Chapter II (1)

We worked in silence, dismantling the walls and packing Rita’s belongings.

Rita herself had left us: some one had knocked at the door, and she had gone into the front room. We had heard her receive a male caller and carry on a decisive, rapid conversation. And she had now been away so long that, deprived of her peremptory commands and made uneasy by the presence of the visitor, we no longer spoke to each other. Duff Burdan, the young man whom at Ray Coleman’s I had taken for a baseball player, but who had turned out to be actually a painter, was laboring over Rita’s suit-case, in the broken strap of which, with a great air of masculine effectiveness, he was gouging extra holes with a nail-file. The young Jew was taking down the pictures and wrapping them carefully in newspapers: we had only rarely seen him at Rita’s and had not expected to see him to-day: he was very quiet, polite and well-dressed, and we resented as complacency his modest amiability. But Duff Burdan and I were also resenting each other.

And in the stillness which had ensued on hammering down the last boards of a packing-case, I heard the moaning of boat-whistles from the harbor; and my heart horribly sank. So we had used to hear them in summer--their sobbing, melodious and remote--in the late afternoon shadow; or at night, when the rumorous hum of summer came in through the open windows, when the summer world, which had already been sleeping gently by day, seemed scarcely to slumber at night: their trombone and oboe notes--so one night she had imagined Stokowski conducting a symphony of river-noises from the top of the Singer Building.

I stood up and tried not to hear them--tried to level on the objects about me a prosaic disenchanted gaze, as if by force of will I could insulate them and, impervious to the aromatic smell of perfume and cigarettes--the odor of her hair--so put myself out of reach of that current which had charged them with feeling and which still gave them the power to shock me. They were meagre and battered, it was true; the damaged electric heater; the little wooden cot, with the strip of batik above it; the sewing-machine; the potted cactus; the water-color of an Indian corn-dance, with its delicate red-and-black figures distinct against egg-shell white (it had been sent her, like the cactus, I never failed to remember, by an unforgotten admirer who had gone for his health to New Mexico and who was always on the point of coming back); the purple abstract painting of an eggplant taking shape amid a maelstrom of female membranes (which had been given her by another admirer about whom I had always wondered, but whose identity she had never revealed); the bookcase, with its rubbed and broken volumes, so fantastically miscellaneous, in which one could read, as in geological strata, the so various interests and tastes of the men whom Rita had known.

I looked away, and my eyes involuntarily sought the half-open door to the sitting-room. There I could see them standing at last by the door which led out to the staircase: Rita was half turned away, but I had a glimpse of the face of her companion: he was an undistinguished, thin and dingy-eyed young man, commonly dressed. I saw him take some bills from Rita and put them away in his pocket.

When she came back, she gave a sharp look round. “Where’s my little Buddha?” she demanded. I told her I had packed it in the box. “Well, you just get it right out again! I didn’t want it packed! It will be smashed to bits!” I assured her I had packed it carefully. “No: it’ll be broken in that box, just as sure as sure! I think I’ll take it with me--I’ll carry it myself.”

“I’ll carry it over separately, when the other things go, if you want me to,” Duff Burdan volunteered. “Will you promise not to break it?--No, I think I’d better take it myself.” “What do you think I am--a smasher of images?” She laughed on her precise little notes: “You promise not to let it get broken?--promise!--If I come back and find that Buddha broken, I’ll never speak to you again!--Oh, don’t pack that Indian corn-dance with the other pictures!” she interrupted young Kaufmann. “I _do_ want to take that with me!--Can you get it in the suit-case, Duff?--or couldn’t you strap it some way on the outside?”

Duff Burdan dealt with this problem. “Everything here is to go, is it?” he asked, looking round. “Yes, everything,” she replied. “Are you sure you’ll have room for it all?” “Sure: I’m throwing out a whole lot of my own junk.” “It’s so sweet of you to offer to keep it for me!--Don’t let anybody borrow my books!” she admonished him, the moment after.

I looked at my watch and announced that it was time to get a taxi--Duff Burdan was storing her furniture, but I was to see her off.

Those stairs which I had climbed so many times to find, at the top, her little figure, intense and sharp even standing in the doorway and dark against the light of the door, so that it seemed sometimes like a knife on which I was running--those stairs where too often lately I had felt that, in answering the doorbell, she had been hoping for some one else--as I descended them this afternoon, it was not without relief at the thought that I should never have to climb them after to-day.

And was that he, that sloppily dressed reporter, that fellow from some insurance office, to whom Rita had been giving money--was that the visitor she had been always expecting, whom she would rather have seen than myself? I was glad of a new reason for disgust, of a new pretext for hating those stairs--and yet that hatred, as I knew, was only fear, the fear of remembering how much I had loved them. And such bitterness was ignoble, I knew--for houses were things to put away, like worn-out clothes, with the phases of our life, with the emotions with which life was clothed. And was not emotion here worn out?--on my side as well as on Rita’s--had I not come myself to dislike the cold house, the sordid staircase, the saloon with its hanging blinds, the oppressive tunnel of the El, the bleak stony waste of the docks, where late one night I had walked so leadenly, not finding Rita at home? Had I not said to myself that afternoon, on my way to Rita’s house for the last time: “Well, thank God, I’ll never have to come back to this damned address again! I’ll be out of prison at last!”

