# The Bond/Part 2/Chapter 5
### V

ONE night in the early winter a party of people started out, after dining at the Ransome's flat, on a slumming expedition. The affair had been arranged for Alice Blackley's benefit; Alice was more eager than ever to see life, and she thought she would like to see it in undress. She had confided to Teresa lately that she was tired of artists (except Basil, of course), and that she did not believe they were any more interesting, when you knew them, than other people. However, Erhart was of the present party, which contained besides only Basil and Teresa, for Erhart was anxious to please Mrs. Blackley, having an eye always to the commercial side of his profession; and Basil had amiably brought the two together.
It was late when they started, the two women in quiet, dark dresses, appropriate for a pure tour of inspection. They went first into the Tenderloin, to two or three music-halls, and a place where coffee and cigarettes and Turkish furnishings competed with the inevitable whisky.
The music-halls were noisy, glaring with electric light, and filled with a crowd of men and girls, sitting or moving about the little tables, ​whose gaiety seemed as hard and thin as the light's blue flare. The tough faces of the waiters, the careless or determined cheerfulness of the women, the bored or excited look of the men of widely varying types, the perpetual drinking, all mixed together in a mirage of which pleasure was the least discoverable element. Some of the girls were very pretty, many of them were young, most of them well-dressed; and all tried to diffuse about themselves an atmosphere of reckless life, zest, enjoyment. But seen in the mass, all these various attempts resulted in one great effect of sham.
Alice's large eyes studied the scene intently. She was so much interested that it was difficult to get her away; yet she had a blank look, too.
"I thought it would have been more exciting," she said. "Don't they dance, or anything?"
The Turkish coffee place, with its dimmer lights and languid couples, she thought more interesting; but still her deer-like eyes looked vainly about for something she did not see; still she seemed perplexed. "Is this really life?" she seemed to ask. "Are these the haunts of vice? Are these people really the horrid people we've come out to see? And if so, why are they not more spectacular?"
From the Tenderloin they crossed to the Bowery, and walked slowly down the broad street, howling with the noise of the cars, bright with ​electricity, crowded with undistinguished people. From innumerable saloons and ten-cent shows came the tinkling strains of mechanical music. All the small shops which catered to the needs of the undistinguished were open, to meet their customers' leisure hours, and so the broad, dirty sidewalk lay in one continuous glare of light.
They went into one music-hall—a bare, untidy room, with a few men sitting over their beer, and on the platform a stout, middle-aged woman, in short skirts, rouge, and a picture hat, singing a sentimental song to the accompaniment of a cracked piano. Several girls walked about, talking to the sallow, stolid men. One stood alone near the piano. She was conspicuous in her solitude, and also because, for all the loose coat that hid her figure, it could be seen that she was about to bear a child. One of the men pointed a thumb at her over his shoulder, and said something to his companion; they both laughed. The girl smiled, with a piteous attempt at bravado.
Teresa hurried her party out of the place. Basil took them next to a saloon where he expected to find an acquaintance of his, an ex-prize-fighter, whose reputation for wit extended up and down and even beyond the Bowery. The saloon was crowded and noisy, and a blast of foul language met them as they entered. Basil ​hastily extracted his man, who saluted him with a "Hello, bloke!" Then the five went to have "chop suey" at a Chinese restaurant to which the ex-prize-fighter led them with the air of a man who knew his world, and was quite indifferent to any other.
He was a small, wiry man, collarless, rather drunk, with a sallow face, hard as steel, in which smouldered two half-extinct black eyes. Scarcely a muscle of his face moved when he spoke. He slid his words out of the corner of his thin immobile, lips, and they rapped with an emphasis like that of metal on metal. His eyes were perfectly expressionless as he observed the various members of the party. He had seen innumerable slumming parties, and while he was quite willing to talk to any of them for the sake of a supper, drink, and a few dollars at the end of the evening, their world did not interest him. He patronised them as easily as he did the Chinese waiters in the small room up a dirty flight of stairs, where he selected the best table, and issued his curt orders. The two Chinese, in loose linen coats and flapping slippers, brought rice, tea, and the curious mixture of veal, bamboo-shoots, and unknown condiments which figured on the sign outside. The prize-fighter addressed to them a few words in their own tongue, and a shade which might have been a smile passed over their faces, immovable as his own.
