Chapter V (2)

Yes: I saw it: there it was: it was acrid, but still honey; and it was something more than beauty of verse. The Greeks’ idea of sweetness had been as different as possible from Stevenson and the “honey-dripping style.” I saw it now, not merely in the nightingales and the ivy of that chorus at Colonus for which the jury had applauded Sophocles, when his competence to dispose of his property had been called in question by his son; but in the passionate frankness of Antigone, even in the asperity of Œdipus, even in the guile of Odysseus. I thought now of the exquisite proportion, of the style with its unique combination of modulation and pith, of the strong and sensitive hand placing with so firm and light an emphasis those culminating scenes where the nobler instincts of humanity reassert or declare themselves: Electra when she speaks to the urn which she believes contains her brother’s ashes, Neoptolemus confessing at last that he cannot act against his nature to deceive even an outcast who has trusted him--as, in the case of Dostoevsky, I remembered, no longer the contention and the horror, but the brightness of the high comic sense which interpenetrates all that is turbid, which flowers constantly in such charming passages as that in _The Idiot_, for example, where the young girl buys the hedgehog from the boys and sends it to the Prince for a peace-offering, and which makes even of _Crime and Punishment_ a comedy rather than a tragedy. It was not that the Athenian jury had merely demonstrated their gratitude for--that the crowds at Dostoevsky’s funeral had merely regretted being deprived of--a sedative to which they had become addicted; but that both had been ravished by the taste--and by it had been partly repaid for the harshness of the common life--of that miraculous secretion of the mind which there was only one man to supply. And so every sort of good literature, so every sort of good art, provided an aliment, a stimulant, as natural and necessary as food and drink themselves! Even the tannic tincture of Poe, which seemed to turn the throat to leather and to petrify the taste, had its own peculiar tonic value, and even from the coarse, used mash of Byron it was possible to extract a strong brandy--even the writer of popular music--The radio was hawking and halting; I had already been waiting a long time--much too long, I began to think. And I suddenly remembered how Daisy had slit her wrist on the night when I had left her at Gus Dunbar’s apartment.

I was on the point of going in to look for her when she finally appeared: I was so much relieved to see her that I did not at first notice how pale she was. She said that she was sorry to have kept me waiting, and we walked on for a moment in silence: then I asked her whether she had been ill. “No: I’m all right,” she replied. “You were such a long time in there,” I said.--“Are you sure that you’re all right?” “Yes, I’m all right,” she said again. “You were sick in there,” I challenged her, stopping. “Did you throw up?” “I’m all right!” she repeated. “It was just the smell of that place, I guess!”

I made her sit down on a bench: she wouldn’t let me get her anything, and neither of us spoke for a time. A fresh, fishy breeze was blowing in: I hoped that it would make her feel better. A lighthouse was winking punctually; the ocean was grayest blue, and the low waves were pale as porcelain on the sands of palest buff: the late bathers were coral limbs. Some children, still playing on the beach, were holding out into the ocean and the night the brass-bristling frost-crystals of sparklers.

I asked Daisy presently how she felt. “All right: fine!” she replied.--I tried to find out whether there were anything seriously wrong with her. “No,” she said. “To tell the truth, we haven’t had very much to eat out in the country lately: the grocer and the butcher in the village wouldn’t give us any more credit, and we had to live on the things that we already had in the house--which were mostly corn-flakes--corn-flakes without cream or anything--that was about all we’d had for a week before we came in. I guess I overdid it with those clams.”

I said I thought that the gin had been rotten and that the ginger-ale had been inferior. I began to produce the toys from my pockets. She took a sudden interest in the harmonica and amused herself by working out tunes on it: her most conspicuous success, from which she seemed to derive a good deal of satisfaction, was _Nearer My God to Thee_. After a while, she said: “Well, let’s go on!” I asked her whether she wanted to go home. “No,” she declared, “not yet: I want to do some more things!--don’t you?”

