We worked in silence, dismantling the walls and packing Rita’s
belongings.
Rita herself had left us: some one had knocked at the door, and she had
gone into the front room. We had heard her receive a male caller and
carry on a decisive, rapid conversation. And she had now been away so
long that, deprived of her peremptory commands and made uneasy by the
presence of the visitor, we no longer spoke to each other. Duff Burdan,
the young man whom at Ray Coleman’s I had taken for a baseball player,
but who had turned out to be actually a painter, was laboring over
Rita’s suit-case, in the broken strap of which, with a great air of
masculine effectiveness, he was gouging extra holes with a nail-file.
The young Jew was taking down the pictures and wrapping them carefully
in newspapers: we had only rarely seen him at Rita’s and had not
expected to see him to-day: he was very quiet, polite and well-dressed,
and we resented as complacency his modest amiability. But Duff Burdan
and I were also resenting each other.
And in the stillness which had ensued on hammering down the last
boards of a packing-case, I heard the moaning of boat-whistles from
the harbor; and my heart horribly sank. So we had used to hear them
in summer--their sobbing, melodious and remote--in the late afternoon
shadow; or at night, when the rumorous hum of summer came in through
the open windows, when the summer world, which had already been
sleeping gently by day, seemed scarcely to slumber at night: their
trombone and oboe notes--so one night she had imagined Stokowski
conducting a symphony of river-noises from the top of the Singer
Building.
I stood up and tried not to hear them--tried to level on the objects
about me a prosaic disenchanted gaze, as if by force of will I could
insulate them and, impervious to the aromatic smell of perfume and
cigarettes--the odor of her hair--so put myself out of reach of that
current which had charged them with feeling and which still gave them
the power to shock me. They were meagre and battered, it was true; the
damaged electric heater; the little wooden cot, with the strip of batik
above it; the sewing-machine; the potted cactus; the water-color of an
Indian corn-dance, with its delicate red-and-black figures distinct
against egg-shell white (it had been sent her, like the cactus, I
never failed to remember, by an unforgotten admirer who had gone for
his health to New Mexico and who was always on the point of coming
back); the purple abstract painting of an eggplant taking shape amid
a maelstrom of female membranes (which had been given her by another
admirer about whom I had always wondered, but whose identity she had
never revealed); the bookcase, with its rubbed and broken volumes, so
fantastically miscellaneous, in which one could read, as in geological
strata, the so various interests and tastes of the men whom Rita had
known.
I looked away, and my eyes involuntarily sought the half-open door to
the sitting-room. There I could see them standing at last by the door
which led out to the staircase: Rita was half turned away, but I had a
glimpse of the face of her companion: he was an undistinguished, thin
and dingy-eyed young man, commonly dressed. I saw him take some bills
from Rita and put them away in his pocket.
When she came back, she gave a sharp look round. “Where’s my little
Buddha?” she demanded. I told her I had packed it in the box. “Well,
you just get it right out again! I didn’t want it packed! It will be
smashed to bits!” I assured her I had packed it carefully. “No: it’ll
be broken in that box, just as sure as sure! I think I’ll take it with
me--I’ll carry it myself.”
“I’ll carry it over separately, when the other things go, if you
want me to,” Duff Burdan volunteered. “Will you promise not to break
it?--No, I think I’d better take it myself.” “What do you think I am--a
smasher of images?” She laughed on her precise little notes: “You
promise not to let it get broken?--promise!--If I come back and find
that Buddha broken, I’ll never speak to you again!--Oh, don’t pack
that Indian corn-dance with the other pictures!” she interrupted young
Kaufmann. “I _do_ want to take that with me!--Can you get it in the
suit-case, Duff?--or couldn’t you strap it some way on the outside?”
Duff Burdan dealt with this problem. “Everything here is to go, is it?”
he asked, looking round. “Yes, everything,” she replied. “Are you sure
you’ll have room for it all?” “Sure: I’m throwing out a whole lot of
my own junk.” “It’s so sweet of you to offer to keep it for me!--Don’t
let anybody borrow my books!” she admonished him, the moment after.
I looked at my watch and announced that it was time to get a taxi--Duff
Burdan was storing her furniture, but I was to see her off.
Those stairs which I had climbed so many times to find, at the top,
her little figure, intense and sharp even standing in the doorway and
dark against the light of the door, so that it seemed sometimes like a
knife on which I was running--those stairs where too often lately I had
felt that, in answering the doorbell, she had been hoping for some one
else--as I descended them this afternoon, it was not without relief at
the thought that I should never have to climb them after to-day.
And was that he, that sloppily dressed reporter, that fellow from some
insurance office, to whom Rita had been giving money--was that the
visitor she had been always expecting, whom she would rather have seen
than myself? I was glad of a new reason for disgust, of a new pretext
for hating those stairs--and yet that hatred, as I knew, was only fear,
the fear of remembering how much I had loved them. And such bitterness
was ignoble, I knew--for houses were things to put away, like worn-out
clothes, with the phases of our life, with the emotions with which life
was clothed. And was not emotion here worn out?--on my side as well as
on Rita’s--had I not come myself to dislike the cold house, the sordid
staircase, the saloon with its hanging blinds, the oppressive tunnel of
the El, the bleak stony waste of the docks, where late one night I had
walked so leadenly, not finding Rita at home? Had I not said to myself
that afternoon, on my way to Rita’s house for the last time: “Well,
thank God, I’ll never have to come back to this damned address again!
I’ll be out of prison at last!”
And now I could see that the winter sun was bright on a colored
cigarette-poster, and that the school-girls returning from school
were prettier than any school-girls had seemed to me for many
months. I compared one of them with Rita, to the advantage of the
school-girl--Rita had lately been looking rather badly. I should be
free to love another girl now! I thought of Daisy, whom I had seen the
night before and who had seemed to me unexpectedly desirable. If I
could only keep up my spirit--if I could only play the game according
to the sportsman’s code which Rita had been trying to teach me so
gravely and so sweetly--if I could only, I told myself, do that, then
in the long run, all might be right between us--because I had not
nagged her or wearied her, because I had proved myself her peer, as
prompt to offer all for love and as brave to bear its passing. If I
could only remember that the days were not bricks to be laid row on
row, to be built into a solid house, where one might dwell in safety
and peace, but only food for the fires of the heart, the fires which
keep the poet alive as the citizen never lives, but which burn all the
roofs of security! Be glad, be proud, to end so well--before that music
of the harbor--I could hear it now again, as I came back to Rita’s with
the taxi--before that music had lost its beauty--for so one could hear
it as beautiful forever!
Back in the apartment, I found that a new visitor had arrived to
say good-by to Rita. It was a young man from Columbus, Ohio, whom
I remembered having met with Rita one evening when we had gone to
the theatre. He was one of those curious Westerners who dress like
Westerners, but who speak like Philadelphians. The night Rita had
recognized him at the theatre, she had seemed disquietingly glad to see
him, and my first instinct had been to identify him as the admirer in
Santa Fé who had sent her the corn-dance and the cactus, and of whose
arrival I lived in dread. When he had turned out not to be this person,
I had been exceedingly relieved, and as Rita had never afterward
mentioned him, I had forgotten him completely. Now, however, his
presence seemed ominous: it was evident that Rita had been seeing him.
I remembered that, when we had met him at the theatre, he had said that
he was soon going West, and that, I calculated now, had been at least a
month ago. It had, it seemed to me, been just about a month that things
had been going particularly badly between Rita and me.
She was hurried but gay with the partings--I thought that she had
become more good-natured since the arrival of the new admirer. Just
before she got into the taxi, she kissed everybody good-by. The
Westerner, with unctuous heartiness, was all for seeing her off, but
she explained that that was my prerogative--and she kissed him a second
time. I felt suddenly that it was an impudence for her to have divided
with such scrupulous fairness, between Duff Burdan and me, the honor of
seeing her off and the honor of storing her furniture.--Yes: she had
certainly got out of an engagement with me a very short time after
that night when we had met the Ohioan at the theatre!