And now I could see that the winter sun was bright on a colored cigarette-poster, and that the school-girls returning from school were prettier than any school-girls had seemed to me for many months. I compared one of them with Rita, to the advantage of the school-girl--Rita had lately been looking rather badly. I should be free to love another girl now! I thought of Daisy, whom I had seen the night before and who had seemed to me unexpectedly desirable. If I could only keep up my spirit--if I could only play the game according to the sportsman’s code which Rita had been trying to teach me so gravely and so sweetly--if I could only, I told myself, do that, then in the long run, all might be right between us--because I had not nagged her or wearied her, because I had proved myself her peer, as prompt to offer all for love and as brave to bear its passing. If I could only remember that the days were not bricks to be laid row on row, to be built into a solid house, where one might dwell in safety and peace, but only food for the fires of the heart, the fires which keep the poet alive as the citizen never lives, but which burn all the roofs of security! Be glad, be proud, to end so well--before that music of the harbor--I could hear it now again, as I came back to Rita’s with the taxi--before that music had lost its beauty--for so one could hear it as beautiful forever!

Back in the apartment, I found that a new visitor had arrived to say good-by to Rita. It was a young man from Columbus, Ohio, whom I remembered having met with Rita one evening when we had gone to the theatre. He was one of those curious Westerners who dress like Westerners, but who speak like Philadelphians. The night Rita had recognized him at the theatre, she had seemed disquietingly glad to see him, and my first instinct had been to identify him as the admirer in Santa Fé who had sent her the corn-dance and the cactus, and of whose arrival I lived in dread. When he had turned out not to be this person, I had been exceedingly relieved, and as Rita had never afterward mentioned him, I had forgotten him completely. Now, however, his presence seemed ominous: it was evident that Rita had been seeing him. I remembered that, when we had met him at the theatre, he had said that he was soon going West, and that, I calculated now, had been at least a month ago. It had, it seemed to me, been just about a month that things had been going particularly badly between Rita and me.

She was hurried but gay with the partings--I thought that she had become more good-natured since the arrival of the new admirer. Just before she got into the taxi, she kissed everybody good-by. The Westerner, with unctuous heartiness, was all for seeing her off, but she explained that that was my prerogative--and she kissed him a second time. I felt suddenly that it was an impudence for her to have divided with such scrupulous fairness, between Duff Burdan and me, the honor of seeing her off and the honor of storing her furniture.--Yes: she had certainly got out of an engagement with me a very short time after that night when we had met the Ohioan at the theatre!

I saw, as I helped her into the taxi, that she was carrying the little potted cactus, to which I had taken an intense dislike: it had a stubby and prickled stalk, and it had with time come to wear to my eyes a significance all too plainly phallic.

In the taxi, I at first said nothing: we had both become, together, so tense. But when we had turned into Seventh Avenue, I looked at her and smiled and said, “Well!” She puckered her eyes and mouth in one of her ecstatic grins and spasmodically threw back her head in the movement which had once made me feel that she was lifting me into her ecstasy, but which now seemed to draw her away from me: “Oh, it’s so _wonderful_ to be going away where I won’t have to see any more people!”

Yes: she had left me already--long ago. She would not let me come with her to that world. I must return to the common world--and what should I do there now? Those qualities of desperate independence and of intellectual passion which had once exalted me so, could make me now so glum!

Rita had decided overnight to leave New York. One of her aunts, who still lived in the little up-state town where Rita had been born, had lately fallen ill, and Rita’s mother, with whom Rita shared her rooms, had gone to stay with her sister. One evening, when I came to get Rita to take her out to the opera, I had found her, not even dressed for dinner, sitting amidst packets of old letters on the day-bed, and passionately preoccupied with the idea of returning to her native place, sustaining the old age of her aunt, and consecrating herself in solitude to the composition of a play in verse. I saw, to my annoyance, that she had been crying. And at the _Rosenkavalier_ she had relapsed into that punctual responsiveness, with its effect of deliberate polite effort, which I had noted in her the night I had first met her, but which she had dropped when I had got to know her better. She had intimated, on the way home in the taxi, that she considered the _Rosenkavalier_ a little cheap. And I had expected her to like it so much!

I had hoped then that her intention to leave town, which I had applauded with insincerity, would evaporate like any other of those suddenly excited desires--to go West, to go to Paris, to return to the stage again--which she would as suddenly forget; and I was dismayed when I found that she persisted in it. She had sat down and written half-a-dozen stories for a popular magazine, and had succeeded in getting an advance from the editor (who was also wildly in love with her), on the strength of a promise of more stories. She had then paid her arrears of rent and had persuaded the Italian landlord to allow her to break her lease.

