“I certainly enjoyed those clams!” she said, when all the little
hollows in her plate were empty around the red-splashed glass of sauce.
She smiled: “After all,” she declared, “say what you please--there’s
nothing like a good plate of food!” I asked her if she would like some
more clams. “Yes,” she answered, after a moment’s thought, “I believe
that I would.” I ordered another clam-cocktail.
I asked if it weren’t true, as I had heard from Hugo Bamman, the night
of Ray Coleman’s party, that she and her husband, on their honeymoon,
had ridden on a motor-cycle all the way from Pittsburgh to Atlantic
City: this had seemed to me tremendously romantic. “It wasn’t Atlantic
City,” Daisy explained. “It was here.”
“What was Phil Meissner like?” I inquired. “He had a lot of charm,”
said Daisy, “and a lot of brains, too--but he never did anything with
them except perfectly foolish things. For instance, he’d spend days
inventing something that worked by electricity to make the blinds open
in the morning--he could lie in bed and press a button and make the
water-basin fill, and when it was full, the faucet would turn itself
off, and everything!”
“Were you very much in love with him?” I asked. She shook her head,
as if in scorn. “I didn’t know anything about anything then. He was
the first regular beau I’d ever had: my father wouldn’t let me go with
the boys. I was all excited aboutum at first.--I was so much impressed
withum when I first marriedum that it was just ridiculous! I couldn’t
even go to the drug-store to get a tube of tooth-paste without askingum
what kind to buy. But I wasn’t really in love withum--I didn’t know
what it was all about--and then, by the time I might have been in love,
everything was pretty well wrecked.--My father followed us here and
burst in on us with a detective at four o’clock in the morning. He made
us get up and get married then and there--we hadn’t gotten married
before we left because Phil didn’t want to attract attention. Dad said
I’d either have to marry Phil or go back to Pittsburgh. So we got up
and got married at four o’clock in the morning--it was the night after
the champagne party and we both felt like nobody’s business. Phil was
sore as a crab, because Dad had a Catholic priest marry us, and Phil
wasn’t a Catholic--but Dad threatened to havum arrested for abducting a
minor, and he had the detective right there.
“Things were never quite the same after that. I don’t blame Phil
for being sore: nobody likes to be forced into a thing like
that--especially with a hangover, at four o’clock in the morning!”
I had been thinking: her father from Pittsburgh--why had they named her
Daisy?--I remembered that old song of my boyhood,
_“Daisy! Daisy!
Give me your answer true--
I’m half-crazy!
All for the love of you!
It won’t be a stylish marriage--
I can’t afford a carriage!
But you’ll look sweet, upon the seat
Of a bicycle built for two!”_
--that old song of an earlier time to which Daisy’s name seemed to
relate her--and her large hips, too--I had never been aware how round
they were till I had seen her in her bathing-suit--they were the kind
that had been admired at the time when the song had been new--they went
in for slender hips to-day--but I liked Daisy’s none the less--how
bicycles had gone out, too--but she and Phil, appropriately enough, had
spent their honeymoon on a motor-cycle.
“Are you happy now with Pete?” I asked. She shook her head: “I don’t
know if I’ve really ever been happy--but I’ve sworn to go through with
this with Pete: I’m tired of leaving people.” “Are you and Pete married
now?” She shook her head again and grunted negatively, “uh-uh!”
“I know I’m not happy now,” she went on, “because I keep having these
dreams where some kind of a great piece of good fortune is just about
to befall me--and they’re the goofiest dreams!--When Prince Charming
comes along, he’s always just a great, big, strong, clean-limbed
American who gathers me up in his arms. It’s so silly! I feel ashamed
of myself after I wake up.--And I’m always dressed in the costume that
I wore in the first _Gambols_, when I came out in a white old-fashioned
dress, with curls and pantalettes and everything. I loved it--Gus
Dunbar used to say that I looked so sweet and dewy that he wanted to
smack me down. But you know one night the boys from Notre Dame came
and stole my picture in that costume that was on show in front of the
theatre--and they published it in the college paper. They sent me a
copy of the paper: I was tickled to death. That was the only one they
stole!”
I had been watching, through the tall, open windows, the double, white,
pearly globes of the boardwalk lamps, so pale, so chaste and so bright,
hanging gracefully, like lilies-of-the-valley, from their straight,
slender stalks, against the background of the paler blue, now the
cooler blue, of the sea, where a buoy shone ruby-red.
When we came down the steps of the hotel, all was in deep blue dusk,
with the lamps a double rope of moons. “Have you noticed this?” I
asked, waving my hand toward the lamps.--“I suppose the last time I was
happy,” she said, “was back there in the old Seaview dining-room!”
