Chapter III (3)

I remembered the big volumes of Jebb in which, with the hope of tranquillizing my spirit, I had lately been reading Sophocles. _There_ was perhaps the supreme achievement of the organized imposture of literature! How many times had one seen the calmness and the sobriety of Sophocles played off against the harshness or the cynicism of some modern tragic writer! These plays had become the unchallenged example of classic moderation and wisdom, the touchstone for modern turbulence. Yet in what work of a modern dramatist had the harshness of Sophocles been surpassed? I remembered the unruly tempers of the family of Œdipus: the foolish quarrel of Œdipus with his father over a casual encounter on the road; his harshness with Tiresias; the passionate directness of all his gestures. Did one find even in the Œdipus of Colonus that spirit of peace and resignation with which Victorian critics sometimes credited it? Was the exiled and embittered king a figure of mellow clemency? Surely his final cursing of his sons was one of the most shocking scenes in literature!--nor did the species of divine electrocution with which Sophocles finally disposed of him strike precisely a note of tranquillity. And those sons who quarrel for the kingdom and who finally slaughter each other! And the passionate obstinacy of Creon, so like the passionate obstinacy of Œdipus--and the passionate obstinacy of Antigone! The mother and daughter, in _Electra_, bandying the most brutal abuse! These people were, in their way, and even on the occasions when they were animated by some passionate fanatical loyalty, as narrowly egoistic as the characters of Ibsen, but more quarrelsome and more virulent!

Was there, indeed, I suddenly asked myself, from the point of view of barbarous behavior, very much to choose between Sophocles and Dostoevsky himself? There they were, the old hideous discords--Œdipus killing his father, the old Karamazov murdered by his sons--that cruel inevitable turning upon the beings who have given us life! I remembered how Hugo had just told me that, rebelling against his father, he had come to hate even those poets whom his father had loved--and how Rita, in leaving behind her all that dull and homely life which for so long had hobbled her youth, had discarded the name of Aunt Sadie, who had taught her to play Handel and Bach.--And were not the horrors of Dostoevsky--Myshkin’s epilepsy, Zossima’s putrefaction and Stavrogin’s rape--quite matched by Philoctetes’s ulcer, by the unburied corpse of Polyneices and by the incest of Œdipus? If even the form of Sophocles were more chastened than the form of Dostoevsky, his spirit was more astringent!

I remembered the story about Sophocles in Plato--how he had been asked whether old age had made him impotent, and how he had replied that growing old was like deliverance from a mad and cruel master. Was this the saying of a calm and gentle nature? And what of the tranquillity of even those later years?--I remembered in the second _Œdipus_, the terrible description of old age--“unfriended, feeble, chided, unfit for company, the crowning ill of all--not to be born is best, but once we have seen the light it is better to go soon!” How did Matthew Arnold know that “from first youth tested up to extreme old age,” “passion” had never made Sophocles “wild”?

Yet so great was the need of humanity to believe in a human intellect all-self-controlled and all-wise that there had been superimposed on the plays of that great master of hatred and horror a legend which now disguised them--and the solemn impassive don, laboring day after day at his desk, explaining, interpreting, translating, every word of the poet’s text--sometimes altering his words--had pared Sophocles down, had sapped his power, ironing out to marmoreal smoothness a style rather nodulous and tough, congealing angry cataracts of consonants to colorless pediments of prose, and reducing the weighty rhythm, with its urgent pulse of blood, tiding along from one line to another the contractions of swift-spoken speech, to a tongue which could never have been spoken--the British don, after centuries of critics, had supplied us with what men of letters, what all mankind, had desired: a writer super-human and humanly impossible, a writer who could never have existed--a Master, of impeccable technique and imperturbable moral balance, a writer who could never be supplanted and never be outgrown, a writer unassailable, a classic!

So we had established the myth of the classics: from the written remains of humanity, of beings outraged and wondering like ourselves, we had created the illusion of a fortress of absolute beauty and wisdom, into which educated men might retreat, upon whose invulnerable strength they might rely.

And I thought, also, of those other efforts, those efforts more characteristic of our time, which aimed, also, at an absolute beauty, at an art wholly independent of the appetites and agonies of men--paintings which represented nothing, “pure poetry” devoid of ideas: both, in reality, mere assimilations on the part of literature and painting to the pattern and rhythm of music--which itself had been piously striving--in those composers who named their productions after trigonometrical figures and the integral calculus--to assimilate itself to mathematics.