I saw, as I helped her into the taxi, that she was carrying the little
potted cactus, to which I had taken an intense dislike: it had a stubby
and prickled stalk, and it had with time come to wear to my eyes a
significance all too plainly phallic.
In the taxi, I at first said nothing: we had both become, together, so
tense. But when we had turned into Seventh Avenue, I looked at her and
smiled and said, “Well!” She puckered her eyes and mouth in one of her
ecstatic grins and spasmodically threw back her head in the movement
which had once made me feel that she was lifting me into her ecstasy,
but which now seemed to draw her away from me: “Oh, it’s so _wonderful_
to be going away where I won’t have to see any more people!”
Yes: she had left me already--long ago. She would not let me come
with her to that world. I must return to the common world--and what
should I do there now? Those qualities of desperate independence and of
intellectual passion which had once exalted me so, could make me now so
glum!
Rita had decided overnight to leave New York. One of her aunts, who
still lived in the little up-state town where Rita had been born, had
lately fallen ill, and Rita’s mother, with whom Rita shared her rooms,
had gone to stay with her sister. One evening, when I came to get
Rita to take her out to the opera, I had found her, not even dressed
for dinner, sitting amidst packets of old letters on the day-bed, and
passionately preoccupied with the idea of returning to her native
place, sustaining the old age of her aunt, and consecrating herself in
solitude to the composition of a play in verse. I saw, to my annoyance,
that she had been crying. And at the _Rosenkavalier_ she had relapsed
into that punctual responsiveness, with its effect of deliberate
polite effort, which I had noted in her the night I had first met
her, but which she had dropped when I had got to know her better. She
had intimated, on the way home in the taxi, that she considered the
_Rosenkavalier_ a little cheap. And I had expected her to like it so
much!
I had hoped then that her intention to leave town, which I had
applauded with insincerity, would evaporate like any other of those
suddenly excited desires--to go West, to go to Paris, to return to the
stage again--which she would as suddenly forget; and I was dismayed
when I found that she persisted in it. She had sat down and written
half-a-dozen stories for a popular magazine, and had succeeded in
getting an advance from the editor (who was also wildly in love with
her), on the strength of a promise of more stories. She had then paid
her arrears of rent and had persuaded the Italian landlord to allow her
to break her lease.
I had made to Rita’s sigh of relief, in the taxi on our way to
the station, some appropriate reply, conscientious and devoid of
conviction; but I saw now that we were already at the Waldorf, where,
with the traffic cut across us, we stopped.
I looked toward her and saw that her face, with her old fur collar
close about her neck, was pale and demoralized and ill, staring and
pinched. For the first time since that night in Bank Street, when her
cheeks had flushed a hot pink and, leaning back against my couch, she
had revealed her long Muse’s throat, her face seemed sharp-featured
and tarnished. And though I knew well enough, even then, that, if all
I had once adored in that face--passion, intelligence, daring--seemed
now to have disappeared, it was strained nerves and hard living which
had killed them--her poverty which had put her at the mercy of all
that importunate pack--myself among them--who had been forever ringing
her doorbell, and all that alien life of the city which had taxed her
almost to dementia (the crosstown traffic stopped; our own commenced
to move: she had told me once that the traffic terrified her)--though
all my conscious feelings were of horror that some one I so honored
should be injured, that I should ever come to find unlovely a being I
had once so loved; yet that savagery of the human animal which makes us
fall upon our wounded fellows, especially those whom we have feared,
impelled me to say cuttingly and abruptly: “You have no faith!”
“What do you mean--religious faith?” she asked, as if she had been
talking to a stranger--but I cut her short with, “No: the other
kind--good faith, I mean!”
“You know very well,” she replied, suddenly speaking to me directly,
“you know very well that I know what sort of person I am--but if I
wasn’t that sort of person, I shouldn’t be the sort of person who would
do what I did with you.... I was cruel to other people then.”
“Yes,” I said, “I know: but when I see some of the people you care
about, you can’t blame me if I take it a little hard!”
“What do you mean?” she demanded.
“I was thinking of this afternoon.”
“Duff Burdan and Max Kaufmann are both nice boys--I thought you liked
them. And I’m not in love with either of them, if that’s what you mean!”
“I wasn’t thinking about them--I think they’re all right.”
“I hadn’t seen Max Kaufmann for months,” she went on. “He came around
to see me just because he heard that I was going away. It was nice of
him to come.”
“Who was that fellow that needed a shave?”
“Who do you mean?” Her wonder made me angry.--“You don’t mean my
brother?” she added, after a moment.
“Was that your brother?” I pretended to be amused by my own jealous
suspicions. I had forgotten she had a brother, though she had told me
about him once.
“Yes,” she answered. “My brother came in this afternoon.”
“What does your brother do?” I inquired.
“He drinks,” she said bitterly, without humor.
As I remembered the visitor’s face, dim-eyed and devoid of personality,
I could see now in it Rita’s sharp nose and her eyes of indefinite
color. And my first feeling was one of relief that the shabby nonentity
I had seen, to whom Rita had given money, was merely Rita’s brother.
But the discovery, as I found in a moment, had the effect of increasing
my resentment: if my worst suspicions had been justified, I could
at least, to that extent, have despised her, could even perhaps have
washed my hands of her. But now I knew that if it was not the unknown
visitor, as unconsciously I must have hoped, with whom Rita had been
lately preoccupied, it must have been the young man from Columbus, who
was obviously attractive and eligible.
“At least,” I brought out after a pause, “this big-hearted guy from the
West isn’t a relation of yours?”
She was silent. Then she began, with her effect of dramatic sincerity
which I had come to resent and dread: “It’s so false of you to nag me
and scold me like this. You ought to understand how I feel! You ought
to be able to see what I’ve been going through. If you really loved me,
you wouldn’t want to say hateful things to me!--But I don’t care now--I
don’t care about any of you!”
“I know: I do understand,” I replied. “I hope that you get a lot of
work done.” But I wanted to say, “That’s nonsense, and disingenuous
besides, to say that my being jealous means that I don’t love you
enough. And then you accuse me of being ‘false’!”
I stared out at the motor-cars and taxis which were mounting the
enormous driveway of the viaduct that girds the Grand Central. They had
still, I found, the power to stir in me, like those taxis I had heard
from the window the night I had first met Rita, the excitement and
hope of the city. They were urgent and expectant now, crowding up-town
along their private gallery, to dinners in apartments and hotels, where
romances and adventures were beginning, where people were drinking
cocktails and becoming amusing and gay (as I had not been able to be
for so long)--to parties, to night-clubs, to plays, to the theatrical
iridescent Forties, which I had never properly explored and where I
knew that Daisy was living.
“Did you know Daisy had left Ray Coleman and gone back to the stage?” I
asked.
“No,” said Rita. I could see that her hands were quivering with
tenseness.
“I think it’s probably a darn good thing, don’t you?” By approving of
Daisy’s vagaries, I perhaps hoped to make reparation for my harshness
about her own.
“Yes,” she answered, “I suppose it is.”
“I like her so much,” I continued. “I saw her at Sue Borglum’s last
night. She has a wonderful sort of good-natured frankness. I really
think, in fact, that she’s one of the girls I know that I like best.”
I hoped, no doubt, to make Rita believe that I had been happy the night
before without her. She had told me--what seemed to me improbable--that
she wanted to be left alone, that it always made her nervous to have
people around while she was packing. I tried to fix my mind on Daisy
as I had seen her at Sue Borglum’s party: with bare arms in a girlish
black evening-gown--with her candid American smile and her continual
spark of wisecracks. And it occurred to me now in the taxi that, as
soon as I had seen Rita off--I had never hitherto been able to think
beyond that event--I should be free to cultivate Daisy. I could go at
once to her place on Forty-fourth Street--I could ask her to dinner
to-night! And this realization sustained me.
