IV

In the bright warm room, so alive inside the bleak November dark,

before the fire burning briskly and stoutly, Professor Grosbeake’s

three beautiful daughters gave me tea, in their parents’ absence. Among

the elegant and slender spindles of the legs and rungs of the English

furniture, which seemed blacker and stronger-sinewed, as if they had

been brought to a sharper focus, than American mahogany--which, as in

the case of the Queen Anne secretary, with its narrow shape, its dark

dense grain, its close-laid shelves above, hooded with a double-loaf

top, and its close-packed drawers below, diminishing in thickness

toward the bottom, its air of having always contained sealed letters

and legal papers, all safely and neatly locked away, seemed designed

for a tighter, compacter, and more downright civilization; among the

late pale autumnal flowers, the roses and the bowl of white cosmos; the

white ruffle-bordered curtains against the black of the winter panes

and the patches of confused pink and green made by the modest modernist

paintings--Magda, Frieda, and Rosamond, themselves in fresh light

frocks like the flowers, enchanted me with their loveliness and candor.

They were all very smooth and blond; they had never bobbed their hair,

and Frieda and Magda wore theirs brushed abundantly down their backs,

like Alice in the Alice books. Rosamond, who was older than the twins,

had hers up: it was parted in the middle and tightly wound behind in a

blond and young-womanly knot, so that, if one thought only of her hair,

she seemed like a young German fräulein (Mrs. Grosbeake was German),

whereas, if one thought of her blue eyes, her straight nose, her long

oval face and her long and graceful neck, she seemed like an English

girl. She served the tea with nice shy manners. Rosamond was dressed in

pale blue; and one of the twins, Magda, wore white, and Frieda, a kind

of lilac, with stockings a kind of lavender, lighter than the frock.

The twins seemed rather German than English: they had plump round

cheeks and round noses, and were maturely developed for fourteen.

Frieda had golden-red hair, which gave a singular effect of richness as

it came down over her purple dress; Magda was more heavily built and

slower-moving and slower-thinking than her sister: she was the blondest

of all--her hair was the palest, purest flaxen I had ever seen. And her

blondness made me think of Daisy, whom I expected to see the next day.

(I had lately come back from abroad. My aunt had left me a small

legacy, and very soon after the night at Sue Borglum’s, I had gone to

Europe and had stayed there till fall. When I had returned, I had been

eager to see Grosbeake, one of whose books I had bought in England and

had been reading on the boat, and in whom I now felt a new interest. I

had also planned to visit Daisy and Pete Bird, who had left New York,

even before I had, and were now living together in the country, not far

out of my way back to town. Since I had been back, I had written to

Daisy, and she had invited me to come to see them.)

I liked the English voices of the young Grosbeakes: they had a soft

flurried way of speaking, and a maidenly innocence of timbre, quite

unlike young American girls (though the twins were beginning already

to acquire American slang). “I don’t like this kind of crackers,” said

Magda. “We couldn’t get the regular biscuits,” Rosamond explained.

“The grocer’s all out of them.--I’m sorry,” she went on seriously to

me. “I’m afraid they’re not very good!” “You always say ‘biscuits,’”

said Frieda, “and Magda always says ‘crackers.’ I think we all ought

to say the same thing!” “What do you say?” queried Magda. “Sometimes

I say one,” said Frieda, “and sometimes I say the other. But I like

‘biscuits’ best!” “I think these are really crackers,” said Rosamond,

who did not want my feelings hurt by a discrimination in favor of

‘biscuits,’ “because they crackle so when you break them.” “That’s why

I think ‘biscuits’ is better,” insisted Frieda, “--because ‘crackers’

sounds as if they _all_ crackled--but _some_ biscuits just bend, you

know!” “They’re not biscuits,” said Rosamond. “They’re cakes.--Won’t

you have some more tea?” she urged me. “No,” said Frieda, “you know

those little soft ones that we had in the country last summer, that you

can almost bend in two!” “They were little cakes,” said Rosamond.--We

heard some one come in at the front door. “There’s Father,” Magda

announced.

I could see Grosbeake taking off his black coat and his low-crowned

black hat and setting his stick in the stand, before he appeared in the

doorway. He had the rounded back of the scholar, a back, indeed, almost

humped--of which I always used to feel that the exceptional extent

to which it was bowed was an index to the degree of the difficulty

of his researches. But Grosbeake, beyond this, had nothing of the

physical deficiency--the weak eyes or the feeble figure--ordinarily

attributed to the scholar. On the contrary, he seemed to have sprung

from some tough ruddy-cheeked English stock which not even a lifetime

of universities could enervate or fade. Despite the fineness of his

features, he had something of Mr. Pickwick and even something of

Mr. Punch. And upon an American who had been living in New York, he

produced a curious and gratifying impression: it was as if one were

surprised and rejoiced, after seeing a horde of depersonalized masks,

at finding some one who possessed a face. With his fair cheeks flushed

rosy by the cold, his salient nose and chin, his slanting Henry VIII

eyes and his look of having been carved by hand out of some very sound

kind of wood by a wood-carver of the days before machinery, he gave

the impression of being a product, by way of the generations which had

preceded him, of a constant hand-to-hand encounter with the turbulence

of the elements and with the occasions of human life. He wore black

English clothes and his stiff white cuffs were very white: his collar

and his cravat, and his white locks which came down over his collar,

seemed to me very old-fashioned. He always carried a thickish dark

stick, with a brass top of interlocked apes, which a brother had

brought him from India.

He greeted me with his charming courtesy and peered up at me with

wise and subtle bird-lidded eyes. “I’m sorry,” he explained, “not to

have been able to be here for tea. But there was a meeting of the

examination committee at precisely a quarter to five--something which

would be unthinkable in England, you know.” He lifted sparse old

eyebrows in a smile. “Rather than make the dons miss their tea, they’d

allow the examination to be prepared without adequate consultation!--I

had proposed holding the meeting in a tea-room, but they didn’t seem

to care for the suggestion--or to take the hint!” He spoke slowly and

very deliberately, and his voice had fine up-and-down inflections of

sweetness and irony: his nostrils had inflections, too, and vibrated

while he spoke.

“I’m afraid the tea’s cold,” said Rosamond. “I’ll have some fresh

made.” “No: never mind!” said Grosbeake. He stood before the fire, his

hands clasped just above his stomach. “I think we shall have snow,”

he announced. “I think we shall have snow!--The Dean was very sure we

shouldn’t--but I believe that we shall!” I remarked that we had had no

frost and that the afternoon had been warm. “That was what the Dean

pointed out,” he replied. “He even insisted on making a bet with me.

He bet me a bottle of Scotch whiskey against a bottle of my sherry. I

think he’ll get the better of the bargain: the sherry is very good:

it was given me by a friend in the Embassy, who had the privilege of

bringing it in!”

He took the cup of tepid tea from Rosamond and sat down in an arm-chair

before the fire. He asked me about myself and what I had been writing.

I was ashamed to be obliged to tell him that, even while I had been

abroad, I had really not written anything--I said that my literary

morale had been low, or something equally silly.

“I was just thinking,” he replied, “in the Dean’s room, in looking

at the portraits of the college presidents there--that it may be

from certain points of view as much of a misfortune to have too much

character, too well-sustained a morale, as to have too little. When

I looked at the early presidents, especially the seventeenth-century

ones, I said to myself, ‘There are men whose character has been

overdeveloped!’ It’s a very special combination of qualities, you know,

that’s required for a mind capable of original work. A man mustn’t have

his character too vigorously developed, because he must be able to

experiment with ideas. It’s like going to buy a hat, you know--first

you try one on and wear it for a bit to see how it goes, and then you

try on another. But a man with a strongly developed character is unable

to do that.--But, on the other hand, of course, he must still have

character enough not simply to drift about without preferring one idea

to another.”

Grosbeake had a curious irony, which was always at the same time

benign. It was the irony--one sees it seldom--of a mind which is at

once innocent and subtle, and which has, in consequence, something

divine about it: an irony without malice. He had a touch perhaps of

the vanity, or rather, of the dandyism, of the modern mathematical

philosopher, who finds himself provided with paradoxes at once so

surprising, so attractive and so sound. I have heard him comment with

his calm amusement on the mistakes of unmathematical philosophers when

they attempted to invoke mathematics: “It’s curious,” he would say,

“how peculiarly unfortunate they are in their choice of mathematical

examples! They always seem to hit upon something which isn’t

necessarily true at all--which might quite as well be the other way,

you know! Bradley, for example, in his _Logic_, when he wants to give

an illustration of a particularly indisputable truth--something we must

accept as self-evident--that, if B is to the left of C, and if A is to

the left of B, then A must be to the left of C, also--when, of course,

that’s not true at all!--if you prolong a straight line indefinitely,

you come back on the other side!” Though, when Bradley’s _Logic_ was

written, non-Euclidean geometry could hardly have been widely known.

(There may have entered, also, into Grosbeake’s attitude, in this

particular instance, some traditional opposition between the points of

view of Cambridge and Oxford.)

But no one could have been farther than Grosbeake from the essential

triviality of mind which academic arrogance or complacency so often

tries to disguise. For if Hugo Bamman and his father were the modern

type of saints, Grosbeake was a modern type of sage, who taught wisdom

in casual conversation and virtue only by example. I had felt his

influence even in college, at a time when I as yet knew nothing of his

philosophical ideas. For Grosbeake had the most comprehensive mind,

at home in the most varied fields, with which I had ever come into

contact. For him, philosophy was an attempt to take account of all the

aspects of the universe, and to find in them coherence and a meaning;

so that Grosbeake’s comment on any subject had a special significance

and value, and, despite the fact that he never made an effort to

expostulate or convert, was likely to present itself long afterwards

as something to be seriously considered in making up one’s own mind on

the subject. And though he detested every sort of preaching (Mr. Bamman

had been a born preacher), and though even the study of Ethics was

inconceivable to him, he had the effect, more than any one else I had

known, of making moral distinction attractive. I remember his saying

once of some student, a student of whose abilities he thought well, but

who, as punishment for some escapade, had had his chapel cuts taken

away from him, so that he couldn’t go out of town over Sundays, that it

would “do him good,” because he would now work during the week-ends.

“So you do believe in doing people good!” some one present had caught

him up. “I thought you didn’t believe in that!” “That’s an object,”

Grosbeake had replied, a little taken aback, “which I believe is best

promoted indirectly.”

Mrs. Grosbeake came in before dinner: she was a broad, handsome, placid

German woman, very thoroughly educated and very practical. One always

felt that she was a kind of base upon which Grosbeake’s metaphysics

rested; for he was more sensitive and nervous than he appeared, and,

although intellectually imperturbable, was in other ways easily

disorganized.

We had dinner in the white-walled dining-room--it was a solid and

attractive Colonial house. The Grosbeakes had brought over their own

silver, as well as their own furniture, and the pieces had always

seemed to me to possess plainly discernible personalities, even

physiognomies: there was a squarish silver tea-pot which squatted

flat upon the table and had a very sharp emphatic spout that jutted

straight out from the base and was balanced on the other side by a long

straight high-cocked handle. And the cream-pitcher, the sauce-boat, and

even the little salt-cellars straddled sturdily on three tiny legs,

like some sort of blunt-beaked beetles, or rather, it occurred to me

to-night, like the snouted and potbellied demons of Bruegel or Callot.

Even the color and substance of the food seemed to have a special

richness and density, as if they had been painted in a still-life: the

bread and the boiled potatoes looked particularly white and firm, the

mound of currant jelly particularly lucent and red, and the beefsteak

particularly vivid in its contrasts of red and brown. The Ambassador’s

sherry was delicious. In spite, however, of the satisfaction which

Grosbeake had seemed to feel in it, his epicurean tastes were really

indulged almost exclusively in the things of the intellect, so that I

have heard him relish a page of Hume as if it had been a wine, whereas

food and drink themselves, as well as other material comforts, he

usually disregarded. Now he dominated the table, talking tranquilly

and blandly; and in the presence of their father and mother, the three

lovely Grosbeake girls--unlike young American girls, who usually

dominate their parents--were entirely in abeyance, with only an

occasional low rapid interchange between the twins, who were sitting

together.

“I’ve been reading Sinclair Lewis’s _Babbitt_,” Grosbeake remarked. I

asked him what he thought of it. “Oh, very good,” he replied. “Though

a little unfair to Babbitt, I think. Of course, I know very little

about the American cities of the Middle West--I can’t pretend to speak.

