Chapter I (1)

It was a low red-brick house with a white door, a brass knob and brass name-plates, and new green-and-white awnings and green window-boxes: the sort of place which, in those days, downtown, seemed particularly smart. We rang, and, after a moment, the electric clicking began--with its quick and ready profusion, plucking distinctly the string of excitement which was still capable of vibrating in my breast at the prospect of meeting new people in Greenwich Village.

They were Hugo Bamman’s friends: I had never met them. Rita Cavanagh, the poet, was to be there--and other persons reputed to possess genius or to whom I vaguely attributed romance. The stairs were soft-carpeted in green. The host, tall and smiling, in a dinner-jacket, met us at the door. The rooms were very bright and well kept: I saw lettuce-green cocktail glasses, a bruised-mulberry batik behind a divan and, on the wall, a set of framed designs for the costumes of some ballet, vivid tinselly golds, blues and purples. And there were girls, like the colored sketches, in the brightest make-ups and clothes, with red silk roses of Cuban shawls, and silver turbans, and red hair, and black arching Russian eyebrows, beautifully pencilled on.

The host waylaid the hostess, who had a cocktail glass in each hand and appeared preoccupied. I thought her adorable--she was quite short and had very small gold slippers and Buster Brown blond bobbed hair. “Oh, how do you do!” she said, stopping. “How about putting down the glasses and shaking hands?” said Ray Coleman. “Here, you take this, then,” she said, making him hold one of the glasses: I thought he looked a little severe as he stood with the cocktail in his hand. “There’s so much traffic,” she remarked, “that it’s hard to receive people right.” She smiled charmingly with a little mauve-rouged, moist and lovely American mouth. Her hand, which she gave me now, was fragile and small, and, with her thin round bare arm, seemed like some soft little tentacle. “What a nice apartment!” I said. “It’s the apple of our eye,” she replied. That wasn’t quite right either, but, as it evidently was the apple of Coleman’s, he smiled with satisfaction as he demurred that they were “a little cramped for space.”

A bulky woman in green--the one with the silver turban--blazed upon my vision. She recognized me and we shook hands. She was one of those plain elderly ladies who do something or other and whom we meet at parties, but whose names we have difficulty in remembering. I had a drink which Mrs. Coleman had given me and I asked the lady with the silver turban whether I couldn’t get her one. She said: “A little of that Scotch--straight,” and we sat down, at her suggestion, on a large ottoman in front of the fireplace. She had the hearty manners and broad speech of an old _vivandière_--an old _vivandière_ of the social revolution, I thought, and approached her with a special respect.

“What we have in America,” she declared--we had arrived, through Prohibition, at politics--“is government by headlines! What’s the actual explanation of these booms for Cox and Wood? Neither one has the brains of a rabbit. But their names are one-syllable words. They’re one-syllable words! I’m a newspaper woman and I know!” “So is Debs,” I suggested. “Yes,” she replied, “but he’s out.” I felt that I had said something stupid. I had let her see that I was only an outsider.

My whole point of view at this period was still largely taken over from my old school-friend, Hugo Bamman: he had come, after the War, to live in Greenwich Village, and I had been brought there by his example. It was Hugo who had taken me around and who had told me what to think of what I saw; and I had seen through Hugo’s eyes. The people whom Hugo thought important seemed important to me, too: he and they, I believed, were leaders, leaders of the true social idealism which cut under capitalistic politics. To them the social revolution seemed as real as their love affairs; and I had often a guilty consciousness that it was not quite real enough to me. This plain-spoken woman, for example, to whom I presumed to talk of politics, might, for all I knew, have just returned from Russia--might have fought on the barricades. Her bad language and her great bare chest might represent the heroic braveries of some heart-breaking campaign--the devotion to some anarchist lover, deported or put in prison; the shouldering of some burden of poverty; or perhaps some point-blank vindication of basic human rights in the teeth of the mounted police and the mob.

In that company I had always felt humble: beyond publishing a few satiric verses in a radical magazine, I had never myself struck any blow in the war for humanity (Hugo Bamman was a freelance and a communist, whereas I professed no political faith and had a tame and respectable job in a publisher’s office); but, like Hugo, I had served in the other war, and had served as an enlisted man, and after seeing all the nations of the West temporarily scrambled together and the social order turned upside down, I had come away with a new conviction of the necessity of human solidarity. “Ten Days That Shook the World”--they had given me pause when I had read about them one morning, among the inanities of the Paris _Herald_, after a night spent sleeping in a puddle. In college, I had read of the Russia of the Czars as one reads about the Middle Ages; but now I had been forced to recognize, even among Americans, and as one of the strongest instincts of society, that horrifying contempt of a dominating class for the lives of those they dominate. So that, by the time I had got out of the Army, I had acquired a scorn for the pursuit of money, position or rank: the people who cared for such things seemed now to me sinister or childish. It appeared impossible ever again to accept conventional values complacently, to acquiesce in the prosperous inertia and the provincial ignorance of America. One could never go back again now to living indifferently or trivially; one was afraid of lending oneself to some offense against that unhappy humanity which one shared with other men.