We were confronted, when we turned back toward the amusements, by a
large and very garish electric sign in the form of a gigantic human
foot, on which a red Mephistopheles was standing: by means of alternate
systems of bulbs, the arm of the Mephistopheles was made to jerk back
and forth, prodding energetically with a spear an illuminated corn on
the big toe, which at each jab changed the color of its light, first
blue, then purple, then green. The legend, which flashed on and off,
proclaimed, in contorted, striking letters: “Take a Walk with Clancy’s
Corn Fix. Knocks the Devil Out of Sore Feet.”
“Oh, do you see that sign?” said Daisy. “That was Larry Mickler’s
idea. He’s making a lot of money out of it: they’ve got them all over
the country.” I was glad to know that Larry Mickler, through a truly
Dostoevskian device, had constrained his sadistic instincts to serve
this beneficent end.
“I hope we get somewhere soon!” said Daisy presently. “I’ve got to
go to about eighteen ladies’-rooms!” We had been walking along the
boardwalk and were only just reaching the shops again. Daisy presently
disappeared in a small and rather sordid-looking restaurant.
There was a penny-in-the-slot place next door, and as I walked back
and forth in front of the restaurant, I stopped and looked in. I saw,
standing before me in the doorway, a tall, young man with a stoop,
who had a darkish tooth-brush mustache, which I considered a little
silly, and rather large brown eyes of the kind usually described as
spaniel-like: he was wearing, like everybody else, a straw hat with a
black band, which, it seemed to me, he had pulled too far down on his
forehead. I had a feeling of mild irritation that he should be standing
and staring so innocently, so well-meaningly, and so lackadaisically,
square in the middle of the doorway, where he made it difficult for
people to pass. He was laden down, I saw, with packages: no doubt some
woman had made him carry them.--Then sharply I pulled myself up from
that vague and absent moment: the man was my own reflection in a mirror
opposite the door. On either side were other mirrors which distorted
people’s shapes.
I continued to gaze at myself: how had I ever failed to
recognize--especially after Daisy had remarked on it--my ridiculous
bulbous nose? My eyes, which I had hoped were intelligent, had only
appeared to me canine--and my mustache was unsuccessful. My pockets
were bulging with the atomizer, the mouth-organ, the baby-doll, and the
pistol with the snake; and I was carrying the roulette-wheel and the
moccasins, which had been wrapped up in pasteboard boxes. I seemed to
myself a figure from the funny-papers: Mr. Suburban American, at the
sea-side, with packages and a straw hat.
I went back to the door of the restaurant: Daisy had not yet emerged.
There was a radio playing outside, and for some reason the programme
included some vaudeville or night-club woman soloist singing _Mamie
Rose_, that popular song of several years ago which Daisy had started
on the phonograph when Rita had been reading her poems and which had
desolated me so on the day when I had seen Rita off at the station and
had been waiting for Daisy in her rooms. Now I listened idly for the
words, parts of which, on that horrible record, I had never been able
to catch. The contralto, whose voice was rich and deep, delivered them
with a masterly casual emphasis, in that nondescript dialect--perhaps
the result of Irish actors learning from Jewish comedians how to sing
Negro songs--which has become the language of American jazz:
_“There she goes,
Mamie Rose
She--loves--me!
Don’t seem to show it!
How do I know it?
It’s ABC!
She’s smart as Satan--
She’s aggravatin’--
But when I want a little lovin’,
She don’t keep me waitin’--
She’s proud and snooty,
But she’s my cutie--
She tells me, Fireman, do your duty!”_
_That_ was the line that I’d never been able to hear!--That song, but
a few years old, seemed already to belong to the past, like _Daisy_
and the _American Patrol_, and the old musical-comedy tune which the
musicians had played on the boat, and I found that I had at last come
to feel for it a certain familiar affection. Furthermore, I now thought
it quite good: there was something rather unexpected, something even
quite original about the manipulation of the tune: what was original
and unexpected was the repetition, in some sort of minor, of the
pattern which had just gone before--recommencing, with _She’s proud and
snooty_, what one had thought was entirely finished--and recommencing
it agreeably and queerly, so that for a moment one always paused to
listen. I wondered how the composer had arrived at it. He was a man
named Harry Hirsch, I remembered: I imagined him: a small, young Jew
with very large, intense, black eyes, like motor headlights; after the
success of the musical comedy in which _Mamie Rose_ had been sung, he
had probably taken to wearing spats. He was no doubt the son of a Rabbi
or of the Cantor in a Synagogue: the base of his music was German, and
I imagined some dark room of a stifling apartment on the East Side,
in which his youth had been fed on Schubert and on the light opera of
Vienna and Berlin, cities which his eyes had never seen. But what had
he done to this music?--what had made him repeat those bars of the
sweet German melody with which he had begun, but transforming them
abruptly, by daring what any hack worker in the field would have told
him _a priori_ was impossible, what would have lasted in commonplace
hands impossibly too long? By carrying us beyond expectation, by
breaking into that new accent, half agonized and half thrilling, he had
enchanted the public so completely that not merely had _Mamie Rose_
turned out to be one of the principal factors in the success of the
musical comedy in which it had first appeared (and where, as a matter
of fact, the director had been afraid to feature it), but it had been
heard on every radio and phonograph; at every college prom, at every
Greenwich Village ball; from the most perfunctory chirpings of the
orchestras of restaurants to the jazz-bands de luxe of roof-gardens;
on the vaudeville circuits of small towns and in the scores of feature
moving-pictures; worked up for the Elks summer fair; struck up, with
the words thrown on a screen, during the intermissions of burlesque
shows; ground out at “dancing academies” where, from New York to Los
Angeles, clumsy and inarticulate young men pushed wary and inarticulate
girls about a crowded, monotonous floor--and as I had heard it once,
late at night, sung strangely from a summer street by a child’s voice,
nasal and shrill, following subtly and with marvellous accuracy the
deviating minor strain, and repeating it again and again!
