Chapter III (1)

I had made a dinner engagement with Daisy for the next evening but one after the night when I had taken her to the movies; but the sudden death of one of my aunts, who had for many years lived with my mother, prevented my keeping it. I was obliged to go down to the country, and for several weeks I commuted between my mother’s house and my work. Sustained by the vision of Rita renouncing the vanities of passion and vowed in solitude to her play, I applied myself to reading Sophocles, who at college had always bored me, but of whom I had so often heard it said that he saw life steadily and saw it whole that I wondered whether, in my present situation, I mightn’t perhaps be able to benefit by his wisdom. Rather, however, than risk a first evening alone in my Bank Street apartment, where for so long I had seen no one but Rita, I had asked Daisy to have dinner with me the night of my return to town.

When I dropped my suit-case in the darkened sitting-room, with its drawn blinds and its frigid radiator, I felt for a moment, with a shudder, the shock of that current of emotion which I had hoped had been for ever disconnected when Rita had moved out of Twelfth Street, but which I found now that my own possessions, themselves saturated with Rita, had also the power of conducting. At the sight of the couch, the Leonardo (which Rita had admired), the Pernod peach-brandy bottle on the little marble mantelpiece (I had kept it there ever since the night when Rita had spoken of the label)--my heart sank as it had done in Twelfth Street the day when I had heard the boat-whistles. But I resolutely thought of Daisy--and as gaily as I had ever done, it seemed to me, I took my bath, changed my clothes, picked out an appropriate tie. I threw away the peach-brandy bottle, which the last time I had looked at it on the mantel on the occasion of a ghastly scene with Rita, I had had a violent impulse to smash as an outlet for my exacerbated passion: it fell in the waste-basket with a thud which astounded and routed my nerves. I was throwing in, as if to cover and conceal it, all the circulars which had accumulated during my absence when, on the tightened silence of the room, the telephone suddenly blazed.

It was somebody speaking for Daisy; I was to meet her now, not at Gus Dunbar’s, but somewhere else--I couldn’t make out where: the voice--it was a man’s--kept instructing me just to walk right in and to ask for Mr. Somebody’s--he was at once so indistinct and so admirably polite that I concluded he must be drunk. I asked if I could speak to Daisy, and her voice was presently heard through the receiver--she seemed faraway, facetious and vague. I tried to find out whether the place I was to go to were a speakeasy or a private apartment--but she only answered, “Yes,” and laughed, and then insisted that I should walk right in and go right up to Somebody-or-other’s. I begged her to spell out the name--and she began with loud-vibrating emphasis: “M for mother--I for ’ighball--C for seasick--K for--Oh, you know K!--L for laryngitis”--She began to laugh again, evidently at some suggestion from somebody else in the room. I tried to check up on the letters which I had already heard, but she broke in: “Just put them all together and they spell love!”--then, with no relation to my further questions: “Yes, ‘Mick’--just ask for Mick!--All right!--hurry up!--Good-by!” She hung the receiver up: I had, however, got the address.

The taxi carried me far, too far--beyond Lexington Avenue--along East Thirty-fourth Street: the neighborhood seemed to me sordid. I had hoped to find Daisy, clean from her bath and with her lovely candid smile, as on the night when I had taken her to the movies: I had looked forward to watching her in the light of the little pink table-lamp, over the white cloth and yellow wine of a brisk and bright French restaurant.

We drew up at a narrow entrance which the driver located with difficulty between a manufacturer of nasal syphons and a merchant of rebuilt typewriters. It was the meagrest pretense of a doorway: a layer of livid imitation marble, a length of blue-and-white rubber tiles. I looked above the bells in vain for a name which began with Mick; but then, in some of the grimy little frames, there were not even any cards. I rang one of the nameless bells--but it awakened no responsive click, and I rang another.

A man was coming out of the hallway, and I asked him whether he knew of a Mr. Mickle. I looked into dim and evasive eyes: I was appalled to see that he had no chin, that his nose was an almost elephantine proboscis and that his ears stood out from his head like those of an elephant listening; he wore an old shabby overcoat and a curious gray felt hat, which tended to be conical; his hands were non-prehensile, and trembled. He shook his head without a word, in answer to my question--and passed on like an apparition. I thought: He must live alone!--he must have lived alone for so long that he is numb and can no longer feel loneliness, can no longer feel even irritation at strangers who are looking for friends and who hurriedly break in on his solitude. And I resented such an existence, solitary, dismal, and uncouth, resigned to drop out of the world, hoping only to be noticed by no one; and I was repelled by his strange trunklike snout: my own nose, I remembered, was bulbous, and, as I mounted the narrow staircase, it seemed to me more bulbous than ever.

The stairs turned above the typewriter shop, and I was confronted by the cramped and crowded doors of cheap dentists and real-estate offices. I explored the corridor, and found another staircase, and climbed to another and darker hall, where there were no longer, as below, any names painted on the doors. That was evidently where people lived: it was as if the occupants had made their homes in the chinks left by petty business: they seemed as narrowly confined, as discouragingly inaccessible, as the inhabitants of a jail--and they lacked even that common bond, that limited intercommunication; each had stowed himself dumbly away at the bottom of his little slot, in oblivion of the others: each asked only to be let alone at the end of the herded day--behind the locked and anonymous door, presenting a blank to all the rest, as they presented blanks to him.