I had made to Rita’s sigh of relief, in the taxi on our way to the station, some appropriate reply, conscientious and devoid of conviction; but I saw now that we were already at the Waldorf, where, with the traffic cut across us, we stopped.

I looked toward her and saw that her face, with her old fur collar close about her neck, was pale and demoralized and ill, staring and pinched. For the first time since that night in Bank Street, when her cheeks had flushed a hot pink and, leaning back against my couch, she had revealed her long Muse’s throat, her face seemed sharp-featured and tarnished. And though I knew well enough, even then, that, if all I had once adored in that face--passion, intelligence, daring--seemed now to have disappeared, it was strained nerves and hard living which had killed them--her poverty which had put her at the mercy of all that importunate pack--myself among them--who had been forever ringing her doorbell, and all that alien life of the city which had taxed her almost to dementia (the crosstown traffic stopped; our own commenced to move: she had told me once that the traffic terrified her)--though all my conscious feelings were of horror that some one I so honored should be injured, that I should ever come to find unlovely a being I had once so loved; yet that savagery of the human animal which makes us fall upon our wounded fellows, especially those whom we have feared, impelled me to say cuttingly and abruptly: “You have no faith!”

“What do you mean--religious faith?” she asked, as if she had been talking to a stranger--but I cut her short with, “No: the other kind--good faith, I mean!”

“You know very well,” she replied, suddenly speaking to me directly, “you know very well that I know what sort of person I am--but if I wasn’t that sort of person, I shouldn’t be the sort of person who would do what I did with you.... I was cruel to other people then.”

“Yes,” I said, “I know: but when I see some of the people you care about, you can’t blame me if I take it a little hard!”

“What do you mean?” she demanded.

“I was thinking of this afternoon.”

“Duff Burdan and Max Kaufmann are both nice boys--I thought you liked them. And I’m not in love with either of them, if that’s what you mean!”

“I wasn’t thinking about them--I think they’re all right.”

“I hadn’t seen Max Kaufmann for months,” she went on. “He came around to see me just because he heard that I was going away. It was nice of him to come.”

“Who was that fellow that needed a shave?”

“Who do you mean?” Her wonder made me angry.--“You don’t mean my brother?” she added, after a moment.

“Was that your brother?” I pretended to be amused by my own jealous suspicions. I had forgotten she had a brother, though she had told me about him once.

“Yes,” she answered. “My brother came in this afternoon.”

“What does your brother do?” I inquired.

“He drinks,” she said bitterly, without humor.

As I remembered the visitor’s face, dim-eyed and devoid of personality, I could see now in it Rita’s sharp nose and her eyes of indefinite color. And my first feeling was one of relief that the shabby nonentity I had seen, to whom Rita had given money, was merely Rita’s brother. But the discovery, as I found in a moment, had the effect of increasing my resentment: if my worst suspicions had been justified, I could at least, to that extent, have despised her, could even perhaps have washed my hands of her. But now I knew that if it was not the unknown visitor, as unconsciously I must have hoped, with whom Rita had been lately preoccupied, it must have been the young man from Columbus, who was obviously attractive and eligible.

“At least,” I brought out after a pause, “this big-hearted guy from the West isn’t a relation of yours?”

She was silent. Then she began, with her effect of dramatic sincerity which I had come to resent and dread: “It’s so false of you to nag me and scold me like this. You ought to understand how I feel! You ought to be able to see what I’ve been going through. If you really loved me, you wouldn’t want to say hateful things to me!--But I don’t care now--I don’t care about any of you!”

“I know: I do understand,” I replied. “I hope that you get a lot of work done.” But I wanted to say, “That’s nonsense, and disingenuous besides, to say that my being jealous means that I don’t love you enough. And then you accuse me of being ‘false’!”

I stared out at the motor-cars and taxis which were mounting the enormous driveway of the viaduct that girds the Grand Central. They had still, I found, the power to stir in me, like those taxis I had heard from the window the night I had first met Rita, the excitement and hope of the city. They were urgent and expectant now, crowding up-town along their private gallery, to dinners in apartments and hotels, where romances and adventures were beginning, where people were drinking cocktails and becoming amusing and gay (as I had not been able to be for so long)--to parties, to night-clubs, to plays, to the theatrical iridescent Forties, which I had never properly explored and where I knew that Daisy was living.

“Did you know Daisy had left Ray Coleman and gone back to the stage?” I asked.

“No,” said Rita. I could see that her hands were quivering with tenseness.

“I think it’s probably a darn good thing, don’t you?” By approving of Daisy’s vagaries, I perhaps hoped to make reparation for my harshness about her own.

“Yes,” she answered, “I suppose it is.”

“I like her so much,” I continued. “I saw her at Sue Borglum’s last night. She has a wonderful sort of good-natured frankness. I really think, in fact, that she’s one of the girls I know that I like best.”

