Chapter III (2)

“He’d had a sort of a crush on Adelina Patti, before he married Mother, and I think that somehow all his life, in spite of the fact that he enjoyed Washington for a while, he was worried by the feeling that he’d really left the great world behind. I remember he got a phonograph record made by Adelina Patti just about the time she was passing out, and when he heard it, he flew into a rage and said it wasn’t like her at all, that it was outrageous to allow such a record to be sold--and then he shut himself up in his room and wrote at something or other for days.

“I think that he’d really wanted to be an artist--he had a very fine voice, you know, and loved to sing--but the 1880’s got him--and then, when he found himself snowed under by American respectability, he tried to be a saint. Even before Mother died and he went to live in the Adirondacks, he wanted to carry us all away to the wilderness with him--but Mother wouldn’t let him.”

I had drawn Hugo out about his father with an interest all the more intent because I was trying to keep my mind closed to Rita: but Mr. Bamman and Adelina Patti had opened the fatal abyss, and as Hugo saw me becoming abstracted, he stopped talking and, looking around with eyes which could now see so much farther, he remarked that Pete Bird, who had not moved but was still posed against the sink, looked exactly like a waxwork. “Who is he, anyway?” I inquired. “What does he do?” “Why, I don’t think he does anything,” said Hugo. “He’s just a bum like another.--He writes some wather nice little poems occasionally!”

“Yes,” said Pete, not opening his eyes, but speaking with perfect self-possession: “A bum like another--but a poet, nevertheless!” “Have you witten anything lately?” asked Hugo, with one of those veritable hemorrhages of kindliness which, when he feared he had hurt some one’s feelings, often followed his bitterest strictures. “I thought that some of your things in _Sedition_ were weally awfully nice!” “I’m not a poet!” said Pete Bird, still without opening his eyes. “Ask Giovanni Squarcillupi!--ask Mike Kraus!--ask Miriam Fotherwell Finck!”

“You haven’t any manuscripts about you at this moment, have you?” inquired Hugo, who, despite his harsh and contemptuous judgments, had a secret sympathetic instinct for the vanities and aspirations of others. “I feel that I could read a little poetry. These parties seem to be getting less and less stimulating--Sue is getting to be more and more like a wegular Philadelphia hostess!”

Pete fumbled with one hand in his pocket, partially opening his eyes, but still supporting his head on his hand. He finally produced a cough-drop: “Here’s a cough-drop,” he announced, “if that would do just as well.--Eases irritation, just like a poem. Of course, the cough-drop’s a little bit fuzzy, but then the poems are a little bit lousy!” “I know,” said Hugo sympathetically, “when you try to find anything in your pocket, you always fish up cough-drops and unpaid bills and things!” “Bills!” said Pete Bird. “They don’t even send me bills any more!--I’ve gotten long past that stage!--Here’s a villanelle,”--he said at length--“a little toy of a villanelle!--and here’s an experimental poem--an experiment in multiple metaphors--all of my metaphors are multiple--they have an infinite number of facets--like the eye of a fly!”

He handed the verses to Hugo: “You read them yourself,” he said--“My eyes are not very good to-night,”--and lapsed back into immobility.

The poems were on creased and dog-eared paper, typed in very small type with rather a wavering touch, but, to my surprise, they had a certain charm, in a rose-petally, snow-flaky way. I could not, to be sure, distinguish very much difference between the sonnets and villanelles, on the one hand, and the “experimental” poems, on the other: Pete Bird’s “multiple metaphors” turned out to be quite easy and mild--his description, for example, of his mistress’s hands as “little surprising moonbeam violins.”

The door into the dining-room opened, and Larry Mickler and Daisy appeared.

“Come on, yuh dope!” said Daisy to Pete Bird. “What d’ye think yuh are, brooding around the kitchen?--a cockroach?” “Get away, yuh dumb cluck!” replied Pete, reluctantly opening his eyes, “and leave me to my meditations!”

“Let’s leave him to his slumbers,” said Larry Mickler, who was evidently drunker than ever. “The boy-friend’s passed out! Too many of those rich liverwurst sandwiches!”

“Come on, Mr. Zilch,” said Daisy, still addressing Pete. “The little woman wants to go home!” “Leave me alone for three minutes!” said Pete Bird,--“only three minutes!--and I’ll rejoin you in the drawing-room!” Though he talked quietly and sensibly, he was evidently incapable of moving. “Well, all right,” she replied, with some bitterness. “But if you don’t make it pretty snappy, you’ll find me gone!”

“Come on back and let him have his sleep out,” Larry Mickler pressed her, pulling at her arm.

But Daisy, ignoring Mickler’s importunities as well as Pete’s mildly aggrieved remonstrances, turned to me: “Take me in,” she demanded, “and get me a drink and dance with me!” She had made up again since I had seen her: her eyebrows had been heavily pencilled to an effect of moth’s antennæ and her mouth had been heavily rouged, so that her sallow and waxen complexion merely contributed a morbid paleness to an effect of provocative luridity; and as I found myself responding to her make-up, after my indifference of the earlier evening, I reflected, with dismay rather than cynicism, upon the purely biological basis of the interest which we feel in women, simple animals like ourselves, produced upon a similar model, monotonous and banal, to which only the recurrent brimming over of accumulating spermatozoa imparts a recurrent attraction.