At random, I rang a bell--and, as if in confutation of my vision of benumbed and sullen recluses, after shuffling precipitate noises within, the door was suddenly flung open and there appeared a lady with bright dyed red hair and a lacy dowdy dressing-gown who, at the barest suggestion of a name which began with M-i-c-k, seemed transported by enthusiasm. Yes: they lived just across the hall--just opposite her own apartment. “Yes: they’re just in now,” she ran on, slopping over with friendly helpfulness and with a simpering ladylike smile. “If you’d come a little later, I don’t think you’d have found them home, because they most always go out to dinner about seven o’clock!” She eagerly crossed the hall in her voluminous negligé and rang the bell herself. I thanked her, but she did not withdraw. She waited, repeating herself and beaming. I thought her a little insane--from loneliness, I supposed.

Some one was hastening from the depths within. Then Pete Bird opened the door and confronted me with a goggling stare. The red-haired woman still lingered in the hall as if she hoped for a little general conversation, but Pete Bird merely asked me in, and shut the door behind us.

We passed through a little dark hallway and emerged into a narrow sitting-room. I saw Daisy in a morris chair with her legs dangling over one arm and her back against the other: she greeted me with an odd unsmiling daze. And, still charmed by the memory of her paleness when she had lain along the bed like a moonbeam the night that I had taken her to the movies, I was horrified to find her now with touzled, muddy hair and a sallow, puffy visage, in which the nose was an ignoble little knob, blobbed in candle wax, and the eyes were two protruding gooseberries, scored about with discolored skin: she was wearing a greenish-blackish plaid. I took her hand: it was a cold little claw.

I remarked that she looked quite different, that having her hair done differently had transformed her: I saw now that the ragged effect had been originally intentional. She said: “Yes, and I suppose you’re going to tell me that it looks terrible, too.” “You look like a French whore!” said Pete. “Well, you know what you look like?” said Daisy. “You look like some kind of a goblin that’s been drowned at the bottom of a well!” And it was true: with his gargoyle gaze, his haggard, greenish cheeks, the deep furrows in his forehead and the ape-like lines to his wide mouth, he had an aspect half immature and half prematurely old, at once disaffected and aghast. There seemed to have occurred, since I had talked to them on the telephone, some abysmal lapse of hilarity. Yet Pete Bird’s double-breasted jacket, his spats, the handkerchief sticking out of his pocket, and the collar of his blue shirt fastened together by a small gold pin, gave to his appearance and to the whole situation an odd indestructible note of urbanity and smartness.

In that atmosphere clouded by drunkenness, I glanced instinctively about for a drink, and saw nothing but empty bottles and a débris of the enormous thick crusts of delicatessen sandwiches, with the oiled paper in which they had been wrapped. “There’s nothing to drink,” declared Daisy with what I thought was a note of asperity. “What is this place, anyway?” I asked. “Listen to-um!” said Daisy, indignantly. “He expects us to tend bar for-um!”

“No,” I explained, “I just meant, who lives here?” “It belongs to Larry Mickler,” she replied, as if she had already, over the telephone, made all this quite clear enough. “Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence Mickler,” said Pete, with the invincible gentlemanly instinct to be informative and agreeable from his grave at the bottom of the well.

I inquired where the host and hostess were. “Well,” said Pete, as if his own extinction, though powerless to impair his politeness, had rendered him uncannily detached toward the catastrophic fates of others, “Mr. Mickler’s in the bathroom, probably unconscious, and Mrs. Mickler’s in the bedroom, sore as a crab.” “I insulted the hostess,” said Daisy. “Well, anyway,” concluded Pete, “that leaves the drawing-room to us!”

The drawing-room, like everything else in that place, cooped one up and made one uncomfortable: I saw, at the other end, a contracted fireplace, like a large square-cornered rat-hole, with, above it, on the shallow mantelpiece, a plaster cast of the Winged Victory; and between two narrow windows, which looked down on the Thirty-fourth Street car-tracks, a bookcase containing, I noted, volumes of D. H. Lawrence, Cabell, Dunsany, and Shaw; George Moore’s _Memoirs of My Dead Life_; Freud’s _Interpretation of Dreams_; Frank Harris’s _Oscar Wilde_; several volumes of Levy’s _Nietzsche_ and a whole shelf’s array of Dostoevsky.

“Come on,” exclaimed Daisy abruptly, swinging out of the morris chair. “Let’s get out of here right away!” I asked her where she wanted to dine, in the hope that we might now be able to effect a separation from Pete. “I don’t want any dinner!” she replied, as if nothing could have seemed more revolting. “I’ve just had some sandwiches.--What I want is a dirty big drink!”

“I’d better say good-by to Larry,” suggested Pete Bird. “I wouldn’t say good-by to-um,” said Daisy, “after the way he acted with us.”

Pete went into the little corridor and knocked on the bathroom door. “We had a fight,” Daisy explained. “We would have left before, if we hadn’t been waiting for you. Larry sent Pete out to the delicatessen’s to get some sandwiches for supper and gave him a ten-dollar bill--and Pete brought back six sandwiches and Larry didn’t think that Pete had given-um back enough change and accused Pete of keeping the money--when they’d actually cost that much!” We could hear the voice of Pete in the bathroom, pleading with the host on a tone of gentlemanly reasonableness. I asked how the _Frolics_ were going. “Oh, I got canned!” she replied, sullenly and shortly. “I stayed away from too many rehearsals.”

Pete returned with Larry Mickler. He was a young man with dingy skin, a round head and a small dark mustache, very smartly and cockily waxed: he bent forward from the waist when he shook hands with me, and I took an almost immediate dislike to him: he was taller than Pete Bird, but not so tall as I.

