served in the other war, and had served as an enlisted man, and after

seeing all the nations of the West temporarily scrambled together

and the social order turned upside down, I had come away with a new

conviction of the necessity of human solidarity. “Ten Days That Shook

the World”--they had given me pause when I had read about them one

morning, among the inanities of the Paris _Herald_, after a night spent

sleeping in a puddle. In college, I had read of the Russia of the

Czars as one reads about the Middle Ages; but now I had been forced to

recognize, even among Americans, and as one of the strongest instincts

of society, that horrifying contempt of a dominating class for the

lives of those they dominate. So that, by the time I had got out of

the Army, I had acquired a scorn for the pursuit of money, position or

rank: the people who cared for such things seemed now to me sinister

or childish. It appeared impossible ever again to accept conventional

values complacently, to acquiesce in the prosperous inertia and the

provincial ignorance of America. One could never go back again now to

living indifferently or trivially; one was afraid of lending oneself to

some offense against that unhappy humanity which one shared with other

men.

“Yes, of course,” I replied, “he’s out.--And Wood is such a gentlemanly

fellow!--he hasn’t any of the Regular Army mannerisms--he’s surprising

in that way. You think he’s going to be awful, and then he turns out

to be quite a relief after listening to the regular West Point line.

You can perfectly see why Roosevelt got on with him. Neither one was

an ordinary ruffian. Yet both, at bottom, were stupid men. Roosevelt

was only just civilized enough to know and remember more facts than his

neighbors. But all his imagination was good for was habitually to make

a melodrama out of the most serious affairs of the world--a melodrama

with himself as hero.”

Her eye had strayed, she hailed a young man with a slit-eyed impassive

gaze, who, his hands in his trousers-pockets, had stationed himself

near us. I felt abashed--what I had said had betrayed me as a young

bourgeois trying to play up to her: it had given me away as never

having been at the barricades!--“Oh, Bobby!” she exclaimed, “your

ballet was marvellous! Those divine Chinese whites!” The young man

accepted the compliment, with no attempt to turn it off or to pretend

embarrassment. He seemed serious and complacent: I wondered whether he

were Jewish--he was blond, but had a hooked nose. He replied without

change of expression and bending over with his hands in his pockets:

“It’s the first time, so far as I know, that Chinese white has been

used in the theatre. I have two different kinds of white contrasted.”

“How did you ever do it?” said Sue Borglum (that, it turned out,

was my companion’s name). “I was experimenting for two years,” he

replied. I could tell from his accent that he was Scotch: besides, his

eyes remained narrow and solemn, and a Jew, no matter how serious, no

matter how relentlessly preoccupied with the importance of his own

activities, would have veiled with some irony of politeness his human

and earth-bound ambitions in this Valley of the Shadow under the eye

of a Jealous God. “I don’t see,” she protested, emphatically, “how

people ever have the patience to go on experimenting for effects they

may never be able to get! In the newspaper game, it’s different: we

never experiment: we know how to get our effects and we get them right

off, the same day.--And they’re forgotten the same day!” He answered,

without smiling: “There’s going to be a photograph of my set in Bradley

Foster’s book on the ballet.” He looked around as some one grasped his

arm.

Daisy Coleman was talking in a corner with an anomalous slight little

man; they were drinking the cocktails she had been carrying. She

seemed appetizing in her lobster-bisque dress, her paler flesh-colored

stockings and her little gold slippers. She was talking over the back

of a chair, with one knee on the seat and with both hands clasping

the top, like a little girl at school, chatting between classes: the

conversation was accompanied with sympathetic movements of the elevated

foot. As I watched her, I saw Ray Coleman, smiling in a curious fixed

way at nobody in particular, go over, interrupt the conversation,

detach Daisy from the little tadpole and launch her again on the

company at large. She came forward rather blankly and, it seemed to

me, a little sullenly.

Ray Coleman had left Hugo Bamman standing huddled against the

mantelpiece and staring out through his thick myopic lenses; and it

occurred to me at once that he could talk better than I to Sue Borglum.

He would be sure to have the right tone--and besides, he never seemed

to care whether women were young or old, attractive or plain. “Ah,

there he is!” I cried--I disloyally used to kid him--“Bamman: The

People’s Friend!” He looked about, smiling vaguely, then, locating

us, craned forward, and bubbled and beamed over Sue.--I got up and

intercepted Daisy.

She began by making an earnest effort to discharge her obligations as a

hostess, but I could see that her heart wasn’t in it. “Don’t you want

another cocktail?” she suggested. “I’m afraid the one you got was all

water. Ray has just made some new ones.”

“You were in _Patsy_, weren’t you?” I asked: I knew that she had been a

chorus-girl. “I think that that was about the best musical show that I

ever saw--I went to see it four times!” “Well, we couldn’t complain,”

she said (it had had a phenomenal run). “Which one were you? I don’t

recognize you.” “Oh, I was just in the chorus,” she said. “And then

I was one of the pages that came down the steps with the candles in

the _Honeymoon Moon_ number.” “Oh, were you one of those pages?” I

exclaimed. “You were awfully cute! I remember you well!--and that

set with the lavender drop and the orange moon was marvellous!--Do

you ever miss the stage?” “I’m beginning to now. Of course, it’s an

awful lot of work--so you don’t get very much fun out of it.” With

the intention of documenting myself--in those days I shared Hugo’s

enthusiasm for sociological documentation--I questioned her about the

theatre. I was delighted by her candor. “By the time the show opens,”

she told me, “everybody is groggy. When we were rehearsing for _Patsy_,

I drank so much to keep myself going that I finally got some kind of

d.t.’s: I saw a horse sitting beside my bed.” I expressed interest.

“It was sitting by my bed with its hoofs on its knees--this way: like

hands--its hoofs were painted blue. It was sitting there leering at

me.” “Were you able to go on?” “Yes, the doctor gave me a great big

drink of something bitter and I went to sleep and slept it off.” “It

must be a terrific thing to rehearse one of those shows!” “It’s a lot

of work to be beautiful--especially when you aren’t,” she added. “Oh,

come!” I replied, “I was just thinking that you were one of the very

few actresses I had seen who were as pretty on the stage as off!” She

made a gesture of burlesque demureness, putting a finger to her mouth.

I inquired about the hardships of the stage. “Once, at the Winter

Garden,” she told me, “I was in one of those living curtains: they left

us up there for an hour and we nearly got roasted with the lights. When

they let us down again, half the girls fainted.--Oh, yes; us girls,”

she concluded, parodying us girls, “us girls has our trials!” I found

her interesting, attractive, amusing, and profoundly sympathetic. “What

a lovely color your hair is!” I told her. “Just the color of honey!”

“Mm-Mm!” said Daisy. “More! I eat that stuff up!”

Ray Coleman, smiling, came up behind her and put his arms about her,

with his hands over her breasts. “Don’t you think he looks like Ned

Grover?” Daisy inquired of her husband. “No: not a bit,” replied

Coleman. He explained to me humorously: “She always has these insane

ideas about people looking like each other--and there’s never the

faintest resemblance!” I seemed to make out that Ned Grover raised an

issue.

“Won’t you let me fill your glass?” he suggested. “I’ve got some real

bonded rye over here that I’ve only just opened. I thought at first

I wouldn’t open it to-night, because when you have a lot of people

like this, anything special is lost on them--you might just as well

give them plain bootlegger’s stuff.” “I thought your cocktails were

splendid!” “Well, I know you’ll appreciate this rye: it’s the real Old

Overholt, bottled in bond.”

“Is Rita Cavanagh here?” I asked over the glass-topped drinking-caddy.

“Yes: she’s here somewhere”--it gave him pleasure to feel himself

master of a company among whom distinguished names might be casually

mislaid. “Haven’t you seen her?” “I’ve never met her.” “I’ll introduce

you to her.” He lifted his tall amber glass with an air: I saw that his

dark eyebrows, which he was always raising in conversation with the air

of a man of the world, nearly met above his nose.

He led me over to the divan. Rita Cavanagh was a sharp-nosed little

thing with mousey bobbed hair; she wore a shabby black dress. She was

so small that I hadn’t noticed her. But, as I shook hands with her,

she gave me from eyes of a greenish uncertain color, a curious alert

intent look, as of a fox peering out from covert. She was curled up in

the middle of the divan and evidently the centre of its company. I told

her how much I had liked her poems.

Ray Coleman, with smiling politeness, requested her to recite. “Did

you know I’d been asked to read in public?” she said. She spoke in

rather a dry staccato voice, and with something like an English accent,

which seemed to me artificial.--“Where is that?” inquired Ray Coleman.

“At the Poets’ League.”--“Well, you’re going to do it, aren’t you?”

said a young man who looked like a baseball player. “Well, would you?

Do you think it’s the thing to do?” She took a brief puff at her

cigarette--staccato and precise. “Do they offer you money?” asked the

man. “Yes.” “Then do it!” “But they come up and talk to you afterwards,

and you’re supposed to answer their questions. What would you _say_ to

them?” “Say to them?” said the young man. “What did Shakespeare say to

the horses? _Whoa! Get over there! Back up!_” She laughed, puckering

her eyes, and again raised the cigarette.

This young man, I felt, was a good fellow--his hulking frame, his

jutting brow and his prognathous jaw seemed to mask some gentleness

and modesty--but I had the impression that he was jealously straining

toward Rita with a maximum of nervous effort, was almost, in fact, on

the point of seizing her; and I felt that all the three other men about

her were bent in the same direction; and that I myself, though I had

only just met her, was about to become involved in the competition.

