EPILOGUE
I
Lake water had done strange things to Jenny’s little green dress. It was rough-dried and draggled, and it had kind of sagged here and drawn up there. The skirt in the back, for instance; because now between the gracious miniature ballooning of its hem and the tops of her dingy stockings, you saw pink flesh.
But she was ineffably unaware of this as she stood on Canal street waiting for her car to come along, watching Pete’s damaged hat slanting away amid the traffic, clutching the dime he had given her for carfare in her little soiled hand. Soon her car came along and she got in it and gave the conductor her dime and received change and put seven cents in the machine while men, unshaven men and coatless men and old men and spruce young men and men that smelled of toilet water and bay rum and sweat and men that smelled of just sweat, watched her with the moist abjectness of hounds. Then she went on up the aisle, rife, placidly unreluctant, and then the car jolted forward and she sat partly upon a fat man in a derby and a newspaper, who looked up at her and then hunched over to the window and dived again into his newspaper with his derby on.
The car hummed and spurted and jolted and stopped and jolted and hummed and spurted between croaching walls and old iron lovely as dingy lace, and shrieking children from south Europe once removed and wild and soft as animals and cheerful with filth; and old rich food smells, smells rich enough to fatten the flesh through the lungs; and women screaming from adjacent door to door in bright dirty shawls. Her three pennies had got warm and moist in her hand, so she changed them to the other hand and dried her palm on her thigh.
Soon it was a broader street at right angles—a weary green spaciousness of late August foliage and civilization again in the shape of a filling station; and she descended and passed between houses possessing once and long ago individuality, reserve, but now become somehow vaguely and dingily identical; reaching at last an iron gate through which she went and on up a shallow narrow concrete walk bordered on either side by beds in which flowers for some reason never seemed to grow well, and so on across the veranda and into the house.
Her father was on the night force and he now sat in his sock feet and with his galluses down, at his supper of mackerel (it is Friday) and fried potatoes and coffee and an early afternoon edition. He wiped his mustache with two sweeps of the back of his hand.
“Where you been?”
Jenny entered the room removing her hat. She dropped it to the floor and came up in a flanking movement. “On a boat ride,” she answered. Her father drew his feet under his chair to rise and his face suffused slowly with relief and anger.
“And you think you can go off like that, without a word to nobody, and then walk back into this house—” But Jenny captured him and she squirmed onto his rising lap and though he tried to defend himself, kissed him through his mackerelish mustache, and held him speechless so while she delved amid that vague pinish region which was her mind. After a while she remembered it.
“Haul up your sheet,” she said. “You’re jibbing.”
2
Pete was the baby: he was too young to have been aware of it, of course, but that electric sign with the family name on it had marked a climacteric: the phœnix-like rise of the family fortunes from the dun ashes of respectability and a small restaurant catering to Italian working people, to the final and ultimate Americanization of the family, since this fortune, like most American ones, was built on the flouting of a statutory impediment.
Prior to nineteen-nineteen you entered a dingy room fecund with the rich heavy odor of Italian cooking, you sat surrounded by Italian faces and frank Italian eating sounds, at oilcloth of a cheerful red-and-white check and cunningly stained, impermeated with food, where you were presently supplied with more food. Perhaps old lady Ginotta herself came bustling out with soup and one thumb in a thick platter and a brisk word for you, or by Joe, anyway, barearmed and skilful and taciturn, while Mr. Ginotta himself in his stained apron stood talking to a table of his intimates. Perhaps if you lingered long enough over your banana or overripe oft-handled grapes you would see Pete in his ragged corduroy knickers and faded clean shirt, with his curling shock of hair and his queer golden eyes, twelve years old and beautiful as only an Italian lad can be.
But now, all this was changed. Where was once a dingy foodladen room, wooden floored and not too clean, was now a tiled space cleared and waxed for dancing and enclosed on one side by mirrors and on the other by a row of booths containing each a table and two chairs and lighted each by a discreet table lamp of that surreptitious and unmistakable shade of pink and curtained each with heavy maroon rep. And where you once got food good and Italian and cheap, you now paid so much for it that you were not required to eat it at all: and platters of spaghetti and roasted whole fowls, borne not by Joe, barearmed and skilful if taciturn, but by dinner-coated waiters with faces ironed and older than sin;—platters which served as stage properties for the oldest and weariest comedy in the world, were served you and later removed by the waiters with a sort of clairvoyant ubiquity and returned to the kitchen practically intact. And from the kitchen there came no longer any odor of cooking at all.
Joe’s idea, it was. Joe, five-and-twenty and more American than any of them, had seen the writing on the wall, had argued, prevailed, and proven himself right. Mr. Ginotta had not stood prosperity. He was afraid of the new floor, to begin with. It was too slick, dangerous for a man of his age and bulk; and to look out of his kitchen, that kitchen into which he no longer dared bring his stained apron, upon a room once crowded with his friends and noisy and cheerful with eating and smells of food . . .
But all that was changed now. The very waiters themselves he did not know, and the food they bore back and forth was not food; and the noise was now a turgid pandemonium of saxophones and drums and, riding above it like distracted birds, a shrill and metallic laughter of women, ceaseless and without joy; and the smells a blending of tobacco and alcohol and unchaste scent. And from the kitchen there came no longer any odor of cooking at all: even his range was gone, replaced by an oil stove.
So he died, fairly full of years and with more money to his name in the bank than most Italian princes have. Mrs. Ginotta had the flu at the same time. It had settled in her ears and as time passed she became quite deaf; and because of the fact that her old friends now went elsewhere to dine and the people who came now arrived quite late, after she was in bed mostly, and her old man was dead and her sons were such Americans now, busy and rich and taciturn, and because the strange waiters frightened her a little, the old lady had got out of the habit of talking at all. She prepared food for her sons on the new stove of which she was afraid, but they were in and out so much it was hard to anticipate their mealtimes; and her eyes being no longer good enough for sewing, she spent her time puttering about their living quarters overhead or in a corner of the kitchen where she would be out of the way, preparing vegetables and such—things that didn’t require keenness of sight or attention.
The room itself she would not enter, though from her accustomed corner in the kitchen she could on occasion watch the boneless sophistication of the saxophone player and the drummer’s flapping elbows, and years ago she had heard the noise they made. But that was long ago and she had forgotten it, and now she accepted their antics as she accepted the other changes, associating no sound with them at all. Joe had several automobiles now: big noticeable ones, and he used to try to persuade her to ride in them. But she refused stubbornly always, though it was a matter of neighborhood comment, how good the Ginotta boys were to the old lady.
But Joe, with his shrewd taciturn face and his thinning hair and his shirt of heavy striped silk smoothly taut across his tight embryonic paunch—Joe, standing with his head-waiter at the desk, paused in his occupation to glance down that room with its every modern fixture, its tiled floor and lights and mirrors, with commendable pride. With the quiet joy of ownership his gaze followed its mirrored diminishing tunnel and passed on to the discreetly curtained entrance beneath that electric sign, that ultimate accolade of Americanization, flashing his name in golden letters in rain or mist or against the remote insane stars themselves; and to his brother slanting his damaged hat defiantly, turning in beneath it.
Joe held his sheaf of banknotes in one hand and his poised wetted finger over it and watched Pete traverse the mirrored length of the room.
“Where in hell you been?” he demanded.
“To the country,” Pete answered shortly. “Anything to eat?”
“Eat, hell,” his brother exclaimed. “Here I’ve had to pay a man two days just because you were off helling around somewheres. And now you come in talking about something to eat. Here—” he put aside his sheaf of money and from a drawer he took a pack of small slips of paper and ran through them. The headwaiter counted money undisturbed, methodically. “I promised this stuff to her by noon. You get busy and run it out there—here’s the address—and no more foolishness, see? Eat, hell.” But Pete had brushed past the other without even pausing. His brother followed him. “You get right at it, you hear?” He raised his voice. “You think you can walk out of here and stay as long as you want, huh? You think you can come strolling back after a week, huh? You think you own this place?”
The old lady was waiting inside the kitchen. She didn’t hardly talk at all any more: only made sounds, wet sounds of satisfaction and alarm; and she saw her older son’s face and she made these sounds now, looking from one to the other but not offering to touch them. Pete entered the room and his brother stopped at the door, and the old lady shuffled across to the stove and fetched Pete a plate of warmed-over spaghetti and fish and set it before him at a zinc-covered table. His brother stood in the door and glared at him.
“Get up from there, now, like I told you. Come on, come on, you can eat when you get back.”
But the old lady bustled around, getting between them with the stubborn barrier of her deafness, and her alarmed sounds rose again, then fell and became a sort of meaningless crooning while she kept herself between them, pushing Pete’s plate nearer, patting his knife and fork into his hands. “Look out,” Pete said at last, pushing her hands away. Joe glared from the door, but he humored her, as he always did.
“Make it snappy,” he said gruffly, turning away. When he had gone the old lady returned to her chair and her discarded bowl of vegetables.
Pete ate hungrily. Sounds came back to him: a broom, and indistinguishable words, and then the street door opened and closed and above a swift tapping of heels he heard a woman’s voice. It spoke to his brother at the desk, but the brittle staccato came on without stopping, and as Pete raised his head the girl entered on her high cheap heels and an unbelievable length of pale stocking severed sharply by her skimpy dark frock. Within the small bright bell of her hat, her painted passionate face, and her tawdry shrillness was jointless and poised as a thin tree.
“Where you been?” she asked.
“Off with some women.” He resumed his meal.
“More than one?” she asked quickly, watching him.
“Yeh. Five or six. Reason it took me so long.”
“Oh,” she said. “You’re some little poppa, ain’t you?” He continued to eat and she came over beside him. “Whatcher so glum about? Somebody take your candy away from you?” She removed his hat. “Say, look at your hat.” She stared at it, then laid it on the table and sliding her hand into his thickly curling hair she tugged his face up, and his queer golden eyes. “Wipe your mouth off,” she said. But she kissed him anyway, and raised her head again. “You better wipe it off now, sure enough,” she said with contemplation. She released his hair. “Well, I got to go.” And she turned, but paused again at the old lady’s chair and screamed at her in Italian. The old lady looked up, nodding her head, then bent over her beans again.