“Very good!” assented Larry Mickler, with a playfulness distinctly malignant. “Then I’ll just practise a little marksmanship!” He retreated to the end of the kitchen and, taking up a stand near the bathroom door, he aimed his revolver at a row of plates: “I wonder if I could pick those off in order!”

“Why don’t you break them with the butt of the gun?” asked Daisy. “This long-range marksmanship of yours burns me up! You’ve already won the barbed-wire garters for shooting plaster statues at two yards!”

“Listen, Pete,” insisted Larry Mickler, disregarding Daisy, “you go over to the far end of the room and throw up the plates one by one--and we’ll see how many I can pot!--like clay pigeons!” “All right!” responded Pete, not moving or opening his eyes. “Oh, don’t be _dull!_” cried Daisy with disgust.

Sue Borglum burst in with the Jap butler, who produced, at her direction, from the ice-box, a glass gallon-container of cocktails. She threw her arm around Daisy’s shoulder, and exclaimed in a strained excited shriek which she seemed to have become incapable of moderating: “Oh, you _dear_ child! You were an angel to come! Everybody’s deserted me! Bobby said he’d be here at ten, and it’s almost midnight now. I suppose he’s gone out with his little cutie. I don’t mind his keeping a girl--if he’d only get one that was intelligent, or attractive, or something!--but she’s just a dumb little wench out of the chorus--she can’t even dance!” “I think all chorus girls are dumb,” said Daisy. “I’ve just lost my job, that’s why.” “Stand ’em on their heads and they’re all alike!” said Pete Bird, without opening his eyes. Sue squawked with delighted laughter.

Larry Mickler, since Sue’s arrival had been amusing himself at a distance by drawing his revolver on an imaginary foe: he would whip it out, declaring loudly: “I’ll teach those damn goldfish to snap at me!”--then leer humorously in our direction; but as nobody paid any attention to him, he finally came over to the group and poured himself a drink of Scotch from a bottle standing on the table. “No wonder there are so many hold-ups!” he contemptuously remarked to me. “These dubs that we live among are just asking to be knocked on the head and have their pennies taken away from them!” He proposed drinking to Dostoevsky. “We’ve done that already,” I said. “Let’s do it again,” he insisted, with a suggestion of becoming quarrelsome. “Drinking to Dostoevsky is always in order!” bubbled Hugo, with a tiresome recrudescence of his gushing undergraduate enthusiasm.

“Are you going to take me in to dance or aren’t you?” demanded Daisy, turning to me, as Sue Borglum plunged toward the bathroom to greet with effusion another guest who was just emerging from there and whom she seemed not previously to have seen.

Daisy and I left the kitchen together. As we went, Larry Mickler called after me: “So twice is too many times to drink to Dostoevsky, is it?” Pete Bird was still sitting as before, his eyelids dropped in their death-mask and his head propped upon his hand--which, I observed, now that I had read his verses, was finely articulated and long.

“Isn’t it wonderful,” Daisy observed, as we made our way through the dining-room, “how clean Sue Borglum keeps her kitchen! Most kitchens would have an awful hangover after a party like this--but I bet hers will be neat as a pin!”

I avoided the large front room and led Daisy around by way of the hall, through a door that opened out of the dining-room, to the room on the other side of the house where people were dancing to the phonograph.

Daisy danced well: she was light; and the responsive alacrity of her straight little legs walking backward in the fox-trot had the same prosaic charm as her speech.

“Say, just do me a favor,” she said. “Don’t leave me with Larry Mickler. If he tries to cut in on you, don’t letum--I’ll just tellum, no soap!” I asked her what sort of a fellow Larry Mickler was. “Oh, he’s just a fool,” she replied.

“I’m sorry about to-night,” she went on. “I wanted to have dinner with you, but a whole lot of things happened. I’m awfully sorry.” I told her that her touzled hoodlum hair-cut went beautifully with her plaid dress, and that the green in the plaid dress went beautifully with the green of her eyes. She said, “Yes, and the green of my eyes goes beautifully with the green of my complexion!”

I held her close: her lips were slightly open, her eyes partly closed: I wondered whether she were really lapsing into a voluptuous, languorous dream or whether she were merely very tired. It occurred to me, as I looked at Daisy’s fingers, pale, brittle-looking and thin, that her hands, which I had never considered among her prettiest features, must be the “little surprising moonbeam violins” of Pete Bird’s poem.

But now I could stave it off no longer; I could talk no longer against time: I had to think about Rita and Ray! My first feeling had been one of horror that Rita should have been capable of betraying, not another, not me--but herself; then I had made, in my mind, as I quitted the group, a movement of repudiation which passed even beyond anger; and, at the time I had been talking to Hugo and after, this had lifted me to a sudden elation of lucidity and freedom. But now my need to love and believe in Rita, even stronger than my impulse to reject her, reasserted itself. She must have found, I saw now, in Ray Coleman, with her confounded perverse generosity, some fineness, some crippled aspiration, which she had been able to cherish and feed. Was there not in his persistent desire to meet and entertain artists the inveterate ungratified longing to think and to feel like them? Had I not noted in him an unexpected deference, even in his face something gentle and abashed, when, after he had advanced with his usual assurance some opinion on art or literature, a critic or artist present had expressed contradictory views? And as I had watched him just now, in front of the fire, describing Rita’s play, he had seemed to me more nearly amiable than I had ever known him before. He was happy because he felt himself on intimate terms with Rita--because she had told him about her play, and had allowed him to tell others. That was his destiny, perhaps--his salvation: to praise her, to care for her, to soothe her, to guard her from the pack of suitors who came baying after her like dogs--and so, at last, he might become useful and happy--even likable, perhaps! So he might finally justify his calling: he could buy Rita security and comfort!