How senseless such attempts seemed to-night! How could there be anything absolute or pure about such exercises as the arts, which were but pleasing arrangements of sensations, and which, therefore, were inextricably dependent on the senses we had clumsily evolved to meet our needs and to find our way through the jungle of nature! And if the art which derived from our hearing seemed to us purer than the others, it was merely because we experienced, in the region of sound divorced from speech, sensations less complex and complete than through images or words. These crude games, so much the play of our bodies, of our primary animal life, that neither stories, visions, drama, nor music--not argumentation even, not Euclid’s geometry itself, which comes to a climax, like a Greek play, with the proposition of the square on the hypotenuse--had been able to liberate themselves from the type of our reproductive processes--so that one had always either, as in Greek plays, to work up to a climax toward the end and then gently and briefly subside, or, as in our modern ones, to reach a climax and then abruptly cease. I thought of the heat of Catullus and Keats, of the mounting excitement of Dante; of the even unimpassioned glow of purely homosexual writers like Plato and André Gide; of the blank stretches where the climaxes should be, in the novels of Henry James.

And I reflected, also, that between the sexes--Rita’s poetry and Catullus’s--there was no real common norm of judgment in matters of literature or art--men and women were each tied to their stakes: they could only turn in circles about them. What critic could really pretend to judge the work of men and women side by side?--or, for that matter, the work of different races, or even of different nations--of different periods, generations, each with its own adjustment to make to the world which pursued and pressed it, each with its own particular disasters, its own particular discords and conflicts, which, to be easy, it must resolve? Or even of different individuals!

What a discrepancy--worst of all--what a gulf between the self which experiences and the self which writes! What was the sense, I asked myself, in that room where I had once brought Rita and where we had talked the night through and seen the blue of June on the glass--what was the comfort of “moments of emotion recollected in tranquillity”? As if there could ever be a common denominator, as if there could ever be a fusion or union, between those moments of tranquillity and our moments of pain!

* * * * *

As I went out to buy a bottle of gin at a near-by Italian restaurant, I resolved to disgorge all these ideas in a gigantic destructive essay. But I found now that I was getting a headache: my mind was still going on at a furious fatiguing rate--with slashed and deflated tires, running rackingly on its rims--and I wanted now to make it stop. I had been feeling rather faint with hunger, and, while the waiter was wrapping up the bottle, I ate some bread and drank a highball.

I tried to shift my thoughts to Daisy, as I expected to find her when I should call for her--in her pretty black evening-gown, and much beautified and refreshed.--After the highball, and a second highball, I found myself full of enthusiasm for the night-club.

When I arrived at Forty-fourth Street, however, the door of Daisy’s apartment was opened by Pete Bird, and I saw Daisy sitting on the edge of the bed, with the same old rowdy plaid dress and the same demoralized countenance, now unnaturally pale. Pete said, “Oh, hello!” and both stared at me. I saw that Daisy had been crying: she had a bandage around her wrist.

I inquired what had happened. “Daisy cut her wrist,” said Pete. “I was trying to open a spaghetti can,” said Daisy, without expression. “Good Heavens!” I exclaimed. “Don’t you think you ought to have a doctor?” “We’ve had one,” said Pete. “He’s just gone.” Daisy continued to stare up at me, without speaking, with watery, swollen eyes.

I felt a deep disgust with them both. I protested that she should have waited, that I had planned to get dinner at the night-club. “Just didn’t want to wait,” she replied--then added, after a moment’s pause: “I had some spaghetti here, and I thought I might as well eat it!”

“I don’t suppose you want to do any more looping, then,” I said. She answered shortly: “Not to-night.”

Pete Bird had sat down on the bed beside her, and put one arm around her: he looked like a faithful dog. She looked like a wounded owlet: I was astonished to observe that her nose, in the centre of her pale round face, could appear like a little beak. She had through suffering and fatigue reached one of those moments when women seem completely dispossessed of their sex, and it occurs to us as a surprise that they probably resemble their fathers.

I asked whether she wouldn’t like a drink. “You might leave some here,” said Daisy. I felt that Pete regarded me with coldness, that he had assumed complete proprietorship of Daisy, so I gave them the bottle and took my leave. “I’m sorry,” said Daisy, without feeling, “that I couldn’t go out.”