Where had he got it?--from the sounds of the streets? the taxis
creaking to a stop? the interrogatory squeak of a street-car? some
distant and obscure city-sound in which a plaintive high note, bitten
sharp, follows a lower note, strongly clanged and solidly based? Or
had he got it from Schoenberg or Stravinsky?--or simply from his own
nostalgia, among the dark cells and the raspings of New York, for those
orchestras and open squares which his parents had left behind?--or
for the cadence, half-chanted and despairing, of the tongue which the
father had known, but which the child had forgotten and was never to
know again?
But the relations between Schoenberg, the taxi-brakes, and the
Synagogue, baffled further speculation.--And, in any case, what
charmed and surprised one, in this as in all works of art, was no
mere combination of elements, however picturesque or novel, but some
distinctive individual quality which the artist himself supplied. Of
all the young Jews in New York who had listened to the service in
the Synagogue or who had been kept awake at night by taxis, how many
had written good music, even good popular music? I thought of that
personal color or rhythm which, the night when I had been dressing in
Bank Street to take Daisy out to a night-club, had seemed to me, in
the work of an artist, as little important or interesting as the color
of his hair or eyes, or his way of mispronouncing certain words; but I
could recognize now that it was precious. And as I recalled my gloomy
meditations of the night of Sue Borglum’s party, I remembered how the
Greeks had given Sophocles the name of “the Attic Bee.”
Yes: I saw it: there it was: it was acrid, but still honey; and it was
something more than beauty of verse. The Greeks’ idea of sweetness had
been as different as possible from Stevenson and the “honey-dripping
style.” I saw it now, not merely in the nightingales and the ivy of
that chorus at Colonus for which the jury had applauded Sophocles, when
his competence to dispose of his property had been called in question
by his son; but in the passionate frankness of Antigone, even in the
asperity of Œdipus, even in the guile of Odysseus. I thought now of
the exquisite proportion, of the style with its unique combination of
modulation and pith, of the strong and sensitive hand placing with so
firm and light an emphasis those culminating scenes where the nobler
instincts of humanity reassert or declare themselves: Electra when she
speaks to the urn which she believes contains her brother’s ashes,
Neoptolemus confessing at last that he cannot act against his nature
to deceive even an outcast who has trusted him--as, in the case of
Dostoevsky, I remembered, no longer the contention and the horror,
but the brightness of the high comic sense which interpenetrates all
that is turbid, which flowers constantly in such charming passages
as that in _The Idiot_, for example, where the young girl buys the
hedgehog from the boys and sends it to the Prince for a peace-offering,
and which makes even of _Crime and Punishment_ a comedy rather than
a tragedy. It was not that the Athenian jury had merely demonstrated
their gratitude for--that the crowds at Dostoevsky’s funeral had
merely regretted being deprived of--a sedative to which they had
become addicted; but that both had been ravished by the taste--and
by it had been partly repaid for the harshness of the common life--of
that miraculous secretion of the mind which there was only one man to
supply. And so every sort of good literature, so every sort of good
art, provided an aliment, a stimulant, as natural and necessary as food
and drink themselves! Even the tannic tincture of Poe, which seemed
to turn the throat to leather and to petrify the taste, had its own
peculiar tonic value, and even from the coarse, used mash of Byron it
was possible to extract a strong brandy--even the writer of popular
music--The radio was hawking and halting; I had already been waiting a
long time--much too long, I began to think. And I suddenly remembered
how Daisy had slit her wrist on the night when I had left her at Gus
Dunbar’s apartment.