We had been silent, but now Rita began again: “It’s so _false_ of you
to talk to me like that! You used to understand things so well! You
know that the first time I met you, you said that Ray Coleman was
bitter because he hated his newspaper work, and that that had made
him harsh with Daisy. Well, don’t you think that _my_ life makes _me_
bitter? Don’t you think _I_ hate the way I’ve been living?”
“I know: I’m sorry,” I replied, and I took her hand and pressed it,
without tenderness or warmth.
We had stopped at the station door. I gave Rita’s suit-case to a porter.
“Don’t you want him to carry that?” I asked, nodding toward the cactus.
“Oh, no!” she guarded it, grinning. “I wouldn’t trust it to
anybody--I’m afraid that something might happen to it!”
All the rest was mechanical--when we kissed good-by, most of all. I sat
down in the train for a moment, and told her what an excellent thing I
thought it for her to go away alone and write: I hoped that she would
accomplish a great deal. “You must produce a masterpiece,” I said. “Let
me see it when it’s done, won’t you?”
I plunged out into the hurrying concourse and made straight for the
door to Forty-fourth Street.
On my way--as I was passing a news-stand--at the sight of a bright red
magazine-cover, I found myself shocked by that terrible current of
which the furniture and pictures of Twelfth Street, of which everything
connected with Rita, had for so long been such active conductors. It
was the second-rate fiction magazine for which Rita had written the
stories that had enabled her to leave New York. She had never been
willing to sign them--I remembered that now--though they were really
not at all discreditable: she was incapable of writing badly. But as
she had never taken them seriously, as she had written them merely to
make money, she had always hated them, and had insisted on signing them
with a pseudonym, though she could have gotten a far better price for
them by publishing them over her own name.
I turned suddenly back toward the train, as if I could still have
redeemed our farewell from the memory of my bitterness and spite--but
the man was taking down the sign.
* * * * *
The news of her aunt’s illness had deeply affected Rita; and though I
was sceptical and suspicious at the time, I see now that it had really
preoccupied her to the exclusion of everything else. Aunt Sarah, who
was always called “Aunt Sadie,” had been the artistic member of the
family; and Rita had originally been named for her. But when Rita
had first come to New York, and had acted for a short time on the
stage, she had substituted “Rita” for her real name, and she had never
afterwards been able to bring herself to be known as Sarah again.
Her first poems had been published over her stage name. And now she
tortured herself with the fear that this might have hurt Aunt Sadie’s
feelings. With her passionate concentration, she had talked to me of
that extraordinary little woman with the birdlike nose and neck, and
the square enormous brow (which Rita had inherited).
Aunt Sadie had, in her youth, been the organist in the church and the
gay getter-up of church “sociables”; she had wanted to go to Paris to
study music, and had nearly succeeded. But the men of Aunt Sadie’s
family--like Rita’s brother--had not made life easy for the women:
some drank; some had broken down; some had simply disappeared. When
she had found she could not go to Paris, Aunt Sadie had decided to
move to Watertown and teach music; but a last brother, who kept the
general store in the little town where they lived, had been disabled
by a paralytic stroke, and Aunt Sadie had had to take care of him and
help with the store, for which she presently found herself assuming
the whole responsibility. But as she had always been hopelessly
perplexed by the local problems of supply and demand, she was gradually
deprived of her trade by a newer and more modern store, which had a
soda-fountain with tables. Now she had come down with a bad case of
pleurisy, and was unable to work at all.
And Rita, brooding on the slow extinction of Aunt Sadie’s personality,
tragically reproached herself for having suppressed Aunt Sadie’s name.
She talked to me about Aunt Sadie till I could see the chipped and
yellow keys of her little upright piano, and the elegantly engrossed
scrolleries of the old-fashioned black-and-white music-covers, more
clearly than the objects in the room in which we were, and could
hear those other scrolleries, both elegant and noble, of the voices
of the fugue, weaving an indelible watermark of beauty in the air of
the cramped little parlor behind the general store. Aunt Sadie had
taught Rita to play; and Rita still remembered some fragments of Handel
and Bach, which sometimes tumbled out without warning when she found
herself beside a piano, all rumpled, as it were, but still fresh, from
the disordered wardrobe of her mind. These gusts of music surprised
me at first: they were so spontaneous, light-hearted and lovely--so
different from the sometimes tight, and always sober, style of her
poetry; and I have thought since that they were perhaps the only thing
which I ever knew of Rita as she had been in her girlhood.
For Rita, too, had spent long years in the little up-state town; had
sung in the church choir and known all the hymns by heart; had studied
French from the book, where there was no one to teach her to speak it,
and had read Baudelaire and Gautier when she could not pronounce their
names. And before she had finally gone to college on the scholarship
which she had won by fierce solitary effort, she had almost, she told
me, abandoned the hope of ever sloughing off that life of the small
American town, which she put on when she woke every morning, like some
cursed indestructible dress of girlhood, too worn, too soiled, too
small.
Yet, I never heard her speak with resentment of her early environment:
it was herself, and not the place or its people, which, when she told
me of her youth, she made me see. When Sinclair Lewis wrote his famous
novel, in its own way so intense, he made one feel that the American
small town had rendered the whole of American life unpalatable, had
flavored it with a rank flat taste, like some minute organism which
spoils the drinking-water. But my impression of the town from which
Rita had come was made up merely of those moments in Rita’s life
which she had told me of passing there and which seemed to me, like
everything else about her, to have taken place outside the common
world. She had described to me once, for example, how, lying late awake
at night, she had heard some drunkard, returning from the town, singing
clearly in the empty country road, dark-and-clear with the autumn moon:
“I wooed her in the summer-time
And in the winter, too;
And all night long I held her in my arms,
Just to shield her from the foggy, foggy dew!”
To-day, when I can sort out the drunkard, the song which every one
knows, the little New-York-State town, the girl who wants to get
away--though I summon all the drunkards, all the bawdy songs, all the
discontented girls, all the towns, that I have ever known--I can see
nothing but that moment of Rita’s girlhood, of her girlhood too long
detained, which seemed to hang half clear black and half a turbid
crystal, in the radiant-dark country night, like a drop of foggy dew--I
see all through the eyes of the poet, to whom our social history is
invisible.
_I_ made differences between New York and Paris; between New Orleans
and New York. _I_ had wondered, at Ray Coleman’s party, whether
McIlvaine were a Scotchman or a Jew; I had insisted on finding out from
Hugo in what city Daisy was born. And though I did not, like Hugo,
compute incomes nor peg out the people I encountered in the economic
web, I marked degrees of education and was always trying to identify
accents. I had noted, in this way, in Rita, the Irish fickle-mindedness
and sharpness; the traces of the superior person in the small
provincial community; of the bold and original personality in the
community of college girls, who had, however, learned the language of
the rest--that savorless language of young segregated women constantly
dosed by older women with the highest feminine ideals; the intonations
of the American actress of English light comedy; and, finally,
dominating all, her rôle of princess and rake of the Village. But it
made no difference how she talked, where she had been, what she wore,
where she lived, what boors she caught up in her life, what threadbare
images she used--the being who filled my mind had little relation
to all this. I first learned from Rita that the importance, the
significance, of what we see, is supplied by the mind which perceives
them--that the power which creates, through imagination and passion,
never stops to appraise the value of the materials with which it works,
but itself assigns them value.