“Yes, of course,” I replied, “he’s out.--And Wood is such a gentlemanly fellow!--he hasn’t any of the Regular Army mannerisms--he’s surprising in that way. You think he’s going to be awful, and then he turns out to be quite a relief after listening to the regular West Point line. You can perfectly see why Roosevelt got on with him. Neither one was an ordinary ruffian. Yet both, at bottom, were stupid men. Roosevelt was only just civilized enough to know and remember more facts than his neighbors. But all his imagination was good for was habitually to make a melodrama out of the most serious affairs of the world--a melodrama with himself as hero.”

Her eye had strayed, she hailed a young man with a slit-eyed impassive gaze, who, his hands in his trousers-pockets, had stationed himself near us. I felt abashed--what I had said had betrayed me as a young bourgeois trying to play up to her: it had given me away as never having been at the barricades!--“Oh, Bobby!” she exclaimed, “your ballet was marvellous! Those divine Chinese whites!” The young man accepted the compliment, with no attempt to turn it off or to pretend embarrassment. He seemed serious and complacent: I wondered whether he were Jewish--he was blond, but had a hooked nose. He replied without change of expression and bending over with his hands in his pockets: “It’s the first time, so far as I know, that Chinese white has been used in the theatre. I have two different kinds of white contrasted.” “How did you ever do it?” said Sue Borglum (that, it turned out, was my companion’s name). “I was experimenting for two years,” he replied. I could tell from his accent that he was Scotch: besides, his eyes remained narrow and solemn, and a Jew, no matter how serious, no matter how relentlessly preoccupied with the importance of his own activities, would have veiled with some irony of politeness his human and earth-bound ambitions in this Valley of the Shadow under the eye of a Jealous God. “I don’t see,” she protested, emphatically, “how people ever have the patience to go on experimenting for effects they may never be able to get! In the newspaper game, it’s different: we never experiment: we know how to get our effects and we get them right off, the same day.--And they’re forgotten the same day!” He answered, without smiling: “There’s going to be a photograph of my set in Bradley Foster’s book on the ballet.” He looked around as some one grasped his arm.

Daisy Coleman was talking in a corner with an anomalous slight little man; they were drinking the cocktails she had been carrying. She seemed appetizing in her lobster-bisque dress, her paler flesh-colored stockings and her little gold slippers. She was talking over the back of a chair, with one knee on the seat and with both hands clasping the top, like a little girl at school, chatting between classes: the conversation was accompanied with sympathetic movements of the elevated foot. As I watched her, I saw Ray Coleman, smiling in a curious fixed way at nobody in particular, go over, interrupt the conversation, detach Daisy from the little tadpole and launch her again on the company at large. She came forward rather blankly and, it seemed to me, a little sullenly.

Ray Coleman had left Hugo Bamman standing huddled against the mantelpiece and staring out through his thick myopic lenses; and it occurred to me at once that he could talk better than I to Sue Borglum. He would be sure to have the right tone--and besides, he never seemed to care whether women were young or old, attractive or plain. “Ah, there he is!” I cried--I disloyally used to kid him--“Bamman: The People’s Friend!” He looked about, smiling vaguely, then, locating us, craned forward, and bubbled and beamed over Sue.--I got up and intercepted Daisy.

She began by making an earnest effort to discharge her obligations as a hostess, but I could see that her heart wasn’t in it. “Don’t you want another cocktail?” she suggested. “I’m afraid the one you got was all water. Ray has just made some new ones.”

“You were in _Patsy_, weren’t you?” I asked: I knew that she had been a chorus-girl. “I think that that was about the best musical show that I ever saw--I went to see it four times!” “Well, we couldn’t complain,” she said (it had had a phenomenal run). “Which one were you? I don’t recognize you.” “Oh, I was just in the chorus,” she said. “And then I was one of the pages that came down the steps with the candles in the _Honeymoon Moon_ number.” “Oh, were you one of those pages?” I exclaimed. “You were awfully cute! I remember you well!--and that set with the lavender drop and the orange moon was marvellous!--Do you ever miss the stage?” “I’m beginning to now. Of course, it’s an awful lot of work--so you don’t get very much fun out of it.” With the intention of documenting myself--in those days I shared Hugo’s enthusiasm for sociological documentation--I questioned her about the theatre. I was delighted by her candor. “By the time the show opens,” she told me, “everybody is groggy. When we were rehearsing for _Patsy_, I drank so much to keep myself going that I finally got some kind of d.t.’s: I saw a horse sitting beside my bed.” I expressed interest. “It was sitting by my bed with its hoofs on its knees--this way: like hands--its hoofs were painted blue. It was sitting there leering at me.” “Were you able to go on?” “Yes, the doctor gave me a great big drink of something bitter and I went to sleep and slept it off.” “It must be a terrific thing to rehearse one of those shows!” “It’s a lot of work to be beautiful--especially when you aren’t,” she added. “Oh, come!” I replied, “I was just thinking that you were one of the very few actresses I had seen who were as pretty on the stage as off!” She made a gesture of burlesque demureness, putting a finger to her mouth. I inquired about the hardships of the stage. “Once, at the Winter Garden,” she told me, “I was in one of those living curtains: they left us up there for an hour and we nearly got roasted with the lights. When they let us down again, half the girls fainted.--Oh, yes; us girls,” she concluded, parodying us girls, “us girls has our trials!” I found her interesting, attractive, amusing, and profoundly sympathetic. “What a lovely color your hair is!” I told her. “Just the color of honey!” “Mm-Mm!” said Daisy. “More! I eat that stuff up!”

