III

I had made a dinner engagement with Daisy for the next evening but one

after the night when I had taken her to the movies; but the sudden

death of one of my aunts, who had for many years lived with my mother,

prevented my keeping it. I was obliged to go down to the country, and

for several weeks I commuted between my mother’s house and my work.

Sustained by the vision of Rita renouncing the vanities of passion and

vowed in solitude to her play, I applied myself to reading Sophocles,

who at college had always bored me, but of whom I had so often heard

it said that he saw life steadily and saw it whole that I wondered

whether, in my present situation, I mightn’t perhaps be able to benefit

by his wisdom. Rather, however, than risk a first evening alone in my

Bank Street apartment, where for so long I had seen no one but Rita, I

had asked Daisy to have dinner with me the night of my return to town.

When I dropped my suit-case in the darkened sitting-room, with its

drawn blinds and its frigid radiator, I felt for a moment, with a

shudder, the shock of that current of emotion which I had hoped had

been for ever disconnected when Rita had moved out of Twelfth Street,

but which I found now that my own possessions, themselves saturated

with Rita, had also the power of conducting. At the sight of the couch,

the Leonardo (which Rita had admired), the Pernod peach-brandy bottle

on the little marble mantelpiece (I had kept it there ever since the

night when Rita had spoken of the label)--my heart sank as it had

done in Twelfth Street the day when I had heard the boat-whistles.

But I resolutely thought of Daisy--and as gaily as I had ever done,

it seemed to me, I took my bath, changed my clothes, picked out an

appropriate tie. I threw away the peach-brandy bottle, which the last

time I had looked at it on the mantel on the occasion of a ghastly

scene with Rita, I had had a violent impulse to smash as an outlet for

my exacerbated passion: it fell in the waste-basket with a thud which

astounded and routed my nerves. I was throwing in, as if to cover and

conceal it, all the circulars which had accumulated during my absence

when, on the tightened silence of the room, the telephone suddenly

blazed.

It was somebody speaking for Daisy; I was to meet her now, not at Gus

Dunbar’s, but somewhere else--I couldn’t make out where: the voice--it

was a man’s--kept instructing me just to walk right in and to ask

for Mr. Somebody’s--he was at once so indistinct and so admirably

polite that I concluded he must be drunk. I asked if I could speak to

Daisy, and her voice was presently heard through the receiver--she

seemed faraway, facetious and vague. I tried to find out whether the

place I was to go to were a speakeasy or a private apartment--but she

only answered, “Yes,” and laughed, and then insisted that I should

walk right in and go right up to Somebody-or-other’s. I begged her

to spell out the name--and she began with loud-vibrating emphasis:

“M for mother--I for ’ighball--C for seasick--K for--Oh, you know

K!--L for laryngitis”--She began to laugh again, evidently at some

suggestion from somebody else in the room. I tried to check up on

the letters which I had already heard, but she broke in: “Just put

them all together and they spell love!”--then, with no relation to my

further questions: “Yes, ‘Mick’--just ask for Mick!--All right!--hurry

up!--Good-by!” She hung the receiver up: I had, however, got the

address.

The taxi carried me far, too far--beyond Lexington Avenue--along East

Thirty-fourth Street: the neighborhood seemed to me sordid. I had hoped

to find Daisy, clean from her bath and with her lovely candid smile, as

on the night when I had taken her to the movies: I had looked forward

to watching her in the light of the little pink table-lamp, over the

white cloth and yellow wine of a brisk and bright French restaurant.

We drew up at a narrow entrance which the driver located with

difficulty between a manufacturer of nasal syphons and a merchant of

rebuilt typewriters. It was the meagrest pretense of a doorway: a layer

of livid imitation marble, a length of blue-and-white rubber tiles.

I looked above the bells in vain for a name which began with Mick;

but then, in some of the grimy little frames, there were not even any

cards. I rang one of the nameless bells--but it awakened no responsive

click, and I rang another.

A man was coming out of the hallway, and I asked him whether he knew

of a Mr. Mickle. I looked into dim and evasive eyes: I was appalled

to see that he had no chin, that his nose was an almost elephantine

proboscis and that his ears stood out from his head like those of an

elephant listening; he wore an old shabby overcoat and a curious gray

felt hat, which tended to be conical; his hands were non-prehensile,

and trembled. He shook his head without a word, in answer to my

question--and passed on like an apparition. I thought: He must live

alone!--he must have lived alone for so long that he is numb and can no

longer feel loneliness, can no longer feel even irritation at strangers

who are looking for friends and who hurriedly break in on his solitude.

And I resented such an existence, solitary, dismal, and uncouth,

resigned to drop out of the world, hoping only to be noticed by no

one; and I was repelled by his strange trunklike snout: my own nose,

I remembered, was bulbous, and, as I mounted the narrow staircase, it

seemed to me more bulbous than ever.

The stairs turned above the typewriter shop, and I was confronted

by the cramped and crowded doors of cheap dentists and real-estate

offices. I explored the corridor, and found another staircase, and

climbed to another and darker hall, where there were no longer, as

below, any names painted on the doors. That was evidently where

people lived: it was as if the occupants had made their homes in the

chinks left by petty business: they seemed as narrowly confined, as

discouragingly inaccessible, as the inhabitants of a jail--and they

lacked even that common bond, that limited intercommunication; each

had stowed himself dumbly away at the bottom of his little slot, in

oblivion of the others: each asked only to be let alone at the end

of the herded day--behind the locked and anonymous door, presenting a

blank to all the rest, as they presented blanks to him.

At random, I rang a bell--and, as if in confutation of my vision of

benumbed and sullen recluses, after shuffling precipitate noises

within, the door was suddenly flung open and there appeared a lady with

bright dyed red hair and a lacy dowdy dressing-gown who, at the barest

suggestion of a name which began with M-i-c-k, seemed transported by

enthusiasm. Yes: they lived just across the hall--just opposite her own

apartment. “Yes: they’re just in now,” she ran on, slopping over with

friendly helpfulness and with a simpering ladylike smile. “If you’d

come a little later, I don’t think you’d have found them home, because

they most always go out to dinner about seven o’clock!” She eagerly

crossed the hall in her voluminous negligé and rang the bell herself.

I thanked her, but she did not withdraw. She waited, repeating herself

and beaming. I thought her a little insane--from loneliness, I supposed.

Some one was hastening from the depths within. Then Pete Bird opened

the door and confronted me with a goggling stare. The red-haired

woman still lingered in the hall as if she hoped for a little general

conversation, but Pete Bird merely asked me in, and shut the door

behind us.

We passed through a little dark hallway and emerged into a narrow

sitting-room. I saw Daisy in a morris chair with her legs dangling

over one arm and her back against the other: she greeted me with an

odd unsmiling daze. And, still charmed by the memory of her paleness

when she had lain along the bed like a moonbeam the night that I had

taken her to the movies, I was horrified to find her now with touzled,

muddy hair and a sallow, puffy visage, in which the nose was an ignoble

little knob, blobbed in candle wax, and the eyes were two protruding

gooseberries, scored about with discolored skin: she was wearing a

greenish-blackish plaid. I took her hand: it was a cold little claw.

I remarked that she looked quite different, that having her hair done

differently had transformed her: I saw now that the ragged effect had

been originally intentional. She said: “Yes, and I suppose you’re

going to tell me that it looks terrible, too.” “You look like a French

whore!” said Pete. “Well, you know what you look like?” said Daisy.

“You look like some kind of a goblin that’s been drowned at the bottom

of a well!” And it was true: with his gargoyle gaze, his haggard,

greenish cheeks, the deep furrows in his forehead and the ape-like

lines to his wide mouth, he had an aspect half immature and half

prematurely old, at once disaffected and aghast. There seemed to have

occurred, since I had talked to them on the telephone, some abysmal

lapse of hilarity. Yet Pete Bird’s double-breasted jacket, his spats,

the handkerchief sticking out of his pocket, and the collar of his blue

shirt fastened together by a small gold pin, gave to his appearance

and to the whole situation an odd indestructible note of urbanity and

smartness.

In that atmosphere clouded by drunkenness, I glanced instinctively

about for a drink, and saw nothing but empty bottles and a débris of

the enormous thick crusts of delicatessen sandwiches, with the oiled

paper in which they had been wrapped. “There’s nothing to drink,”

declared Daisy with what I thought was a note of asperity. “What is

this place, anyway?” I asked. “Listen to-um!” said Daisy, indignantly.

“He expects us to tend bar for-um!”

“No,” I explained, “I just meant, who lives here?” “It belongs to Larry

Mickler,” she replied, as if she had already, over the telephone, made

all this quite clear enough. “Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence Mickler,” said

Pete, with the invincible gentlemanly instinct to be informative and

agreeable from his grave at the bottom of the well.

I inquired where the host and hostess were. “Well,” said Pete, as

if his own extinction, though powerless to impair his politeness,

had rendered him uncannily detached toward the catastrophic fates

of others, “Mr. Mickler’s in the bathroom, probably unconscious,

and Mrs. Mickler’s in the bedroom, sore as a crab.” “I insulted the

hostess,” said Daisy. “Well, anyway,” concluded Pete, “that leaves the

drawing-room to us!”