And just as, despite the fact that Aunt Sadie presented herself as an
obstacle to my happiness, that I was by no means, at the time of which
I write, in a mood to share Rita’s anguish for the muted and dying
vibrations of that steel-silver and tight-strung soul--so she had
compelled me, against my taste and interest, to accept all her friends
and admirers at the value she put upon them herself. These friends,
when I came to meet them, almost always impressed me at first as quite
unlike what I had heard about them from Rita--as insipid, ineffective,
or underbred. And I used at first to find my jealousy allayed at
discovering that Rita’s swans were geese--(though I suppose that I
still felt, in the case of the Greenwich Villagers proper, a sort of
jealousy at their having participated with Rita in the braver exploits
of an earlier day--a day which I myself had come too late for: I had
the sense that even the worst of Rita’s friends had at least “fired one
ringing shot and passed”). But young journalists cheapened by their
work; pottering young writers, like myself; debauched or epicene young
poets, with neither genius nor self-respect; mediocre middle-aged
literary men, with bald heads and stale reputations; and all that odd
mixed company of lawyers, contractors and brokers--I was obliged to
grant even to these each his gift or his special distinction--and, even
then, I could never be sure how far they were distinctions or gifts
which Rita herself had lent them. So constant and so acute was her need
to intensify experience that, just as she would cherish the timbre of
certain boat-whistles which she heard from her apartment in Twelfth
Street, just as she would sometimes keep for days a tangerine or an
apple which she had bought at the grocer’s on the corner, but of which,
when she had brought it home, she had become fascinated by the color
or the shape--so she had the faculty of endowing her admirers with
qualities which they themselves may hardly have hoped to possess. With
Rita, the vagabond poet would prove to have an interesting temperament;
the journalist, an honest conviction; the obsolete editor or essayist,
something of the grace of a man of the world; and those bewitched
business men and brokers, who so furiously pursued her, seemed to
have caught from Rita’s own imagination some disturbing conception
of themselves which they were straining to realize--she told me once
how a man who had seen her on but a single occasion, and whom she
had afterwards succeeded in evading, had recognized her again, after
years, merely from hearing her voice over the telephone, when he had by
mistake been connected with a wire on which Rita was talking to some
one else.
But it was not merely that Rita disregarded all those social and moral
considerations which occupy so large a place in the minds of ordinary
people. It was not merely that she was free from prejudices; but that
character itself, in the sense in which it may amuse us, stimulate
our curiosity or appear to us picturesque, did not interest her. She
was not at all the sort of woman who enjoys collecting celebrities or
types: gossip did not entertain her; she had little taste for novels.
In her own stories and plays, there were no characters, but merely
situations and emotions. And so, not seeing at all in her friends what
most of them saw in each other, she made it possible for them, in
their relation to her, to play rôles for which the world would never
have cast them. It was as if, in their contacts with Rita, they had
become somehow facets of herself, their longings given body by Rita’s
imagination and their vitality doubled by her force. They had become
aspects of her own personality; and so wear for me even to-day--the
middle-western journalist with the Abraham-Lincoln voice, the snow and
quiet of the diamond winter night when she had spoken to me, after he
had left, of the purity and peace of his spirit of which she suggested
that the longings were yet so poignant--the international vagabond, the
muffled vagueness of the August dusk when we had carried him part way
up Fifth Avenue in the victoria in which we were riding, and she had
afterwards, in Central Park, among the asphalt windings and dark walls,
where the lovers embraced mute on their benches, sung some Spanish
songs he had taught her--and the man in New Mexico, alas! the sweet
pathos of the short days she had known him and which she had described
to me with her brief telling eloquence on the very afternoon in Bank
Street when I had counted on finding eloquence myself to persuade her
to marry me--the bare two days and a half she had spent with that
tubercular landscape painter whom she had loved, she said, the best of
all!
I myself had good cause to be grateful: when I had read Rita my
indifferent verses, she would always afterwards take them from me and
go through them intently herself, repeating aloud the lines which
pleased her, so that they had the sound, brought to life by her voice,
of being a great deal better than they were; and, at the time, I
never remembered that she had also a knack of reading certain poems
by Coventry Patmore and Arthur Henry Clough, poets whom I detested,
so that they sounded as if she had written them herself.--Even during
our last conversation when I had scolded and complained in the taxi,
she had appealed to a generosity for which I was really by no means
remarkable by reminding me of those excuses, perfunctory and largely
hypocritical, which I had made long ago for Ray Coleman.
In any case, we swarmed to her apartment, devoured her time and her
force, and finally, at the period of which I write, had rendered her
life intolerable. I had told her once of something that Hugo had said
of literary people together, as one saw them in New York or Paris--that
they were like the leeches in a druggist’s jar: dependent for
nourishment on blood, but reduced to the desperate extremity of preying
on one another. Rita had added: “Yes, and I’m the druggist, when he
puts his hand in the jar!”
So I had learned in half a year from Rita that from another point of
view than Hugo’s, the world may present quite different values, and
give rise to quite different problems. But I had learned something
else from Rita, which it had cost me more pain to learn. When I had
taken her to task in the taxi, reproaching her for lack of “faith,”
she had forced me to confront a principle which, since I had known
her, had haunted and tormented me, but which I had hitherto tried to
evade; and even she, who must have lived with it so long, was reluctant
to confess it to me: she had pretended for a moment to mistake what
I meant. As Hugo had learned from his weeks in the prison-camp that
men who are beaten become brutalized and that poor men starve; so
I had been obliged to learn from Rita that any great strength or
excellence of character must be, by its very nature, incompatible
with qualities of other kinds--that it carries with it weaknesses and
ignominies inseparable from excellence and strength. I should, I dare
say, like every one else, always have been willing to admit both these
truths: they would, in fact, have seemed to me platitudes. But I had
had to learn them both from experience, and once I had felt their
reality, it had seemed to me that all our social and moral conventions
had been based on the opposite assumptions--that a person who had
had either revelation (either Rita’s revelation or Hugo’s), and who
uncompromisingly met life on that basis, must, like Hugo or Rita, be a
rebel, and in consequence, an enemy of society.
For Rita, who exalted every impulse and made dramatic every relation,
neither happiness nor drama could endure. I taunted her once, in
those later days, with Wilde’s saying that, “_He who lives more lives
than one, more deaths than one must die_.” But it was not deaths of
the body that she suffered: it was the deaths of all those human
relations--it was her rejection, day after day and year after year,
of all the natural bonds and understandings which make up the greater
part of human life--comfort, security, children, the protection and
devotion of a husband, even simple comradeship and affection--so that
she was still, at the time of which I write, an outlaw living from
hand to mouth, always poor and often ill, bedevilled day and night
by all the persons she no longer had the energy to excite to her own
pitch of incandescence. And even at the time I had taunted her, even
at the time I had denounced her in the cab, it was my consciousness
of this strength which had continued to keep me in subjection. For I
knew now, in spite of all my pain, in spite of all my complaints and
indignation, that if we have the instinct to admire what is admirable,
we must also have the courage, and must not rage against--nor even try
to minimize--that which makes it possible and mars it.
* * * * *
Outside, the light had grown cold; but the white and orange power of
the lamps was beginning to dominate the town. The day seemed hardly now
to have been serious: it was withdrawing, by arrangement with the city,
which had so much to do at night. The taxis on Vanderbilt Avenue were
wedging, honking and hitching, in their efforts to turn and to pass;
but I dodged energetically through them and headed west.
If I could only find Daisy home! If only she were free to-night! I had
refrained from telephoning on purpose: I wanted so desperately to see
her, even if she were going out.
I could still feel the thrill of Fifth Avenue--I scarcely glanced a
second time at a face which looked a little like Rita’s. And that
fascinating region of the Forties, where I had lately gone so rarely--I
found that I could still peer with interest at the photographs in front
of the theatres and at the faces of the passing women, who seemed
sometimes, with their theatrical make-ups, as miraculously, ideally
pretty as women on the stage.
The apartment-house where Daisy lived was narrow and very plain: there
was merely a bare hall, with a telephone man, who also opened the door
and ran the elevator.
He took me up to her floor, and I knocked at her room, but no one
answered; then, as the door had been left half-open, I went inside.