​Then he took the big bowl of rice and a pair of chop-sticks, put the chop-sticks first into his mouth, then into the rice, and passed the bowl round the table. Rice was generally declined, but the party tried eating the chop suey with their bamboo sticks. The prize-fighter managed his deftly, and endeavoured to instruct the others.
"You've got 'em by the wrong end, see? Hold 'em so," he said to Alice.
She persisted in her own way, however, and he said with indifference:
"All right, Sis, what you don't know won't hurt you."
Then, on Erhart's lead, he began to talk about a recent prize-fight. Erhart described to the rest of them, with æsthetic enthusiasm, the marvellous effect of the pink bodies of the men, seen through a cloud of dust; and the ex-professional listened cynically.
"I'm going to model Young, the light-weight," exclaimed Erhart. "I got him to promise to pose for me. I can do a bully thing of the fighter!"
"What's the good of that?" demanded the other. "If you want to make a statoo, you'd ought to take the champion. You make a good likeness of him, and I tell you, young feller, every saloon in the country'd take a copy. You don't know your own business."
​Basil changed the topic and asked after the prize-fighter's wife.
"About the same," he answered. "A doc told her she had consumption, and she'd ought to go to the country. But she won't go and leave me for fear I'd get drunk too much."
"Why don't you go with her, then?" enquired Alice.
"Me in the country? What in hell would I do in the country?" he replied contemptuously. "There ain't no better air than there is right here on the Bowery—it's as good as Fifth Av-noo air any day, mind that, Sis."
Alice looked at Basil and giggled. Basil smiled wearily. He had been very silent all the evening, and when he was not talking his face looked gloomy. Teresa, too, seemed oppressed. She felt as though she were at the bottom of some vast slough, where unpleasant creatures of all sorts swarmed, living their pathetic lives. The perfect content of the prize-fighter with his particular spot in the slough was illuminating, yet it did not lighten the impression of the whole. The man interested her. She studied his face, but did not try to talk to him. The gulf between their worlds was too wide, and she knew that she was as intolerant of his as he of hers.
He began presently to talk about politics to the two men, and gave a racy outline of the Bow​ery's sentiments concerning a recent municipal election. In the midst of this, on a hint from Basil, the party moved on, the prize-fighter leading the way. They walked through Chinatown—quaint, dingy, mysterious shadow of the East thrown athwart the old houses of the Knickerbockers—and then they came out on the Bowery again, and went into another drinking-place. This was full of sailors, half or quite drunk. There were a number of young girls, shabbily dressed; and among them were two slight, pretty creatures, who looked not older than sixteen. As soon as they had taken a table, and, as a matter of form, ordered beer, a drunken sailor came up to their party, and leaning over the table and fixing a pair of child-like, sad eyes on Teresa, began a long story of his sufferings and wrongs on board his ship. His voice was so pathetic, his incoherent unhappiness so convincing, that the two women listened, quite fascinated; but he repeated himself, and finally lost himself in a maze of words, lurching heavily to this side and that; when Basil rose, took him by the arm, and led him away to another table, gave him a drink, and left him murmuring to himself.
Teresa looked about the room as though in a dream. The close air, the smell of beer, the throng of brutal faces, the drunken, lascivious eyes, the rough words caught here and there, made up an impression of naked sordidness so complete as to ​pass reality. The movements of the one waiter fascinated her. He was a young man, slim and powerfully built, with a face almost handsome, which had the same absolute hardness and immobility that marked the prize-fighter's. He moved quickly amongst the crowd, with a business-like, lordly air, his eyes everywhere at once. He swept off half-filled beer-glasses, and brought full ones without being asked, balancing a tray in each hand. And twice in fifteen minutes he put down his trays, took an obstreperous sailor by the collar and jerked him through the door of the place into the street without moving a muscle of his face, or losing for an instant his business-like calm.