We explored Luna Park--all bright minarets and festoons of white imitation pearls. I offered to take her on the “Thunderbolt”; the “Shoot-the-Chutes”; the “Dragon’s Gorge”; but she did not seem very eager. “Why don’t we try that Noah’s Ark thing?” she suggested, as we were wandering a little aimlessly, “that thing that you wanted to go into when we first came.”

We went back to the steamboat pier and found the Noah’s Ark still rocking and sounding its sombre fog-horn; it was lighted up now with green ship’s lanterns, which revealed the elephant, the ostrich, and the giraffe, the fisherman pulling up the shoe, the old patriarch hitting his bottle, and the monster shaking his bars. “Do you think you can stand it?” I asked. “Oh, yes,” insisted Daisy, smiling. “I want to go in, don’t you?”

We bought tickets and mounted the gang-plank. Inside, the Ark was rather a sell, as there was nothing amusing to see--the animals and the monster turned out to have been constructed so as to be visible merely from the outside. We found that we had been let in for an assortment of banal and disconcerting sensations. We had to walk on a shifting platform--pass along a wobbly corridor--climb a flight of quaking stairs. Our hats were almost blown off by a violent blast of air and when we tried to catch hold of the railing, we received an electric shock. I was afraid that it might make Daisy sick again, and asked her whether she wanted to go back: “No, I’m all right,” she replied. We went through with it to the end, in silence and rather solemnly. I felt protective and tender toward Daisy, and contrite at having brought her in: I was only just beginning fully to realize that she had probably, when we first started out, been faint for lack of food; that she had been drinking on an empty stomach; that she had been sickened by the Eden Musée and upset by my stupid joke; and that revisiting the Seaview Hotel, which had brought back her first days with Phil Meissner, had finally overcome her. I became acutely aware, too late, that if she had insisted on going in for the Noah’s Ark, it had been entirely because she thought I wanted to.--The last stunt was a spiral slide which landed us on a whirling platform: in my efforts to rescue Daisy, I fell on the roulette-wheel and broke it.

It was now time to go home, we decided--but as it turned out that the last boat had left, we were obliged to go back by the bus.

On our way to the place where the buses stopped, we passed the poster of a spiritualist fortuneteller. “Did I tell you my joke?” asked Daisy. “About ‘Striking a Happy Medium’?” “Yes,” I said. “I think it’s fine!”

As the bus left Coney Island behind, a cluster of bright, pearly globes among the vivid red pumps of a filling-station repeated the pearls of Luna Park and the drooping white lamps of the boardwalk.

Along the boulevard to New York, were aligned little sections of shops, bright-windowed and built in new concrete: drug-stores; grocery-stores; automobile show-rooms; a bank.

There were girls in summer dresses, hatless, with bobbed heads and pink or tan stockings, strolling out, alone or in couples. Down side-streets, I could see little houses with compact and screened porches giving way to the wastes of building-lots, where a lonely and random street-lamp would light untidy bushes and trees. That was the America to which I had returned when, coming back after the War from France, I had been greeted by that other suburban street-lamp on the Staten Island shore! That was the America to which to-night I felt myself returning again--those neat and new little shops, those girls wandering out in the evening between the drug-store and the building-lots--hardly knowing what they expected but half hoping for some new turn to their lives! Had not Daisy been once such a girl, walking out in the streets of Pittsburgh--had not Rita, in her up-state town?

I asked Daisy about her father, of whom she had told me at dinner that he had not let her go out with boys. “He was Irish,” she explained. “He lost all his money when we were just kids. But he was determined that the fact that he’d lost his money shouldn’t make any difference about our being well brought up--I guess it did all right, though.” She smiled her candid smile. “That’s one reason they used to send me to my aunt’s in Nova Scotia so much.” I remembered her timidity about the freaks, her “independence” about rehearsals, and her coldness with the woman in the store. “That was one trouble about Phil and me,” she went on. “Phil’s father and my father had known each other very well when they first came to Pittsburgh. We used to live next door to the Meissners, before they made money and moved. And in those days, Dad had a much more important position than Mr. Meissner: he was one of the principal men in the Billings Company and Mr. Meissner was just a clerk in a bank. Then when the Meissners made money and Dad was down and out, they got snooty about us--and Dad didn’t want me to go with Phil--Phil had the reputation of being the wildest boy in Pittsburgh. Dad was fit to be tied when I ran away withum!”