I was on the point of going in to look for her when she finally
appeared: I was so much relieved to see her that I did not at first
notice how pale she was. She said that she was sorry to have kept me
waiting, and we walked on for a moment in silence: then I asked her
whether she had been ill. “No: I’m all right,” she replied. “You were
such a long time in there,” I said.--“Are you sure that you’re all
right?” “Yes, I’m all right,” she said again. “You were sick in there,”
I challenged her, stopping. “Did you throw up?” “I’m all right!” she
repeated. “It was just the smell of that place, I guess!”
I made her sit down on a bench: she wouldn’t let me get her anything,
and neither of us spoke for a time. A fresh, fishy breeze was blowing
in: I hoped that it would make her feel better. A lighthouse was
winking punctually; the ocean was grayest blue, and the low waves were
pale as porcelain on the sands of palest buff: the late bathers were
coral limbs. Some children, still playing on the beach, were holding
out into the ocean and the night the brass-bristling frost-crystals of
sparklers.
I asked Daisy presently how she felt. “All right: fine!” she
replied.--I tried to find out whether there were anything seriously
wrong with her. “No,” she said. “To tell the truth, we haven’t had
very much to eat out in the country lately: the grocer and the butcher
in the village wouldn’t give us any more credit, and we had to live
on the things that we already had in the house--which were mostly
corn-flakes--corn-flakes without cream or anything--that was about all
we’d had for a week before we came in. I guess I overdid it with those
clams.”
I said I thought that the gin had been rotten and that the ginger-ale
had been inferior. I began to produce the toys from my pockets. She
took a sudden interest in the harmonica and amused herself by working
out tunes on it: her most conspicuous success, from which she seemed
to derive a good deal of satisfaction, was _Nearer My God to Thee_.
After a while, she said: “Well, let’s go on!” I asked her whether she
wanted to go home. “No,” she declared, “not yet: I want to do some more
things!--don’t you?”
We explored Luna Park--all bright minarets and festoons of white
imitation pearls. I offered to take her on the “Thunderbolt”; the
“Shoot-the-Chutes”; the “Dragon’s Gorge”; but she did not seem very
eager. “Why don’t we try that Noah’s Ark thing?” she suggested, as we
were wandering a little aimlessly, “that thing that you wanted to go
into when we first came.”
We went back to the steamboat pier and found the Noah’s Ark still
rocking and sounding its sombre fog-horn; it was lighted up now with
green ship’s lanterns, which revealed the elephant, the ostrich, and
the giraffe, the fisherman pulling up the shoe, the old patriarch
hitting his bottle, and the monster shaking his bars. “Do you think you
can stand it?” I asked. “Oh, yes,” insisted Daisy, smiling. “I want to
go in, don’t you?”
We bought tickets and mounted the gang-plank. Inside, the Ark was
rather a sell, as there was nothing amusing to see--the animals and the
monster turned out to have been constructed so as to be visible merely
from the outside. We found that we had been let in for an assortment
of banal and disconcerting sensations. We had to walk on a shifting
platform--pass along a wobbly corridor--climb a flight of quaking
stairs. Our hats were almost blown off by a violent blast of air and
when we tried to catch hold of the railing, we received an electric
shock. I was afraid that it might make Daisy sick again, and asked her
whether she wanted to go back: “No, I’m all right,” she replied. We
went through with it to the end, in silence and rather solemnly. I felt
protective and tender toward Daisy, and contrite at having brought her
in: I was only just beginning fully to realize that she had probably,
when we first started out, been faint for lack of food; that she had
been drinking on an empty stomach; that she had been sickened by the
Eden Musée and upset by my stupid joke; and that revisiting the Seaview
Hotel, which had brought back her first days with Phil Meissner, had
finally overcome her. I became acutely aware, too late, that if she had
insisted on going in for the Noah’s Ark, it had been entirely because
she thought I wanted to.--The last stunt was a spiral slide which
landed us on a whirling platform: in my efforts to rescue Daisy, I fell
on the roulette-wheel and broke it.
It was now time to go home, we decided--but as it turned out that the
last boat had left, we were obliged to go back by the bus.
On our way to the place where the buses stopped, we passed the poster
of a spiritualist fortuneteller. “Did I tell you my joke?” asked Daisy.
“About ‘Striking a Happy Medium’?” “Yes,” I said. “I think it’s fine!”
As the bus left Coney Island behind, a cluster of bright, pearly globes
among the vivid red pumps of a filling-station repeated the pearls of
Luna Park and the drooping white lamps of the boardwalk.