"That's the bouncer," explained Erhart to Alice. She wanted to know all about the bouncer, whom Basil was sketching on the back of a letter; but she was even more interested in the two young girls, and at her request Erhart asked them to come up to the table, and gave them some beer. They were not at all shy. The prettiest at once began to talk to Teresa with easy frankness; told her that she and her friend lived in a room together, and had done so for two years; that she was a morphine-fiend; and she showed, with a certain pride, her arm, covered with punctures. Her face was round and delicately coloured, without a touch of powder or paint. She had large, blue eyes, and curl​ing, brown hair. The other girl was paler, more nervous, but almost as pretty. Neither was over seventeen. The nervous girl slipped away in a few moments, and sat down at a table with a sailor. Teresa was still talking with the other, when at the far end of the room a disturbance began. The bouncer leaped to the fray, and ejected two individuals; but in a moment the room was in an uproar. The crowd surged down toward the door, overturning tables and chairs; every second man drew a knife or pistol. Basil, Erhart, and the prize-tighter pushed the three women toward the wall, and made a buffer between them and the crowd; but in spite of their efforts they were caught in the jam and forced under a hail of broken glass, toward the one narrow entrance. Basil stretched out his arms on either side of Teresa, and with vicious digs of his elbows and fists, tried to protect her. Gleaming eyes turned toward him, and one man lifted a knife. They were crushed in the shouting, heaving mass. Teresa, half-suffocated, almost lost consciousness, but fear for Basil sustained her. In a final, fierce stampede they were pushed through the door.
When they found themselves in the street, and succeeded in reaching the other three, it was discovered that Erhart had a deep knife-cut in the arm, and by common consent the expedition broke up. The Ransomes took Alice home. She ​was pleased by the evening; talked a good deal about the two young girls, and the possibility of reforming them, or at least of giving them some good clothes, so that they would have a better chance.
Teresa could not get to sleep that night. When she closed her eyes the room was peopled by the dreadful faces she had seen. The drunken sailor, the "bouncer," the girl at whom those men had laughed, the pretty young girl with the spotted arm, stood out on a background of sodden, diseased, malevolent human wrecks. This was worse than the sham mirth of the Tenderloin; perhaps it was the reality behind the sham. The figures all whirled round as though in a drunken dance, and behind them she seemed to see uncounted myriads of other figures, all driven on blindly, all mad, broken, blighted.
Basil had given her his sketch of the "bouncer" as they came home. She had seen in his eyes that night not only gloom and weariness, but also the impersonal interest in the scene before him that meant a stirring of his impulse to expression. He would put them all down on paper—those pathetic girls, those brutal or stupid men—all that complex of misery, all that waste of life. And it would mean to him just fact—just what is what must be.
In her present mood she revolted, as she often did, against his acceptation of the world, invol​ving even, it seemed to her, a certain pleasure in its hardness, its inequalities. Perhaps this was the artistic interest, the dramatic interest; but to Teresa now it seemed cruel to enjoy the sight of such a world, to use it as material for art. The impersonal side of Basil presented itself to her as a cool, observing eye, a firm noting hand; apart from his own human interests, he was not moved—the mass of misery did not move him. He dissociated himself from it completely. His attitude was: "I did not make this world—I'm not responsible for it—I can't help it. I can only observe it, recognise it for what it is—and make my own particular life out of it, a satisfaction to myself." Basil was selfish, egotistic, hard—but he loved her, and she loved him. A sudden need to be near him came upon her. She got up and went into his room.
The winter dawn was faintly beginning. He was asleep. His relaxed face looked sad, but sleep gave it also a curiously young expression, a strange beauty. She crept into the bed beside him; half waking, he put his arm about her, and murmured something softly. They had quarrelled bitterly the day before. But now, comforted to the soul by his nearness, and the word of endearment that had come unconsciously from the deep feeling that united them, from the depths below all surface storms, Teresa, too, could sleep.