But from the students from the West whom I’ve had in my courses, I

get rather a different impression. They’re very alert, you know--very

eager to learn. And they do well: they grasp things very quickly. So I

don’t think that the families they come from can be quite so uniformly

benighted as Lewis represents them in _Babbitt_.--And I feel, in

reading your friend Hugo Bamman, that he paints a little too sombre a

picture of the business men and their families in much the same way.

“It seems to me rather a mistake, you know, to hold the business men up

to ridicule for their Rotary Clubs and their fraternal organizations.

Under conditions of that kind, where the city is quite new and

the people have no institutions, they have to create some sort of

institutions in order to hold the community together. Rotary Clubs

and societies of that sort, imperfect as they may be, fulfil a very

necessary function.

“It seems to me that, from some points of view, the most unfortunate

feature of American business is its failure to provide real leaders.

Professor Pittinger, who has been making a study of the subject, tells

me that it has become impossible, for example, for the president or one

of the directors of a large corporation to leave a controlling interest

to his son. He can only leave him an investment, and the son can spend

the money as he pleases; but he inherits no responsibility and no

power, and the surviving officers of the company don’t recognize his

right to any. That seems to me unfortunate, because where the father

has to make his own way, largely without advantages, to a position of

importance, the son, who has had the advantages, finds himself with no

power. You often find in England that the squire who has lived in the

country, and has had to deal at first-hand with his tenants, and with

his animals and land, has a far stronger sense of realities than the

more enlightened Londoner.”

“But he sometimes mistreats his tenants and mismanages his estate

abominably,” Mrs. Grosbeake interjected.

“If he does,” continued Grosbeake, “he knows better what he’s doing,

nevertheless, than the average Liberal member of Parliament, say, who

has the best intentions in the world, but who lives between his club,

and certain houses to which he goes, and the House of Commons--always

seeing the same people, who are all people of precisely his way of

thinking, who are living in precisely the same way--so that he never

at any point really comes into contact with realities--and so never

really knows what he is talking about. Even Morley was a little like

that.

“I wonder whether it mightn’t be an advantage, both to the sons of

business men and to the businesses themselves, if the second generation

could take over some responsibility in connection with their fathers’

work. They seem to me very intelligent--so far as I’ve been able to

judge from those I meet in my classes--and the effect on trade and

industry of even one generation of such men might, I should think, be

enormous. In that event, the Rotary Clubs might become very important

institutions--they might provide the moral leadership for business.”

I had so long been taking it for granted that no good could come out of

business, that this idea of Grosbeake’s seemed to me a very queer and

foreign one; but I reflected on what he had said.

I always listened with interest and respect to Grosbeake’s opinions

on American matters. He had studied American affairs with the

attention, at once sympathetic and detached, which he applied to

everything, and he often succeeded in illumining them with that

uncanny divination which he displayed in all sorts of fields quite

outside his special province. At that time, it had become the custom

for Englishmen who visited America--we encouraged it, of course,

ourselves--to edify us with generalizations about American life and

institutions--generalizations often based on a round of cocktail

parties in New York, or, at most, on a lecture tour. So many of the

prizes in America always went to the third and second-rate, that

we had become, especially since the War, a paradise for British

mediocrities--poets, novelists, and universal critics, who had often

great success as lecturers. They went about patronizing the Americans

with a gusto and a giddy elation which suggested that they might

themselves have been patronized at home; and they would sometimes

tour the country from coast to coast and return again and again. It

was, therefore, peculiarly gratifying for an American to discover in

Grosbeake those qualities of toughness, richness, eccentricity, and

independence which one had admired in English literature and history,

but of which one had so often been disappointed in the English

celebrities who visited us.

After dinner, we sat before the fire. Mrs. Grosbeake seemed to

contribute a ground-tone of infinite repose: she made one feel that the

body of humanity was invulnerably solid and sound, and that it was deep

and contained many treasures which had never been brought to birth. She

sat with her feet side by side, resting squarely on the floor, and she

wore some sort of leather sandals, with very wide blunt toes. These

sandals, like the modernist paintings (which Grosbeake had bought from

a former student, in financial difficulties), were one of the odd notes

of unconventionality in the tranquil conventional household; and they

surprised me in the same unwarranted way as when one found Grosbeake,

in certain of his writings, carrying his philosophical principles

through morals into the field of political criticism and bringing in an

indictment against nationalism or capitalism.

I had never, as an undergraduate, read anything which Grosbeake had

written, and I had never taken any of his courses. I had, however, in

my senior year, sometimes gone to his house. After meeting him once

or twice at teas, I had run into him one day in the hallway of one of

the recitation buildings: he had recognized me and had talked to me

about an article which I had just written for the college magazine,

and which had aroused a certain amount of controversy. I had attacked

wholesale, as a sinister conspiracy against freedom of action and

thought, the policy of the English Department, the administration of

the Dean’s office, football mass-meetings, compulsory chapel, and the

custom of compelling freshmen to wear little black caps; and I was

surprised and rather embarrassed by Grosbeake’s expression of friendly

interest. I replied almost apologetically--I had been dismayed by

the rumpus I had roused--that I seemed to have laid myself open to a

good deal of adverse criticism. “Ah, well,” Grosbeake had reassured

me, “one can’t take up any position, can one? without doing that.” My

complaints had been made in resentment, and they had been answered

with resentment by the faculty, the alumni, the editors of the college

daily, the officers of the athletic association, and some of the more

ardent and articulate freshmen, who insisted that they asked nothing

better than to pay homage to the college tradition by continuing to

wear their little black caps: it had never occurred to me, at the

time, that I was engaged in doing anything so dignified as taking up

a position, and I had felt that I must be careful, in the future, to

conduct the controversy with more scrupulousness and sobriety, that I

must remember my intellectual responsibilities. And half my bitterness

and indignation against the college authorities was gone at finding an

elderly and important professor willing to consider without heat what I

had said.

He had invited me then to his house, and I used to go there on Sunday

evenings, when the Grosbeakes received faculty and students. I rarely

heard him talk about his subject, and did not understand him when

he did: I had only the vaguest notion what it was. I figured him as

eternally occupied with solving the same sort of problems with which

I had struggled in Trigonometry and Permutations and Combinations.

I did not know that those strings of puzzles were not the whole

of mathematics, but merely multiplied illustrations of general

mathematical laws, in which no one had attempted to interest us. And

still less did I realize that Grosbeake had passed beyond Mathematics

proper to Symbolic Logic (it was principally the fact that we had in

our faculty another of the small but infatuated band of the students

of Symbolic Logic--a man with whom he wished to collaborate--which

had brought him to the United States and which had kept him there so

long). I did not know that Symbolic Logic was an attempt to provide

a universal language for all the branches of science, and that this

attempt to formulate relations common to different departments of

thought was itself a deeper expression of the same genius which had

given rise to Grosbeake’s interest in such varied fields of human

activity, and of his extraordinary instinct for tracing their

inter-relations. Aside from his personal distinction and charm, it was

this gift which had fascinated me: he had usually talked to me about

literature, but, aside from his appreciation of poetry, plays, and

novels as such--which was in itself remarkable--he had also a brilliant

faculty for reading into them social and moral history and revealing

their philosophic implications. He was the first person, since Hugo’s

father, who had helped me toward the kind of education which I had

begun when Mr. Bamman had talked to me at school about Shakespeare.

I had, however, never guessed at Grosbeake’s real importance--and

indeed his importance outside his special field had never really

appeared until a year or two before the War, when he had turned

from mathematics to philosophy. When I came to read his books, I

was astonished. First of all, Grosbeake’s tone and style, in his

philosophical writings, were not at all what I should have expected.

His manner in conversation was rather urbane, dispassionate, and

dry: he seemed, as I have said, to approach ideas with a certain

epicureanism of the intellect. But his writing had a close tough grain:

it was crystalline, in the sense that it gave an effect of the hardness

and clarity of crystals rather than of the limpidity of crystal; it

had a peculiar earnestness and intensity, and a kind of incandescence.

But what had surprised me most--I had already had some idea of the

universal scope of his mind--were the power of his imagination and the

boldness and stoutness of his spirit.

Grosbeake was one of the first modern philosophers, really competent to

understand the new physics of relativity and quantum theory, who had

made an attempt, on the full scale, to trace the consequences of these

discoveries for the concepts of general philosophy, and to construct

a system which should admit them. This had brought him to a drastic

rejection of the philosophical assumptions of old-fashioned mechanistic

science.

Since my recent encounters with the world in New York, which had made

me feel my own weakness and baseness, I had myself been haunted and

oppressed, as on the night of Sue Borglum’s party, by the thought that

humanity, after all, was merely another race of animals, whose behavior

was fixed by their environment, and by the cells which they had had

from their parents, and that the earth and all its creatures was only

a complicated interaction of hard little particles like bullets. I now

learned that it had lately become possible, in the light of scientific

research--that it had even become inevitable (though I was far from

being able to follow all Grosbeake’s arguments) to regard the universe,

not as a machine, which had once been wound up and was still running,

but as an organism in course of development. The unit was no longer

a bullet, but something called an event; and the world was a flux of

events. The relativity of time and space and the anomalous behavior

of electrons, in undermining the “iron laws” of nature, had opened

flood-gates of speculation which the ordinary reasonable mind, the kind

of mind which respected science without examining its assumptions or

attempting to force them to their consequences, had long tended to

regard as closed. And despite the surprise and disapproval of other

mathematicians who, capable of practising only one trade, prided

themselves on sticking to their lasts, Professor Grosbeake had late in

his career emerged as a metaphysician.

I wanted to make him talk on this subject, and I inquired vaguely

about the congress of a scientific association which he had attended

the summer before. He told me briefly of some of its proceedings, then

added, after a pause, with his bland and serious irony: “If you want

to see the sort of men that the mediæval church must have been made

up of, you should study an assemblage of modern scientists. I thought

about them last summer that they must be very like the mediæval

doctors. They’re all more or less internationally minded, you know,

and they’re men of strong character and conviction--and they’re all

authoritarians: they subscribe to a body of dogma and they won’t

countenance any heresy. If a scientist has evolved an hypothesis

which runs counter to the established hypothesis, they won’t give it

a serious hearing--if he’s performed an experiment, you know, which

conflicts with accepted experiments, they refuse to look at it!”----

At this point in the conversation, Magda and Frieda, who had to go

to bed, came in to say good-night. They kissed their mother, who

spoke to them in a low voice, but they hesitated about kissing their

father--in the midst of solemn discourse and with a visitor present.

Magda hung back by her mother’s couch, but Frieda cut the knot by

dashing forward, diving for his bald brow--I saw her own beautiful

hair over her shoulders, like some spilling of gold by the gods--and

running abruptly out of the room. “Oh, good-night, my dear!” said

Grosbeake.--“They have never executed any one,” he continued--Magda

kissed him on the cheek, more diffidently: “Good-night, my dear!--But

there are other methods of suppression even more expedient and

effective; for burning calls attention to the victim.”

His criticism of contemporary science soon led him into

metaphysics.--The entrance of those gold and white girls--the

offspring, so late in life, of that old bald round-shouldered man who

had spent long years in the obstinate plumbing (by means of formulas so

difficult and abstract that they excluded even ideas of number, so far

beyond the ordinary reaches of even scientific minds that they dismayed

even mathematicians) of that mysterious reality which is at once

what we find outside us and what we think about it--the entrance of

Grosbeake’s lovely daughters had had the effect on me of a revelation

of the human vitality, the creative force of flesh and blood, which is

embodied in abstract thought. It was as if my imagination had fully

conceived for the first time that the logician’s chain of propositions,

no less than the astronomer’s systems and the physicist’s analysis of

the invisible, was as much the ripened fruit of rich natures as the

poetry of Shakespeare and Dante, or as those beautiful long-limbed

children, the breed of the Kentish seas and of the forests of the

Rhineland, who had brusquely embraced their father.