I marked another filling-station: a crowd of great white stars, which seemed uttered by a rocket’s detonation.

Now we were passing a row of small houses with tapestry-brick façades and, in front of them, little green lawns enclosed by little hedges.

“Dad was really a bright man, though,” Daisy presently went on. “He was one of the first people in the country to design certain kinds of trucks.--He invented all kinds of things--he invented a kind of siren.”

A filling-station where the lights were dimmer and the pumps a duller red was outshone by the lunar beauty of the radiant white pergola which followed it.

“Did you ever hear them talk about auto-horns--in a store or anywhere, I mean?” she asked. “It’s a shout. There’s a _toot-toot_, and a _beep-beep_--and an _oorah_--and a _blah-blah_, and a _blurp-blurp_.--Dad’s was a kind of a _oorah_--and it was a humdinger, too!--it had an authoritative sound and it wasn’t ugly like most sirens.”

In the show-rooms on either side appeared the present-day glories of the motor industry: the Lancerd was celebrating its “Silver Anniversary” with a new model in “distinctive” apple-green, posed with dignity behind its plate-glass pane, in a white-balconied Colonial salon.

“It was getting indicted for manslaughter,” Daisy went on, “that really ruined Dad: he and another man ran into each other as Dad was coming out of a garage. It was really both’s fault--but the man was killed and they indicted Dad--though he’d been a month in the hospital himself. They made him pay a big fine and he lost his job--and he never could get back after that.--He used to come home drunk and sit down on the edge of my bed and hold directors’ meetings all by himself--I used to think it was funny, but my mother used to be so worried!”

I had been brooding on the name of Meissner, which seemed to raise for me vague associations. “Did they ever call Phil Meissner, ‘Junior’?” I finally asked. “The family always calledum that,” she answered. “Why?--did you ever knowum?” “Did they live in a great big house with green and blue stained-glass windows?” “Yes,” said Daisy. “Why? Did you ever knowum? They lived on Aylesworth Avenue. That was where they moved to after they lived next door to us.”

Phil and his family were the people, then, whom I had visited as a child, when I had gone to Pittsburgh with my mother, and who had come back into my mind, when Hugo, at Ray Coleman’s party, had said that Daisy came from Pittsburgh! I told Daisy how much I had envied Phil Meissner’s elaborate toy railroad and his device for making dinner-plates jump, but how obnoxious, on the whole, I had thought him. “He was spoiled to death,” said Daisy. “That was what was the trouble withum, I guess.”

And this discovery that Daisy had married a boy I had myself known in my childhood had an effect out of all proportion to its apparent importance or interest. Hitherto, I now fully took account, I had regarded Daisy as an alien--first, as a denizen of Broadway, and afterwards, as a product of the Village. But she seemed now to have taken her place in the world which I had always known. She was no longer of a different race--of an exotic glamor or guile: she was simply an American girl, who had grown up in an American town like other American towns, lived in a house like other houses, gone to a school like other schools. I seemed to have been given a new vision of the fluidity of manners in America, the plasticity of social position--of the swiftness and adventitiousness of the way in which such things changed. If Daisy’s family had gone down in the world, the Meissners had obviously come up. But the human material was the same; and in the face of its constant fluctuations, attempts to fix social differences became ludicrous and futile. Americans might turn into anything!

What, for example, might not be made of Daisy? On each of the occasions when I had met her, I had seen in her something different, as my own mind had been differently disposed by my personal situation at the time and by the influences by which I had been affected--by Hugo, first; then, by Rita; then, by my disgust and disillusion the night of Sue Borglum’s party; then, by my evening with the Grosbeakes. And I could see how she herself had taken the color of each of the men with whom she had lived since she left Pittsburgh: Phil Meissner’s extravagant tastes; Ray Coleman’s constrained correctitude; and Pete Bird’s engaging humor. She had even, I noted, begun lately to talk exactly like Pete. She had been eager to accept whatever they gave, and how little they had had to give her! Phil with his inherited money, his egoism, and his silly jokes; Ray with his substantial salary, his ignoble employment and his meanness; and Pete with his pennilessness and uselessness, his gentlemanly hobbies and his charm--they seemed now to me like figures of comedy for familiar American types.--But what hope was there for Daisy with any of them?