I hoped, no doubt, to make Rita believe that I had been happy the night before without her. She had told me--what seemed to me improbable--that she wanted to be left alone, that it always made her nervous to have people around while she was packing. I tried to fix my mind on Daisy as I had seen her at Sue Borglum’s party: with bare arms in a girlish black evening-gown--with her candid American smile and her continual spark of wisecracks. And it occurred to me now in the taxi that, as soon as I had seen Rita off--I had never hitherto been able to think beyond that event--I should be free to cultivate Daisy. I could go at once to her place on Forty-fourth Street--I could ask her to dinner to-night! And this realization sustained me.

We had been silent, but now Rita began again: “It’s so _false_ of you to talk to me like that! You used to understand things so well! You know that the first time I met you, you said that Ray Coleman was bitter because he hated his newspaper work, and that that had made him harsh with Daisy. Well, don’t you think that _my_ life makes _me_ bitter? Don’t you think _I_ hate the way I’ve been living?”

“I know: I’m sorry,” I replied, and I took her hand and pressed it, without tenderness or warmth.

We had stopped at the station door. I gave Rita’s suit-case to a porter.

“Don’t you want him to carry that?” I asked, nodding toward the cactus.

“Oh, no!” she guarded it, grinning. “I wouldn’t trust it to anybody--I’m afraid that something might happen to it!”

All the rest was mechanical--when we kissed good-by, most of all. I sat down in the train for a moment, and told her what an excellent thing I thought it for her to go away alone and write: I hoped that she would accomplish a great deal. “You must produce a masterpiece,” I said. “Let me see it when it’s done, won’t you?”

I plunged out into the hurrying concourse and made straight for the door to Forty-fourth Street.

On my way--as I was passing a news-stand--at the sight of a bright red magazine-cover, I found myself shocked by that terrible current of which the furniture and pictures of Twelfth Street, of which everything connected with Rita, had for so long been such active conductors. It was the second-rate fiction magazine for which Rita had written the stories that had enabled her to leave New York. She had never been willing to sign them--I remembered that now--though they were really not at all discreditable: she was incapable of writing badly. But as she had never taken them seriously, as she had written them merely to make money, she had always hated them, and had insisted on signing them with a pseudonym, though she could have gotten a far better price for them by publishing them over her own name.

I turned suddenly back toward the train, as if I could still have redeemed our farewell from the memory of my bitterness and spite--but the man was taking down the sign.

* * * * *

The news of her aunt’s illness had deeply affected Rita; and though I was sceptical and suspicious at the time, I see now that it had really preoccupied her to the exclusion of everything else. Aunt Sarah, who was always called “Aunt Sadie,” had been the artistic member of the family; and Rita had originally been named for her. But when Rita had first come to New York, and had acted for a short time on the stage, she had substituted “Rita” for her real name, and she had never afterwards been able to bring herself to be known as Sarah again. Her first poems had been published over her stage name. And now she tortured herself with the fear that this might have hurt Aunt Sadie’s feelings. With her passionate concentration, she had talked to me of that extraordinary little woman with the birdlike nose and neck, and the square enormous brow (which Rita had inherited).

Aunt Sadie had, in her youth, been the organist in the church and the gay getter-up of church “sociables”; she had wanted to go to Paris to study music, and had nearly succeeded. But the men of Aunt Sadie’s family--like Rita’s brother--had not made life easy for the women: some drank; some had broken down; some had simply disappeared. When she had found she could not go to Paris, Aunt Sadie had decided to move to Watertown and teach music; but a last brother, who kept the general store in the little town where they lived, had been disabled by a paralytic stroke, and Aunt Sadie had had to take care of him and help with the store, for which she presently found herself assuming the whole responsibility. But as she had always been hopelessly perplexed by the local problems of supply and demand, she was gradually deprived of her trade by a newer and more modern store, which had a soda-fountain with tables. Now she had come down with a bad case of pleurisy, and was unable to work at all.

And Rita, brooding on the slow extinction of Aunt Sadie’s personality, tragically reproached herself for having suppressed Aunt Sadie’s name. She talked to me about Aunt Sadie till I could see the chipped and yellow keys of her little upright piano, and the elegantly engrossed scrolleries of the old-fashioned black-and-white music-covers, more clearly than the objects in the room in which we were, and could hear those other scrolleries, both elegant and noble, of the voices of the fugue, weaving an indelible watermark of beauty in the air of the cramped little parlor behind the general store. Aunt Sadie had taught Rita to play; and Rita still remembered some fragments of Handel and Bach, which sometimes tumbled out without warning when she found herself beside a piano, all rumpled, as it were, but still fresh, from the disordered wardrobe of her mind. These gusts of music surprised me at first: they were so spontaneous, light-hearted and lovely--so different from the sometimes tight, and always sober, style of her poetry; and I have thought since that they were perhaps the only thing which I ever knew of Rita as she had been in her girlhood.

For Rita, too, had spent long years in the little up-state town; had sung in the church choir and known all the hymns by heart; had studied French from the book, where there was no one to teach her to speak it, and had read Baudelaire and Gautier when she could not pronounce their names. And before she had finally gone to college on the scholarship which she had won by fierce solitary effort, she had almost, she told me, abandoned the hope of ever sloughing off that life of the small American town, which she put on when she woke every morning, like some cursed indestructible dress of girlhood, too worn, too soiled, too small.