And, since I had told her that I liked her poems and since she had

turned to me, acknowledging my compliments, as if they had gratified

her especially, I began to find myself resenting the other men almost

as rivals.

She laughed--on distinct, impish, economized notes: “I might take an

apple with me,” she said, “or a lump of sugar.” “Couldn’t you rehearse

a little for us?” Ray Coleman suggested, inclining and smiling again.

“You’ll find us an appreciative audience!”--“This is one that I

wrote to-day,” she said, taking a last puff at her cigarette--“This

very day!” And, sitting back against the wall behind the couch,

straightening her neck and throwing up her head, she began to recite.

The effect was, at first, to embarrass me: it was a little as if a

Shakespearian actor were suddenly, off the stage, to begin expressing

private emotions with the intonations of the play. The only girl I had

ever known who had been able to write respectable poetry had been in

the habit of reading aloud--when she read aloud at all--as if her poems

had been compositions which she had never seen before, poems written by

some other person and by some one of whom she disapproved. But in the

gradual silence of the room, amid the respect with which all seemed to

turn toward her, those deep sonorities of sorrow and wonder began to

move me as much as a play. I had admired, in reading her lyrics, the

uncounterfeitable force of sincerity which, in dealing with classic

themes--themes in other hands commonplace--the longing for home, the

shortness of life, the passing of love--with an effect both of boldness

and austerity, had not hesitated to clothe them in an imagery drawn

directly from ordinary life. But I had not known, till I heard her

recite, to what music these things had been tuned: all her art was in

her ear; her words had little color for the eye. Now, in the poem which

she had told us she had just written, she described a bonfire built on

the beach, which shut out for those around it the empty weight of the

waters and the desolate litter of the shore, where a poor disfeatured

corpse lay, worried by unresting waves, among the seaweed, bleached

boards and dead dogfish--as the joy which we know to be doomed may seem

yet to overflow the moment. And in a second poem, the sight of two

children--one blotted from birth in face and mind, the other creeping

on wry spider legs--yet dressed and fed and sent out every morning

by the mothers of wretched streets to play with the other children,

was made to shake us with that despair--the dammed anguish of our own

frustration--which, in the presence of some pitiful human failure may

overcome us with the sudden conviction that no satisfactions can be

real beside the humiliations of life. And on her lips, the barrenness

of the shore, the dingy images of the streets, were a kind of song.

In the pause after the second poem, dramatically tense and distinct as

every syllable she had spoken, a smooth-faced and girlish boy whom, if

my attitude toward all the company had not been so much one of respect,

I should certainly have considered a fool, said, “That _does_ something

to me--that last one!” The baseball player shook his head and said:

“Gosh! that’s a knockout!” Rita said, “Yes: I’ve written that one since

I’ve seen you! You haven’t heard that one! I’m _so glad_ that you like

it!”

Somebody suddenly turned on the phonograph, which began jigging a

popular fox-trot. Ray Coleman went over and stopped it, and I saw him

engaged with his wife in what looked like a restrained altercation.

Then he returned to us, bringing Daisy. “I’m sorry,” he explained,

smiling--his smile was beginning to get on my nerves. “Daisy has the

phonograph habit: it’s like a drug--she can’t keep away from it! It was

unpardonable to jar on those lovely poems!”

“Yes,” said Daisy, “I hope you’ll forgive me, but I thought you were

all through.” “We had hoped that you weren’t,” insisted Ray. “I wish

you’d let us hear some more!” Rita replied, puckering up her eyes, “Oh,

I think that’s quite enough of me for one evening!”

“How sweet she looks in pink!” said Sue Borglum: Daisy had been

standing by like a bad little child reproved. “She looks like one of

those big pink bonbons on the top of a box of candy.” “Melt in your

mouth,” said Daisy, with her frank and charming grin.--“Speaking of

clothes,” said Rita, “has anybody seen Myra Busch since she got back

from Paris?” “_Have_ I?” returned Sue Borglum. “She says she bought it

all with what she got from writing for _McMoony’s_, but if she did,

_McMoony’s_ must pay her a damn sight more than they ever paid me.

She’s so wide-eyed about it, too! I asked her if she hadn’t been able

to find a night to go with that lace nightgown.” “Oh, Myra Busch is a

push-over!” said Daisy, a little snappishly. “She’s got round heels!”

Sue Borglum’s pleasantry had been in the vein of the Village; Daisy’s

was in the taste of Broadway--I do not know which, at that period,

enchanted me the more. Since I had come back to America from France, I

had been noticing with a new attention the way the Americans talked:

I had read, with astonished gratification, the first books of those

American writers who seemed making a new kind of literature out of

that sprawling square-syllabled speech where the words had been like

colorless frame-houses on the outskirts of an American town, a language

fit only, it had seemed, for the uses of a prosaic trade or of a

plebeian extravagance and irony. And I noted American slang with an

interest self-conscious and pedantic.

I felt, however, that Daisy’s husband disapproved of her coarseness and

sharpness, and I resented his failure to appreciate her.

“I understand you caught a thief,” said Sue Borglum, addressing Ray.

“Yes,” said Ray, with satisfaction. “Caught him, convicted him, and

sent him where he’ll do no more thieving.” “Burglar or sneak-thief?”

asked Sue Borglum. “All kinds of a thief!” replied Ray. “He got into

the house in broad daylight. Somebody rang the bell last Sunday

afternoon, and I pressed the button to open the door, but nobody came

up. Now, I always make it a rule, whenever that happens, to go down and

find out what’s up!”

I had often in my own apartment responded to these false alarms, but

checking up on them, I reflected, was like Crainquebille’s prison

stool chained to the leg of the bed--an idea which would never have

occurred to me.

“I went down,” Ray Coleman continued, following Daisy with his eyes,

as she quietly detached herself from the group and went back in the

direction of the phonograph, “but there was nobody in the hall--and

nobody on the floor below. Then I went to all the other apartments and

asked whether anybody had just come in, and they all said that nobody

had. Then I went back and got a gun and a flashlight, and I went down

into the basement. I held the flashlight out to one side, so that if he

fired he wouldn’t hit me. And lo and behold! there was Mr. Thief hiding

in the coalbin! I covered him with the gun and asked him what he was

up to, and he began telling me a long sob-story about how he hadn’t

any place to sleep and had just come in to spend the night.” Smiling

steadily, he gazed at Daisy, who had gone back to the corner again to

talk to the anomalous little man with the dark amusing eyes, the natty

blue suit and the belling sailor’s trousers. “I said, ‘Well, you just

wait here awhile till we find out a little more about that story,’

and I locked him in the basement and telephoned the police. When we

searched him we found all the jewelry hidden away in his shoes!--two

stick-pins, a ring and a wrist-watch, and five dollars in bills and

change. He’d stolen them from a man in Eleventh Street!” “Oh, they

weren’t your things, then!” said Rita, who had been listening with

that odd tension which she seemed to apply to everything, whether of

absorbing interest or not.

“Oh, no,” Ray heartily reassured her. “He didn’t get anything of

ours. He didn’t get the chance! I’ve got some etchings and some

valuable firsts--so I can’t afford to take risks. And Daisy has an

ostrich-feather evening wrap that’s worth three hundred dollars. The

fellow on Eleventh Street had missed a lot of other things, too; but

they couldn’t get the little bastard to tell them what had become of

them. They beat him up at the station, but they couldn’t get him to

tell--he was just sullen. A West Indian boy. We ought to have some way

of keeping such scum out of the country. If they’d only do with all

the criminals”--he spoke with a sort of exaltation and his eyes were

rapt away to Daisy--“if they’d only do with all the criminals what

they do with the regular gunmen! They’re not supposed to beat a man

up more than just so much, you know--but the way that they get around

that in the case of the big thugs is to send them around from one

police station to the other. As soon as they get done with them in one

place, they just send them along to another--so that the men in any one

station can always say they haven’t beaten ’em up more than just so

much, and yet they can give ’em all they want. If they’d been able to

do that with my West Indian friend, we might have found out about the

silk bathrobe that he’d stolen from the man on Eleventh Street.”

“Yes,” said Hugo, whose eyes, behind his spectacles, I had felt

beginning to glow with antagonism. “They might even have made him

confess to stealing the towers of Notre Dame!” “What do you mean?”

asked Ray. “I mean, if you torture anybody long enough, you can make

them confess to anything. That was what the Inquisition did, wasn’t it?”

I perceived that, although Ray Coleman enjoyed entertaining poets and

radical journalists, he was far from sharing the humanitarian feeling

which at that epoch pervaded the Village. I had thought, when I first

came in, that his dinner-jacket struck for the Village an unfamiliar

and incongruous note; and I was growing more and more sympathetic with

Daisy. I began to concoct an ironic short story, something rather

in the vein of _Crainquebille_ or of Maupassant’s _Boule de Suif_,

in which a vulgar but charming little wife was to be patronized and

bullied by her husband--who would be editor of a popular newspaper:

one day when the husband had gone out, the wife was to find in the

basement a poor starving tailor’s boy, who would tell her of the petty

tyrannies of the presser for whom he had worked. And, remembering her

life on the stage--the cruelties of the living curtain; remembering the

harshness of her husband--all that money-grubbing anti-human world in

which she had always found her own life so harassed--she would listen

to the boy with sympathy, and would be just on the point of offering

him some clothes and something to eat, when the husband would return

with the police; the boy would turn out to be a thief whom the husband

had caught and locked up!--There would have to be something more to it,

though--I would think about it later.