“I declare,” I said finally aloud, “I don’t see why you haven’t been able to do better than Pete and Ray! Haven’t you ever found anybody in the Village that really amounted to something and that you liked at the same time?” She shook her head, not turning from the window. Then, after a moment, she turned: “You know the only person,” she said, “that I ever thought I could get a real crush on was your friend Hugo Bamman. I actually got all hopped up, that night he was sailing for Egypt, or wherever it was, about the idea of going away withum. I think he’s good-looking, too--especially since he’s stopped wearing spectacles. Some people think that scar spoils his face, but I think it’s smart-looking.--But he’s certainly cagy about women--Myra Busch was crazy aboutum, you know.--Either that or he’s afraid of them.--He’s so sure of himself, too--he knows what he wants to do.--None of the men I’ve ever lived with were sure of themselves.--You know what you told me out in the country, about my knowing about everything better than anybody--well, I wanted to say at the time that that isn’t true at all. That’s just the trouble: I don’t know what it’s all about. I want somebody to tell me!”

Daisy’s mentioning Hugo reminded me of the world as I had seen it through his eyes when I had first come down to Greenwich Village: then, like him, I had thought myself a rebel against the standards of a bourgeoisie--that is, in a country like America, where there was really only one class, or rather, as I had just been reflecting, no classes, properly speaking, at all, against an abstraction of all the worst qualities attributable to respectable Americans; then later, when I had been in love with Rita, all the interests and occupations of the common life had seemed to me on so low a plane and of so lax an impulse, that I could feel for them nothing but contempt. Now my trip to Europe since the War had had the effect of making me more content with America, even at her worst; and my conversation with Grosbeake _à propos_ of Lewis’s _Babbitt_, though Grosbeake’s opinions had surprised me at the time, had in the long run had the effect of helping me to approach America from a different point of view than the point of view which, at the time when I had thought like Hugo, had allowed me to take account only of American mediocrity and timidity. To-day I seemed to have re-entered that world and to find myself perfectly at home there: now I found that it no longer inspired either hatred, apprehension, or scorn.

“By the way,” I presently asked, “where did you get that line about ‘the downfall of western civilization’?--You know, that night I took you to the movies, you said that you probably looked like the downfall of western civilization.” “Oh,” she said, “that was just something I picked up at the Ritz Bar in Paris!”

The little tapestry-brick houses had been supplanted by apartment-buildings, also in tapestry-brick, and with attractive green or brown awnings at the doorways and windows; but now the awnings came closer together and the crowded house-fronts were laced by zigzagging fire-escapes: they got dingier, balder, denser. We were in Brooklyn, and now Brooklyn Bridge repeated the fire-escape zigzags.

Delancey Street, with its car-tracks and hooded subway entrances; the Bowery, with its El.

We got out at Astor Place. I asked Daisy what she wanted to do. “I think I’d like a drink,” she said. “It’s so long since I’ve been absolutely free, without any housework or anything, that I feel like making the most of it!” “Have you gotten over your sinking-spell?” I asked. “Sure,” she replied with conviction. “I feel fine!”

The oppression of summer, again, hung over and hushed the city-streets: the very taxi horns seemed muted. The greenery in Washington Square, behind the arc-lights, looked heavy and dark; and the benches overflowed with Italians, dirty and sweaty, swarming to the air, giving out the sounds of life, but heavy-footed, slowed down and subdued.

My rooms in Bank Street were stuffy and messy: the colored woman who took care of them had abandoned me without warning and they had not been cleaned for a week. I threw open all the windows. In the house across the court, the people were sitting on the fire-escape in their undershirts. A baby was howling and sobbing.