The drawing-room, like everything else in that place, cooped one up

and made one uncomfortable: I saw, at the other end, a contracted

fireplace, like a large square-cornered rat-hole, with, above it, on

the shallow mantelpiece, a plaster cast of the Winged Victory; and

between two narrow windows, which looked down on the Thirty-fourth

Street car-tracks, a bookcase containing, I noted, volumes of D. H.

Lawrence, Cabell, Dunsany, and Shaw; George Moore’s _Memoirs of My

Dead Life_; Freud’s _Interpretation of Dreams_; Frank Harris’s _Oscar

Wilde_; several volumes of Levy’s _Nietzsche_ and a whole shelf’s array

of Dostoevsky.

“Come on,” exclaimed Daisy abruptly, swinging out of the morris chair.

“Let’s get out of here right away!” I asked her where she wanted to

dine, in the hope that we might now be able to effect a separation from

Pete. “I don’t want any dinner!” she replied, as if nothing could have

seemed more revolting. “I’ve just had some sandwiches.--What I want is

a dirty big drink!”

“I’d better say good-by to Larry,” suggested Pete Bird. “I wouldn’t say

good-by to-um,” said Daisy, “after the way he acted with us.”

Pete went into the little corridor and knocked on the bathroom door.

“We had a fight,” Daisy explained. “We would have left before, if we

hadn’t been waiting for you. Larry sent Pete out to the delicatessen’s

to get some sandwiches for supper and gave him a ten-dollar bill--and

Pete brought back six sandwiches and Larry didn’t think that Pete had

given-um back enough change and accused Pete of keeping the money--when

they’d actually cost that much!” We could hear the voice of Pete

in the bathroom, pleading with the host on a tone of gentlemanly

reasonableness. I asked how the _Frolics_ were going. “Oh, I got

canned!” she replied, sullenly and shortly. “I stayed away from too

many rehearsals.”

Pete returned with Larry Mickler. He was a young man with dingy skin, a

round head and a small dark mustache, very smartly and cockily waxed:

he bent forward from the waist when he shook hands with me, and I took

an almost immediate dislike to him: he was taller than Pete Bird, but

not so tall as I.

Pete was urging Larry Mickler to come out with us, and I seconded him

insincerely. “Get Alice out,” Pete insisted, “and make her come along,

too!” “Oh, she’s tired,” Larry Mickler perfunctorily assured him--“she

doesn’t want to come!”

“I’m not out for any looping,” said Daisy, with what I thought--with

what I hoped--was an intention of discouraging this idea. “I think I’ll

go home and go to bed.” “You’re not going home yet, little woman,”

Pete asserted, with a firm, though humorous, accent of masculine

domination. “You’re not going home to bed till you’ve had a little

insomnia-medicine, a little touch of the magic elixir that causes

the lame to see and the tongue-tied to run like rabbits! The old

miracle-scattering scamper-juice!--Am I right?” he appealed to me.

“Let’s go to Tony Scallopino’s,” suggested Larry Mickler. “Let’s not!”

said Daisy promptly. “You see,” Pete Bird explained, with dignity,

irony and ease, “Tony raised a check of mine once and I’ve never felt

quite the same about him since.” I proposed Harry Heinz’s. “Well, Harry

Heinz and I are not quite the best of friends either,” Pete casually

replied. “In my opinion, a restaurant is a place where the patrons

are supposed to drink while the man who runs the place stays sober:

when the guests have to take care of the proprietor and put him under

the pump, I consider that the time has arrived to seek recreation

elsewhere!”

“Let’s go to Sue Borglum’s!” said Daisy, with a sudden inspiration.

“To-night is Thursday night, and she has a party every Thursday. I saw

her the other day and I promised that I’d come.--Oh, I’m so glad I

thought of that!” she added, smiling for the first time. “I want to see

Sue Borglum!”

“All right: Sue Borglum’s it is!” Pete approved, with rollicking

decisiveness. “Come: snap into your coats, ladies and gents! Let’s be

off to some place where there’s stimulants!”

I helped Daisy on with her coat, and as I caught a momentary glimpse

of her pale watery-yolked poached eyes, it seemed to me--(Rita and I

had read some scientific books together: the vision of human futility

which she derived from scientific ideas exercised upon her a strong

fascination, and threw her back with an exacerbated appetite on the

gratification of the moment--and to-night it was these scientific

images which rose to my own imagination at the expense of both

Sophocles and Rita’s poems themselves)--it seemed to me as if the Daisy

whose profile had appeared to me in the theatre, so fragile, pale and

chaste, whom almost with the tenderness of tears I had covered with a

blanket in Forty-fourth Street--as if that Daisy had been merely the

spray of which I had happened to catch a glimpse for a moment on a wave

of common human colloids, the unstable fluids of the body, continually

gluing and ungluing--or a cloud which had for a moment taken symmetry

from those atoms of carbon and the other things, but which to-night

had been blown awry. I turned Daisy’s collar down carefully.

Larry Mickler had been getting into his coat, a garish rust-red ulster,

and Pete Bird had been helping him on with it. Now Mickler pulled up

his collar, which completely covered his ears, and slapped on a rakish

felt hat, pulling the brim down over his eyes.

“You know, that damn statue annoys me!”--he indicated the Winged

Victory: I saw that he was drunk. “Alice’s had that goddam thing ever

since we were married: she acquired it at college. It always reminds me

of a chicken running around with its head cut off!”

He produced a revolver from his pocket and, almost before we had seen

it, had fired before him point-blank at the little plaster cast: it

fell from the mantel, and lay shattered in chalky fragments and flakes.

“Well,” said Mickler, “so much for Nikky! Alice may miss her at

first, but I’m sure it’ll be a splendid thing for her to have to get

along without her.--I feel almost,” he added, grinning at us, “as

if I’d committed a murder, though! ‘Ad Writer Slays Phi Beta Kappa

Girl!’--Well, let’s go! The neighbors may be coming in to find out

who’s been shot!”

He turned to me, grinning, and explained, as if in friendly

humorous confidence: “No disrespect to the Greeks!--I’m a Dionysian

myself!--sometimes a Dionysian and sometimes an Apollonian!--it all

depends on metabolism!” He began to sing, parodying the popular song:

“Sometimes I’m Dionysian!--sometimes I’m Apollonian!

My disposition depends on metabolism!”

Then, finding me a little unresponsive, he changed his tone and

addressed me more earnestly: “I just wanted you to know,” he insisted,

“that I don’t mean any disrespect to the Greeks. The Greeks knew what

it was all about: they danced with arms and legs--but we lock ourselves

up in the bathroom because we’re afraid to face life!”

“Say, listen,” declared Daisy, “if you’re going to go out with us,

you’ve got to leave that thing behind! I can face life without it.”

“Take it along to protect you!” said Mickler. “Never know who’s going

to stick you up nowadays!” “Don’t be a fool,” said Daisy. “I won’t,

sweetheart,” he retorted. “Never you worry about that!”

“I’m going to say good-by to Alice!” said Daisy, as if with a sudden

resurgence of sympathy. She went out into the little hallway and

knocked at the bedroom door, but there was no reply. “Oh, she’s

all right!” insisted Larry Mickler. “She probably thinks I’ve shot

myself--let her enjoy a few moments’ happiness!” Pete and Mickler put

their arms around Daisy, propelled her along the little hallway and

pushed her out through the apartment door.

Outside, we found the lady in the dressing-gown, who giggled

ingratiatingly: “I thought I heard a shot.” “I was just shooting a

cat,” said Larry Mickler. “It was keeping my wife awake!”

I finally, standing in the slush, succeeded in capturing a taxi; it

couldn’t draw up to the curb, and Daisy got her feet wet. She seemed

worried and morose.

“That old hag’ll lie awake all night,” remarked Larry Mickler, with

a chuckle, “thinking that I’ve killed Alice!” “Well,” said Pete, “it

will doubtless afford her a great deal of entertainment. I’m sure her

life is far too tame!” “Yes,” said Mickler, “how they lick their chops

in vicarious enjoyment over other people’s murders! How all the world

loves a murderer!” “It would take more than that,” said Daisy, “to make

me love you!”

“I hear,” said Larry Mickler, changing the subject and evidently

attempting to talk more soberly--“I hear that Bobby McIlvaine has given

Sue Borglum the air.--Is that true?” he inquired of Daisy. “Guess so,”

said Daisy. “I don’t know.” “I guess he decided that she’d done all

she could for him,” Larry Mickler continued, “and that it was time

to move farther up-town!” (Sue Borglum, who knew every one, more or

less, had taken Bobby McIlvaine up soon after the night that I had met

them at Ray Coleman’s, and had smoothed his way among the managers

and dramatists.) I remarked that I considered Bobby McIlvaine a very

gifted fellow, none the less, and that I admired his designs for Homer.

“Yes,” said Mickler, “but why not make designs for Wells’s _Outline

of History_? Why not try to produce the _World Almanac_?--Bobby

McIlvaine’s all right on paper, but did you ever see a show that he’d

staged that was worth its space in the storehouse? Look at _April

Showers_, for instance: Fritz Fishbein, Al Leiper’s publicity man,

blames Bobby for the show being a flop. It seems that Bobby insisted on

putting in a trick ballet, where the chorus had to wear papier-mâché

bodies. Al Leiper wanted to throw it out at dress rehearsal, because

the papier-mâché bodies took up too much room behind--they could hardly

change the scenery. But Bobby hit on the brilliant idea of sending

them downstairs in an elevator--it seems they use elevators in Berlin.