Pete finished his meal. He could still hear her shrill voice from the other room, and he lit a cigarette and strolled out. The old lady hadn’t been watching him, but as soon as he was gone, she got up and removed the plate and washed it and put it away, and then sat down again and picked up her bowl.
“Ready to go, huh?” his brother looked up from the desk. “Here’s the address. Snap it up, now: I told her I’d have it out there by noon.” The bulk of Joe’s business was outside, like this. He had a name for reliability of which he was proud. “Take the Studebaker,” he added.
“That old hack?” Pete paused, protesting. “I'll take your Chrysler.”
“Damn if you will,” his brother rejoined, heating again. “Get on, now; take that Studebaker like I told you,” he said violently. “If you don’t like it, buy one of your own.”
“Ah, shut up.” Pete turned away. Within one of the booths, beyond a partly drawn curtain, he saw her facing the mirror, renewing the paint on her mouth. Beside her stood one of the waiters in his shirtsleeves, holding a mop. She made a swift signal with her hand to his reflection in the glass. He slanted his hat again, without replying.
She was an old hack, beside the fawn-and-nickel splendor of the new Chrysler, but she would go and she’d carry six or seven cases comfortably—the four cases he now had were just peas in a matchbox. He followed the traffic to Canal street, crossed it and fell into the line waiting to turn out St. Charles. The line inched forward, stopped, inched forward again when the bell rang. The policeman at the curb held the line again and Pete sat watching the swarming darting newsboys, and the loafers and shoppers and promenaders, and little coltlike girls with their monotonous blonde legs. The bell rang, but the cop still held them. Pete leaned out, jazzing his idling engine. “Come on, come on, you blue-bellied bastard,” he called. “Let’s go.”
At last the cop lowered his glove and Pete whipped skilfully into St. Charles, and presently the street widened and became an avenue picketed with palms, and settling onto his spine and slanting his damaged straw hat to a swaggering slant on his dark reckless head, he began to overhaul the slow ones, passing them up.
3
Fairchild’s splitting head ultimately roused him and he lay for some time submerged in the dull throbbing misery of his body before he discovered that the boat was stationary again and, after an effort of unparalleled stoicism, that it was eleven o’clock. No sound anywhere, yet there was something in the atmosphere of his surroundings, something different. But trying to decide what it was only made his head pound the worse, so he gave it up and lay back again. The Semitic man slumbered in his berth.
After a while Fairchild groaned, and rose and wavered blundering across the cabin and drank deeply of water. Then he saw land through the port: a road and a weathered board wall, and beyond it, trees. Mandeville he decided. He tried to rouse the Semitic man, but the other cursed him from slumber and rolled over to face the wall.
He hunted again for a bottle, but there were not even any empty ones: who ever did it had made a clean sweep. Well, a cup of coffee, then. So he got into his trousers and crossed the passage to a lavatory and held his head beneath a tap for a while. Then he returned and finished dressing and sallied forth.
Some one slumbered audibly in Major Ayers’ room. It was Major Ayers himself, and Fairchild closed the door and went on, struck anew with that strange atmosphere which the yacht seemed to have gained overnight. The saloon was empty also, and a broken meal offended his temporarily refined sensibilities with partially emptied cups and cold soiled plates. But still no sound, no human sound, save Major Ayers and the Semitic man in slumber’s strophe and antistrophe. He stood in the door of the saloon and groaned again. Then he took his splitting head on deck.
Here he blinked in the light, shutting his eyes against it while hot brass hammers beat against his eyeballs. Three men dangled their legs over the edge of the quay and regarded him, and he opened his eyes again and saw the three men.
“Good morning,” he said. “What town’s this? Mandeville?”
The three men looked at him. After a time one said:
“Mandeville? Mandeville what?”
“What town is it, then?” he asked, but as he spoke awareness came to him and looking about he saw a steel bridge and a trolley on the bridge, and further still, a faint mauve smudge on the sky, and in the other direction the flag that floated above the yacht club, languorous in a faint breeze. The three men sat and swung their legs and watched him. Presently one of them said:
“Your party went off and left you.”
“Looks like it,” Fairchild agreed. “Do you know if they said anything about sending a car back for us?”
“No, she ain’t going to send back to-day,” the man answered. Fairchild cleared his aching eyes: it was the captain. “Trolley track over yonder a ways,” he called after Fairchild as he turned and descended the companionway.
4
Major Ayers’ appointment was for three o’clock. His watch corroborated and commended him as he stepped from the elevator into a long cool corridor glassed on either hand by opaque plate from beyond which came a thin tapping of type-writers. Soon he found the right door and entered it, and across a low barrier he gave his card to a thin scented girl, glaring at her affably, and stood in the ensuing interval gazing out the window across diversified rectangles of masonry, toward the river.
The girl returned. “Mr. Reichman will see you now,” she said across her chewing gum, swinging the gate open for him.
Mr. Reichman shook his hand and offered him a chair and a cigar. He asked Major Ayers for his impressions of New Orleans and immediately interrupted the caller’s confused staccato response to ask Major Ayers, for whom the war had served as the single possible condition under which he could have returned to England at all, and to whom for certain private reasons London had been interdict since the Armistice, how affairs compared between the two cities. Then he swung back in his patent chair and said:
“Now, Major, just what is your proposition?”
“Ah, yes,” said Major Ayers, flicking the ash from his cigar. “Its a salts. Now, all Americans are constipated—”
5
Beneath him, on the ground floor, where a rectangle of light fell outward across the alley, a typewriter was being hammered by a heavy and merciless hand. Fairchild sat with a cigar on his balcony just above the unseen but audible typist, enjoying the cool darkness and the shadowed treefilled spaciousness of the cathedral close beneath his balcony. An occasional trolley clanged and crashed up Royal street, but this was but seldom, and when it had died away there was no sound save the monotonous merging clatter of the typewriter. Then he saw and recognized Mr. Talliaferro turning the corner and with an exclamation of alarm he sprang to his feet, kicking his chair over backward. Ducking quickly into the room redolent of pennyroyal he snapped off the reading lamp and leaped upon a couch, feigning sleep.
Mr. Talliaferro walked dapperly, swinging his stick, his goal in sight. Yes, Fairchild was right, he knew women, the feminine soul—? No, not soul: they have no souls. Nature, the feminine nature: that substance, that very substance of their being, impalpable as moonlight, challenging and retreating at the same time; inconsistent, nay, incomprehensible, yet serving their ends with such a devastating practicality. As though the earth, the world, man and his very desires and impulses themselves, had been invented for the sole purpose of hushing their little hungry souls by filling their time through serving their biological ends. . . .
Yes, boldness. And propinquity. And opportunity, that happy conjunction of technique and circumstance, being with the right one in the right place at the right time. Yes, yes, Opportunity, Opportunity—more important than all, perhaps. Mr. Talliaferro put up Opportunity: he called for a ballot. The ayes had it.
He stopped utterly still in the flash of his inspiration. At last he had it, had the trick, the magic Word. It was so simple that he stood in amaze at the fact that it had not occurred to him before. But then he realized that its very simplicity was the explanation. And my nature is complex, he told himself, gazing at stars in the hot dark sky, in a path of sky above the open coffin of the street. It was so devastatingly simple that he knew a faint qualm. Was it—was it exactly sporting? Wasn’t it like shooting quail on the ground? But no, no: now that he had the key, now that he had found the Word, he dared admit to himself that he had suffered. Not so much in his vanity, not physically—after all, man can do without the pleasures of love: it will not kill him; but because each failure seemed to put years behind him with far more finality than the mere recurrence of natal days. Yes, Mr. Talliaferro owed himself reparation, let them suffer who must. And was not that woman’s part from time immemorial?
Opportunity, create your opportunity, prepare the ground by overlooking none of those small important trivialities which mean so much to them, then take advantage of it. And I can do that, he told himself. Indifference, perhaps, as though women were no rare thing with me; that there is perhaps another woman I had rather have seen, but circumstances over which neither of us had any control intervened. They like a man who has other women, for some reason. Can it be that love to them is half adultery and half jealousy? . . . Yes, I can do that sort of thing, I really can. . . . “She would have one suit of black underthings,” Mr. Talliaferro said aloud with a sort of exultation.
He struck the pavement with his stick, lightly. “By God, that’s it,” he exclaimed in a hushed tone, striding on. . . . “Create the opportunity, lead up to it delicately but firmly. Drop a remark about coming to-night only because I had promised. . . . Yes, they like an honorable man: it increases their latitude. She'll say, “Please take me to dance,” and I'll say ‘No, really, I don’t care to dance to-night,’ and she'll say, ‘Won’t you take me?’ leaning against me, eh?—let’s see—yes, she’ll take my hand. But I shan’t respond at once. She'll tease and then I’ll put my arm around her and raise her face in the dark cab and kiss her, coldly, and I'll say, ‘Do you really want to dance to-night?’ and then she’ll say, ‘Oh, I don’t know. Suppose we just drive around a while? . . .’ Will she say that at this point? Well, should she not. . . Lets see, what would she say?”
Mr. Talliaferro strode on, musing swiftly. Well, anyway, if she says that, if she does say that, then I'll say ‘No, let’s dance.’ Yes, yes, something like that. Though perhaps I’d better kiss her again, not so coldly, perhaps? . . . But should she say something else. . . But then, I shall be prepared for any contingency, eh? Half the battle. . . . Yes, something like that, delicately but firmly done, so as not to alarm the quarry. Some walls are carried by storm, but all walls are reduced by siege. There is also the fable of the wind and the sun and the man in a cloak. “We’ll change the gender, by Jove,” Mr. Talliaferro said aloud, breaking suddenly from his revery to discover that he had passed Fairchild’s door. He retraced his steps and craned his neck to see the dark window.
“Fairchild!”
No reply.
“Oh, Fairchild!”
The two dark windows were inscrutable as two fates. He pressed the bell, then stepped back to complete his aria. Beside the door was another entrance. Light streamed across a half length lattice blind like a saloon door; beyond it a typewriter was being thumped viciously. Mr. Talliaferro knocked diffidently upon the blind.
“Hello,” a voice boomed above the clattering machine, though the machine itself did not falter. Mr. Talliaferro pondered briefly, then he knocked again.
“Come in, damn you.” The voice drowned the typewriter temporarily. “Come in: do you think this is a bathroom?” Mr. Talliaferro opened the blind and the huge collarless man at the typewriter raised his sweating leonine head, and regarded Mr. Talliaferro fretfully. “Well?”