He talked to me about the book he was writing. All that I had ever

learned at college of philosophy had been a conception of the external

world as a colorless and soundless wilderness whose true nature one

could never know, which one could not even imagine--but which I did,

none the less, imagine as a vast landscape of polar spaces in whose

eternal twilight one wandered, preoccupied and deluded by a flicker

of magic-lantern pictures which danced inside one’s mind and forever

remained private to oneself. I had now learned, however, from Grosbeake

that since, for example, the high flush of Rita’s cheeks and the sound

of her voice reciting poetry had so radically affected my behavior,

they must belong as much to reality, to that Nature which was no

longer outside one, as the blood corpuscles and the light-waves, the

sound-waves and the vocal organs which were assumed to have produced

them. And it now appeared that Grosbeake admitted as belonging, also,

to reality those æsthetic values which, for example, had made Rita,

when she wrote her poems, feel that the pavements of the Village were

harsh and the sound of the river musical. And so, finally, he told me,

moral values, which he identified with æsthetic values, must be equally

a part of that reality which he found it impossible to split into two

divisions of mind and matter, body and soul. Those moral judgments,

then, I reflected, which had given rise to my disgust and despair the

night of Sue Borghum’s party had been, after all, as real, as much to

be taken seriously, as the biological and neurological processes to

which I had tended to reduce them.

What astonished me most, however, was that Grosbeake now crowned his

system with a new conception of God: he brought God back into the

universe of science, under what appeared to me at first an unfamiliar

form. For Grosbeake’s God was as different as possible from the

tolerant and moderate Great Spirit, the enlightened parliamentary

monarch, of the modern liberal theologian. God, for Grosbeake, was the

ultimate harmony implied by the æsthetic and moral values of which

men were aware in the universe; and our moments of divine revelation

were simply those when we realized most indubitably the necessity

of this harmony and order, when we became most acutely conscious of

this creative purpose of God. And it was, then, this creative purpose

which, in the interest of the ultimate harmony, determined which

possibilities, among the infinite possibilities of the constant flux

of events--the development of the universal organism--should make

themselves actual.

I listened to Grosbeake with excitement. He seemed to me at that moment

to justify to me those instincts and those beliefs which--suspicious of

all the world and uncertain of myself most of all--I had lately come to

doubt. And I was moved by what seemed to me the greatness of his mind

and the boldness of his spirit amidst the modesty and mildness of his

home.--I mustn’t keep him up, then, and tire him: Mrs. Grosbeake had

already gone to bed.

I said that I must go, and he got up and brought a bowl of nuts, which

we cracked in front of the fire. He told me some Victorian anecdote

about Gladstone and Disraeli, whom he always called “Dizzy.”

As I finally came out of the warm house into the white-framed

glass-sided porch which enclosed the front door, I felt a tinge of

crispness in the air, as when the first ice-splinters web a pond, and

I caught the chilly fragrance of the roses and the white and daisylike

cosmos, which had been set out in vases for the night--and as I took

leave of Grosbeake--gazing out through the glass at the pavement

lightly dappled with leaves and the dark grass glittering with wet--my

mind bemused with a vision of God as a vast crystal fixing its symmetry

from a liquefied universe--I felt a delicious delicacy of iciness,

glossy fall-leaf slivers and black rain-glinting glass.

“It’s beginning to snow,” said Grosbeake. It was true: it was not

raining, but snowing. A great flake alighted on my sleeve. “So I win

my bet with the Dean,” he said. “I shall have his Scotch whiskey and

not he my sherry!--You know, the weather’s the only subject on which

I really regard myself as infallible. It comes from being bred on the

Kentish coast--learning about one’s weather from the narrow seas! What

does Dean Mosely know of the weather?--coming from an inland city like

Indianapolis!”

Grosbeake stood in the outside door and regarded the large flakes with

satisfaction. “Dean Mosely kept insisting,” he continued, “that there

were none of the signs of snow--and when he came to enumerate them, I

saw that it was true: there were none of the signs. But I knew it was

going to snow!”

* * * * *

It was a heavy snowstorm for November. It had snowed, and then rained,

and then frozen: on the train, the next afternoon, when I scraped a

peep-hole in the frost-glazed window, I disclosed a vignette of fences,

strung with wires of ice, and tree-branches decked with crystals, like

glittering chandeliers.

But it was late when I arrived at my station: the falling darkness and

the cold lay heavy on the little town. I finally succeeded in getting

a taxi, which had no cushions on the seat and which bucked over the

frozen ruts. There were nice white houses on the road and all the

people seemed to be inside them: the windows were orange against the

snow, which was bluing and graying with the night.

To the east, when we had left behind the town, an army of corn-stacks

in the grayness were frozen to their posts; and to the west, the skies

were split across with the tragic gold and black of a late November

sunset. The grandeur of the winter landscape--since Grosbeake had

predicted the snowfall--had associated itself in my mind with the

grandeur of the philosophic mind; and as I gazed at those last gigantic

cracks of a light beyond human skies, I remembered the fiery walls of

the world of which Lucretius had said that the thinker, in sending his

intellect beyond them, had broken Nature’s locks and won the freedom of

the universe: they seemed to speak to me of bold and lonely thought.

The house, when we finally pulled in to it, was so low that it seemed

sunk in the snow--deep-embedded in the winter ground, which held it

fast: there was a single yellow square of light.

Pete Bird hurried cordially out--I could see Daisy standing in the

doorway. Pete insisted on my not paying for the taxi: “Just put it on

my bill!” he told the man.

Inside, I found Daisy transformed: she greeted me with her frank

American smile, but it was this time unmistakably the smile of the

young American girls of my boyhood, who had never used lipstick or

rouge. I was surprised to see her wholly without make-up: her lips were

a pale coral-pink and her hair, which at Sue Borglum’s party had been

mongrel, muddy and dull, was now an even flaxen yellow. She was wearing

a neat white apron over a pretty blue dress, and looked exactly like

some model little housewife in a bright-colored American advertisement,

smiling sunnily over the lightness of a new kind of pancake-flour or

the flavor of a can of baked beans.

She apologized for the apron--she was just getting dinner, she

said--and I thought that she knew she looked well in it. I told her

how healthy and lovely she looked. “Just feel this!” she invited me,

hooking up her little short-sleeved elbow: I found it studded with

solid bulging muscles. “Good Heavens!” I exclaimed. “How did you ever

get like that?” “Just working!” Daisy explained. “We fixed the place

all up ourselves. When we came, it was just a dump!”

Pete himself, to my surprise, with his slight erect figure, seemed

wiry, effective and hardy. He wore a khaki shirt with a smartly tied

navy-blue tie, which gave to his old gray trousers and his old Norfolk

jacket which did not match them, a gentlemanly air of roughing it.

Daisy amiably excused herself and went to attend to the dinner on the

stove. Pete Bird--a casual and cordial host--invited me in before the

fire.

The hall had been a little nondescript, a cross between a work-shed

and a hall-closet; but the living-room was orderly and cheerful. There

was a bright rag-rug on the floor, and there were bright prints and

maps on the walls--Pete was a great hand at making maps--and lamps with

warmly glowing lampshades, also the work of Pete. And there was a large

old-fashioned fireplace, where big logs were roaring and snapping on

tall black old-fashioned andirons, still stiff-necked, though lame and

leaning crooked.

I expressed my enthusiasm for the fire, and admired the fireplace and

the room. Pete received my compliments with the easy nod and brief word

of the owner of an Adirondack camp: he made one feel that the spacious

fireplace was something he had had specially built, and evoked a vision

of moose-horns and bear-heads under heavy darkling rafters.

“That black log’s not burning well,” he announced. “Either it’s frozen

in the cracks or it’s cranky!” He hooked it and wrenched it with a

poker and an old rickety pair of tongs which did not come together: he

had a master’s way with the logs. “Get over there, you old alligator!”

he commanded. “You _will_ be hard-boiled, _will_ you!”

“I’m sorry,” he remarked, as he stood up in front of the mantelpiece,

which was almost as high as his head, and invited me to sit down before

the fire--“I’m sorry that I can’t offer you a drink--but the only

things you can get around here are apple and alcohol, and both of them

are vile. We’ve finally come to the conclusion that it’s really more

considerate to the guests not to offer them anything at all!”--“We

hoped you might bring something with you,” said Daisy, looking up with

her sweet candid smile: she was dealing out white plates around a table

in the middle of the room. I apologized for not having thought of it.

“We never think of it ourselves--if you can believe me,” Pete insisted.

“It’s almost impossible now to get any kind of decent liquor, in New

York or anywhere else--and the kind of drinks that you _can_ get just

don’t interest me!” I agreed with him heartily, and added that the

trouble with New York was that everybody there drank far too much bad

liquor. “That’s why we came to the country,” said Daisy. “We decided

that it was that or the drunkard’s home!”

“Now, good people!” Daisy invited us, mimicking the kind of women who

say, “Now good people!”--“The dinner is all ready!--if you’ll just sit

down and fly at it!”

The dinner was an admirable pot-roast, with onions, potatoes and

carrots. We all ate a great deal and did very little talking while we

ate.

The table was thick-legged and long: it seemed that Pete had made it

himself--and that he had also made or made over most of the other

pieces of furniture. When they had moved in, the place had been

desolate--full of rubbish, mould and rats. It had taken them all

summer to make it habitable: Pete had rummaged in old barns and houses

and unearthed many mutilated antiques, which he had then, with great

patience, repaired. He seemed to know a great deal about antiques.

The principal prize was a comb-backed rocking-chair, for which Pete

had himself supplied new rockers; but they warned me not to try to sit

in it, because it always went over backwards. I told Pete about the

Grosbeakes’ furniture, and he remembered that there was a Queen Anne

secretary something like the one I was describing, in the Metropolitan

Museum.

For dessert, we ate golden canned peaches, and we drank a great deal of

black coffee. “Now, don’t worry about the dishes,” said Pete to Daisy.

“Just stack them in the kitchen, and I’ll do them later myself!” “If

that doesn’t mean,” replied Daisy, “that _I_’ll have to do them in the

morning, when they’re all greasy and cold.” “Don’t be silly!” said

Pete, indignantly.

After dinner, we sat around the fire. I asked them what they did in the

evenings. “We just do this!” said Pete. “We read aloud,” supplemented

Daisy. “We’ve read Bulwer-Lytton’s novels almost entirely through.”

“Is he any good?” I inquired. “Fine,” said Daisy. “Besides, he’s the

only novelist that they’ve got in the village library.” I was amazed

at the idea of Daisy spending long winter evenings over Bulwer-Lytton;

but as I had talked to her, I soon discovered that she had always been

addicted to novel-reading and had excellent sense and taste--it had

apparently been only Ray Coleman’s reading aloud to her out of the

_Oxford Book of English Verse_ that she hadn’t been able to stand.

I saw now that her ordinary vocabulary was partly literary, and that it

was the combination of literary words with slang which gave her speech

its peculiar charm--as when she had said, at the time I had first

talked to her, that the horse she had seen in her delirium had been

“leering” at her, or when she had told me that Ray Coleman in Paris had

seemed “pretty affluent.”

I asked her what writers she liked best. “Well,” she said, “when I

was a girl at school, I used to think that Compton Mackenzie was the

swellest thing in the world--I thought that that was what life ought to

be like--that was what I thought Phil and I were like, when we ran away

from Pittsburgh. But I soon found out that the old racket was more like

a Russian novel!”

Russian novels reminded me of Larry Mickler, and I asked Pete and

Daisy about him. I had never seen him before or since the night of

Sue Borglum’s party, and I had never been able to explain him: he

had come to seem to me--like the elephantine creature whom I had

encountered in the doorway on Thirty-fourth Street--a sort of demon who

had fleetingly materialized out of the infernal fumes of the evening.

“Oh,” said Daisy, “he’s perfectly harmless--he’s just a fool, that’s

all. He’s usually controlled by Alice, his wife. He was just acting up

that night because Alice wasn’t along. He’s always threatening to do

something desperate, but he usually ends up with Alice administering

triple-bromides.” I asked what Alice was like. “She’s just a clean

stalwart college girl,” said Daisy. “She doesn’t know quite what a

genius is,” Pete Bird contributed, “but she thinks that Larry is a

genius. He wrote a novel once which he was never able to get published,

and he’s always threatening to write another. In the meantime, he’s in

the advertising business, which he says he can never respect.”

“I don’t like Larry Mickler,” Pete added, after a pause. “He cheats at

limericks!” I asked him what he meant. “Why, he gets you to play this

game where you both have to take the same first line and make up a

limerick to fit it. But he’s got the limericks all made up beforehand.

When I finally got wise and supplied the first line myself, he couldn’t

do a thing--he got sullen and wouldn’t play. Our relations have never

been cordial since.--That’s why he tried to make out that I gypped him

on those liverwurst sandwiches.”

