Chapter V (1)

In that asphalt sky of August, the summer sun burnt a blunt point of light, like the blinding violet-livid torch with which a worker on city mains gashes through a tough piece of pipe. A gray haze blurred the vistas of Fifth Avenue and dulled the too full-blown bushes and trees which one saw beyond Washington Arch, as if the buildings and pavements themselves, under the action of the terrible heat, were vaporizing and fogging the air.

Down a side-street, an old white truck-horse stood sleeping and stupefied, its head lowered like a lizard’s and its eyelids closed, while the driver, sluggish and sweating, piled a mountain of boxes on the dray. And farther over, on Seventh Avenue, I saw a barefoot ragged boy, who had flung himself down on his stomach above the grating that ventilates the subway, and whose coat was blown up violently behind him, like the streamers of an electric fan, by the warm, sudden gust from the trains.

My handkerchief was sopped with sweat, and I was refreshed by an unexpected breeze which washed over the butt of the island the hot, bilgy river-smell, as if, now that the people of the Village had abandoned the Village for the summer, the waterside were invading the town. I saw nobody anywhere that I knew. On the corner of Twelfth Street, where Rita had lived, the obsolete beer-saloon still bore its discolored blue Pilsener sign.

It occurred to me to examine, as I passed them, those landmarks of Abingdon Square which, the morning of my first meeting with Rita, when I had been drunk with peach-brandy and poetry, had seemed to me impressive and romantic, but which I had afterward passed so many times without ever observing them closely. I now found that what I had taken for a statue of some interesting celebrity of the quarter was merely a monument to the soldiers of the ward who had died in the European War; and that the object which had figured to my fancy as a temple or a tomb was simply a disused band-stand.

Daisy and Pete had come recently to town. Gus Dunbar, who was now in Boston, had, at Daisy’s instigation, taken steps toward getting Pete a job there; and Pete had gone on to see about it, leaving Daisy for a few days in New York. She had called me up the day before, and, with the idea of getting away from the heat, I had suggested our going to Coney Island.

She was to meet me at the pier. I had not been to Coney Island since my childhood, and for some reason, I supposed that the boat left from the foot of Christopher Street. At the docks, I learned otherwise, and took a taxi down to the Battery, along the wide cobbled avenue that runs along beside the wharves.

There was the funny high yellow façade, built of wood but with an aspect of pasteboard: it had precisely, I remembered, the quality of the amusement-places of my boyhood, and it looked faded and flimsy now.

Daisy was waiting in the cavernous anteroom. In a corner of the high, darkish space, she showed charmingly neat, small and clear. In spite of the roundness of her hips and the smartness of her clothes--her white dress and her tight _cloche_ hat--she might almost have been mistaken for a child. How cute and how chic she looked in those short, tight skirts that cut off her slim legs just above the knees! “Well,” she greeted me with her unblinking smile, “the first twenty years of my life I spent waiting for the Coney Island boat!” I apologized and explained. “But why didn’t you find out first?” she protested. “It’s a good thing you didn’t think it left from the foot of Forty-second Street!”

“Well, how do you feel?” I inquired, as we climbed the flight of steps. “I feel pretty sassy!” she said.

I had of course missed the four-o’clock boat, and now we should have to wait for the five-o’clock one. But up-stairs, the gray-timbered shadow of the low-roofed leaving-place was tranquillizing and cool: through a low narrow opening that ran along the side, one had a glimpse of the crude, unshadowed blocks of the enormous downtown buildings, where only one sheer green roof and a steep crane, on a float that was green, broke the cliffs of colorlessness.

I had brought some gin, and I bought some ginger-ale at the refreshment stand. “I must tell you my joke,” she said, as we drank that impossible concoction--at once too bitter and too sickeningly sweet--for which I had acquired a certain affection, because I had come to associate it with Daisy. “I’ve made up an idea for a joke. There’ll be a caption that says ‘Striking a Happy Medium’--and then there’ll be a picture of a medium--you know, a spiritualistic medium--with a big piece of bogus ectoplasm coming out of her mouth and a grin of satisfaction on her face, and a man with his arm all raised, just ready to smack her down.--Don’t you think that’s pretty good?” I told her that I thought it was terrible.

There was a large, old, slot-machine phonograph standing against the wall: it was lyre-shaped and had a mirror in its belly, and seemed stationed as an outpost and siren for the frivolities and gaieties beyond. We put a nickel in and started it playing an antiquated xylophone record of the _American Patrol_: its patriotic gallop, half-stifled behind the glass and losing itself in the wide, gray waiting-room, woke in my heart a happy response as if to Fourth-of-July bands of my boyhood.

Then the boat was in; the doors were opened; we went down and stepped over the side. Assailed by the sunlight, we were dazed: in the brightness, we seemed merely to enter a smell of white boat-paint and to ascend to a brisk and merry tinkling of some pretty antique tune.

I pulled camp-stools beside a rail on an upper deck.--Sea and shore were rawest gray and the sky a raw, pale blue--it was not that the blue was pale, but rather that blue was lacking. The sun streaked the water to the west with a bright glaze of zinc.--I got some more ginger-ale and a couple of paper cups from the little soft-drink bar below.