“Pardon me, I’m looking for Fairchild.”
“Next floor,” the other snapped, poising his hands. “Good night.”
“But he doesn’t answer. Do you happen to know if he is in to-night?”
“I do not.”
Mr. Talliaferro pondered again, diffidently. “I wonder how I might ascertain? I’m pressed for time—”
“How in hell do I know? Go up and see, or stand out there and call him.”
“Thanks, I’ll go up, if you’ve no objection.”
“Well, go up, then,” the big man answered, leaping again upon his typewriter. Mr. Talliaferro watched him for a time.
“May I go through this way?” he ventured at last, mildly and politely.
“Yes, yes. Go anywhere. But for God’s sake, don’t bother me any longer.”
Mr. Talliaferro murmured Thanks and sidled past the large frenzied man. The whole small room trembled to the man’s heavy hands and the typewriter leaped and chattered like a mad thing.
He went on and into a dark corridor filled with a thin vicious humming, and mounted lightless stairs into an acrid region scented with pennyroyal. Fairchild heard him stumble in the darkness, and groaned. I’ll have your blood for this! he swore at the thundering oblivious typewriter beneath him. After a time his door opened and the caller hissed Fairchild! into the room. Fairchild swore again under his breath. The couch complained to his movement, and he said:
“Wait there until I turn up the light. You'll break everything I’ve got, blundering around in the dark.”
Mr. Talliaferro sighed with relief. “Well, well, I had just about given you up and gone away when that man beneath you kindly let me come through his place.” The light came on under Fairchild’s hand. “Oh, you were asleep, weren’t you? So sorry to have disturbed you. But I want your advice, as I failed to see you this morning. . . . You got home all right?” he asked with thoughtful tact.
Fairchild answered “Yes” shortly, and Mr. Talliaferro laid his hat and stick on a table, knocking therefrom a vase of late summer flowers. With amazing agility he caught the vase before it crashed, though not before its contents had liberally splashed him. “Ah, the devil!” he ejaculated. He replaced the vase and quickly fell to mopping at his sleeves and coat front with his handkerchief. “And this suit fresh from the presser, too!” he added with exasperation.
Fairchild watched him with ill-suppressed vindictive glee. “Too bad,” he commiserated insincerely, lying again on the couch. “But she won’t notice it: she’ll be too interested in what you’re saying to her.”
Mr. Talliaferro looked up quickly, a trifle dubiously. He spread his handkerchief across the corner of the table to dry. Then he smoothed his hands over his neat pale hair.
“Do you think so? Really? That’s what I stopped in to discuss with you.” For a while Mr. Talliaferro sat neatly and gazed at his host from beyond a barrier of a polite and hopeless despair. Fairchild remarked his expression with sudden curiosity, but before he could speak Mr. Talliaferro reassimilated himself and became again his familiar articulated mild alarm.
“What’s the matter?” Fairchild asked.
“I? Nothing. Nothing at all, my dear fellow. Why do you ask?”
“You looked like you had something on your mind, just then.”
The guest laughed artificially. “Not at all. You imagined it, really.” His hidden dark thing lurked behind his eyes yet, but he vanquished it temporarily. “I will ask a favor, however, before I . . . before I ask your advice. That you don’t mention our—conversation. The general trend of it, you know.” Fairchild watched him with curiosity. “To any of our mutual women friends,” he added further, meeting his host’s curious gaze.
“All right,” Fairchild agreed. “I never mention any of the conversations we have on this subject. I don’t reckon I'll start now.”
“Thank you.” Mr. Talliaferro was again his polite smug self. “I have a particular reason, this time, which I'll divulge to you as soon as I consider myself . . . You will be the first to know.”
“Sure,” said Fairchild again. “What is it to be this time?”
“Ah, yes,” said the guest with swift optimism, “I really believe that I have discovered the secret of success with them: create the proper setting beforehand, indifference to pique them, then boldness—that is what I have always overlooked. Listen: to-night I shall turn the trick. But I want your advice.” Fairchild groaned and lay back. Mr. Talliaferro picked his handkerchief from the table and whipped it about his ankles. He continued:
“Now, I shall make her jealous to begin with, by speaking of another woman in—ah—quite intimate terms. She will doubtless wish to dance, but I shall pretend indifference, and when she begs me to take her to dance, perhaps I'll kiss her, suddenly but with detachment—you see?”
“Yes?” murmured the other, cradling his head on his arms and closing his eyes.
“Yes. So we'll go and dance, and I’ll pet her a bit, still impersonally, as if I were thinking of some one else. She'll naturally be intrigued and she’ll say, ‘What are you thinking of?’ and I’ll say, ‘Why do you want to know?’ She'll plead with me, perhaps dancing quite close to me, cajoling; but I’ll say, ‘I’d rather tell you what you are thinking of,’ and she will say ‘What?’ immediately, and I’ll say, ‘You are thinking of me.’ Now, what do you think of that? What will she say then?”
“Probably tell you you’ve got a swelled head.”
Mr. Talliaferro’s face fell. “Do you think she’ll say that?”
“Don’t know. You'll find out soon enough.”
“No,” Mr. Talliaferro said after a while, “I don’t believe she will. I rather fancied she’d think I knew a lot about women.” He mused deeply for a time. Then he burst out again: “If she does, I’ll say “Perhaps so. But I am tired of this place. Lets go.” She’ll not want to leave, but I’ll be firm. And then—” Mr. Talliaferro became smug, bursting with something he withheld. “No, no: I shan’t tell you—it’s too excruciatingly simple. Why some one else has not . . .” He sat gloating.
“Scared I’ll run out and use it myself before you have a chance?” Fairchild asked.
“No, really; not at all. I—” He considered a moment, then he leaned to the other. “It’s not that at all, really; I only feel that . . . Being the discoverer, that sort of thing, eh? I trust you, my dear fellow,” he added swiftly in a burst of confidence. “Merely my own scruples— You see?”
“Sure,” said Fairchild drily. “I understand.”
“You will have so many opportunities, while I. . .” Again that dark thing came up behind Mr. Talliaferro’s eyes and peered forth a moment. He drove it back. “And you really think it will work?”
“Sure. Provided that final coup is as deadly as you claim. And provided she acts like she ought to. It might be a good idea to outline the plot to her, though, so she won’t slip up herself.”
“You are pulling my leg now,” Mr. Talliaferro bridled slightly. “But don’t you think this plan is good?”
“Airtight. You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?”
“Surely. That’s the only way to win battles, you know. Napoleon taught us that.”
“Napoleon said something about the heaviest artillery, too,” the other said wickedly. Mr. Talliaferro smiled with deprecatory complacence.
“I am as I am,” he murmured.
“Especially when it hasn’t been used in some time,” Fairchild added. Mr. Talliaferro looked like a struck beast and the other said quickly: “But are you going to try this scheme to-night, or are you just describing a hypothetical case?”
Mr. Talliaferro produced his watch and glanced at it in consternation. “Good gracious, I must run!” He sprang to his feet and thrust his handkerchief into his pocket. “Thanks for advising me. I really think I have the system at last, don’t you?”
“Sure,” the other agreed. At the door Mr. Talliaferro turned and rushed back to shake hands. “Wish me luck,” he said turning again. He paused once more. “Our little talk: you'll not mention it?”
“Sure, sure,” repeated Fairchild. The door closed upon the caller and his descending feet sounded on the stairs. He stumbled again, then the street door closed behind him, and Fairchild rose and stood on the balcony and watched him out of sight.
Fairchild returned to the couch and reclined again, laughing. Abruptly he ceased chuckling and lay for a time in alarmed concern. Then he groaned again, and rose and took his hat.
As he stepped into the alley, the Semitic man pausing at the entrance spoke to him. “Where are you going?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Fairchild replied. “Somewhere. The Great Illusion has just called,” he explained. “He has an entirely new scheme to-night.”
“Oh. Slipping out, are you?” the other asked, lowering his voice.
“No, he just dashed away. But I don’t dare stay in this evening. He’ll be back inside of two hours to tell me why this one didn’t work. We’ll have to go somewhere else.” The Semitic man mopped his handkerchief across his bald head. Beyond the lattice blind beside them the typewriter still chattered. Fairchild chuckled again. Then he sighed. “I wish Talliaferro could find him a woman. I’m tired of being seduced. . . . Let’s go over to Gordon’s.”
6
The niece had already yawned elaborately several times at the lone guest: she was prepared, and recognized the preliminary symptoms indicating that her brother was on the point of his customary abrupt and muttered departure from the table. She rose also, with alacrity.
“Well,” she said briskly, “I’ve enjoyed knowing you a lot, Mark. Next summer maybe we'll be back here, and we'll have to do it again, won’t we?”
“Patricia,” her aunt said, “sit down.”
“I’m sorry, Aunt Pat. But Josh wants me to sit with him to-night. He’s going away to-morrow,” she explained to the guest.
“Aren’t you going, too?” Mark Frost asked.
“Yes, but this is our last night here, and Gus wants me to—”
“Not me,” her brother denied quickly. “You needn’t come away on my account.”
“Well, I think I’d better, anyway.”
Her aunt repeated “Patricia.”
But the niece ignored her. She circled the table and shook the guest’s hand briskly, before he could rise. “Good-by,” she repeated. “Until next summer.” Her aunt said “Patricia” again, firmly. She turned again at the door and said politely: “Good night, Aunt Pat.”
Her brother had gone on up the stairs. She hurried after him, leaving her aunt to call “Patricia!” from the dining room, and reached the head of the stairs in time to see his door close behind him. When she tried the knob, the door was locked, so she came away and went quietly to her room.
She stripped off her clothes in the darkness and lay on her bed, and after a while she heard him banging and splashing in the connecting bathroom. When these sounds had ceased she rose and entered the bathroom quietly from her side, and quietly she tried his door. Unlocked.
She snapped on the light and spun the tap of the shower until needles of water drummed viciously into the bath. She thrust her hand beneath it at intervals: soon it was stinging and cold; and she drew her breath as for a dive and sprang beneath it, clutching a cake of soap, and cringed shuddering and squealing while the water needled her hard simple body in its startling bathing suit of white skin, matting her coarse hair, stinging and blinding her.