I had been watching Daisy follow the talk with a childlike seriousness

and candor. Though it was cold, she wore no stockings--for reasons

of economy, she said--and she shifted her slim and pretty legs, with

their straw-colored sharp-toed slippers, in the movements of a good

little girl listening restlessly but attentively to the conversation

of her elders. As we spoke humorously or gravely, told limericks or

deplored the demoralizing effects of the city, she would respond with

gravity or humor, turning her eyes from one speaker to the other. She

seemed sober-minded, shy and nice: I felt that some of the limericks

embarrassed her: I came to think of her almost as a _jeune fille_

and vaguely confused her in my mind with Grosbeake’s golden-haired

daughters.

Like all people who live in the country, they commenced about ten to

yawn: when I suggested that they must be tired they confessed it with

little protestation.

“Now,” said Pete, “we have a guest-room which is always at the disposal

of the guests--but it’s as cold as a fiddler’s bitch to-night, and if

you really want to keep warm, you’d better sleep here on the couch.”

“But what about you?” I asked. “If you can stand the cold, I can.”

“Oh, we sleep in here!” replied Pete--and opening the door into the

next room, which had the aspect of a store-room--barren as an attic

and littered with all kinds of junk--he produced a gigantic set of

bed-springs, which he manœuvred through the door with nonchalance and

set out on a pair of trestles.

I explored the regions beyond: there was a bedroom behind the

living-room, like a plunge into a cold black lake. Through the little

low square-paned window, I saw the moon, cut in brightest coldest

silver over the lonely and frozen fields. There had been something

almost miraculous about Grosbeake’s predicting the snowfall--as if

Nature had admitted him to her secrets!

I returned to the smell of wood-smoke and the yellow-shaded lamps of

the living-room, and announced that I would sleep on the couch.

How jolly it was, I reflected, back amid the warmth again, to go to bed

in front of a fire, in the country, in the winter-time, in the house of

friends! And as I undressed in the dark and grisly store-room, which

evidently represented the house as they had originally found it--before

they had taken it in hand--I was moved by admiration for what seemed

to me their pioneering heroism. They had established, with no help and

little money, in the midst of that hard rural wilderness--if but in a

single room--these amenities and decencies--this core of civilization!

And they were right! Who should know it by this time--all the more

since my visit to Grosbeake!--better than I? All that dignified

mankind, all that kept them from the brawling and the squalor which,

the night of Sue Borglum’s party, had seemed to me the universal fate,

had been built up through endurance and patience, through steadiness

of purpose and good faith, through property well administered, through

families standing together, through lovers true to their pledges!

How had I ever been taken in by that foolish and shallow philosophy

of living only for the moment?--that philosophy I had learned from a

woman, which was possible only for a woman, given up, by her woman’s

nature, to her impulses, passions and moods! I remembered how I had

once used to wonder at Rita’s constant preoccupation with death, both

in her poetry and in conversation, and I could see now how such a life

as Rita’s, looking always upon the image of itself, must be ridden by

the terror of death, because death meant for it the end of the world.

When Daisy was in bed, Pete Bird summoned me back into the living-room,

and I wrapped myself up in blankets and lay down before the fire on the

couch. But the coffee had made us wakeful and we went on talking in

bed. At first, we told funny stories, till we had obviously exhausted

our best and had begun to fall back on second-rate ones. Then Pete

regaled me with reminiscences of eccentric Greenwich Village characters

who had flourished before my day--there had been one uncompromising

prophet, who had made a practice of robbing fur-stores: he would hide

himself among the furs at the back, till the shop had been closed for

the night, then climb out with his booty, through a window: he had,

however, never profited by these activities, but had given everything

he stole to the poor, and had lived himself in the direst privation.

We agreed that the great days were passing. I tried to remember some

of the songs which Bobby Edwards had used to sing in the restaurants.

Pete, it turned out, knew them all by heart and could sing them from

beginning to end. We agreed that there had been something remarkable

about Bobby Edwards. I said it was the curious prestige which very

clever people sometimes acquire by pretending to be stupid. Pete said

that this was not quite it, because Bobby Edwards did not look stupid:

the thing was that he never changed his face and consequently had

everybody buffaloed.

These songs led to other songs: Pete and I finally got to the point

of singing _My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean_ and _There Is a Tavern in

the Town_. “I suppose this burns you up,” I said to Daisy, who had for

some time been lying silent. “I suppose you want to go to sleep.” “Oh,

I guess I can bear it!” she answered--then added, after a pause: “_My

Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean_ always reminds me of when I was a girl in

Yarmouth--in Canada. My uncle used to sing it.--And he used to sing

_The Girl I Left Behind Me_, too. I used to love to hearum sing that!”

Her voice, as she lay in the darkness, divested of the emphasis of day,

had almost the timbre of a child’s--and it moved me with the charming

pathos of young girls’ voices, the pathos of frailness and freshness.

“Did you come from Canada?” I asked. “I thought you came from

Pittsburgh!” “My mother came from there,” she explained. “My aunt still

lives up there. I used to be up there a lot when I was a kid.--Yes, I’m

really just a country girl!” she said, burlesquing herself. “That’s why

I take so easily to living out here. My other aunt,” she went on, after

a moment’s recollection, “married some kind of a nobleman.--I always

thought there must have been something wrong withum--he must have had

syphilis or something. But he was a real nobleman, it seemed!”

When we were tired of singing ballads, we experimented with hymns: I

rendered, with what I felt at the time was an impressive solemnity and

resonance, _Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past_, and _The Starry Firmament

on High_.--But the second of these was met by silence--I received

no response from the bed. And when Pete and Daisy replied to my

good-night, it was plain they had been asleep.

Those magnificent hymns! I went on thinking. What a first-rate poet

Watts had been! And that grandeur of the universe, of the moral

principle it implied--did one not feel it, also, even, in the calm

complacent firmament of Addison?

Perhaps the effect on my imagination of Grosbeake’s religious ideas

had been, in recreating my conception of God, to revive for me a

vision of the Devil; but at any rate, my recent image of Larry Mickler

as a species of hobgoblin combined itself with my assimilation of

the gravy-boat and cream-pitcher at the Grosbeakes’ to the demons of

Bruegel and Callot, to inspire me with the idea of a satire in which

I should ascribe to a race of demons all those anti-social views and

habits which had come lately to seem to me so sinister.

My mind, laying hold upon this, worked for a time with great clarity

and speed: I even framed sentences and paragraphs: “The attitude of

the demons toward each other is entirely devoid of the amenity and

dignity characteristic of human behavior. In their amorous relations,

they are neither romantic nor faithful. Many of the demons do not

function sexually, but among those that do--notably the succubæ and

incubi--their matings are wholly physical and transient, and involve

neither responsibility nor affection. A human being who has seen

the demons at close range is not perhaps disposed to consider this

unnatural. The more hideous and monstrous types have died out, like the

larger and more powerful: the bat’s ears, pig’s snout and ape’s mug

appear only in modified forms; and such a bestial and complex mask as

that worn, for example, by Dürer’s Satan would probably be impossible

to-day. Yet the devils which have endured to our own time are still

sufficiently unsightly and grotesque, and in a sufficient variety of

ways, to appear repulsive to human taste as objects of amorous desire,

and impracticable even for each other. We do not wonder when a female

demon, coming straight from the embraces of a male, makes no scruple of

spitting and jeering at him in the presence of other female demons, or

in the presence of another male; or when a male, who has been mating

with a female, makes her the victim of one of those practical jokes to

which the devils are so inveterately addicted--impaling her in a public

place or hacking off her arms and legs and leaving her on a crowded

thoroughfare. We should, however, be quite wrong in supposing that the

devils resent each other’s ugliness: being entirely without ideas of

beauty, they are, in consequence, impervious to ugliness, and do not

even, as has sometimes been supposed, esteem it for its own sake. The

demons exchange, in their amorous intercourse, in a manner not unlike

ours, pledges of lasting affection and epithets of tender endearment;

but these expressions are simple reflexes involved in the physical

process itself and as involuntary as it; they attach no significance

to them and we should wrong them in supposing they do. The devils are

sterile, and unable, or unwilling, to reproduce their kind.

“The fiends have a highly developed literature, which reflects their

habits and ideas. It is mostly printed on crude loose sheets which are

passed around from hand to hand; and it consists chiefly of obscene

anecdotes and stories of atrocious crime. We must, however, bear in

mind, in connection with this literature, that to the demons, whose

point of view is so incomprehensible from our own, a scandal is not a

scandal, nor a crime, a crime: the former they enjoy as a farce, and

the latter as a practical joke. They have an interesting school of

poetry, of which the leader is Blashtalatshk. I have met Blashtalatshk

and found him a devil of high intelligence. His horns are rudimentary

and his lower jaw is lacking: but his enormous dark eyes are among

the most sensitive and glowing that I have ever seen. His poetry and

that of his fellows is, of course, devoid of the moral ideas and of

the ennobling emotions which distinguish human poetry to-day: it is

exclusively occupied with the mere representation of sights, sounds,

smells and other sensations, which the demons have a genius for

recreating with vividness and precision, though occasionally with so

much complexity as to produce an effect of incoherence.”...

At this point, however, I dropped it: I found that my satire was boring

me, and that it also went against my conscience. My portrait of the

demon poet had been a caricature of Pete Bird, and I had no desire to

caricature Pete: on the contrary, I liked him. I found that I did not

want to write a satire: to satirize humanity was to slander it, and

I no longer thought so ill of humanity. Pete and Daisy and the rest,

after all--even Larry Mickler himself--were not really base: they had

disliked their lives as much as I had. If I had disliked them and found

them base, it was because I myself had been tarred with the same stick.

Moral problems, I now saw, were too complicated, and human nature too

delicate a matter, to be hacked by the axe of satire. So, regretting

the emphatic prose style with which a simple moral conviction may

supply us and which I now found myself obliged to sacrifice, I decided

to be scrupulous of the truth.

Still I could not sleep: I sat up against the arm of the couch, and

saw the round cold winter moon, of which I had before had a glimpse

on the other side of the house, now studding with its white blinding

pearl the pane of the room where I lay. When had I seen it before,

setting so, but the moon of summer then, embedded in the morning

glass? I thought of Rita, in Paris now. I had been wrong about her

and Ray Coleman: Rita had merely, at the time when I had seen her and

she had seemed to me evasive about her address, gone to stay at Duff

Burdan’s studio--all the rest had been a gruesome fantasy of my jealous

imagination and my shaken self-confidence. She had gone abroad for

the first time, by herself, at just about the time I was returning,

and I had had a letter from her the day before: it had come just as I

was leaving town for the country. She was staying, she wrote me, in

a little Left Bank hotel, and had as yet seen nobody. But the early

morning market-trucks, she said, which rumbled through the Rue du Four

and made the walls of her bedroom vibrate, though they kept her awake

after midnight, made her feel that she was “really a part of Paris.” I

seemed to divine behind her letter an aching loneliness--the loneliness

of all Americans when they first try to live in Europe; and I imagined

about her, as she wrote, the dark brownish walls of the room, the

dispiriting wash-basin and slop-jar, the stuffy and musty French bed.

It was partly the fact that I could pity Rita, and that at last she

had written to me, as well as the spectacle of Grosbeake’s equanimity,

which made it possible for me to think well of humanity.

Not that her letter was plaintive or effusive: it was, on the contrary,

dry and brief; but the fact that she had written me at all--she very

rarely wrote letters--seemed to me to imply, on her part, an unusual

degree of desolation; and the two poems which she enclosed in her

letter--she told me she had composed them at night when she could not

sleep on account of the trucks--were the palest things of hers I had

seen. The first was meagre, terse and wistful: it ticked off, in three

brief stanzas, three images from that countryside of her youth--a lone

elm, a gray stone fence, a pond athrob with frogs at nightfall--and I

recognized in their phantom faintness--so unlike the stinging actuality

which she usually gave to such things--that dim aspect which, to the

traveller abroad, even the best loved and known sights of home come to

wear in alien places, as if they had perhaps never existed, but were

the receding images of a dream.