Ray Coleman, smiling, came up behind her and put his arms about her, with his hands over her breasts. “Don’t you think he looks like Ned Grover?” Daisy inquired of her husband. “No: not a bit,” replied Coleman. He explained to me humorously: “She always has these insane ideas about people looking like each other--and there’s never the faintest resemblance!” I seemed to make out that Ned Grover raised an issue.

“Won’t you let me fill your glass?” he suggested. “I’ve got some real bonded rye over here that I’ve only just opened. I thought at first I wouldn’t open it to-night, because when you have a lot of people like this, anything special is lost on them--you might just as well give them plain bootlegger’s stuff.” “I thought your cocktails were splendid!” “Well, I know you’ll appreciate this rye: it’s the real Old Overholt, bottled in bond.”

“Is Rita Cavanagh here?” I asked over the glass-topped drinking-caddy. “Yes: she’s here somewhere”--it gave him pleasure to feel himself master of a company among whom distinguished names might be casually mislaid. “Haven’t you seen her?” “I’ve never met her.” “I’ll introduce you to her.” He lifted his tall amber glass with an air: I saw that his dark eyebrows, which he was always raising in conversation with the air of a man of the world, nearly met above his nose.

He led me over to the divan. Rita Cavanagh was a sharp-nosed little thing with mousey bobbed hair; she wore a shabby black dress. She was so small that I hadn’t noticed her. But, as I shook hands with her, she gave me from eyes of a greenish uncertain color, a curious alert intent look, as of a fox peering out from covert. She was curled up in the middle of the divan and evidently the centre of its company. I told her how much I had liked her poems.

Ray Coleman, with smiling politeness, requested her to recite. “Did you know I’d been asked to read in public?” she said. She spoke in rather a dry staccato voice, and with something like an English accent, which seemed to me artificial.--“Where is that?” inquired Ray Coleman. “At the Poets’ League.”--“Well, you’re going to do it, aren’t you?” said a young man who looked like a baseball player. “Well, would you? Do you think it’s the thing to do?” She took a brief puff at her cigarette--staccato and precise. “Do they offer you money?” asked the man. “Yes.” “Then do it!” “But they come up and talk to you afterwards, and you’re supposed to answer their questions. What would you _say_ to them?” “Say to them?” said the young man. “What did Shakespeare say to the horses? _Whoa! Get over there! Back up!_” She laughed, puckering her eyes, and again raised the cigarette.

This young man, I felt, was a good fellow--his hulking frame, his jutting brow and his prognathous jaw seemed to mask some gentleness and modesty--but I had the impression that he was jealously straining toward Rita with a maximum of nervous effort, was almost, in fact, on the point of seizing her; and I felt that all the three other men about her were bent in the same direction; and that I myself, though I had only just met her, was about to become involved in the competition. And, since I had told her that I liked her poems and since she had turned to me, acknowledging my compliments, as if they had gratified her especially, I began to find myself resenting the other men almost as rivals.

She laughed--on distinct, impish, economized notes: “I might take an apple with me,” she said, “or a lump of sugar.” “Couldn’t you rehearse a little for us?” Ray Coleman suggested, inclining and smiling again. “You’ll find us an appreciative audience!”--“This is one that I wrote to-day,” she said, taking a last puff at her cigarette--“This very day!” And, sitting back against the wall behind the couch, straightening her neck and throwing up her head, she began to recite.

The effect was, at first, to embarrass me: it was a little as if a Shakespearian actor were suddenly, off the stage, to begin expressing private emotions with the intonations of the play. The only girl I had ever known who had been able to write respectable poetry had been in the habit of reading aloud--when she read aloud at all--as if her poems had been compositions which she had never seen before, poems written by some other person and by some one of whom she disapproved. But in the gradual silence of the room, amid the respect with which all seemed to turn toward her, those deep sonorities of sorrow and wonder began to move me as much as a play. I had admired, in reading her lyrics, the uncounterfeitable force of sincerity which, in dealing with classic themes--themes in other hands commonplace--the longing for home, the shortness of life, the passing of love--with an effect both of boldness and austerity, had not hesitated to clothe them in an imagery drawn directly from ordinary life. But I had not known, till I heard her recite, to what music these things had been tuned: all her art was in her ear; her words had little color for the eye. Now, in the poem which she had told us she had just written, she described a bonfire built on the beach, which shut out for those around it the empty weight of the waters and the desolate litter of the shore, where a poor disfeatured corpse lay, worried by unresting waves, among the seaweed, bleached boards and dead dogfish--as the joy which we know to be doomed may seem yet to overflow the moment. And in a second poem, the sight of two children--one blotted from birth in face and mind, the other creeping on wry spider legs--yet dressed and fed and sent out every morning by the mothers of wretched streets to play with the other children, was made to shake us with that despair--the dammed anguish of our own frustration--which, in the presence of some pitiful human failure may overcome us with the sudden conviction that no satisfactions can be real beside the humiliations of life. And on her lips, the barrenness of the shore, the dingy images of the streets, were a kind of song.