On one side, as we left the dock, we looked out at the Statue of Liberty, a solid, dull slug of gray against a colorless, burning sky; and on the other, at the old red fort, round and full of holes like a mouse-trap, with its rusty and abandoned barracks.

The thin strains of linkéd sweetness, with now and then a note frailly sour, of the harp and violin--some old musical-comedy tune I remembered from my college days--seemed to me even in this false and elfin echo to keep more that was human and charming than the pace of the newer dance-music had ever allowed it to possess; and as I glanced at Daisy, gazing out like a charming, good-natured child, at the sights of the passing shore, I was touched with sentimental revery.

Then the music was blotted out by the vehement snoring of a steamer and the pert sput-sputtering of a tug.

She seemed unusually carefree to-day, and I saw that her lips were rouged an unusually pretty mauve. I told her how pretty she looked, and she replied by complimenting me on the harmony of my clothes: “With most people,” she said, “their socks, for instance, haven’t anything to do with the rest of their clothes--but your socks match your suit.” My socks, which were a grayish blue, had been given me as a Christmas present and I had worn them only by accident on the same day as a gray summer suit. “But you have the worst-looking nails I ever saw!” she went on. “They look just like mechanics’ nails, except that mechanics’ nails are dirty.” I explained that I always cut them with a pair of library shears, implying that I regarded any other method as effeminate.

I now decided to speak to Daisy of a matter which had been worrying me since I had met her at the pier. I said, “I think you’ve got some egg or something on this cheek.” She took out her little mirror: “That’s just a streak of cold-cream,” she replied. “It always does that when I leave some on and the powder sticks.” She rubbed it off. In the stunning sun of that windless, unshaded day, we were dumb for a time.

Governor’s Island, the harbor in summer, the old patriotic tune, the statue of the soldier in the park, had brought back to me another vision which for some moments loomed bright in my mind.

Once--it seemed to me long ago--on a morning in early July, I had come back to Governor’s Island when it had been green with trees and grass, and when the barracks had been low, white houses: there had been soldiers in khaki grooming horses or standing at the water’s edge, in white shirts.

I remembered how, the afternoon before, though we had not yet been in sight of land, the empty horizons of those waters had held already the presence of home. The hours had seemed to run more smoothly with the homing ship--and in that calm summer evening, the sea had scarcely breathed. The silver sun had dipped, had sent its silver path along the blue, and had sunk at the end of its path--spreading yellows and reds, which the night took.

Then at last the yellow star of a lighthouse had been winking in the black--it did not seem like the play of a machine, but a deliberate human signal; and then a lightship spangled with stars. A quarantine tug had presently come out to us from the still invisible shore, and sent out some men in a boat: they transacted their business quickly, rowed quickly back to the launch and were pulled up in their boat with such promptness that it seemed to leap over the side. One had heard American voices: that was the American way of doing things!

Then a bed of lights on the water: after nearly two years of France, Coney Island had seemed incredible!

Then land on either side: there had been trees and lawns on the shore, and large, white American houses, with here and there a lighted window, set along on a little hill that sloped down to the water--and each of the houses had its boathouse and its little pier. Now soon one was to walk in such houses!--to play one’s part again in that life hidden there behind those lighted windows, in that life grown now so strange and yet the life of home!

There had come to us a sudden sweet smell through the quiet summer night: trees and flowers; the summer grass; the luxuriance and rankness of America. And then, as the ship passed on, a smell even more unmistakable, a smell even more of home, surrounded and saturated us: it was the rotten smell of the river, which, when to-day I had smelt it again in the Greenwich Village streets, had made me think of the salt bilge-water of the harbor, but which had breathed then the grease, the sour heat and the smoke of the factories, of the city. Dark chimneys were disturbing the darkness with their noiseless eruptions of red. That evening, on Riverside Drive, the benches would be full of couples, and all would be soaked from the Jersey bank by the glue-factories’ hot, heavy fumes.

Then suddenly I had almost caught my breath--I had been curiously moved by the sight of a single, solitary street-lamp on the Staten Island shore. It had merely shed a loose and whitish radiance over a few feet of the baldish road of some dark, thinly settled suburb. Above it, there had loomed an abundant and disorderly tree. But there was America, I had felt with emotion--there under that lonely suburban street-lamp, there in that raw and livid light!

Then, from somewhere behind those shadowy lawns, one heard the moan of an American train, and then its faint bell, and the swift, shuffling sounds of its progress. It was speeding away with eagerness and sureness to American cities at night--far, perhaps--to the farthest reaches of a continent without frontiers! There had been a petulance and a sadness in the piping of the French locomotives--they had spoken always of the dead hours of dawn and the carloads of wounded men. But these trains were bringing soldiers home--and far away from Europe--at night!

In the morning, off South Brooklyn, at anchor, we had seen the smoky rose of dawn come up over the black roofs of the city, and we had listened to the river-traffic waking with soft puffs and toots. The colors had begun to come out on the vermilion smoke-stacks of steamers. The gray sides of a battle-ship were clear: it was soon trimmed with live figures in white suits. We had put down a motor-boat, which sprang away, when it touched the water, as if the water had given it life: a blue sailor, standing at the tiller, and negligently and gracefully leaning to balance the tilt of the boat, was guiding it in bold easy curves.