The lights had also been left on, and the chairs and the floor were
littered with a débris of stockings and chemises, as surprisingly
slight and as sordid as the shreds of exploded balloons. On the table
stood an empty spaghetti can, two plates gummed with cold tomato
sauce, several tumblers with the stale remains of drinks, and an empty
gin-bottle. It seemed to me from the contents of the tumblers, that
they had begun by drinking gin and ginger-ale, fallen back on gin and
bathroom water, and probably ended up with raw gin.
It would be hours now, no doubt, before her rehearsal was over: I had
come far too early, had better go away and come back. I looked about
the room, and then searched in my pockets, for paper to write her a
note, but could find nothing except a letter from a distinguished
professor of philosophy whom I had greatly admired at college and to
whom I had sent a book of Rita’s poems: he had written me, thanking
me for the poems and inviting me to come to see him. I had thrown the
envelope away, but my respect for the professor had been so strong that
I had never destroyed his letter, though my preoccupation with Rita had
prevented my answering it.
But now, as I could find nothing else--finally reflecting that
colleges, after all, were places where poets were put to sleep--I tore
off part of the back page of the letter, just below the signature, and
sitting down in a mission morris-chair, I wrote a note to Daisy.
When I had finished the note, however, I turned over the pages of the
magazine--it was a movie magazine called _Photo-Life_--which I had
picked up to hold the paper on. Suddenly becalmed in that abandoned
apartment, high aloft on that inaccessible floor, with the elevator
between me and the street, I found that I had dropped into a pocket
of inertia and lassitude. When I had exhausted _Photo-Life_, I looked
carefully, with the same serious interest, through _Zit’s Weekly_,
the _Cosmopolitan_ and a tabloid of two days before. Then, with the
magazines in my lap, I remained blank and incapable of rising: I
apprehended the onset of despair. What motive had I for moving? I could
no longer go to see Rita, and was there any one else in New York whom I
really desired to see? It was as if the emptiness of Daisy’s room had
represented the emptiness of the world where I had been left by Rita’s
departure. I had not slept much for several nights, and I felt that my
joints were heavy. The telephone rang: I did not answer it.
There was a phonograph beside me on the table: it was a small cheap
portable one. I regarded it with hebetude. Without Daisy, it seemed
as depressing as the glasses, as the garments, as the magazines. But
involuntarily grasping at a last resource against despair, I picked up
the heap of phonograph records, lying half-shuffled, like a battered
pack of cards. Scrupulously I pushed them even and ran through them,
reading all the titles: _With You in Paradise_, from _Pretty Kitty_,
sung by Bee Brewster; _Ben Bolt_, by John McCormack; _Chanson
Hindoue_, Saxophone solo; _So’s Your Old Man_, Fox Trot, by Fred Casey
and His Burglar-Alarm Boys; _La Forza del Destino_, Red Seal, Duet by
Caruso and Scotti; _Mamie Rose_, Fox Trot, by Jake King and His Eight
Kentucky Mocking-Birds. I remembered that _Mamie Rose_ was the fox-trot
which Daisy had so offended by playing, the night of Ray Coleman’s
party, when Rita had been reciting her poems. I got up and put it on
the machine.
The record, I noted, as I wound the crank, had been made by the
American Melody Company: it was a pale and unpleasant brown and seemed
to have been moulded in river mud. Remembering the handsome victrola
which I had seen at Ray Coleman’s apartment, I pitied Daisy a little;
yet she had had the right sort of bravery, the bravery to go free when
love had passed! The only needles I could find were in an ash-tray,
under the débris of cigarette-butts and burnt matches, and it was
impossible to tell the used from the new: the first I tried began with
a blurt, a hideous stuttering blur. Still dominated by Rita’s tastes,
I began to feel that turning on the phonograph would be like applying
to myself a dental engine: Rita had not cared for popular music--had
thought lightly of even the _Rosenkavalier!_
The second needle turned out no better, but I let it go; and presently
_Mamie Rose_ emerged as a kind of fiendish jig, running itself off at
impossible speed: too fast, too nasal, too shrill. I made an effort
to regulate it and only effected a harrowing descent of pitch, like
the gasping and discordant howl of some demon inside the machine
crying out in intolerable agony at being compressed from one tempo to
another. I listened for the first night I had met Daisy, but merely
succeeded in having my heart wrung by the first night I had heard
Rita’s poems. The spring of the little phonograph held only for a
single winding, so that the record began too fast and was already
running down before it came to the end; but, what was worse, it had
no horn, so that the demon inside the box, beating in its cramped
black prison like a panic-stricken bat, had to squeeze out, as it
were, through a crack--the little aperture at the base of the “arm.”
No wonder it chittered and squealed so thinly, like an unwinding wire
of sound, like a wire, rusted, wry and eaten, worn away so that it
seemed almost snapping, or so rough that it would stick and stammer
over some echolaliac phrase! So completely had the music been robbed
of resonance that it seemed a mere memorandum of music, as if some
writer in sound had scribbled down the skeleton of an orchestration,
with the brasses brief tin-whistle blasts and raspings, the strings
a jotted jingle of cicada-chirpings, and the tympani scored as tiny
explosions and echoless crashes of glass. And the “vocal refrain,”
when it suddenly began, had as little in common with the human voice
as the noises of the instruments had with music: it gave the effect of
some mere momentary modulation in the quick mechanical jigging of a
railroad train--it was simply a sharper shrillness, a more insistent
iteration: _There she goes--Mamie Rose--She--loves--me!--Don’t seem
to show it!--How do I know it?--It’s A. B. C.!--She’s_ a crackle of
high-pitched syllables ending with _aggravatin’. But when I want a
little lovin’ she don’t keep me waitin’!--She’s proud and snooty--But
she’s my cutie!--She tells me_ a second slip of dulled and driven
cogs--_That’s how I knows--Mamie Rose!--She--loves--me!_ The jazz
departed, with redoubled violence and complexities of deformation, into
a last frantic charivari--then, after a brief unpleasing flourish, was
bitten off as abruptly as it began.
I lifted the needle, clicked the little catch and went over to the
window. Outside, gaped a blank abyss: several buildings had just
been demolished and the vacuum of vacancy they had left seemed to be
sucking with its blind raw walls for some structure to rush in and
fill it. I felt again the horrible imminence of despair, and I tried
to summon against that blank outlook and against the mechanical voice
of the phonograph--those negations of flesh and blood--an intensified
vision of Daisy: her alert little yellow head, with its deep stainings
of Irish rust, her lips still moist through carnation rouge, and the
robust little organism of her body, which made its home among those
stone and metal cells, not merely resilient to their surface, but
making their grindings quicken and feed it.--Then a sudden voice said,
“Hello!” and with a start I turned round and saw her.
I asked her to come to dinner with me. She had on a dark blue street
dress, and she looked tired; I had been imagining her animated and
hearty, but it seemed to me now that she was frail: her eyes, a lighter
green than Rita’s, looked colorless and dim.--“Why--I’d like to,” she
demurred, “but I’ve got a sort of a date.”
The telephone rang again and she answered it: I heard her begging
off with her little-girl-like “Well, I don’t think I will--I’m so
tired--I just got back from rehearsal--I think I’ll go to bed--well, I
don’t think I will--you go--well, I don’t want to--all right, see you
to-morrow!”
And I felt, not merely flattered, but also reassured, to find that
Daisy seemed to think it natural to set aside her previous engagements
in favor of those higher obligations--of which I had learned the
importance from Rita--of following one’s own inclination.
“I’m glad you came,” she explained. “I didn’t want to go to that party
and if you hadn’t come, I would have gone.” “Where was it?” I asked.
“At Myra Busch’s.” “Are her parties any fun?” She shook her head
contemptuously: “No: she just has a lot of twirps.--I can’t stand ’em!”
“How cute you sounded talking over the telephone!” “Yes: strong men
weep!” “No, really: you’re awfully cute!” “You don’t mean it really,
do you? It’s a panic, isn’t it?” “No: I do mean it! You sounded cute.”