As we danced past the door into the hall, I glanced across to the couch where I had left Rita, and the sight of the group which thronged about it irritated me suddenly in the same way as the pathetic and exasperating obstinacy of phototropic bugs. “Well,” I remarked to Daisy, smiling, “Ray seems to be having himself a time with Rita Cavanagh!” “Yes,” she replied; “I noticed that! He was trying to tell me last week that he was all to pieces about my leavingum--but it doesn’t look much like it!”

I remembered how Daisy had complained of Ray Coleman’s making her stay home and listen to his reading aloud from the _Oxford Book of English Verse_; and I imagined what a sympathetic audience he must now be finding in Rita: I could see how she would take the book from him and begin to read herself, and how she would presently recite her own poems--poems, no doubt, which she had written lately, and which I had never heard. He would flatter her without discrimination: I scorned her for accepting such praise!

“I suppose he’s pleased with his new job,” I remarked, “but a promotion from the _Dispatch_ to the _Sketch_ seems almost like a promotion from the morgue to the pound!” “If the boys on the _Sketch_,” replied Daisy, “are any worse than the boys on the _Dispatch_, I’m glad I made my getaway in time!”

“Let’s go up-stairs for a minute, shall we?” Daisy suggested, as a record ended. “I want to give the old cuckoo’s-nest a comb.”

On the stairs, I took her arm and steered her up toward the sombre upper reaches, through the couples who were sitting on the steps: I gripped her firmly in my preoccupation, as if I had been guiding a child. “The trouble about having your hair done this way,” she remarked, as if talking for other ears, “is that you have to keep fixing it all the time or people think it’s just mussed up!” As we arrived at the top of the stairs, I found that I had gone suddenly hollow, and I remembered that I had eaten no dinner.

Instead of heading, as I expected, for the bedroom where the coats and hats had been left, Daisy went on along the dark up-stairs hallway--she seemed to know the house well--to a door at the further end.

It was dark inside: by the light that came in through a single window from the house across the scanty back yard, I could see a cot and a simple bureau--the Jap servant’s room, no doubt. I clawed the air for the chain of a shadeless electric bulb which was hanging above our heads. “Why don’t you try the bathroom?” I suggested. “I don’t see any comb on that bureau.” “Never mind about the comb!” she replied.

I embraced her and pasted my lips on her half-opened mouth. I thought about the mouth and moth’s eyebrows which had aroused me for a moment in the kitchen, but which I could not see now in the dark--and I tried to make up for my stupidity and tardiness by holding Daisy against me very tightly and kissing her again and again--but it was an assault of which I found myself conscious chiefly as a determined physical pressure and a deliberate application of the lips: I felt my arms crushing cartilage and flesh, and my mouth missing its goal against her teeth. It occurred to me that Daisy’s lips were really, despite her make-up, not particularly well-adapted to passionate kissing of this kind: I still thought of them as cool-looking and childlike, as they had seemed to me the night of the movies. And I became aware of the succession of my kisses as something tediously mechanical and repetitive. Fearing Daisy might notice this, too, I broke it up by making her sit down on the bed.--I had desired her, and there we were at last! I found myself representing the long stupefied embrace of passion by sheer immobility and weight. I was all too far from being stupefied, I reflected, during the moments when I relaxed my ministrations: some obstinate unconscious loyalty, in spite of all my efforts, kept me cold. And I was distracted by a variety of ideas. I had a vision of the pilloried frog of a behaviorist moving-picture which I had gone to see with Rita: the frog, even with its brain removed, had responded with an automatic kick when an acidulated pad had been applied to one of its legs.--And the consciousness that the little bedroom belonged to the Japanese servant reminded me that the Japs did not kiss, that they did not know what kissing was--and I wondered whether they tried to learn kissing when they set out to become Americanized, and whether it took long.--I murmured, “Daisy darling!” in a low and secret voice.

We became aware that the door was open: I looked around and saw a small spare figure: his face was half in shadow, and I could not see his eyes. I quickly sat up on the cot, and he suddenly withdrew and slammed the door.

“Who was it?” Daisy asked in a whisper. “It was Pete!” I replied.

She got up. “I don’t care,” she said. “A great help _he_ turned out to be!” She pulled on the electric bulb, went over to the mirror on the bureau, and applied her powder and rouge. When she had finished, she said, without looking at me, putting her powder away in the vanity-case, “Take me home, will you?”

We went out and extricated our coats--it was a little like a search in a bad dream--from the avalanche of wraps on the beds; and in silence descended the stairs, looking solemn and matter-of-fact, as we threaded our way among the couples.

So, I told myself, I had not hesitated to wound Pete in his love for Daisy, even after he had shown me his poems, such poems as I had written to Rita, in which his tenderness and his longing had, as it were, been confessed and entrusted to me--to me, another poet! In my glimpse of his face in the doorway, dimly lit by the light from the hall, his pale cheeks and his eyes large with shadow had seemed sensitive and even handsome. Was it Daisy’s indifference, I asked myself, was it jealous suspicions like my own, which had given him that gargoyle’s mask? Yet one had to be hard about these things: love and poetry, as I myself knew, were paid for with danger and pain!

