2

and was afraid that they would not make the six o'clock train, the excitement which had mounted in him stopped by impatient unrest and the desire to hurry. North went the evening traffic about them, and Richmond looked to see on the pavers' faces the easy daily look, and for a moment the thought came to him, How can they endure it? Pedestrians strolled by also, from the distance of his emotion Richard looked at them too, astonished in the insane enclosure of his own feeling, that any human being wasted the precious life in such thin phantasies.

Then they rode in the taxi again, and his aunt said, Your poor mother would not like this going away, Richmond. They were coming near to Grand Central Station, and Aunt Leah took forth once more from her intense, hard, narrow being the sentimentality which was the other half of her sternness, invoking the dead sister whom neither of the two boys had known because she had died quickly of the influenza in 1919. And then they were at the great station and under the great dome, among the mingling travellers, and then they were at the gate-barred gate where Richmond solemnly shook hands with his younger only brother Martin as Aunt Leah told the two boys to kiss each other, lacking forever an imagination of the feeling of another self. The two boys looked shyly at each other at this suggestion, and Aunt Leah kissed Richmond, and permitted herself tears because she liked tears, and Richmond turned quickly from her kiss because he detested her tears, he did not like to be kissed by her, and he really did not like her at all.

Richmond hurried awkwardly with the awkward carriage of his suitcase, his tennis-racket, and his violin case. He sat on the worn green plush in the false evening of the train and the station. He wished that the journey would begin and thought of the three times that the trunk had fallen from the trunk-rack. He turned his mind

He sat dinner in the dining-car, an important part of a journey for him, he went back to the observation car, but it was black night now with the mere marbles of passing lights or the dim shingle of a small station left for him to look at, and twice the rush of a long train going back to New York, and the rushed impression of the faces seated in the other train, the quick empty flash from the true eternity of all the other lives. He went back to his seat, and soon he undressed in the lower berth, wishing to get to the next day quickly by going to sleep, but he was unable to sleep, the train sounds ran through him with the rising foam of sound of the locomotive and the rim-running step of the wheels on the track, which sang more and more successively as the joy in Richmond waited, unwilling to let him sleep, until at last the repetition and the long forward movement, shocked now and then, was all that was left in his mind as he brushed the surface of sleep, sleeping thinly and waking too early with the raw feeling of not enough sleep as he lifted the shade and looked at the Indiana town, serene, fixed, and empty in the early morning.

He was impatient at the four hours which must pass before the train came to Chicago, and he went to the smoking car after breakfast and stayed there when he saw a small middle-aged man in conversation with a heavy man in whose face youth sagged. The middle-aged man spoke of Freud, and Richmond saw that the other man was uncomfortable and did not like the discussion, and Richmond was immediately eager to be in the conversation, and he broke in shyly and hoarsely, hoarse from his shyness. Richmond spoke with authority of how Freud was wrong because he thought everything was really a disguise of the libido and the libido merely sexual desire, he spoke with the authority and dogma of judgement which he thought was necessary in all ideas, and the middle-aged man was very interested, and the other man saw his

20.

by thinking of how melodramatic Roger had been in stalking from the room. But he knew then that Roger really hated him and he saw that Ben's prophecy had been inspired by the energy of attack with which Joseph went after Roger.

Joseph took out Dinah twice again and told her more stories which engrossed her, but when he tried to kiss her goodnight, she said: "Please don't", in a tone which was meant to be gentle. Joseph wondered if she really was the kind of girl who permitted every liberty, but when the other boys asked him how he was making out with Dinah, he hinted plainly that he was making out very well, and then again felt ashamed of himself.

When Ben met Dinah on the campus on e afternoon, he asked her if she liked Joseph and she answered that she did not like him very much, but she enjoyed being taken to dinner. Ben told Joseph who became very angry and went to see Dinah. He took her to dinner and then hired a car and went for a ride with her. "he let him kiss her, but when he put his hand under her dress and on her thighs, she made him stop. Joseph said: "Why should I stop?" and Dinah said: "You must stop because I am a decent girl". He asked her if she had really said that she went out with him only because she liked to be taken to dinner, and "Dinah admitted that she had said that to Ben, but it was also true that he admired Joseph, she liked to listen to him, and she did not go with him just to get taken to dinner. "You said the same thing about going to dinner with Roger", said Joseph, "Are you ashamed of going out with any of the boys just because you like one of them?" Dinah was impressed by this question and she said that Joseph might be right about her, she really did not like any one very much, just as she did not like music, though her mother had taken her to many concerts. Joseph said goodbye to her and decided not to see her any more and not to see any girls who did not want a man TO MAKE LOVE TO THEM.

23.

might have started Dinah.