The first night, the elevator got stuck just before the second act and

they couldn’t ring the curtain up--they had to hold it twenty minutes.

Finally, Al Leiper sent some stage-hands down with great big mallets

and--zongo! zongo! zongo!--they just smashed in the elevator doors

and threw all the papier-mâché bodies out in the alley--and then,

when that was full, they threw them into Beattie’s drug-store. There

were all those pop-eyed dummies which Bobby had been working on for

God knows how long lying around Beattie’s--though I don’t suppose you

could have told them from the customers!--What a civilization, eh?” he

turned to me again. “Bring slavery back, I say--it never should have

been abolished! Bring slavery back and make nine-tenths of the people

slaves! Then the superior man would be free to live life like it ought

to be lived! As it is, the civilized man has got to black the peasant’s

boots!”

We had come to the end of Fifth Avenue, and Daisy, sliding back the

glass panel that opened in the front of the cab, directed the driver to

turn to the right.

Among those tangled irregular streets to the west of Washington

Square, I caught occasionally, from the taxi, a glimpse, almost

eighteenth-century, of a lampless black-windowed street-end where the

street-urchins, shrieking in the silence, were stacking up bonfires

in the snow--those lost corners of the old provincial city, where the

traffic of the upper metropolis no longer gnashed iron teeth, no longer

oppressed the pavements with its grindings and its groans--where those

soft moans and hoots of the shipping washed the island from the western

shore. There they had come, those heroes of my youth, the artists and

the prophets of the Village, from the American factories and farms,

from the farthest towns and prairies--there they had found it possible

to leave behind them the constraints and self-consciousness of their

homes, the shame of not making money--there they had lived with their

own imaginations and followed their own thought. I did not know that,

with the coming of a second race, of which Ray Coleman, without my

divining it, had already appeared as one of the forerunners--a mere

miscellaneous hiving of New Yorkers like those in any other part

of town, with no leisure and no beliefs--I did not know that I was

soon to see the whole quarter fall a victim to the landlords and the

real-estate speculators, who would raise the rents and wreck the old

houses--till the sooty peeling fronts of the south side of Washington

Square, to whose mysterious studios, when I had first come to live in

the Village, I had so much longed some day to be admitted, should be

replaced by fresh arty pinks--till the very guardian façades of the

north side should be gutted of their ancient grandeurs and crammed

tight with economized cells--till the very configuration of the streets

should be wiped out, during a few summer months when I had been out

of New York on vacation, by the obliteration of whole blocks, whole

familiar neighborhoods--and till finally the beauty of the Square,

the pattern of the park and the arch, the proportions of everything,

should be spoiled by the first peaks of a mountain-range of modern

apartment-houses (with electric refrigerators, uniformed elevator boys

and, on the street-level, those smartly furnished restaurants in which

Hugo was soon to be horrified at finding copies of _Town and Country_),

dominating and crushing the Village, so that at last it seemed merely

to survive as a base for those gigantic featureless mounds, swollen,

clumsy, blunt, bleaching dismally with sandy yellow walls that sunlight

which once, in the autumn, on the old fronts of the northern side,

still the masters of their open plaza--when the shadows of the leafless

trees seemed to drift across them like clouds--had warmed their roses

to red.

Sue Borglum, at any rate, at the time of which I am writing, had rented

the whole of a large old house (of which she sub-let the top floor

and the basement) in one of the oldest obscurest streets, where the

children, deserting their bonfire, came clamoring to open our door, and

where the lights and sounds of the party seemed incongruously bright

and loud amid the darkness and silence about. There were dark double

ogival outer doors and, inside them, another pair of doors, with a

design in frosted glass of sphinx-heads and vine-leaf scrolleries.

We pulled a bell, and a Jap let us in. Sue Borglum rushed up

boisterously to greet us: she seemed high-keyed and overwrought, and

embraced Daisy with cries of “_Darling!_” In her blatant green evening

gown, with a rhinestone aigrette in her hair and on her fingers a large

scarab and some diamonds, she seemed to me uglier than ever: her cheeks

were beginning to hang in jowls, her wide mouth was a grotesque gash

of lipstick, and the pouches under her eyes were as distinctly shaded

off from her cheeks as if they had been drawn by a caricaturist. Behind

her, rose the hubbub of the party: the hallway and the rooms were full

of people.

We had started up-stairs to put our things away when Sue Borglum,

gesticulating frantically toward a water-cooler in the hall near

the staircase, shouted after us: “Cocktails!--Cocktails!--That

water-cooler’s full of cocktails.--Yes! Isn’t it a grand idea?”

Pete and Daisy came down first, and Sue had already swept them off by

the time Larry Mickler and I had arrived at the foot of the stairs: we

stopped at the water-cooler and drew drinks. Larry Mickler swallowed

his at a gulp. “That little bastard, Pete Bird!” he complained. “I

gave him ten dollars at my house to get some sandwiches for supper

and what do you think he did? He went out and got liverwurst--the

cheapest kind there is!--and then had the Christ-Almighty nerve to

bring me back four dollars change--six dollars for six sandwiches!”

I asked whether he thought that Daisy was pretty fond of Pete. “She

hasn’t got the capacity for love,” he replied, shaking his head with

a sneer and turning the spigot for another cocktail. “But they’re two

of a kind--out for what they can do you for! She’s a cold little

proposition that calculates every kiss--and he owes money, or he’s

passed bad checks, in every joint below Fourteenth Street. It’s

wonderful how he’s able to get away with it even where they’re cagy!

He’s got this soft-spoken wide-eyed way with him.--Well, _he_ can have

her!”

We moved on to the door of the front room. Sue Borglum’s front room

was spacious and not without a certain grandeur: I could see, above a

marble fireplace, the wide sheet of a gilt-framed mirror, which doubled

the high white mouldings and the sombre maroon wall-paper.--Such a

house as I had once imagined for Rita and myself to live in! Ah, I

should have asked nothing better of life than to have fitted up such

a house, to have passed my days alone with Rita in those high quiet

rooms, hidden away among those crooked streets, with poetry and

love!--But these fancies now seemed to me naïve, and I was ashamed

of ever having had them. I stoically dismissed them from my mind,

and could still, I found, feel hope and excitement amid the variety

and gaiety of the Village, so densely intermingling, so vivaciously

chattering about me: the Italian and Russian painters; the intelligent

amateur actors; the mad baroness who kept a restaurant; the radical

journalists and agitators, who, despite the homely forthright style

of their writings, not infrequently turned out, when one met them,

to be engagingly shy, and sometimes to possess personal charm to a

degree almost cloying; the pretty Jewesses with thick red lips and

glossy black bobbed hair; the austere and handsome woman managers of

theatres and magazines, with their dignity of Mother Superiors; and

the megalomaniac lunatics whom it was the thing rather to like.

Larry Mickler and I, in the doorway, did not at first encounter any one

we knew. “Well,” said Mickler, lifting his cocktail, “here’s to the

Seven Deadly Sins! May they never perish from the earth!--Let’s drink

to the memory of Dostoevsky--the only goddam genius,” he added, “who

ever understood the human soul!” I drank with him to Dostoevsky. “The

Seven Deadly Sins!” said Larry Mickler scornfully. “What chance have

they got to-day when everybody wears these horn-rimmed glasses!”

I wondered whether it mightn’t be true that a novelist like Dostoevsky

was greater than any lyric poet, even so great a one as Rita--but

suppose the play on which Rita was working should turn out to reveal

wider gifts?--And, stimulated by my cocktail, I asked myself whether,

in spite of everything, I shouldn’t go to see her again, when she

eventually came back from her aunt’s: I had behaved so horribly when we

had parted, and we had exchanged no letters since she left.

A man who had been leaning over the back of a couch that faced the

marble fireplace moved away and let me see the head and neck of a woman

who was sitting on the couch and whose bobbed and coppery hair reminded

me of Rita’s.--What a comfort that it could not be she! Then the

woman, turning her head with a staccato birdlike movement, in some gay

interchange with the man sitting next to her, revealed her profile and

I saw that it was Rita. I could see also that the man was Ray Coleman.

My companion recognized him at the same time: “There’s Ray Coleman

over there!” he exclaimed. “He’s just got a new job on the _Sketch!_”

Larry Mickler made his way across the room. I followed him, and spoke

to Rita over the back of the couch, taking care to betray no surprise.

“How long have you been back?” I inquired. “Since last Friday--last

Friday night,” she replied, as if by frankness and accuracy to fend off

my disapproval.

I asked about her aunt: “She’s much better,” she assured me, smoothing

out the creases of her smile and making her eyes, which looked to me

now like little hard green pebbles of glass, serious and blank. “The

doctor said that she was simply tired out, that all she needed was to

rest. My mother is still up there with her.--Do come around and sit

down!” I sat down, not beside her on the couch, but on a stool at one

side of the fireplace.

“You know, I was thinking about you,” she said, “just before I

left!” “What made you do that?” I asked. “I went wading in Stony

River one day--in the cold, and everything!--and I thought about you

then--because you liked the poem, you know!--You know, it was freezing

cold: I almost froze my feet off--but somehow I wanted to do it!”

I asked how she’d got on with her play. She dropped her eyes, which had

girlishly puckered over her wading in Stony River: “Well, I haven’t

actually _written_ very much, but I’ve thought about it a lot. I know

just what I _want_ to write--I’ve got it all blocked out, you know!”