The other poem was a sonnet; and when I first saw it, I did not know

what to make of it. It seemed very unlike Rita: in the first place,

she never wrote sonnets; and my first thought, when I commenced to

read it, was one of solicitude: I felt distressed that her isolation

should so disastrously have affected her poetry. Then it dawned on

me, after I had finished it, that it was supposed to be addressed to

myself. I reread it with attention: it was the first time she had ever

written me a poem. Then I became aware of the true situation: the

trouble here with Rita’s style was simply that, for the moment, she

had become infected with mine. It was I who was addicted to sonnets;

and I could recognize in this one of Rita’s, my own forcible-feeble

rhetoric and my adjectives in monotonous pairs--all those unavailing

devices with which I had muffed the kind of effects that she would

clinch with a single short verb or a commonplace idiom. I had never

thought myself much of a poet, but now that Rita seemed to be talking

my jargon, seemed to be trying to reply to me in the language in which

I had been apostrophizing her, I found that I was sickened by it. And

I was horrified to observe that even the banal imagery with which Rita

could usually perform miracles remained, in this ill-inspired sonnet,

irredeemably banal.

My first feeling had been one of depression, the result partly of

wounded _amour-propre_--because Rita, having written me a poem,

should have written me such an indifferent one--and partly of pained

concern that she should have sacrificed a poem for my sake. I had been

embarrassed as to what I should write her: I wanted to urge her to

suppress the poem, but, as it had been written in an effort to be nice

to me, it was impossible to be so ungracious.

Now, as I lay staring into the fire, I thought of the sonnet again,

and ran over it in my mind. It had been a memory of our first days

together, when we had talked about poetry; and now suddenly, for the

first time, I was touched that she should have remembered those days

and should have tried to let me know it. I had thought only of the

artistic sincerity which she had sacrificed for her subject! Now I

was able to take account of the sincerity of some personal sort which

must, after all, have come into play to induce her to sacrifice it.

In her dismal Paris hotel--so cold and dark in November--had she been

trying to recall, to reaffirm, in spite of all our quarrels and

failures (and she had known then, as I had not known, how life undoes

the soundest of our reasons and depreciates the dearest of our hopes),

those moments of common understanding and common enthusiasm of the days

when we had first talked freely together--when we had both, for that

moment, found a language for those deepest unspoken convictions, for

those deepest realities, of such different lives!--And I began even to

wonder at last--a possibility I had never admitted--whether, that night

at Sue Borglum’s house, when I had met Rita with my freezing, blank

looks and my tiresome disapproval and when, reminding me of the poem

which I had so loved when I had been in love with her, she had tried

to describe to me the river all lined with sword-blades of ice,--and

when I had listened only with contempt--I wondered now whether, after

all, she had not herself been glad to think of the hours--how rare in

the world they must be!--when poetry had burned with love. Had not the

river itself been the symbol of the breaking and fraying of passion,

of the dispersal of the torrents of the heart?--and had she not, when

she had told me, at Sue Borglum’s, of the river alive in winter, for

all the frozen countryside about it and though cramped by the ice of

its banks--had she not tried to tell me something more, to speak again

to the old comrade and admirer, over the head of the angry lover--to

establish again that contact--which I now chose to make impossible--but

which had brought once, if only for those moments, that common light

into a world which, for her as well as for me--it occurred to me now

for the first time--must be chiefly a world of darkness?

The last log had a comforting beauty--all woody, rosy luminosity--but

I saw that it must soon crumble. I put on another log, trying not to

wake Pete and Daisy. I glanced over toward their bed--they had turned

to each other in sleep. The log smoked, and then caught fire: it sent

up little tongues of flame. What a pity that I couldn’t write a satire,

making use of my wide knowledge of demonology, for lack of misanthropic

conviction! The log began to crackle and blaze.

I looked for the moon, but it was gone: I craned around the side of the

couch and saw it low, vaporish and gray, as if dissolving in the ichor

of dawn. So I had watched it set so many times, on guard at night, in

France--in that terrible, dull, dead hour when night is over and day

not begun, when one must either make verses or be dull, be dead, as the

earth and sky, as the soldiers in their deepest sleep--I had run into

Hugo in Toul--I had not seen him since the beginning of the War and we

had only had a chance for half an hour’s talk in a café--he had been

so funny about his unit, so funny and so good-natured, that unit which

was soon to condemn him to the horrors of the prison-camp--what a great

fellow he really was, in spite of the fact that, as Grosbeake said, he

did caricature American business men too grimly--how few there were

like him!--that France where Rita had never been till she arrived in

that dreary hotel, where the market-trucks kept her awake!--I rolled

over and went to sleep.

But I had scarcely closed my eyes, it seemed, when persistent coughs,

steps, and bumpings compelled me to open them again: it was Pete, in

the gray, early light, getting into his pants and khaki shirt; he was

rolling up his sleeves before the window.

I tore myself out of my blanket-cocoon and--though he begged me not to

get up--I blinkingly pulled on my clothes, and followed him out into

the cold undersea of the early morning ocean. He had gone into the

shed to chop some wood: I had used up the last log during the night,

and he wanted to make the room warm for Daisy. He begged me again not

to bother; but with eager, if incompetent, helpfulness, I hacked up a

large crooked limb, as well as several of the planks of the floor.

After this, we went in and had some coffee--Daisy was still asleep. We

talked about literature and drinks: Pete had volumes of Shelley and

Keats, and a treatise on French wines, which he said were the only

books he had not sold when he had come away to the country. Sitting

close against the stove, I examined the wine book with interest. “Never

buy 1916 Burgundy,” Pete admonished me, with an air of independent

knowledge. “From 1910 to 1914 are all good years--and 1915 is fair. But

you have to go back to 1904 to get really A-1 Burgundy!”

I had to leave before noon--it was a long way into the town and a

long way back to New York. We talked a little about a taxi; but as it

was already growing late and as the nearest telephone was at a farm

some distance away, I decided that I would undertake to walk, and

Daisy offered to go with me. Pete had promised to call on a farmer

and examine his grandfather’s clock--putting clocks in order, it

appeared, was one of his curious useless aptitudes--in return for which

service, he explained to us, he hoped to be able to induce the farmer

to make him a present of a crippled lowboy which was being used as a

kitchen-table.

“I can supply the handles,” he assured us. “Nothing easier in the

world! Just take them off that old bureau in the store-room. But I

_don’t_ see how I can supply that missing leg without a lathe.--But,

after all, why not have a lathe?” he went on, with the liberal

enthusiasm of a thoroughly practical man. “Think of all we could

do with one! We could make regular tables and chairs!--Why, I’d be

turning out table-legs so voluptuous that all the local oafs would be

trampling over one another to buy them!” “I suppose,” said Daisy, “that

you’re going to buy the lathe with the money we owe the grocer.” “My

dear child,” Pete retorted, like a millionaire who takes pleasure in

explaining that he always saves money on his clothes by having them

made when he is in London, “you can get a lathe from Sears Roebuck for

ten dollars! You simply say that you want to buy it on instalments, and

they send you the lathe. Then you don’t pay them anything more--and

by the time they’ve sent a man for the money and he’s gotten way out

here, you’ve had time to turn out a whole dining-room set, enough legs

and rungs for several dining-room sets, and you’ve sold the sets and

ordered another lathe from another mail-order company, paying the first

instalment out of what you get for the sets--so that by the time the

first lathe is taken away, another one is just arriving, and the work

goes merrily on!”

We set out--Daisy and I--on a hard crust of frozen snow, which broke

through at every step and let us down into powdered depths. Daisy

was dressed in high laced leather boots, a white sweater under a tan

leather jacket and a round knitted white cap. I had never liked her so

much: a certain strength and independence of character, which I had

felt in her even at the period when she had seemed most demoralized,

had now fully come into its own. Her frankness and her common-sense

jokes, which I had once thought the typical products of Pittsburgh and

New York, now seemed to me the wisdom of the country, which the false

values of the city couldn’t fool.--I began to think--it had already

occurred to me--how delightful it would be to live with Daisy in a

solitary farmhouse in the country, to chop wood to keep her warm, to

sit with her at night before the fire, to read Bulwer-Lytton’s novels

aloud. I thought wistfully of Bulwer Lytton, whom it seemed to me I

should like to read.

I congratulated her on leaving New York: “I began to feel before I

left,” I said, “as if the Village were a cage of wild animals--I began

to feel that it might be just as well to make good your escape in

time.” “I certainly felt that way,” said Daisy, “but I didn’t know

anybody else did.--I thought everybody ate it up but me.--I got so I

felt that I couldn’t trust anybody!”

We strode, plodding, through the snow. “You know, Pete and I,” she went

on, “just after that last time I saw you--we got on a train with our

last money”--(the money, no doubt, from Pete’s books)--“and got off

at the first town that looked good to us out of the train-window. We

went to the real-estate office and asked for the cheapest thing there

was--and we finally got this old hell-hole. The owner said that, if

we’d fix it up, they’d give it to us free.” The idea of this exploit

enchanted me, and I envied Pete more than ever.

I told Daisy how much I liked Pete--what a relief I thought she must

find him after living with Ray Coleman. “To tell the truth,” she

replied, “I don’t notice much difference. The only thing is that I

get along much better with Pete. We can sit around and wisecrack for

hours.--The time that we had that party--the first time that I ever

met you--I’d only seenum a few times, but I said to-um, ‘I get along

with you better than with anybody else I know.’” “What did he say?” I

inquired. “He just grinned,” said Daisy. I remembered how I had felt

myself when it had first burst upon me that Rita, instead of scorning

my apartment, enjoyed it. “So,” Daisy continued, “we went out and went

to Julius’s bar together--and here we are now!”

I told her how wise I thought them to have left New York for the

country--how glad I had been to go abroad--what a fool I had made of

myself the night of Sue Borglum’s party. “As far as I’m concerned,”

she replied, “that night was about the worst I remember--about the

worst sunk I’ve ever been.”

“You know,” she added, after a pause, “I cut my wrist that night--you

knew that, didn’t you?” “Good Heavens!” I exclaimed, “Why did you do

that?” “Why, because I’d lost my job, I suppose,” she said, “--and

because I got tired of the traffic going in and out of Gus Dunbar’s

rooms--and I’d been drinking so much that I didn’t know what I was

doing anyway.--I felt like such a tramp--that I’d been so inconsiderate

of other people, and just gotten myself into a worse mess than

before.--I cut my wrist,” she went on, “with Gus Dunbar’s razor-blade.

I never saw anything spurt the way the blood did--it seemed as if all

the blood in my body must be just in my wrist--it spurted clear across

the bathroom. I just stood there and looked at it--the only thing I

could think of was the leak in the hose, in that movie that you and I

went to--don’t you remember?--a little while before. If Pete hadn’t

come in just then, I’d probably have bled to death. But he arrived and

called a doctor and put a tourniquet on my wrist: he certainly stopped

it in short order--it seems he knows all about tourniquets.”

“Oh, my dear,” I said, “did you do that?--Is it really all right now?”

“Yes,” she said. “The doctor said that I really ought to have an

operation, but I’m almost all right again now without one.”

I made her take off her gauntlet: I saw that she could hardly move

the fingers of that hand which Pete had once described as a “little

surprising moonbeam violin”--they were as stiff as the fingers of a

doll which a child tries to make hold a broom.--“Why don’t you get them

operated on?” I asked. “It probably isn’t a very serious operation.”

“Can’t afford to,” she replied.

“What had happened, anyway,” I asked, “before I came to get you that

night?” “Oh, it was horrible!” said Daisy. “I’d gone around to Larry

Mickler’s to see Larry about getting Pete a job--he was a friend of

Gus Dunbar’s.--When I’d called him up on the telephone and suggested

sending Pete around, he’d said for me to come--but I told Pete to drop

in after I’d been there a while. I could see what Larry wanted, but I

thought that I’d jolly him along a little if Pete could get anything

out of it. I thought that I could fix it all up and get back in time to

have dinner with you. Well, when I got there, he made me drink and then

he tried to grab me. And then before Pete arrived, his wife came in. It

was awful: that was really one reason that I cut my wrist, I guess--I

was so disgusted with everybody!”

I thought with pitying superiority of Larry Mickler. I felt to-day that

I myself was so very far from being capable of behaving in such a way

as to make a young girl lose faith in life!

We marched on--we were in wagon-ruts now: there was a long, rising road

before us, with a straight row of trees on each side. We climbed the

hill--there was a farmhouse at the top--we started down the slope of

snow.

“Our favorite yokels live in there,” she said. “You ought to see me

giving parties for the yokels--I have the time of my life--and so do

they: they think I’m swell--they never saw anything like me before!”