Along the boulevard to New York, were aligned little sections of shops,
bright-windowed and built in new concrete: drug-stores; grocery-stores;
automobile show-rooms; a bank.
There were girls in summer dresses, hatless, with bobbed heads and
pink or tan stockings, strolling out, alone or in couples. Down
side-streets, I could see little houses with compact and screened
porches giving way to the wastes of building-lots, where a lonely and
random street-lamp would light untidy bushes and trees. That was
the America to which I had returned when, coming back after the War
from France, I had been greeted by that other suburban street-lamp
on the Staten Island shore! That was the America to which to-night I
felt myself returning again--those neat and new little shops, those
girls wandering out in the evening between the drug-store and the
building-lots--hardly knowing what they expected but half hoping for
some new turn to their lives! Had not Daisy been once such a girl,
walking out in the streets of Pittsburgh--had not Rita, in her up-state
town?
I asked Daisy about her father, of whom she had told me at dinner that
he had not let her go out with boys. “He was Irish,” she explained.
“He lost all his money when we were just kids. But he was determined
that the fact that he’d lost his money shouldn’t make any difference
about our being well brought up--I guess it did all right, though.”
She smiled her candid smile. “That’s one reason they used to send me
to my aunt’s in Nova Scotia so much.” I remembered her timidity about
the freaks, her “independence” about rehearsals, and her coldness with
the woman in the store. “That was one trouble about Phil and me,” she
went on. “Phil’s father and my father had known each other very well
when they first came to Pittsburgh. We used to live next door to the
Meissners, before they made money and moved. And in those days, Dad
had a much more important position than Mr. Meissner: he was one of
the principal men in the Billings Company and Mr. Meissner was just a
clerk in a bank. Then when the Meissners made money and Dad was down
and out, they got snooty about us--and Dad didn’t want me to go with
Phil--Phil had the reputation of being the wildest boy in Pittsburgh.
Dad was fit to be tied when I ran away withum!”
I marked another filling-station: a crowd of great white stars, which
seemed uttered by a rocket’s detonation.
Now we were passing a row of small houses with tapestry-brick façades
and, in front of them, little green lawns enclosed by little hedges.
“Dad was really a bright man, though,” Daisy presently went on. “He
was one of the first people in the country to design certain kinds of
trucks.--He invented all kinds of things--he invented a kind of siren.”
A filling-station where the lights were dimmer and the pumps a duller
red was outshone by the lunar beauty of the radiant white pergola which
followed it.
“Did you ever hear them talk about auto-horns--in a store or
anywhere, I mean?” she asked. “It’s a shout. There’s a _toot-toot_,
and a _beep-beep_--and an _oorah_--and a _blah-blah_, and a
_blurp-blurp_.--Dad’s was a kind of a _oorah_--and it was a humdinger,
too!--it had an authoritative sound and it wasn’t ugly like most
sirens.”
In the show-rooms on either side appeared the present-day glories
of the motor industry: the Lancerd was celebrating its “Silver
Anniversary” with a new model in “distinctive” apple-green, posed with
dignity behind its plate-glass pane, in a white-balconied Colonial
salon.
“It was getting indicted for manslaughter,” Daisy went on, “that really
ruined Dad: he and another man ran into each other as Dad was coming
out of a garage. It was really both’s fault--but the man was killed and
they indicted Dad--though he’d been a month in the hospital himself.
They made him pay a big fine and he lost his job--and he never could
get back after that.--He used to come home drunk and sit down on the
edge of my bed and hold directors’ meetings all by himself--I used to
think it was funny, but my mother used to be so worried!”
I had been brooding on the name of Meissner, which seemed to raise for
me vague associations. “Did they ever call Phil Meissner, ‘Junior’?”
I finally asked. “The family always calledum that,” she answered.
“Why?--did you ever knowum?” “Did they live in a great big house with
green and blue stained-glass windows?” “Yes,” said Daisy. “Why? Did you
ever knowum? They lived on Aylesworth Avenue. That was where they moved
to after they lived next door to us.”
Phil and his family were the people, then, whom I had visited as a
child, when I had gone to Pittsburgh with my mother, and who had
come back into my mind, when Hugo, at Ray Coleman’s party, had said
that Daisy came from Pittsburgh! I told Daisy how much I had envied
Phil Meissner’s elaborate toy railroad and his device for making
dinner-plates jump, but how obnoxious, on the whole, I had thought him.
“He was spoiled to death,” said Daisy. “That was what was the trouble
withum, I guess.”