Now the varied craft of the harbor were coughing and sneezing all about us, fully waked-up for the day: squat shouldering ferry-boats and tugs; a tiny motor-boat darting like a waterbug; railroad barges, floating freight-cars--Delaware and Lackawanna; New York, New Haven and Hartford--all those dear, square names of home!

Then the shore was moving: to the left, the docks had begun to bristle with the first thickets of the forest of masts. In a moment, the sky would be crowded, and one would behold, above the docks and the shipping, the tremendous towers of the town!

At that moment, on our way to Coney Island, the freshness of that other summer day, when I had come back to the United States with what seemed infinite freedom before me, was recreated in my mind so vividly that I tried to describe it to Daisy. But for Daisy, the things which had delighted me--the boat leaping into the tug, the sound of the train in the dark, the sailor guiding the boat, had no special significance or point, because they were things which she took for granted, and which seemed perfectly commonplace. I felt that she kept waiting for these incidents to develop into anecdotes, in which something entertaining should happen.

When I had finally given it up, she put her hand over the middle of my face and regarded me attentively. “You’d be very good-looking,” she said, “if it wasn’t for your nose.” I said, “I know I’ve got a terrible nose!” “No,” she reassured me. “It’s cute. But it interferes with any Adonis-like beauty that you might otherwise have had.”

In the harbor, the harbor of the August day which was actually about us, the lowering of the zinc-bright colorless sun had made of the water to the west a gleaming sheet of zinc; and to the east, it had begun to blue. A bell-buoy clanged and bathed. Before us, we could see the steamers moving out toward the open sea, their smoke trailing back from seaward. A fresh, easier, breezy sea-smell reached us--it was a lightening of the load of life.

“Doesn’t that feel nice, though!” said Daisy. “I think I’m going to enjoy this trip!”

I asked her about Pete and his job. “I’m so glad we’re going to Boston,” she said. “I’m tired of the country, but I don’t want to live in New York! I think New York is terrible!”

Sea Gate--and beaches rank with bathers; little brummagen summer bungalows with green or red roofs.

Then a monumental buff hotel with a blunt obelisk tower rose alone from a level shore--where, however, we could presently make out the skeletons of roller-coasters and the squirrel-cages of ferris-wheels.

Now, more quickly than in our bemusement we had expected, the boat was pulling in toward the boardwalk: we could see a row of improbable objects--the sails of a bright-red Dutch windmill; the teeth of a gigantic grinning mask; a rocking full-size Noah’s Ark, with animals sticking their heads out the windows and with curious half-clownlike figures, which made the spasmodic movements of automata and which seemed the true unearthly inhabitants of that city of enormous toys.

When the boat stopped, as we stood on deck, waiting to get off, we suddenly again felt the heat. “The sun makes me reel!” said Daisy. We walked, dazed, up a little gang-plank and down a very long white pier. The hotel, which rose now to our left, against the dazzling zinc of the sky, was a dull and solid slug, as the Statue of Liberty had been. The sea was now quite blue.

I was enchanted by the Noah’s Ark: there were an ostrich, a giraffe, and an elephant, wagging their heads out the portholes; a Noah, who, at regular intervals, threw back his Uncle Josh beard and took a swig from a bottle of whiskey; and a fisherman who, at similar intervals, jerked up an old shoe on his hook. There was also a mysterious monster, labelled “Hank,” half human and half brute, who in paroxysms shook his window-bars. An urgent and ominous fog-horn sounded at the same short intervals. I was all for going inside.

“Let’s go in swimming first,” said Daisy, “while we’ve still got the sun--then we’ll feel fine--then we’ll have another drink. Then we can go and do things, huh?” She squeezed my arm: she seemed happy.

We floated, on our way, through warm currents: the balm of hot buttered pop-corn; the fragrance of burnt molasses; the sweet-acrid odor of orange-peels.

And then, after the close, musky smell, human and marine, of the damp-and-dry gray boards of the bath-house, I met Daisy in my hired bathing-suit, and we walked out under the boardwalk to the beach.

She had brought an old bathing-suit of Pete’s which had enormous brown and white stripes and which was in places much too tight for her. With her fair skin among the tanned bathers and her hair tucked behind her ears, she looked like one of the Mack Sennett bathing girls, in the old-fashioned movie comedies. “I know it looks awful,” she said, when I kidded her about this, “but I thought it didn’t matter at Coney Island--and I couldn’t afford to get a new one.”

There were tiny children playing in the surf, in tiny slips of bathing-suits of yellow, pale green, and red, like the variously flavored fruit-drops--orange, raspberry, and lime--in the glass jars we had passed on a candy counter; or like the bottles of colored soft-drinks--cherry, orange, and lemon soda--which we had seen at a soft-drink stand--they were splashing in wild delight or fleeing from the sea with squeals.

Daisy worked, for a few minutes, squinting, in an ineffective under-water side-stroke. I, still partly bemused by my drinks, flung myself with abandon to the waves, and swam around a small stone breakwater in what--although I unexpectedly ran into the breakwater--I thought was pretty good order.

“That was a marvellous wallow of yours!” said Daisy. “I thought you were trying to push the breakwater over! I was just going to yell out and tell you to stop, it was built there on purpose!”