In the meantime, Hugo’s skirmish with Ray had ended in an emphatically

disguised evasion on the latter’s part as he had become aware that

his attitude toward criminals might be considered intellectual bad

form. I inquired of Hugo, aside, where Daisy Coleman came from. “From

Pittsburgh, I think,” he replied--then still chafing with repressed

resentment over his argument with Ray, he added: “You never seem to be

able to take people for granted!--you always want to know where they

come from!” I answered that those things interested me.

And I brooded a little on Pittsburgh--I had been there as a boy--my

mother had had a school-friend who had married and gone to live

there, and we had visited them once. They had lived in a massive and

formidable house, with dingy Ionic pillars, and with blue and green

stained-glass windows which, far from adorning the interior, had seemed

to me at the time merely sombre, forbidding and blind--there had been a

boy about my age called Junior, and he had had a great many expensive

toys; an Indian costume and a military costume (which I had thought

a good deal of a bore) and the most elaborate toy railroad that I

had ever seen outside a toy-store--a labyrinth of signals, switches,

turntables and tunnels; it had covered the floors of several rooms and

rendered them uninhabitable. This boy had also had fencing foils; a

real rifle; a thing that he told you to look through but which squirted

water into your eye; and a device of rubber tubes and bulbs, which

made plates jump up and down on the table. These luxuries had strongly

impressed me and they now presented themselves to my mind--as well

as Junior’s egoism and arrogance, the arrogance of an over-indulged

child, which had kept me from quite getting on with him. Now, as I

remembered it for the first time in years, I found that I detested that

household. There had been a Pennsylvania Dutch father, who had made

money in the coke business and whose domineering silences had oppressed

the dining-table; and there had been a mother who had been always

playing the piano, and singing, with inexhaustible vivacity, the scores

of old musical comedies--from the _Sultan of Sulu_ to _Forty-five

Minutes from Broadway_--which she had heard in New York. I had, at

the time I came to live in the Village, developed something of that

inverted snobbishness which, in Hugo’s case, had impelled him to go to

all the garment-workers’ balls at the same time that he would grimly

decline a dinner where he knew he would be expected to dress; and I had

at that moment the kind of emotions which I thought Hugo would probably

have in connection with a large heavy house inhabited by a Pittsburgh

capitalist. Thank heaven! I said to myself, spurred no doubt by Hugo’s

rebuke, if I ever go to Pittsburgh again, I shan’t have to be visiting

there! Here, in Daisy, is the real vital Pittsburgh: frank, vulgar,

humorous, human!

“She married some fellow from Pittsburgh, I think, before she married

Ray Coleman,” added Hugo, after a moment during which he had gulped his

drink, self-consciously and hurriedly--he was excessively sensitive

and so haunted by the fear of hurting people’s feelings that his

sharpness was invariably followed by a spasm of special affability.

“They made a honeymoon trip on a motor-cycle from Pittsburgh to

Atlantic City. They had all kinds of fantastic accidents. She told me

about it once. It must have been awfully fine!” I, too, thought that

it must have been fine. That was the real, the live America--where our

bravery and freedom lay! I drank my highball up. I saw them, skidding

breathtakingly in the ditches--skinned, bruised and mud-beplastered!

Dodging motors and trucks, shaking off towns and cities, like twigs

that had been caught in their wheels and had scraped the mud-guard

a little, and had then been whipped away!--masters of that new and

American and almost super-human sense--the sense of motor traffic!

Till, at last, after boiling hot baths, they had lain clean in Atlantic

City, in their clean-sheeted hotel bed, with the ice-water in the

pitcher and the room as warm as a hothouse. In the morning, they would

have breakfast in bed!

Hugo had turned away to bubble, giggle, and gasp to a radical

journalist with a harsh western accent and extraordinary personal

charm: I rose to talk to the theatrical designer, who, with deep-lodged

slit-eyed self-satisfaction, stood near me, his arms folded, unmoved

by what went on about him. “Are you doing any shows,” I asked, “this

spring?” “Just the ballet in the _Merry-Go-Round_” he answered. “Next

year,” he went on to explain, “I want to stage the Iliad and the

Odyssey.” “The Iliad and the Odyssey?” I repeated a little blankly.

“I want to do them in a cycle,” he said--“something like Wagner’s

Ring.” “How long would it take?” I inquired. “Not more than a week,”

he replied. “I shan’t try to have everything, of course. I’ll have

to leave out a good many incidents--though I believe that, when the

public have been interested, I’ll be able to put it on in an outdoor

stadium and do it on a bigger scale--there would be a week for each. My

production next fall would be an experiment with that in view.” “That

would be awfully interesting,” I said: the air then, especially in

the theatre, was so full of high novelty and striving that no project

seemed impossible. “What sort of text are you going to use?” “Fritz

Fishbein is making an adaptation of Butcher and Lang--it’s in a sort of

free verse, that will be chanted to music. Boulomé is working out the

old Greek modes, so that we’ll have music that will be really Greek.”

“That sounds extremely interesting,” I repeated.--“Come in here,” he

said, “and I’ll show you the drawings.”

He led me into a little study with a desk, a window-seat and some

bookcases, and opened on the desk a large portfolio--I don’t know how

he happened to have it there. “How,” I asked, “are you going to do the

clangor of Apollo’s silver bow?” “I’m not going to do it,” he said,

“that is, I’m not going to make the attempt to reproduce the sound.

I’m not going to do anything realistically. There’ll be no sound at

all. You’ll just see Apollo off on a hill--just a little silhouette,

perfectly black, but awful, you know--with a bow in his hands. And

then every one will cover their ears and sink down to the ground, and

the stage will turn green-black, and then everything will be black.”

I turned over the water-color drawings, so beautifully and lovingly

covered with large clinging sheets of tissue-paper. “What’s this one?”

I asked. “That’s the slaying of the suitors in the Odyssey.” “They look

a little like white rats,” I commented. “Yes: I meant to give that

suggestion--those are masks that they’re to wear throughout the play.”

I had never heard before of using masks.

Rita Cavanagh had come up behind us, and I made room for her to look at

the drawings. I had been aware of her voice in the next room saying:

“Oh, Bobby McIlvaine’s showing his Homer designs!--I want to see them!”

“Oh, what a beautiful Pallas Athena!” she cried, as she stood over the

portfolio beside me. I noticed again how shabby her black dress was:

she must be very poor, I thought. “Almost like a man!” she continued.

It was a figure all in silver-gray, spare, upstanding and clean, like

some male heroic woman of the Village--with a helmet that shaded its

eyes and with an owl perched on its shoulder--rather an odd-looking

owl, I thought: thin and long, like Athena herself, but like her,

austere and impressive. And I found myself delighted--especially now

that Rita Cavanagh was admiring them--with McIlvaine’s designs for

Homer. I seemed to see that, for all their eccentricity, they were

closer to the spirit of the poems than the sobriety and smoothness of

conventional representations: they had something of the unclassical

stiffness of archaic Greek sculpture. Rita Cavanagh smiled, and I

smiled, at Venus caught in the net with Mars, her little rose-dotted

breasts a charming pink behind the gold meshes.

Hugo suddenly blundered into the room in his purblind big-booted

way and took down his old felt hat from the bookcase--where he had

carefully put it, I realized, in order to get at it quickly and without

searching among the other hats. I wondered how he could bring himself

to leave so enchanting a party so soon. He signalled to me a friendly,

but detached and remote, farewell--stooping, stuttered and bubbled

good-nights over Rita and Bobby McIlvaine--and abruptly was gone. I

heard him ask in the next room: “Where’s Daisy?” and the host reply, as

if with humorous frankness: “I don’t know where she is!”

“Oh, what _lovely_ browns and grays!” breathed Rita, before the

autumnal smock of Eumæus. “I never saw such lovely browns!” Her

italicized “lovely” was not gushing, but had a sort of disinterested

and passionate conviction. That was the sort of thing that impressed

me about her. She seemed to feast upon the color, eating it with her

eyes. I should myself have stopped at something brighter, and I felt

guiltily that I should have been wrong. But she lingered over Eumæus:

“Like the leaves in October!” she went on. “Like the leaves in the

autumn mud! Such delicacy and such color standing out against something

neutral--and common!”

The baseball player, or whatever he was, whom I had noticed on the

divan, was now standing in the doorway, with his hat in his hand. “I’m

going along, Rita,” he said, “take you over if you’re ready to go!” I

saw that he was unsure and self-conscious. “I’m not going for a long

time yet,” she replied--her voice had the tautness, the distinctness

and the metallic quality of wire--though of a wire which twanged with

the vibrations of some strong and superior temper; yet she tried at

the same time to smile at him with a definite effect of good-will, at

once elfin and sharply registered, as she added for his consolation: “I

don’t want to be taken home to-night, anyway. I came alone, and I want

to go home alone! I’m an independent woman, I am!” “Well, go ahead and

have your old single standard!” he met her, putting humorously his best

face on it, and disappeared from the doorway.

She turned over to a group of nymphs, the wild girls of some northern

loch. “Some people think they’re not graceful enough for nymphs,” said

McIlvaine, without expression. “People who say they’re not graceful,”

said Rita, “don’t know anything about grace!” She spoke with a

passionate vehemence which seemed to me rather excessive--yet I felt

something of the awe of the infidel who overhears the prayer of the

believer. “They think that grace has something to do with round bodies

and Greek dancing! These nymphs of yours _are_ beautiful!--they have

the natural beauty of country girls--they’re graceful even when they’re

gawky and awkward!”