Sue Borglum protested wildly and loudly against Daisy’s leaving so early, and begged me, at any rate, to come back when I had taken Daisy home: she had evidently a morbid fear that her parties were becoming less popular.--I felt the cold taste of winter in the vestibule.

After splashing about in the slush of the dark and deserted streets, I finally brought back a taxi. Hugo Bamman came down the steps with Daisy. He was wearing his old limp felt hat, but no overcoat; and he was carrying over his shoulder the musette-bag he had had in the Army.

We invited him to come with us in the taxi. When I got in after Hugo and Daisy, I found Hugo planted on one of the little turn-down seats, and it was only with considerable difficulty that Daisy persuaded him to sit beside her.

“The tone of Sue Borglum’s parties,” Hugo began at once to complain, “is certainly getting more and more respectable!--she’ll soon be sending out engwaved invitations!” I asked him what he meant. “Why, you just go and meet people now, and talk to them a little, politely--just like a Washington reception. Things used to be so much fwanker and fweer at Sue Borglum’s! I remember one night when Leo Shatov got up and did a Cossack dance on the dining-room table--and the Baroness von Samstag-Solferino always used to appear wearing a coal-scuttle on her head!--And she has these little thin sandwiches, now, made of chopped olives and spiced ham and things. There used to be just a great big cheese, and you gouged out what you wanted with your pocket-knife!”

We were about to drop Hugo off at his house, only a block or two from Sue Borglum’s, but he announced that he was sailing at midnight and would, therefore, go further up-town. I forbore to show surprise, but asked him where he was bound for. He explained, with his self-conscious giggle, that he was sailing for Smyrna on a fruit steamer: his ultimate goal was Afghanistan.

We asked why he was going to Afghanistan. “Well, I think that it must really be an awfully fine place!” he replied. “You know, it’s one of the only places in the world that hasn’t been Europeanized--it’s all a European can do to get into Cabul at all. Not a trace of a business man or a missionary or a newspaper! The Amir has electric lighting and European plumbing in his palace, but, instead of sending for European plumbers and electricians to put them in for him, he sends Afghans to Europe to learn how to do it themselves. When they come back, they’re searched for Bibles.--At the same time, they go in for witchcraft and all kinds of entertaining magic!”

He was bubbling now just as he had done at college over the little pastry-shop in the side-street where he and his friends had bought cinnamon buns.

“Is that where the afghans come from?” asked Daisy. “Yes: I suppose so,” chortled Hugo. “I suppose that, even though it’s forbidden to bring in any modern textile machinery, a smart Europeanized Afghan might be able to do a little profitable sweating in the afghan business!”

I asked Hugo what his literary plans were and he explained that, when he came back from Afghanistan, he was going out to the American West to write a novel about one of the big Western cities, either Pittsburgh or Detroit. (He had already done Boston and New York, though he refused to pay Philadelphia even the compliment of exposing it.) “Oh, God!” Daisy exclaimed. “What do you want to go to Pittsburgh for? I spent the best years of my life trying to get away from there!” “Why, I’ve always wanted to see a Pittsburgh millionaire,” Hugo explained, gaily, mildly, sweetly. “Wasn’t it you who were telling me about the man from Pittsburgh who bought ten thousand dollars worth of fireworks and set them off in the Bois de Boulogne, and then committed suicide?” “Yes,” said Daisy, “that was Phil Meissner’s uncle.” “I think Detroit must be awfully fine, too!” Hugo continued. “I’ve always wanted to see a Ford put together.--I’ve always thought it must be wather like one of those things in the movies, don’t you know, where the man draws a cat, stwoke by stwoke, and then it suddenly comes alive!”

As I listened to Hugo’s prattle, it occurred to me to suspect for the first time that he was allowing himself to prattle on purpose. His spectacles had had the effect of making him look owlish and juvenile; but now that he no longer wore them, his intent deep-sunken gaze betrayed the silliness of what he said--betrayed, I mean, that he himself was not silly. I became aware that the undergraduate patter from which, formerly and while still an undergraduate, he had so desperately strained to escape by harsh paradoxes and flat contradictions, was now a habit which he had accepted, partly no doubt because it was difficult to break, but also partly because he found it useful as a screen for his real purposes and ideas. His real purposes and ideas, it seemed to me, as I watched him in the taxi to-night, had by this time completely matured and stood firmly on their own feet; and a certain amount of success, which he had never aimed at or expected, had given him a new assurance. Hugo’s novels on the American cities had become almost best-sellers; and he was no longer spurred by the painful necessity of asserting his views in ordinary conversation, but was content to chatter on like a school-boy: it saved tedious contentious explanations.

There was no chatter about what he wrote: Hugo’s novels were sober, even morose, and were built with a solidity of cement. They were comprehensive reports on human society, industriously and conscientiously drawn up. And as I thought to-night of Hugo’s assiduity, his independence and his sense of responsibility, I seemed to recognize in them those qualities which had for so many years made his father a respected public servant. The son had cut himself off from his family; had even sold, piece by piece, all the furniture and family silver which he had inherited from his mother, and, set by set, his father’s library; and he had done this--to the great consternation of his cousins and his aunts, to whom the sale of mahogany and silver was like a massacre of kin--all in order that he might live poorly in Patchin Place, writing appeals for political prisoners, making speeches for striking garment-workers and composing those encyclopædic novels from which he had never hoped to make money. Yet, by the sacrifice of property and family, he had saved the honor of a family tradition which was otherwise largely moribund: he had truly assumed the responsibilities of leadership and shown the disinterestedness of public spirit, in the only fields where, in our generation, he had found it possible for him to work.