And this discovery that Daisy had married a boy I had myself known
in my childhood had an effect out of all proportion to its apparent
importance or interest. Hitherto, I now fully took account, I had
regarded Daisy as an alien--first, as a denizen of Broadway, and
afterwards, as a product of the Village. But she seemed now to have
taken her place in the world which I had always known. She was no
longer of a different race--of an exotic glamor or guile: she was
simply an American girl, who had grown up in an American town like
other American towns, lived in a house like other houses, gone to a
school like other schools. I seemed to have been given a new vision
of the fluidity of manners in America, the plasticity of social
position--of the swiftness and adventitiousness of the way in which
such things changed. If Daisy’s family had gone down in the world, the
Meissners had obviously come up. But the human material was the same;
and in the face of its constant fluctuations, attempts to fix social
differences became ludicrous and futile. Americans might turn into
anything!
What, for example, might not be made of Daisy? On each of the occasions
when I had met her, I had seen in her something different, as my own
mind had been differently disposed by my personal situation at the
time and by the influences by which I had been affected--by Hugo,
first; then, by Rita; then, by my disgust and disillusion the night
of Sue Borglum’s party; then, by my evening with the Grosbeakes. And
I could see how she herself had taken the color of each of the men
with whom she had lived since she left Pittsburgh: Phil Meissner’s
extravagant tastes; Ray Coleman’s constrained correctitude; and Pete
Bird’s engaging humor. She had even, I noted, begun lately to talk
exactly like Pete. She had been eager to accept whatever they gave, and
how little they had had to give her! Phil with his inherited money,
his egoism, and his silly jokes; Ray with his substantial salary, his
ignoble employment and his meanness; and Pete with his pennilessness
and uselessness, his gentlemanly hobbies and his charm--they seemed now
to me like figures of comedy for familiar American types.--But what
hope was there for Daisy with any of them?
“I declare,” I said finally aloud, “I don’t see why you haven’t been
able to do better than Pete and Ray! Haven’t you ever found anybody
in the Village that really amounted to something and that you liked
at the same time?” She shook her head, not turning from the window.
Then, after a moment, she turned: “You know the only person,” she
said, “that I ever thought I could get a real crush on was your friend
Hugo Bamman. I actually got all hopped up, that night he was sailing
for Egypt, or wherever it was, about the idea of going away withum. I
think he’s good-looking, too--especially since he’s stopped wearing
spectacles. Some people think that scar spoils his face, but I think
it’s smart-looking.--But he’s certainly cagy about women--Myra Busch
was crazy aboutum, you know.--Either that or he’s afraid of them.--He’s
so sure of himself, too--he knows what he wants to do.--None of the
men I’ve ever lived with were sure of themselves.--You know what you
told me out in the country, about my knowing about everything better
than anybody--well, I wanted to say at the time that that isn’t true at
all. That’s just the trouble: I don’t know what it’s all about. I want
somebody to tell me!”
Daisy’s mentioning Hugo reminded me of the world as I had seen it
through his eyes when I had first come down to Greenwich Village: then,
like him, I had thought myself a rebel against the standards of a
bourgeoisie--that is, in a country like America, where there was really
only one class, or rather, as I had just been reflecting, no classes,
properly speaking, at all, against an abstraction of all the worst
qualities attributable to respectable Americans; then later, when I had
been in love with Rita, all the interests and occupations of the common
life had seemed to me on so low a plane and of so lax an impulse, that
I could feel for them nothing but contempt. Now my trip to Europe since
the War had had the effect of making me more content with America, even
at her worst; and my conversation with Grosbeake _à propos_ of Lewis’s
_Babbitt_, though Grosbeake’s opinions had surprised me at the time,
had in the long run had the effect of helping me to approach America
from a different point of view than the point of view which, at the
time when I had thought like Hugo, had allowed me to take account only
of American mediocrity and timidity. To-day I seemed to have re-entered
that world and to find myself perfectly at home there: now I found that
it no longer inspired either hatred, apprehension, or scorn.
“By the way,” I presently asked, “where did you get that line about
‘the downfall of western civilization’?--You know, that night I took
you to the movies, you said that you probably looked like the downfall
of western civilization.” “Oh,” she said, “that was just something I
picked up at the Ritz Bar in Paris!”
The little tapestry-brick houses had been supplanted by
apartment-buildings, also in tapestry-brick, and with attractive green
or brown awnings at the doorways and windows; but now the awnings came
closer together and the crowded house-fronts were laced by zigzagging
fire-escapes: they got dingier, balder, denser. We were in Brooklyn,
and now Brooklyn Bridge repeated the fire-escape zigzags.
Delancey Street, with its car-tracks and hooded subway entrances; the
Bowery, with its El.