The pretty boy--the one who had asserted that Rita’s poem had “done

something” to him--glided behind her in a sinuous newtish way and

slid one arm about her waist. His hair was glossy and parted in the

middle and he was scarcely taller than she: his tapering and shapely

hand, which I saw--and saw with distaste--lying against her black

dress, would have seemed too small for a man’s, if her own hands had

not been so tiny--not with the American thinness of Daisy’s, but with

a miniature complete beauty, at once childlike and mature, as of

some muse or magic being. He did not speak at once, but looked with

her.--The next picture represented Penelope, who had an unexpected

proud angularity.

“Won’t Ulysses get hell,” said the boy, “when he comes back home from

his trip!” “No,” said Rita, “she’s noble!” “Yes,” the boy acquiesced at

once, “she’s beautifully done! Great austerity! Great restraint!”

She had come to the blank cover at the back and slowly turned it over,

almost as if with reverence. “I think they’re _beautiful!_” she said,

“_beautiful!_” I had heard people say that the flowers were beautiful,

or that the front room was beautiful, or even that the view of the

Hudson or the painting of Renoir was beautiful--but I had never before

heard it said with such authority and such simple intensity. Though

still shy of her unconvincing accent and suspicious of a pose, I was,

in regions just beneath the surface, excited by this authority and

intensity--I found myself heated, too, by the fire which the drawings

had seemed so to kindle in her. Bobby McIlvaine accepted her tribute in

silence distended by pride and tied up the strings of the portfolio. I

said: “I must go to see your ballet!” “It’s not much,” he replied, “but

the white is something to see.”

“Well, Princess,” said Rita’s friend, the boy with the insinuating

hands, “are you ready to sail away?” I realized that her rôle of

princess was a part of some romance which they had spun together, and

I divined, in another moment, that it was a romance of which she was

tired. “No,” she said, “I want to stay a little longer,” and added,

with her elfin smile: “Send the boatman back at twelve!”--He swept low

an invisible plumed hat.--“Leave the outside bolts open: I can push the

door myself!”--He bowed again and backed away, and, as he retreated,

she became more amusing, entering more willingly into the spirit of

the legend which they had evidently elaborated, which they had perhaps

lived, together.--“But shut the watchdogs in their kennels, so that

they won’t bay at me when I come. Tell the old woman who makes the

fires that she shall have her snuff on Thursday, and that I shan’t wake

her from sleep to-night, when she’s dreaming of the little stony river

of her girlhood in the North.--Tell her to mind the fire, though,” she

added, giving good measure to her friend, who now impressed me rather

disconcertingly as perhaps not a boy at all, but a man of mature years

whose coquetry was wearing stale.--“Though sleep is sweet, the sparks

are always flying, even after the faggot is dead!”

Some originality I felt in her having so entered into the old woman,

who seemed to have nothing to do with the plumed hat which her partner

was pretending to doff, interested me and made me like her, just when I

was beginning to be rather sickened by this business about the Princess

and the boatman.

I could hear the voice of her admirer, as he left, just outside the

study door, saying good-night to Ray Coleman and asking him where

Daisy was, and Coleman’s voice replying, as if in frank humorous

confession, disclaiming all responsibility: “I don’t know! I haven’t

the slightest idea!”--Bobby McIlvaine, who had put away his drawings,

and, having finished his own performance, was not disposed to be

interested in the comedy which Rita and her friend were acting, had

also gone out of the room.

“That river your old woman dreams about,” I began, hoping to keep Rita

there, “sounds like something in up-state New York.” She looked up at

me in her unaccountable, quick, nervous, searching way: “Do you come

from there?” she asked. “No,” I said, “but I’ve been there a good

deal.” She had a way of scrupulously following, of checking up with a

special exactitude which suggested anxious conscious effort, all the

moves of social intercourse, at the same time that she seemed always

preoccupied with something different and more absorbing; she now nodded

and lifted a moment a brief interested stare.

“Let’s sit down here, shall we?” she proposed, moving toward the

window-seat. She curled up in one of the corners. “Do turn away that

light--it’s so bright!” I turned aside the adjustable desk-light which

was the only illumination in the room so that it lit only the farther

wall: then I sat down on the window-seat, leaning up against the

opposite corner.

Below the window lay Washington Square: it was still smooth and

gleaming with wet. When I had come home before dinner to dress, idle,

happy, and vaguely expectant, breathing in the rainy sidewalks of

the last day of May, I had seen the sky, above the bulk of office

buildings, high-piled with white banks of solid light, and in the

Square, had found the pavements swimming with milky pallors and

freshened by tenderest green. When I had gone to meet Hugo at the

Brevoort, I had seen a pale peach-silver sun dissolving the light

tree-fringes at the corner of the Avenue. Now these wonders had

sprung from that delight--so long and so varied the days were! It was

dark--there were the lamps and the taxis with their impudent brisk

honking--spinning away through rainy May in the wet relieved fresh

freedom.

Rita was looking out the window with her same strange trancèd

seriousness. I asked: “Don’t you like the city just after it’s been

raining? Hear how happy the taxis sound!” She smiled and said simply,

“Yes.” I wondered whether she were still thinking of the drawings,

of which I was almost becoming jealous. “Don’t you feel a little,

though,” I ventured, “that it robs Homer of his own kind of subtlety

to deliberately make him exotic by translating him into terms of

the Russian ballet?” “Why--I hadn’t thought of that,” she said. “I

hadn’t thought of the Russian ballet. I thought those drawings were

beautiful in themselves--quite apart from Homer perhaps.” Then she

added, after a pause: “That figure of Pallas Athena--so slender--so

strong--so grave--so lightly built--as strong and yet as light as her

spear! No _man_ could ever combine that power and that lightness!”

“Yes,” I said, “that’s true, isn’t it?” “And then they talk,” she went

on, “about women never having done anything really important! When

the Greeks made the goddess of wisdom a woman! And just as important

a woman goddess as the goddess of love!” I tried to assure her that

I understood: “Yes, I know,” I replied, “men are always expecting

the wrong things of women, aren’t they?”--while before my mind there

aligned themselves, in the guise of long slender javelins, the long

slender sentences of John Stuart Mill on the Subjection of Women.

“It’s so _false_ of them,” she went on. “You know, some people who

pretend to admire independence in women really want to prevent them

from doing things! They think that a woman’s work is something she can

put aside, as if she were laying down her knitting--or her embroidery!

Whatever they may say, they can’t really believe in their hearts that

her work is the thing she lives for, that she puts above everything and

everybody!”

I assented briefly, but with earnest emphasis: the generous flow of

my feeling had been perhaps a moment impeded by the “above everything

and everybody”: my mounting moral exaltation lapsed for a space

into a brooding happiness which hovered outside the window over the

rain-freshened square--those romantic lamps that burned all night,

while all night the speeding taxis, plying in happy privacy to a

thousand dark addresses, took people, took lovers, home. To that part

of my mind, however--the part which had been talking to Rita--from

which my attention had been withdrawn, there presented itself a stupid

remark: “I have read John Stuart Mill on the Subjection of Women!”

But it was Rita who, after a silence, went on with the conversation:

“I’m so _tired_ of people,”--she spoke with violence--“who pretend to

understand what women feel about things!--and then behave like any

stupid stock-broker, who keeps a wife just as he keeps a car!--The

stock-broker would really be more sensible, because he’d expect to give

his wife certain things in return for what she gave him--she’d at least

be paid in comfort and money for what she lost in independence!” The

figure of the baseball player rose in my imagination: a good fellow, no

doubt, but dull and boorish, with no subtlety and no high honor in his

relations with women; quite unworthy of Rita! I was all on Rita’s side

now: how I could share her fierceness against fools!--“I don’t believe

_any_ man can understand!” But this seemed to shut me out again, and

again I gazed out into the Square.

I was, however, after a moment, on the point of attempting to convince

her that she might find that _I_ understood, when of a sudden, so

peremptory and clear that we looked at each other startled, we heard

from the next room, which we now became aware had been silent, the

voice of Ray Coleman demanding: “Well, what have you got to say?”--and

then Daisy Coleman, replying in a voice which sounded constrained,

“Where’s all the party gone to?” “You can see for yourself they’ve all

gone home: I suppose they saw that the hostess had left and decided

that they didn’t want to stay!” “We weren’t gone so long, were we?”

said Daisy. “I just went around the corner with Pete to get a glass of

beer.” “You’ve been gone for an hour and a half!--And you!” he went on

vehemently, evidently addressing Daisy’s late companion--the little

man with the large eyes, I imagined. “You weren’t invited here to-night

and you can leave right away!” “I invited him,” said Daisy. “Well, I

asked you not to invite him!--Now, get out of here right away!--No:

your things are not in there!--There’s your coat in the fireplace!--and

there’s your stick in pieces over there!--and I threw your hat out the

window! Maybe you can find it in the street!--Now, don’t stand there

staring at me like that, but get out!” We heard him slam the door.

Rita and I got up quickly from the window-seat, but the tirade which

followed checked us. “You humiliate me in my house!”--now that Ray

Coleman had Daisy alone, he opened upon her his fiercest fire. “You

drive my friends away! You send C. O. D. packages home!” “I had to have

some stockings for to-night!” “Well, why didn’t you ask me for them? I

won’t have you running up bills!” “Well, I can’t see what’s the idea of

this big third act!” “I told you not to bring that little rat here!”

“Well, you have all _your_ friends--I don’t see why I shouldn’t have

mine!” “You sat in there on the window-seat and let him see your legs!”