She had brought out of the surf, about her shoulders, a great strip of glossy gold-brown seaweed, and she wore it as a boa: it went beautifully with her hair and with the taffy-colored stripes of Pete’s bathing-suit, both darkened by the wet. Her slim legs below her full hips looked almost like the legs of a bird.

We lay on the sand for awhile. “Your hair seems a different color,” I said. “In fact--I don’t know whether it’s just my imagination or not--but it always seems a different color every time that I see you.” “It is, I guess,” she replied. “They put white henna on it when they bleached it for the _Gambols_--and I always used to put peroxide and lemon-juice on it every so often, but I haven’t been able to lately. That’s why it’s pink, I guess.” I asked what color it had originally been. “Oh, Gee: I don’t know,” she said. “It’s so long ago!--Mouse-color, I guess!”

I inquired about a system of vivid blue veins on her thigh. “That’s my charley-horse,” she explained; “I got it in the first _Gambols_.” I asked her why she didn’t go back on the stage. “I’m too short,” she replied, “and my feet are too small for me to dance well--and I don’t like it, anyway: I always get independent and cut too many rehearsals. That was why I got fired the last time.”

Beside us, a brown young man had his arm about the shoulders of a young woman in an old-rose bathing-suit, with large carpet-like flower-patterns, which richly harmonized with the purple tan of her skin: she presently slipped a hand beneath the top of her companion’s bathing-suit and affectionately rubbed his back. A handsome blond girl in blue, who seemed to have two men in attendance, was pawing the sand with one foot. Another girl, in a turquoise costume, had stretched out on her back on the sand, with her shoulders between a man’s knees: he was passionately stroking her arm.

I watched one really beautiful woman, very blond and rather Germanic: she wore a pair of red bathing-trunks with an orange stripe down the side, belted and athletically faded, and a plain white bathing-shirt. She lay voluptuously, one knee elevated and her head on the knees of a barrel-shaped man, who wore horn-rimmed spectacles. Her skin was extremely white, only toasted a little about the shoulders; and she had smiling darkish brown eyes. I watched her as, presently, she got up and walked over to the water, and--while her companion bobbed in the surf--with an easy and graceful crawl, lay voluptuously along the swell.

“This is all artificial sand, you know,” said Daisy,--“Oh, yes: they spent half a million dollars fixing up this beach. There didn’t used to be any beach at all. That was the same time they put up the hotel. I wonder if they’re making money.”

Gray steamers were passing quite close along the gray line of the water--they made me think of summers in Europe, of coming back from abroad in the fall--at the age when I had been last to Coney Island, there had always been uncles and aunts sailing to or from France--there had been an uncle who brought home from Paris silk stockings for my cousins and aunts--he had had a bluff and ironical way of retorting, “You don’t say!” which was precisely the way Daisy said things--it was the American way.--The Americans went to Paris, and then they came back again with silk stockings and things they had bought, and that frank American smile, and that straightforward way of speaking.--The people who interested me most were, almost all, I reflected, now abroad: Grosbeake was in England for the summer; Hugo, in spite of his enthusiasm for the American Middle Western cities, was still in Afghanistan; and Rita was still in Paris--yet I did not at the moment seem to miss them and did not want to go abroad myself. What fun we had had together after all--Rita and I--though we had never been easy and friendly together, as Daisy and I were to-day: there had been one evening--we had been drinking raw gin--Rita would never have drunk the gin and ginger-ale to which Daisy was addicted--when we had told each other things about ourselves which had seemed at the time to mean a great deal--I couldn’t quite remember what they were--she had told me something about her girlhood, it was that night she had sung me the song about _the foggy, foggy dew_--and I had told her how my father had died of tuberculosis--and what a rotten time I had had at boarding-school, and how I intended to write a novel about it. Those nocturnal drunken conversations which seemed to mean so much!--which did, no doubt, mean so much. All literature, perhaps--and not poetry alone, but even the systematized facts of Hugo’s documented novels, even the formulas of Grosbeake’s logic--was in the nature of a drunken language, expressing, by certain symbols, sensations and emotions merely--the readjustments, that would be, of our little corner of nature to the universe of which we were part--which was forever passing into new phases and where each phase meant a new adjustment for every part--where, then, a new art or idea was something more than the mere compensation for an individual weakness or disaster, it was a necessity of universal development--I would think it all out some time--the sun was hot on the sand.

“Well,” said Daisy, “now that we’ve earned that other drink, how about going in?”

Hot dogs were being roasted twenty at a time, on wide polished iron slabs: they were crisp, with a delicious stink. At an oilcloth-covered table, Daisy and I ate one apiece, dabbing them gamboge with a little long-handled wooden spoon from the common mustard pot.

“I’m ravenous!” said Daisy, biting into the pulp of her roll.

Dim and languid from the swim, I was watching the reflections of girls, in wide hats and bright summer colors, shine briefly in the silver high myriad-paned mirror, in the sun that bleached whites whiter and blues and yellows white.

“Do you want another?” I asked, when she had bolted the last morsel. “Not now; maybe later,” she replied.