I seemed to see that, behind the mask of the outlaw, he had finally gravitated to a position exactly similar to his father’s, before his father, in his later erratic years, had withdrawn from public life. For Hugo had applied himself to literature as to one of the old-fashioned professions, Medicine, Law or the Church; and, despite his rôle of eccentric and rebel, had taken on--what set him off at that time from most of the other literary men of the Village--the solid and honorable character of a first-rate professional man. Through the late escapades of the father and the early extravagances of the son, the curve had come round again.

And I envied Hugo to-night: I could think only of his established position as a writer, of the security and the freedom of movement which his royalties had finally brought him, at the same time that he had earned the satisfaction of serious work well done. I myself felt disgusted and gloomy over the aimlessness and uselessness of my life. I had seen clearly, at the funeral of my aunt, that my relations did not think me a success: I was still an underling in a publisher’s office, with no great enthusiasm for my work and with no particular hopes of advancement. And, on the other hand, I was not a writer: I had not made Hugo’s sacrifice and effort. No wonder I had never been able to persuade Rita Cavanagh to marry me! I had offered her merely the meagre resources and the questionable future of a young man with vague literary ambitions; and she had already known many such young men--had already, on one or two occasions, embarked on such lives of cramped space and small comfort, without finding them magic carpets. What wonder that she should now prefer Ray Coleman, with his apartment that overlooked the Square, his lettuce-green cocktail glasses, his water-colors of the Russian ballet, and his rye whiskey bottled in bond?

Hugo asked us to let him out at the corner of Seventh Avenue and one of the upper Twenties. I asked him where his baggage was. “I’ve got it all here!” he replied, indicating the musette-bag on his shoulder. “Haven’t you even got an overcoat?” asked Daisy. “Why, you know, I don’t know why it is,” he replied, with the bogus naïveté with which he masked his stubbornest manias, “but I can’t seem to stand to wear overcoats. They always make me feel so loaded down and sewed up--and they always make me too hot! I always feel, when I get into them, that there isn’t a pin to choose between the modern winter-overcoat and the Iron Maiden at Nuremberg.” “I should think you’d get your death!” protested Daisy. “If the people in New York,” he replied, “didn’t wear so many overcoats, they probably wouldn’t catch so many colds! They bundle themselves up in winter-overcoats and lower the resistance of their bodies so that the least little change in temperature brings them down with the grippe or the ‘flu’!”

“Gee,” said Daisy, with admiration, rather to my surprise, “I wish I was going to Afghanistan! Take me along with you, won’t you?” “I’d love to!” said Hugo. “Come on!”--but he began looking out anxiously for the street. “Oh, _will_ you?” cried Daisy. “_Take me!_ I’m so fed up with it here! I haven’t got any belongings either! I left most of what I had at Ray’s. I could walk right on the boat now and sacrifice practically nothing!--You couldn’t really take me, could you?” “Why, yes--come along!” said Hugo, smiling but, I could see, with some uneasiness: he shrank from the possibility of committing himself to a woman--even in gallantry, even in jest--and was nervously watching the street numbers--“if you wouldn’t mind a few tarantulas and scorpions and things that go with the date and fig trade!” “Well, the fruit’s all unloaded here, isn’t it?” Daisy determinedly objected, with a strong grasp of commercial realities. “We don’t export it over there, do we?” “No: of course--it’s all unloaded on us--but the animals may stay behind! I suppose some of them are regular passengers!” “Well,” said Daisy, “I’ve fought fleas and rats and bedbugs in my time--and Greenwich Village bar-flies--so I guess I could cope with a tarantula!”

Hugo stopped the cab. We were all for taking him to his steamer and seeing him off; but he refused to let us. I think that he was honestly afraid that Daisy would insist upon sailing with him--for he leapt out almost before the taxi had stopped, and his leave-taking was abrupt and expeditious. He opened the door again a moment afterwards and tried to give me some money for the fare, but I pulled his hat down over his ears. He waved at us once with a long spasmodic arm, then marched off in the direction of the docks.

“Gee,” said Daisy, as we drove away, “I’d like to go to Afghanistan!”

We fell silent: Yes, I reflected, Daisy admired Hugo, just as Rita admired Ray--because he had made himself a place in the world, because he was successful and independent!

I was on the point of taking Daisy’s hand when she suddenly snatched the driver’s license out of its isinglass frame opposite her and, without a word of explanation, tore it up, photograph and all. “What made you do that?” I demanded. “I can’t stand his face!” she said tartly. “I’ve been looking at it all the way, and if I had to look at it any more, I’d begin to go half-witted myself!”

I was irritated by Daisy’s gesture: it jarred upon my mood of enthusiasm for Hugo’s sense of social responsibility and I felt against it the same sort of resentment as against Rita’s perversities and caprices. But I laughed--with a certain harshness, as if to mock at the respecters of property, and at the poets who succumbed to their bribes--as if Daisy and I alone, now, still stood together against Ray.

Yet, I was thinking the moment after, one couldn’t really blame Ray Coleman for becoming infuriated with Daisy: hadn’t she squandered all his money and then kept having C. O. D. packages sent home? Hadn’t she even complained to me, the night that I had taken her to the movies, of Ray’s too conscientious practice of paying all his bills? I thought of Daisy the night of the party, when I had first met her and Rita. Hadn’t she behaved like a little fiend?--Hadn’t she turned on a phonograph record in the middle of Rita’s poems? Hadn’t she humiliated Ray by leaving the party with Pete Bird? I found that I forgave Ray more easily for his violent scene with Daisy, which Rita and I had overheard.