She whirled the tap again and the water ceased its antiseptic miniature thunder, and after toweling herself vigorously she found that she was hot as ever, though not sticky any longer; so moving more slowly she returned to her room and donned fresh pajamas. This suit had as yet its original cord. Then she went on her bare silent feet and stood again at the door of her brother’s room, listening.
“Look out, Josh,” she called suddenly, flinging open the door, “I’m coming in.”
His room was dark, but she could discern the shape of him on the bed and she sped across the room and plumped jouncing onto the bed beside him. He jerked himself up sharply.
“Here,” he exclaimed. “What do you want to come in here worrying me, for?” He raised himself still further: a brief violent struggle, and the niece thudded solidly on the floor. She said Ow in a muffled surprised tone. “Now, get out and stay out,” her brother added. “I want to go to sleep.”
“Aw, lemme stay a while. I’m not going to bother you.”
“Haven’t you been staying under my feet for a week, without coming in here where I’m trying to go to sleep? Get out, now.”
“Just a little while,” she begged. “I’ll lie still if you want to go to sleep.”
“You won’t keep still. You go on, now.”
“Please, Gus. I swear I will.”
“Well,” he agreed at last, grudgingly. “But if you start flopping around—”
“I’ll be still,” she promised. She slid quickly onto the bed and lay rigidly on her back. Outside, in the hot darkness, insects scraped and rattled and droned. The room, however, was a spacious quiet coolness, and the curtains at the windows stirred in a ghost of a breeze.
“Josh.” She lay flat, perfectly still.
“Huh.”
“Didn’t you do something to that boat?”
After a while he said: “What boat?” She was silent, taut with listening. He said: “Why? What would I want to do anything to the boat for? What makes you think I did?”
“Didn’t you, now? Honest?”
“You're crazy. I never hurt—I never was down there except when you came tagging down there, that morning. What would I want to do anything to it, for?” They lay motionless, a kind of tenseness. He said, suddenly: “Did you tell her I did something to it?”
“Aw, don’t be a goof. I’m not going to tell on you.”
“You're damn right you won’t. I never did anything to it.”
“All right, all right: I’m not going to tell if you haven’t got guts to. You're yellow, Josh,” she told him calmly.
“Look here, I told you that if you wanted to stay in here, you’d have to keep quiet, didn’t I? Shut up, then. Or get out.”
“Didn’t you break that boat, honest?”
“No, I told you. Now, you shut up or get out of here.”
They lay quiet for a time. After a while she moved carefully, turning onto her belly by degrees. She lay still again for a time, then she raised her head. He seemed to be asleep, so she lowered her head and relaxed her muscles, spreading her arms and legs to where the sheet was still cool.
“I’m glad we're going to-morrow,” she murmured, as though to herself. “I’ll like to ride on the train. And mountains again. I love mountains, all blue and . . . blue. . . . We’ll be seeing mountains day after to-morrow. Little towns on ’em that don’t smell like people eating all the time . . . and mountains. . .”
“No mountains between here and Chicago,” her brother said gruffly. “Shut up.”
“Yes, there are.” She raised herself to her elbow. “There are some. I saw some coming down here.”
“That was in Virginia and Tennessee. We don’t go through Virginia to Chicago, dumbbell.”
“We go through Tennessee, though.”
“Not that part of Tennessee. Shut up, I tell you. Here, you get up and go back to your room.”
“No. Please, just a little while longer. I’ll lie still. Come on, Gus, don’t be so crummy.”
“Get out, now,” he repeated implacably.
“I’ll be still: I won’t say a w—”
“No. Outside, now. Go on. Go on, Gus, like I tell you.”
She heaved herself over nearer. “Please, Josh. Then I’ll go.”
“Well. Be quick about it.” He turned his face away and she leaned down and took his ear between her teeth, biting it just a little, making a kind of meaningless maternal sound against his ear. “That’s enough,” he said presently, turning his head and his moistened ear. “Get out, now.”
She rose obediently and returned to her room. It seemed to be hotter in here than in his room, so she got up and removed her pajamas and got back in bed and lay on her back, cradling her dark grave head in her arms and gazing into the darkness; and after a while it wasn’t so hot and it was like she was on a high place looking away out where mountains faded dreaming and blue and on and on into a purple haze under the slanting and solemn music of the sun. She’d see ’em day after to-morrow. Mountains. . .
7
Fairchild went directly to the marble and stood before it, clasping his hands at his burly back. The Semitic man sat immediately on entering the room, preëmpting the single chair. The host was busy beyond the rep curtain which constituted his bedroom, from where he presently reappeared with a bottle of whisky. He had removed both shirt and undershirt now, and beneath a faint reddish fuzz his chest gleamed with heat, like an oiled gladiator’s.
“I see,” Fairchild remarked as the host entered, “that you too have been caught by this modern day fetich of virginity. But you have this advantage over us: yours will remain inviolate without your having to shut your eyes to its goings-on. You don’t have to make any effort to keep yours from being otherwise. Very satisfactory. And very unusual. The greatest part of man’s immolation of virginity is, I think, composed of an alarm and a suspicion that some one else may be, as the term is, getting it.”
“Perhaps Gordon’s alarm regarding his own particular illusion of it is, that some one else may not get it,” the Semitic man suggested.
“No, I guess not,” Fairchild said. “He don’t expect to sell this to anybody, you know. Who would pay out good money for a virginity he couldn’t later violate, if only to assure himself it was the genuine thing?”
“Leda clasping her duck between her thighs could yet be carved out of it, however,” the other pointed out; “it is large enough for that. Or—”
“Swan,” corrected Fairchild.
“No. Duck,” the Semitic man insisted. “Americans would prefer a duck. Or udders and a fig leaf might be added to the thing as it stands. Isn’t that possible, Gordon?”
“Yes. It might be restored,” Gordon admitted drily. He disappeared again beyond the curtain and returned with two heavy tumblers and a shaving mug bearing a name in Gothic lettering of faded gilt. He drew up the bench on which his enamel water pitcher rested, and Fairchild came and sat upon it. Gordon took the shaving mug and went to lean his tall body against the wall. His intolerant hawk’s face was like bronze in the unshaded glare of the light. The Semitic man puffed at his cigar. Fairchild raised his glass, squinting through it.
“Udders, and a fig leaf,” he repeated. He drank, and set his tumbler down to light a cigarette. “After all, that is the end of art. I mean—”
“We do get something out of art,” the Semitic man agreed. “We all admit that.”
“Yes,” said Fairchild. “Art reminds us of our youth, of that age when life don’t need to have her face lifted every so often for you to consider her beautiful. That’s about all the virtue there is in art: it’s a kind of Battle Creek, Michigan, for the spirit. And when it reminds us of youth, we remember grief and forget time. That’s something.”
“Something, if all a man has to do is forget time,” the Semitic man rejoined. “But one who spends his days trying to forget time is like one who spends his time forgetting death or digestion. That’s another instance of your unshakable faith in words. It’s like morphine, language is. A fearful habit to form: you become a bore to all who would otherwise cherish you. Of course, there is the chance that you may be hailed as a genius after you are dead long years, but what is that to you? There will still be high endeavor that ends, as always, with kissing in the dark, but where are you? Time? Time? Why worry about something that takes care of itself so well? You were born with the habit of consuming time. Be satisfied with that. Tom-o’-Bedlam had the only genius for consuming time: that is, to be utterly unaware of it.
“But you speak for the artists. I am thinking of the majority of us who are not artists and who need protection from artists, whose time the artists insist on passing for us. We get along quite well with our sleeping and eating and procreating, if you artists only let us alone. But you accursed who are not satisfied with the world as it is and so must try to rebuild the very floor you are standing on, you keep on talking and shouting and gesturing at us until you get us all fidgety and alarmed. So I believe that if art served any purpose at all, it would at least keep the artists themselves occupied,”
Fairchild raised his glass again. “It’s more than that. It’s getting into life, getting into it and wrapping it around you, becoming a part of it. Women can do it without art—old biology takes care of that. But men, men . . . A woman conceives: does she care afterward whose seed it was? Not she. And bears, and all the rest of her life—her young troubling years, that is—is filled. Of course the father can look at it occasionally. But in art, a man can create without any assistance at all: what he does is his. A perversion, I grant you, but a perversion that builds Chartres and invents Lear is a pretty good thing.” He drank, and set his tumbler down.
“Creation, reproduction from within. . . . Is the dominating impulse in the world feminine, after all, as aboriginal peoples believe? . . . There is a kind of spider or something. The female is the larger, and when the male goes to her he goes to death: she devours him during the act of conception. And that’s man: a kind of voraciousness that makes an artist stand beside himself with a notebook in his hand always, putting down all the charming things that ever happen to him, killing them for the sake of some problematical something he might or he might not ever use. Listen,” he said, “love, youth, sorrow and hope and despair—they were nothing at all to me until I found later some need of a particular reaction to put in the mouth of some character of whom I wasn’t at that time certain, and that I don’t yet consider very admirable. But maybe it was because I had to work all the time to earn a living, when I was a young man.”
“Perhaps so,” the Semitic man agreed. “People still believe they have to work to live.”
“Sure you have to work to live,” Fairchild said quickly.
“You'd naturally say that. If a man has had to deny himself any pleasures during his pleasuring years, he always likes to believe it was necessary. That’s where you get your Puritans from. We don’t like to see any one violate laws we observed, and get away with it. God knows, heaven is a dry reward for abnegation.”
Fairchild rose and went to stand again before the fluid, passionate fixity of the marble. “The end of art,” he repeated. “I mean, to the consumer, not to us: we have to do it, they don’t. They can take it or leave it. Probably Gordon feels the same way about stories that I do about sculpture, but for me. . .” He mused upon the marble for a time. “When the statue is completely nude, it has only a coldly formal significance, you know. But when some foreign matter like a leaf or a fold of drapery (kept there in defiance of gravity by God only knows what) draws the imagination to where the organs of reproduction are concealed, it lends the statue a warmer, a—a—more—”’
“Speculative significance,” supplied the Semitic man.
“—speculative significance which I must admit I require in my sculpture.”
“Certainly the moralists agree with you.”
“Why shouldn’t they? The same food nourishes everybody’s convictions alike. And a man that earns his bread in a glue factory must get some sort of pleasure from smelling cattle hooves, or he’d change his job. There’s your perversion, I think.”