“It must be nice to live in the country,” I said--I felt envious

of the yokels. “It must be nice to know your neighbors--which you

never do in New York.” “Yes,” said Daisy, “I get to take positive

pride in competing with the other housewives to see who can have the

best-looking kitchen. You know how sloppy Gus Dunbar’s looked?--I think

it was that as much as anything that discouraged me with life that

time--well, when I came down here to the country, the first farmhouse

kitchen that I saw brought out a suppressed housewife’s complex,”--I

remembered her remark, at Sue Borglum’s, on the neatness of Sue

Borglum’s kitchen--“and I used to feel ashamed unless our kitchen was

just shining!”

There was still a stretch at the bottom of the hill. What a marvellous

walker she was!--And she had felt as I had done, that life without

honor was horrible! But where Rita could save her self-respect with a

poem, where even I could imagine a satire, Daisy could only cut her

wrist!

We walked on for a time in silence. I could be so happy with Daisy, I

thought--taking long walks in the snow in silence!

“I was in a pretty bad way myself,” I presently remarked. “That night

that we went to the movies, you really saved my life! You don’t know

how sweet you were!” “Well,” she replied with amiability, “you weren’t

so sour yourself!”

We were coming now into the town: we had reached the first white

houses. I was cheered by a sudden inspiration: “Look,” I said, “we

couldn’t get a drink, could we?--Isn’t there some kind of a bootlegger

in town?--I’ve got plenty of time before the train.” “We might go to

Ned Lovejoy’s,” she said thoughtfully.

It was just a room in a private house: there was an oil-cloth-covered

table; a stove--which was pleasant after the cold; some “cabinet-size”

photographs of members of the family, paralyzed in family groups;

and an old-fashioned tinted picture of a little beribboned girl,

smiling innocently and sweetly upon a sweet-natured cat and dog who

ate amicably out of the same bowl. I don’t know which was worse--the

gin or the ginger-ale. Ned Lovejoy was inclined to converse, but we

discouraged him and he left.

“You don’t think that Pete and I are getting to look alike, do you?”

asked Daisy: I assured her that they weren’t in the least. “That’s what

Gus Dunbar said when he was out here a couple of weeks ago: he said we

were getting alike. They say that people who live together do get to

look alike.”

I began to tell her again how much I approved of her course; how I

had come to detest New York. I explained that I was going away, and

intended to stay away as long as I possibly could. When I had returned

in the fall from abroad, I hadn’t been able to get back my job; and I

had decided that, before looking for another, I might as well go on

squandering my legacy, to the extent of a trip to New Orleans: I wanted

to be there for the Mardi Gras.

Against the cold, sunny light of the window, her sharp nose, pale eyes,

and blond hair looked almost Scandinavian. I told her how much I had

enjoyed myself--how fine it was to have seen her again--how much I

wished I were living in the country. “Why do you go to New Orleans,

then?” she asked. I replied, not without a touch of wistfulness, that

I had nowhere in the country to go. I tried to summon another drink;

but Ned Lovejoy was absorbed by his radio, of which we could hear the

sepulchral buzzing--and there was a long, rather stupid silence. I went

and found him, and got him to bring us some more ginger-ale and gin, of

which I had almost ceased to notice the taste.

I told her how splendid she looked with her outdoor complexion and

clothes; and how much I liked and admired her.--She said suddenly:

“Take me to New Orleans!” “Come along!” I replied. “I’m sailing

just after Christmas.” “Take me away from all this!” she went on,

burlesquing a woman in a play saying “Take me away from all this!”--but

it seemed to me, and shocked me a little, that she was partly in

earnest. “Pete can’t go on like this!” she said. “He’ll have to go

back to the city and get some kind of a job. We owe everybody in town!

I get panicky about it sometimes. Living with Pete like this is just

like living with another woman--you just live on your wits from day to

day--you don’t dare to think ahead.--You know: you can keep yourself on

the go and keep using your vitality up, just so you won’t mind things

so much--but every now and then I begin to think about the situation

and then I don’t know what to do!--I never thought I’d be living like

this--I never thought I’d be with anybody the way I’ve been with Pete

and Ray!”...

I remembered how, suddenly one night, she had left Ray Coleman for

Pete, and had never come back--and I remembered how she had begged Hugo

to take her to Afghanistan. What if I could really get her away from

Pete! I wanted a mistress now, and I liked Daisy so much--I desired her

so much. But I couldn’t flatter myself that she cared about me, she

merely wanted to get away--and all that treachery, that promiscuity,

that stealing of other men’s girls, had come by this time to seem to me

detestable: I had known Pete Bird through his poems, and had stayed in

his house and read his books, drunk his coffee and eaten his food--and

I remembered how bitter _I_ had been when Rita had not scrupled to

betray me, poetry, devotion and all, for that fellow from Columbus (or

whoever it had been: I never knew; if it was not merely some image of

herself, that self which could not mate with others, because it had

already, in one body, made a union of female with male).--Pete Bird

had, as it were, built his house with his own hands, and he possessed

no legacy.--I did not even doubt now that he had, as he said, been

slandered by Larry Mickler in the matter of the liverwurst sandwiches.

The cold light on the cold road where I was looking, early as it was

in the day, was already beginning to darken; and I had a consciousness

of stoic fortitude at the thought that, if the sun was short, I could

endure the closing-down of night.--I spoke to Daisy of the sad

imperfection inherent in all human relations, and of the necessity for

loyalty and faith in a world where love was sure to fail us. “But,” I

warmly and earnestly broke off, “you know all about that better than

anybody! You know all about everything better than anybody! You’re one

of the most intelligent girls I know!” And I told her again how much I

liked her and how well she deserved of life.--It was time for me to go.

At the station, I tried to get some gum for her out of a solitary

slot-machine, but it was apparently frozen up. There were some country

people standing about, and I was a little shy of kissing her good-by;

but we kissed, as I was getting on the train: I touched her coral lips

for an instant. It was deliciously cold, moist and light, like that

moment of ice and winter flowers inside the glass of Grosbeake’s porch.

V

In that asphalt sky of August, the summer sun burnt a blunt point of

light, like the blinding violet-livid torch with which a worker on city

mains gashes through a tough piece of pipe. A gray haze blurred the

vistas of Fifth Avenue and dulled the too full-blown bushes and trees

which one saw beyond Washington Arch, as if the buildings and pavements

themselves, under the action of the terrible heat, were vaporizing and

fogging the air.

Down a side-street, an old white truck-horse stood sleeping and

stupefied, its head lowered like a lizard’s and its eyelids closed,

while the driver, sluggish and sweating, piled a mountain of boxes on

the dray. And farther over, on Seventh Avenue, I saw a barefoot ragged

boy, who had flung himself down on his stomach above the grating that

ventilates the subway, and whose coat was blown up violently behind

him, like the streamers of an electric fan, by the warm, sudden gust

from the trains.

My handkerchief was sopped with sweat, and I was refreshed by an

unexpected breeze which washed over the butt of the island the hot,

bilgy river-smell, as if, now that the people of the Village had

abandoned the Village for the summer, the waterside were invading the

town. I saw nobody anywhere that I knew. On the corner of Twelfth

Street, where Rita had lived, the obsolete beer-saloon still bore its

discolored blue Pilsener sign.

It occurred to me to examine, as I passed them, those landmarks of

Abingdon Square which, the morning of my first meeting with Rita,

when I had been drunk with peach-brandy and poetry, had seemed to me

impressive and romantic, but which I had afterward passed so many times

without ever observing them closely. I now found that what I had taken

for a statue of some interesting celebrity of the quarter was merely a

monument to the soldiers of the ward who had died in the European War;

and that the object which had figured to my fancy as a temple or a tomb

was simply a disused band-stand.

Daisy and Pete had come recently to town. Gus Dunbar, who was now in

Boston, had, at Daisy’s instigation, taken steps toward getting Pete a

job there; and Pete had gone on to see about it, leaving Daisy for a

few days in New York. She had called me up the day before, and, with

the idea of getting away from the heat, I had suggested our going to

Coney Island.

She was to meet me at the pier. I had not been to Coney Island since my

childhood, and for some reason, I supposed that the boat left from the

foot of Christopher Street. At the docks, I learned otherwise, and took

a taxi down to the Battery, along the wide cobbled avenue that runs

along beside the wharves.

There was the funny high yellow façade, built of wood but with an

aspect of pasteboard: it had precisely, I remembered, the quality of

the amusement-places of my boyhood, and it looked faded and flimsy now.

Daisy was waiting in the cavernous anteroom. In a corner of the high,

darkish space, she showed charmingly neat, small and clear. In spite

of the roundness of her hips and the smartness of her clothes--her

white dress and her tight _cloche_ hat--she might almost have been

mistaken for a child. How cute and how chic she looked in those short,

tight skirts that cut off her slim legs just above the knees! “Well,”

she greeted me with her unblinking smile, “the first twenty years of

my life I spent waiting for the Coney Island boat!” I apologized and

explained. “But why didn’t you find out first?” she protested. “It’s

a good thing you didn’t think it left from the foot of Forty-second

Street!”

“Well, how do you feel?” I inquired, as we climbed the flight of steps.

“I feel pretty sassy!” she said.

I had of course missed the four-o’clock boat, and now we should have to

wait for the five-o’clock one. But up-stairs, the gray-timbered shadow

of the low-roofed leaving-place was tranquillizing and cool: through a

low narrow opening that ran along the side, one had a glimpse of the

crude, unshadowed blocks of the enormous downtown buildings, where only

one sheer green roof and a steep crane, on a float that was green,

broke the cliffs of colorlessness.

I had brought some gin, and I bought some ginger-ale at the refreshment

stand. “I must tell you my joke,” she said, as we drank that impossible

concoction--at once too bitter and too sickeningly sweet--for which I

had acquired a certain affection, because I had come to associate it

with Daisy. “I’ve made up an idea for a joke. There’ll be a caption

that says ‘Striking a Happy Medium’--and then there’ll be a picture

of a medium--you know, a spiritualistic medium--with a big piece of

bogus ectoplasm coming out of her mouth and a grin of satisfaction on

her face, and a man with his arm all raised, just ready to smack her

down.--Don’t you think that’s pretty good?” I told her that I thought

it was terrible.

There was a large, old, slot-machine phonograph standing against the

wall: it was lyre-shaped and had a mirror in its belly, and seemed

stationed as an outpost and siren for the frivolities and gaieties

beyond. We put a nickel in and started it playing an antiquated

xylophone record of the _American Patrol_: its patriotic gallop,

half-stifled behind the glass and losing itself in the wide, gray

waiting-room, woke in my heart a happy response as if to Fourth-of-July

bands of my boyhood.

Then the boat was in; the doors were opened; we went down and stepped

over the side. Assailed by the sunlight, we were dazed: in the

brightness, we seemed merely to enter a smell of white boat-paint and

to ascend to a brisk and merry tinkling of some pretty antique tune.

I pulled camp-stools beside a rail on an upper deck.--Sea and shore

were rawest gray and the sky a raw, pale blue--it was not that the blue

was pale, but rather that blue was lacking. The sun streaked the water

to the west with a bright glaze of zinc.--I got some more ginger-ale

and a couple of paper cups from the little soft-drink bar below.

On one side, as we left the dock, we looked out at the Statue of

Liberty, a solid, dull slug of gray against a colorless, burning sky;

and on the other, at the old red fort, round and full of holes like a

mouse-trap, with its rusty and abandoned barracks.

The thin strains of linkéd sweetness, with now and then a note frailly

sour, of the harp and violin--some old musical-comedy tune I remembered

from my college days--seemed to me even in this false and elfin echo

to keep more that was human and charming than the pace of the newer

dance-music had ever allowed it to possess; and as I glanced at Daisy,

gazing out like a charming, good-natured child, at the sights of the

passing shore, I was touched with sentimental revery.

Then the music was blotted out by the vehement snoring of a steamer and

the pert sput-sputtering of a tug.

She seemed unusually carefree to-day, and I saw that her lips were

rouged an unusually pretty mauve. I told her how pretty she looked, and

she replied by complimenting me on the harmony of my clothes: “With

most people,” she said, “their socks, for instance, haven’t anything

to do with the rest of their clothes--but your socks match your suit.”