(Now that I had to renew my assurances, I began to feel insincere--I
had so long praised no one but Rita, and had praised her with such
passionate conviction, that I found now that it cost me an effort to
compliment any one else.) “Ray Coleman used to say that I had the
world’s worst voice on the telephone--he said I sounded like some awful
whining cash-girl.” Another proof of Ray’s stupidity! I could see what
he meant, but there was about Daisy’s speech something finely chiselled
like her features, so that I had scarcely been aware of her voice; and
my resentment at Ray’s stupid taste imparted to my compliments a new
fervor.
“Shall I go out and get a drink?” I suggested. “That would be fine!”
said Daisy, brightening, and with the humorous consciousness of
brightening, that irony of the city I so liked in her. “As the English
actor said, when the girl said, ‘How about twenty-five dollars?’--‘That
would be a godsend!’--I’ll be getting dressed while you’re gone.”
When I came back, she was still in the bathroom, and called out to me:
“You might pass me a drink in here, if you don’t mind.” I poured the
dregs out of one of the glasses and handed in some gin and ginger-ale:
her little naked arm, reached out from behind the door, had the
prettiness of a child’s.--“Now, you turn on the phonograph,” she called
to me, “so you won’t hear me use the what-not!” I started _Mamie Rose_
again and poured out a drink for myself: the music seemed almost gay
and, when the record had come to an end, I put on another record.
When she came out, she looked a good deal rosier and extremely clean:
she was dressed in a light blue dress, with a blue scarf dappled with
white, and wore straw-colored stockings. “How nice you look in your
blond clothes!” I told her. “Oh, this is just an old rag!” she squeaked
in a burlesque hen’s voice. “Well,” I insisted, “you look sweet!”
“I probably look like the Collapse of Western Civilization!” she
replied--but with a particularly charming smile.
She turned off the phonograph, which had been gibbering like an
imbecile over a single unintelligible phrase. “That phonograph’s a
delight, isn’t it?” she said. “I took it with me when I left Ray,
because it was one of the only things I had left that had belonged to
me before I lived withum. Phil gave it to me on our honeymoon. Some of
those records are Ray’s, though, I guess.” I remembered Rita’s bookcase.
“Phil was your first husband, was he?” “Yes: he’s my ex,” she
said.--She went on, after a moment: “Did you think I was really married
to Ray?” “Yes,” I said, “I did.” “I guess a good many people really
did. But we weren’t. It was a lucky thing, too: if I’d marriedum, it
would have been harder to leavum.” “Did you have a pretty trying time?”
I asked. “He wouldn’t let me do anything or go any place. If I went
out with anybody else, he’d burn up one of my dresses--he was great on
burning things up--I used to tellum that if he’d lived a little longer
ago, he’d have been burning witches.--He’d say that he didn’t buy me
clothes to have me go out with other men. And then when I did stay home
withum, I’d just have to listen to-um read to me out of the _Oxford
Book of English Verse_.--Finally, one night I got reckless and stayed
out for two days with Pete Bird”--(Pete Bird was the little man with
whom I had seen her talking at Ray Coleman’s and in whose company I had
found her the night before)--“and when I came back, he wouldn’t let me
in, so there was nothing to do but go looping again--I was plastered
for a week. Finally Gus Dunbar offered to let me stay here--it was
awfully decent ofum and he just did it out of friendliness. He helped
me get a job, too. I understand that Myra Busch is telling it around
the Village that I’m having a love-affair with Gus--but that’s
just absurd--he’s my oldest friend in New York: I knew him back in
Pittsburgh. He’s just my yes-man. He lets me sleep in the bed and he
sleeps on the couch. And besides, he’s sick!--He’s gone out of town and
I’m going to get a good rest. Oh, how I’m going to rest!”
We continued the conversation in a chop-house, with red-and-white
checked table-cloths and the smell of a butcher-shop, where very large
sour pickles were served with every order, on the side.
“What sort of a fellow is Pete Bird?” I inquired. “Isn’t he more or
less of a twirp?” “Well,” she said, “he did pretty well the other
night: he spent about a hundred and thirty dollars.” Even allowing
for the tremendous prestige which always attached in New York to the
spending of large sums of money, I felt a little that she was evading
my question, but I didn’t pursue the matter further: I seemed to divine
that Pete Bird was the man with whom she had broken her engagement to
go to Myra Busch’s that night.
I asked Daisy how she had ever happened to run away with Ray. “I
metum in the Ritz Bar in Paris,” she explained. “Phil and I didn’t
care anything about each other, by that time--Phil was in love with
a French girl. I didn’t resent his having affairs with other women,
but he used to give her my clothes.--Besides, I didn’t want to have
people saying: ‘That poor little Mrs. Meissner, sitting around crying
her eyes out, while her husband goes with other women!’ Besides, Phil
and I had just been thrown out of our hotel. Phil had a lot of money
when I marriedum, but we spent it all. Ray came along and he seemed
to be pretty affluent at that time, and I was so tired of not paying
any bills.--I will say about Phil, though, that he did everything with
a grand air. Ray would get worried if a bill ran for as much as a
week--whereas Phil never thought of paying a bill, even if he had the
money. It was funny: when you were with Phil, you felt that you were
swell, even though you didn’t have a cent--but when you were with Ray,
even though everything was paid for and all the bellboys and everybody
tipped, you felt you were only trying to be swell.”
I asked what Phil did. “He was a photographer,” she replied. “Not an
ordinary photographer, but one of these super-photographers. He only
took a picture about once every two months--he’d charge a hundred and
fifty dollars for a sitting. At least that’s what he did when he did
anything. He had money--at least, he did till his family wouldn’t
givum any more--so he didn’t really have to do anything.--He composed
songs, too.--But what he really worked hardest at was getting up
practical jokes. He’d spend hours sending out invitations to all the
worst bums in Paris, asking them to come to dinner at the house of
one of the social leaders of the American colony.” “What happened?” I
asked. “Well, they all showed up--all the dope-fiends and deadbeats,
and all the old drunken bozos that hang around the bars--all the most
undesirable Americans in Paris--and Mrs. Tilford was furious and almost
gottum arrested. Then another time, when he had to have lunch with
some friends of his family’s from Pittsburgh, he put camphorated oil on
the seats of all their chairs--well, camphorated oil makes you feel as
if you were freezing--so they all had to sit there at the table with
their fannies freezing and not knowing what was the trouble.”
I laughed. “Well, that sort of thing,” she explained, “can get to be
pretty tiresome, if you live with it all the time. And I was his wife,
so I felt partly responsible. When some guest almost broke his back
on a chair that flattened out when you sat in it, I’d feel pretty
humiliated.--And then he’d work his gags on me. One day he left a note
for me, saying that he’d committed suicide. And I suppose he thought it
was a joke when he took half my clothes away and told me that he was
sending them to the devastated regions, and then gave ’em to-uz little
French twirp!”
We had ordered ginger-ale, and had had some more gin: “You really look
marvellous in blue!” I said. She knocked herself under the chin: “That
sets me all up,” she said, meeting my gaze without blinking. Then she
dropped her eyes and added: “Phil really had a lot of charm, though.”
“What shall we do after dinner?” I asked. “Take me to the movies!” she
said, smiling. “I’ve had a yen to see some movies all day: I want to do
something restful.--Take me to something funny.--I’m so glad you came
to-night! I’ve been beginning to feel like a twirp. If I keep getting
plastered like I have been, I’ll lose my job.--It’s so long since I’ve
been alone or had any place where I could go and be by myself. It
seems to me I haven’t done anything for weeks but sit around and be
funny for people I didn’t really care about.--Gee, I don’t know what
to do! When I begin to get paid, I can live on what I make. But I’ve
been afraid to sober up, because then I’d have to face the future.”