Yet, I never heard her speak with resentment of her early environment: it was herself, and not the place or its people, which, when she told me of her youth, she made me see. When Sinclair Lewis wrote his famous novel, in its own way so intense, he made one feel that the American small town had rendered the whole of American life unpalatable, had flavored it with a rank flat taste, like some minute organism which spoils the drinking-water. But my impression of the town from which Rita had come was made up merely of those moments in Rita’s life which she had told me of passing there and which seemed to me, like everything else about her, to have taken place outside the common world. She had described to me once, for example, how, lying late awake at night, she had heard some drunkard, returning from the town, singing clearly in the empty country road, dark-and-clear with the autumn moon:

“I wooed her in the summer-time
And in the winter, too;
And all night long I held her in my arms,
Just to shield her from the foggy, foggy dew!”

To-day, when I can sort out the drunkard, the song which every one knows, the little New-York-State town, the girl who wants to get away--though I summon all the drunkards, all the bawdy songs, all the discontented girls, all the towns, that I have ever known--I can see nothing but that moment of Rita’s girlhood, of her girlhood too long detained, which seemed to hang half clear black and half a turbid crystal, in the radiant-dark country night, like a drop of foggy dew--I see all through the eyes of the poet, to whom our social history is invisible.

_I_ made differences between New York and Paris; between New Orleans and New York. _I_ had wondered, at Ray Coleman’s party, whether McIlvaine were a Scotchman or a Jew; I had insisted on finding out from Hugo in what city Daisy was born. And though I did not, like Hugo, compute incomes nor peg out the people I encountered in the economic web, I marked degrees of education and was always trying to identify accents. I had noted, in this way, in Rita, the Irish fickle-mindedness and sharpness; the traces of the superior person in the small provincial community; of the bold and original personality in the community of college girls, who had, however, learned the language of the rest--that savorless language of young segregated women constantly dosed by older women with the highest feminine ideals; the intonations of the American actress of English light comedy; and, finally, dominating all, her rôle of princess and rake of the Village. But it made no difference how she talked, where she had been, what she wore, where she lived, what boors she caught up in her life, what threadbare images she used--the being who filled my mind had little relation to all this. I first learned from Rita that the importance, the significance, of what we see, is supplied by the mind which perceives them--that the power which creates, through imagination and passion, never stops to appraise the value of the materials with which it works, but itself assigns them value.

And just as, despite the fact that Aunt Sadie presented herself as an obstacle to my happiness, that I was by no means, at the time of which I write, in a mood to share Rita’s anguish for the muted and dying vibrations of that steel-silver and tight-strung soul--so she had compelled me, against my taste and interest, to accept all her friends and admirers at the value she put upon them herself. These friends, when I came to meet them, almost always impressed me at first as quite unlike what I had heard about them from Rita--as insipid, ineffective, or underbred. And I used at first to find my jealousy allayed at discovering that Rita’s swans were geese--(though I suppose that I still felt, in the case of the Greenwich Villagers proper, a sort of jealousy at their having participated with Rita in the braver exploits of an earlier day--a day which I myself had come too late for: I had the sense that even the worst of Rita’s friends had at least “fired one ringing shot and passed”). But young journalists cheapened by their work; pottering young writers, like myself; debauched or epicene young poets, with neither genius nor self-respect; mediocre middle-aged literary men, with bald heads and stale reputations; and all that odd mixed company of lawyers, contractors and brokers--I was obliged to grant even to these each his gift or his special distinction--and, even then, I could never be sure how far they were distinctions or gifts which Rita herself had lent them. So constant and so acute was her need to intensify experience that, just as she would cherish the timbre of certain boat-whistles which she heard from her apartment in Twelfth Street, just as she would sometimes keep for days a tangerine or an apple which she had bought at the grocer’s on the corner, but of which, when she had brought it home, she had become fascinated by the color or the shape--so she had the faculty of endowing her admirers with qualities which they themselves may hardly have hoped to possess. With Rita, the vagabond poet would prove to have an interesting temperament; the journalist, an honest conviction; the obsolete editor or essayist, something of the grace of a man of the world; and those bewitched business men and brokers, who so furiously pursued her, seemed to have caught from Rita’s own imagination some disturbing conception of themselves which they were straining to realize--she told me once how a man who had seen her on but a single occasion, and whom she had afterwards succeeded in evading, had recognized her again, after years, merely from hearing her voice over the telephone, when he had by mistake been connected with a wire on which Rita was talking to some one else.