“And,” the Semitic man said, “if you spend your life worrying over sex, it’s an added satisfaction to get paid for your time.”
“Yes. But if I earned my bread by means of sex, at least I’d have enough pride about it to be a good honest whore.” Gordon came over and filled the glasses again. Fairchild returned and got his, and prowled aimlessly about the room, examining things. The Semitic man sat with his handkerchief spread over his bald head. He regarded Gordon’s naked torso with envious wonder. “They don’t seem to bother you at all,” he stated fretfully.
“Took here,” Fairchild called suddenly. He had unswaddled a damp cloth from something and he now bent over his find. “Come here, Julius.” The Semitic man rose and joined him.
It was clay, yet damp, and from out its dull, dead grayness Mrs. Maurier looked at them. Her chins, harshly, and her flaccid jaw muscles with savage verisimilitude. Her eyes were caverns thumbed with two motions into the dead familiar astonishment of her face; and yet, behind them, somewhere within those empty sockets, behind all her familiar surprise, there was something else—something that exposed her face for the mask it was, and still more, a mask unaware. “Well, I’m damned,” Fairchild said slowly, staring at it. “I’ve known her for a year, and Gordon comes along after four days . . . Well, I’ll be damned,” he said again.
“I could have told you,” the Semitic man said. “But I wanted you to get it by yourself. I don’t see how you missed it; I don’t see how any one with your faith in your fellow man could believe that any one could be as silly as she, without reason.”
“An explanation for silliness?” Fairchild repeated. “Does her sort of silliness require explanation?”
“It shouts it,” the other answered. “Look how Gordon got it, right away.”
“That’s so,” Fairchild admitted. He gazed at the face again, then he looked at Gordon with envious admiration. “And you got it right away, didn’t you?”
Gordon was replenishing the glasses again. “He couldn’t have missed it,” the Semitic man repeated. “I don’t see how you missed it. You are reasonably keen about people—sooner or later.”
“Well, I guess I missed her,” Fairchild returned, and extended his tumbler. “But it’s the usual thing, ain’t it? plantations and things? First family, and all that?”
“Something like that,” the Semitic man agreed. He returned to his chair and Fairchild sat again beside the water pitcher. “She’s a northerner, herself. Married it. Her husband must have been pretty old when they married. That’s what explains her, I think.”
“What does? Being a northerner, or marriage? Marriage starts and explains lots of things about us, just like singleness or widowhood does. And I guess the Ohio river can affect your destiny, too. But how does it explain her?”
“The story is, that her people forced her to marry old Maurier. He had been overseer on a big place before the Civil War. He disappeared in ’63, and when the war was over he turned up again riding a horse with a Union Army cavalry saddle and a hundred thousand dollars in uncut Federal notes for a saddle blanket. Lord knows what the amount really was, or how he got it, but it was enough to establish him. Money. You can’t argue against money: you only protest.
“Everybody expected him to splurge about with his money: show up the penniless aristocracy, that sort of thing; work out some of the inhibitions he must have developed during his overseer days. But he didn’t. Perhaps he’d got rid of his inhibitions during his sojourn at the war. Anyway, he failed to live up to character, so people decided that he was a moral coward, that he was off somewhere in a hole with his money, like a rat. And this was the general opinion until a rumor got out about several rather raw land deals in which he was assisted by a Jew named Julius Kauffman who was acquiring a fortune and an unsavory name during those years immediately following General Butler’s assumption of the local purple.
“And when the smoke finally cleared somewhat, he had more money than ever rumor could compute and he was the proprietor of that plantation on which he had once been a head servant, and within a decade he was landed gentry. I don’t doubt but that he had dug up some blueblood émigré ancestry. He was a small shrewd man, a cold and violent man; just the sort to have an unimpeachable genealogy. Humorless and shrewd, but I don’t doubt that he sat at times in the halls of his newly adopted fathers, and laughed.
“The story is that her father came to New Orleans on a business trip, with a blessing from Washington. She was young, then; probably a background of an exclusive school, and a social future, the taken-for-granted capital letter kind, but all somehow rather precarious—cabbage, and a footman to serve it; a salon in which they sat politely, surrounded by objects, and spoke good French; and bailiff’s men on the veranda and the butcher’s bill in the kitchen—gentility: evening clothes without fresh linen underneath. I imagine he—her father—was pretty near at the end of his rope. Some government appointment, I imagine, brought him south: hijacking privileges with official sanction, you know.
“The whole family seemed to have found our climate salubrious, though, what with hibiscus and mimosa on the lawn instead of bailiffs, and our dulcet airs after the rigors of New England; and she cut quite a figure among the jeunesse dorée of the nineties; fell in love with a young chap, penniless but real people, who led cotillions and went without gloves to send her flowers and glacé trifles from the rue Vendôme and sang to a guitar among the hibiscus and mimosa when stars were wont to rise. Old Maurier had made a bid, himself, in the meantime. Maurier was not yet accepted by the noblesse. But you can’t ignore money, you know: you can only protest. And tremble. It took my people to teach the world that. . . . And so—” the Semitic man drained his glass. He continued:
“You know how it is, how there comes a certain moment in the course of human events during which everything—public attention, circumstance, even destiny itself—is caught at the single possible instant, and the actions of certain people, for no reason at all, become of paramount interest and importance to the rest of the world? That’s how it was with these people. There were wagers laid; a famous gambler even made a book on it. And all the time she went about her affairs, her parties and routs and balls, behind that cold Dresden china mask of hers. She was quite beautiful then, they say. People always painting her, you know. Her face in every exhibition, her name a byword in the street and a toast at Antoine’s or the St. Charles. . . . But then, perhaps nothing went on behind that mask at all.”
“Of course there was,” said Fairchild quickly. “For the sake of the story, if nothing else.”
“Pride, anyway, I guess. She had that.” The Semitic man reached for the bottle. Gordon came and refilled his mug. “It must have been pretty hard for her, even if there was only pride to suffer. But women can stand anything—”
“And enjoy it,” Fairchild put in. “But go on.”
“That’s all. They were married in the Cathedral. She wasn’t a Catholic—Ireland had yet to migrate in any sizable quantities when her people established themselves in New England. That was another thing, mind you. And her horseless Lochinvar was present. Bets had been made that if he stayed away or passed the word, no one would attend at all. Maurier was still regarded— Well, imagine for yourself a situation like that: a tradition of ease unassailable and unshakable gone to pieces right under you, and out of the wreckage rising a man who once held your stirrup while you mounted. . . . Thirty years is barely the adolescence of bitterness, you know.
“I’d like to have seen her, coming out of the church afterward. They would have had a canopy leading from the door to the carriage: there must have been a canopy, and flowers, heavy ones—Lochinvar would have sent gardenias; and she, decked out in all the pagan trappings of innocence and her beautiful secret face beside that cold, violent man, graying now, but you have remarked how it takes the harlequinade of aristocracy to really reveal peasant blood, haven’t you? And her Lochinvar to wish her godspeed, watching her ankles as she got into the carriage.
“They never had any children. Maurier may have been too old; she herself may have been barren. Often that type is. But I don’t think so. I believe . . . But who knows? I don’t. Anyway, that explains her, to me. At first you think it’s just silliness, lack of occupation—a tub of washing, to be exact. But I see something thwarted back of it all, something stifled, yet which won’t quite die.”
“A virgin,” Fairchild said immediately. “That’s what it is, exactly. Fooling with sex, kind of dabbing at it, like a kitten at a ball of string. She missed something: her body told her so, insisted, forced her to try to remedy it and fill the vacuum. But now her body is old; it no longer remembers that it missed anything, and all she has left is a habit, the ghost of a need to rectify something the lack of which her body has long since forgotten about.”
The Semitic man lit his cold cigar again. Fairchild gazed at his glass, turning it this way and that slowly in his hand. Gordon stood yet against the wall, looking beyond them and watching something not in this room. The Semitic man slapped his other wrist, then wiped his palm on his handkerchief. Fairchild spoke.
“And I missed it, missed it clean,” he mused. “And then Gordon . . . Say,” he looked up suddenly, “how did you happen to learn all this?”
“Julius Kauffman was my grandfather,” the Semitic man replied.
“Oh. . . Well, its a good thing you told me about it. I guess I won’t have another chance to get anything from her at first hand.” He chuckled without mirth.
“Oh, yes, you will,” the other told him. “She won’t hold this boat party against us. People are far more tolerant of artists than artists are of people.” He puffed at his cigar for a time. “The trouble with you,” he said, “is that you don’t act right at all. You are the most disappointing artist I know. Mark Frost is much nearer the genuine thing than you are. But then, he’s got more time to be a genius than you have: you spend too much time writing. And that’s where Gordon is going to fall down. You and he typify genius décolleté. And people who own motor cars and food draw the line just at negligé—somewhere about the collarbone. And remind me to give that to Mark to-morrow: it struck me several times these last few days that he needs a new one.”
“Speaking of décolleté—” Fairchild mopped his face again. “What is it that makes a man drink whisky on a night like this, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” the other answered. “Perhaps it’s a scheme of nature’s to provide for our Italian immigrants. Or of Providence. Prohibition: for the Latin, politics for the Irish, invented He them.”
Fairchild filled his glass again, unsteadily. “Might as well make a good job of it,” he said. Gordon yet leaned against the wall, motionless and remote. Fairchild continued: “Italians and Irish. Where do we homegrown Nordics come in? What has He invented for us?”
“Nothing,” the Semitic man answered. “You invented Providence.” Fairchild raised his tumbler, gulping, and a part of the liquor ran over thinly and trickled from both corners of his mouth down his chin. Then he set the glass down and stared at the other with a mild astonishment.
“I am afraid,” he enunciated carefully, “that that one is going to do the business for me.” He wiped his chin unsteadily, and moving he struck his empty glass to the floor. The Semitic man groaned.
“Now we'll have to move again, just when I had become inured to them. Or perhaps you’d like to lie down for a while?”
Fairchild sat and mused a moment. “No, I don’t,” he stated thickly. “If I lie down, I wouldn’t get up again. Little air, fresh air. I’ll go outside.” The Semitic man rose and helped him to his feet. Fairchild pulled himself together. “Come along, Gordon. I’ve got to get outside for a while.”