“We were just telling jokes in there--Gus Dunbar was in there, too.”

“I don’t mind having Gus see your legs--he’s a friend of the family,

but--” “Well, will you just let me have a list of all the family

friends that you’re willing to have see my legs?” “Don’t be vulgar!” he

replied.

Rita determinedly and swiftly broke into the lighted room, and

I followed her. “I must really go,” she said. “It’s been such a

marvellous party!--I’ve been having such a marvellous time that I’ve

stayed much too late!” I made my apologies, also, and got Rita’s coat

out of the bedroom and helped her on with it. “Why, it’s not late at

all,” said Ray Coleman. “I’m afraid it’s we who haven’t been very

entertaining!” When we said good-by to Daisy, she merely met us with a

pale drunken gaze, and remarked: “Well, I opened cold!”

Outside, I caught a taxi and asked Rita where she lived. “Oh, dear,”

she demurred, “I don’t think I want to go home. I think I’ll go to

somebody’s house--let’s see, whose house shall I go to?” I asked her if

she wouldn’t come to my house. “But you want to go to bed, don’t you?”

I assured her that I didn’t, for hours.

“Pretty painful scene that was!” I remarked when we had started in the

taxi. “I shouldn’t think she’d stay with him.” “No,” said Rita, but

assenting, it struck me, from some different point of view than mine.

“She’s such a dear, isn’t she?” I went on. “Yes,” she said. “She’s so

beautifully made, isn’t she?--her ankles and wrists.” I thought of

Daisy under the guise of Bobby McIlvaine’s little blond Venus caught

in the net with Mars. “What do you make of him?” I asked. “He’s pretty

poisonous, isn’t he?” She looked up at me with a little appreciative

smile, as if my saying that Coleman was poisonous had been an original

deliberate joke, instead of a familiar cliché. Then, “He’s very jealous

of her,” she said; and then: “Yes, he is _poisonous!_” Her way of

agreeing that he was poisonous made it neither a cliché nor a joke,

but something convinced and bitter. “All jealousy is poisonous: it

poisons the woman as well as the man--it makes both of them suspicious

of all that has ever been between them--and even when they want to be

nice, they sound hateful to each other!” I remembered some novel of

Wells in which the hero had overcome jealousy along with a number of

other ignoble and anti-social emotions: I reflected that it was very

foolish and very base to be jealous. However: “I suppose,” I said,

“that working for the _Telegram-Dispatch_ makes him hate himself, and

so makes him awfully irritable. How can people who are really sensitive

and intelligent--as I have no doubt he is--but who are obliged to

spend all their working hours feeding the public libels and lies--how

can they possibly be amiable at home?” “Yes,” she said, “such lies

they print!--such cowardly lies! And even if the facts are true, they

cheapen the emotions behind them--and to cheapen human passion, human

suffering, is to lie! Like poor Lina Lemberg’s letters.” (Lina Lemberg

was a young Polish girl, who had recently murdered her husband, and

been much on the front page.) “They may have been illiterate and

clumsy, but they meant something real.--To tear people’s hearts to

pieces for all the grinning crowd to see--and pick up a bit of it and

finger it, and perhaps wish they had one, too, and hate the people who

have--and then throw it back in the gutter again!” Her passion had

not ceased to surprise me. She still seemed a little theatrical, but

I had never heard a woman speak so eloquently. “Yes: that’s just what

happens,” I said--it was all that I could say: I felt that I could

never express myself so well nor feel what I said so intensely.

I lived in Bank Street then, and the taxi had stopped at my door. Rita

waited for me on the sidewalk while I was paying the driver: her little

face seemed narrow and thin--almost nunlike.

When we had climbed to my apartment, and I had turned on the light,

I was ashamed of the prospect disclosed. There were a large and

comfortable couch, sets of books in glass-doored bookcases, Whistler’s

“Battersea Bridge,” and a drawing by Leonardo, which I had brought

up with me from college, a small mahogany desk, a green carpet and

a French clock. Besides, the maid had been there that morning and

everything was swept and neat. I was afraid that she would see at

once--if she had not already guessed--that I was really not one of

them, that I had never paid their price. The luxurious couch seemed

vulgar; the sets in the bookcases pedantic; the pictures unbearably

banal; and the little mahogany desk appropriate kindling-wood for the

social revolution. I attempted to call attention to the only feature of

the place which might be considered Bohemian and raffish: “That’s not

the right time,” I pointed out. “That clock hasn’t gone for years!”

“Oh, isn’t this nice!” she exclaimed, looking quickly and interestedly

about her. There was a little alcove off the sitting-room which I used

as a study, and she stood looking into it, as if entranced. “Do you

work in there?” she exclaimed. “What a _wonderful_ place to work!” She

came back and sat down on the couch: “Oh, it’s so _nice_ here!--so

_nice!_” she smiled in an ecstatic childlike way.

I felt, at any rate, that she meant it, and that I possessed an

unexpected advantage. None the less, I was a little diffident about

producing a bottle of peach brandy, as I had seen her drinking whiskey

straight at the Colemans’ party: I brought out both liqueur and Scotch,

and deprecatingly remarked that I didn’t suppose she’d care for the

former. “I’d love some!” she said.--“What a lovely label! It looks like

lace, doesn’t it?--like lace made out of wire!”

“You know,” she went on, “I have no place of my own to work in now--and

I miss it so! I’m living with my mother and sister, and the apartment

is so small! I have to write with the sewing-machine going in the next

room.” “Oh, what a pity!” I said, “I should think it would drive you

crazy. I know how nervous it makes you to have something going on to

a different kind of rhythm from the one you’re writing to!” “Do you

write?” she asked. “I try to write poetry--but I’m not any good.” “I’d

like to hear your poems,” she said, looking up with an intent gaze

which seemed to pierce the politeness of her remark. “No,” I replied.

“After hearing yours to-night, I wouldn’t have the nerve to show you

mine.--I don’t suppose you’d recite again the ones that you recited at

the party.” “I’m so glad that you liked them,” she said, again with

that incongruous intensity which gave sincerity and significance to

even her formulas of courtesy. “I just wrote them, and I like them

myself,” she smiled with her funny grin, which left her as serious

and as strangely pressing as before. She sat back against the couch,

dropped her cigarette to her lap and recited the poems again--more

beautifully, it seemed to me, than the first time: her voice, in the

silent room, sounded lonely, and I was stirred and awed to be alone

with this living voice of poetry.

All to me was a wonder then--her old dress, her mother’s

sewing-machine, her wide gamine’s grin, her formidable dignity and her

feverish preoccupation with some unexplained disturbing reality which I

was coming more and more to feel underlay everything she did. It was,

I came to see, as she recited, the same thing--a kind of moral agony,

unremitting and exalted--which made it possible for her, in her poetry,

to deal with commonplace ideas--as she worked often with the tritest

figures, the old debased currency of verse, which poets had then begun

to pride themselves on ceasing to try to pass--making them carry

whatever passion and whatever strangeness she chose.

Her cheeks were fiery now--all her face was suffused with fierce pink,

and I saw that there was red in her hair. I saw now for the first

time that she was beautiful. Her brow was very high and wide, and the

resonant voice with which she recited--so different from her quick

dry speech, a mere pizzicato of those strings--seemed the full-toned

and proper music of what I saw now also for the first time was a long

and lovely throat of a solidity and complexity of symmetry, like some

harmoniously swollen musical instrument, almost incongruous with her

tiny body--and through which now the lonely beach, beyond the meagre

moment of fire, and the futile devotion of the mother to the blemished

and dim-witted child, sounded the chords of some mode of feeling more

profound than our human sadness, some ground-tone where human emotion

becomes merely the process of life, of life in its labor through the

universe. I knew, what I had never really felt in my intercourse with

friends who had written, that literature could be reality--as natural

as conversation, yet as deep as life itself.

For I have not, in speaking of these poems, in any adequate way

described them: they were poems about love, and in them what was true

of love was true not of love only. And even now, in this part of what

I write, which deals with feelings and thoughts most remote from me,

least real to the mind that writes--at the memory of that music, I halt

and lose my way.

In another poem, which I had never seen, and which she had also

recently written, she had some image of a swift up-country river

lacerated by rapids, where a smooth and lovely flock of stones forever

tumbled and crashed into splinters the black-silver mirror of its

deeps, dismissing it, fiercer at first, then thin, querulous and

shredded, divided in the threads of feebler streams that drip at last

over slimy mossy banks among the last orange drops of the jewel-weed,

and lose themselves in the fields. I have turned it all into ordinary

literature, over-animating the water, describing the jewel-weed too

exactly (it is I who supply the drops: she had only named the flower).

I have used too many adjectives: she had only the barest verbs and

nouns; but she woke through them the resonant ache of the throaty sound

of the river, so noble in its dwindled fall. And I, knowing enough of

literature to enjoy the consummate art, but not yet enough of life,

to assent with my heart to the terror, the terror mastered by the

mind, and clutched and wrenched into beauty, which I could only half

divine, but which troubled me and made me solemn, could only tell her

how wonderful I thought it, as if it had been merely a dress she had

been wearing or a garden she had grown. And I sounded even sillier and

lamer when I added: “I’ve seen those up-state rivers: I know exactly

what you mean!” “Yes, I knew you did,” she replied, “when you said that

something I said this evening sounded like a New York State river. I

come from up there, you know, and I’ve been getting homesick lately.

That was why I was talking about rivers--and why I wrote that poem.”