Pete was urging Larry Mickler to come out with us, and I seconded him insincerely. “Get Alice out,” Pete insisted, “and make her come along, too!” “Oh, she’s tired,” Larry Mickler perfunctorily assured him--“she doesn’t want to come!”

“I’m not out for any looping,” said Daisy, with what I thought--with what I hoped--was an intention of discouraging this idea. “I think I’ll go home and go to bed.” “You’re not going home yet, little woman,” Pete asserted, with a firm, though humorous, accent of masculine domination. “You’re not going home to bed till you’ve had a little insomnia-medicine, a little touch of the magic elixir that causes the lame to see and the tongue-tied to run like rabbits! The old miracle-scattering scamper-juice!--Am I right?” he appealed to me.

“Let’s go to Tony Scallopino’s,” suggested Larry Mickler. “Let’s not!” said Daisy promptly. “You see,” Pete Bird explained, with dignity, irony and ease, “Tony raised a check of mine once and I’ve never felt quite the same about him since.” I proposed Harry Heinz’s. “Well, Harry Heinz and I are not quite the best of friends either,” Pete casually replied. “In my opinion, a restaurant is a place where the patrons are supposed to drink while the man who runs the place stays sober: when the guests have to take care of the proprietor and put him under the pump, I consider that the time has arrived to seek recreation elsewhere!”

“Let’s go to Sue Borglum’s!” said Daisy, with a sudden inspiration. “To-night is Thursday night, and she has a party every Thursday. I saw her the other day and I promised that I’d come.--Oh, I’m so glad I thought of that!” she added, smiling for the first time. “I want to see Sue Borglum!”

“All right: Sue Borglum’s it is!” Pete approved, with rollicking decisiveness. “Come: snap into your coats, ladies and gents! Let’s be off to some place where there’s stimulants!”

I helped Daisy on with her coat, and as I caught a momentary glimpse of her pale watery-yolked poached eyes, it seemed to me--(Rita and I had read some scientific books together: the vision of human futility which she derived from scientific ideas exercised upon her a strong fascination, and threw her back with an exacerbated appetite on the gratification of the moment--and to-night it was these scientific images which rose to my own imagination at the expense of both Sophocles and Rita’s poems themselves)--it seemed to me as if the Daisy whose profile had appeared to me in the theatre, so fragile, pale and chaste, whom almost with the tenderness of tears I had covered with a blanket in Forty-fourth Street--as if that Daisy had been merely the spray of which I had happened to catch a glimpse for a moment on a wave of common human colloids, the unstable fluids of the body, continually gluing and ungluing--or a cloud which had for a moment taken symmetry from those atoms of carbon and the other things, but which to-night had been blown awry. I turned Daisy’s collar down carefully.

Larry Mickler had been getting into his coat, a garish rust-red ulster, and Pete Bird had been helping him on with it. Now Mickler pulled up his collar, which completely covered his ears, and slapped on a rakish felt hat, pulling the brim down over his eyes.

“You know, that damn statue annoys me!”--he indicated the Winged Victory: I saw that he was drunk. “Alice’s had that goddam thing ever since we were married: she acquired it at college. It always reminds me of a chicken running around with its head cut off!”

He produced a revolver from his pocket and, almost before we had seen it, had fired before him point-blank at the little plaster cast: it fell from the mantel, and lay shattered in chalky fragments and flakes.

“Well,” said Mickler, “so much for Nikky! Alice may miss her at first, but I’m sure it’ll be a splendid thing for her to have to get along without her.--I feel almost,” he added, grinning at us, “as if I’d committed a murder, though! ‘Ad Writer Slays Phi Beta Kappa Girl!’--Well, let’s go! The neighbors may be coming in to find out who’s been shot!”

He turned to me, grinning, and explained, as if in friendly humorous confidence: “No disrespect to the Greeks!--I’m a Dionysian myself!--sometimes a Dionysian and sometimes an Apollonian!--it all depends on metabolism!” He began to sing, parodying the popular song:

“Sometimes I’m Dionysian!--sometimes I’m Apollonian!
My disposition depends on metabolism!”

Then, finding me a little unresponsive, he changed his tone and addressed me more earnestly: “I just wanted you to know,” he insisted, “that I don’t mean any disrespect to the Greeks. The Greeks knew what it was all about: they danced with arms and legs--but we lock ourselves up in the bathroom because we’re afraid to face life!”

“Say, listen,” declared Daisy, “if you’re going to go out with us, you’ve got to leave that thing behind! I can face life without it.” “Take it along to protect you!” said Mickler. “Never know who’s going to stick you up nowadays!” “Don’t be a fool,” said Daisy. “I won’t, sweetheart,” he retorted. “Never you worry about that!”

“I’m going to say good-by to Alice!” said Daisy, as if with a sudden resurgence of sympathy. She went out into the little hallway and knocked at the bedroom door, but there was no reply. “Oh, she’s all right!” insisted Larry Mickler. “She probably thinks I’ve shot myself--let her enjoy a few moments’ happiness!” Pete and Mickler put their arms around Daisy, propelled her along the little hallway and pushed her out through the apartment door.

Outside, we found the lady in the dressing-gown, who giggled ingratiatingly: “I thought I heard a shot.” “I was just shooting a cat,” said Larry Mickler. “It was keeping my wife awake!”

I finally, standing in the slush, succeeded in capturing a taxi; it couldn’t draw up to the curb, and Daisy got her feet wet. She seemed worried and morose.