(She always gave to all her clichés--“facing the future,” etc.--a
special ironic emphasis.) “I can’t think of anybody I care about--I
haven’t even got a girl-friend any more: all the ones that I had are
off me now because Ray wouldn’t let me have ’em around. So I haven’t
even got anybody to laugh about things with.--Business of twisting
handkerchief.--Let’s go, before I have you in tears!”
We had a reckless taxi-driver; but to me, strong with accelerations
of gin and with my normal masculine self-assurance, which Rita had
done so much to demoralize, now gratifyingly re-enforced by Daisy’s
feminine confession of helplessness and distress--it seemed to me at
that moment that I occupied a position of unchallengeable supremacy--it
seemed to me now that it had become possible for our taxi, at its
exhilarating giddy speed, to plunge through every opposition, to make
every obstruction give way. I marked with intensest vision the objects
which we seemed to ride down: an American Railway Express truck; a
woman with a German police dog; other scuttling and inferior taxis.
Rita had always been nervous about El posts; but, as we ripped our way
through the traffic, Daisy merely remarked: “Madcap Joe: the Demon
Driver!”--and as we erupted into Broadway: “You better stop him or
he’ll drive into the lobby!”
I thought scornfully of Duff Burdan, who had been barking so long
on Rita’s doorstep, and who, for the privilege of storing Rita’s
furniture, for the certainty of seeing her again, had been willing to
render his studio uninhabitable.
In the darkened moving-picture house, we found the news-reel passing
before us like a gray inconsecutive dream, and its images, as I
watched them, seemed to swell with the significance of dreams.--A
handsome buxom Sixteen-Year-Old Girl winning a Florida yacht-race in
a bathing-suit to the blaring triumphant pace of a red-white-and-blue
Sousa march. “She’s cute,” whispered Daisy, “isn’t she?” Yes: there
was the real native American poetry!--my spirit flashed again at the
thought of it--it had the daring and excitement of a poem!--and such
a spirit, which abandoned itself to the water and the wind, to the
speed of the flying yacht, would she not give herself also to love
beneath the nights of southern waters!--Mayor Hylan--_East Side, West
Side_--making a speech in New York: the flat-faced official visage,
the senseless savorless words of the American public figure--while the
brave filled the air with words of fire or slashed with white sails
and tanned arms the deep blue of Florida seas!--free America that flew
above those drones, that never paused for a thought of Mayor Hylan and
his imbecile servile speeches; in our eagerness, our taut attention,
stimulated more by the drinks than the film, Daisy and I were sitting
forward and our arms were pressing each other.--An aeroplane wafted
by a waltz--I had missed the title, my mind ablaze with the beauty of
poetry and sportsmanship--below, the city, flat as a map, a plane
shifted, not haphazardly, but with some underlying harmony and balance,
to a jerky succession of angles.--Laddy Boy’s Rival, a husky brought
to Washington, to the gallop of some lolloping dog music, by one of
Harding’s Secret Service Men--I whispered, “I believe that that husky
would make good presidential timber!” I glanced aside at Daisy and
saw her profile pale and clear as porcelain in the pale light from
the film, in which her pert little nose and chin showed a fineness
and purity of outline--an outline prolonged by the frail hand which,
with the fingertips lifted to the chin, received also, along fingers
and wrist, a pale porcelain border of light.--Members of the Municipal
Council at Baka, Japan, to the tune of _We’re Gentlemen of Japan_,
visit the city’s reservoir; they jump in and catch carp with their
hands: “I should think it would be bad enough,” whispered Daisy, “to
have to drink the carp, without drinking the municipal councillors,”
and I so threw myself forward in laughing at this that Daisy became
self-conscious about the pressure of our arms on the seat, and drew
a little away.--A slow-motion diving picture of champion woman
swimmers--they turned along the sweet lengthened rhythms of _All Alone
with the Telephone_, curving wonderfully through the air in moulded
recumbent postures and sending up, when they had slipped into the
water, a slowly condensing cloud of spray--how Rita would have loved
those slow parabolas, stripped clean of the flashiness of speed, as
tight-strung as the curve of a bow--she would have exclaimed of the
cloud of spray, “It’s like some lovely sort of punctuation--as if you
could punctuate a statue with some solid effect of light!”--The Prince
of Wales--_It’s a Long Way to Tipperary_--joking with a paralyzed
soldier--I wondered whether Rita would find the Prince of Wales
attractive, then reflected that, on the contrary, she would probably be
just perverse enough to prefer the paralyzed soldier: it occurred to me
now to consider that I was becoming too much preoccupied with Rita and
not paying enough attention to Daisy, so I moved my arm back against
hers.--Jo LeBlanc, Head of the New Central Ticket Office, playing
tennis to the jigging tune of _Tea for Two and Two for Tea_, to decide
who shall pay the religious expenses of one hundred Jewish children
to aid the Jewish Education Association Drive--“I bet the other man
loses, don’t you?” Daisy remarked. I wondered whether perhaps, after
all, I hadn’t been unfair to Max Kaufman--whether, perhaps, what I
had taken for complacency hadn’t been, after all, merely modesty--I
had a pang as I was revisited by the feeling that I had behaved badly
with Rita in the taxi.--Bishop Manning, to the firm exaltation of the
_Pilgrim’s Chorus_, receiving an emblematic pastoral staff, a huge
encrusted crozier, from the Chaplain of the House of Commons--Daisy and
I thought that Bishop Manning had the look of a priggish baby being
handed an enormous rattle: I put my hand gently over Daisy’s, which
lay beneath it cool and friendly.--A Chimpanzee Chauffeur: roguish
monkey music: _Yes, We Have No Bananas_; but I had fallen to reflecting
that, like some hero of a mediæval legend--the _Pilgrim’s Chorus_ and
the pastoral staff had made me see myself in that image--I had, for
a dreamlike space escaping measure, been shut away with Venus under
the hill, or, like Oisin, with some goddess of fairyland--that I had
been gone from the world of men, and only now, still blinking from the
Venusberg, still with the music of fairyland in my ears, still knowing
how the ache for the ideal may torture us like the ache for a drug of
which we have been deprived, beheld with joy, with bewildered relief,
the vision of Senator Oscar W. Underwood, who--to the rousing music
of _Dixie_--was making a speech at a Monster Barbecue in Montgomery,
Alabama--and found myself almost safe again in that familiar American
world, heterogeneous and absurd, which had ceased for so long to
seem real to me, of which I had never for so long been aware save to
repudiate it with scorn and impatience. The Oldest Human Remains, a
Skeleton of the Stone Age Discovered in an Oyster Bed: black bones
embedded in oysters: dull sombre chords--Rita could have done something
with this--something bitter about the fatuity of the twentieth-century
traveller who was pointing at the bones with his stick--or better--what
I could never have done: it was I who would have made easy capital out
of the traveller with the spectacles and the stick!--something simple,
troubling and hard about the bare black bones themselves.
And the smoothly revolving globe, supported by a kneeling goddess and
scrolling suddenly and rapidly out--as if in the burst of an exciting
revelation--the title of the comedy that followed--affected me, in
a drop equally sudden, as idiotic and insupportable: now that I had
been brooding on those blackened bones, I had become impatient with
everything again--and I crushed my way across to the aisle, over
overcoats, seats, and knees. I got some waxed-paper cups from the
smoking-room, and Daisy and I, in the half-darkness, had a drink of
water and gin. The paper cups leaked, and we had to get it down at a
draft.