We got out at Astor Place. I asked Daisy what she wanted to do. “I
think I’d like a drink,” she said. “It’s so long since I’ve been
absolutely free, without any housework or anything, that I feel like
making the most of it!” “Have you gotten over your sinking-spell?” I
asked. “Sure,” she replied with conviction. “I feel fine!”
The oppression of summer, again, hung over and hushed the city-streets:
the very taxi horns seemed muted. The greenery in Washington Square,
behind the arc-lights, looked heavy and dark; and the benches
overflowed with Italians, dirty and sweaty, swarming to the air, giving
out the sounds of life, but heavy-footed, slowed down and subdued.
My rooms in Bank Street were stuffy and messy: the colored woman who
took care of them had abandoned me without warning and they had not
been cleaned for a week. I threw open all the windows. In the house
across the court, the people were sitting on the fire-escape in their
undershirts. A baby was howling and sobbing.
I had brought in some ice from a drug-store, and this time we had
Scotch instead of gin. It was pretty good Scotch, as it went, and we
had highballs with mineral water. It was pleasant to relax on the
couch, with the cold misted glasses in our hands, alone, with nowhere
to go, with no buses or boats to catch.
“Who did you say you were staying with?” I asked.
“Sue Borglum,” Daisy replied--and added: “I think she’s going nuts.
Have you seen her lately? She’s turned green!--She’s turned absolutely
green!--But I can’t worry about her!--I’ve got all the worrying I can
do with Pete and myself!”
“Did you ever know Peter Kester?” I asked. “No,” said Daisy, “Who is
he?” “He’s a great friend of Rita Cavanagh’s--she always used to be
telling me about him. I met him yesterday for the first time--he’s
just come back from New Mexico.--He’s just a nice old bozo, who paints
rather mediocre landscapes. He’s just like all the American painters
of that generation that you meet at the Washington Irving Club.--He
wears tortoise-shell-rimmed eye-glasses with a big black ribbon--and he
thinks that Picasso is a clown!”
The electric lights were hot, and I got up to turn one out. “Why don’t
you turn them all out,” said Daisy, “and just turn on that lamp in the
alcove? It would be a lot cooler.” I turned on the table-lamp in my
study and put the others out. I was glad that the things in the room
were obscured by the shadow now: I had been feeling that that Leonardo
was not a particularly suitable picture for New York in the summer time.
When I came back, she had stretched out along the couch, with her head
propped up on a pillow against the arm and her highball clasped in her
hand. “I hope you don’t mind my lying down,” she said. I sat down on
the edge of the couch beside her.
The voice of a radio, dimly muttering or hoarsely warbling, came in to
us from across the back yard. I was reminded of my recent meditations
while I had been waiting for Daisy in front of the restaurant, and I
told her now about looking in the mirror and mistaking myself for some
one else.
“You’re not so bad!” said Daisy. “I think your mustache is all right.
In fact, I’ve always liked the way you look.” I replied, “Well, I’ve
often told you how much I like the way _you_ look!”
Encouraged, I began to describe to her my consoling æsthetic
revelations in connection with the popular song.--I had always thought
of her, I told her, also, ever since that first night I had met her,
whenever I had heard _Mamie Rose_.--I talked on, and even got as far as
the Attic Bee.
But all the time that I was talking, she was looking at me, serious and
flushed, as if I had been making love to her. At last I stopped and
said, “You’re such a darling!” and kissed her. We said little after
that....
When, from the profuse delight of that love, hot, moist, mucilaginous
and melting, I found my thoughts springing up again, they seemed
unfolding like fresh new leaves in an atmosphere of gentleness and
peace.
I thought of Daisy under her different aspects, as she had seemed to me
at different times--and I remembered the literary productions which at
one time or another she had inspired--all so different from my present
vision of her, from our present reality: first, the night that I had
met her at Ray Coleman’s, the cool Gallic short story I had imagined,
with its humanitarian irony--then, the night that we had gone to the
movies, the romantic apostrophe of the sonnet--then, the night that
I was to take her to a night-club, when my alienation from Rita had
had the effect of thrusting away from me all the rest of the world as
well--Daisy along with the others--the desperate exposure of literature
itself, on which my mind had run so furiously and interminably--then,
when I had visited Pete and Daisy in the country, the savage moralistic
satire which the letter I had received from Rita and the spectacle
of Grosbeake’s equanimity had prevented me from writing. I had, in
fact, rejected all these projects--as I had outgrown those phases of
myself of which my successive conceptions of Daisy had been merely the
reflections in another.
And now I felt that I should be content if I could only make some
sketches of Daisy, as I remembered her at different times and
places--if I could only hit off, in prose, her attitudes, her
gestures, her expressions, the intonations of her voice--preserve
them so they should not vanish, as Degas had done for his dancers--as
Toulouse-Lautrec had done for the women of cabarets.... I dreamed a
whole series of Daisy....