“That old hag’ll lie awake all night,” remarked Larry Mickler, with a chuckle, “thinking that I’ve killed Alice!” “Well,” said Pete, “it will doubtless afford her a great deal of entertainment. I’m sure her life is far too tame!” “Yes,” said Mickler, “how they lick their chops in vicarious enjoyment over other people’s murders! How all the world loves a murderer!” “It would take more than that,” said Daisy, “to make me love you!”

“I hear,” said Larry Mickler, changing the subject and evidently attempting to talk more soberly--“I hear that Bobby McIlvaine has given Sue Borglum the air.--Is that true?” he inquired of Daisy. “Guess so,” said Daisy. “I don’t know.” “I guess he decided that she’d done all she could for him,” Larry Mickler continued, “and that it was time to move farther up-town!” (Sue Borglum, who knew every one, more or less, had taken Bobby McIlvaine up soon after the night that I had met them at Ray Coleman’s, and had smoothed his way among the managers and dramatists.) I remarked that I considered Bobby McIlvaine a very gifted fellow, none the less, and that I admired his designs for Homer. “Yes,” said Mickler, “but why not make designs for Wells’s _Outline of History_? Why not try to produce the _World Almanac_?--Bobby McIlvaine’s all right on paper, but did you ever see a show that he’d staged that was worth its space in the storehouse? Look at _April Showers_, for instance: Fritz Fishbein, Al Leiper’s publicity man, blames Bobby for the show being a flop. It seems that Bobby insisted on putting in a trick ballet, where the chorus had to wear papier-mâché bodies. Al Leiper wanted to throw it out at dress rehearsal, because the papier-mâché bodies took up too much room behind--they could hardly change the scenery. But Bobby hit on the brilliant idea of sending them downstairs in an elevator--it seems they use elevators in Berlin. The first night, the elevator got stuck just before the second act and they couldn’t ring the curtain up--they had to hold it twenty minutes. Finally, Al Leiper sent some stage-hands down with great big mallets and--zongo! zongo! zongo!--they just smashed in the elevator doors and threw all the papier-mâché bodies out in the alley--and then, when that was full, they threw them into Beattie’s drug-store. There were all those pop-eyed dummies which Bobby had been working on for God knows how long lying around Beattie’s--though I don’t suppose you could have told them from the customers!--What a civilization, eh?” he turned to me again. “Bring slavery back, I say--it never should have been abolished! Bring slavery back and make nine-tenths of the people slaves! Then the superior man would be free to live life like it ought to be lived! As it is, the civilized man has got to black the peasant’s boots!”

We had come to the end of Fifth Avenue, and Daisy, sliding back the glass panel that opened in the front of the cab, directed the driver to turn to the right.

Among those tangled irregular streets to the west of Washington Square, I caught occasionally, from the taxi, a glimpse, almost eighteenth-century, of a lampless black-windowed street-end where the street-urchins, shrieking in the silence, were stacking up bonfires in the snow--those lost corners of the old provincial city, where the traffic of the upper metropolis no longer gnashed iron teeth, no longer oppressed the pavements with its grindings and its groans--where those soft moans and hoots of the shipping washed the island from the western shore. There they had come, those heroes of my youth, the artists and the prophets of the Village, from the American factories and farms, from the farthest towns and prairies--there they had found it possible to leave behind them the constraints and self-consciousness of their homes, the shame of not making money--there they had lived with their own imaginations and followed their own thought. I did not know that, with the coming of a second race, of which Ray Coleman, without my divining it, had already appeared as one of the forerunners--a mere miscellaneous hiving of New Yorkers like those in any other part of town, with no leisure and no beliefs--I did not know that I was soon to see the whole quarter fall a victim to the landlords and the real-estate speculators, who would raise the rents and wreck the old houses--till the sooty peeling fronts of the south side of Washington Square, to whose mysterious studios, when I had first come to live in the Village, I had so much longed some day to be admitted, should be replaced by fresh arty pinks--till the very guardian façades of the north side should be gutted of their ancient grandeurs and crammed tight with economized cells--till the very configuration of the streets should be wiped out, during a few summer months when I had been out of New York on vacation, by the obliteration of whole blocks, whole familiar neighborhoods--and till finally the beauty of the Square, the pattern of the park and the arch, the proportions of everything, should be spoiled by the first peaks of a mountain-range of modern apartment-houses (with electric refrigerators, uniformed elevator boys and, on the street-level, those smartly furnished restaurants in which Hugo was soon to be horrified at finding copies of _Town and Country_), dominating and crushing the Village, so that at last it seemed merely to survive as a base for those gigantic featureless mounds, swollen, clumsy, blunt, bleaching dismally with sandy yellow walls that sunlight which once, in the autumn, on the old fronts of the northern side, still the masters of their open plaza--when the shadows of the leafless trees seemed to drift across them like clouds--had warmed their roses to red.

Sue Borglum, at any rate, at the time of which I am writing, had rented the whole of a large old house (of which she sub-let the top floor and the basement) in one of the oldest obscurest streets, where the children, deserting their bonfire, came clamoring to open our door, and where the lights and sounds of the party seemed incongruously bright and loud amid the darkness and silence about. There were dark double ogival outer doors and, inside them, another pair of doors, with a design in frosted glass of sphinx-heads and vine-leaf scrolleries.