We did the shooting-galleries after this, and the ring-throwing and ball-rolling games. We were both quite good: we knocked over any number of moving ducks, which was what we had decided to concentrate on; and we won a baby-doll in a chemise, a miniature roulette-wheel, an harmonica, an atomizer and a trick pistol which shot off a snake. Daisy was so delighted with the snake that she kept shooting it down the ball-rolling table, so that the Jap had to find it and bring it back. Every time, with oriental patience, he would stuff it into the pistol, hand it back to Daisy, and caution her politely with a smile, as he indicated the trigger: “Now don’t put your finger on that!”--whereupon Daisy would shoot it off again. I was somehow obscurely reminded of that horrible night at Sue Borglum’s, and I took a dislike to the Jap and made Daisy move on.

“Let’s send some goofy post-cards,” said Daisy, in front of a post-card store. We went inside and selected several with fastidious care. I sent cards to Hugo and Rita; and Daisy sent cards to Gus Dunbar and Sue Borglum. “I’m going to be dirty,” she said, putting a cross on a bathing beauty, and writing, “X marks my room.”

I asked her if she would care for a pin-cushion heavily encrusted with sea-shells and inscribed, “Souvenir of Coney Island,” or if there were anything else she would like. “I’d like some moccasins,” she said. “Very well,” I replied. “Will you really buy me some?” she asked eagerly. “You great big munificent old thing!--I haven’t got any slippers now, and I used to keep getting my feet full of splinters and thumb-tacks in the country.”

It turned out that her feet were so small that the man had to get a special size out of the stockroom at the back. The woman in the shop, fat and sharp-eyed, became very friendly with Daisy and, while the man was looking for the moccasins, tried to engage her in conversation. “Do you mind my asking what kind of lipstick that is?” the woman inquired with interest. Rather to my surprise, this seemed to embarrass Daisy: she explained that it was called “carnation,” but when the woman asked her how much it cost, Daisy said that she had forgotten, and became markedly unresponsive. “If they can’t find the right size,” she presently remarked to me pointedly, “we might as well go!” The moccasins, however, were forthcoming: they were moccasins for a child and I did not suppose they could fit her; but they did. She looked down at her little blunt-toed foot with its border, at the throat, of gray fur: “That’s all right,” she said shortly.

“That woman certainly took a friendly interest,” I remarked, when we were out on the boardwalk. “Yes,” said Daisy. “I never know what to do when people like that get chummy.”

I had been surprised at Daisy’s shrinking from the familiarity of the woman in the shop, and I was now to be surprised again. I had lingered in front of a side-show, where there were posters of a Hula-Hula Dancer, a Dog-faced Boy, a Mermaid, an Hermaphrodite and a Magician, and I suggested going in. But Daisy evidently did not care to. “My mother would never let me see any freaks,” she said. “They’re all fakes, aren’t they?” she asked, a little timidly.

As we walked on, she shot the snake off again, and I had to go and get it out of an umbrella-stand bristling with pennants and canes.

Then I discovered the Eden Musée--I had forgotten that it had moved to Coney Island and had thought of it as having perished. I had not visited it since my childhood, when, coming up to New York with my father, he had used to take me to see it in the days when it had still been on Twenty-third Street: there I had seen for the first time moving-pictures, along with the automatic chess-player and the manipulator of liquid air. And now here was the same old policeman in his high obsolete helmet; the same refined widow in black, with the tight waist of the early nineteen-hundreds; the same old hayseed with his spectacles, his flopping wide-brimmed straw hat and his flaccid carpet-bag--but now no longer posed inside, where they could no longer be mistaken for real people, but set out in front as a guarantee of the authentic antiquity of the show.

I induced Daisy to go in.--There they were, that awful group of my youth, though it seemed to me their number was diminished: Jenny Lind, Mary Queen of Scots, Anna Held, Oliver Cromwell, Beethoven, Brigham Young, General Grant, Napoleon and Booker T. Washington: I was sorry to see that Marshall P. Wilder no longer had a place among them.

I did not examine them closely, however, for Daisy, who seemed never to have seen wax-works before, hurried on to the more dramatic tableaux set back in compartments along the side. She passed before them, gazing in silence. The groups were not particularly interesting, but they presently led us to the “Crypt.” We entered a darkened curving passage. I was delighted: it was the old “Chamber of Horrors,” which in the Twenty-third Street days had used to be downstairs in the basement. We gazed at the Opium Den; the Execution of a Burmese Criminal (it seemed to me now that the elephant who steps on the criminal’s head had shrunk since I was a boy); the Cannibal Feast; the Whipping Post, “still in use in the State of Delaware”; and, the electrocution of poor Lina Lemberg, who had finally, a few weeks before, been executed for the murder of her husband. The witnesses, in the Death Chamber, were regarding the proceedings with simpers, and I wondered whether they had not been borrowed from an old tableau of a lobster-and-champagne supper, with Mephistopheles in the background, of which the personnel of revellers seemed to me, like the Burmese elephant, to have dwindled since the Twenty-third Street days. I suggested this to Daisy. “I don’t think this is very exciting,” she replied. She seemed to look at everything so perfunctorily that I was afraid she was being bored: as she had never seen the Musée in her childhood, I could not expect her to share my interest in it.