Soon after, Joseph went to the pictures with Dinah, asking Arthur if he wanted to come too. In the theatre darkness, he thought that Dinah was holding Arthur's hand as on the other side she held his, but then he thought that this was impossible, for Arthur would not permit that, no matter what Dinah did. After he had taken Dinah back to the dormitory, kissed her goodnight, and deliberately made believe that nothing had occurred the Sunday before, Joseph rejoined Arthur in his room and told him that Dinah had just said she was in love with him. He told this untruth instead of speaking of her surrender, which in pride he wanted to speak about, but felt must not be named, "Did she that say that?" Arthur asked, "She held my hand at the show", "I thought she did", said Joseph, smiling to hide his dismay, "Why did you let her?" "She took my hand", said Arthur, his ironic and questioning smile upon his face. Joseph was very angry, he decided that she was just promiscuous, and he was certain that she slept with the Brazilian boy too.

Joseph did not go out with Dinah again and he did not go out with any girls. Some of his teachers were impressed very much with him very much and one of them said that Joseph might have an academic career, if he wanted one, and it was in pride and success that Joseph returned from school in June. He went by bus and he stopped overnight at a hotel in Pittsburg. When he was taken up to the hotel room by the bellboy, the bellboy looked at him curiously, hesitated, then asked him if he wanted any company. Joseph was excited, but he did not have very much money left. The Bellboy showed him photographs of four girls in bathing suits, but when Joseph told him how much money he had, the bellboy said that that was not enough. "I can get you a bottle of gin", said the bellboy, "That's just as good, if not better". Joseph did not want

50.

and even had pleaded with him, but that he had had refused. Richmond then was ashamed that he had lied like that, but his vanity pressed him because he had known so many disappointments of expectancy since the Christmas recess began.

It was very cold at Jordan, the day bright hard windless cold off mid-winter existed outside as if forever, snow was white allover, and it was hard to think back to the bronze and red autumn or to the spring which was to come. Richmond's numbness of feeling continued, he had no interesting thoughts and no fluency even when he went and drank wine with Lewis at Panetti's. He began to be anxious about his final examinations and he tried to study for them and he could not, and now there was not even the credit of reading other books to make him think he was engaged in something superior. He was afraid to look at the first book of The Ark because each he had looked at it amid such a state of mind he found that it was no good at all.

All the boys returned and the duel with Hershel began again, now more fanatical about Marxism than he had been about James Joyce whom he now Debounced. Richmond heard that Roger had gone out with Dinah and Leo and Ben said that Roger must be getting his, and this made Richmond want to call up Dinah, but he hesitated and did not know how to begin. He forced him self at last, stammering and self-conscious on the telephone. Dinah was pleased to go out with him, and it turned out that she was an active member of a Communist youth group, which made Richmond argued with her about Communism in an effort to impress her, but she did not want to argue, Richmond was not fluent, she was not impressed with him, and she yawned when he told her about the grandeur of The Ark. Richmond spoke of Roger then, and told Dinah how Roger was a romantic fool, and Dinah said that Roger had spoken of his father as rich and an important politician.

51.

Richmond knew that Roger's father was a laundryman and drove a truck, and he said nothing of this to Dinah, but told her of Roger's poses and projects, how he was going to learn Sanskrit in a month and how he declaimed about the wonders of Studentjahre, Jordan as a Heidelberg, the stein song of camaraderie, and other such things. Richmond's malevolence and contempt made him interesting and Dinah said that he told stories very well, and this pleased Richmond very much, so that he told her of Lewis, making him a fabulous character full of the hurt and alienation of a secret marriage, and then Dinah said that she would like to meet Lewis and that she did not think she would go out anymore with Roger.

At the dormitory, when he returned, Richmond's bad genius became intense in him and he summoned some of the other boys, Roger among them, and he told them with rejoicing irony of what Dinah had said of Roger, and what Roger had said to her, how his father was an important politician and how he was rich. Roger smiled fatly, saying that all was fair in love, but as Richmond continued his fat smile vanished now and then, and now and then, the sun passed behind the clouds, only to be forced back, for he was a good sport, so that Richmond who gazed at Roger as he spoke, said that Roger had the English idea of sport he kept a stiff upper lip, but it would do no good, Dinah had told him she was going out with a Brazilian, and this Brazilian would win out, while he and Roger were left at the starting post. Leo Moscowitz said then that the one who would really win would be Richmond, for Richmond's malice and energy of attack was clear to the other boys. Roger echoed Leo and said with his sickening smile that he was sure also that Dinah would prefer Richmond to the Brazilian, and Richmond was pleased to think he had impressed the other boys and flattered both by Leo's and Roger's declaration, cried out that Roger really liked him, despite all the taunting, and Roger cried out in a magic voice with a black contracted face, I hate you, and stalked

52.

from the room, making Richmond feel guilty, but he denied the guilt
by thinking of how melodramatic had been Roger's exit. But he knew
then that Roger really hated him.