My socks, which were a grayish blue, had been given me as a Christmas

present and I had worn them only by accident on the same day as a gray

summer suit. “But you have the worst-looking nails I ever saw!” she

went on. “They look just like mechanics’ nails, except that mechanics’

nails are dirty.” I explained that I always cut them with a pair of

library shears, implying that I regarded any other method as effeminate.

I now decided to speak to Daisy of a matter which had been worrying me

since I had met her at the pier. I said, “I think you’ve got some egg

or something on this cheek.” She took out her little mirror: “That’s

just a streak of cold-cream,” she replied. “It always does that when

I leave some on and the powder sticks.” She rubbed it off. In the

stunning sun of that windless, unshaded day, we were dumb for a time.

Governor’s Island, the harbor in summer, the old patriotic tune, the

statue of the soldier in the park, had brought back to me another

vision which for some moments loomed bright in my mind.

Once--it seemed to me long ago--on a morning in early July, I had

come back to Governor’s Island when it had been green with trees and

grass, and when the barracks had been low, white houses: there had been

soldiers in khaki grooming horses or standing at the water’s edge, in

white shirts.

I remembered how, the afternoon before, though we had not yet been in

sight of land, the empty horizons of those waters had held already the

presence of home. The hours had seemed to run more smoothly with the

homing ship--and in that calm summer evening, the sea had scarcely

breathed. The silver sun had dipped, had sent its silver path along the

blue, and had sunk at the end of its path--spreading yellows and reds,

which the night took.

Then at last the yellow star of a lighthouse had been winking in the

black--it did not seem like the play of a machine, but a deliberate

human signal; and then a lightship spangled with stars. A quarantine

tug had presently come out to us from the still invisible shore, and

sent out some men in a boat: they transacted their business quickly,

rowed quickly back to the launch and were pulled up in their boat with

such promptness that it seemed to leap over the side. One had heard

American voices: that was the American way of doing things!

Then a bed of lights on the water: after nearly two years of France,

Coney Island had seemed incredible!

Then land on either side: there had been trees and lawns on the shore,

and large, white American houses, with here and there a lighted window,

set along on a little hill that sloped down to the water--and each of

the houses had its boathouse and its little pier. Now soon one was to

walk in such houses!--to play one’s part again in that life hidden

there behind those lighted windows, in that life grown now so strange

and yet the life of home!

There had come to us a sudden sweet smell through the quiet summer

night: trees and flowers; the summer grass; the luxuriance and rankness

of America. And then, as the ship passed on, a smell even more

unmistakable, a smell even more of home, surrounded and saturated us:

it was the rotten smell of the river, which, when to-day I had smelt it

again in the Greenwich Village streets, had made me think of the salt

bilge-water of the harbor, but which had breathed then the grease, the

sour heat and the smoke of the factories, of the city. Dark chimneys

were disturbing the darkness with their noiseless eruptions of red.

That evening, on Riverside Drive, the benches would be full of couples,

and all would be soaked from the Jersey bank by the glue-factories’

hot, heavy fumes.

Then suddenly I had almost caught my breath--I had been curiously

moved by the sight of a single, solitary street-lamp on the Staten

Island shore. It had merely shed a loose and whitish radiance over

a few feet of the baldish road of some dark, thinly settled suburb.

Above it, there had loomed an abundant and disorderly tree. But there

was America, I had felt with emotion--there under that lonely suburban

street-lamp, there in that raw and livid light!

Then, from somewhere behind those shadowy lawns, one heard the moan of

an American train, and then its faint bell, and the swift, shuffling

sounds of its progress. It was speeding away with eagerness and

sureness to American cities at night--far, perhaps--to the farthest

reaches of a continent without frontiers! There had been a petulance

and a sadness in the piping of the French locomotives--they had spoken

always of the dead hours of dawn and the carloads of wounded men. But

these trains were bringing soldiers home--and far away from Europe--at

night!

In the morning, off South Brooklyn, at anchor, we had seen the smoky

rose of dawn come up over the black roofs of the city, and we had

listened to the river-traffic waking with soft puffs and toots. The

colors had begun to come out on the vermilion smoke-stacks of steamers.

The gray sides of a battle-ship were clear: it was soon trimmed with

live figures in white suits. We had put down a motor-boat, which

sprang away, when it touched the water, as if the water had given

it life: a blue sailor, standing at the tiller, and negligently and

gracefully leaning to balance the tilt of the boat, was guiding it in

bold easy curves.

Now the varied craft of the harbor were coughing and sneezing all

about us, fully waked-up for the day: squat shouldering ferry-boats

and tugs; a tiny motor-boat darting like a waterbug; railroad barges,

floating freight-cars--Delaware and Lackawanna; New York, New Haven and

Hartford--all those dear, square names of home!

Then the shore was moving: to the left, the docks had begun to bristle

with the first thickets of the forest of masts. In a moment, the

sky would be crowded, and one would behold, above the docks and the

shipping, the tremendous towers of the town!

At that moment, on our way to Coney Island, the freshness of that other

summer day, when I had come back to the United States with what seemed

infinite freedom before me, was recreated in my mind so vividly that

I tried to describe it to Daisy. But for Daisy, the things which had

delighted me--the boat leaping into the tug, the sound of the train in

the dark, the sailor guiding the boat, had no special significance or

point, because they were things which she took for granted, and which

seemed perfectly commonplace. I felt that she kept waiting for these

incidents to develop into anecdotes, in which something entertaining

should happen.

When I had finally given it up, she put her hand over the middle of my

face and regarded me attentively. “You’d be very good-looking,” she

said, “if it wasn’t for your nose.” I said, “I know I’ve got a terrible

nose!” “No,” she reassured me. “It’s cute. But it interferes with any

Adonis-like beauty that you might otherwise have had.”

In the harbor, the harbor of the August day which was actually about

us, the lowering of the zinc-bright colorless sun had made of the water

to the west a gleaming sheet of zinc; and to the east, it had begun

to blue. A bell-buoy clanged and bathed. Before us, we could see the

steamers moving out toward the open sea, their smoke trailing back

from seaward. A fresh, easier, breezy sea-smell reached us--it was a

lightening of the load of life.

“Doesn’t that feel nice, though!” said Daisy. “I think I’m going to

enjoy this trip!”

I asked her about Pete and his job. “I’m so glad we’re going to

Boston,” she said. “I’m tired of the country, but I don’t want to live

in New York! I think New York is terrible!”

Sea Gate--and beaches rank with bathers; little brummagen summer

bungalows with green or red roofs.

Then a monumental buff hotel with a blunt obelisk tower rose alone

from a level shore--where, however, we could presently make out the

skeletons of roller-coasters and the squirrel-cages of ferris-wheels.

Now, more quickly than in our bemusement we had expected, the boat

was pulling in toward the boardwalk: we could see a row of improbable

objects--the sails of a bright-red Dutch windmill; the teeth of a

gigantic grinning mask; a rocking full-size Noah’s Ark, with animals

sticking their heads out the windows and with curious half-clownlike

figures, which made the spasmodic movements of automata and which

seemed the true unearthly inhabitants of that city of enormous toys.

When the boat stopped, as we stood on deck, waiting to get off, we

suddenly again felt the heat. “The sun makes me reel!” said Daisy. We

walked, dazed, up a little gang-plank and down a very long white pier.

The hotel, which rose now to our left, against the dazzling zinc of the

sky, was a dull and solid slug, as the Statue of Liberty had been. The

sea was now quite blue.

I was enchanted by the Noah’s Ark: there were an ostrich, a giraffe,

and an elephant, wagging their heads out the portholes; a Noah, who,

at regular intervals, threw back his Uncle Josh beard and took a swig

from a bottle of whiskey; and a fisherman who, at similar intervals,

jerked up an old shoe on his hook. There was also a mysterious monster,

labelled “Hank,” half human and half brute, who in paroxysms shook his

window-bars. An urgent and ominous fog-horn sounded at the same short

intervals. I was all for going inside.

“Let’s go in swimming first,” said Daisy, “while we’ve still got the

sun--then we’ll feel fine--then we’ll have another drink. Then we can

go and do things, huh?” She squeezed my arm: she seemed happy.

We floated, on our way, through warm currents: the balm of hot buttered

pop-corn; the fragrance of burnt molasses; the sweet-acrid odor of

orange-peels.

And then, after the close, musky smell, human and marine, of the

damp-and-dry gray boards of the bath-house, I met Daisy in my hired

bathing-suit, and we walked out under the boardwalk to the beach.

She had brought an old bathing-suit of Pete’s which had enormous brown

and white stripes and which was in places much too tight for her. With

her fair skin among the tanned bathers and her hair tucked behind her

ears, she looked like one of the Mack Sennett bathing girls, in the

old-fashioned movie comedies. “I know it looks awful,” she said, when

I kidded her about this, “but I thought it didn’t matter at Coney

Island--and I couldn’t afford to get a new one.”

There were tiny children playing in the surf, in tiny slips of

bathing-suits of yellow, pale green, and red, like the variously

flavored fruit-drops--orange, raspberry, and lime--in the glass jars

we had passed on a candy counter; or like the bottles of colored

soft-drinks--cherry, orange, and lemon soda--which we had seen at a

soft-drink stand--they were splashing in wild delight or fleeing from

the sea with squeals.

Daisy worked, for a few minutes, squinting, in an ineffective

under-water side-stroke. I, still partly bemused by my drinks, flung

myself with abandon to the waves, and swam around a small stone

breakwater in what--although I unexpectedly ran into the breakwater--I

thought was pretty good order.

“That was a marvellous wallow of yours!” said Daisy. “I thought you

were trying to push the breakwater over! I was just going to yell out

and tell you to stop, it was built there on purpose!”

She had brought out of the surf, about her shoulders, a great strip

of glossy gold-brown seaweed, and she wore it as a boa: it went

beautifully with her hair and with the taffy-colored stripes of Pete’s

bathing-suit, both darkened by the wet. Her slim legs below her full

hips looked almost like the legs of a bird.

We lay on the sand for awhile. “Your hair seems a different color,”

I said. “In fact--I don’t know whether it’s just my imagination or

not--but it always seems a different color every time that I see

you.” “It is, I guess,” she replied. “They put white henna on it when

they bleached it for the _Gambols_--and I always used to put peroxide

and lemon-juice on it every so often, but I haven’t been able to

lately. That’s why it’s pink, I guess.” I asked what color it had

originally been. “Oh, Gee: I don’t know,” she said. “It’s so long

ago!--Mouse-color, I guess!”

I inquired about a system of vivid blue veins on her thigh. “That’s

my charley-horse,” she explained; “I got it in the first _Gambols_.”

I asked her why she didn’t go back on the stage. “I’m too short,” she

replied, “and my feet are too small for me to dance well--and I don’t

like it, anyway: I always get independent and cut too many rehearsals.

That was why I got fired the last time.”

Beside us, a brown young man had his arm about the shoulders of a

young woman in an old-rose bathing-suit, with large carpet-like

flower-patterns, which richly harmonized with the purple tan of her

skin: she presently slipped a hand beneath the top of her companion’s

bathing-suit and affectionately rubbed his back. A handsome blond girl

in blue, who seemed to have two men in attendance, was pawing the sand

with one foot. Another girl, in a turquoise costume, had stretched out

on her back on the sand, with her shoulders between a man’s knees: he

was passionately stroking her arm.

I watched one really beautiful woman, very blond and rather Germanic:

she wore a pair of red bathing-trunks with an orange stripe down the

side, belted and athletically faded, and a plain white bathing-shirt.

She lay voluptuously, one knee elevated and her head on the knees of

a barrel-shaped man, who wore horn-rimmed spectacles. Her skin was

extremely white, only toasted a little about the shoulders; and she had

smiling darkish brown eyes. I watched her as, presently, she got up

and walked over to the water, and--while her companion bobbed in the

surf--with an easy and graceful crawl, lay voluptuously along the swell.

“This is all artificial sand, you know,” said Daisy,--“Oh, yes: they

spent half a million dollars fixing up this beach. There didn’t used to

be any beach at all. That was the same time they put up the hotel. I

wonder if they’re making money.”