Gordon came out of his dream. He came and raised the bottle to the light, and divided it between his mug and the Semitic man’s tumbler, and supporting Fairchild between them they drank. Then Fairchild must examine the marble again.
“I think it’s kind of nice.” He stood before it, swaying, swallowing the hot salty liquid that continued to fill his throat. “You kind of wish she could talk, don’t you? It would be sort of like wind through trees. . . . No... not talk: you’d like to watch her from a distance on a May morning, bathing in a pool where there were a lot of poplar trees. Now, this is the way to forget your grief.”
“She is not blonde,” Gordon said harshly, holding the empty bottle in his hand. “She is dark, darker than fire. She is more terrible and beautiful than fire.” He ceased and stared at them. Then he raised the bottle and hurled it crashing into the huge littered fireplace.
“Not—?” murmured Fairchild, trying to focus his eyes.
“Marble, purity,” Gordon said in his harsh, intolerant voice. “Pure because they have yet to discover some way to make it unpure. They would if they could, God damn them!” He stared at them for a moment from beneath his caverned bronze brows. His eyes were pale as two bits of steel. “Forget grief,” he repeated harshly. “Only an idiot has no grief; only a fool would forget it. What else is there in this world sharp enough to stick to your guts?”
He took the thin coat from behind the door and put it on over his naked torso, and they helped Fairchild from the room and down the dark stairs, abruptly subdued and quiet.
8
Mark Frost stood on the corner, frankly exasperated. The street light sprayed his tall ghostly figure with shadows of bitten late August leaves, and he stood in indecision, musing fretfully. His evening was spoiled: too late to instigate anything on his own hook or to join any one else’s party, too soon to go home. Mark Frost depended utterly upon other people to get his time passed.
He was annoyed principally with Mrs. Maurier. Annoyed and unpleasantly shocked and puzzled. At her strange. . . not coldness: rather, detachment, aloofness . . . callousness. If you were at all artistic, if you had any taint of art in your blood, dining with her filled the evening. But now, tonight . . . Never saw the old girl so bloodless in the presence of genius, he told himself. Didn’t seem to give a damn whether I stayed or not. But perhaps she doesn’t feel well, after the recent excitement, he added generously. Being a woman, too. . . . He had completely forgotten about the niece: the sepulchral moth of his heart had completely forgotten that temporary flame.
His car (owned and operated by the city) came along presently, and instinct got him aboard. Instinct also took the proper transfer for him, but a crumb of precaution (or laziness) at the transfer point haled him amid automobiles bearing the young enchanted of various ages swiftly toward nowhere or less, to and within a corner drug store where was a telephone. His number cost him a nickel.
“Hello . . . It’s me . . . Thought you were going out tonight . . . Yes, I did. Very stupid party, though. I couldn’t stick it . . . So you decided to stay in, did you?. . . No, I just thought I’d call you up. . . you’re welcome. I have another button off . . . Thanks. I’ll bring it next time I am out that way. . . . To-night? We—ll. . . huh?. . . all right. I’ll come on out. G’bye.”
His very ghostliness seemed to annihilate space: he invariably arrived after you had forgotten about him and before you expected him. But she had known him for a long time and ere he could ring she appeared in a window overhead and dropped the latchkey, and he retrieved its forlorn clink and let himself into the dark hall. A light gleamed dimly from the stairhead where she leaned to watch the thin evaporation of his hair as he mounted.
“I’m all alone to-night,” she remarked. “The folks are gone for the weekend. They didn’t expect me back until Sunday.”
“That’s good,” he answered. “I don’t feel up to talking to your mother to-night.”
“Neither do I. Not to anybody, after these last four days. Come in.”
It was a vaguely bookish room, in the middle of which a heavy, hotlooking champagne shaded piano lamp cast an oasis of light upon a dull blue brocaded divan. Mark Frost went immediately to the divan and lay at full length upon it. Then he moved again and extracted a package of cigarettes from his jacket. Miss Jameson accepted one and he relaxed again and groaned with hollow relief.
“I’m too comfortable,” he said. “I’m really ashamed to be so comfortable.”
Miss Jameson drew up a chair, just without the oasis of light. “Help yourself,” she replied. “There’s nobody here but us. The family won’t be back until Sunday night.”
“Elegant,” Mark Frost murmured. He laid his arm across his face, shading his eyes. “Whole house to yourself. You're lucky. Lord, I’m glad to be off that boat. Never again for me.”
“Don’t mention that boat,” Miss Jameson shuddered. “I think it’ll be never again for any of that party. From the way Mrs. Maurier talked this morning. Not for Dawson and Julius, anyway.”
“Did she send a car back for them?”
“No. After yesterday, they could have fallen overboard and she wouldn’t even have notified the police. . . . But let’s don’t talk about that trip any more,” she said wearily. She sat just beyond the radius of light: a vague humorless fragility. Mark Frost lay on his back, smoking his cigarette. She said: “While I think of it: Will you be sure to lock the door after your I’ll be here alone, to-night.”
“All right,” he promised from beneath his arm. His pale, prehensile mouth released the cigarette and his arm swung it outward to where he hoped there was an ash tray. The ash tray wasn’t there and his hand made a series of futile dabbing motions until Miss Jameson leaned forward and moved the ash tray into the automatic ellipsis of his hand. After a while she leaned forward again and crushed out her cigarette.
A clock somewhere behind him tapped monotonously at silence and she moved restlessly in her chair, and presently she leaned and took another cigarette from his pack. Mark Frost removed his arm long enough to raise the pack to his vision and count the remaining cigarettes. Then he replaced his arm.
“You're quiet to-night,” she remarked. He grunted and once more she leaned forward and ground out her halfsmoked cigarette with decision. She rose. “I’m going to take off some clothes and get into something cooler. Nobody here to object. Excuse me a moment.”
He grunted again beneath his arm, and she went away from the oasis of light. She opened the door of her room and stood in the darkness just within the door a moment. Then she closed the door audibly, stood for a moment, then opened it again slightly and pressed the light switch.
She went to her dressing table and switched on two small, shaded electric candles there, and returned and switched off the ceiling light. She considered for a while; then she returned to the door and stood with the knob in her hand, then without closing it she went back to the dressing table and turned off one of the lights there. This left the room filled with a soft, pinkish glow in which a hushed gleaming of crystal on the dressing-table was the only distinguishable feature. She removed her dress hastily and stood in her underthings with a kind of cringing, passive courage, but there was still no sound of movement beyond the door, and she switched on the other light again and examined herself in the mirror.
She mused again, examining her frail body in its intimate garment. Then she ran swiftly and silently to a chest of drawers and in a locked drawer she sought feverishly among a delicate neat mass of sheer fabric, coming at last upon an embroidered night dress, neatly folded and unworn and scented faintly. Then, standing where the door, should it be opened, would conceal her for a moment, she slipped the gown over her head and from beneath it she removed the undergarment. Then she took her reckless troubled heart and the fragile and humorless calmness in which it beat, back to the dressing table; and sitting before the mirror she assumed a studied pose, combing and combing out her long, uninteresting hair.
......
Mark Frost lay at length on the divan, as was his habit, shading his eyes with his arm. At intervals he roused himself to light a fresh cigarette, at each time counting the diminishing few that remained, with static alarm. A clock ticked regularly somewhere in the room. The soft light from the lamp bathed him in a champagne colored and motionless sea. . . . He raised a fresh cigarette: his pale, prehensile mouth wrapped about it as though his mouth were a separate organism.
But after a while there were no more cigarettes. And roused temporarily, he remarked his hostess’ prolonged absence. But he lay back again, luxuriating in quiet and the suave surface on which he rested. But before long he raised the empty cigarette package and groaned dismally and rose and prowled quietly about the room, hoping perhaps to find one cigarette some one had forgotten. But there was none.
The couch drew him and he returned to the oasis of light, where he discovered and captured the practically whole cigarette which Miss Jameson had discarded. “Snipe,” he murmured with sepulchral humorlessness and he fired it, averting his head lest he lose his eyelashes in doing so, and he lay once more, shading his eyes with his arm. The clock ticked on in the silence. It seemed to be directly behind him: if he could just roll his eyes a bit further back into his skull. . . . He’d better look, anyhow, after a while. After midnight only one trolley to the hour. If he missed the twelve o’clock car. . .
So, after a while he did look, having to move to do so, and he immediately rose from the divan in a mad, jointless haste. Fortunately he remembered where he had left his hat and he caught it up and plunged down the stairs and on through the dark hall. He blundered into a thing or so, but the pale rectangle of the glass door guided him and after a violent struggle he opened it, and leaping forth he crashed it behind him. It failed to catch and in midflight down the steps he glanced wildly back at the growing darkness of its gap that revealed at the top edge a vague gleam from the light at the head of the stairs.
The corner was not far, and as he ran loosely and frantically toward it there came among the grave gesturing of tall palms a worn and bloodless rumor of the dying moon, and the rising hum of the street car crashed among the trees. He saw its lighted windows halt, heard its hum cease, saw the windows move again and heard its hum rise swelling, drowning his hoarse reiterated cries. But the conductor saw him at last and pulled the cord again and the car halted once more, humming impatiently; and Mark Frost plunged his long ungovernable legs across the soft slumbrous glare of polished asphalt and clawed his panting, ghostly body through the opened doors out of which the conductor leaned, calling to him:
“Come on, come on: this ain’t a taxi.”
9
Three gray, softfooted priests had passed on, but in an interval hushed by windowless old walls there lingers yet a thin celibate despair. Beneath a high stone gate with a crest and a device in carven stone, a beggar lies, nursing in his hand a crust of bread.
(Gordon, Fairchild and the Semitic man walked in the dark city. Above them, the sky: a heavy, voluptuous night and huge, hot stars like wilting gardenias. About them, streets: narrow, shallow canyons of shadow rich with decay and laced with delicate ironwork, scarcely seen.)
Spring is in the world somewhere, like a blown keen reed, high and fiery cold—he does not yet see it; a shape which he will know—he does not yet see it. The three priests pass on: the walls have hushed their gray and unshod feet.
(In a doorway slightly ajar were women, their faces in the starlight flat and pallid and rife, odorous and exciting and unchaste. Gordon hello dempsey loomed hatless above his two companions. He strode on, paying the women no heed. Fairchild lagged, the Semitic man perforce also. A woman laughed, rife and hushed and rich in the odorous dark come in boys lots of girls cool you off come in boys. The Semitic man drew Fairchild onward, babbling excitedly.)