In the pause after the second poem, dramatically tense and distinct as every syllable she had spoken, a smooth-faced and girlish boy whom, if my attitude toward all the company had not been so much one of respect, I should certainly have considered a fool, said, “That _does_ something to me--that last one!” The baseball player shook his head and said: “Gosh! that’s a knockout!” Rita said, “Yes: I’ve written that one since I’ve seen you! You haven’t heard that one! I’m _so glad_ that you like it!”

Somebody suddenly turned on the phonograph, which began jigging a popular fox-trot. Ray Coleman went over and stopped it, and I saw him engaged with his wife in what looked like a restrained altercation. Then he returned to us, bringing Daisy. “I’m sorry,” he explained, smiling--his smile was beginning to get on my nerves. “Daisy has the phonograph habit: it’s like a drug--she can’t keep away from it! It was unpardonable to jar on those lovely poems!”

“Yes,” said Daisy, “I hope you’ll forgive me, but I thought you were all through.” “We had hoped that you weren’t,” insisted Ray. “I wish you’d let us hear some more!” Rita replied, puckering up her eyes, “Oh, I think that’s quite enough of me for one evening!”

“How sweet she looks in pink!” said Sue Borglum: Daisy had been standing by like a bad little child reproved. “She looks like one of those big pink bonbons on the top of a box of candy.” “Melt in your mouth,” said Daisy, with her frank and charming grin.--“Speaking of clothes,” said Rita, “has anybody seen Myra Busch since she got back from Paris?” “_Have_ I?” returned Sue Borglum. “She says she bought it all with what she got from writing for _McMoony’s_, but if she did, _McMoony’s_ must pay her a damn sight more than they ever paid me. She’s so wide-eyed about it, too! I asked her if she hadn’t been able to find a night to go with that lace nightgown.” “Oh, Myra Busch is a push-over!” said Daisy, a little snappishly. “She’s got round heels!”

Sue Borglum’s pleasantry had been in the vein of the Village; Daisy’s was in the taste of Broadway--I do not know which, at that period, enchanted me the more. Since I had come back to America from France, I had been noticing with a new attention the way the Americans talked: I had read, with astonished gratification, the first books of those American writers who seemed making a new kind of literature out of that sprawling square-syllabled speech where the words had been like colorless frame-houses on the outskirts of an American town, a language fit only, it had seemed, for the uses of a prosaic trade or of a plebeian extravagance and irony. And I noted American slang with an interest self-conscious and pedantic.

I felt, however, that Daisy’s husband disapproved of her coarseness and sharpness, and I resented his failure to appreciate her.

“I understand you caught a thief,” said Sue Borglum, addressing Ray. “Yes,” said Ray, with satisfaction. “Caught him, convicted him, and sent him where he’ll do no more thieving.” “Burglar or sneak-thief?” asked Sue Borglum. “All kinds of a thief!” replied Ray. “He got into the house in broad daylight. Somebody rang the bell last Sunday afternoon, and I pressed the button to open the door, but nobody came up. Now, I always make it a rule, whenever that happens, to go down and find out what’s up!”

I had often in my own apartment responded to these false alarms, but checking up on them, I reflected, was like Crainquebille’s prison stool chained to the leg of the bed--an idea which would never have occurred to me.

“I went down,” Ray Coleman continued, following Daisy with his eyes, as she quietly detached herself from the group and went back in the direction of the phonograph, “but there was nobody in the hall--and nobody on the floor below. Then I went to all the other apartments and asked whether anybody had just come in, and they all said that nobody had. Then I went back and got a gun and a flashlight, and I went down into the basement. I held the flashlight out to one side, so that if he fired he wouldn’t hit me. And lo and behold! there was Mr. Thief hiding in the coalbin! I covered him with the gun and asked him what he was up to, and he began telling me a long sob-story about how he hadn’t any place to sleep and had just come in to spend the night.” Smiling steadily, he gazed at Daisy, who had gone back to the corner again to talk to the anomalous little man with the dark amusing eyes, the natty blue suit and the belling sailor’s trousers. “I said, ‘Well, you just wait here awhile till we find out a little more about that story,’ and I locked him in the basement and telephoned the police. When we searched him we found all the jewelry hidden away in his shoes!--two stick-pins, a ring and a wrist-watch, and five dollars in bills and change. He’d stolen them from a man in Eleventh Street!” “Oh, they weren’t your things, then!” said Rita, who had been listening with that odd tension which she seemed to apply to everything, whether of absorbing interest or not.

“Oh, no,” Ray heartily reassured her. “He didn’t get anything of ours. He didn’t get the chance! I’ve got some etchings and some valuable firsts--so I can’t afford to take risks. And Daisy has an ostrich-feather evening wrap that’s worth three hundred dollars. The fellow on Eleventh Street had missed a lot of other things, too; but they couldn’t get the little bastard to tell them what had become of them. They beat him up at the station, but they couldn’t get him to tell--he was just sullen. A West Indian boy. We ought to have some way of keeping such scum out of the country. If they’d only do with all the criminals”--he spoke with a sort of exaltation and his eyes were rapt away to Daisy--“if they’d only do with all the criminals what they do with the regular gunmen! They’re not supposed to beat a man up more than just so much, you know--but the way that they get around that in the case of the big thugs is to send them around from one police station to the other. As soon as they get done with them in one place, they just send them along to another--so that the men in any one station can always say they haven’t beaten ’em up more than just so much, and yet they can give ’em all they want. If they’d been able to do that with my West Indian friend, we might have found out about the silk bathrobe that he’d stolen from the man on Eleventh Street.”