I was silent, and she looked beyond the lamp, through the little dark

study, to where the moon seemed imbedded in the pane like a flaw of

pearl in dark blue glass. “How lovely the moon is!” she exclaimed in

her nervous, alert way. I looked out and answered: “Yes: it looks like

a bubble in the glass.” She noted the accuracy of this, checking it

up: “Yes, it does exactly!”--so emphatically that I felt pleased at

having said something clever. We stared at the moon without speaking--I

thinking, a little dazedly, of the perfect felicity of the moment, full

of brightness and freedom and peace--of the beauty of stony rivers, of

the pearly moon in the pane, of intoxicating coldness and poetry--of

stones, of lovely globes of a lunar fluidity of yolks, lodged unbroken

below the translucence of a limpid vitreous stream.

Then I recalled my wandering senses and suggested another drink.

“Oh, if I have another drink, I’ll be drunk!” she said, screwing

herself down in her corner and with a sudden rictus of her grin which

transmogrified her grossly in a strange tense glee.

But I could talk to her only of poetry--of those terrific images of the

commonplace by which the greatest poets can move us and which her own

poems had brought to my mind--the Roman street-corners of Catullus, the

prison-window of Verlaine, the race for the green flag at Verona which

Dante remembers in Hell. She had read extraordinarily widely for a

woman, and she talked about the poets as only a master can talk of the

masters of his craft and with the fierceness with which only a woman,

when woman’s narrow concentration has been displaced from its ordinary

objects, can concern itself with art--isolating in familiar poems

phrases I had never thought of: some armor-joint of a preposition which

rang with a solid sound or some unobtrusive adjective which troubled

the whole line.

It was cold: she put on her cloak and I wrapped her legs in a

blanket--but still we talked, and drank the peach brandy sip by sip. At

last, as I was gazing toward the window, I became aware of an indigo

deepness which deeply delighted me, like some full and triumphant

staining of emotion and thought. It was the blue of dawning June,

through which presently, as brooding I watched it, green and red began

darkly to deepen. The blue brightened and now was translucent, now

limpid, now dissolved. And, still talking of poetry, still quoting,

still eager and glowing with the images of that life of literature

which rejects or suppresses nothing that goes to make our common life,

but where all is passionate, noble and rich, I saw, as it were with

incredulity, that the brightening green and red were the rain-revived

trees and brick walls of my own backyards in Bank Street. Now even the

poor soiled yellows of the downtown tenement houses, the leaves of the

flaccid ailanthus swaying their fingery clusters in the stir of morning

air, through that first distinct light of day were seen washed with

libations of light--till it seemed to me that I had waked--or rather

that, without sleeping, I had passed--to the happier, more living hues

of a different world. And I knew, and knew with amazement, that we had

talked the night through, and only sunk deeper in spring.

“Good gracious! it’s morning!” she cried.--“Oh, no: it’s not so late,”

I assured her. “The nights are getting shorter.” She laughed and put

out a cigarette. “I must go home!” she said, springing up.

We found a taxi in Greenwich Avenue. She gave the directions to the

driver in her precise and compelling fashion. I invited her, in the

taxi, to come with me to see McIlvaine’s ballet. “I’d love to!” she

replied. We made an engagement for Tuesday (it was Sunday morning).

Then, with hesitation, I explained that I was never at home in

the daytime, and that if she needed a place to work, I should be

glad to have her use my apartment. She demurred, but I thought not

unpersuadably.

I left her at an incredible address beyond the Ninth Avenue

Elevated--on Twelfth Street, almost at the docks--one of two or three

red-brick houses among warehouses and sordid saloons. We parted, she

quite tired and pale, but with a queer tense final vibration even as I

left her in the doorway, just before, quickly closing the door, she

seemed to disappear in a flash.

It was day. I walked home through a little open square--Abingdon

Square, I saw with surprise: I had never heard of it before, though

it lay almost around the corner from where I lived. I gazed vaguely

at a statue of a man in a little triangular park and wondered who it

was--some legislator or some patriot, perhaps--some patriot in the old

style, like Garibaldi in Washington Square--some great man I had never

heard of in that region I had never discovered. Farther on, I became

aware of a kind of monumental stone pergola--it seemed to me then to

be in marble--which I didn’t understand--and which in my weariness, my

happy weariness, I didn’t try to. Some downtown equivalent of Grant’s

Tomb--but who was buried in it? It was almost like a temple. I was

still moving in that strange daytime world into which, by staying up

all night, I seemed to have been translated. Now the Village was at

last revealed to me; it had that day come alive about me, and I felt

myself part of its life. I, like them, had turned my back on all that

world of mediocre aims and prosaic compromises; and at that price--what

brave spirit would not pay it?--I had been set free to follow poetry!

In Bank Street, as I passed a presser’s shop, it occurred to me that it

would be, after all, a difficulty about the story which I had had the

idea of writing when I had heard about Ray Coleman’s thief, that the

presser’s boy would probably have escaped as soon as the wife opened

the door.

When I came back to my rooms again, they seemed no longer, through the

drowsy eyes of day, my own familiar husk: there was the couch where she

had sat--there was the ash-tray full of ashes--there were the glasses

from which we had drunk. I poured out the last sweet dregs of peach

brandy.

It was Sunday--I did not have to work. I dumped the Sunday paper on

the couch. I pulled down the shades in my bedroom--the sun made them

glow dull orange. I pulled Dante out and read the lines about the green

flag at Verona--and the scene with Beatrice that began, “_Dante, perchè

Virgilio se ne vada--grieve not, thou needst must grieve for another

wound!_”--but scarcely paying attention to the words, I pushed the book

back to the table and turned over on my cheek. Something or other I had

come for, I had found.

* * * * *

It was characteristic of Hugo Bamman--with whom I had gone to prep

school (though we had afterwards gone to different colleges), and

whose point of view, up to the night I met Rita, had, as I say, so

much influenced my own--that, at the height of a convivial evening,

he should take a sudden and determined departure. Even at parties

in Greenwich Village, with which he was in principle more nearly

sympathetic than with parties anywhere else, he would carefully isolate

his hat or hang it up in some specially conspicuous place. He was never

sure, even in the Village, when he might not feel that it was urgently

needed, as had been the case on the evening I have described, after his

argument with Ray Coleman. And when he once had his hat in his hands,

it was impossible to keep him. It was at the same time as if he had

suddenly become frightened, and as if he were under some obligation of

reporting for duty elsewhere.

And it was true that he did become frightened, and that he was, in a

certain sense, at the orders of a higher obligation. Hugo’s father

had been a well-to-do lawyer of a Philadelphia Quaker family; his

mother, a Bostonian. The elder Bamman, after serving with distinction

through three administrations at Washington as Solicitor General,

had been dislodged by the advent of the Democrats; and had thereupon

retired from public life and occupied himself with writing books. He

knew Shakespeare and Milton by heart and was given to quoting them

in conversation, and he already had a reputation for unconventional

political views; but nobody had been quite prepared for the

opinions which he now made public. His first book, which was called

_Representative Government, and the Way and the Light_, began with an

extremely realistic, and even cynical, discussion of American public

life and ended, with quotations from Isaiah, on an unexpected note of

religious clairvoyance.

It was said sometimes that Mr. Bamman had been embittered by his

enforced retirement; sometimes, that he was insane. It was not that he

had prophesied good of the Democrats: on the contrary, he had predicted

the worst; but he had appeared also to repudiate the Republicans. He

had asserted that, between the two parties, there was not a pin to

choose--that both were lost in corruption and error; and, what was

worse, that one could hope for nothing better from the society which

accepted their leadership and from the religion which allowed them to

survive. The book excited a certain amount of interest, was made the

subject of editorials; then was completely forgotten by everybody.

If I had not happened to know Hugo, I should never have looked it up

and read it. Thereafter--his wife having died and his sons gone away

to school--Mr. Bamman left Washington altogether and secluded himself

on a lonely island in an Adirondack lake, where he lived on fish and

game, cooked all his own meals and struck off another book even more

realistically pungent and even more apocalyptic than the first. He had

vowed to stay the winter out in his cabin, but in February he caught a

bad cold which developed into pneumonia, and, despite his protests, he

had to be removed to a town where he could have medical attention. His

sons were telegraphed at their school; and Hugo, blinking at his sudden

release from the agonizing life of prep school, where the boys made fun

of his ebullient stuttering, his inability to pronounce _r_, his stiff

intractable black hair, and his clothes, which were bought for him by

an aunt and which always looked too young for him, lifted his goggles

from the frozen ground and gazed about him with singular relief at the

ice-ponds and white houses of the North; read nervously half a chapter

of Meredith; and, at last, heard his father, dying, mingle texts from

Isaiah and Ezekiel with anxious queries about the pump at his camp,

which he seemed to fear was irremediably frozen, and with the names of

his sisters and his wife.

Hugo Bamman, after his father’s death, had spent his vacations with

the aunt in Philadelphia who had selected his neckties and suits, and

he had rebelled against her so violently, that he soon found himself

under suspicion of having inherited his father’s “queerness.” But the

more the aunt, who was an admirable person and felt her responsibility

acutely, tried to inculcate sound principles in Hugo, the more

resentfully did he shy away from them. Save for an occasional peevish

outbreak, however, he remained generally docile; and his own docility

increased his resentment. While he was still at school and college, his

heresies were mostly confined to matters of literature and of minor

social convention. But during the third year of the War, though he was

to graduate the following spring, he suddenly left college and enlisted

in the American Ambulance. In spite of his Quaker tradition, he was at

that time full of romantic enthusiasm for the cause of the Allies, and

had composed, for the college magazine, an eloquent editorial which

began with Joan of Arc and ended with Villiers de L’Isle-Adam. When

America joined the Allies, he went over to an American medical unit.