Richmond went out with Dinah twice again and told her
more stories which engrossed her, but when he tried to kiss her
goodnight, she said Please don't, and this made him wonder if Leo
and Ben had feally been right about her gemrosity of sex. Yet he
hinted plainly to the other boys that he and Dinah were getting along
very well, and this one evening, Leo, Ben, Hershel, and Roger stood
outside of Richmond's room, where the telephone was. They had just
knocked on Richmond's door, knowing that he was there, and Richmond
had not answered because he wanted to impress the boys with his habit
of solitude and concentration of study, having done this several times.
Hershel said that he knew how to get Richmond to answer, the method
was to tell up Dinah. Richmond heard, seated at his desk, and decided
to show them his strength of resolution. Dinah was called by Hershel
and in a falsetto voice Hershel said that this was Richmond speaking,
and told her that he dreamed of her day and night, and was really
infatuated with her and was going to inscribe his great poem to her.
Richmond heard and smiled to himself but then saw as the conversation
continued that Dinah must be deceived and think that this was really
Richmond, making a declaration to her. The mention of his poem set
him afire, he burst from his room enraged, and shoved Leo and Ben
black
from the place near the telephone and then grabbed the/telephone
recorder from Hershel and told him to take off his glasses and fight,
to which Hershel replied, I will not, as I were rejecting a
dishonorable proposal, and then Richmond said he would make Hershel
fight it out anyway and advanced on Hershel, who ran down the hall,
shouting that the hook had been down, Dinah had not been on the tele
phone, Richmond was vulgar to become physical about a dispute, He
ran into Lewis' room as Richmond ran after him, and Lewis let him in,

55

he was finding out about the wide world, and gaining images for his poem.
He tried then to stop himself by going to the library in the evening
and reading in the stacks, but by eighty-thirty his desire for the
pictures was unbearable and he went, looking at the masterworks about
him from which he was withdrawing and judging himself with contempt.

He went to the pictures during the week when the boys were
supposed to be preparing for the final examinations of the first term,
and then he tried to study all night before his examination in Botany,
but grew full of sleep at three o'clock and went to have something to
eat and returned to decide that he would say he was sick and would not
go to the examination, feeling desperate at how much he did not know
that he would have to know for the final examinations. He did not go
the examination, he secured an excuse at the school hospital, and then
he managed to get by in his two other examinations by the method of
expounding many generalities instead of answering the question posed,
a method which worked well enough in such subjects as History and
French Literature, where the instructors saw how little specific
knowledge he had, but took him to be very intelligent, because of
his general discussion and because they knew how voluble and inter-
ested he was in a class. But Richmond knew that this was why he had
passed and he felt that he was dishonest and that this was not how
such a one as he, poet and prophet, should be, and he resolved that
in terms which began in January, he would study as he had never had
before this time.

Yet his high-flown expositions availed him nothing in the
English class, where he had not read the book the whole class had
been assigned. Mr. Welch gave him a failing mark in the examination
and the lowest passing mark for the whole term, and Richmond was
much distressed and went to see him, and argued with him that he had
been told not to come to class and he had been reading other works
of literature during that time. Mr. Welch said that he had taken it

56.

for granted that Richmond would read the modest amount the whole class assigned, and Richmond grew impassioned, and spoke in a low strange voice, strange to him as well as to Mr. Welch. The Chinese instructor who directed the Apollo Society passed on the hall stair where Richmond sat with Mr. Welch and took Mr. Welch aside and then Richmond thought that perhaps the Chinese instructor expressed a critical view of Richmond, speaking of his visit to the Apollo Society. Mr. Welch returned and said that it was unfair to the other students to give Richmond any other mark, Richmond remarked again that he had been told not to come to class, Mr. Welch said he would raise Richmond's mark to the next grade, and Richmond said that that was not enough, speaking in a low impassioned voice which was strange to Richmond, for he had never spoken thus before, and telling Mr. Welch that he was going to go to Oxford and that such a low grade would make it impossible for him to gain admission, Mr. Welch wanted to know why Richmond had not read the assigned book, a famous novel of life in America, at some time in his rich encounter with all literature, and he said too that that was what was wrong with all you fellows, mentioning the teacher and author because of whom Richmond had come to Jordan and then mentioning Richmond among such authors as James Joyce. Richmond was astonished by the grotesque sound of his name with that of James Joyce, and he was not flattered, and he thought Mr. Welch foolish and he saw the intense resentment Mr. Welch felt for him, as if he were a symbol of all that Mr. Welch feared and disliked and did not understand. Richmond said then that he would have to do something about his low passing grade, although this was a general remark and Richmond did not know what he would do. You have to have an A then? said Mr. Welch, and Richmond saw that Mr. Welch had supposed he would speak to the head of the English department. He saw that he had unknow-

57.

touched Mr. Welch at the height of his sense of insecurity, and he was sure when Mr. Welch said that he would give him his A, although he felt that Richmond had much to learn. Richmond thanked and tried to free himself from his low impassioned voice, which had now become virtually that of a hurried conspirator, and said goodbye to Mr. Welch, and decided that Mr. Welch was really a fool, they of all kinds of feelings which distorted the nature of things as they actually were.