“Yes,” said Hugo, whose eyes, behind his spectacles, I had felt beginning to glow with antagonism. “They might even have made him confess to stealing the towers of Notre Dame!” “What do you mean?” asked Ray. “I mean, if you torture anybody long enough, you can make them confess to anything. That was what the Inquisition did, wasn’t it?”

I perceived that, although Ray Coleman enjoyed entertaining poets and radical journalists, he was far from sharing the humanitarian feeling which at that epoch pervaded the Village. I had thought, when I first came in, that his dinner-jacket struck for the Village an unfamiliar and incongruous note; and I was growing more and more sympathetic with Daisy. I began to concoct an ironic short story, something rather in the vein of _Crainquebille_ or of Maupassant’s _Boule de Suif_, in which a vulgar but charming little wife was to be patronized and bullied by her husband--who would be editor of a popular newspaper: one day when the husband had gone out, the wife was to find in the basement a poor starving tailor’s boy, who would tell her of the petty tyrannies of the presser for whom he had worked. And, remembering her life on the stage--the cruelties of the living curtain; remembering the harshness of her husband--all that money-grubbing anti-human world in which she had always found her own life so harassed--she would listen to the boy with sympathy, and would be just on the point of offering him some clothes and something to eat, when the husband would return with the police; the boy would turn out to be a thief whom the husband had caught and locked up!--There would have to be something more to it, though--I would think about it later.

In the meantime, Hugo’s skirmish with Ray had ended in an emphatically disguised evasion on the latter’s part as he had become aware that his attitude toward criminals might be considered intellectual bad form. I inquired of Hugo, aside, where Daisy Coleman came from. “From Pittsburgh, I think,” he replied--then still chafing with repressed resentment over his argument with Ray, he added: “You never seem to be able to take people for granted!--you always want to know where they come from!” I answered that those things interested me.

And I brooded a little on Pittsburgh--I had been there as a boy--my mother had had a school-friend who had married and gone to live there, and we had visited them once. They had lived in a massive and formidable house, with dingy Ionic pillars, and with blue and green stained-glass windows which, far from adorning the interior, had seemed to me at the time merely sombre, forbidding and blind--there had been a boy about my age called Junior, and he had had a great many expensive toys; an Indian costume and a military costume (which I had thought a good deal of a bore) and the most elaborate toy railroad that I had ever seen outside a toy-store--a labyrinth of signals, switches, turntables and tunnels; it had covered the floors of several rooms and rendered them uninhabitable. This boy had also had fencing foils; a real rifle; a thing that he told you to look through but which squirted water into your eye; and a device of rubber tubes and bulbs, which made plates jump up and down on the table. These luxuries had strongly impressed me and they now presented themselves to my mind--as well as Junior’s egoism and arrogance, the arrogance of an over-indulged child, which had kept me from quite getting on with him. Now, as I remembered it for the first time in years, I found that I detested that household. There had been a Pennsylvania Dutch father, who had made money in the coke business and whose domineering silences had oppressed the dining-table; and there had been a mother who had been always playing the piano, and singing, with inexhaustible vivacity, the scores of old musical comedies--from the _Sultan of Sulu_ to _Forty-five Minutes from Broadway_--which she had heard in New York. I had, at the time I came to live in the Village, developed something of that inverted snobbishness which, in Hugo’s case, had impelled him to go to all the garment-workers’ balls at the same time that he would grimly decline a dinner where he knew he would be expected to dress; and I had at that moment the kind of emotions which I thought Hugo would probably have in connection with a large heavy house inhabited by a Pittsburgh capitalist. Thank heaven! I said to myself, spurred no doubt by Hugo’s rebuke, if I ever go to Pittsburgh again, I shan’t have to be visiting there! Here, in Daisy, is the real vital Pittsburgh: frank, vulgar, humorous, human!

“She married some fellow from Pittsburgh, I think, before she married Ray Coleman,” added Hugo, after a moment during which he had gulped his drink, self-consciously and hurriedly--he was excessively sensitive and so haunted by the fear of hurting people’s feelings that his sharpness was invariably followed by a spasm of special affability. “They made a honeymoon trip on a motor-cycle from Pittsburgh to Atlantic City. They had all kinds of fantastic accidents. She told me about it once. It must have been awfully fine!” I, too, thought that it must have been fine. That was the real, the live America--where our bravery and freedom lay! I drank my highball up. I saw them, skidding breathtakingly in the ditches--skinned, bruised and mud-beplastered! Dodging motors and trucks, shaking off towns and cities, like twigs that had been caught in their wheels and had scraped the mud-guard a little, and had then been whipped away!--masters of that new and American and almost super-human sense--the sense of motor traffic! Till, at last, after boiling hot baths, they had lain clean in Atlantic City, in their clean-sheeted hotel bed, with the ice-water in the pitcher and the room as warm as a hothouse. In the morning, they would have breakfast in bed!