I directed the taxi-driver to take me to Sue Borglum’s.--I was irritated by Daisy’s clumsiness in cutting her wrist on the spaghetti can; and I resented the presence of Pete Bird. I did not particularly want to see any more of Sue Borglum’s party--in fact, the thought of returning was repugnant to me. But I had got to the bottom of everything--nothing really mattered to-night. Going back to my apartment alone was the most intolerable prospect of all.

In the cab, I fell to wondering, in my discouragement with art and literature, whether it might not perhaps be possible to find a deeper, more austere satisfaction in scientific writing and research: my mind had been haunted that evening by ideas from my recent scientific reading. In the sciences, at least, one was dealing with ruthless reality itself: _there_ one did not pretend to justify; _there_ one’s work was accomplished in indifference as to whether it solaced men’s minds. I regretted now that I had never had the foresight to study physics and biology at college. And in an attempt to exercise, at least, that gift of scientific observation upon which I had rather prided myself, I asked the taxi-driver, as I was paying him, whether he had not been born in Alabama. But he replied that he had been born in New York, and had lived there all his life.

I was struck, when I re-entered Sue Borglum’s, by a certain demoralization which seemed to have taken place since I left. In the room where people were dancing, a little baldish man with spectacles was playing on a set of trap-drums: he was apparently under the impression that he was contributing to the pleasure of the dancers; but as his drumming made the phonograph inaudible, they were endeavoring to restrain him. He was complacently smiling to himself, and when any one remonstrated with him, only glanced up and smiled more happily, deafened by his own drums. From time to time, he blew a kazoo.

On the couch in the room across the hall--the couch on which Rita had been sitting--there lay a man (though he might almost have been a woman of the taller more aquiline type) in a green and orange kimono, from which protruded lean bare shanks and feet. He made me pause in horror when I first saw him: his eyes, which had mascara on them, were cadaverously closed, and his unnaturally narrow face had almost the pinched look of the dead.

In the room where the refreshments had been served, there was nothing left now but a sandwich which some one had bitten into, and the purplish dregs of the punch. Bobby McIlvaine was leaning against the mantel: his straight mouth and his narrow eyes seemed to have shut up, at the intimation of danger, like a turtle’s shell. Sue Borglum was vehemently haranguing him, while a girl with lustreless complexion and lips painted a heavy magenta was expostulating tearfully with Sue in an endeavor to justify herself for having just thrown a punch glass at another girl, who, in her turn, feminine and frail in a fashion rather wispy and washy, was half-hiding, like a frightened chick, behind a species of woman doctor. This last person, who was broad and well-tailored, with white cuffs and a black masculine dress, was herself defying and deriding the first girl--the one who was appealing to Sue Borglum--with robustious male taunts and chuckles, which served to convey female malice.

Sue received me with a violent gust of welcome, evidently forgetting that she had seen me before--no doubt my changing my clothes had misled her--and immediately called me as a witness against Bobby McIlvaine: “Now, tell him--tell him frankly!” she shouted. “I want him to know what people really think of his sets! Did you ever see anything more terrible in your life than the first act of _April Showers_? I tell him that as a snug little cottage, it would make a good annex to the Public Library!” I said that it was a great pity that the scene hadn’t taken place in a palace, because Bobby was so good at palaces. “It’ll take place in Cain’s palace soon!” Sue Borglum breathlessly went on. “Palace! The trouble with him is that his style has gotten vulgar! It’s vulgar, that’s what it is! Palace! It looks like a movie palace! It looks like some movie man’s idea of a palatial ladies’ lavatory!”

I drifted on, after a little, to the kitchen: perhaps I wanted to be sure that Rita had really gone--perhaps I still hoped to speak to her alone and to break down that constraint between us of which I carried the consciousness everywhere, like an ache at the back of my head.