But it was not merely that Rita disregarded all those social and moral considerations which occupy so large a place in the minds of ordinary people. It was not merely that she was free from prejudices; but that character itself, in the sense in which it may amuse us, stimulate our curiosity or appear to us picturesque, did not interest her. She was not at all the sort of woman who enjoys collecting celebrities or types: gossip did not entertain her; she had little taste for novels. In her own stories and plays, there were no characters, but merely situations and emotions. And so, not seeing at all in her friends what most of them saw in each other, she made it possible for them, in their relation to her, to play rôles for which the world would never have cast them. It was as if, in their contacts with Rita, they had become somehow facets of herself, their longings given body by Rita’s imagination and their vitality doubled by her force. They had become aspects of her own personality; and so wear for me even to-day--the middle-western journalist with the Abraham-Lincoln voice, the snow and quiet of the diamond winter night when she had spoken to me, after he had left, of the purity and peace of his spirit of which she suggested that the longings were yet so poignant--the international vagabond, the muffled vagueness of the August dusk when we had carried him part way up Fifth Avenue in the victoria in which we were riding, and she had afterwards, in Central Park, among the asphalt windings and dark walls, where the lovers embraced mute on their benches, sung some Spanish songs he had taught her--and the man in New Mexico, alas! the sweet pathos of the short days she had known him and which she had described to me with her brief telling eloquence on the very afternoon in Bank Street when I had counted on finding eloquence myself to persuade her to marry me--the bare two days and a half she had spent with that tubercular landscape painter whom she had loved, she said, the best of all!

I myself had good cause to be grateful: when I had read Rita my indifferent verses, she would always afterwards take them from me and go through them intently herself, repeating aloud the lines which pleased her, so that they had the sound, brought to life by her voice, of being a great deal better than they were; and, at the time, I never remembered that she had also a knack of reading certain poems by Coventry Patmore and Arthur Henry Clough, poets whom I detested, so that they sounded as if she had written them herself.--Even during our last conversation when I had scolded and complained in the taxi, she had appealed to a generosity for which I was really by no means remarkable by reminding me of those excuses, perfunctory and largely hypocritical, which I had made long ago for Ray Coleman.

In any case, we swarmed to her apartment, devoured her time and her force, and finally, at the period of which I write, had rendered her life intolerable. I had told her once of something that Hugo had said of literary people together, as one saw them in New York or Paris--that they were like the leeches in a druggist’s jar: dependent for nourishment on blood, but reduced to the desperate extremity of preying on one another. Rita had added: “Yes, and I’m the druggist, when he puts his hand in the jar!”

So I had learned in half a year from Rita that from another point of view than Hugo’s, the world may present quite different values, and give rise to quite different problems. But I had learned something else from Rita, which it had cost me more pain to learn. When I had taken her to task in the taxi, reproaching her for lack of “faith,” she had forced me to confront a principle which, since I had known her, had haunted and tormented me, but which I had hitherto tried to evade; and even she, who must have lived with it so long, was reluctant to confess it to me: she had pretended for a moment to mistake what I meant. As Hugo had learned from his weeks in the prison-camp that men who are beaten become brutalized and that poor men starve; so I had been obliged to learn from Rita that any great strength or excellence of character must be, by its very nature, incompatible with qualities of other kinds--that it carries with it weaknesses and ignominies inseparable from excellence and strength. I should, I dare say, like every one else, always have been willing to admit both these truths: they would, in fact, have seemed to me platitudes. But I had had to learn them both from experience, and once I had felt their reality, it had seemed to me that all our social and moral conventions had been based on the opposite assumptions--that a person who had had either revelation (either Rita’s revelation or Hugo’s), and who uncompromisingly met life on that basis, must, like Hugo or Rita, be a rebel, and in consequence, an enemy of society.

For Rita, who exalted every impulse and made dramatic every relation, neither happiness nor drama could endure. I taunted her once, in those later days, with Wilde’s saying that, “_He who lives more lives than one, more deaths than one must die_.” But it was not deaths of the body that she suffered: it was the deaths of all those human relations--it was her rejection, day after day and year after year, of all the natural bonds and understandings which make up the greater part of human life--comfort, security, children, the protection and devotion of a husband, even simple comradeship and affection--so that she was still, at the time of which I write, an outlaw living from hand to mouth, always poor and often ill, bedevilled day and night by all the persons she no longer had the energy to excite to her own pitch of incandescence. And even at the time I had taunted her, even at the time I had denounced her in the cab, it was my consciousness of this strength which had continued to keep me in subjection. For I knew now, in spite of all my pain, in spite of all my complaints and indignation, that if we have the instinct to admire what is admirable, we must also have the courage, and must not rage against--nor even try to minimize--that which makes it possible and mars it.

* * * * *

Outside, the light had grown cold; but the white and orange power of the lamps was beginning to dominate the town. The day seemed hardly now to have been serious: it was withdrawing, by arrangement with the city, which had so much to do at night. The taxis on Vanderbilt Avenue were wedging, honking and hitching, in their efforts to turn and to pass; but I dodged energetically through them and headed west.

If I could only find Daisy home! If only she were free to-night! I had refrained from telephoning on purpose: I wanted so desperately to see her, even if she were going out.

I could still feel the thrill of Fifth Avenue--I scarcely glanced a second time at a face which looked a little like Rita’s. And that fascinating region of the Forties, where I had lately gone so rarely--I found that I could still peer with interest at the photographs in front of the theatres and at the faces of the passing women, who seemed sometimes, with their theatrical make-ups, as miraculously, ideally pretty as women on the stage.