And sustained by this triumphant phrase, she lifted earnest eyes to

mine.

I said that she looked awfully well--and it was true: she had already

been flushed by the excitement of conversation, and when I spoke to

her, she had flushed more deeply, so that she burned like a little

furnace, as she had done that first night in Bank Street when she and

I had talked about poetry. She had brought back from the country a

complexion refreshed from the tarnish of the city, and the contours

of her face had filled out again: again she could challenge the world

from the tower of her lovely throat, which gave to her little figure a

dignity almost extra-human, like the dignity of a great work of art.

“And I _feel_ so well,” she replied. “I went tramping and sleighing

and skating!--I did all the things that I hadn’t done since I was a

little girl! And I tell you, I went _wading!_--you don’t seem impressed

by that, but I assure you it was no tame experience: the water was so

cold that it burned! The snow is still on the ground up there, two

feet deep--the river-banks were all crusted with ice--in some places

there were little fragile translucent ledges of ice that came out over

the water--just like blades of swords made of ice!--You know, I’m

going to have a sword that’s made of ice in my play--don’t you think

that’s a wonderful idea?” “I should think it would break easily,” I

replied. “Not if it was sharp enough!” “Perhaps not.” “Mine will be!”

she held her own, grinning briefly. “Well, anyway, I went wading--and

it was so _thrilling!_ You haven’t any idea how beautiful a river

is in winter till you get right out in the middle of it and see the

water still alive like quicksilver in the midst of the dead frozen

landscape--running away between the wicked jagged edges! It’s as if

the tighter other things froze, the faster the river ran--like a live

vein in a paralyzed body!”

Her feeling for Stony River, which had once so completely enchanted

me, now irritated me profoundly. I could see plainly in imagination

some tall young country boy, panting with desire and only too happy to

accompany her on her uncomfortable escapade: he would have carried her,

of course, over the bad spots--would, in fact, probably have carried

her most of the time--he had ended no doubt by chafing her feet.

“It must have been wonderful,” I replied, and turned away to listen to

Ray Coleman. Lina Lemberg, the young Polish girl who had been convicted

of murdering her husband, had just been sentenced to death; and Ray was

describing with enthusiasm how he had pursued the car which was taking

her to Sing Sing, and had succeeded in having her photographed from the

taxi. (He had just left the _Telegram-Despatch_ for the city desk of

the _Daily Sketch_, the most important of the new tabloids.) “I see,”

said Larry Mickler, showing small white even teeth, “that she says she

wishes Nicky were back with her.” “She’s going to get half her wish,”

said Ray--“She’s going to get it fifty-fifty: she’s not going to get

Nicky back, but she’s going to go to join him!” Larry Mickler laughed

with loud appreciation. “Well,” he remarked, “the murderer has his fun,

and he ought to be willing to pay for it! True, he has to pay dearer

than most people--but then he has more fun!”

Ray presented Larry Mickler to Rita: he did so with obvious

pride--with, it seemed to my jealous eye, something akin to an air of

proprietorship. Rita invited Larry Mickler to sit down, and he took

the stool on the other side of the fireplace. Ray Coleman inquired

affably how Mickler’s own work was going. “It’s just the same old

hick-diddling game!” he replied, leaning forward, his hands clasped

between his knees. “We still manage to land the suckers!” I thought

that he was ashamed of the advertising business, and was being

contemptuous about it for Rita’s benefit. “Our latest masterpiece was

putting over Marona--‘Makes the Mouth Safe for Teeth!’ was a product of

our fly-paper factory.” “You don’t say!” Ray Coleman exclaimed, raising

his almost continuous eyebrows, as if this feat commanded respect.

“Is that so?” “You know what it’s made of, don’t you?” “No,” admitted

Ray Coleman, “what?” “Horse-chestnuts! Nothing but horse-chestnuts!

Just nothing in the world but plain old buckeyes! Can you beat it? A

million and a-half people every morning, sitting down to a breakfast

of buckeyes, with sugar and cream!” “Don’t you do anything to them?”

asked Ray. “Not a blessed thing!--just chop ’em up. We’ve struck such

terror into the hearts of the boobs by telling them that ordinary food

was soft and ruined their teeth, and that in a few more generations the

human race would be toothless, that now there are a million and a half

people breaking their jaws every morning over horse-chestnuts! ‘Makes

the Mouth Safe for Teeth!’--they find it irresistible!”

“Say,” said Coleman, humorously, “isn’t it about time that the Osage

orange got a break?” “You might sell them for their perfume,” said

Rita. “They have a marvellous smell, you know!” “By Jove, that’s a

good idea!” said Coleman. “You might have all the women carrying

them around!” I doubted whether on ordinary occasions he would have

considered this a particularly good idea--it seemed to me all too

plain that he had fallen under the spell of Rita and that he thought

only of playing up to her. I remembered the night when I had first met

them and when Rita had agreed with me that Ray was poisonous. “They’d

be a little heavy, I’m afraid, to carry around,” said Rita. “And they

wouldn’t be becoming to many people. I might wear one, though--a very

little one--on account of the color of my eyes!”

She was gay, and seemed to me so pleased with herself, so sufficient

to herself, so remote from me; and I reflected that, while she had

been speaking, I had been aware, for the first time since the earliest

days of our acquaintance, of her acquired English accent. Not that

she always spoke in this way: she had the accent in which she recited

her poems and the accent of the Village gamine--nor did she hesitate

to bite down on a hard up-country r, when some special situation--a

sundae at the soda-fountain or a hammock on a porch--had suggested to

her versatile spirit the rôle of a girl in a small town; but, coming

in contact with English actresses during the days when she had been on

the stage, her natural disposition toward brittleness and briskness

had found their accent a congenial modification, and it was this

accent which usually predominated on occasions when she was meeting

strangers. Yet how many times since that first night I must have heard

her drop into this manner, without ever having been aware of it! And I

was sharply forced to take account of the distance between the present

and the days when I had first known Rita. Then, I had been in love--and

that was what it meant to be in love: so to surround, so to devour,

another human being with tenderness, passion, admiration, that their

very absurdities and perversities had been fused with the rest in

the furnace till there was nothing but a white molten glow--till one

resented, not merely the hostility, but even the critical detachment

of others, because the point of view of a critic was unimaginable from

one’s own. But that critical detachment, to-day it was I who exercised

it--and at the thought that I could now meet Rita with a mind which had

become so cold that I could note her little affectations, I was filled,

not with the relief I hoped for and in which I tried to believe, but

with horror and fear. She had gone, the creature who had summoned my

love--or whom my love itself had created, I hardly now knew which--the

being, who had commanded the allegiance of mind, imagination and

desire--and could I never now rejoin her again? Was it true that my

love had been destroyed? Could I never retrace my way? Could I never

get back across that chasm?

“I declare,” Larry Mickler was saying, “I don’t know where a civilized

man can find more hilarious entertainment than in the advertising game.

You’d never believe what the boobs will consume till you actually

commence to feed ’em! You can make ’em do anything, buy anything! All

you need is a gaudy picture and an idiotic phrase and you can make them

do themselves an actual injury! Now, of course, in the case of Marona,

for example, horse-chestnuts are indigestible--they make the mouth safe

for teeth but they ruin the digestion. But that doesn’t discourage

the suckers for a minute. If they get sick, it would never occur to

them to blame it on the Marona, because Marona, according to the ads,

has been endorsed by eminent dentists. Nothing was said about stomach

specialists.--But then I suppose it’s a desirable thing to provide the

peritonitis surgeons with work--they’re usually civilized fellows, the

surgeons, and, if they prosper at the expense of the peasantry, that’s

quite as it ought to be.--You must have a lot of fun yourself”--he

addressed himself to Ray Coleman--“in the newspaper game.”

“Yes,” said Ray. “It’s amazing really. You can’t lay it on too

thick--the more maudlin and preposterous it is, the better they seem

to like it. Have you been reading Lina Lemberg’s confessions in the

_Sketch_? They’re written by Ted Mahony in the office--you know Ted, a

big husky Irishman who’s always half-stewed. You know that installment

where she tells about the birth of little Annie--well, when he read

that aloud in the office just after he’d written it, the other day, he

almost broke up the shop!”

I asked Rita where she was living. “Well, I’m not living anywhere

exactly,” she answered. “I’ve just been visiting around.” She lifted

her eyes quickly. “I’ll let you know when I’m settled.” “You must let

me see your play, when it’s finished,” I said.

“Don’t you think it’s going to be fine?” Ray Coleman demanded eagerly.

“Have you heard about the idea?” I assured him that I had. He turned to

Larry Mickler: “She’s got the swellest idea. It’s about this old woman

who lives in a tower----”

Larry Mickler leaned forward to listen, with a polite appreciative

leer; and Ray Coleman described Rita’s play with an enthusiasm even

more emphatic than he had brought to his previous account of the

photographing of Lina Lemberg. And it seemed to me that Rita herself

was gratified by this enthusiasm.

It had already occurred to me that Coleman must be in love with Rita:

everybody, more or less, was. But now, with horror, I remembered that,

since Daisy had left him, he must be living alone in his apartment,

and that Rita, when I had asked her where she was staying, had seemed

evasive about her address. I watched Ray Coleman telling the plot of

Rita’s play, and Rita herself, following intently and occasionally

prompting or checking up--lifting her eyes briefly to smile or to

put in a quick supplementary word when Larry Mickler expressed

appreciation, and punctuating the pauses with puffs at her cigarette.