We pulled a bell, and a Jap let us in. Sue Borglum rushed up boisterously to greet us: she seemed high-keyed and overwrought, and embraced Daisy with cries of “_Darling!_” In her blatant green evening gown, with a rhinestone aigrette in her hair and on her fingers a large scarab and some diamonds, she seemed to me uglier than ever: her cheeks were beginning to hang in jowls, her wide mouth was a grotesque gash of lipstick, and the pouches under her eyes were as distinctly shaded off from her cheeks as if they had been drawn by a caricaturist. Behind her, rose the hubbub of the party: the hallway and the rooms were full of people.

We had started up-stairs to put our things away when Sue Borglum, gesticulating frantically toward a water-cooler in the hall near the staircase, shouted after us: “Cocktails!--Cocktails!--That water-cooler’s full of cocktails.--Yes! Isn’t it a grand idea?”

Pete and Daisy came down first, and Sue had already swept them off by the time Larry Mickler and I had arrived at the foot of the stairs: we stopped at the water-cooler and drew drinks. Larry Mickler swallowed his at a gulp. “That little bastard, Pete Bird!” he complained. “I gave him ten dollars at my house to get some sandwiches for supper and what do you think he did? He went out and got liverwurst--the cheapest kind there is!--and then had the Christ-Almighty nerve to bring me back four dollars change--six dollars for six sandwiches!” I asked whether he thought that Daisy was pretty fond of Pete. “She hasn’t got the capacity for love,” he replied, shaking his head with a sneer and turning the spigot for another cocktail. “But they’re two of a kind--out for what they can do you for! She’s a cold little proposition that calculates every kiss--and he owes money, or he’s passed bad checks, in every joint below Fourteenth Street. It’s wonderful how he’s able to get away with it even where they’re cagy! He’s got this soft-spoken wide-eyed way with him.--Well, _he_ can have her!”

We moved on to the door of the front room. Sue Borglum’s front room was spacious and not without a certain grandeur: I could see, above a marble fireplace, the wide sheet of a gilt-framed mirror, which doubled the high white mouldings and the sombre maroon wall-paper.--Such a house as I had once imagined for Rita and myself to live in! Ah, I should have asked nothing better of life than to have fitted up such a house, to have passed my days alone with Rita in those high quiet rooms, hidden away among those crooked streets, with poetry and love!--But these fancies now seemed to me naïve, and I was ashamed of ever having had them. I stoically dismissed them from my mind, and could still, I found, feel hope and excitement amid the variety and gaiety of the Village, so densely intermingling, so vivaciously chattering about me: the Italian and Russian painters; the intelligent amateur actors; the mad baroness who kept a restaurant; the radical journalists and agitators, who, despite the homely forthright style of their writings, not infrequently turned out, when one met them, to be engagingly shy, and sometimes to possess personal charm to a degree almost cloying; the pretty Jewesses with thick red lips and glossy black bobbed hair; the austere and handsome woman managers of theatres and magazines, with their dignity of Mother Superiors; and the megalomaniac lunatics whom it was the thing rather to like.

Larry Mickler and I, in the doorway, did not at first encounter any one we knew. “Well,” said Mickler, lifting his cocktail, “here’s to the Seven Deadly Sins! May they never perish from the earth!--Let’s drink to the memory of Dostoevsky--the only goddam genius,” he added, “who ever understood the human soul!” I drank with him to Dostoevsky. “The Seven Deadly Sins!” said Larry Mickler scornfully. “What chance have they got to-day when everybody wears these horn-rimmed glasses!”

I wondered whether it mightn’t be true that a novelist like Dostoevsky was greater than any lyric poet, even so great a one as Rita--but suppose the play on which Rita was working should turn out to reveal wider gifts?--And, stimulated by my cocktail, I asked myself whether, in spite of everything, I shouldn’t go to see her again, when she eventually came back from her aunt’s: I had behaved so horribly when we had parted, and we had exchanged no letters since she left.

A man who had been leaning over the back of a couch that faced the marble fireplace moved away and let me see the head and neck of a woman who was sitting on the couch and whose bobbed and coppery hair reminded me of Rita’s.--What a comfort that it could not be she! Then the woman, turning her head with a staccato birdlike movement, in some gay interchange with the man sitting next to her, revealed her profile and I saw that it was Rita. I could see also that the man was Ray Coleman.

My companion recognized him at the same time: “There’s Ray Coleman over there!” he exclaimed. “He’s just got a new job on the _Sketch!_” Larry Mickler made his way across the room. I followed him, and spoke to Rita over the back of the couch, taking care to betray no surprise.

“How long have you been back?” I inquired. “Since last Friday--last Friday night,” she replied, as if by frankness and accuracy to fend off my disapproval.

I asked about her aunt: “She’s much better,” she assured me, smoothing out the creases of her smile and making her eyes, which looked to me now like little hard green pebbles of glass, serious and blank. “The doctor said that she was simply tired out, that all she needed was to rest. My mother is still up there with her.--Do come around and sit down!” I sat down, not beside her on the couch, but on a stool at one side of the fireplace.

“You know, I was thinking about you,” she said, “just before I left!” “What made you do that?” I asked. “I went wading in Stony River one day--in the cold, and everything!--and I thought about you then--because you liked the poem, you know!--You know, it was freezing cold: I almost froze my feet off--but somehow I wanted to do it!”

I asked how she’d got on with her play. She dropped her eyes, which had girlishly puckered over her wading in Stony River: “Well, I haven’t actually _written_ very much, but I’ve thought about it a lot. I know just what I _want_ to write--I’ve got it all blocked out, you know!” And sustained by this triumphant phrase, she lifted earnest eyes to mine.