The apartment-house where Daisy lived was narrow and very plain: there was merely a bare hall, with a telephone man, who also opened the door and ran the elevator.

He took me up to her floor, and I knocked at her room, but no one answered; then, as the door had been left half-open, I went inside. The lights had also been left on, and the chairs and the floor were littered with a débris of stockings and chemises, as surprisingly slight and as sordid as the shreds of exploded balloons. On the table stood an empty spaghetti can, two plates gummed with cold tomato sauce, several tumblers with the stale remains of drinks, and an empty gin-bottle. It seemed to me from the contents of the tumblers, that they had begun by drinking gin and ginger-ale, fallen back on gin and bathroom water, and probably ended up with raw gin.

It would be hours now, no doubt, before her rehearsal was over: I had come far too early, had better go away and come back. I looked about the room, and then searched in my pockets, for paper to write her a note, but could find nothing except a letter from a distinguished professor of philosophy whom I had greatly admired at college and to whom I had sent a book of Rita’s poems: he had written me, thanking me for the poems and inviting me to come to see him. I had thrown the envelope away, but my respect for the professor had been so strong that I had never destroyed his letter, though my preoccupation with Rita had prevented my answering it.

But now, as I could find nothing else--finally reflecting that colleges, after all, were places where poets were put to sleep--I tore off part of the back page of the letter, just below the signature, and sitting down in a mission morris-chair, I wrote a note to Daisy.

When I had finished the note, however, I turned over the pages of the magazine--it was a movie magazine called _Photo-Life_--which I had picked up to hold the paper on. Suddenly becalmed in that abandoned apartment, high aloft on that inaccessible floor, with the elevator between me and the street, I found that I had dropped into a pocket of inertia and lassitude. When I had exhausted _Photo-Life_, I looked carefully, with the same serious interest, through _Zit’s Weekly_, the _Cosmopolitan_ and a tabloid of two days before. Then, with the magazines in my lap, I remained blank and incapable of rising: I apprehended the onset of despair. What motive had I for moving? I could no longer go to see Rita, and was there any one else in New York whom I really desired to see? It was as if the emptiness of Daisy’s room had represented the emptiness of the world where I had been left by Rita’s departure. I had not slept much for several nights, and I felt that my joints were heavy. The telephone rang: I did not answer it.

There was a phonograph beside me on the table: it was a small cheap portable one. I regarded it with hebetude. Without Daisy, it seemed as depressing as the glasses, as the garments, as the magazines. But involuntarily grasping at a last resource against despair, I picked up the heap of phonograph records, lying half-shuffled, like a battered pack of cards. Scrupulously I pushed them even and ran through them, reading all the titles: _With You in Paradise_, from _Pretty Kitty_, sung by Bee Brewster; _Ben Bolt_, by John McCormack; _Chanson Hindoue_, Saxophone solo; _So’s Your Old Man_, Fox Trot, by Fred Casey and His Burglar-Alarm Boys; _La Forza del Destino_, Red Seal, Duet by Caruso and Scotti; _Mamie Rose_, Fox Trot, by Jake King and His Eight Kentucky Mocking-Birds. I remembered that _Mamie Rose_ was the fox-trot which Daisy had so offended by playing, the night of Ray Coleman’s party, when Rita had been reciting her poems. I got up and put it on the machine.

The record, I noted, as I wound the crank, had been made by the American Melody Company: it was a pale and unpleasant brown and seemed to have been moulded in river mud. Remembering the handsome victrola which I had seen at Ray Coleman’s apartment, I pitied Daisy a little; yet she had had the right sort of bravery, the bravery to go free when love had passed! The only needles I could find were in an ash-tray, under the débris of cigarette-butts and burnt matches, and it was impossible to tell the used from the new: the first I tried began with a blurt, a hideous stuttering blur. Still dominated by Rita’s tastes, I began to feel that turning on the phonograph would be like applying to myself a dental engine: Rita had not cared for popular music--had thought lightly of even the _Rosenkavalier!_

The second needle turned out no better, but I let it go; and presently _Mamie Rose_ emerged as a kind of fiendish jig, running itself off at impossible speed: too fast, too nasal, too shrill. I made an effort to regulate it and only effected a harrowing descent of pitch, like the gasping and discordant howl of some demon inside the machine crying out in intolerable agony at being compressed from one tempo to another. I listened for the first night I had met Daisy, but merely succeeded in having my heart wrung by the first night I had heard Rita’s poems. The spring of the little phonograph held only for a single winding, so that the record began too fast and was already running down before it came to the end; but, what was worse, it had no horn, so that the demon inside the box, beating in its cramped black prison like a panic-stricken bat, had to squeeze out, as it were, through a crack--the little aperture at the base of the “arm.” No wonder it chittered and squealed so thinly, like an unwinding wire of sound, like a wire, rusted, wry and eaten, worn away so that it seemed almost snapping, or so rough that it would stick and stammer over some echolaliac phrase! So completely had the music been robbed of resonance that it seemed a mere memorandum of music, as if some writer in sound had scribbled down the skeleton of an orchestration, with the brasses brief tin-whistle blasts and raspings, the strings a jotted jingle of cicada-chirpings, and the tympani scored as tiny explosions and echoless crashes of glass. And the “vocal refrain,” when it suddenly began, had as little in common with the human voice as the noises of the instruments had with music: it gave the effect of some mere momentary modulation in the quick mechanical jigging of a railroad train--it was simply a sharper shrillness, a more insistent iteration: _There she goes--Mamie Rose--She--loves--me!--Don’t seem to show it!--How do I know it?--It’s A. B. C.!--She’s_ a crackle of high-pitched syllables ending with _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_ a second slip of dulled and driven cogs--_That’s how I knows--Mamie Rose!--She--loves--me!_ The jazz departed, with redoubled violence and complexities of deformation, into a last frantic charivari--then, after a brief unpleasing flourish, was bitten off as abruptly as it began.