In the kitchen, I found a little group waiting around the bathroom door. One of the men was remonstrating with the others. In those days, in Greenwich Village, there was always a man in a dinner-jacket who was present on all major social occasions: he was some sort of a bond-salesman or broker who took an interest in the arts. When, as in the case of Sue Borglum’s Thursday evenings, these occasions became a little more formal and many people wore dinner-jackets, he began to appear in a dress-suit. Thus costumed, he was now leaning against the sink, with his hands in his trousers pockets--his regular equine face expressionless and almost distinguished--protesting with good-humored gentlemanliness against the vigorous measures proposed by certain other members of the group for inducing the occupants of the bathroom, who, it appeared, had been in there a long time, to give somebody else a chance. It was also suggested that the people inside might actually be ill, that they might even have committed suicide, and that one really ought to find out. “No,” said the gentleman in the dress-suit. “I don’t think they’ve bumped themselves off. A little while ago I heard somebody laughing.” “Maybe one of them’s bumped the other off,” suggested somebody in the group, “and it’s the one that’s alive that’s laughing.” “I don’t think so,” replied the arbiter. “I know them both.--I want to get in,” he added, “just as badly as you do, but I think we ought to be discreet.”

“Well, I’m damned if I do!” declared emphatically a little chunky Hungarian, one of the editors of a communist paper. “Whatever they’ve been doing in there, they’ve been doing it long enough!” “Yes,” said a furtive-eyed poet, who wore a khaki shirt. “It’s time the workers got a break!” The Hungarian’s companion, a chunky and pretty young Jewess, smiled a little uneasily, in awe of the communist, but impressed by the man in the dress-suit.

The Hungarian marched to the door and knocked resolutely and clearly. “Look here, old chap!” said the man in the dress-suit, going forward and taking him by the shoulder, though without violence or heat. “Better lay off! Let’s be tactful!” “Get away, you animal cracker!” the communist retorted. “Don’t try to high-hat me! There are other gentlemen and ladies in the world besides you and your friends in the bathroom!”

The door opened suddenly and widely, and Larry Mickler came out. He was followed by a tall plain blonde, very much flushed and evidently angry. They made their way through the group about the door, looking fixedly straight ahead of them. But when Mickler came up to me--I was the farthest from the bathroom--he stopped and let the girl leave the kitchen alone.

“Well, old-timer!” he greeted me genially--with the exaggerated heartiness of one who has failed to commend himself elsewhere. I asked him whether Rita had gone. “I don’t know,” he replied, reaching for the bottle of Scotch. “She was in the other room a little while ago.--_There’s_ a woman who’s not afraid to be herself!--These women are all afraid of themselves--they’re afraid to say _Yea_ to life! Village and college girls, one’s just as bad as the other in this goddam country of ours!--Like that rope-haired blonde girl, for instance--she wants it and yet she’s afraid of it--when it comes to the point, she’s afraid! She pretends to be scandalized, when she’s really only sore at herself!--Well, let’s drink to Rita Cavanagh, the woman who’s not afraid!”

“I’m all for Rita Cavanagh,” I said, “but I’ve drunk enough toasts to-night!” “That’s right!” replied Larry Mickler, immediately directing his resentment at me. “Say _Nay_, like all the rest! I’m not surprised you’re in the publishing business. The publishers are all _Nay_-sayers! I wouldn’t be writing ads, instead of novels, if the publishers said _Yea_ to life!--Why, if the whole tribe of publishers--and editors!--and critics!--were combined in one attack, they wouldn’t be enough to make a Dostoevsky scratch the bite!” I repressed an impulse to answer, “To hell with Dostoevsky!”--but replied, “I never heard that Dostoevsky had any trouble getting published.” I left him glaring, before he had retorted, and went back into the dining-room.

In the dining-room, the girl with the lustreless skin had broken down and was weeping on a chair, while Sue Borglum, her own eyes leaking tears, was making an effort to console her. Sue was saying: “Never mind, Claudette--you can’t win! you can’t win!” Bobby McIlvaine, who was standing alone, his face locked against the scene which confronted him, produced two theatre-ticket stubs from his pocket and dropped them into the dregs of the punch. He remarked to me: “That’s a combination that I’ve always wanted to try in the theatre--mauve and blue!”