I had brought in some ice from a drug-store, and this time we had Scotch instead of gin. It was pretty good Scotch, as it went, and we had highballs with mineral water. It was pleasant to relax on the couch, with the cold misted glasses in our hands, alone, with nowhere to go, with no buses or boats to catch.

“Who did you say you were staying with?” I asked.

“Sue Borglum,” Daisy replied--and added: “I think she’s going nuts. Have you seen her lately? She’s turned green!--She’s turned absolutely green!--But I can’t worry about her!--I’ve got all the worrying I can do with Pete and myself!”

“Did you ever know Peter Kester?” I asked. “No,” said Daisy, “Who is he?” “He’s a great friend of Rita Cavanagh’s--she always used to be telling me about him. I met him yesterday for the first time--he’s just come back from New Mexico.--He’s just a nice old bozo, who paints rather mediocre landscapes. He’s just like all the American painters of that generation that you meet at the Washington Irving Club.--He wears tortoise-shell-rimmed eye-glasses with a big black ribbon--and he thinks that Picasso is a clown!”

The electric lights were hot, and I got up to turn one out. “Why don’t you turn them all out,” said Daisy, “and just turn on that lamp in the alcove? It would be a lot cooler.” I turned on the table-lamp in my study and put the others out. I was glad that the things in the room were obscured by the shadow now: I had been feeling that that Leonardo was not a particularly suitable picture for New York in the summer time.

When I came back, she had stretched out along the couch, with her head propped up on a pillow against the arm and her highball clasped in her hand. “I hope you don’t mind my lying down,” she said. I sat down on the edge of the couch beside her.

The voice of a radio, dimly muttering or hoarsely warbling, came in to us from across the back yard. I was reminded of my recent meditations while I had been waiting for Daisy in front of the restaurant, and I told her now about looking in the mirror and mistaking myself for some one else.

“You’re not so bad!” said Daisy. “I think your mustache is all right. In fact, I’ve always liked the way you look.” I replied, “Well, I’ve often told you how much I like the way _you_ look!”

Encouraged, I began to describe to her my consoling æsthetic revelations in connection with the popular song.--I had always thought of her, I told her, also, ever since that first night I had met her, whenever I had heard _Mamie Rose_.--I talked on, and even got as far as the Attic Bee.

But all the time that I was talking, she was looking at me, serious and flushed, as if I had been making love to her. At last I stopped and said, “You’re such a darling!” and kissed her. We said little after that....

When, from the profuse delight of that love, hot, moist, mucilaginous and melting, I found my thoughts springing up again, they seemed unfolding like fresh new leaves in an atmosphere of gentleness and peace.

I thought of Daisy under her different aspects, as she had seemed to me at different times--and I remembered the literary productions which at one time or another she had inspired--all so different from my present vision of her, from our present reality: first, the night that I had met her at Ray Coleman’s, the cool Gallic short story I had imagined, with its humanitarian irony--then, the night that we had gone to the movies, the romantic apostrophe of the sonnet--then, the night that I was to take her to a night-club, when my alienation from Rita had had the effect of thrusting away from me all the rest of the world as well--Daisy along with the others--the desperate exposure of literature itself, on which my mind had run so furiously and interminably--then, when I had visited Pete and Daisy in the country, the savage moralistic satire which the letter I had received from Rita and the spectacle of Grosbeake’s equanimity had prevented me from writing. I had, in fact, rejected all these projects--as I had outgrown those phases of myself of which my successive conceptions of Daisy had been merely the reflections in another.

And now I felt that I should be content if I could only make some sketches of Daisy, as I remembered her at different times and places--if I could only hit off, in prose, her attitudes, her gestures, her expressions, the intonations of her voice--preserve them so they should not vanish, as Degas had done for his dancers--as Toulouse-Lautrec had done for the women of cabarets.... I dreamed a whole series of Daisy....

So I should perhaps save myself at last from that dreadful isolation of the artist which had appalled me in Hugo and Rita--both forever, it seemed to me now, occupying impregnable solitudes with the creation of impossible worlds--so, by the way of literature itself, I should break through into the real world--as to-night I had seemed at last, with Daisy, as if by a simple mutual transfusion, to come so naturally into contact with life.... Such pictures as I imagined of Daisy would grow directly and freshly from life. And it seemed to me to-night that literature was as amiable as writing ballads, as necessary as making tables--and indeed that, when one came right down to it, there was really no difference in kind between carpentry and literature.