So I should perhaps save myself at last from that dreadful isolation
of the artist which had appalled me in Hugo and Rita--both forever, it
seemed to me now, occupying impregnable solitudes with the creation
of impossible worlds--so, by the way of literature itself, I should
break through into the real world--as to-night I had seemed at last,
with Daisy, as if by a simple mutual transfusion, to come so naturally
into contact with life.... Such pictures as I imagined of Daisy would
grow directly and freshly from life. And it seemed to me to-night that
literature was as amiable as writing ballads, as necessary as making
tables--and indeed that, when one came right down to it, there was
really no difference in kind between carpentry and literature.
I bent over Daisy--her head on the pillow had that look--the little
soft round chin and the soft bare throat--of women in those moments
when they have dropped off, along with their garments, all the ruses
and resolutions with which they meet the world--when we see them just
awakened or lying thinking at night, with wide eyes and anxious mouth,
and we realize how gentle they are, how much they wonder, and how
tender toward them we must be.... I wondered whether she would leave
Pete for me....
“Let’s run away together!” I suggested.
“Oh, I couldn’t--now,” she replied. “I told Pete that if he got a job,
I’d stay withum.”
It seemed to me now that I wanted above everything to go away somewhere
with Daisy.
“I’ll take you on a motor-cycle!” I proposed.
“No, you won’t!” she promptly replied. “I’ve done my last motor-cycle
elopement!”
“Still you must have had a lot of fun!”
“I didn’t know whether I was ever going to get there alive. We had
about six accidents.... The real reason for the motor-cycle, I found
out afterwards, was that I was afraid I was pregnant and Phil wanted to
bring me around. He thought that a motor-cycle trip would be just the
thing.... There! I’d told you that we weren’t married! Oh, well--never
mind!” She was silent a moment, then went on: “That’s something that
nobody but Phil would think of--taking a girl on a motor-cycle trip to
bring her around!... He wouldn’t even let me ride in a side-car--he
carried me all the way on the handle-bars!”
I made her turn and embraced her anew, kissing her with pleasure and
compassion. When she told me of the rejection and death of her love,
I recognized the fate of my own. And it was so sweet to include in my
arms that warmth, that solidity, that slenderness--and to feel that she
followed me!...
In the peace and silence again, I could hear that poor child still
crying, and I remembered how once, as a child, I myself had lain awake
with the heat, and suffered and complained.--Then, in a moment, I
remembered, also, how those same children of the Village had figured
in the poem which Rita had recited the night of Ray Coleman’s party
and which she told us she had written that day. On that very day when
she had filled my imagination with the splendor of her genius and her
beauty, when she had seemed to me a goddess or a muse--on that day, her
own mind had been haunted by visions of imbecility and deformity--she
had seen only, among those children of the streets, the most wretched
and the most afflicted, and she had seen in them only the crippling of
the spirit and the clouding of the mind by love....
What relief and what a rebirth, our only real birth into this world,
when from the fears and snobberies of youth, from all our preconceived
ideas, from all those foolish abstractions we learn, all those things
that we think we think, we find at last in these beings who have
crowded, offended, disgusted or fought us, that interest and that value
which we have found only in a few or in one--when, youth’s passion and
anguish spent, we see rising about us that reality of those we have
looked on as strangers, and know that it is our reality--that what is
strange to us is strange to them, that what hurts them hurts us, that
what is good for them is good for us--when we no longer dread the fool
nor hate the one who wounds us, but can sleep in our beds in peace and
in peace face the waking world!...
I kept telling Daisy how smooth her skin was, and she was finally moved
to retort: “Are you used to women with scales?”
“I suppose I ought to go,” she said presently. “I don’t want Sue
Borglum to have it on me that I stayed out all night.”
“I’ve been so happy with you to-day,” I said, “and I’m afraid that you
haven’t been happy.”
“Oh, yes, I have,” she replied. “But I’ve been depressed about the
Boston business. I don’t want to go to Boston, damn it!”
She sat up on the edge of the bed. “Now you go into the other room
while I put on my dress!”
When she came back, her dress wasn’t hung very well, and her lipstick,
newly applied, had a look of fresh paint.
“I don’t care about any of those things,” she said, “except the
mouth-organ and the pistol.”
I couldn’t find the mouth-organ: I looked for it all over in vain.
“Confound it!” I exclaimed, “I must have left the mouth-organ in the
taxi!” “Oh,” she said, “I wanted to show Pete how I could play _Nearer
My God to Thee!_ But I guess that the snake will amuse him!”
[The End]