Gray steamers were passing quite close along the gray line of the

water--they made me think of summers in Europe, of coming back from

abroad in the fall--at the age when I had been last to Coney Island,

there had always been uncles and aunts sailing to or from France--there

had been an uncle who brought home from Paris silk stockings for my

cousins and aunts--he had had a bluff and ironical way of retorting,

“You don’t say!” which was precisely the way Daisy said things--it was

the American way.--The Americans went to Paris, and then they came

back again with silk stockings and things they had bought, and that

frank American smile, and that straightforward way of speaking.--The

people who interested me most were, almost all, I reflected, now

abroad: Grosbeake was in England for the summer; Hugo, in spite of

his enthusiasm for the American Middle Western cities, was still in

Afghanistan; and Rita was still in Paris--yet I did not at the moment

seem to miss them and did not want to go abroad myself. What fun we

had had together after all--Rita and I--though we had never been easy

and friendly together, as Daisy and I were to-day: there had been one

evening--we had been drinking raw gin--Rita would never have drunk

the gin and ginger-ale to which Daisy was addicted--when we had told

each other things about ourselves which had seemed at the time to

mean a great deal--I couldn’t quite remember what they were--she had

told me something about her girlhood, it was that night she had sung

me the song about _the foggy, foggy dew_--and I had told her how my

father had died of tuberculosis--and what a rotten time I had had at

boarding-school, and how I intended to write a novel about it. Those

nocturnal drunken conversations which seemed to mean so much!--which

did, no doubt, mean so much. All literature, perhaps--and not poetry

alone, but even the systematized facts of Hugo’s documented novels,

even the formulas of Grosbeake’s logic--was in the nature of a drunken

language, expressing, by certain symbols, sensations and emotions

merely--the readjustments, that would be, of our little corner of

nature to the universe of which we were part--which was forever passing

into new phases and where each phase meant a new adjustment for every

part--where, then, a new art or idea was something more than the mere

compensation for an individual weakness or disaster, it was a necessity

of universal development--I would think it all out some time--the sun

was hot on the sand.

“Well,” said Daisy, “now that we’ve earned that other drink, how about

going in?”

Hot dogs were being roasted twenty at a time, on wide polished iron

slabs: they were crisp, with a delicious stink. At an oilcloth-covered

table, Daisy and I ate one apiece, dabbing them gamboge with a little

long-handled wooden spoon from the common mustard pot.

“I’m ravenous!” said Daisy, biting into the pulp of her roll.

Dim and languid from the swim, I was watching the reflections of girls,

in wide hats and bright summer colors, shine briefly in the silver high

myriad-paned mirror, in the sun that bleached whites whiter and blues

and yellows white.

“Do you want another?” I asked, when she had bolted the last morsel.

“Not now; maybe later,” she replied.

We did the shooting-galleries after this, and the ring-throwing and

ball-rolling games. We were both quite good: we knocked over any number

of moving ducks, which was what we had decided to concentrate on;

and we won a baby-doll in a chemise, a miniature roulette-wheel, an

harmonica, an atomizer and a trick pistol which shot off a snake. Daisy

was so delighted with the snake that she kept shooting it down the

ball-rolling table, so that the Jap had to find it and bring it back.

Every time, with oriental patience, he would stuff it into the pistol,

hand it back to Daisy, and caution her politely with a smile, as he

indicated the trigger: “Now don’t put your finger on that!”--whereupon

Daisy would shoot it off again. I was somehow obscurely reminded of

that horrible night at Sue Borglum’s, and I took a dislike to the Jap

and made Daisy move on.

“Let’s send some goofy post-cards,” said Daisy, in front of a post-card

store. We went inside and selected several with fastidious care. I

sent cards to Hugo and Rita; and Daisy sent cards to Gus Dunbar and

Sue Borglum. “I’m going to be dirty,” she said, putting a cross on a

bathing beauty, and writing, “X marks my room.”

I asked her if she would care for a pin-cushion heavily encrusted

with sea-shells and inscribed, “Souvenir of Coney Island,” or if

there were anything else she would like. “I’d like some moccasins,”

she said. “Very well,” I replied. “Will you really buy me some?” she

asked eagerly. “You great big munificent old thing!--I haven’t got any

slippers now, and I used to keep getting my feet full of splinters and

thumb-tacks in the country.”

It turned out that her feet were so small that the man had to get a

special size out of the stockroom at the back. The woman in the shop,

fat and sharp-eyed, became very friendly with Daisy and, while the man

was looking for the moccasins, tried to engage her in conversation. “Do

you mind my asking what kind of lipstick that is?” the woman inquired

with interest. Rather to my surprise, this seemed to embarrass Daisy:

she explained that it was called “carnation,” but when the woman

asked her how much it cost, Daisy said that she had forgotten, and

became markedly unresponsive. “If they can’t find the right size,”

she presently remarked to me pointedly, “we might as well go!” The

moccasins, however, were forthcoming: they were moccasins for a child

and I did not suppose they could fit her; but they did. She looked down

at her little blunt-toed foot with its border, at the throat, of gray

fur: “That’s all right,” she said shortly.

“That woman certainly took a friendly interest,” I remarked, when we

were out on the boardwalk. “Yes,” said Daisy. “I never know what to do

when people like that get chummy.”

I had been surprised at Daisy’s shrinking from the familiarity of the

woman in the shop, and I was now to be surprised again. I had lingered

in front of a side-show, where there were posters of a Hula-Hula

Dancer, a Dog-faced Boy, a Mermaid, an Hermaphrodite and a Magician,

and I suggested going in. But Daisy evidently did not care to. “My

mother would never let me see any freaks,” she said. “They’re all

fakes, aren’t they?” she asked, a little timidly.

As we walked on, she shot the snake off again, and I had to go and get

it out of an umbrella-stand bristling with pennants and canes.

Then I discovered the Eden Musée--I had forgotten that it had moved

to Coney Island and had thought of it as having perished. I had not

visited it since my childhood, when, coming up to New York with my

father, he had used to take me to see it in the days when it had

still been on Twenty-third Street: there I had seen for the first

time moving-pictures, along with the automatic chess-player and the

manipulator of liquid air. And now here was the same old policeman in

his high obsolete helmet; the same refined widow in black, with the

tight waist of the early nineteen-hundreds; the same old hayseed with

his spectacles, his flopping wide-brimmed straw hat and his flaccid

carpet-bag--but now no longer posed inside, where they could no longer

be mistaken for real people, but set out in front as a guarantee of the

authentic antiquity of the show.

I induced Daisy to go in.--There they were, that awful group of my

youth, though it seemed to me their number was diminished: Jenny Lind,

Mary Queen of Scots, Anna Held, Oliver Cromwell, Beethoven, Brigham

Young, General Grant, Napoleon and Booker T. Washington: I was sorry to

see that Marshall P. Wilder no longer had a place among them.

I did not examine them closely, however, for Daisy, who seemed never to

have seen wax-works before, hurried on to the more dramatic tableaux

set back in compartments along the side. She passed before them, gazing

in silence. The groups were not particularly interesting, but they

presently led us to the “Crypt.” We entered a darkened curving passage.

I was delighted: it was the old “Chamber of Horrors,” which in the

Twenty-third Street days had used to be downstairs in the basement.

We gazed at the Opium Den; the Execution of a Burmese Criminal (it

seemed to me now that the elephant who steps on the criminal’s head

had shrunk since I was a boy); the Cannibal Feast; the Whipping Post,

“still in use in the State of Delaware”; and, the electrocution of poor

Lina Lemberg, who had finally, a few weeks before, been executed for

the murder of her husband. The witnesses, in the Death Chamber, were

regarding the proceedings with simpers, and I wondered whether they

had not been borrowed from an old tableau of a lobster-and-champagne

supper, with Mephistopheles in the background, of which the personnel

of revellers seemed to me, like the Burmese elephant, to have dwindled

since the Twenty-third Street days. I suggested this to Daisy. “I

don’t think this is very exciting,” she replied. She seemed to look at

everything so perfunctorily that I was afraid she was being bored: as

she had never seen the Musée in her childhood, I could not expect her

to share my interest in it.

Several tableaux farther on, I found that I had turned a corner and

left Daisy behind--still staring, no doubt, at Lina Lemberg. I was

before a group of the Spanish Inquisition, and I had a sudden happy

inspiration for enlivening the entertainment for Daisy. I climbed

quickly over the railing, put my straw hat on the head of the presiding

inquisitor--he had a lean and sallow face, and the hat came down over

his eyes--and, with my back to the railing, struck an energetic pose

among the torturers with red-hot irons, myself applying to the victim’s

blood-streaked shoulder the cork-screw I had brought for the gin. In

a moment, I heard distinct light steps, which stopped--then, after an

instant’s pause: “Come on out of there, you old cut-up!” I climbed back

over the railing. “I thought you were real at first,” she said, as we

reached the exit. “You gave me quite a turn!”

On our way out, I caught a glimpse of Roosevelt, the Teddy Roosevelt

of San Juan Hill, who, with his handkerchief knotted about his neck,

his Rough-Rider puttees, his felt hat, his mustache, his glaring teeth

and his eye-glasses, made me think of that younger America which I had

assumed we had forever left behind, but which to-day seemed quite close

to me again. It had been a boy’s America--and not merely because it had

been the America of my boyhood. Roosevelt, who had been so charming

with his children, had become the idol of the Americans of that time

for very much the same reasons--he had been everything that a boy

could imagine: Dan Beard, Old and Young King Brady, Frank Merriwell,

and Stanley in Africa, all rolled into one. I asked Daisy whether she

remembered the time when Roosevelt had been a great hero. She said,

“No,”--and showed so little interest that for a time I relapsed into

silence. Then she let me see what she had been thinking about: “I’ve

never seen a dead person,” she said, “except an aunt of mine that died.”

“By the way,” I asked, after a moment, “what became of that thief that

Ray Coleman caught--the one that didn’t steal anything of yours, but

stole the bathrobe of the man next door, or something?” She was silent.

“Don’t you remember?” “Yes, I remember,” she replied. “But I don’t know

what became of him. I was thinking too much about myself at that time

to pay much attention to anything else.”

“Would you mind taking me to dinner?” she said presently. “I’m

absolutely starved!” I asked her where she wanted to go. “I’d like to

go to the old Seaview, if you don’t mind. I don’t know how the food

there is now--but I’d just like to see the place.--I went there with

Phil Meissner,” she added, “when we first came on from Pittsburgh.”

The Seaview was quite remote--beyond a kind of grassy common,

criss-crossed with bald paths. It was an old-fashioned summer hotel,

of the cupolaed and pillared design of the days before concrete and

brick: like all wooden hotels by the shore, it had a flimsy discolored

look, and seemed peculiarly desolate and dry. The dining-room was

entirely empty: only a few of the tables were set. One side was all

high narrow windows, separated by thin wooden frames, which looked out

on the boardwalk and the sea; and on the other, an old closed piano

stood against the wall, and space had been left for a dance-floor; slim

pillars from floor to roof at intervals threaded the room. We waited,

but no one came. I finally hallo’d; and a waiter appeared from the

pantry. He came forward without inspiration, as if he expected to be

asked for cigarettes or to be asked to direct us to Luna Park. When he

learned that we wanted dinner, his eagerness to serve us was extreme.

“Well,” said Daisy, as we sat down, “the table linen’s nice and clean,

anyway.” It was true: very white large napkins had been folded into

angles and stuck into large clear goblets.

“I’m going to have clams,” said Daisy. “They used to have the most

wonderful clam-cocktails here.” I ordered a melon for myself, and

bluefish for both of us afterwards. I also ordered some ginger-ale and

poured out what was left of the gin. “I don’t think I’ll have any,”

said Daisy, “until after I’ve had something to eat.” She looked a

little pale and was silent for some time, and I hoped that the Chamber

of Horrors hadn’t upset her. She smiled broadly, however, at last, and

proclaimed: “Look out, Food: I’m coming!”

I asked her how she and Phil had ever happened to come to the Seaview.

“Phil knew the manager,” she explained. “The manager gave a party in

my honor--just some of his men friends. We had champagne, and I’d

never had anything to drink before--I was awfully young--I was only

seventeen. I thought it was swell, and I got lit. They kept filling up

my glass with champagne. You know how men are when they’ve got a girl

that’s young and kind of cute, and they’re trying to get her tight. I

had on a little black dress like they wore then, that buttoned up the

back, and the bottom buttons got unbuttoned--and then every man that

danced with me would unbutton another button--so that pretty soon it

was unbuttoned all the way up to the waist. I didn’t know anything

about it and just went on smiling and dancing, and thinking I was

cutting quite a figure, with my legs hanging out all the time!”