I bent over Daisy--her head on the pillow had that look--the little soft round chin and the soft bare throat--of women in those moments when they have dropped off, along with their garments, all the ruses and resolutions with which they meet the world--when we see them just awakened or lying thinking at night, with wide eyes and anxious mouth, and we realize how gentle they are, how much they wonder, and how tender toward them we must be.... I wondered whether she would leave Pete for me....

“Let’s run away together!” I suggested.

“Oh, I couldn’t--now,” she replied. “I told Pete that if he got a job, I’d stay withum.”

It seemed to me now that I wanted above everything to go away somewhere with Daisy.

“I’ll take you on a motor-cycle!” I proposed.

“No, you won’t!” she promptly replied. “I’ve done my last motor-cycle elopement!”

“Still you must have had a lot of fun!”

“I didn’t know whether I was ever going to get there alive. We had about six accidents.... The real reason for the motor-cycle, I found out afterwards, was that I was afraid I was pregnant and Phil wanted to bring me around. He thought that a motor-cycle trip would be just the thing.... There! I’d told you that we weren’t married! Oh, well--never mind!” She was silent a moment, then went on: “That’s something that nobody but Phil would think of--taking a girl on a motor-cycle trip to bring her around!... He wouldn’t even let me ride in a side-car--he carried me all the way on the handle-bars!”

I made her turn and embraced her anew, kissing her with pleasure and compassion. When she told me of the rejection and death of her love, I recognized the fate of my own. And it was so sweet to include in my arms that warmth, that solidity, that slenderness--and to feel that she followed me!...

In the peace and silence again, I could hear that poor child still crying, and I remembered how once, as a child, I myself had lain awake with the heat, and suffered and complained.--Then, in a moment, I remembered, also, how those same children of the Village had figured in the poem which Rita had recited the night of Ray Coleman’s party and which she told us she had written that day. On that very day when she had filled my imagination with the splendor of her genius and her beauty, when she had seemed to me a goddess or a muse--on that day, her own mind had been haunted by visions of imbecility and deformity--she had seen only, among those children of the streets, the most wretched and the most afflicted, and she had seen in them only the crippling of the spirit and the clouding of the mind by love....

What relief and what a rebirth, our only real birth into this world, when from the fears and snobberies of youth, from all our preconceived ideas, from all those foolish abstractions we learn, all those things that we think we think, we find at last in these beings who have crowded, offended, disgusted or fought us, that interest and that value which we have found only in a few or in one--when, youth’s passion and anguish spent, we see rising about us that reality of those we have looked on as strangers, and know that it is our reality--that what is strange to us is strange to them, that what hurts them hurts us, that what is good for them is good for us--when we no longer dread the fool nor hate the one who wounds us, but can sleep in our beds in peace and in peace face the waking world!...

I kept telling Daisy how smooth her skin was, and she was finally moved to retort: “Are you used to women with scales?”

“I suppose I ought to go,” she said presently. “I don’t want Sue Borglum to have it on me that I stayed out all night.”

“I’ve been so happy with you to-day,” I said, “and I’m afraid that you haven’t been happy.”

“Oh, yes, I have,” she replied. “But I’ve been depressed about the Boston business. I don’t want to go to Boston, damn it!”

She sat up on the edge of the bed. “Now you go into the other room while I put on my dress!”

When she came back, her dress wasn’t hung very well, and her lipstick, newly applied, had a look of fresh paint.

“I don’t care about any of those things,” she said, “except the mouth-organ and the pistol.”

I couldn’t find the mouth-organ: I looked for it all over in vain. “Confound it!” I exclaimed, “I must have left the mouth-organ in the taxi!” “Oh,” she said, “I wanted to show Pete how I could play _Nearer My God to Thee!_ But I guess that the snake will amuse him!”

[The End]