The second term began and Richmond's program of a new way of life faded in the very first week as he began to go out with Dinah more O God, do and more, telling her about his poem until she said, I have to hear about that again? The Brazilian turned out to be the one that Dinah really liked, although she said she liked to be with Richmond too, and it was this rivalry which made Richmond want to go forward with Dinah. He took her to dinner and this cost more money than he had each week, so that he asked Aunt Leah for more, and Aunt Leah refused and said that Richmond had the wrong idea about how much he was to inherit from his father's brother's estate, a statement which Richmond took to be one more instance of Aunt Leah's meanness of mind. The estate depended upon the apartment houses and office buildings his dead uncle had owned in Cleveland, Ohio, and they had lost much of their value since October 1929, but Richmond wrote to his aunt that soon he would be very valuable again, the depression would end as all other depressions had ended, there would be a new and greater period of prosperity, he was sure of this, for everything that went down must go up. Then Aunt Leah wrote him a serious letter about how he was wrong about his whole view of his future, nothing would be the same again, and Richmond had better think seriously now about how he was going to make his living. But Richmond was angered by this letter and was sure that his uncle's estate would make it possible for him to live at ease as an author, and besides, who was more serious about what he was going to do in life?

58.

Ben met Dinah one day, and asked her why she went so much with Richmond, and she said she liked to be taken out by him to dinner and the pictures, and Ben and Leo told Seymour what she had said, making Seymour who most of the time avoided Richmond tell Richmond about this. Richmond did not believe it was true, and was angry, and took Dinah out but hired a car this time, and made love to her, passively accepted until he ran his hand up her thigh. He made him stop and he asked why and she said she was a decent girl, and then Richmond was sure that what Ben and Leo had said about Dinah was untrue. Then he asked her if she had really said she went out with him just because he took her to dinner and the pictures, and she denied that she said that. Richmond believed her because he did not think a girl would not be interested in him for his own sake. But he decided that he did not really care much about Dinah, and there was nothing in it, and he would not see much of her anymore, he would withdraw even further into his solitude.

He found in his solitude some of the elevation he had known during the fall. And now one of his classes was in Milton and one was in Shakespeare, and although he was again unable to read a book as soon as it was due for class, he read much about Milton and about Shakespeare. He wrote an essay about Milton's "Lycidas" to show that it was not the product of strong personal emotion, but purely of the poet's imagination, and then he wrote an essay about Shakespeare in which he maintained that Shakespeare, great as he was, always left out the sixth act, the last acts of his plays, a fact made evident by what Dante did to provide a true conclusion. The professor who taught Milton read a page of Richmond's essay at lecture, and then summoned him to his office, praised him, and said he might, if he liked, earn some money as a tutor for the students who did not do well and had to pass the examination to graduate. He said also that he wanted Richmond to let him know what he expected to study next year, for Richmond had such an obvious gift that the department was going to be interested in him.

59.

Richmond wrote in triumph to Aunt Leah, and began to tutor two women, a sorority girl and a highschool teacher of fifty, Both of them had to get fairly high grades in order to get degrees. And he felt that he made a genuine success, even though he had not very done/well in other subjects, he slipped further and further back in Latin, he had not written any of the second book of his poem, and the exaltation of the autumn seemed to be gone for good.

After Richmond had not seen Dinah for three weeks, she called him up and asked him what was wrong, and he said with forced indifference amid his pleasure that he had been working very hard at something very important, but he would see her that day. It was a Sunday late in February, cold, bright, and glittering, when Richmond met Dinah at her dormitory and told her of the plane that had been taking off from the frozen lake. He asked her if she wanted to go for a ride, and she hesitated and then consented. It cost Richmond all the money he had just earned by tutoring, but when they rose in the pén plane she became frightened, and held his hand hard. The plane rose as if into the sunset itself and turned in the air so that it seemed as if the enormous tray of the academic city were being turned up like a hard plate, on which was fixed the dwarfed campus, chapel, spire, strip of street, and the houses of the city. The cold and the gold light and the immense clarity made Richmond feel outside of himself, and when he looked down this feeling increased, he had a real sense of being free from and lifted from the whole world. He paid no attention to Dinah who still grasped his hand and who now shut her eyes. And then the flight was over, the plane was running with two bounces on the white surface of the lake, they were getting out of the plane, and as Dinah stepped down her dress caught on the side of the door, and Richmond saw her round white thighs for a moment and she saw his gaze as she pulled down her dress.