In the front room, to which I immediately returned, I was just in time to witness an arrival which made upon me a curious impression. I could hardly at first believe my eyes: there had appeared suddenly, under the escort of Tony Scallopino, the proprietor of one of those Greenwich Village restaurants which were beginning, at that period, to be transformed into small but increasingly expensive night-clubs, two young women who, even among that company where one was not ordinarily surprised at anything, astonished and jarred upon me, like some incongruous image of a dream, remembered after we wake, some image which owes its strangeness, its power obscurely to worry us, to the fact that it has been transferred from its surroundings in the waking world to surroundings which do not fit it. They were strangely conspicuous, these girls--more conspicuous, even, in their way, than the man in the orange kimono or the woman with the stiff white cuffs. In the first place, they were very brightly dressed, one in blue, the other in red--and I saw, at a second glance, that their dresses, though gay and even smart, were flimsy and cheap. Neither was bad-looking; and when they first came in, I thought they were attractive. The small one, the one in blue, had blue eyes and looked a little like a fish; but the other, the one in red, was quite handsome; she had rich brown hair, large brown eyes, full cheeks, fleshy lips, rather a creamy complexion and a nice thick nose. But their cheeks glowed with a heightening of color, and their eyes were starred with a black radiation, which, among all the varied make-ups of the party, seemed improper and out of place; such faces were not meant for the lighting of ordinary private houses, but for the pink-shaded lights-in-darkness of Tony Scallopino’s night-club. And in their eyes I saw that public stare, the stare of the prostitute, which, like the jockey’s bowed legs, the tailor’s peering eyes, the courtroom intonations of the lawyer, the military officer’s curtness, is the universal sign of the profession--that stare which must be always watching, which must meet all the world without winking, without demurring or veiling itself--that stare which sometimes looks amazed, sometimes panic-stricken, sometimes resentful and sullen, and sometimes insane, but which seems always to have robbed the face of some essential element of personality, and therefore of humanity itself.

I gazed at these girls, and, in an instant, the brunette had become aware of my gaze and was welcoming it, with smiling eyes. I approached her, and she began at once, before I had even spoken: “I think this is the most delightful old house! What a lovely old mirror over the mantel!” We discussed the house, the weather, the theatre: she had opinions about the plays that were being given in the little Village theatres: I was surprised to hear her make conversation so cleverly and with such a good manner, but I was shocked to see her ply her trade--she made no pretense of anything else--so brazenly and so promptly.

I was made uneasy, as we talked of other things, to meet nothing in her large fine eyes but a look of sly, humorous complicity. Those eyes, for all their intelligence, had been glazed against the warmth of frankness, the expression of personal feeling, as much as those of any streetwalker’s who makes off to the streets again the moment her transaction is finished. And this troubled me--I hated and resented it: to-night I had felt myself estranged, first, from Rita, and then, from Daisy--I had felt cut off beyond even communication. And I now exerted myself to make a contact with the brown-eyed girl in red--to force her to meet my friendliness.

But as she saw that I was refusing to do business, she soon passed on to the man in the dress-suit, who happened to be standing near us. Without excuse or explanation, without hesitation or resentment, like some salesman of carpet-sweepers, who, rejected at one door where he has knocked, immediately passes on to the next, she assailed him with her shameless patter.

I wondered how Tony Scallopino had ever dared to bring these women here, and I was aroused to disgusted anger. (I found out afterwards that Sue herself, in her morbid and hysterical fear lest her party should be ill-attended, had telephoned to Tony to bring any one still at his place--meaning, of course, any of his regular patrons.) I remembered how Tony Scallopino, in the days before his advent to the Village, had been an I. W. W. agitator and how, in the course of the long Italian dinners, in his former and cheaper restaurant, he had often sat down at our table and talked about politics with us; I had at that time always rather liked him, but it seemed to me to-night that Tony had become Manhattanized and cynical. It did not occur to me that, from Tony’s point of view, the girls were working-people like himself, and that in bringing them to Sue Borglum’s party he might be merely endeavoring to make it up to them for a night of bad business at his night-club; I might have guessed, from their technique of hungry wolves, that they were desperately badly off. But I only felt that Tony had somehow become a traitor.

The fish-faced blonde approached me in her turn, hoping to succeed where the other had failed, but I let her see that I was disaffected. She passed on to the creature on the couch, the man in the orange kimono, and by some playful overture, awoke him. But he, nervously starting up, regarded her with surprise and indignation, and exclaimed, in a high peevish voice: “I want to lie down here, please! I’ve got a perfectly terrible headache!”