I said that she looked awfully well--and it was true: she had already been flushed by the excitement of conversation, and when I spoke to her, she had flushed more deeply, so that she burned like a little furnace, as she had done that first night in Bank Street when she and I had talked about poetry. She had brought back from the country a complexion refreshed from the tarnish of the city, and the contours of her face had filled out again: again she could challenge the world from the tower of her lovely throat, which gave to her little figure a dignity almost extra-human, like the dignity of a great work of art. “And I _feel_ so well,” she replied. “I went tramping and sleighing and skating!--I did all the things that I hadn’t done since I was a little girl! And I tell you, I went _wading!_--you don’t seem impressed by that, but I assure you it was no tame experience: the water was so cold that it burned! The snow is still on the ground up there, two feet deep--the river-banks were all crusted with ice--in some places there were little fragile translucent ledges of ice that came out over the water--just like blades of swords made of ice!--You know, I’m going to have a sword that’s made of ice in my play--don’t you think that’s a wonderful idea?” “I should think it would break easily,” I replied. “Not if it was sharp enough!” “Perhaps not.” “Mine will be!” she held her own, grinning briefly. “Well, anyway, I went wading--and it was so _thrilling!_ You haven’t any idea how beautiful a river is in winter till you get right out in the middle of it and see the water still alive like quicksilver in the midst of the dead frozen landscape--running away between the wicked jagged edges! It’s as if the tighter other things froze, the faster the river ran--like a live vein in a paralyzed body!”

Her feeling for Stony River, which had once so completely enchanted me, now irritated me profoundly. I could see plainly in imagination some tall young country boy, panting with desire and only too happy to accompany her on her uncomfortable escapade: he would have carried her, of course, over the bad spots--would, in fact, probably have carried her most of the time--he had ended no doubt by chafing her feet.

“It must have been wonderful,” I replied, and turned away to listen to Ray Coleman. Lina Lemberg, the young Polish girl who had been convicted of murdering her husband, had just been sentenced to death; and Ray was describing with enthusiasm how he had pursued the car which was taking her to Sing Sing, and had succeeded in having her photographed from the taxi. (He had just left the _Telegram-Despatch_ for the city desk of the _Daily Sketch_, the most important of the new tabloids.) “I see,” said Larry Mickler, showing small white even teeth, “that she says she wishes Nicky were back with her.” “She’s going to get half her wish,” said Ray--“She’s going to get it fifty-fifty: she’s not going to get Nicky back, but she’s going to go to join him!” Larry Mickler laughed with loud appreciation. “Well,” he remarked, “the murderer has his fun, and he ought to be willing to pay for it! True, he has to pay dearer than most people--but then he has more fun!”

Ray presented Larry Mickler to Rita: he did so with obvious pride--with, it seemed to my jealous eye, something akin to an air of proprietorship. Rita invited Larry Mickler to sit down, and he took the stool on the other side of the fireplace. Ray Coleman inquired affably how Mickler’s own work was going. “It’s just the same old hick-diddling game!” he replied, leaning forward, his hands clasped between his knees. “We still manage to land the suckers!” I thought that he was ashamed of the advertising business, and was being contemptuous about it for Rita’s benefit. “Our latest masterpiece was putting over Marona--‘Makes the Mouth Safe for Teeth!’ was a product of our fly-paper factory.” “You don’t say!” Ray Coleman exclaimed, raising his almost continuous eyebrows, as if this feat commanded respect. “Is that so?” “You know what it’s made of, don’t you?” “No,” admitted Ray Coleman, “what?” “Horse-chestnuts! Nothing but horse-chestnuts! Just nothing in the world but plain old buckeyes! Can you beat it? A million and a-half people every morning, sitting down to a breakfast of buckeyes, with sugar and cream!” “Don’t you do anything to them?” asked Ray. “Not a blessed thing!--just chop ’em up. We’ve struck such terror into the hearts of the boobs by telling them that ordinary food was soft and ruined their teeth, and that in a few more generations the human race would be toothless, that now there are a million and a half people breaking their jaws every morning over horse-chestnuts! ‘Makes the Mouth Safe for Teeth!’--they find it irresistible!”

“Say,” said Coleman, humorously, “isn’t it about time that the Osage orange got a break?” “You might sell them for their perfume,” said Rita. “They have a marvellous smell, you know!” “By Jove, that’s a good idea!” said Coleman. “You might have all the women carrying them around!” I doubted whether on ordinary occasions he would have considered this a particularly good idea--it seemed to me all too plain that he had fallen under the spell of Rita and that he thought only of playing up to her. I remembered the night when I had first met them and when Rita had agreed with me that Ray was poisonous. “They’d be a little heavy, I’m afraid, to carry around,” said Rita. “And they wouldn’t be becoming to many people. I might wear one, though--a very little one--on account of the color of my eyes!”