That’s it, that’s it! You walk along a dark street, in the dark. The dark is close and intimate about you, holding all things, anything—you need only put out your hand to touch life, to feel the beating heart of life. Beauty: a thing unseen, suggested: natural and fecund and foul—you don’t stop for it; you pass on.
(The Semitic man drew him onward after Gordon’s tall striding.) I love three things. Rats like dull and cunning silver, keen and plump as death, steal out to gnaw the crust held loosely by the beggar beneath the stone gate. Unreproved they swarm about his still recumbent shape, exploring his clothing in an obscene silence, dragging their hot bellies over his lean and agechilled body, sniffing his intimate parts. I love three things.
(He drew Fairchild onward, babbling in an ecstasy.) A voice, a touch, a sound: life going on about you unseen in the close dark, beyond these walls, these bricks—(Fairchild stopped, laying his hand against the heatdrunken wall beside him, staring at his friend in the starlight. Gordon strode on ahead)—in this dark room or that dark room. You want to go into all the streets of all the cities men live in. To look into all the darkened rooms in the world. Not with curiosity, not with dread nor doubt nor disapproval. But humbly, gently, as you would steal in to look at a sleeping child, not to disturb it.
Then as one rat they flash away, and, secure again and still, they become as a row of cigarettes unwinking at a single level. The beggar, whose hand yet shapes his stolen crust, sleeps beneath the stone gate.
(Fairchild babbled on. Gordon striding on ahead turned and passed through a door. The door swung open, letting a sheet of light fall outward across the pavement, then the door swung to, snatching the sheet of light again. The Semitic man grasped Fairchild’s arm, and he halted. About him the city swooned in a voluption of dark and heat, a sleep which was not sleep; and dark and heat lapped his burly short body about with the hidden eternal pulse of the world. Above him, above the shallow serrated canyon of the street, huge hot stars burned at the heart of things.)
Three more priests, barefoot, in robes the color of silence, appear from nowhere. They are speeding after the first three, when they spy the beggar beneath the stone gate. They pause above him: the walls hush away their gray and sibilant footsteps. The rats are motionless as a row of cigarettes. (Gordon reappeared, looming above the other two in the hushed starlight. He held in his hand a bottle.) The priests draw nearer, touching one another, leaning diffidently above the beggar in the empty street while silence comes slow as a procession of nuns with breathing blent. Above the hushing walls, a thing wild and passionate, remote and sad; shrill as pipes, and yet unheard. Beneath it, soundless shapes amid which, vaguely, a maiden in an ungirdled robe and with a thin bright chain between her ankles, and a sound of far lamenting.
(They went on around a corner and into a darker street. Gordon stopped again, brooding and remote. He raised the bottle against the sky.) Yes, bitter and new as fire. Fueled close now with sleep. Hushed her strange and ardent fire. A chrysalis of fire whitely. Splendid and new as fire. (He drank, listening to the measured beat of his wild, bitter heart. Then he passed the bottle to his companions, brooding his hawk’s face above them against the sky. The others drank. They went on through the dark city.)
The beggar yet sleeps, shaping his stolen crust, and one of the priests says, Do you require aught of man, Brother? Just above the silence, amid the shapes, a young naked boy daubed with vermilion, carrying casually a crown. He moves erratic with senseless laughter; and the headless naked body of a woman carved of ebony, surrounded by women wearing skins of slain beasts and chained one to another, lamenting. The beggar makes no reply, he does not stir; and the second priest leans nearer his pale half-shadowed face. Beneath his high white brow he is not asleep, for his eyes stare quietly past the three priests without remarking them. The third priest leans down, raising his voice. Brother
(They stopped and drank again. Then they went on, the Semitic man carrying the bottle, nursing it against his breast.) I love three things. (Fairchild walked erratically beside him. Above him, among the mad stars, Gordon’s bearded head. The night was full and rich, smelling of streets and people, of secret beings and things.)
The beggar does not move and the priest’s voice is a dark bird seeking its way from out a cage. Above the silence, between it and the antic sky, there grows a sound like that of the sea heard afar off. The three priests gaze at one another. The beggar lies motionless beneath the stone gate. The rats stare their waiting cigarettes upon the scene.
I love three things: gold, marble and purple. The sound grows. Amid shadows and echoes it becomes a wind thunderous from hills with the clashing hooves of centaurs. The headless black woman is a carven agony beyond the fading placidity of the ungirdled maiden, and as the shadows and echoes blend the chained women raise their voices anew, lamenting thinly. (They were accosted. Whispers from every doorway, hands unchaste and importunate and rife in the tense wild darkness. Fairchild wavered beside him, and Gordon stopped again. “I’m going in here,” he said. “Give me some money.” The Semitic man gave him a nameless bill.) The wind rushes on, becoming filled with leaping figures antic as flames, and a sound of pipes fiery cold carves the world darkly out of space. The centaurs’ hooves clash, storming; shrill voices ride the storm like gusty birds, wild and passionate and sad. (A door opened in the wall. Gordon entered and before the door closed again they saw him in a narrow passageway lift a woman from the shadow and raise her against the mad stars, smothering her squeal against his tall kiss.) Then voices and sounds, shadows and echoes change form swirling, becoming the headless, armless, legless torso of a girl, motionless and virginal and passionately eternal before the shadows and echoes whirl away.
(They went on. The Semitic man nursed the bottle against his breast.) I love three things. . . . Dante invented Beatrice, creating himself a maid that life had not had time to create, and laid upon her frail and unbowed shoulders the whole burden of man’s history of his impossible heart’s desire. . . . At last one priest, becoming bolder, leans yet nearer and slips his hand beneath the beggar’s sorry robe, against his heart. It is cold. (Suddenly Fairchild stumbled heavily beside him and would have fallen. He held Fairchild up and supported him to the wall, and Fairchild leaned against the wall, his head tilted back, hatless, staring into the sky, listening to the dark and measured beating of the heart of things. “That’s what it is. Genius.” He spoke slowly, distinctly, staring into the sky. “People confuse it so, you see. They have got it now to where it signifies only an active state of the mind in which a picture is painted or a poem is written. When it is not that at all. It is that Passion Week of the heart, that instant of timeless beatitude which some never know, which some, I suppose, gain at will, which others gain through an outside agency like alcohol, like to-night—that passive state of the heart with which the mind, the brain, has nothing to do at all, in which the hackneyed accidents which make up this world—love and life and death and sex and sorrow—brought together by chance in perfect proportions, take on a kind of splendid and timeless beauty. Like Yseult of the White Hands and her Tristan with that clean, highhearted dullness of his; like that young Lady Something that some government executed, asking permission and touching with a kind of sober wonder the edge of the knife that was to cut her head off; like a redhaired girl, an idiot, turning in a white dress beneath a wistaria covered trellis on a late sunny afternoon in May. . .? He leaned against the wall, staring into the hushed mad sky, hearing the dark and simple heart of things. From beyond a cornice there came at last a cold and bloodless rumor of the dying moon.)
(The Semitic man nursed the bottle against his breast. “I love three things: gold, marble and purple—”) The priests cross themselves while the nuns of silence blend anew their breath, and pass on: soon the high windowless walls have hushed away their thin celibate despair. The rats are arrogant as cigarettes. After a while they steal forth again climbing over the beggar, dragging their hot bellies over him, exploring unreproved his private parts. Somewhere above the dark street, above the windcarved hills, beyond the silence; thin pipes unheard, wild and passionate and sad. (“—form solidity color,” he said to his own dark and passionate heart and to Fairchild beside him, leaning against a dark wall, vomiting.)
10
The rectangle of light yet fell outward across the alleyway; beyond the halflength lattice blind the typewriter yet leaped and thundered.
“Fairchild.”
The manipulator of the machine felt a vague annoyance, like knowing that some one is trying to waken you from a pleasant dream, knowing that if you resist the dream will be broken.
“Oh, Fairchild.”
He concentrated again, trying to exorcise the ravisher of his heart’s beatitude by banging louder on the keyboard. But at last there came a timid knock at the blind.
“Damn!” He surrendered. “Come in,” he bellowed, raising his head. “My God, where did you come from? I just let you in about ten minutes ago, didn’t I?” Then he saw his caller’s face. “What’s the matter, friend?” he asked quickly, “sick?”
Mr. Talliaferro stood blinking in the light. Then he entered slowly and drooped upon a chair. “Worse than that,” he answered with utter despondence. The large man wheeled heavily to face him.
“Need a doctor or anything?”
The caller buried his face in his hands. “No, no, a doctor can’t help me.”
“Well, what do you want, then? I’m busy. What is it?”
“I believe I want a drink of whisky,” Mr. Talliaferro said at last. “If it’s no trouble,” he added with his customary polite diffidence. He raised a stricken face for a moment. “A terrible thing happened to me to-night.” He lowered his face to his hands again, and the other rose and returned presently with a tumbler half full of liquor. Mr. Talliaferro accepted it gratefully. He took a swallow, then lowered the glass shakily. “I simply must talk to some one. A terrible thing happened to me . . .” He brooded for a moment. “It was my last opportunity, you see,” he burst out suddenly. “For Fairchild now, or you, it would be different. But for me—” Mr. Talliaferro hid his face in his free hand. “A terrible thing happened to me,” he repeated.
“Well, spit it out, then. But be quick about it.”
Mr. Talliaferro fumbled his handkerchief and weakly mopped his face. The other sat watching him impatiently. “Well, just as I’d planned, I pretended indifference; said that I didn’t care to dance to-night. But she said, ‘Ah, come along: do you think I came out just to sit in the park or something?’ Like that. And when I put my arm around her—”
“Around who?”
“Around her. And when I tried to kiss her, she just put—”
“But where was this?”
“In the cab. I haven’t a car, you see. Though I am planning to buy one next year. And she just put her elbow under my chin and choked me until I had to move back to my side of the seat, and she said, ‘I never dance in private or without music, mister man.’ And then—”
“In God’s name, friend, what are you raving about?”