I felt an urgent need to get away, and, looking up, I saw Hugo Bamman,

standing alone like a heron, just back of Rita’s couch, his head thrust

forward, his shoulders hunched up, his long arms hugged to his sides

and his hands in his trousers pockets, staring out, as I supposed,

half-blindly at the people moving about him.

I got up and went around to speak to him: I was glad of a pretext for

leaving in the middle of Ray Coleman’s recital.

When Hugo turned at my greeting, I was astounded to find his appearance

completely transformed. Instead of regarding me at first for a moment

with dubious unrecognizing goggles, he fixed upon me a naked gaze of

deep-sunken but piercing black eyes. I asked him what had become of

his spectacles, and he explained to me that he had been going to a new

oculist, who had discovered a revolutionary method of treating myopic

vision: this oculist made his patients go without glasses and had them

exercise the muscles of their eyes. Hugo’s father, to his dying hour,

when he had lain sick in his Adirondack camp, had refused to summon

a doctor; and Hugo himself was suspicious of doctors, as of all the

respectable professions. But in this case, the doctor was himself a

heretic and an outlaw: the fact that his methods had been denounced

by all the other oculists was enough to convince Hugo of their value.

The immediate effects of the treatment were in appearance certainly

remarkable: Hugo had unsheathed from behind his mild round blinders a

darkly burning and eagle-like glance, beneath a steep and sharp-jutting

brow which reminded me for the first time of his father’s.

And despite my present scornful point of view toward Hugo’s political

opinions, despite the fact that it was so many months since I had

made any effort to look him up, I had never been so glad to see him.

For one thing, without his glasses, he seemed to have become a more

interesting person and a person with whom it was easier to communicate:

but for another, I found it somehow a relief to be talking again with

some one whom I had known before I had come to Greenwich Village.

As there was no place to sit down where we were, and as the back

room, where we found a large table with a punch-bowl and sandwiches,

was crowded even more densely, we made our way on through into the

kitchen--which, by one of those freaks of old houses renovated and

rented out for apartments, had been installed in a former hallway and

was thus located between the dining-room and a bathroom (Sue Borglum

had sub-let the basement, where the original kitchen had been), so

that, in the absence of any other hallway, it had become a thoroughfare

for people passing back and forth between the two.

In the kitchen, I was surprised to find Pete Bird, who so short a time

before had been displaying so invincible an _élan_, sitting alone, with

his elbow on the sink and his hand propping up his head, his visage

chopfallen and greenish almost with the mask of death, and his eyelids

sealed.

Our entrance did not disturb him, and we perched on the drawers

of a china-cupboard on the other side of the long narrow room. I

spoke to Hugo of a school-friend of ours who had just produced a

successful play; and though Hugo’s friendly interest was largely

superficial--since he disapproved on principle both of everything

connected with his school-days and of everything connected with

Broadway success--I found an unexpected pleasure in returning thus

for a moment to that world of our early years upon which we had both

turned our backs, a world where, for all its limitations, the ordinary

contacts of life had been easier and more agreeable than one usually

found them in New York: that world had been conventional, but a

common understanding had at least meant a mutual confidence. In the

Village, I had felt less and less confidence in the people with whom

I came into contact and, what was worse, since my difficulties with

Rita, less confidence in myself. And I found now that--despite Hugo’s

stern rejection of everything he had been taught in his youth--I was

aware to-night principally of his good manners, his integrity and his

cultivated intelligence. He had been the first of the boys I had known

at school who had really interested me, and he had remained almost the

only one.

I remembered now how, on one occasion in our school-days, Hugo’s father

had come to see him and had sat down on the bed and talked. I had heard

something about Mr. Bamman and, although Hugo rarely spoke of him, I

had always been conscious of him, in the background of Hugo’s life,

as an important and formidable person. But Mr. Bamman, though his

dignity was regal and his Olympian brow and beard almost those of the

schoolroom Zeus, had turned out unexpectedly agreeable. He had asked

me questions about my studies and my reading quite as if I had been a

grown-up person, and had listened to my opinions with a deference to

which I was entirely unaccustomed. When he had learned that, in our

English course, we had been studying _Julius Cæsar_, he had embarked

upon a discussion of Shakespeare very different from any I had heard

in my English classes: what especially impressed me was the respectful

but urbane familiarity with which he dealt with that great name--as

if Shakespeare were a man like himself, as if he were, in some sense,

Shakespeare’s equal. He spoke of Shakespeare’s amazing comprehension of

political life, of the eternal universal types of his historical plays;

to my surprise, he compared Coriolanus to Benedict Arnold; then in a

manner both ironic and serious went on to speak of the Senate and the

White House, as he had known them in his time. I had never heard any

one talk so before: it was as if the world of Benedict Arnold had for

him the same sort of reality as the world of McKinley and Cleveland;

and what was more surprising still, as if Shakespeare belonged to

the same world as the United States; as if he, Hugo Bamman’s father,

belonged to the world of history and of literature, and as if he took

it for granted that we, since he talked to us as to equals, might hope

to belong to it, too; as if, in fact, that world were our world! For

the first time, I had had the sense of that reality--soon, at that age,

to coagulate from what we see, what we read of or are told, and what we

experience within ourselves--which finally supplies so astonishing a

connection between the private emotions and thoughts, and the names and

legends, of youth.

I reminded Hugo now of this incident, and was going on to tell him of

my great admiration for his father, when he broke in: “Yes, Shakespeare

and Milton: he used to read them to us every night till I got so I

hated them like poison! I never really got to like Shakespeare till I

read him during the War--and I can’t stand Milton to this day! I dare

say it’s not Milton’s fault: it’s probably simply due to the fact that

Father and I antagonized each other so.”

This frankness on Hugo’s part surprised me: I had always found him

rather reticent both about his family and himself. Whenever he had

happened to mention his father since the days when we had been at

school together, it had been always with affection and respect, and

even sometimes as if with a sense of failure at having fallen short of

his father’s standard. Now it was as if Hugo’s liberated gaze had been

accompanied by some new freedom of expression. But I was sorry, and a

little shocked, to hear that his relations with his father had been

difficult, and I asked him what had been the matter.

“I don’t know exactly,” he replied, “but we never got along. He was

pretty impossible at home, and I suppose I sided with Mother against

him. He was nervous and hypochondriacal, and used to shut himself

up for days in his room, and refuse to see anybody. Then, he would

suddenly appear in his dressing-gown, and freeze us with wild prophetic

looks, and announce that the household was ‘hurtling to ruin!’ because

he’d just gotten a caterer’s bill or something. He finally had the

whole household so that it was just like some kind of sanitarium--the

doors were all muffled with felt, and he couldn’t stand to have a

light burning or to hear a sound after he’d gone to bed himself. He

was never rude or domineering about it, but he used to nag us to go

to bed in an insincerely amiable way that used to make me furious.

Of course, he could be charming and sympathetic when any emergency

or crisis arose, and he was able to embarrass us and disarm us so by

having recourse to sympathy and charm, just when we’d been resenting

him at our bitterest, that when it actually came to a show-down, we

were never able to stand up to him. In any case, he had the effect on

me of making me adopt the opposite opinion to whatever his opinion was.

We used to have furious arguments about Socrates and Christ: I used

to back Socrates.--I must have been an unbearable little kid myself.

I never really liked him or appreciated him until after he was dead.

The trouble was, I suppose, that he’d identified the household with

everything that was stodgy and deadly that he’d been coming to loathe

more and more as the years went on.

“He’d had a sort of a crush on Adelina Patti, before he married Mother,

and I think that somehow all his life, in spite of the fact that he

enjoyed Washington for a while, he was worried by the feeling that he’d

really left the great world behind. I remember he got a phonograph

record made by Adelina Patti just about the time she was passing out,

and when he heard it, he flew into a rage and said it wasn’t like her

at all, that it was outrageous to allow such a record to be sold--and

then he shut himself up in his room and wrote at something or other for

days.

“I think that he’d really wanted to be an artist--he had a very fine

voice, you know, and loved to sing--but the 1880’s got him--and then,

when he found himself snowed under by American respectability, he

tried to be a saint. Even before Mother died and he went to live in

the Adirondacks, he wanted to carry us all away to the wilderness with

him--but Mother wouldn’t let him.”

I had drawn Hugo out about his father with an interest all the more

intent because I was trying to keep my mind closed to Rita: but Mr.

Bamman and Adelina Patti had opened the fatal abyss, and as Hugo saw

me becoming abstracted, he stopped talking and, looking around with

eyes which could now see so much farther, he remarked that Pete Bird,

who had not moved but was still posed against the sink, looked exactly

like a waxwork. “Who is he, anyway?” I inquired. “What does he do?”

“Why, I don’t think he does anything,” said Hugo. “He’s just a bum like

another.--He writes some wather nice little poems occasionally!”

“Yes,” said Pete, not opening his eyes, but speaking with perfect

self-possession: “A bum like another--but a poet, nevertheless!” “Have

you witten anything lately?” asked Hugo, with one of those veritable

hemorrhages of kindliness which, when he feared he had hurt some one’s

feelings, often followed his bitterest strictures. “I thought that

some of your things in _Sedition_ were weally awfully nice!” “I’m not

a poet!” said Pete Bird, still without opening his eyes. “Ask Giovanni

Squarcillupi!--ask Mike Kraus!--ask Miriam Fotherwell Finck!”