She was gay, and seemed to me so pleased with herself, so sufficient to herself, so remote from me; and I reflected that, while she had been speaking, I had been aware, for the first time since the earliest days of our acquaintance, of her acquired English accent. Not that she always spoke in this way: she had the accent in which she recited her poems and the accent of the Village gamine--nor did she hesitate to bite down on a hard up-country r, when some special situation--a sundae at the soda-fountain or a hammock on a porch--had suggested to her versatile spirit the rôle of a girl in a small town; but, coming in contact with English actresses during the days when she had been on the stage, her natural disposition toward brittleness and briskness had found their accent a congenial modification, and it was this accent which usually predominated on occasions when she was meeting strangers. Yet how many times since that first night I must have heard her drop into this manner, without ever having been aware of it! And I was sharply forced to take account of the distance between the present and the days when I had first known Rita. Then, I had been in love--and that was what it meant to be in love: so to surround, so to devour, another human being with tenderness, passion, admiration, that their very absurdities and perversities had been fused with the rest in the furnace till there was nothing but a white molten glow--till one resented, not merely the hostility, but even the critical detachment of others, because the point of view of a critic was unimaginable from one’s own. But that critical detachment, to-day it was I who exercised it--and at the thought that I could now meet Rita with a mind which had become so cold that I could note her little affectations, I was filled, not with the relief I hoped for and in which I tried to believe, but with horror and fear. She had gone, the creature who had summoned my love--or whom my love itself had created, I hardly now knew which--the being, who had commanded the allegiance of mind, imagination and desire--and could I never now rejoin her again? Was it true that my love had been destroyed? Could I never retrace my way? Could I never get back across that chasm?

“I declare,” Larry Mickler was saying, “I don’t know where a civilized man can find more hilarious entertainment than in the advertising game. You’d never believe what the boobs will consume till you actually commence to feed ’em! You can make ’em do anything, buy anything! All you need is a gaudy picture and an idiotic phrase and you can make them do themselves an actual injury! Now, of course, in the case of Marona, for example, horse-chestnuts are indigestible--they make the mouth safe for teeth but they ruin the digestion. But that doesn’t discourage the suckers for a minute. If they get sick, it would never occur to them to blame it on the Marona, because Marona, according to the ads, has been endorsed by eminent dentists. Nothing was said about stomach specialists.--But then I suppose it’s a desirable thing to provide the peritonitis surgeons with work--they’re usually civilized fellows, the surgeons, and, if they prosper at the expense of the peasantry, that’s quite as it ought to be.--You must have a lot of fun yourself”--he addressed himself to Ray Coleman--“in the newspaper game.”

“Yes,” said Ray. “It’s amazing really. You can’t lay it on too thick--the more maudlin and preposterous it is, the better they seem to like it. Have you been reading Lina Lemberg’s confessions in the _Sketch_? They’re written by Ted Mahony in the office--you know Ted, a big husky Irishman who’s always half-stewed. You know that installment where she tells about the birth of little Annie--well, when he read that aloud in the office just after he’d written it, the other day, he almost broke up the shop!”

I asked Rita where she was living. “Well, I’m not living anywhere exactly,” she answered. “I’ve just been visiting around.” She lifted her eyes quickly. “I’ll let you know when I’m settled.” “You must let me see your play, when it’s finished,” I said.

“Don’t you think it’s going to be fine?” Ray Coleman demanded eagerly. “Have you heard about the idea?” I assured him that I had. He turned to Larry Mickler: “She’s got the swellest idea. It’s about this old woman who lives in a tower----”

Larry Mickler leaned forward to listen, with a polite appreciative leer; and Ray Coleman described Rita’s play with an enthusiasm even more emphatic than he had brought to his previous account of the photographing of Lina Lemberg. And it seemed to me that Rita herself was gratified by this enthusiasm.

It had already occurred to me that Coleman must be in love with Rita: everybody, more or less, was. But now, with horror, I remembered that, since Daisy had left him, he must be living alone in his apartment, and that Rita, when I had asked her where she was staying, had seemed evasive about her address. I watched Ray Coleman telling the plot of Rita’s play, and Rita herself, following intently and occasionally prompting or checking up--lifting her eyes briefly to smile or to put in a quick supplementary word when Larry Mickler expressed appreciation, and punctuating the pauses with puffs at her cigarette.

I felt an urgent need to get away, and, looking up, I saw Hugo Bamman, standing alone like a heron, just back of Rita’s couch, his head thrust forward, his shoulders hunched up, his long arms hugged to his sides and his hands in his trousers pockets, staring out, as I supposed, half-blindly at the people moving about him.

I got up and went around to speak to him: I was glad of a pretext for leaving in the middle of Ray Coleman’s recital.

When Hugo turned at my greeting, I was astounded to find his appearance completely transformed. Instead of regarding me at first for a moment with dubious unrecognizing goggles, he fixed upon me a naked gaze of deep-sunken but piercing black eyes. I asked him what had become of his spectacles, and he explained to me that he had been going to a new oculist, who had discovered a revolutionary method of treating myopic vision: this oculist made his patients go without glasses and had them exercise the muscles of their eyes. Hugo’s father, to his dying hour, when he had lain sick in his Adirondack camp, had refused to summon a doctor; and Hugo himself was suspicious of doctors, as of all the respectable professions. But in this case, the doctor was himself a heretic and an outlaw: the fact that his methods had been denounced by all the other oculists was enough to convince Hugo of their value. The immediate effects of the treatment were in appearance certainly remarkable: Hugo had unsheathed from behind his mild round blinders a darkly burning and eagle-like glance, beneath a steep and sharp-jutting brow which reminded me for the first time of his father’s.