But, when I remembered that detestable scene, it was no longer as it had seemed to me that evening. That night I had been a spectator looking on at a melodrama, at a melodramatic tableau of jealousy: Ray pointing at Pete’s broken cane; Daisy abashed among the ruins of the party; and I complacently and gallantly helping Rita on with her wrap. Now I myself had played Ray Coleman’s part. I remembered that spiteful scene which I myself had provoked with Rita, in the taxi, and the scenes which for weeks had preceded it. Now it was as if the rôles had been reversed: now it was I who was the jealous blackguard and Ray Coleman who was the solid decent citizen! And now those memories must perhaps always stand as a barrier between Rita and me, as they had done to-night when I had tried to talk to her--a barrier of coldness and resentment which could never be forgotten now and whose shadow must lie, also, behind on all that had been beautiful before. If I could only just now have said the word which would have caused it to fall away!

“I don’t want to go home!” said Daisy, as we were crossing Forty-second Street. I suggested that we might go to a night-club. I did not, as I say, at that moment, particularly care about Daisy, but then, there was nobody else that I liked better--least of all did I like myself or want to be alone with myself. “All right. I can’t go in this plaid dress, though. I tell you: you go and get something to drink, and I’ll go and change my clothes.” “I’ll go and change, too,” I said.

The moment after, she had some sort of qualm: “Give me a piece of paper,” she said, “any kind of piece of paper will do.” The only paper I had in my pocket was the letter from H. M. Grosbeake, the professor of philosophy at college to whom I had sent Rita’s poems and who had invited me to come to see him, but to whose letter I had never replied, though I had been carrying it around ever since: I had torn the blank part off in Daisy’s room, the day I had written her the note, and now I gave her what was left, the page with the letter itself. She stuck it into the driver’s-license frame behind the isinglass.

I left Daisy at her door.

* * * * *

Larry Mickler, with his revolver and his passion for Dostoevsky, had made upon me an unpleasant impression. I had come to connect him obscurely with my impulse to smash the peach-brandy bottle, when I had felt myself so helpless with Rita, and I found that I disliked Dostoevsky, because Larry Mickler admired him. I remembered--as I went back in the taxi to my own apartment in Bank Street--Dostoevsky’s sadistic manias, his complaisance in self-degradation, his extravagant vanity; I began to feel, after meeting Mickler, that the masterpieces of such a man of genius were a doubtful compensation on paper for the moral bankruptcy of a life. Were not the purity of Dostoevsky’s tenderness, the flights of his Christian idealism, to be measured precisely by his perversity, the sub-human depths of his indifference? Were not the Svidrigailovs and the Stavrogins--those malignant growths which seemed to sprout and, almost without the author’s intention, to swell to such monstrous proportions, in Dostoevsky’s novels--were they not the price which one had to pay for the Myshkins and the Alyoshas?

True, it was quite unfair to Dostoevsky to identify him with Larry Mickler; it was the triumph, at least, of the great artist that, by dint of terrific effort, he had, if only in the world of his novels, succeeded in restoring a moral balance to that universe which he had once felt reeling with the world of his own soul; whereas, in the case of Larry Mickler, who had merely to read Dostoevsky’s books, all that desperate idealism, that victory of moral passion, would, it seemed to me at that moment, go principally to give him a good conscience in licking his chops over the cruelties and perversities, and to leave him with the gratified conviction that there was no kind of discreditable behavior which imagination might not redeem.

And Pete Bird, with his charming wistful verses and his swindle of the liverwurst sandwiches! And Rita--without that _mêlée_ in which her varying passions had involved her, that possession by all the devils of all the human desires at once, all that panic and anarchy and anguish and deceit of her daily life, would she ever without all this have been compelled to the noble severity, the firm and harmonious form, the bravery of candor, of her verse?

And those poets of whom Rita and I had talked the first night I had known her in Bank Street! To-night, the curses and groans of Catullus only filled me with the same disgust for his abasement at the feet of Lesbia as did my own preoccupation with Rita.--And Verlaine, in his prison cell, with his imbecile alternations between piety and pornography--if he had published his religious poems, as he had originally intended to do, sandwiched in between his poems of lechery, he would have furnished a perfect example, an example forever ludicrous, of the disorder of the poet’s mind.

Even Dante, of whom I had once thought, of whom I thought still, as the supreme poet of Europe, who had possessed together the fiercest passion and the most powerful intellect, who had been able to apply to one work all man’s highest faculties at once--what stiff-necked, what stupid obstinacy, what fanatic self-confidence, going against all common sense, must have lain back of all that subtlety and feeling! Had not Dante’s indignation with his neighbors, as Professor Grosbeake had once suggested, been based upon an utter incapacity for understanding the realities of his time? Yet he had been spurred by such a passion to be _right_, that, balked and exiled in the real world, he had gone to live in the world of his poem, where, passing over both Emperor and Pope, he had sat in the place of God himself!