I lifted the needle, clicked the little catch and went over to the window. Outside, gaped a blank abyss: several buildings had just been demolished and the vacuum of vacancy they had left seemed to be sucking with its blind raw walls for some structure to rush in and fill it. I felt again the horrible imminence of despair, and I tried to summon against that blank outlook and against the mechanical voice of the phonograph--those negations of flesh and blood--an intensified vision of Daisy: her alert little yellow head, with its deep stainings of Irish rust, her lips still moist through carnation rouge, and the robust little organism of her body, which made its home among those stone and metal cells, not merely resilient to their surface, but making their grindings quicken and feed it.--Then a sudden voice said, “Hello!” and with a start I turned round and saw her.

I asked her to come to dinner with me. She had on a dark blue street dress, and she looked tired; I had been imagining her animated and hearty, but it seemed to me now that she was frail: her eyes, a lighter green than Rita’s, looked colorless and dim.--“Why--I’d like to,” she demurred, “but I’ve got a sort of a date.”

The telephone rang again and she answered it: I heard her begging off with her little-girl-like “Well, I don’t think I will--I’m so tired--I just got back from rehearsal--I think I’ll go to bed--well, I don’t think I will--you go--well, I don’t want to--all right, see you to-morrow!”

And I felt, not merely flattered, but also reassured, to find that Daisy seemed to think it natural to set aside her previous engagements in favor of those higher obligations--of which I had learned the importance from Rita--of following one’s own inclination.

“I’m glad you came,” she explained. “I didn’t want to go to that party and if you hadn’t come, I would have gone.” “Where was it?” I asked. “At Myra Busch’s.” “Are her parties any fun?” She shook her head contemptuously: “No: she just has a lot of twirps.--I can’t stand ’em!”

“How cute you sounded talking over the telephone!” “Yes: strong men weep!” “No, really: you’re awfully cute!” “You don’t mean it really, do you? It’s a panic, isn’t it?” “No: I do mean it! You sounded cute.” (Now that I had to renew my assurances, I began to feel insincere--I had so long praised no one but Rita, and had praised her with such passionate conviction, that I found now that it cost me an effort to compliment any one else.) “Ray Coleman used to say that I had the world’s worst voice on the telephone--he said I sounded like some awful whining cash-girl.” Another proof of Ray’s stupidity! I could see what he meant, but there was about Daisy’s speech something finely chiselled like her features, so that I had scarcely been aware of her voice; and my resentment at Ray’s stupid taste imparted to my compliments a new fervor.

“Shall I go out and get a drink?” I suggested. “That would be fine!” said Daisy, brightening, and with the humorous consciousness of brightening, that irony of the city I so liked in her. “As the English actor said, when the girl said, ‘How about twenty-five dollars?’--‘That would be a godsend!’--I’ll be getting dressed while you’re gone.”

When I came back, she was still in the bathroom, and called out to me: “You might pass me a drink in here, if you don’t mind.” I poured the dregs out of one of the glasses and handed in some gin and ginger-ale: her little naked arm, reached out from behind the door, had the prettiness of a child’s.--“Now, you turn on the phonograph,” she called to me, “so you won’t hear me use the what-not!” I started _Mamie Rose_ again and poured out a drink for myself: the music seemed almost gay and, when the record had come to an end, I put on another record.

When she came out, she looked a good deal rosier and extremely clean: she was dressed in a light blue dress, with a blue scarf dappled with white, and wore straw-colored stockings. “How nice you look in your blond clothes!” I told her. “Oh, this is just an old rag!” she squeaked in a burlesque hen’s voice. “Well,” I insisted, “you look sweet!” “I probably look like the Collapse of Western Civilization!” she replied--but with a particularly charming smile.

She turned off the phonograph, which had been gibbering like an imbecile over a single unintelligible phrase. “That phonograph’s a delight, isn’t it?” she said. “I took it with me when I left Ray, because it was one of the only things I had left that had belonged to me before I lived withum. Phil gave it to me on our honeymoon. Some of those records are Ray’s, though, I guess.” I remembered Rita’s bookcase.