60.

Then they went to dinner at a place where one could get spiked beer, and Dinah pressed close to Richmond and was mild, interested, and humble, as she had never been before. Dinah's best friend was at the low restaurant on the other side of the railroad tracks, and they sat with his girl and her boy friend, and it turned out that she and Dinah had had a fight, so that when an ironic remark was made to Dinah, she took Richmond's hand and said she wanted to sit at another booth. Richmond was unwilling and conflict between two other beings always made him a paragon of disinterested good feeling. But then it looked as if Dinah was going to burst into tears, and Richmond went to another booth, and shetold him of the quarrel, and asked him to take her for a car ride after dinner. Richmond became Olympian and aloof because of her warmth of feeling for him, and when they went for a ride, he was surprised when she put her head on his shoulder and asked him to park the car.

Before Richmond knew how far she had gone, Dinah was drawing her body in long slow motions against his and panting, and making him put his hands on her breasts and saying, harder, harder, as he caressed her breasts, and then her hands were all over him, and her hard breathing excited him very much, but most of all the way that she touched, for he did not know that girls cared as men did about the body, and he had been ashamed of his body, when he was with girls before this. She put her tongue in his mouth and Richmond with his eyes shut felt all the warm wet wet darkness of the moment and did not want her to try away when she did until he saw she was taking up her dress, and when he was in her, he was preoccupied with how she touched him, and breathed hard, and seemed to want most of all to hold him and move her hands over him. And then it was quickly over, and she looked pathetic in her disarray, and Richmond thought the whole thing was nothing much, but he felt he ought to say something and he ought to be affectionate now.

61.

Richmond wanted to get away. He felt infinitely detached from sexual desire, and he wanted to think about what had happened, it had too quickly and too much without the conscious will for him to know what had happened. The other girls he had been with had permitted him, but Dinah seized him, and then it seemed that it was not him, but sexuality itself that she seized.

He went back to the dormitory full of pride in his conquest, but he knew that it was not really a conquest, and he thought that going up in an airplane must have started Dinah and then the quarrel with her girl friend. Above the feeling of pride was the feeling of liberation from shame about his body, the feeling that/was desirable, which came like an access of health. Many other feelings that had troubled him often before fell from him like discarded garments, he felt as after being sunburnt when he delighted in the smoothness and brownness of his arms.

Soon after that, he went to the pictures with Dinah and asked Lewis to come, for they were now mildly intimate again. At the pictures in the darkness, he thought that Dinah was holding on hands with Lewis, one side of her, while she held hands with Richmond, on the other side. He was jealous for a moment and then he thought it could not be true because Lewis would not do that, no matter what Dinah did. He tried to look to see their hands in the darkness, but he was not sure.

After he had taken Dinah home and kissed her goodnight, deliberately making believe that nothing had occurred on that Sunday before, he rejoined Lewis in his room and he told him that Dinah had said she loved him, a euphemism for her physical surrender which Richmond wanted to speak about, for vanity's sake, but felt must not be named.

62.

Is that what she said? asked Lewis. She held my
hand at the show.

I thought she did, said Richmond smiling through
a sinking of dismay. Why did you let her?

She took my hand, said Lewis with his ironic smile
on his face, I saw you trying to look. You looked as if you were
trying to look without letting us see that you were looking.

Then Richmond was angry with Dinah and asked her
why she had done that, and Dinah wished to know if Lewis had told
him. She said that when she went out with two fellows she always
held both of their hands. This was to her the most natural thing
to do, otherwise she of them felt left out.

Richmond decided that Dinah was just promiscuous,
she just wanted to see how many men she could draw to her. But he
really did not care very much, except that he was sure now that
she slept with the Brazilian too.

He argued with her about her belief in Communism
and asked her why there should not be classes in society? Dinah
did not like to argue, she just liked Communist meetings and
groups, and she felt it was right, she enjoyed most the monster
meetings and the intensity of emotion. She told Richmond about
father and mother, how her father was a successful dentist who
hid his copies of "Das Kapital", so that his patients would not
see them, and how she was an only child, and how her mother and
her father had tried to make her interested in music and in
ideas, but she was just unable to care about them and she was
bored stiff at concerts. She was a disappointment to them be-
cause they were both intellectuals and they wanted her to be
one too, and they were unable to understand how their only child
had turned out so differently from either of them.