Several tableaux farther on, I found that I had turned a corner and left Daisy behind--still staring, no doubt, at Lina Lemberg. I was before a group of the Spanish Inquisition, and I had a sudden happy inspiration for enlivening the entertainment for Daisy. I climbed quickly over the railing, put my straw hat on the head of the presiding inquisitor--he had a lean and sallow face, and the hat came down over his eyes--and, with my back to the railing, struck an energetic pose among the torturers with red-hot irons, myself applying to the victim’s blood-streaked shoulder the cork-screw I had brought for the gin. In a moment, I heard distinct light steps, which stopped--then, after an instant’s pause: “Come on out of there, you old cut-up!” I climbed back over the railing. “I thought you were real at first,” she said, as we reached the exit. “You gave me quite a turn!”

On our way out, I caught a glimpse of Roosevelt, the Teddy Roosevelt of San Juan Hill, who, with his handkerchief knotted about his neck, his Rough-Rider puttees, his felt hat, his mustache, his glaring teeth and his eye-glasses, made me think of that younger America which I had assumed we had forever left behind, but which to-day seemed quite close to me again. It had been a boy’s America--and not merely because it had been the America of my boyhood. Roosevelt, who had been so charming with his children, had become the idol of the Americans of that time for very much the same reasons--he had been everything that a boy could imagine: Dan Beard, Old and Young King Brady, Frank Merriwell, and Stanley in Africa, all rolled into one. I asked Daisy whether she remembered the time when Roosevelt had been a great hero. She said, “No,”--and showed so little interest that for a time I relapsed into silence. Then she let me see what she had been thinking about: “I’ve never seen a dead person,” she said, “except an aunt of mine that died.”

“By the way,” I asked, after a moment, “what became of that thief that Ray Coleman caught--the one that didn’t steal anything of yours, but stole the bathrobe of the man next door, or something?” She was silent. “Don’t you remember?” “Yes, I remember,” she replied. “But I don’t know what became of him. I was thinking too much about myself at that time to pay much attention to anything else.”

“Would you mind taking me to dinner?” she said presently. “I’m absolutely starved!” I asked her where she wanted to go. “I’d like to go to the old Seaview, if you don’t mind. I don’t know how the food there is now--but I’d just like to see the place.--I went there with Phil Meissner,” she added, “when we first came on from Pittsburgh.”

The Seaview was quite remote--beyond a kind of grassy common, criss-crossed with bald paths. It was an old-fashioned summer hotel, of the cupolaed and pillared design of the days before concrete and brick: like all wooden hotels by the shore, it had a flimsy discolored look, and seemed peculiarly desolate and dry. The dining-room was entirely empty: only a few of the tables were set. One side was all high narrow windows, separated by thin wooden frames, which looked out on the boardwalk and the sea; and on the other, an old closed piano stood against the wall, and space had been left for a dance-floor; slim pillars from floor to roof at intervals threaded the room. We waited, but no one came. I finally hallo’d; and a waiter appeared from the pantry. He came forward without inspiration, as if he expected to be asked for cigarettes or to be asked to direct us to Luna Park. When he learned that we wanted dinner, his eagerness to serve us was extreme.

“Well,” said Daisy, as we sat down, “the table linen’s nice and clean, anyway.” It was true: very white large napkins had been folded into angles and stuck into large clear goblets.

“I’m going to have clams,” said Daisy. “They used to have the most wonderful clam-cocktails here.” I ordered a melon for myself, and bluefish for both of us afterwards. I also ordered some ginger-ale and poured out what was left of the gin. “I don’t think I’ll have any,” said Daisy, “until after I’ve had something to eat.” She looked a little pale and was silent for some time, and I hoped that the Chamber of Horrors hadn’t upset her. She smiled broadly, however, at last, and proclaimed: “Look out, Food: I’m coming!”

I asked her how she and Phil had ever happened to come to the Seaview. “Phil knew the manager,” she explained. “The manager gave a party in my honor--just some of his men friends. We had champagne, and I’d never had anything to drink before--I was awfully young--I was only seventeen. I thought it was swell, and I got lit. They kept filling up my glass with champagne. You know how men are when they’ve got a girl that’s young and kind of cute, and they’re trying to get her tight. I had on a little black dress like they wore then, that buttoned up the back, and the bottom buttons got unbuttoned--and then every man that danced with me would unbutton another button--so that pretty soon it was unbuttoned all the way up to the waist. I didn’t know anything about it and just went on smiling and dancing, and thinking I was cutting quite a figure, with my legs hanging out all the time!”

I laughed about this.

“I certainly enjoyed those clams!” she said, when all the little hollows in her plate were empty around the red-splashed glass of sauce. She smiled: “After all,” she declared, “say what you please--there’s nothing like a good plate of food!” I asked her if she would like some more clams. “Yes,” she answered, after a moment’s thought, “I believe that I would.” I ordered another clam-cocktail.

I asked if it weren’t true, as I had heard from Hugo Bamman, the night of Ray Coleman’s party, that she and her husband, on their honeymoon, had ridden on a motor-cycle all the way from Pittsburgh to Atlantic City: this had seemed to me tremendously romantic. “It wasn’t Atlantic City,” Daisy explained. “It was here.”

“What was Phil Meissner like?” I inquired. “He had a lot of charm,” said Daisy, “and a lot of brains, too--but he never did anything with them except perfectly foolish things. For instance, he’d spend days inventing something that worked by electricity to make the blinds open in the morning--he could lie in bed and press a button and make the water-basin fill, and when it was full, the faucet would turn itself off, and everything!”