Hugo had turned away to bubble, giggle, and gasp to a radical journalist with a harsh western accent and extraordinary personal charm: I rose to talk to the theatrical designer, who, with deep-lodged slit-eyed self-satisfaction, stood near me, his arms folded, unmoved by what went on about him. “Are you doing any shows,” I asked, “this spring?” “Just the ballet in the _Merry-Go-Round_” he answered. “Next year,” he went on to explain, “I want to stage the Iliad and the Odyssey.” “The Iliad and the Odyssey?” I repeated a little blankly. “I want to do them in a cycle,” he said--“something like Wagner’s Ring.” “How long would it take?” I inquired. “Not more than a week,” he replied. “I shan’t try to have everything, of course. I’ll have to leave out a good many incidents--though I believe that, when the public have been interested, I’ll be able to put it on in an outdoor stadium and do it on a bigger scale--there would be a week for each. My production next fall would be an experiment with that in view.” “That would be awfully interesting,” I said: the air then, especially in the theatre, was so full of high novelty and striving that no project seemed impossible. “What sort of text are you going to use?” “Fritz Fishbein is making an adaptation of Butcher and Lang--it’s in a sort of free verse, that will be chanted to music. Boulomé is working out the old Greek modes, so that we’ll have music that will be really Greek.” “That sounds extremely interesting,” I repeated.--“Come in here,” he said, “and I’ll show you the drawings.”

He led me into a little study with a desk, a window-seat and some bookcases, and opened on the desk a large portfolio--I don’t know how he happened to have it there. “How,” I asked, “are you going to do the clangor of Apollo’s silver bow?” “I’m not going to do it,” he said, “that is, I’m not going to make the attempt to reproduce the sound. I’m not going to do anything realistically. There’ll be no sound at all. You’ll just see Apollo off on a hill--just a little silhouette, perfectly black, but awful, you know--with a bow in his hands. And then every one will cover their ears and sink down to the ground, and the stage will turn green-black, and then everything will be black.” I turned over the water-color drawings, so beautifully and lovingly covered with large clinging sheets of tissue-paper. “What’s this one?” I asked. “That’s the slaying of the suitors in the Odyssey.” “They look a little like white rats,” I commented. “Yes: I meant to give that suggestion--those are masks that they’re to wear throughout the play.” I had never heard before of using masks.

Rita Cavanagh had come up behind us, and I made room for her to look at the drawings. I had been aware of her voice in the next room saying: “Oh, Bobby McIlvaine’s showing his Homer designs!--I want to see them!”

“Oh, what a beautiful Pallas Athena!” she cried, as she stood over the portfolio beside me. I noticed again how shabby her black dress was: she must be very poor, I thought. “Almost like a man!” she continued. It was a figure all in silver-gray, spare, upstanding and clean, like some male heroic woman of the Village--with a helmet that shaded its eyes and with an owl perched on its shoulder--rather an odd-looking owl, I thought: thin and long, like Athena herself, but like her, austere and impressive. And I found myself delighted--especially now that Rita Cavanagh was admiring them--with McIlvaine’s designs for Homer. I seemed to see that, for all their eccentricity, they were closer to the spirit of the poems than the sobriety and smoothness of conventional representations: they had something of the unclassical stiffness of archaic Greek sculpture. Rita Cavanagh smiled, and I smiled, at Venus caught in the net with Mars, her little rose-dotted breasts a charming pink behind the gold meshes.

Hugo suddenly blundered into the room in his purblind big-booted way and took down his old felt hat from the bookcase--where he had carefully put it, I realized, in order to get at it quickly and without searching among the other hats. I wondered how he could bring himself to leave so enchanting a party so soon. He signalled to me a friendly, but detached and remote, farewell--stooping, stuttered and bubbled good-nights over Rita and Bobby McIlvaine--and abruptly was gone. I heard him ask in the next room: “Where’s Daisy?” and the host reply, as if with humorous frankness: “I don’t know where she is!”

“Oh, what _lovely_ browns and grays!” breathed Rita, before the autumnal smock of Eumæus. “I never saw such lovely browns!” Her italicized “lovely” was not gushing, but had a sort of disinterested and passionate conviction. That was the sort of thing that impressed me about her. She seemed to feast upon the color, eating it with her eyes. I should myself have stopped at something brighter, and I felt guiltily that I should have been wrong. But she lingered over Eumæus: “Like the leaves in October!” she went on. “Like the leaves in the autumn mud! Such delicacy and such color standing out against something neutral--and common!”

The baseball player, or whatever he was, whom I had noticed on the divan, was now standing in the doorway, with his hat in his hand. “I’m going along, Rita,” he said, “take you over if you’re ready to go!” I saw that he was unsure and self-conscious. “I’m not going for a long time yet,” she replied--her voice had the tautness, the distinctness and the metallic quality of wire--though of a wire which twanged with the vibrations of some strong and superior temper; yet she tried at the same time to smile at him with a definite effect of good-will, at once elfin and sharply registered, as she added for his consolation: “I don’t want to be taken home to-night, anyway. I came alone, and I want to go home alone! I’m an independent woman, I am!” “Well, go ahead and have your old single standard!” he met her, putting humorously his best face on it, and disappeared from the doorway.

She turned over to a group of nymphs, the wild girls of some northern loch. “Some people think they’re not graceful enough for nymphs,” said McIlvaine, without expression. “People who say they’re not graceful,” said Rita, “don’t know anything about grace!” She spoke with a passionate vehemence which seemed to me rather excessive--yet I felt something of the awe of the infidel who overhears the prayer of the believer. “They think that grace has something to do with round bodies and Greek dancing! These nymphs of yours _are_ beautiful!--they have the natural beauty of country girls--they’re graceful even when they’re gawky and awkward!”