63.

Leo Moscowitz suddenly became sick and went to the school hospital and three days after that David Koster came to say that he was very much upset because Leo had pneumonia and had put in an oxygen tent and his father had been called from New York. Richmond told David that he had a feeling that Leo would get better, but then the next morning he heard David on the telephone saying that Leo had died that night. It was the first of March and it was snowing again. Richmond went up to David's room to find Ben there. He had not spoken to Ben since the begus call to Dinah, but now he felt the seriousness of the occasion and he put his hand on Ben's shoulder, telling him that Leo's death was a shocking thing. Ben was embarrassed by Richmond's proferred sympathy because of the silence between them, and he said nothing to him. Later in the day, David said to Richmond that his intuition had been wrong just when it should have been right. Leo's death was hard to believe, just as the death of anyone at that age was difficult to believe, but most of all with Leo because of the sullen intensity with which he had gone about and studied. The boys learned then that Leo's father had disliked him very much because the father was a Socialist functionary and Leo had been a real Communist and had hated his stepmother and had not wanted to live with them. They heard this from David who went to meet Leo's father and whowas told that Leo was better off dead, he would have come to no good, anyway. The other boys in the house talked of the death of Leo for one day, and then they forgot all about it, it was as if he had not been there at all, for he had been so quiet. But Richmond kept thinking about it, and when he passed Hershel in the street, he broke his silence with Hershel to say how wrong Leo's death was. Hershel was startled to have Richmond speak to him, and murmured yes, and went ahead, and had Richmond been an end of the silence with Ben.

64.

A boy named Otto Grimes moved into the house and immediately offered all by his effort to be friends in the most aggressive way. He broke into conversations, walked into rooms uninvited, called strangers by their nicknames, slapped everyone on the shoulder, and soon found himself regarded as a nuisance and then as a pariah. He had come too late. Everyone felt the travelling salesman in him, the smart aleck, and the boy with an obscene story for every oca sion and context. But no rebuff stopped him, certainly not the wild silence with which Lewis and Richmond greeted his sudden unexpected unwanted entry into the room when they were holding serious conversations about ideas, a subject about which Otto knew nothing and spoke with utter authority.

But when Lewis was silent and apart with Richmond once more, Richmond was glad to see Otto, and he heard all about Otto's family, how his mother was really insane and thought that her husband deliberately sent all of his five sons to college in order to persecute her and make her feel how ignorant she was and to make the sons turn away from their mother. Every time another son went to a university she became hysterical and would not come from her room for weeks. Then when she was calm again, she stayed in the kitchen all the time, although they had servants, and concentrated on the preparation of dinner as if it were the only thing in the world, but would not come and have dinner with them.

Richmond tried to see this as a cause of Otto's character, but he could not see what the connection was.

Now as the spring increased Richmond saw more and more of other and different boys in the house, and the old circle was broken altogether, after an argument with Edwin and Chester about whether Shakespeare believed in ghosts. Richmond insisted that he did and Edwin threw off his gentility and raged at Richmond, pierced by his smiling dogma, and even more by Lewis' agreement with Richmond.

65.

Then the new boys with whom Richmond went were not
intellectual at all, and they did not like intellectuals and
they told Richmond how differently he had seemed to them in
the autumn, and how they thought that when he was in his room
all the time he was really practising self-abuse, not reading
books. They were surprised to find Richmond a regular fellow
full of interesting stories about life in New York and espec-
ially interesting about a woman in Hawaii who said she had been
attacked by a Hawaian, and a woman in New York who had been
found in a rowboat on Long Island Sound, in a stupor, saying
that an old man and a boy had both attacked her. Richmond
newspaper
interpreted these/stories for his new friends, he told them
what he thought really had occurred, he seemed to them to know
the inside story about human beings' motives,

One of these boys was Lee who came from Milwaukee, but
and descended from the great General.
said his family had come from the South. Lee thought some
of the other boys ought not to be permitted to come to school,
Pulanasky was such a boy, boys whose families ran delicatessens,
bakeries or laundries ought not to be allowed to pollute a school,
and all those Communists ought to be tarred and feathered. Richmond
told Lee, whom he liked very much, that the Communists were wrong,
but that something had to be done about the economic system. He agreed
that many of the boys did not belong at a university. Lee said that
the boys and the girls from New York did not know how to behave,
they sprawled about the music room of the Assembly, they sat on the
floor and looked enraptured by the music and then no one else
wanted to be there. He did not care himself for classical music, but
it was not right for people like that to make themselves conspicuous,
to look and be Bohemian, and to dominate the place. Richmond defended
them, and Lee became violent and said that the day would come when
that kind of person would be thrown out of the university.