Hugo served throughout the War; but he came out with different emotions

from those which had carried him in. He never told me much about his

adventures, and never indeed, at this time, talked much about himself,

so that my account of his experience in the Army is derived largely

from the well-known novel which he afterward wrote on the subject

and which seemed such a striking contrast to the rather precious and

exotic little poems, reminiscent of the eighteen-nineties, which he had

published in the college magazine.

From Hugo’s novel, then, it would appear that during the first months

of his ambulance-driving, he was still sustained by his romantic faith

and preoccupied with proving to himself his own capacity for endurance

and courage. He tells us of the hero of his novel, that though most

of the wounded men he had been carrying turned out to have died on

the way, he had never felt so happy in his life as after successfully

bringing his ambulance through the craters and geysers of a

bombardment. At that time, after his first physical sinkings of nausea

and fear, he had been able to line up corpses on the floor of the field

hospital with less emotion than he had once arranged books on the

shelves of his bookcases at college, and had incinerated amputated legs

with less of real regret than he had once burnt discarded manuscripts.

But after America had entered the War, Hugo enlisted in the American

army and found himself posted, with the rank of sergeant, during the

dull and disheartened winter of 1917, at an American base hospital in

the Vosges, some distance behind the lines. One afternoon, he had gone

for a walk in the hills, and come out finally in the public square

of a tiny mountain village. A circle of people were standing about

the body of a wild sow which had been killed by a hunter and which,

bristled like the piny ridges of her northern forests and with her jaws

asnarl in death, lay flat, her belly ripped open and her little ones,

brightly striped and in a day or two to have been farrowed, stretched

out limp beside her on the ground, while the hunter bargained over the

carcasses and the dogs sniffed at the blood. A deep tenderness and

sadness overwhelmed him for the little wild pigs; and he watched with

horror the nonchalance of the hunter: he began to rage within himself

against the violators of life. Then he was chilled with self-contempt.

He took refuge in a little café and fortified himself with brandy. Then

he went back to the base hospital.

There was a major of the medical corps who kicked and cuffed his

patients, and who was in the habit of amusing himself, on his evening

rounds of the wards, by tearing the zinc-oxide bandages off the raw and

running wounds of the gas cases. Hugo complained of this major to the

commanding officer of the unit: he had always feared his superiors more

than any amount of shell-fire.

Soon thereafter, returning in the morning, just before reveille, from

the local château, where he often went to dinner and sometimes, by

private understanding with the other sergeants and the guards, was able

to spend the night, he was, to his surprise, picked up by the Military

Police, put under arrest, court-martialled and convicted, and sent off

under guard to a prison-camp. As a sergeant he had been lax with his

men; and, at the court-martial, he was accused of having abetted all

their misdeeds: of these misdeeds he had never even known, but when

he tried to explain this to the court-martial, the effect was equally

unhappy.

On his arrival in the prison-camp, all his belongings, including

private letters, his money and his watch, were taken from him. He saw

the photograph of another man’s sweetheart torn up before his face.

The first morning, when he was led out in lockstep with the other

prisoners, the ranks fell into disorder, and the sergeants set upon the

men and clubbed them with what were known as “dizzy-sticks,” while the

officers looked on. This was repeated every morning, and Hugo learned

that the confusion in the ranks was brought about by the sergeants

themselves: the sergeant at the head of the line would order the

prisoners to hurry up while the sergeant at the end would order them to

slow down. Hugo was struck in the mouth one day and two of his teeth

knocked out (he had the scar across his lips all his life). After this

ceremony, which the sergeants called “morning exercise,” the prisoners

were drilled before machine-guns.

The food was scant bread and thin soup; and on the third day of Hugo’s

imprisonment, two colored boys got into the kitchen and tried to steal

something to eat. One of the boys was caught, blackjacked, beaten and

dragged bleeding to solitary confinement. When he had sufficiently

recovered, an attempt was made, by order of the officer in command, to

induce him to reveal the name of his accomplice: the boy was chained

for four hours to a wall, while the sergeants threatened and cursed

him, beat him on the soles of his feet and singed off most of his hair.

In the meantime, however, the accomplice had cut his own throat with a

razor-blade. Two days afterwards, a big Texan, who had tried to strike

one of the guards when the latter had assailed him with a blackjack,

was shot down, in the presence of the men, by the commanding officer.

At the end of three weeks, however, Hugo was finally released through

the intervention of his elder brother, who was already a major in the

Adjutant-General’s department and to whom Hugo had managed to send a

letter before he had left his unit.

Hugo’s further participation in the War was of rather a half-hearted

character. Now, it was no longer the Germans who were the enemy, but

the governing classes of the world.

By the time he had been discharged from the service, he had become

a social revolutionist; and his reaction against the complacent and

conventional, the capitalistic, world from which he came, reached

lengths almost grotesque. He hated this world because he feared it, and

he feared it because he knew how much of it there was still left in

himself. He was haunted by veritable hobgoblins which wore the aspect

of doubles of himself. A visit to any of the members of his family

was enough to throw him into a panic. He would afterwards describe it

in terms which would almost have been excessive on the part of one

resuscitated from drowning. “On a Sunday afternoon in Washington,” he

would gasp, “you go out into the stweet--and you see all those little

bwick houses--and the weather is suffocating--and you look at the

people on the stweet and they don’t seem to be going anywhere--and you

think that, if you stayed there long yourself, you’d probably get like

that, too--and yet you haven’t got the mowal stwength to leave!” Or,

“I was staying with a cousin of mine at Cambwidge--my cousin is being

gwoomed for some big job at Harvard, and it weduced me to such a state

of depwession!--Did you ever know any of these young men who are being

gwoomed for big jobs?--Well, first their hair falls out--then they have

to buy glasses--then they have to appear at certain times and places

wearing a silk hat--then their teeth go and they get false teeth--false

teeth are almost as important as a silk hat, and it isn’t everybody who

can make his teeth drop out just by auto-suggestion--if they can do

that, they’ve got the stuff!--I’d said I was coming back to Cambwidge,

one night after I’d gone in to have dinner in Boston, but I couldn’t

face it!--I couldn’t get a berth at the station, so I sat up all night

in the day-coach!” (This sort of thing was possible for Hugo, because

he purposely never travelled with a suit-case, but only with an old

musette-bag, which he had brought back from France.) Yet I have heard

him, when Boston was disparaged, unexpectedly come to its defense with

a eulogy of Thoreau and Garrison.

Whenever he introduced into his novels representatives of the

“cultivated” class to which he himself belonged, he would never allow

them to figure save in hideous caricature--the result of his having

discerned, seized upon and isolated in them, those ignoble middle-class

qualities which they shared with the families of the _nouveaux riches_

manufacturers and railroad magnates whom they ridiculed. And, on these

occasions of visiting his relatives, by the very force of his fixed

intense belief in their incurable perversity and prejudice, he had

a faculty for trapping them into absurdities which did not at all

represent their real views. These Hugo would make careful note of, as

he returned to New York on the train, leaving the cousins and uncles

a little blank. His aunt in Philadelphia, for example, with whom Hugo

had spent so much of his boyhood, had been, by reason of her Quaker

tradition, strongly disposed to admire his war book, though she was

offended by the bad language of the characters: it always appeared,

however, when she attempted to talk to him about it, that, in deploring

this particular feature, she was damning the whole book.

Hugo’s elder brother, especially, though, unlike the other members of

the family, he did himself profess progressive views, affected Hugo in

a fatal way. This elder brother had studied for the ministry, but had

found himself unable to accept the doctrines of the Episcopal Church

save in a highly rationalized form: as a consequence, he had gone in

for sociology, and, after the War, had become a professor of sociology

in a small New England college. When Hugo went to visit his brother,

the latter would remonstrate with him severely and unremittingly.

He would, for example, point out to Hugo the serious impropriety of

the latter’s having published certain scurrilous verses in a radical

magazine. He would argue along lines of social responsibility: the

real purport of the objectionable metaphors would be understood by

very few readers, whereas the rest would see only obscenity and

unpatriotic sentiments; this would hurt Hugo’s reputation and weaken

his influence as a publicist, etc., etc. Such discussions infuriated

Hugo all the more because his brother always went on the assumption

that he recognized the same evils with which Hugo was so passionately

preoccupied and that he had it as much at heart to discover the proper

way of remedying them: Hugo’s brother’s social ideas and Hugo’s, when

stated in a certain way by the former, appeared indistinguishable.

These visits were further embarrassed by the apprehensions of Hugo’s

sister-in-law: she seemed always on edge for fear Hugo, whose manners

were excellent, might advance, in the presence of the Dean’s or the

President’s wife, with whom she was closely allied, some subversive

opinion.