And even the philosopher and the saint! When I thought now of Professor Grosbeake, it was with a certain sentiment of scorn for the domesticity in which he seemed buried, and with misgivings as to whether his metaphysics were not merely a monstrous hypertrophy, arising, first, from a certain ineptitude at dealing with the affairs of the practical world, and fostered, later, by his practical wife, who had taken possession of him and securely immured him in a life where nothing but contemplation was possible. And had I not just learned that Hugo’s father, from whom I had caught for the first time in my boyhood the sense of the unity of life--had I not just heard that he had fed his vision with the dead wood of some area of his nature of which he had never ceased to feel the lack, and that his ringing arraignment of the Congressmen for their failure to search their hearts in a spirit of Christian humility had been purchased at the expense of the tyrannic subjection of his household! And in the case of Hugo himself, it now appeared to me--what I had never understood before--that his ideas had been given their direction by his early revolt against his father, which had made him, not, as his father had been, the prophet of a new moral discipline, but primarily a champion of the oppressed who still resented and feared the oppressor.

But these reflections began to sicken me (I was at once hungry, nervous and weary): I had succeeded in accounting for all these people, who were precisely the people I most admired, as the victims of deficiencies and derangements; and I now felt that I had been deriving an ignoble satisfaction from knowing the secret of every one’s disease. While I was changing my clothes in Bank Street, I began to remember Dostoevsky’s miseries: the neurotic family given over to its manias and collapsing after the mother’s death; the boy neglected by the drunken father and left without money at his school; the elder Dostoevsky murdered by his peasants; Dostoevsky sentenced to death for plotting against the Czar,--taken out and tied to a stake to be shot, and reprieved only at the last moment; his four years of imprisonment in Siberia, wearing the fetters with murderers and thieves, hauling bricks and pounding alabaster; his later years of servitude as a soldier; his persecution by his brother’s creditors; and the epilepsy which had accompanied all from that first day, when, a boy at school, he had heard the news of the murder of his father. Where was there place for ironic patronage in the contemplation of such a life or of the writings which had been its products?

And I remembered how Hugo, too, had suffered in his prison-camp in France. No wonder he hated discipline and authority! It was true that prison had made of Hugo an uncompromising revolutionist, whereas it had made of Dostoevsky an equally uncompromising conservative: Hugo himself was naturally good, and it seemed to him, in consequence, that all the evil which he encountered must be the product of institutions somehow imposed on humanity against their wish; whereas, in Dostoevsky’s case, his inescapable sense of his own guilt, of the evil in his own heart, seemed at last to have reduced him to feeling that, though he had been punished for a political offense only, his punishment had been somehow deserved, and that he had actually been expiating crimes of which he had never been accused. He had come to believe in the badness of humanity; and mere political readjustments, in consequence, no longer appeared to him important. Yet the effect of the ordeal in each case--in Hugo’s and in Dostoevsky’s--had been essentially the same: as Dostoevsky’s years in Siberia had caused him so deeply to distrust even the liberalism of educated Russians, so Hugo’s weeks in the prison-camp had made it impossible for him to accept, even in their most genial guise, the complacency and comfort of America. Both had been forced to live at close quarters with the basic contentions and discords, the basic horrifying anomalies, of our common life. And both were always afterwards to look with the eyes of strangers and exiles upon even the most conscientious, even the most intelligent, even the most amiable of their fellows who had never recognized those realities.

Hugo and Dostoevsky alike had attempted to explain them, to resolve them, those contentions, anomalies and discords.--And were not these the prime provokers of literature?--not encountered in prisons only, but in all treachery, violence, frustration, all the outbreaks of our barbarous nature and the unlooked-for disasters which befell us at the mercy of unknown forces. Such disasters and outbreaks alone could rouse us from our normal existence of non-thinking and non-feeling, the laziness of bodily processes inertly fulfilling their functions, of the consciousness inertly drifting among random and meaningless images--memories and anticipations--with unconscious but cunning instinct steering clear of problems and tasks. What were literature and art but the by-products of these collisions with the uncomprehended reality--collisions whose repercussions, when we had withdrawn into the shelter of ourselves, we attempted to palliate, to harmonize, to account for, to subdue to a smoother rhythm in the current of our thought, now resuming, which for a moment had been troubled or torn? And was it not true that the individual artist--the greatest master even: Dante himself--no matter how detached his intelligence, how rich his imagination, how comprehensive his range, was never able to escape from the instinct which made him justify his own life? If the poet wrote about himself, or identified himself with his hero, the hero must emerge victorious; or if the hero were allowed to be beaten, he must at least be made to triumph morally; or if the writer confessed to sin or ignominy, the confession itself must be a merit; or if he wrote neither of himself nor of a hero, the historian, the economist or the philosopher, in defending certain values, made them play the hero’s rôle. Like the instinct which made us blink our eyes when anything was brought near them, the instinct to produce a work of art (so I somberly reflected to-night in that room where, so short a time before, as I had heard Rita reciting her poems, the language of literature had seemed to me something at once natural and noble)--the instinct to produce a work of art was merely a self-protective reflex like another. Were not imagination and reason like the phagocytes of our physical nature, which, as soon as an infection occurs, rush to mass themselves at the breach, where they ingest the disturbing intruders and put a stop to the progress of the disease?--with this difference, that the work of art, unlike the dead and discharged phagocytes, for some time and under certain conditions, may retain a certain efficacy for others.