Sue Borglum and Bobby McIlvaine had, in the meantime, appeared from the dining-room; and Sue, beholding the girl in red, who had not long been detained by the dress-suit, address herself immediately to Bobby as if she already knew him, had concluded at once that she was some flame of his, whom Bobby had invited without consulting her. And, in a moment, learning that Sue was the hostess, the newcomer had turned to her enthusiastically, exclaiming over the beauty of the old house, the old mirror, the quiet charm of the neighborhood, the delightfulness of the occasion: “But I’m so sorry to miss seeing Rita Cavanagh: I admire her poetry so much! I was so excited when Tony told me she was going to be here to-night, and then we missed her--she left before we came!”

I made my way to the hall again, where, in the manner of Larry Mickler, I drew and drank rapidly several cocktails from the lemon-cloudy lees of the water-cooler. Then, feeling that these drinks were weak--they consisted principally of melted ice--with a vision of a den of drug addicts gathered together, with gruesome merriment, to dose themselves with alcohol, I drank what was left of a bottle of whiskey, which turned out to be excessively bad, stinging my tongue and constricting my gullet.

Now I began to ask myself whether it were the revolver Larry Mickler was carrying which had made me break off with him so quickly and leave the room without waiting for his reply.

Through a door which led into the dining-room and which opened behind me from the hall, I could hear Sue, who had left the sitting-room--retreating, as was by no means characteristic of her, at the advance of the outrageous guests, whom she still believed to be friends of Bobby’s--pouring out, to the equally unfortunate Claudette, in a shrill, strained, and grating voice, her grievances against Bobby: “It isn’t as if I’d ever been anything to him--I never was! I never wanted to do anything but help him. Some women would have tried to get a hold on him!”--etc., etc. At that moment, it seemed to me that Sue--whom I found that I now somehow identified with the woman with the dyed red hair and the slatternly lacy dressing-gown, whom I had seen at the beginning of the evening in the house where Larry Mickler lived--that Sue Borglum was the ugliest and most odious woman whom I had ever known, and that she possessed the most horrible voice. Yet it was not really her voice which made me hate her, but the fact that she was lonely and in pain.

In the room where the phonograph was playing, the dancers had abandoned the floor, driven off by the man with the drums, who, however, still sat trancedly drumming. They sat or lay on the couches and chairs, which had been moved back against the sides of the room--as if washed up, I said to myself, in what I thought was a felicitous fancy, like driftwood, dead fish, and seaweed left behind by the tide on the shore. Then I remembered Rita’s poem, the poem about the beach-fire and the darkness: it seemed to me that my own image had been caught from it, and I felt that I had been travestying it foolishly.

With an impulse of irritation, I broke in upon the imbecile with the drums, interrupting him in a loud clear voice and inquiring whether he knew the time. “I don’t know the time,” he replied, with his abstracted fatuous smile--“but,” he added, after a moment, when he had come to the end of a spasm of drumming, “I’ve got something else that’s just as good!” He produced a pint flask from his back pocket: “And a darn sight better!” he added. He offered me a drink, which I accepted. I sat down on a chair beside him. “This is something,” he further observed, after taking a swig himself, “which makes time unnecessary!” He had the conviction of quiet humor of a very stupid person. “If you carry a little flask,” he continued, after a brief pause--he had begun softly drumming again--“you don’t need to carry a watch!”

I asked him whether he knew Larry Mickler, and when he shook his head, always smiling, I expressed the extreme distaste I felt for the admirer of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. “Why, he’s a fellow,” I protested, “who smashes the statue of the Winged Victory that his wife brings home from college--a perfectly nice little college girl! He tries to neck other girls in the Jap’s room--in the bathroom!--He threatens them with a gun! He’s the most objectionable man I’ve ever known!”

And I reflected to the tune of the fox-trot and to the subdued rat-a-tat of the drum, that what I had said was literally true: Larry Mickler was, without any question, the most obnoxious man I had ever known--and I had failed to put him properly in his place! I had been afraid of his damned revolver! Here there had come to me an opportunity to stand up to Evil itself: it might be that such a moment as this, such a moment that tested a man, came but once to a man in his life! And I had quailed at the thought of a gun! Yet to stand up to Larry Mickler would be finally to vindicate one’s honor against the horror, the shame, the despair, of that terrible house! They themselves, I felt sure, would thank me for it!