“You haven’t any manuscripts about you at this moment, have you?”

inquired Hugo, who, despite his harsh and contemptuous judgments,

had a secret sympathetic instinct for the vanities and aspirations of

others. “I feel that I could read a little poetry. These parties seem

to be getting less and less stimulating--Sue is getting to be more and

more like a wegular Philadelphia hostess!”

Pete fumbled with one hand in his pocket, partially opening his eyes,

but still supporting his head on his hand. He finally produced a

cough-drop: “Here’s a cough-drop,” he announced, “if that would do

just as well.--Eases irritation, just like a poem. Of course, the

cough-drop’s a little bit fuzzy, but then the poems are a little bit

lousy!” “I know,” said Hugo sympathetically, “when you try to find

anything in your pocket, you always fish up cough-drops and unpaid

bills and things!” “Bills!” said Pete Bird. “They don’t even send

me bills any more!--I’ve gotten long past that stage!--Here’s a

villanelle,”--he said at length--“a little toy of a villanelle!--and

here’s an experimental poem--an experiment in multiple metaphors--all

of my metaphors are multiple--they have an infinite number of

facets--like the eye of a fly!”

He handed the verses to Hugo: “You read them yourself,” he said--“My

eyes are not very good to-night,”--and lapsed back into immobility.

The poems were on creased and dog-eared paper, typed in very small type

with rather a wavering touch, but, to my surprise, they had a certain

charm, in a rose-petally, snow-flaky way. I could not, to be sure,

distinguish very much difference between the sonnets and villanelles,

on the one hand, and the “experimental” poems, on the other: Pete

Bird’s “multiple metaphors” turned out to be quite easy and mild--his

description, for example, of his mistress’s hands as “little surprising

moonbeam violins.”

The door into the dining-room opened, and Larry Mickler and Daisy

appeared.

“Come on, yuh dope!” said Daisy to Pete Bird. “What d’ye think yuh

are, brooding around the kitchen?--a cockroach?” “Get away, yuh dumb

cluck!” replied Pete, reluctantly opening his eyes, “and leave me to my

meditations!”

“Let’s leave him to his slumbers,” said Larry Mickler, who was

evidently drunker than ever. “The boy-friend’s passed out! Too many of

those rich liverwurst sandwiches!”

“Come on, Mr. Zilch,” said Daisy, still addressing Pete. “The little

woman wants to go home!” “Leave me alone for three minutes!” said Pete

Bird,--“only three minutes!--and I’ll rejoin you in the drawing-room!”

Though he talked quietly and sensibly, he was evidently incapable of

moving. “Well, all right,” she replied, with some bitterness. “But if

you don’t make it pretty snappy, you’ll find me gone!”

“Come on back and let him have his sleep out,” Larry Mickler pressed

her, pulling at her arm.

But Daisy, ignoring Mickler’s importunities as well as Pete’s mildly

aggrieved remonstrances, turned to me: “Take me in,” she demanded,

“and get me a drink and dance with me!” She had made up again since

I had seen her: her eyebrows had been heavily pencilled to an effect

of moth’s antennæ and her mouth had been heavily rouged, so that her

sallow and waxen complexion merely contributed a morbid paleness to an

effect of provocative luridity; and as I found myself responding to her

make-up, after my indifference of the earlier evening, I reflected,

with dismay rather than cynicism, upon the purely biological basis of

the interest which we feel in women, simple animals like ourselves,

produced upon a similar model, monotonous and banal, to which only the

recurrent brimming over of accumulating spermatozoa imparts a recurrent

attraction.

“Very good!” assented Larry Mickler, with a playfulness distinctly

malignant. “Then I’ll just practise a little marksmanship!” He

retreated to the end of the kitchen and, taking up a stand near the

bathroom door, he aimed his revolver at a row of plates: “I wonder if I

could pick those off in order!”

“Why don’t you break them with the butt of the gun?” asked Daisy. “This

long-range marksmanship of yours burns me up! You’ve already won the

barbed-wire garters for shooting plaster statues at two yards!”

“Listen, Pete,” insisted Larry Mickler, disregarding Daisy, “you go

over to the far end of the room and throw up the plates one by one--and

we’ll see how many I can pot!--like clay pigeons!” “All right!”

responded Pete, not moving or opening his eyes. “Oh, don’t be _dull!_”

cried Daisy with disgust.

Sue Borglum burst in with the Jap butler, who produced, at her

direction, from the ice-box, a glass gallon-container of cocktails. She

threw her arm around Daisy’s shoulder, and exclaimed in a strained

excited shriek which she seemed to have become incapable of moderating:

“Oh, you _dear_ child! You were an angel to come! Everybody’s deserted

me! Bobby said he’d be here at ten, and it’s almost midnight now. I

suppose he’s gone out with his little cutie. I don’t mind his keeping

a girl--if he’d only get one that was intelligent, or attractive, or

something!--but she’s just a dumb little wench out of the chorus--she

can’t even dance!” “I think all chorus girls are dumb,” said Daisy.

“I’ve just lost my job, that’s why.” “Stand ’em on their heads and

they’re all alike!” said Pete Bird, without opening his eyes. Sue

squawked with delighted laughter.

Larry Mickler, since Sue’s arrival had been amusing himself at a

distance by drawing his revolver on an imaginary foe: he would whip

it out, declaring loudly: “I’ll teach those damn goldfish to snap at

me!”--then leer humorously in our direction; but as nobody paid any

attention to him, he finally came over to the group and poured himself

a drink of Scotch from a bottle standing on the table. “No wonder

there are so many hold-ups!” he contemptuously remarked to me. “These

dubs that we live among are just asking to be knocked on the head and

have their pennies taken away from them!” He proposed drinking to

Dostoevsky. “We’ve done that already,” I said. “Let’s do it again,”

he insisted, with a suggestion of becoming quarrelsome. “Drinking

to Dostoevsky is always in order!” bubbled Hugo, with a tiresome

recrudescence of his gushing undergraduate enthusiasm.

“Are you going to take me in to dance or aren’t you?” demanded Daisy,

turning to me, as Sue Borglum plunged toward the bathroom to greet with

effusion another guest who was just emerging from there and whom she

seemed not previously to have seen.

Daisy and I left the kitchen together. As we went, Larry Mickler called

after me: “So twice is too many times to drink to Dostoevsky, is it?”

Pete Bird was still sitting as before, his eyelids dropped in their

death-mask and his head propped upon his hand--which, I observed, now

that I had read his verses, was finely articulated and long.

“Isn’t it wonderful,” Daisy observed, as we made our way through the

dining-room, “how clean Sue Borglum keeps her kitchen! Most kitchens

would have an awful hangover after a party like this--but I bet hers

will be neat as a pin!”

I avoided the large front room and led Daisy around by way of the hall,

through a door that opened out of the dining-room, to the room on the

other side of the house where people were dancing to the phonograph.

Daisy danced well: she was light; and the responsive alacrity of her

straight little legs walking backward in the fox-trot had the same

prosaic charm as her speech.

“Say, just do me a favor,” she said. “Don’t leave me with Larry

Mickler. If he tries to cut in on you, don’t letum--I’ll just tellum,

no soap!” I asked her what sort of a fellow Larry Mickler was. “Oh,

he’s just a fool,” she replied.

“I’m sorry about to-night,” she went on. “I wanted to have dinner with

you, but a whole lot of things happened. I’m awfully sorry.” I told

her that her touzled hoodlum hair-cut went beautifully with her plaid

dress, and that the green in the plaid dress went beautifully with

the green of her eyes. She said, “Yes, and the green of my eyes goes

beautifully with the green of my complexion!”

I held her close: her lips were slightly open, her eyes partly

closed: I wondered whether she were really lapsing into a voluptuous,

languorous dream or whether she were merely very tired. It occurred to

me, as I looked at Daisy’s fingers, pale, brittle-looking and thin,

that her hands, which I had never considered among her prettiest

features, must be the “little surprising moonbeam violins” of Pete

Bird’s poem.

But now I could stave it off no longer; I could talk no longer against

time: I had to think about Rita and Ray! My first feeling had been one

of horror that Rita should have been capable of betraying, not another,

not me--but herself; then I had made, in my mind, as I quitted the

group, a movement of repudiation which passed even beyond anger; and,

at the time I had been talking to Hugo and after, this had lifted me

to a sudden elation of lucidity and freedom. But now my need to love

and believe in Rita, even stronger than my impulse to reject her,

reasserted itself. She must have found, I saw now, in Ray Coleman,

with her confounded perverse generosity, some fineness, some crippled

aspiration, which she had been able to cherish and feed. Was there not

in his persistent desire to meet and entertain artists the inveterate

ungratified longing to think and to feel like them? Had I not noted

in him an unexpected deference, even in his face something gentle and

abashed, when, after he had advanced with his usual assurance some

opinion on art or literature, a critic or artist present had expressed

contradictory views? And as I had watched him just now, in front of the

fire, describing Rita’s play, he had seemed to me more nearly amiable

than I had ever known him before. He was happy because he felt himself

on intimate terms with Rita--because she had told him about her play,

and had allowed him to tell others. That was his destiny, perhaps--his

salvation: to praise her, to care for her, to soothe her, to guard her

from the pack of suitors who came baying after her like dogs--and so,

at last, he might become useful and happy--even likable, perhaps! So

he might finally justify his calling: he could buy Rita security and

comfort!