“Were you very much in love with him?” I asked. She shook her head, as if in scorn. “I didn’t know anything about anything then. He was the first regular beau I’d ever had: my father wouldn’t let me go with the boys. I was all excited aboutum at first.--I was so much impressed withum when I first marriedum that it was just ridiculous! I couldn’t even go to the drug-store to get a tube of tooth-paste without askingum what kind to buy. But I wasn’t really in love withum--I didn’t know what it was all about--and then, by the time I might have been in love, everything was pretty well wrecked.--My father followed us here and burst in on us with a detective at four o’clock in the morning. He made us get up and get married then and there--we hadn’t gotten married before we left because Phil didn’t want to attract attention. Dad said I’d either have to marry Phil or go back to Pittsburgh. So we got up and got married at four o’clock in the morning--it was the night after the champagne party and we both felt like nobody’s business. Phil was sore as a crab, because Dad had a Catholic priest marry us, and Phil wasn’t a Catholic--but Dad threatened to havum arrested for abducting a minor, and he had the detective right there.

“Things were never quite the same after that. I don’t blame Phil for being sore: nobody likes to be forced into a thing like that--especially with a hangover, at four o’clock in the morning!”

I had been thinking: her father from Pittsburgh--why had they named her Daisy?--I remembered that old song of my boyhood,

_“Daisy! Daisy!
Give me your answer true--
I’m half-crazy!
All for the love of you!
It won’t be a stylish marriage--
I can’t afford a carriage!
But you’ll look sweet, upon the seat
Of a bicycle built for two!”_

--that old song of an earlier time to which Daisy’s name seemed to relate her--and her large hips, too--I had never been aware how round they were till I had seen her in her bathing-suit--they were the kind that had been admired at the time when the song had been new--they went in for slender hips to-day--but I liked Daisy’s none the less--how bicycles had gone out, too--but she and Phil, appropriately enough, had spent their honeymoon on a motor-cycle.

“Are you happy now with Pete?” I asked. She shook her head: “I don’t know if I’ve really ever been happy--but I’ve sworn to go through with this with Pete: I’m tired of leaving people.” “Are you and Pete married now?” She shook her head again and grunted negatively, “uh-uh!”

“I know I’m not happy now,” she went on, “because I keep having these dreams where some kind of a great piece of good fortune is just about to befall me--and they’re the goofiest dreams!--When Prince Charming comes along, he’s always just a great, big, strong, clean-limbed American who gathers me up in his arms. It’s so silly! I feel ashamed of myself after I wake up.--And I’m always dressed in the costume that I wore in the first _Gambols_, when I came out in a white old-fashioned dress, with curls and pantalettes and everything. I loved it--Gus Dunbar used to say that I looked so sweet and dewy that he wanted to smack me down. But you know one night the boys from Notre Dame came and stole my picture in that costume that was on show in front of the theatre--and they published it in the college paper. They sent me a copy of the paper: I was tickled to death. That was the only one they stole!”

I had been watching, through the tall, open windows, the double, white, pearly globes of the boardwalk lamps, so pale, so chaste and so bright, hanging gracefully, like lilies-of-the-valley, from their straight, slender stalks, against the background of the paler blue, now the cooler blue, of the sea, where a buoy shone ruby-red.

When we came down the steps of the hotel, all was in deep blue dusk, with the lamps a double rope of moons. “Have you noticed this?” I asked, waving my hand toward the lamps.--“I suppose the last time I was happy,” she said, “was back there in the old Seaview dining-room!”

We were confronted, when we turned back toward the amusements, by a large and very garish electric sign in the form of a gigantic human foot, on which a red Mephistopheles was standing: by means of alternate systems of bulbs, the arm of the Mephistopheles was made to jerk back and forth, prodding energetically with a spear an illuminated corn on the big toe, which at each jab changed the color of its light, first blue, then purple, then green. The legend, which flashed on and off, proclaimed, in contorted, striking letters: “Take a Walk with Clancy’s Corn Fix. Knocks the Devil Out of Sore Feet.”

“Oh, do you see that sign?” said Daisy. “That was Larry Mickler’s idea. He’s making a lot of money out of it: they’ve got them all over the country.” I was glad to know that Larry Mickler, through a truly Dostoevskian device, had constrained his sadistic instincts to serve this beneficent end.

“I hope we get somewhere soon!” said Daisy presently. “I’ve got to go to about eighteen ladies’-rooms!” We had been walking along the boardwalk and were only just reaching the shops again. Daisy presently disappeared in a small and rather sordid-looking restaurant.

There was a penny-in-the-slot place next door, and as I walked back and forth in front of the restaurant, I stopped and looked in. I saw, standing before me in the doorway, a tall, young man with a stoop, who had a darkish tooth-brush mustache, which I considered a little silly, and rather large brown eyes of the kind usually described as spaniel-like: he was wearing, like everybody else, a straw hat with a black band, which, it seemed to me, he had pulled too far down on his forehead. I had a feeling of mild irritation that he should be standing and staring so innocently, so well-meaningly, and so lackadaisically, square in the middle of the doorway, where he made it difficult for people to pass. He was laden down, I saw, with packages: no doubt some woman had made him carry them.--Then sharply I pulled myself up from that vague and absent moment: the man was my own reflection in a mirror opposite the door. On either side were other mirrors which distorted people’s shapes.