The pretty boy--the one who had asserted that Rita’s poem had “done something” to him--glided behind her in a sinuous newtish way and slid one arm about her waist. His hair was glossy and parted in the middle and he was scarcely taller than she: his tapering and shapely hand, which I saw--and saw with distaste--lying against her black dress, would have seemed too small for a man’s, if her own hands had not been so tiny--not with the American thinness of Daisy’s, but with a miniature complete beauty, at once childlike and mature, as of some muse or magic being. He did not speak at once, but looked with her.--The next picture represented Penelope, who had an unexpected proud angularity.

“Won’t Ulysses get hell,” said the boy, “when he comes back home from his trip!” “No,” said Rita, “she’s noble!” “Yes,” the boy acquiesced at once, “she’s beautifully done! Great austerity! Great restraint!”

She had come to the blank cover at the back and slowly turned it over, almost as if with reverence. “I think they’re _beautiful!_” she said, “_beautiful!_” I had heard people say that the flowers were beautiful, or that the front room was beautiful, or even that the view of the Hudson or the painting of Renoir was beautiful--but I had never before heard it said with such authority and such simple intensity. Though still shy of her unconvincing accent and suspicious of a pose, I was, in regions just beneath the surface, excited by this authority and intensity--I found myself heated, too, by the fire which the drawings had seemed so to kindle in her. Bobby McIlvaine accepted her tribute in silence distended by pride and tied up the strings of the portfolio. I said: “I must go to see your ballet!” “It’s not much,” he replied, “but the white is something to see.”

“Well, Princess,” said Rita’s friend, the boy with the insinuating hands, “are you ready to sail away?” I realized that her rôle of princess was a part of some romance which they had spun together, and I divined, in another moment, that it was a romance of which she was tired. “No,” she said, “I want to stay a little longer,” and added, with her elfin smile: “Send the boatman back at twelve!”--He swept low an invisible plumed hat.--“Leave the outside bolts open: I can push the door myself!”--He bowed again and backed away, and, as he retreated, she became more amusing, entering more willingly into the spirit of the legend which they had evidently elaborated, which they had perhaps lived, together.--“But shut the watchdogs in their kennels, so that they won’t bay at me when I come. Tell the old woman who makes the fires that she shall have her snuff on Thursday, and that I shan’t wake her from sleep to-night, when she’s dreaming of the little stony river of her girlhood in the North.--Tell her to mind the fire, though,” she added, giving good measure to her friend, who now impressed me rather disconcertingly as perhaps not a boy at all, but a man of mature years whose coquetry was wearing stale.--“Though sleep is sweet, the sparks are always flying, even after the faggot is dead!”

Some originality I felt in her having so entered into the old woman, who seemed to have nothing to do with the plumed hat which her partner was pretending to doff, interested me and made me like her, just when I was beginning to be rather sickened by this business about the Princess and the boatman.

I could hear the voice of her admirer, as he left, just outside the study door, saying good-night to Ray Coleman and asking him where Daisy was, and Coleman’s voice replying, as if in frank humorous confession, disclaiming all responsibility: “I don’t know! I haven’t the slightest idea!”--Bobby McIlvaine, who had put away his drawings, and, having finished his own performance, was not disposed to be interested in the comedy which Rita and her friend were acting, had also gone out of the room.

“That river your old woman dreams about,” I began, hoping to keep Rita there, “sounds like something in up-state New York.” She looked up at me in her unaccountable, quick, nervous, searching way: “Do you come from there?” she asked. “No,” I said, “but I’ve been there a good deal.” She had a way of scrupulously following, of checking up with a special exactitude which suggested anxious conscious effort, all the moves of social intercourse, at the same time that she seemed always preoccupied with something different and more absorbing; she now nodded and lifted a moment a brief interested stare.

“Let’s sit down here, shall we?” she proposed, moving toward the window-seat. She curled up in one of the corners. “Do turn away that light--it’s so bright!” I turned aside the adjustable desk-light which was the only illumination in the room so that it lit only the farther wall: then I sat down on the window-seat, leaning up against the opposite corner.

Below the window lay Washington Square: it was still smooth and gleaming with wet. When I had come home before dinner to dress, idle, happy, and vaguely expectant, breathing in the rainy sidewalks of the last day of May, I had seen the sky, above the bulk of office buildings, high-piled with white banks of solid light, and in the Square, had found the pavements swimming with milky pallors and freshened by tenderest green. When I had gone to meet Hugo at the Brevoort, I had seen a pale peach-silver sun dissolving the light tree-fringes at the corner of the Avenue. Now these wonders had sprung from that delight--so long and so varied the days were! It was dark--there were the lamps and the taxis with their impudent brisk honking--spinning away through rainy May in the wet relieved fresh freedom.