“About J———, about that girl I was with this evening. And so we went to dance, and I was petting her a bit, just as I had done on the boat: no more, I assure you; and she told me immediately to stop. She said something about not having lumbago. And yet, all the time we were on the yacht she never objected once.” Mr. Talliaferro looked at his host with polite uncomprehending astonishment. Then he sighed and finished the whisky and set the glass near his feet.
“Good Lord,” the other murmured in a hushed tone.
Mr. Talliaferro continued more briskly: “And quite soon I remarked that her attention was engaged by something or some one behind me. She was dodging her head this way and that as we danced and getting out of step and saying, ‘Pardon me,’ but when I tried to see what it was I could discover nothing at all to engage her like that. So I said, ‘What are you thinking of?’ and she said ‘Huh?’ like that, and I said, ‘I can tell you what you are thinking of,’ and she said ‘Who? me? What am I thinking of?’ still trying to see something behind me, mind you. Then I saw that she was smiling also, and I said, ‘You are thinking of me,’ and she said ‘Oh. Was I?’”
“Good God,” the other murmured.
“Yes,” agreed Mr. Talliaferro unhappily. He continued briskly however: “And so I said, as I’d planned, ‘I’m tired of this place. Let’s go.’ She demurred, but I was firm, and so at last she consented and told me to run down and engage a cab and she would join me on the street.”
“I should have suspected something then, but I didn’t. I ran down and engaged a cab. I gave the driver ten dollars and he agreed to drive out on some unfrequented road and to stop and pretend that he had lost something back along the road, and to wait there until I blew the horn for him.
“So I waited and waited. She didn’t appear, so at last I ordered the cab to wait and I ran back upstairs. I didn’t see her in the anteroom, so I went back to the dancing floor.”
He ceased, and sat for a while in a brooding dejection.
“Well?” the other prompted.
Mr. Talliaferro sighed. “I swear, I think I’ll give it up: never have anything to do with them any more. When I returned to the dancing floor I looked for her at the table where we had been sitting. She was not there, and for a moment I couldn’t find her, but presently I saw her, dancing. With a man I had never seen before. A large man, like you. I didn’t know what to think. I decided finally he was a friend of hers with whom she was dancing until I should return, having misunderstood our arrangement about meeting below. Yet she had told me herself to await her on the street. That’s what confused me.
“I waited at the door until I finally caught her eye, and I signaled to her. She flipped her hand in reply, as though she desired that I wait until the dance was finished. So I stood there. Other people were entering and leaving, but I kept my place near the door, where she could find me without difficulty. But when the music ceased, they went to a table and sat down and called to a waiter. And she didn’t even glance toward me again!
“I began to get angry, then. I walked over to them. I didn’t want every one to see that I was angry, so I bowed to them, and she looked up at me and said, ‘Why hello, I thought you’d left me and so this kind gentleman was kind enough to take me home.’ ‘You damn right I will,’ the man said, popping his eyes at me. ‘Who’s he?’ You see,” Mr. Talliaferro interpolated, “I’m trying to talk as he did. I can’t imitate his execrable speech. You see, it wouldn’t have been so—so— I wouldn’t have felt so helpless had he spoken proper English. But the way he said things—there seemed to be no possible rejoinder— You see?”
“Go on, go on,” the other said.
“And she said, ‘Why, he’s a little friend of mine’ and the man said, ‘Well, it’s time little boys like him was in bed.’ He looked at me, hard, but I ignored him and said firmly, ‘Come, Miss Steinbauer, our taxi is waiting.’ Then he said, ‘Herb, you ain’t trying to take my girl, are you?’ I told him that she had come with me, firmly, you know; and then she said, ‘Run along. You are tired of dancing: I ain’t. So I’m going to stay and dance with this nice man. Good night.’
“She was smiling again: I could see that they were ridiculing me; and then he laughed—like a horse. ‘Beat it, brother,’ he said, ‘she’s gave you the air. Come back to-morrow.’ Well, when I saw his fat red face all full of teeth I wanted to hit him. But I remembered myself in time—my position in the city and my friends,” he explained, “so I just looked at them and turned and walked away. Of course every one had seen and heard it all: as I went through the door a waiter said to me: ‘Hard luck, fellow, but they will do it.’”
Mr. Talliaferro mused again in a sort of polite incomprehension, more of bewilderment than anger or even dejection. He sighed again. “And on top of all that, the cab driver had gone off with my ten dollars.”
The other man looked at Mr. Talliaferro with utter admiration. “O Thou above the thunder and above the excursions and alarms, regard Your masterpiece! Balzac, chew thy bitter thumbs! And here I am, wasting my damn life trying to invent people by means of the written word!” His face became suddenly suffused: he rose towering. “Get to hell out of here,” he roared. “You have made me sick!”
Mr. Talliaferro rose obediently. His hopeless dejection invested him again. “But what am I to do?”
“Do? Do? Go to a brothel, if you want a girl. Or if you are afraid some one will come in and take her away from you, get out on the street and pick one up: bring her here, if you like. But in Christ’s dear name, don’t ever talk to me again. You have already damaged my ego beyond repair. Do you want another drink?”
Mr. Talliaferro sighed again and shook his head. “Thanks just the same,” he answered. “Whisky can’t help me any.” The large man took his arm and kicking the blind outward he helped Mr. Talliaferro kindly but firmly into the alleyway. Then the blind swung to again and Mr. Talliaferro stood for a time, listening to the frantic typewriter, watching planes of shadow, letting the darkness soothe him. A cat, slinking, regarded him, then flashed a swift, dingy streak across the alley. He followed it with his eyes in a slow misery, with envy. Love was so simple for cats—mostly noise, success didn’t seem to make much difference. He sighed and walked slowly on, leaving the thundering typewriter behind. Presently he turned a corner and heard it no more. From beyond a cornice there came at last a cold and bloodless rumor of the dying moon.
His decorous pace spaced away streets interesting with darkness and as he walked he marveled that he could be inwardly so despairing, yet outwardly the same as ever. I wonder if it does show on me? he thought. It is because I am getting old, that women are not attracted to me. Yet, I know any number of men of my age and more, who get women easily . or say they do. . . . It is something I do not possess, something I have never had. . . .
And soon he would be married again. Mr. Talliaferro, seeing freedom and youth deserting him again, had known at first a clear, sharp regret, almost a despair, realizing that marriage this time would be a climacteric, that after this he would be definitely no longer young; and a final flare of freedom and youth had surged in him like a dying flame. But now as he walked dark streets beneath the hot heavy sky and the mad wilting gardenias of stars, feeling empty and a little tired and hearing his grumbling skeleton—that smug and dour and unshakable comrade who loves so well to say I told you so—he found himself looking forward to marriage with a thin but definite relief as a solution to his problem. Yes, he told himself, sighing again, chastity is expected of married men. Or, at least they don’t lose caste by it. . . .
But it was unbearable to believe that he had never had the power to stir women, that he had been always a firearm unloaded and unaware of it. No, it’s something I can do, or say, that I have not yet discovered. As he turned into the quiet street in which he lived he saw two people in a doorway, embracing. He hurried on.
In his rooms at last he slowly removed his coat and hung it neatly in a closet without being aware that he had performed the rite at all, then from his bathroom he got a metal machine with a handpump attached, and he quartered the room methodically with an acrid spraying of pennyroyal. On each downstroke there was a faint comfortable resistance, though the plunger came back quite easily. Like breathing, back and forth and back and forth: a rhythm.
Something I can do. Something I can say, he repeated to the rhythm of his arm. The liquid hissed pungently, dissolving into the atmosphere, permeating it. Something I can do. Something I can say. There must be. There must be. Surely a man would not be endowed with an impulse and yet be denied the ability to slake it. Something I can say.
His arm moved swifter and swifter, spraying the liquid into the air in short, hissing jets. He ceased, and felt for his handkerchief before he recalled that it was in his coat. His fingers discovered something, though, and clasping his reeking machine he removed from his hip pocket a small round metal box and he held it in his hand, gazing at it. Agnes Mabel Becky he read, and he laughed a short, mirthless laugh. Then he moved slowly to his chest of drawers and hid the small box carefully away in its usual place and returned to the closet where his coat hung and got his handkerchief, and mopped his brow with it. But must I become an old man before I discover what it is? Old, old, an old man before I have lived at all. . .
He went slowly to the bathroom and replaced the pump, and returned with a basin of warm water. He set the basin on the floor and went again to the mirror and examined himself. His hair was getting thin, there was no question about that (can’t even keep my hair, he thought bitterly) and his thirty-eight years showed in his face. He was not fleshily inclined, yet the skin under his jaw was becoming loose, flabby. He sighed and completed his disrobing, putting his clothing neatly and automatically away as he removed it. On the table beside his chair was a box of flavored digestive lozenges and presently he sat with his feet in the warm water, chewing one of the tablets.
The water mounted warmly through his thin body, soothing him, the pungent lozenge between his slow jaws gave him a temporary surcease. Let’s see, he mused to his rhythmic mastication, calmly reviewing the evening. Where did I go wrong to-night? My plan was good: Fairchild himself admitted that. Let me think. . . . His jaws ceased and his gaze brooded on a photograph of his late wife on the opposite wall. Why is it that they never act as you had calculated? You can allow for every contingency, and yet they will always do something else, something they themselves could not have imagined nor devised beforehand.
. . . I have been too gentle with them, I have allowed too much leeway for the intervention of their natural perversity and of sheer chance. That has been my mistake every time: giving them dinners and shows right away, allowing them to relegate me to the position of a suitor, of one waiting upon their pleasure. The trick, the only trick, is to bully them, to dominate them from the start—never employ wiles and never allow them the opportunity to employ wiles. The oldest technique in the world: a club. By God, that’s it.
He dried his feet swiftly and thrust them into his bedroom slippers, and went to the telephone and gave a number. “That’s the trick, exactly,” he whispered exultantly, and then in his ear was a sleepy masculine voice.
“Fairchild? So sorry to disturb you, but I have it at last.” A muffled inarticulate sound came over the wire, but he rushed on, unheeding. “I learned through a mistake to-night. The trouble is, I haven’t been bold enough with them: I have been afraid of frightening them away. Listen: I will bring her here, I will not take No; I will be cruel and hard, brutal, if necessary, until she begs for my love. What do you think of that?... Hello! Fairchild?...”
An interval filled with a remote buzzing. Then a female voice said:
“You tell ’em, big boy; treat ’em rough.”
THE END