Another bugaboo which pursued Hugo--another monster which he lived in

terror of allowing to swallow him up--was the college dilettante--that

is to say, the superior undergraduate who takes tea with the snobbish

Latin professor, plays Debussy at the club after the girls from the

house-party have left, and goes about with a small group of friends

who gossip over the politics of the dramatic club and giggle over the

mustache of the brunette who waits on the counter at the pastry shop

where they buy cinnamon buns. These friends, like Hugo himself, had

been affected by their experience in the War: but, in their case, it

had had usually the effect of leaving them merely demoralized and

dispirited, writing fragmentary learned poetry, full of gall and

resignation, in imitation of T. S. Eliot. These friends used to make

fun of Hugo for the obstinate persistence with which--inordinately

fastidious and shy--he had trained himself to speak in public

(overcoming his tendency to stutter, though not his inability to

pronounce _r_), and had even attained a certain reputation as an orator

at strikers’ meetings and demonstrations for civil liberty. Hugo’s

friends, as a rule, disparaged the admirable literary gifts--the logic,

the solid imagination and the feeling for pungent language--which were

disguised by the deliberate plainness and the colloquial carelessness

of Hugo’s novels, pamphlets and appeals.

And Hugo himself would have been the last person to call their

attention to his merits. Since the War, the discussion of literature

had affected him like his memories of college, and the spectre of the

modern literary man, whom he had encountered at New York parties and

in Paris cafés, came to accompany, and to merge with, the spectre

of the æsthetic undergraduate. Though he had in his youth been

full of literary enthusiasms, he now habitually treated the great

writers--including those whom he most admired, from Plato to James

Joyce--in a manner cavalier almost to the point of hysteria. It

was partly, I suppose, that Hugo had never forgotten young country

boys from Arkansas and Georgia who could neither read nor write,

bewilderedly drafted into the army and pitted against young Germans

who had studied Goethe in the gymnasia--the accumulated masterpieces

of literature having apparently not in any way affected the fates

of either. But it was also that he continually tended, by some

natural gravitation which enraged him, to find himself comfortably at

home among the sallow-faced reviewers and the review-writing poets

and novelists who relieved the mediocrity of their days by the

gin-drinking and ribaldry of their evenings. At these gatherings, they

were able to convince themselves that they were not merely dreary

book-worms and hacks, but men of taste and wit, citizens of the world;

and it was partly this anti-academic pose which made Hugo--himself

violently anti-academic--eager at first to attend their parties. But

he soon divined the pit of ashes at the bottom of the gin-bottle, and

shied off as he had done from his family and from the companions of

his college days; and literary society was soon added to his index of

phobias.

When Hugo put himself into a novel, it was always in caricature--as

the little Johnny Boston-Beans of the comic papers of his youth, or

as some incredibly fatuous and inept young college intellectual who

died of tuberculosis or fell into a subway construction. I have seen

him shudder at the sight of a handful of volumes of Max Beerbohm, whom

he had himself enjoyed reading at college, which I was unpacking in a

new apartment; and I have rarely heard him use bad language (though he

admired it on the part of others) save when the name of Henry James was

mentioned. This continual shying away made Hugo a little difficult,

since he was constantly objecting, not merely to what you had said,

but to what he thought you were going to say. Thus, if you remarked

to him of W. Z. Foster that Foster had the barren rigid strength of

a piston in a steel-mill, he would interrupt you with, “Well, I’d

rather see an effective and hard-hitting machine like Foster than a

jerry-built ornamental bank-building in a phony classical style,

like Harding!”--and so plunge into a spirited tirade against the

industrial system, which you vainly tried to avert with explanations

that you did not admire Harding, that you did admire Foster, etc.

Or if you were going out to dinner with him and complained that the

sentimental Yiddish soloist at Zincovitz’s restaurant was beginning to

get on your nerves, he would be off with, “Well, I can’t stand those

little tea-rooms where they have copies of _Town and Country_ lying

around!”--little tea-rooms of whose existence you had never even known.

He was rather afraid of women, and seemed never to fall in love. I

suppose he regarded women as the most dangerous representatives of

those forces of conservatism and inertia against which his whole life

was a protest: but I am convinced that he cherished, in his heart, the

most romantic expectations. I believe that he was always hoping for

some straight, dark, spare, realistic girl revolutionist, who would be

to him a comrade and a partner; but that in fact, he was invariably

alienated from the types of emancipated women whom he encountered

in the Village, by an unconfessed but ineradicable instinct which

rejected them as not being ladies. He would, of course, shy away from

this instinct and overwhelm them with politeness, with sympathy, with

determined good-fellowship; but this effusion masked a retreat. I think

he was affected, in this connection, by the same peculiar and incurable

isolation which had made him seem to himself, during the War, almost

indifferent to the sufferings of the soldiers till he found himself

brimming with tears at the sight of a slaughtered sow. So he would flee

from even parties in the Village, when an appropriate situation arose

for playing a rôle in some woman’s life, and go home to write with

passion, almost with amorous feeling, of some girl bandit who had been

harshly sentenced and brutally denounced by a stupid judge--of whom he

had read in his evening paper.

For Hugo was really on close terms with no one. As soon as he had

sampled the conversation and caught the social flavor of a household

or a group, he would simply go straight away and bottle a specimen for

his books, where he would assign it to its proper place in the economic

structure. He distrusted his family and his early associates, because

he believed that they had sold their souls to capitalist institutions;

but though he chose to live exclusively with outlaws, in whom he was

always discovering qualities heroic and picturesque to the point of

allegory, he never managed really to be one of them and perhaps never

trusted them, either. So tough remained the insulation between himself

and the rest of humanity--the insulation of his Puritan temperament and

his genteel American breeding, reinforced by his artist’s detachment

and his special situation. Hugo once told me of an illiterate Arkansas

boy, lying wounded in a field hospital, who, thinking Hugo a superior

person, had been unwilling to ask him to write a letter, and who had

finally had to beg the favor of another wounded man nearly as helpless

as himself.

And so he walked among us like a human penance for the shortcomings

of a whole class and culture--of the society which, in America, had

paralyzed in his friends and himself half the normal responses to

life; which had sterilized its women with refinement; which had lived

on industrial investments and washed its hands of the corruption of

politics; which had outlawed its men of genius or intimidated them with

taboos; which so strangely had driven his father to his Adirondack lake

and, on the rare and brief occasions when he returned for a wedding or

a funeral, had seemed to Hugo’s eyes to sadden him, as, to the latter’s

heartiness and wit, the other members of the family had returned only

so much that was energetically arid, so much that was self-confidently

timid and so much that was cheerfully cold; and which had desolated

Hugo’s own soul, when, through empty afternoons of boyhood, he had

wondered why he seemed so impotent to break the spell of his tutoring

in the morning, his aunt’s nap after lunch, the people for tea in the

afternoon and his late luxurious reading in bed, to work on a paper,

to ship on a whaler or to live on a ranch in the West; and which had

finally inflicted on him the shame of that day when he had found the

crippled Arkansan dictating his letter to his wife to a man half-flayed

with mustard-gas--the shame of knowing that a fellow sufferer and one

who had suffered more than he, had been afraid to ask him to render

what was perhaps the only service for which his education had fitted

him.

I have said, a whole class and culture; but Hugo had one other memory

of his father, which was afterwards, he told me once, to take on for

him a special significance. They had been lunching at the New York

club of the university from which his father had graduated and to

which Hugo was soon to go, and the elder Bamman had commented during

lunch with humorous disapproval and with imperturbable surprise on

the inferior quality of the men whom he observed in the dining-room

about him: on their way out, as Mr. Bamman was getting into his coat,

he had been violently jostled by a young man in a blue suit and

bone-rimmed spectacles, who was in a great hurry, but who hurriedly

apologized. Mr. Bamman was broad-shouldered and well set-up, and he

still wore a fine Olympian beard and one of those flat-crowned derbies

which were fashionable in the eighties (he remained something of a

dandy even after he had become a recluse); but, at the moment of the

impact, as Mr. Bamman looked dazedly around, Hugo had caught on his

father’s face the shadow of feebleness and pain. And he had realized

then for the first time that his father had no longer the prestige of

an acknowledged leader of the community, nor even of a distinguished

person: he was a figure of isolation, bewilderment and fatigue.

In the America where Hugo came to manhood, there was, in a sense, only

a single class and a single culture; one found it behind every façade,

one felt it through every uniform--and not merely among those members

of society whom it had already become fashionable to ridicule: the

small business man, the hired reformer, the windbag politician--but in

the cramped mind of the clever lawyer, for whom intellectual dignity

and freedom had been forbidden by the interests which he served;

in the grandeur of the medical specialist’s waiting-room and the

impoverishment of science which it masked; in the educated clergyman

turned evangelist and vying with the mountebanks of Methodism; alike

in the silk hat of the labor leader and in the homely and hollow

plain-spokenness of the self-made industrial master; and even in the

universities, with their presidents held in subjection by millionaire

trustees, with their middle-class timidity about raising, in class

or conversation, the real political, moral or æsthetic problems of

the time; even in the best of the theatre, where incompetence and

indifference almost invariably betrayed the beauty of the noblest text;

even in literature, where an ignorant criticism was ready to declare

every apprentice a master; in that whole machine of interrelated

interests, which kept literature, theatre, learning, church,

medicine, politics and law, all fixed in their mediocre functions,

all constrained by the fear of their neighbors, all intent on their

bank accounts--all that appalling susceptibility to regimentation

by “business” and that incapacity for discipline of self, all that

voracity for physical comfort, all that pervading commonness of mind,

which, even in those sections of society from which Hugo’s father had

come and which had at least produced a few men like him, now debased

their distinction to luxury and made cowards of their leaders. It was,

perhaps, after all, hardly necessary to find special explanations

for Hugo’s fear of committing himself, of giving hostages to any

group--which moved beside him like Pascal’s abyss. It was, perhaps,

after all, not unnatural that there should come a moment, in every

company, when Hugo would want to snatch his hat, to say good-by and get

away.