As we danced past the door into the hall, I glanced across to the

couch where I had left Rita, and the sight of the group which thronged

about it irritated me suddenly in the same way as the pathetic and

exasperating obstinacy of phototropic bugs. “Well,” I remarked to

Daisy, smiling, “Ray seems to be having himself a time with Rita

Cavanagh!” “Yes,” she replied; “I noticed that! He was trying to tell

me last week that he was all to pieces about my leavingum--but it

doesn’t look much like it!”

I remembered how Daisy had complained of Ray Coleman’s making her

stay home and listen to his reading aloud from the _Oxford Book of

English Verse_; and I imagined what a sympathetic audience he must now

be finding in Rita: I could see how she would take the book from him

and begin to read herself, and how she would presently recite her own

poems--poems, no doubt, which she had written lately, and which I had

never heard. He would flatter her without discrimination: I scorned her

for accepting such praise!

“I suppose he’s pleased with his new job,” I remarked, “but a promotion

from the _Dispatch_ to the _Sketch_ seems almost like a promotion from

the morgue to the pound!” “If the boys on the _Sketch_,” replied Daisy,

“are any worse than the boys on the _Dispatch_, I’m glad I made my

getaway in time!”

“Let’s go up-stairs for a minute, shall we?” Daisy suggested, as a

record ended. “I want to give the old cuckoo’s-nest a comb.”

On the stairs, I took her arm and steered her up toward the sombre

upper reaches, through the couples who were sitting on the steps:

I gripped her firmly in my preoccupation, as if I had been guiding

a child. “The trouble about having your hair done this way,” she

remarked, as if talking for other ears, “is that you have to keep

fixing it all the time or people think it’s just mussed up!” As we

arrived at the top of the stairs, I found that I had gone suddenly

hollow, and I remembered that I had eaten no dinner.

Instead of heading, as I expected, for the bedroom where the coats and

hats had been left, Daisy went on along the dark up-stairs hallway--she

seemed to know the house well--to a door at the further end.

It was dark inside: by the light that came in through a single window

from the house across the scanty back yard, I could see a cot and a

simple bureau--the Jap servant’s room, no doubt. I clawed the air for

the chain of a shadeless electric bulb which was hanging above our

heads. “Why don’t you try the bathroom?” I suggested. “I don’t see any

comb on that bureau.” “Never mind about the comb!” she replied.

I embraced her and pasted my lips on her half-opened mouth. I thought

about the mouth and moth’s eyebrows which had aroused me for a moment

in the kitchen, but which I could not see now in the dark--and I tried

to make up for my stupidity and tardiness by holding Daisy against me

very tightly and kissing her again and again--but it was an assault

of which I found myself conscious chiefly as a determined physical

pressure and a deliberate application of the lips: I felt my arms

crushing cartilage and flesh, and my mouth missing its goal against

her teeth. It occurred to me that Daisy’s lips were really, despite

her make-up, not particularly well-adapted to passionate kissing of

this kind: I still thought of them as cool-looking and childlike, as

they had seemed to me the night of the movies. And I became aware

of the succession of my kisses as something tediously mechanical

and repetitive. Fearing Daisy might notice this, too, I broke it up

by making her sit down on the bed.--I had desired her, and there we

were at last! I found myself representing the long stupefied embrace

of passion by sheer immobility and weight. I was all too far from

being stupefied, I reflected, during the moments when I relaxed my

ministrations: some obstinate unconscious loyalty, in spite of all my

efforts, kept me cold. And I was distracted by a variety of ideas. I

had a vision of the pilloried frog of a behaviorist moving-picture

which I had gone to see with Rita: the frog, even with its brain

removed, had responded with an automatic kick when an acidulated pad

had been applied to one of its legs.--And the consciousness that the

little bedroom belonged to the Japanese servant reminded me that the

Japs did not kiss, that they did not know what kissing was--and I

wondered whether they tried to learn kissing when they set out to

become Americanized, and whether it took long.--I murmured, “Daisy

darling!” in a low and secret voice.

We became aware that the door was open: I looked around and saw a small

spare figure: his face was half in shadow, and I could not see his

eyes. I quickly sat up on the cot, and he suddenly withdrew and slammed

the door.

“Who was it?” Daisy asked in a whisper. “It was Pete!” I replied.

She got up. “I don’t care,” she said. “A great help _he_ turned out

to be!” She pulled on the electric bulb, went over to the mirror on

the bureau, and applied her powder and rouge. When she had finished,

she said, without looking at me, putting her powder away in the

vanity-case, “Take me home, will you?”

We went out and extricated our coats--it was a little like a search in

a bad dream--from the avalanche of wraps on the beds; and in silence

descended the stairs, looking solemn and matter-of-fact, as we threaded

our way among the couples.

So, I told myself, I had not hesitated to wound Pete in his love for

Daisy, even after he had shown me his poems, such poems as I had

written to Rita, in which his tenderness and his longing had, as it

were, been confessed and entrusted to me--to me, another poet! In

my glimpse of his face in the doorway, dimly lit by the light from

the hall, his pale cheeks and his eyes large with shadow had seemed

sensitive and even handsome. Was it Daisy’s indifference, I asked

myself, was it jealous suspicions like my own, which had given him that

gargoyle’s mask? Yet one had to be hard about these things: love and

poetry, as I myself knew, were paid for with danger and pain!

Sue Borglum protested wildly and loudly against Daisy’s leaving so

early, and begged me, at any rate, to come back when I had taken Daisy

home: she had evidently a morbid fear that her parties were becoming

less popular.--I felt the cold taste of winter in the vestibule.

After splashing about in the slush of the dark and deserted streets,

I finally brought back a taxi. Hugo Bamman came down the steps with

Daisy. He was wearing his old limp felt hat, but no overcoat; and he

was carrying over his shoulder the musette-bag he had had in the Army.

We invited him to come with us in the taxi. When I got in after Hugo

and Daisy, I found Hugo planted on one of the little turn-down seats,

and it was only with considerable difficulty that Daisy persuaded him

to sit beside her.

“The tone of Sue Borglum’s parties,” Hugo began at once to complain,

“is certainly getting more and more respectable!--she’ll soon be

sending out engwaved invitations!” I asked him what he meant. “Why, you

just go and meet people now, and talk to them a little, politely--just

like a Washington reception. Things used to be so much fwanker and

fweer at Sue Borglum’s! I remember one night when Leo Shatov got up

and did a Cossack dance on the dining-room table--and the Baroness von

Samstag-Solferino always used to appear wearing a coal-scuttle on her

head!--And she has these little thin sandwiches, now, made of chopped

olives and spiced ham and things. There used to be just a great big

cheese, and you gouged out what you wanted with your pocket-knife!”

We were about to drop Hugo off at his house, only a block or two from

Sue Borglum’s, but he announced that he was sailing at midnight and

would, therefore, go further up-town. I forbore to show surprise, but

asked him where he was bound for. He explained, with his self-conscious

giggle, that he was sailing for Smyrna on a fruit steamer: his ultimate

goal was Afghanistan.

We asked why he was going to Afghanistan. “Well, I think that it must

really be an awfully fine place!” he replied. “You know, it’s one of

the only places in the world that hasn’t been Europeanized--it’s all

a European can do to get into Cabul at all. Not a trace of a business

man or a missionary or a newspaper! The Amir has electric lighting and

European plumbing in his palace, but, instead of sending for European

plumbers and electricians to put them in for him, he sends Afghans to

Europe to learn how to do it themselves. When they come back, they’re

searched for Bibles.--At the same time, they go in for witchcraft and

all kinds of entertaining magic!”

He was bubbling now just as he had done at college over the little

pastry-shop in the side-street where he and his friends had bought

cinnamon buns.

“Is that where the afghans come from?” asked Daisy. “Yes: I suppose

so,” chortled Hugo. “I suppose that, even though it’s forbidden to

bring in any modern textile machinery, a smart Europeanized Afghan

might be able to do a little profitable sweating in the afghan

business!”

I asked Hugo what his literary plans were and he explained that, when

he came back from Afghanistan, he was going out to the American West to

write a novel about one of the big Western cities, either Pittsburgh or

Detroit. (He had already done Boston and New York, though he refused

to pay Philadelphia even the compliment of exposing it.) “Oh, God!”

Daisy exclaimed. “What do you want to go to Pittsburgh for? I spent

the best years of my life trying to get away from there!” “Why, I’ve

always wanted to see a Pittsburgh millionaire,” Hugo explained, gaily,

mildly, sweetly. “Wasn’t it you who were telling me about the man from

Pittsburgh who bought ten thousand dollars worth of fireworks and set

them off in the Bois de Boulogne, and then committed suicide?” “Yes,”

said Daisy, “that was Phil Meissner’s uncle.” “I think Detroit must be

awfully fine, too!” Hugo continued. “I’ve always wanted to see a Ford

put together.--I’ve always thought it must be wather like one of those

things in the movies, don’t you know, where the man draws a cat, stwoke

by stwoke, and then it suddenly comes alive!”

As I listened to Hugo’s prattle, it occurred to me to suspect for

the first time that he was allowing himself to prattle on purpose.