For the harmony, the justification, provided by a successful piece of literature was accepted by the reader as valid. Yet the writer had falsified life, because he had pretended to harmonize something of which he was conscious chiefly as chaos, and to explain what he was aware, all too well, he could not fully understand. So, when I had written a sequence of sonnets about the night of my first meeting with Rita, I had not mentioned, as I have not mentioned in my description of that evening, the drunken friend who had kept calling me up and interrupting our conversation; the agonized cries of cats; the howling and sobbing of a baby; the sore throat which, toward the end of the evening, I had begun to find very uncomfortable and which, afterwards, during the days when I had been falling in love with Rita, had developed into a bad cold. So I had also deliberately left out all that uncertain and egoistic side of Rita’s character, of which I had already become aware and which was already making me anxious.

A work of art was, then, an imposture. But the reader, himself balked and bewildered, received naïvely the artist’s picture as a true diagram of the world. The artist, who had been disconcerted and spurred to compose a work of art by his failure to discover in the universe either harmony or logic, supplied the logic and harmony himself; and the reader, who had also been hungering for harmony or logic, accepted with joyful reassurance what the artist gave him, and assumed that the artist’s makeshift was a certified revelation, and the artist an oracle. The reader leaned upon the writer: what for the latter was a vague, a confused, or an approximate form of expression, the former applied literally. All that part of literature which dealt directly with current events--editorial-writing, pamphleteering, history, much novel and play-writing--was but the painting of the thinnest varnish of a comforting reason and art over earthquakes which actually took place, not in the world of art and reason, but in the barbarous animal world, bloody, uncontrollable, ignoble--and all the writer could hope for, at best, was to divert the attention of his fellows, like a bystander at a street accident who, when the rest of the crowd are only gaping, insists upon the removal of the body, or like an actor in a burning theatre who, by eloquence or jest, tries to avert a panic and stampede. Yet the public, remembering the catchwords, the incantations, of their leaders, attempted to enforce them as laws; and a flourish of rhetoric, under pressure of a desperate crisis, would be imposed as a practical programme or developed as a philosophic system.

Or the public got to the point of behaving as if every feature of the artist’s work were something premeditated--writing, for example, after the author was dead, “It was about this period that X, in his attempt to understand his own time, decided that it would first be necessary to understand the career of James G. Blaine, and, finding no satisfactory book on the subject, he set out to write one himself,” or, “It was in the course of his travels in the tropics that the necessity first appeared to Y of a new and chaster form of expression,”--when the truth was that the life of Blaine had been merely a piece of hackwork for a publisher, suggested by the publisher himself, and that the baldness of Y’s prose had been simply the result of enervation caused by the tropical heat. Or some work, which had represented for the writer a furious effort at completeness of understanding, at impersonality of projection--an effort obstructed, to the writer’s dismay, by his personal obsessions and mannerisms, his family habits, his organic defects, the limitations of his nation and race, which pursued and exasperated him, like a can tied to a dog’s tail--to the public, who knew nothing of his aim, it was precisely the writer’s personality which they savored and glorified, descending with gratified complacency those very lines of least resistance against which the artist had struggled to mount, and delighting in those very stigmata which the artist had strained to efface. So posterity would piously cherish a distinguished writer’s roughest notes, though these might be merely irrelevant excretions, under the pressure of emotions and interests not commemorated in them at all--productions which derived their only vividness from the acuteness of the writer’s need to turn his mind away from his troubles of the body, the heart or the purse, toward something indifferent and remote--or they might be meaningless mechanical notes, the merest rudimentary twitchings of the literary temperament, made in moments of drunkenness or fatigue, but hungrily saved by the writer’s admirers for their infinitesimal drops of some peculiar personal color, no more significant or precious in itself than the color of his hair or his eyes. From these notes, the writer’s disciples might end by constructing a system which would have filled the writer with horror, but which now carried the credit of his name--just as in the case of ancient poetry, where the text was corrupt or fragmentary, Æschylus seemed to us all the more awful and all the more oracular because, not knowing precisely what he wrote, we did not know precisely what he meant; and Sappho all the more a goddess because there was so little of her left.

Nor were the public readers merely: they were also writers who imitated the author. One had had a vision of movements in literature sweeping over the minds of humanity like the wind that makes waves in the wheat; but would it not, I now reflected, be more accurate to liken such movements simply to the collapse of a row of dominoes, of which only the first has felt the shock, the shock from the unknown reality, and the others have merely toppled over, receiving it at second-hand? Till, at last, the original composer of the symphony, the original inventor of the system, would catch back from the minds of the public themselves (who had merely taken it from him), a new belief in the all-embracing, the all-satisfying character of that pattern, in the finality of those conclusions, which, at the time he had first conceived them, he had never himself regarded as complete.--Some day, like a fool, I should myself read those poems I had written about Rita, and I should be convinced that it had really been like that! Not content with deceiving others, I should finally deceive myself!

But, in the long run, if my sonnets had become famous, the public would have found them out. When the readers had got used to a writer--when our first delight in his peculiar color, his peculiar music or flavor, had commenced to wear thin--then the familiar malaise assailed us: we began fatally to detect once again, beneath the novel or alluring surface, the presence of all those grievances, those diseases and insane preoccupations of the straining, incomplete human being--all those anomalies, discords, and contentions from which, in seeking the support of literature, we had hoped to be set free. And in the end, the public of readers, when they had found out the weaknesses and falsities of the system which it had once accepted--when they had perhaps tried to put into practice some vision, like the morality of Nietzsche (another favorite of Larry Mickler’s), which the writer had imagined in his bed--they would turn against the writer and repudiate him.

Yet beyond the work of the individual artist, there was the concerted general effort, the gigantic universal imposture, of literature itself!