I continued to gaze at myself: how had I ever failed to recognize--especially after Daisy had remarked on it--my ridiculous bulbous nose? My eyes, which I had hoped were intelligent, had only appeared to me canine--and my mustache was unsuccessful. My pockets were bulging with the atomizer, the mouth-organ, the baby-doll, and the pistol with the snake; and I was carrying the roulette-wheel and the moccasins, which had been wrapped up in pasteboard boxes. I seemed to myself a figure from the funny-papers: Mr. Suburban American, at the sea-side, with packages and a straw hat.

I went back to the door of the restaurant: Daisy had not yet emerged. There was a radio playing outside, and for some reason the programme included some vaudeville or night-club woman soloist singing _Mamie Rose_, that popular song of several years ago which Daisy had started on the phonograph when Rita had been reading her poems and which had desolated me so on the day when I had seen Rita off at the station and had been waiting for Daisy in her rooms. Now I listened idly for the words, parts of which, on that horrible record, I had never been able to catch. The contralto, whose voice was rich and deep, delivered them with a masterly casual emphasis, in that nondescript dialect--perhaps the result of Irish actors learning from Jewish comedians how to sing Negro songs--which has become the language of American jazz:

_“There she goes,
Mamie Rose
She--loves--me!
Don’t seem to show it!
How do I know it?
It’s ABC!
She’s smart as Satan--
She’s aggravatin’--
But when I want a little lovin’,
She don’t keep me waitin’--
She’s proud and snooty,
But she’s my cutie--
She tells me, Fireman, do your duty!”_

_That_ was the line that I’d never been able to hear!--That song, but a few years old, seemed already to belong to the past, like _Daisy_ and the _American Patrol_, and the old musical-comedy tune which the musicians had played on the boat, and I found that I had at last come to feel for it a certain familiar affection. Furthermore, I now thought it quite good: there was something rather unexpected, something even quite original about the manipulation of the tune: what was original and unexpected was the repetition, in some sort of minor, of the pattern which had just gone before--recommencing, with _She’s proud and snooty_, what one had thought was entirely finished--and recommencing it agreeably and queerly, so that for a moment one always paused to listen. I wondered how the composer had arrived at it. He was a man named Harry Hirsch, I remembered: I imagined him: a small, young Jew with very large, intense, black eyes, like motor headlights; after the success of the musical comedy in which _Mamie Rose_ had been sung, he had probably taken to wearing spats. He was no doubt the son of a Rabbi or of the Cantor in a Synagogue: the base of his music was German, and I imagined some dark room of a stifling apartment on the East Side, in which his youth had been fed on Schubert and on the light opera of Vienna and Berlin, cities which his eyes had never seen. But what had he done to this music?--what had made him repeat those bars of the sweet German melody with which he had begun, but transforming them abruptly, by daring what any hack worker in the field would have told him _a priori_ was impossible, what would have lasted in commonplace hands impossibly too long? By carrying us beyond expectation, by breaking into that new accent, half agonized and half thrilling, he had enchanted the public so completely that not merely had _Mamie Rose_ turned out to be one of the principal factors in the success of the musical comedy in which it had first appeared (and where, as a matter of fact, the director had been afraid to feature it), but it had been heard on every radio and phonograph; at every college prom, at every Greenwich Village ball; from the most perfunctory chirpings of the orchestras of restaurants to the jazz-bands de luxe of roof-gardens; on the vaudeville circuits of small towns and in the scores of feature moving-pictures; worked up for the Elks summer fair; struck up, with the words thrown on a screen, during the intermissions of burlesque shows; ground out at “dancing academies” where, from New York to Los Angeles, clumsy and inarticulate young men pushed wary and inarticulate girls about a crowded, monotonous floor--and as I had heard it once, late at night, sung strangely from a summer street by a child’s voice, nasal and shrill, following subtly and with marvellous accuracy the deviating minor strain, and repeating it again and again!

Where had he got it?--from the sounds of the streets? the taxis creaking to a stop? the interrogatory squeak of a street-car? some distant and obscure city-sound in which a plaintive high note, bitten sharp, follows a lower note, strongly clanged and solidly based? Or had he got it from Schoenberg or Stravinsky?--or simply from his own nostalgia, among the dark cells and the raspings of New York, for those orchestras and open squares which his parents had left behind?--or for the cadence, half-chanted and despairing, of the tongue which the father had known, but which the child had forgotten and was never to know again?

But the relations between Schoenberg, the taxi-brakes, and the Synagogue, baffled further speculation.--And, in any case, what charmed and surprised one, in this as in all works of art, was no mere combination of elements, however picturesque or novel, but some distinctive individual quality which the artist himself supplied. Of all the young Jews in New York who had listened to the service in the Synagogue or who had been kept awake at night by taxis, how many had written good music, even good popular music? I thought of that personal color or rhythm which, the night when I had been dressing in Bank Street to take Daisy out to a night-club, had seemed to me, in the work of an artist, as little important or interesting as the color of his hair or eyes, or his way of mispronouncing certain words; but I could recognize now that it was precious. And as I recalled my gloomy meditations of the night of Sue Borglum’s party, I remembered how the Greeks had given Sophocles the name of “the Attic Bee.”