His spectacles had had the effect of making him look owlish and

juvenile; but now that he no longer wore them, his intent deep-sunken

gaze betrayed the silliness of what he said--betrayed, I mean, that

he himself was not silly. I became aware that the undergraduate

patter from which, formerly and while still an undergraduate, he

had so desperately strained to escape by harsh paradoxes and flat

contradictions, was now a habit which he had accepted, partly no doubt

because it was difficult to break, but also partly because he found it

useful as a screen for his real purposes and ideas. His real purposes

and ideas, it seemed to me, as I watched him in the taxi to-night, had

by this time completely matured and stood firmly on their own feet; and

a certain amount of success, which he had never aimed at or expected,

had given him a new assurance. Hugo’s novels on the American cities had

become almost best-sellers; and he was no longer spurred by the painful

necessity of asserting his views in ordinary conversation, but was

content to chatter on like a school-boy: it saved tedious contentious

explanations.

There was no chatter about what he wrote: Hugo’s novels were

sober, even morose, and were built with a solidity of cement.

They were comprehensive reports on human society, industriously

and conscientiously drawn up. And as I thought to-night of Hugo’s

assiduity, his independence and his sense of responsibility, I seemed

to recognize in them those qualities which had for so many years made

his father a respected public servant. The son had cut himself off

from his family; had even sold, piece by piece, all the furniture and

family silver which he had inherited from his mother, and, set by set,

his father’s library; and he had done this--to the great consternation

of his cousins and his aunts, to whom the sale of mahogany and silver

was like a massacre of kin--all in order that he might live poorly

in Patchin Place, writing appeals for political prisoners, making

speeches for striking garment-workers and composing those encyclopædic

novels from which he had never hoped to make money. Yet, by the

sacrifice of property and family, he had saved the honor of a family

tradition which was otherwise largely moribund: he had truly assumed

the responsibilities of leadership and shown the disinterestedness of

public spirit, in the only fields where, in our generation, he had

found it possible for him to work.

I seemed to see that, behind the mask of the outlaw, he had finally

gravitated to a position exactly similar to his father’s, before his

father, in his later erratic years, had withdrawn from public life. For

Hugo had applied himself to literature as to one of the old-fashioned

professions, Medicine, Law or the Church; and, despite his rôle of

eccentric and rebel, had taken on--what set him off at that time from

most of the other literary men of the Village--the solid and honorable

character of a first-rate professional man. Through the late escapades

of the father and the early extravagances of the son, the curve had

come round again.

And I envied Hugo to-night: I could think only of his established

position as a writer, of the security and the freedom of movement

which his royalties had finally brought him, at the same time that he

had earned the satisfaction of serious work well done. I myself felt

disgusted and gloomy over the aimlessness and uselessness of my life.

I had seen clearly, at the funeral of my aunt, that my relations did

not think me a success: I was still an underling in a publisher’s

office, with no great enthusiasm for my work and with no particular

hopes of advancement. And, on the other hand, I was not a writer: I

had not made Hugo’s sacrifice and effort. No wonder I had never been

able to persuade Rita Cavanagh to marry me! I had offered her merely

the meagre resources and the questionable future of a young man with

vague literary ambitions; and she had already known many such young

men--had already, on one or two occasions, embarked on such lives of

cramped space and small comfort, without finding them magic carpets.

What wonder that she should now prefer Ray Coleman, with his apartment

that overlooked the Square, his lettuce-green cocktail glasses, his

water-colors of the Russian ballet, and his rye whiskey bottled in bond?

Hugo asked us to let him out at the corner of Seventh Avenue and one

of the upper Twenties. I asked him where his baggage was. “I’ve got

it all here!” he replied, indicating the musette-bag on his shoulder.

“Haven’t you even got an overcoat?” asked Daisy. “Why, you know, I

don’t know why it is,” he replied, with the bogus naïveté with which

he masked his stubbornest manias, “but I can’t seem to stand to wear

overcoats. They always make me feel so loaded down and sewed up--and

they always make me too hot! I always feel, when I get into them, that

there isn’t a pin to choose between the modern winter-overcoat and

the Iron Maiden at Nuremberg.” “I should think you’d get your death!”

protested Daisy. “If the people in New York,” he replied, “didn’t wear

so many overcoats, they probably wouldn’t catch so many colds! They

bundle themselves up in winter-overcoats and lower the resistance of

their bodies so that the least little change in temperature brings them

down with the grippe or the ‘flu’!”

“Gee,” said Daisy, with admiration, rather to my surprise, “I wish I

was going to Afghanistan! Take me along with you, won’t you?” “I’d

love to!” said Hugo. “Come on!”--but he began looking out anxiously

for the street. “Oh, _will_ you?” cried Daisy. “_Take me!_ I’m so fed

up with it here! I haven’t got any belongings either! I left most of

what I had at Ray’s. I could walk right on the boat now and sacrifice

practically nothing!--You couldn’t really take me, could you?” “Why,

yes--come along!” said Hugo, smiling but, I could see, with some

uneasiness: he shrank from the possibility of committing himself to a

woman--even in gallantry, even in jest--and was nervously watching the

street numbers--“if you wouldn’t mind a few tarantulas and scorpions

and things that go with the date and fig trade!” “Well, the fruit’s

all unloaded here, isn’t it?” Daisy determinedly objected, with a

strong grasp of commercial realities. “We don’t export it over there,

do we?” “No: of course--it’s all unloaded on us--but the animals may

stay behind! I suppose some of them are regular passengers!” “Well,”

said Daisy, “I’ve fought fleas and rats and bedbugs in my time--and

Greenwich Village bar-flies--so I guess I could cope with a tarantula!”

Hugo stopped the cab. We were all for taking him to his steamer and

seeing him off; but he refused to let us. I think that he was honestly

afraid that Daisy would insist upon sailing with him--for he leapt out

almost before the taxi had stopped, and his leave-taking was abrupt and

expeditious. He opened the door again a moment afterwards and tried to

give me some money for the fare, but I pulled his hat down over his

ears. He waved at us once with a long spasmodic arm, then marched off

in the direction of the docks.

“Gee,” said Daisy, as we drove away, “I’d like to go to Afghanistan!”

We fell silent: Yes, I reflected, Daisy admired Hugo, just as Rita

admired Ray--because he had made himself a place in the world, because

he was successful and independent!

I was on the point of taking Daisy’s hand when she suddenly snatched

the driver’s license out of its isinglass frame opposite her and,

without a word of explanation, tore it up, photograph and all. “What

made you do that?” I demanded. “I can’t stand his face!” she said

tartly. “I’ve been looking at it all the way, and if I had to look at

it any more, I’d begin to go half-witted myself!”

I was irritated by Daisy’s gesture: it jarred upon my mood of

enthusiasm for Hugo’s sense of social responsibility and I felt against

it the same sort of resentment as against Rita’s perversities and

caprices. But I laughed--with a certain harshness, as if to mock at

the respecters of property, and at the poets who succumbed to their

bribes--as if Daisy and I alone, now, still stood together against Ray.

Yet, I was thinking the moment after, one couldn’t really blame Ray

Coleman for becoming infuriated with Daisy: hadn’t she squandered all

his money and then kept having C. O. D. packages sent home? Hadn’t she

even complained to me, the night that I had taken her to the movies, of

Ray’s too conscientious practice of paying all his bills? I thought of

Daisy the night of the party, when I had first met her and Rita. Hadn’t

she behaved like a little fiend?--Hadn’t she turned on a phonograph

record in the middle of Rita’s poems? Hadn’t she humiliated Ray by

leaving the party with Pete Bird? I found that I forgave Ray more

easily for his violent scene with Daisy, which Rita and I had overheard.

But, when I remembered that detestable scene, it was no longer as

it had seemed to me that evening. That night I had been a spectator

looking on at a melodrama, at a melodramatic tableau of jealousy: Ray

pointing at Pete’s broken cane; Daisy abashed among the ruins of

the party; and I complacently and gallantly helping Rita on with her

wrap. Now I myself had played Ray Coleman’s part. I remembered that

spiteful scene which I myself had provoked with Rita, in the taxi, and

the scenes which for weeks had preceded it. Now it was as if the rôles

had been reversed: now it was I who was the jealous blackguard and Ray

Coleman who was the solid decent citizen! And now those memories must

perhaps always stand as a barrier between Rita and me, as they had done

to-night when I had tried to talk to her--a barrier of coldness and

resentment which could never be forgotten now and whose shadow must

lie, also, behind on all that had been beautiful before. If I could

only just now have said the word which would have caused it to fall

away!

“I don’t want to go home!” said Daisy, as we were crossing Forty-second

Street. I suggested that we might go to a night-club. I did not, as I

say, at that moment, particularly care about Daisy, but then, there was

nobody else that I liked better--least of all did I like myself or want

to be alone with myself. “All right. I can’t go in this plaid dress,

though. I tell you: you go and get something to drink, and I’ll go and

change my clothes.” “I’ll go and change, too,” I said.

The moment after, she had some sort of qualm: “Give me a piece of

paper,” she said, “any kind of piece of paper will do.” The only paper

I had in my pocket was the letter from H. M. Grosbeake, the professor

of philosophy at college to whom I had sent Rita’s poems and who

had invited me to come to see him, but to whose letter I had never

replied, though I had been carrying it around ever since: I had torn

the blank part off in Daisy’s room, the day I had written her the note,

and now I gave her what was left, the page with the letter itself. She

stuck it into the driver’s-license frame behind the isinglass.