66.

Otto Grimes was impressed by the way Richmond was accepted by Lee and his crowd. They did not like Otto, and they asked Richmond why he had anything to do with him. But now Richmond had come to like Otto and not to mind the slick knowingness which made him like a travelling salesmen or a Broadway gambler. Otto wanted to see the town one night, he wanted to see the real night life, and Richmond was willing to go with him, although he did not want to go with any of the whores, because there was Dinah, and because such experiences had been nothing at all, mechanical and without any excitement or pleasure.

They did not where to go when they started out one mild early spring evening, and they started speaking to a taxi-driver in the Square. Otto spoke out of the side of his mouth in his wise guy man of the world manner, telling the cab-driver that he was sick of going after the girls at school who held out for months and did not know how to let themselves go even then. Otto said this because he was ahmed af having to ask a cab-driver and did not want him to think he could not get regular girls. The cab-driver fell in with Otto's tone and expressed sympathy and took them to a place on the other side of the railroad tracks, where the door was answered by a slight pretty hard-looking girl who seemed to have nothing on under her dress. She said they had to have a card, but Otto kept his foot in the door and asked to see the fellow who ran the place, for the party-sounds of music and hilarious drunken laughter made this seem the kind of a place they wanted to go to, but then, after they waited, the boss came, cigar in his mouth, and shut the door in their faces, saying that this was a private club and you had to have a card. Then the cab-driver told them of another place five miles out of town and was willing to shut off the meter and take them there for a couple of dollars. They went to that place, and Richmond sat downstairs drinking spiked beer with one of the girls, a red-headed plump girl

67.

who, as soon as Richmond said he was going to go upstairs,
todd him, that was a good idea, honey, the best thing was to get
yourself a girl of your own. She was dressed in beach pajamas,
but sat there knitting and looking just like a prosperous house-
wife. Some of the farmers came too, and some other boys and they
were absented or in a hurry, and Richmond felt superiority and ex-
perience as he conversed with the redheaded girl who told him about
her child who was really the cutest thing. "It last, after what seem-
-ed doo long a time, Otto came downstairs, glowing and pleased with
himself. When they returned to town in the taxi, he told Richmond how
his girl had not wanted to let him lift her dress or touch her breasts,
but he had persuaded her after a time. Otto thought she was the owner's
girl and she was saving the upper half of her body for him, for the
owner had squeezed her hand and smiled intimately to her as they
passed him in the hallway on the second floor.

Richmond told Lee and the other boys about this adventure,
but extended and magnified it, making out that the girls had tried
hard to get him to go upstairs with her. And then he told Seymour
and Roger, and Roger was critical of Richmond, but Seymour wanted to
go and he asked where the place was, and he went with a friend of his
who also waited on tables, and both of them were sick and Seymour
had to spend the money saved by his sister and mother at work in the
factory to go to the doctor, and Roger blamed it all on Richmond.
Lee and his crowd went too on another night and had a wonderful time
and ran wild and came back to the dormitory very drunk to tell Rich-
mond all about it.

Lewis received a telegram one afternoon to come to Chicago
very quickly because his mother was very sick, and he left immediately,
giving Richmond the key to his room and brushing aside Richmond's
effort to take the matter with much seriousness and sympathy. Then
in the late afternoon Richmond before he knew it was in the midst

68.

of an argument about a question of grammar with Roger and a boy
named Boyd Wilson, a small hard-looking boy whom he did not know
well. Boyd was put out by Richmond's smiling attitude of supreme
authority and told Richmond not to act as if he knew everything,
and when Richmond smilingly repeated that he was right and Boyd-
was wrong, Boyd called him a son of a bitch, and Richmond took him
by the shoulders and said that he could not called him that, and
Boyd called him a son of a bitch again, and then twice more, while
Richmond shook him by the shoulders, not wanting to fight but feeling
that he had come too far. In a moment the two boys were struggling
with each other on the floor, and then Roger separated them, making
critical remarks about Richmond. But as they had wrestled, Richmond
had been hstruck in the eye by Boyd's elbow. When he went back to
his room with the feeling that he could not keep out of fights, he
saw in the looking-glass above the dressed that he had a black eye,
and he decided that he would not go the dining room that evening, be-
cause then his black eye would be seen and the boys would think he had
lost the fight. He went into Lewis' room and stayed their all evening,
eating from the box full of cakes and sweet biscuits Lewis was always
getting from his brother's wife. He decided to see how long he could
stay by himself. He lay on Lewis' bed all evening and heard some of
the boys knocking on his own door at the other end of the hallway.