And despite my present scornful point of view toward Hugo’s political opinions, despite the fact that it was so many months since I had made any effort to look him up, I had never been so glad to see him. For one thing, without his glasses, he seemed to have become a more interesting person and a person with whom it was easier to communicate: but for another, I found it somehow a relief to be talking again with some one whom I had known before I had come to Greenwich Village. As there was no place to sit down where we were, and as the back room, where we found a large table with a punch-bowl and sandwiches, was crowded even more densely, we made our way on through into the kitchen--which, by one of those freaks of old houses renovated and rented out for apartments, had been installed in a former hallway and was thus located between the dining-room and a bathroom (Sue Borglum had sub-let the basement, where the original kitchen had been), so that, in the absence of any other hallway, it had become a thoroughfare for people passing back and forth between the two.

In the kitchen, I was surprised to find Pete Bird, who so short a time before had been displaying so invincible an _élan_, sitting alone, with his elbow on the sink and his hand propping up his head, his visage chopfallen and greenish almost with the mask of death, and his eyelids sealed.

Our entrance did not disturb him, and we perched on the drawers of a china-cupboard on the other side of the long narrow room. I spoke to Hugo of a school-friend of ours who had just produced a successful play; and though Hugo’s friendly interest was largely superficial--since he disapproved on principle both of everything connected with his school-days and of everything connected with Broadway success--I found an unexpected pleasure in returning thus for a moment to that world of our early years upon which we had both turned our backs, a world where, for all its limitations, the ordinary contacts of life had been easier and more agreeable than one usually found them in New York: that world had been conventional, but a common understanding had at least meant a mutual confidence. In the Village, I had felt less and less confidence in the people with whom I came into contact and, what was worse, since my difficulties with Rita, less confidence in myself. And I found now that--despite Hugo’s stern rejection of everything he had been taught in his youth--I was aware to-night principally of his good manners, his integrity and his cultivated intelligence. He had been the first of the boys I had known at school who had really interested me, and he had remained almost the only one.

I remembered now how, on one occasion in our school-days, Hugo’s father had come to see him and had sat down on the bed and talked. I had heard something about Mr. Bamman and, although Hugo rarely spoke of him, I had always been conscious of him, in the background of Hugo’s life, as an important and formidable person. But Mr. Bamman, though his dignity was regal and his Olympian brow and beard almost those of the schoolroom Zeus, had turned out unexpectedly agreeable. He had asked me questions about my studies and my reading quite as if I had been a grown-up person, and had listened to my opinions with a deference to which I was entirely unaccustomed. When he had learned that, in our English course, we had been studying _Julius Cæsar_, he had embarked upon a discussion of Shakespeare very different from any I had heard in my English classes: what especially impressed me was the respectful but urbane familiarity with which he dealt with that great name--as if Shakespeare were a man like himself, as if he were, in some sense, Shakespeare’s equal. He spoke of Shakespeare’s amazing comprehension of political life, of the eternal universal types of his historical plays; to my surprise, he compared Coriolanus to Benedict Arnold; then in a manner both ironic and serious went on to speak of the Senate and the White House, as he had known them in his time. I had never heard any one talk so before: it was as if the world of Benedict Arnold had for him the same sort of reality as the world of McKinley and Cleveland; and what was more surprising still, as if Shakespeare belonged to the same world as the United States; as if he, Hugo Bamman’s father, belonged to the world of history and of literature, and as if he took it for granted that we, since he talked to us as to equals, might hope to belong to it, too; as if, in fact, that world were our world! For the first time, I had had the sense of that reality--soon, at that age, to coagulate from what we see, what we read of or are told, and what we experience within ourselves--which finally supplies so astonishing a connection between the private emotions and thoughts, and the names and legends, of youth.

I reminded Hugo now of this incident, and was going on to tell him of my great admiration for his father, when he broke in: “Yes, Shakespeare and Milton: he used to read them to us every night till I got so I hated them like poison! I never really got to like Shakespeare till I read him during the War--and I can’t stand Milton to this day! I dare say it’s not Milton’s fault: it’s probably simply due to the fact that Father and I antagonized each other so.”

This frankness on Hugo’s part surprised me: I had always found him rather reticent both about his family and himself. Whenever he had happened to mention his father since the days when we had been at school together, it had been always with affection and respect, and even sometimes as if with a sense of failure at having fallen short of his father’s standard. Now it was as if Hugo’s liberated gaze had been accompanied by some new freedom of expression. But I was sorry, and a little shocked, to hear that his relations with his father had been difficult, and I asked him what had been the matter.

“I don’t know exactly,” he replied, “but we never got along. He was pretty impossible at home, and I suppose I sided with Mother against him. He was nervous and hypochondriacal, and used to shut himself up for days in his room, and refuse to see anybody. Then, he would suddenly appear in his dressing-gown, and freeze us with wild prophetic looks, and announce that the household was ‘hurtling to ruin!’ because he’d just gotten a caterer’s bill or something. He finally had the whole household so that it was just like some kind of sanitarium--the doors were all muffled with felt, and he couldn’t stand to have a light burning or to hear a sound after he’d gone to bed himself. He was never rude or domineering about it, but he used to nag us to go to bed in an insincerely amiable way that used to make me furious. Of course, he could be charming and sympathetic when any emergency or crisis arose, and he was able to embarrass us and disarm us so by having recourse to sympathy and charm, just when we’d been resenting him at our bitterest, that when it actually came to a show-down, we were never able to stand up to him. In any case, he had the effect on me of making me adopt the opposite opinion to whatever his opinion was. We used to have furious arguments about Socrates and Christ: I used to back Socrates.--I must have been an unbearable little kid myself. I never really liked him or appreciated him until after he was dead. The trouble was, I suppose, that he’d identified the household with everything that was stodgy and deadly that he’d been coming to loathe more and more as the years went on.