On the screen, a dough-faced comedian with goggling horn-rimmed
glasses was enlisting in a fire-brigade.--An alarm!--he is the first
to respond--he rushes headlong for the fire-house pole, slides down it
head-first and remains at the bottom stunned: the firemen who follow
fall over him and pile up like a football scrimmage. We laughed at
this; and, on the way to the fire, the long hook-and-ladder truck,
whisking briskly around a corner with impossible nimbleness, caused
Daisy to laugh so violently that I thought again, as I had done on
the night when I had heard about her motor-cycle honeymoon, of that
American sense of motor-traffic which we had developed to such an
extraordinary degree--and which was now further played upon, in the
film, when the hero, in goggling innocence, allowed his hook-and-ladder
attachment to swing around at right-angles to the truck, so that
it swept the boulevard like a scythe, mowing the tops off all the
Fords, and never failing at every disaster to make Daisy laugh with
delight.--On the scene of the burning building, the hero was contending
with the hose, which enmeshed him like a boa-constrictor. The owner
of the building appeared, a pompous and imposing dignitary, in a
frock-coat and silk hat. “Oh, I hope he turns the hose on his hat,
don’t you?” whispered Daisy. And in a moment, just as the dignitary was
denouncing the clumsiness of the hero, an unexpected leak in the hose
cleanly squirted off the silk hat, which landed on an organ-grinder’s
monkey and gave rise to a fantastic chase.
Such was our wild exhilaration over this that I reflected, as the chase
began to flag, how, only half a year ago, if I had gone to the same
film with Hugo, I should, in laughing at the ruin of the hat, have been
moved by something more than the impulse, the mischievous impulse of a
child, which I shared to-night with Daisy: I should have laughed with
both savagery and zeal. I should, like Hugo, have taken the silk hat as
a symbol; I should have made of its destruction an issue. And now at
last I became aware how completely my point of view had changed since
I had fallen in love with Rita and ceased to see much of Hugo. Had I
not myself, only a few days before, taken out my own silk hat to go
with Rita to the _Rosenkavalier_? I knew now that I no longer cared to
imitate Hugo’s intransigeance in matters of this kind: his rejection of
all the amenities of that civilized life of which he was himself the
product; his fixed belief that society was divided into two mutually
hostile classes, a proletariat and a bourgeoisie; his unquestioning
acceptance of the catchwords of the social revolution, and his hostile
and suspicious unwillingness to arrive at a human understanding with
people who lived by different catchwords--all this seemed to me
to-night the product of a superficial point of view, or, almost, of an
arrested development. For Rita, despite the revolt against conventions
which all her life implied, despite her long association with radicals,
had had really but little interest in politics: her revolt was a revolt
of the individual--and I had discovered to my surprise, when I had come
to discuss with her the personalities of the Village, her complete
lack of interest in, and, in some cases, her positive contempt for,
certain of the radical leaders who most generally commanded admiration;
and that, despite the atmosphere in which she lived, it was actually
possible to strike fire from her mind by reactionary or conventional
views, if they were delivered with the right ring of bravery. And I had
myself, oblivious of the film, taken to meditating so exaltedly on the
vanity of people’s opinions beside the deeper realities of character,
the insignificance of politics compared to clairvoyance and passion,
that I began to laugh only belatedly when I had already become aware
that Daisy was roaring over one of the captions. The hero with the
horn-rimmed spectacles had just been bitten by a small bull-terrier,
and had picked it up and bitten it back: the caption read, “See how you
like it yourself!”
“Oh, I’m so glad you took me!” said Daisy. “I think it’s swell! I
just wanted to see something funny!” I slipped my hand over hers
again with sympathetic affection, and watched the rest of the comedy
leaning toward her and paying closer attention. We followed the picture
together, with a lively interchange of comment.
“Well, I suppose you want to go to bed,” I said to Daisy as we
walked out into Broadway. I suggested that we might stop at a
restaurant and finish up the gin. “No,” she said, “I’m too tired for a
restaurant.--Why don’t you come up to my place and we can drink it up
there?--‘Should she ask him in?’ If he’s got anything to drink: Yes!”
When we reached the room, the telephone was ringing. Daisy answered it,
speaking with some vehemence: “No: I don’t want to come--I’m tired,
I’ve gone to bed--well, I went out to get something to eat.--No, I
_don’t want_ to come!”
She lay down upon the bed, propping her head on the pillow and crossing
her feet: she was wearing lizard-skin shoes, light brown and very
small, but quite different-looking, I reflected, from any shoes that
Rita wore: Rita’s feet, like everything about her, seemed to manage
to be attractive in a curious personal way quite apart from current
fashions of prettiness, whereas Daisy’s feet were pretty in an almost
perfect ideal way, like the small feet of the girls with slim ankles in
the drawings in magazines.
“Well,” yawned Daisy, “this is where Mother takes a long refreshing
rest!” I handed her her gin and ginger-ale and sat down beside her,
drinking mine. “But I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to,” she added,
after a moment. “That’s why I want a drink.”
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Are you worried?” “No,” she replied.
“I’ve just got the heeby-jeebies!” “What’s the matter?” “I think
everybody’s a twirp!” “Are you in love?” “No; that’s the trouble.”
“You ought to be glad you’re not,” I said. “You have been, haven’t
you?” she asked. “Yes.” “You still are, aren’t you?” “No,” I
answered--“not any more.” She was trying to kick out of her shoes
without unbuttoning the straps, and I undid them and lifted them off.
“Thanks,” she said. “As soon as I lie down, I’m dead!”
I held her firm little insteps for a moment in my hands: in pale
stockings, her tired and sweaty feet were like two little moist
cream-cheeses encased in covers of cloth: her body, which seemed now so
slight in its pale blue dress, lay as limp as a lettuce-leaf soaked by
the summer rain.
“No,” I said. “You oughtn’t to be sorry if you’re not in love.” “I
know: that’s what I keep saying to myself when I think what damn fools
people make of themselves. But sometimes you feel the old aching in the
arm-pits--and it’s not just because you want to sleep with somebody
either.--You know the real reason that I asked you to come up here? It
was because I knew it would give me the willies to come back alone. As
soon as I get alone, everything seems so empty--I begin to get panicky.
Of course, it’s just the heeby-jeebies, though--after I’ve had a good
night’s sleep, I’ll be all right again.”
A deep tenderness of sympathy seemed to flush my very mind, and I
almost felt she must feel its warmth as it brimmed from my soul and
bathed her. I put one arm about her shoulders and with the other hand
covered her breast--it was low and lapsed a little--Rita, for all her
small head, her small hands and feet, had had the bosom of some divine
being--and from Ray Coleman’s gesture at the party, when he had put his
arms about Daisy, and from McIlvaine’s plump little Venus, I had been
imagining Daisy’s breasts as little firm globes. I kissed her on the
neck--which was round and short and had no sculptural contours like
Rita’s--and she kissed me back on the cheek: it was like the kiss of a
little girl, some cousin or playmate from next door, whom, at ten, one
decides to marry, and the relief of that human kiss, that embrace of
simple comradeship, soothed the strain with which my spirit, with which
my body itself, had ached.
I stretched myself beside her. If I had ever had any idea--playing the
part I had learned from Rita--of making love to Daisy that night. I
knew now that it had never been real, I could not now even conceive
it--it was so long since I had heard the boats as they moaned from
the harbor in Twelfth Street and the thought of them no longer moved
me, yet to try to love another woman on the day one had parted from
Rita!... And there began to take music in my weary, in my half-drunken,
mind the falling rhythm of a poem, the beginning of a sonnet of which,
the night before in my wakefulness, I had with obstinacy fixed in their
target the accurate shafts of the end. It took the form of an answer
to Daisy, and I found now that what had then been unbearable, because
written of myself for myself, now that I could write from the point of
departure of another’s fate than mine, now that I could dramatize my
fate for another--dignifying, or rather creating, for another person’s
mind--another’s mind which I merely imagined, since Daisy, it seemed,
hated poetry--a romance which should somehow console me for the wreck
and defilement of romance--now I could bear to return to the poem, and
to the pain which had stamped its images, putting another between them
and me--“_Ah, never sigh for love, for love is death!_”...
She was asleep--I could hear her breath: it seemed so slight to supply
the fuel for that warm body I felt against my arm, that engine of
activity and desire!--I turned off the electric light, covered Daisy
over with a blanket, and lay down myself on the couch--and with the
silence of the mind, love was still.