I decided to seek him out. I should find him slinking about the rooms--I remembered his dirty complexion and his furtive, ill-natured eye, his cockily waxed mustache. He would ask me to drink to Dostoevsky, and I should reply: “To hell with Dostoevsky! What’s the good of a Dostoevsky to nourish such worms as you? The world would be more decent without him!--the world would be better off if it were rid of all the cripples and defectives who find their only justification in reading and writing books!”

And I was steadied with a deep satisfaction, a perfect self-assurance: I took on a new authority. With the most affable friendliness, I complimented the man with the spectacles on his mastery of the traps, and asked him whether he had taken lessons. He said, no: that he had just picked it up, and added some quiet pleasantry, at which I uproariously laughed, but to which I had paid no attention, as I had been thinking of the classical statue which Larry Mickler had smashed on the mantelpiece and which now presented itself to my mind in the guise of a silver-gray Athena as slender as her spear--and this vision, in the glimpse of a second, had dragged with it all the fresh bright beauty of the portfolio of drawings for Homer which Bobby McIlvaine had shown Rita and me that May night in University Place.

I arose and thanked the drummer for his drink, which I extravagantly commended with a condescension almost regal. He offered me another, which I took.

Walking composedly from room to room, I began scouring the house for Larry Mickler: with a keen and arrogant glance, I scrutinized the groups one by one.--I told myself that, once Mickler was disposed of, I should carry off the pretty brunette, who had come to seem to me very desirable--I should meet her at first on her professional basis, and then I should compel her to be human with me--she should drop that horrible manner and mask, she should share with me her feelings and her thoughts!--She should become my companion--she should love me!

But I could find Larry Mickler nowhere, and when at last I began to inquire, nobody seemed to know what had become of him. In the front room, I was taken aback to discover that the girl with the brown eyes had already reached an understanding with a clownish-looking elderly man, who wore a heavy black ribbon on his eye-glasses. He was pressing her to leave with him at once; and she was explaining that she would have to wait until her “girl-friend” was ready to go. The little fish-faced blonde, for her part, had, in the meantime, been taken in the toils of one of the licensed Greenwich Village lunatics, who, without a penny in his pocket, was exerting the active and ironic intelligence of which his derangement had never deprived him to convince her of the seriousness of his intentions.

I went up to Tony Scallopino, who greeted me with a broad, sunny smile, and asked him whether he had seen Larry Mickler. “I just see him go,” he replied.

I stood for a moment without speaking. Then, “What’s the idea,” I began, “of bringing these girls here to-night?” “They’re just two little girls,” he explained, “who come to my place to dance. They’ve had hard luck and they have to earn a little money. They’re two very nice girls.” He had said this with a smiling eye in which I thought I detected insolence: I found myself glaring at him. “Well, I think that it was a great mistake to bring them here to-night!” I declared.

His grin was for a second obscured by a blink, like the shutter of a camera: he began to say something more, I don’t know what. I only stared into his face: his eyes were wide open but shrewd; he still smiled--he had the habitual tactfulness of the Italian restaurant-proprietor, but his obsequiousness was gone: he was raising his heavy black eyebrows, as if in protest and surprise. I felt that he thought me drunk, that he considered my objections tactless: was Tony Scallopino not himself an independent Villager? had he not been invited to the party? had he not sometimes loaned money to the lunatic who was attempting to impose on the blond girl? had he not talked like a brother to Hugo of the trials and aspirations of the workers? had he not cashed my checks?

My lips opened, without my having planned it, and, despite the gummy tongue of drunkenness, I heard myself suddenly interrupt him: “You used to be a Wobbly! You used to talk about justice to the workers! Well, it seems to me that now you’re betraying the workers! You’re trying to give the Greenwich Villagers a taste for leisure-class luxuries! You’ve turned your old Italian restaurant into an expensive up-town night-club!--and you charge us high prices for bad liquor! And you have the nerve to bring these girls--” He tried to slip away, but I seized him by the arms and pinioned him against the wall: “You used to talk about the social revolution--well, if there’s ever a social revolution, you proletarians who run night-clubs will be the first to get the axe!--When I first came down to Greenwich Village----”

He was angry and tried to pull away--I thought I heard him say, “You must be drunk!” and saw him give me a black malign look. With a powerful movement of his arms, he lifted them and pushed me away with such force that I staggered backward and almost fell.--I struck him in the jaw with my fist--and the next moment was looking at the room from a different point of view, and knew that I was lying on the floor.