Rita was looking out the window with her same strange trancèd seriousness. I asked: “Don’t you like the city just after it’s been raining? Hear how happy the taxis sound!” She smiled and said simply, “Yes.” I wondered whether she were still thinking of the drawings, of which I was almost becoming jealous. “Don’t you feel a little, though,” I ventured, “that it robs Homer of his own kind of subtlety to deliberately make him exotic by translating him into terms of the Russian ballet?” “Why--I hadn’t thought of that,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of the Russian ballet. I thought those drawings were beautiful in themselves--quite apart from Homer perhaps.” Then she added, after a pause: “That figure of Pallas Athena--so slender--so strong--so grave--so lightly built--as strong and yet as light as her spear! No _man_ could ever combine that power and that lightness!” “Yes,” I said, “that’s true, isn’t it?” “And then they talk,” she went on, “about women never having done anything really important! When the Greeks made the goddess of wisdom a woman! And just as important a woman goddess as the goddess of love!” I tried to assure her that I understood: “Yes, I know,” I replied, “men are always expecting the wrong things of women, aren’t they?”--while before my mind there aligned themselves, in the guise of long slender javelins, the long slender sentences of John Stuart Mill on the Subjection of Women. “It’s so _false_ of them,” she went on. “You know, some people who pretend to admire independence in women really want to prevent them from doing things! They think that a woman’s work is something she can put aside, as if she were laying down her knitting--or her embroidery! Whatever they may say, they can’t really believe in their hearts that her work is the thing she lives for, that she puts above everything and everybody!”

I assented briefly, but with earnest emphasis: the generous flow of my feeling had been perhaps a moment impeded by the “above everything and everybody”: my mounting moral exaltation lapsed for a space into a brooding happiness which hovered outside the window over the rain-freshened square--those romantic lamps that burned all night, while all night the speeding taxis, plying in happy privacy to a thousand dark addresses, took people, took lovers, home. To that part of my mind, however--the part which had been talking to Rita--from which my attention had been withdrawn, there presented itself a stupid remark: “I have read John Stuart Mill on the Subjection of Women!”

But it was Rita who, after a silence, went on with the conversation: “I’m so _tired_ of people,”--she spoke with violence--“who pretend to understand what women feel about things!--and then behave like any stupid stock-broker, who keeps a wife just as he keeps a car!--The stock-broker would really be more sensible, because he’d expect to give his wife certain things in return for what she gave him--she’d at least be paid in comfort and money for what she lost in independence!” The figure of the baseball player rose in my imagination: a good fellow, no doubt, but dull and boorish, with no subtlety and no high honor in his relations with women; quite unworthy of Rita! I was all on Rita’s side now: how I could share her fierceness against fools!--“I don’t believe _any_ man can understand!” But this seemed to shut me out again, and again I gazed out into the Square.

I was, however, after a moment, on the point of attempting to convince her that she might find that _I_ understood, when of a sudden, so peremptory and clear that we looked at each other startled, we heard from the next room, which we now became aware had been silent, the voice of Ray Coleman demanding: “Well, what have you got to say?”--and then Daisy Coleman, replying in a voice which sounded constrained, “Where’s all the party gone to?” “You can see for yourself they’ve all gone home: I suppose they saw that the hostess had left and decided that they didn’t want to stay!” “We weren’t gone so long, were we?” said Daisy. “I just went around the corner with Pete to get a glass of beer.” “You’ve been gone for an hour and a half!--And you!” he went on vehemently, evidently addressing Daisy’s late companion--the little man with the large eyes, I imagined. “You weren’t invited here to-night and you can leave right away!” “I invited him,” said Daisy. “Well, I asked you not to invite him!--Now, get out of here right away!--No: your things are not in there!--There’s your coat in the fireplace!--and there’s your stick in pieces over there!--and I threw your hat out the window! Maybe you can find it in the street!--Now, don’t stand there staring at me like that, but get out!” We heard him slam the door.

Rita and I got up quickly from the window-seat, but the tirade which followed checked us. “You humiliate me in my house!”--now that Ray Coleman had Daisy alone, he opened upon her his fiercest fire. “You drive my friends away! You send C. O. D. packages home!” “I had to have some stockings for to-night!” “Well, why didn’t you ask me for them? I won’t have you running up bills!” “Well, I can’t see what’s the idea of this big third act!” “I told you not to bring that little rat here!” “Well, you have all _your_ friends--I don’t see why I shouldn’t have mine!” “You sat in there on the window-seat and let him see your legs!” “We were just telling jokes in there--Gus Dunbar was in there, too.” “I don’t mind having Gus see your legs--he’s a friend of the family, but--” “Well, will you just let me have a list of all the family friends that you’re willing to have see my legs?” “Don’t be vulgar!” he replied.

Rita determinedly and swiftly broke into the lighted room, and I followed her. “I must really go,” she said. “It’s been such a marvellous party!--I’ve been having such a marvellous time that I’ve stayed much too late!” I made my apologies, also, and got Rita’s coat out of the bedroom and helped her on with it. “Why, it’s not late at all,” said Ray Coleman. “I’m afraid it’s we who haven’t been very entertaining!” When we said good-by to Daisy, she merely met us with a pale drunken gaze, and remarked: “Well, I opened cold!”

Outside, I caught a taxi and asked Rita where she lived. “Oh, dear,” she demurred, “I don’t think I want to go home. I think I’ll go to somebody’s house--let’s see, whose house shall I go to?” I asked her if she wouldn’t come to my house. “But you want to go to bed, don’t you?” I assured her that I didn’t, for hours.