In the morning, his eye was blacker and purpled, and it was
the worst black Richmond had ever seen. He stayed in Lewis' room all
day and tried to read and found his solitude oppressive and blank.
He had no money and would have none until the next morning when his
weekly check would come from Aunt Leah and when he supposed he would
be able to go to a drugstore downtown and get something to disguise
the condition of his eye.

69.

By evening, he was unable to eat anymore of the cakes and sweet biscuits, he felt full of pity for himself, but he was pleased to have been able to be alone for all that time. After dinner, some of the boys knocked on his door again. They had heard about the fight. They kept knowing and Richmond was touched to the heart that his being should concern them. Roger, Otto, and Chester were the ones who were knocking. They came down the hallway, for it had occurred to Otto that Richmond might be in Lewis' room. They knocked and at first Richmond did not answer, but then he thought the school authorities might be told, and he went to the door and from behind the closed door asked them what they wanted, Otto asked him if he was all right, and he answered that he was, but his voice broke to a quaver of self-pity, he was touched so much by their concern. He said in a strange voice that he was doing something very important and had to be alone, and then Otto said to let him know if he wanted anything, and this made Richmond feel that he really had been wrong about Otto, he had a very good heart.

In the dusk as he lay again on Lewis' bed, Richmond's sorrow for himself increased as his hunger increased and he tried again to eat the cakes, but was sick of them. He began to feel strange, and he thought that perhaps he would have an extraordinary experience such as the great mystic had had. By nine o'clock, he could not bear his hunger any longer. He slipped from the dormitory in the darkness, and went to the soda fountain where the counter man never allowed anyone to have anything without paying right then. Richmond had no money, but his hunger and his emotion of sick elevation made him ingenious. He told the counter man to fry two eggs for him, and the counter man looked at him and Richmond thought he saw his black eye, although he had powdered it as much as he could. The counter man was a curious character who came from St. Louis and had not gone to the university, but had come to live and work there because he rooted for the university football team passionately and spoke of

70. nothing but the football team all the time. Richmond saw this fellow's look and saw the placard which declared that no credit was permitted, according to university rules. Then as the counter man cracked the eggs and let them drop on the pan, Richmond said to wait a minute, he had no money at all, he had thought he had, but now his pockets were empty and turned out. Richmond had intended, thinking that once the eggs were on the pan he would get credit.

The counter man looked at the eggs and looked carefully again at Richmond and said in a tone in which Richmond thought there was unwilling sympathy that Richmond might pay him next week. Then Richmond ate his eggs, and toast and drank his coffee, and he thought they tasted better than anything ever had before, and he listened as the counter man spoke with intensity and passion of the football team's prospects for the coming fall, five months distant, and how the coach was no good at all, all they needed was a really good coach.

In the morning, Richmond did not go to breakfast, for his black eye had diminished but still was visible. He waited until the hour when the mail was in the boxes, slipped out then, took Aunt Leah's check, and went downtown, seeking from one drugstore to another some lotion which would disguise his eye. But he could find none, although the druggist seemed to have to look close to see that it had been hit. This made Richmond decide that he would go to the dining-room at noon, but it was then but ten o'clock, and he went to one of the restaurants and had a regular dinner, and did not like it very much.

When Richmond went into the dining room at noon, powder concealed all that was left of his black eye, there was just a caked whiteness above his cheek, and he looked about him with serenity. The boys of the house all looked at him, and Boyd Wilson came up to him and shook hands with him, and said nothing, but looked guilty and relieved.

71.

Nothing was said at the table of Richmond's absence, but as they left the dining-room, Chester walked with Richmond and told him in a voice intended as gentle and full of tact that he had not faced the problems of life in the right way, it was wrong to run away and hide when anything was wrong, the right thing was to brave all difficulty. Richmond was annoyed and pretended that he did not know what Chester was talking about and he told Chester that he had found out a wonderful thing by staying by himself in contemplation, but Chester did not believe him, and said again that running away and hiding was immature and might grow too be a trait of character. Richmond then took Chester to Lewis' room and said that he wanted Chester to see how he had spent his last two days in solitude. He took from a cardboard box the skull which Lewis as a medical student owned, and held it in his hand and said that he stared for a whole day at this skull, and then held it in his hand at night in the dark, and had had profound emotions. Lewis had told the boys that this was the skull of a beautiful girl, a girl of extraordinary beauty, who had died the year before in the insane asylum across the beautiful lake. Chester took the skull in his hand and he seemed to be very much impressed and he said to Richmond, I did not know, and Richmond gave him a cake to eat, and smiled to him as one who gazed at the mystery and abyss of life.

Lewis returned the next night. His mother had died. Richmond wanted to speak with him about her death and he wanted to shoe his sympathy, and he asked Lewis if he wanted to talk about it, and Lewis said he did not curtly, but was quite willing to go out to eat with Richmond late in the evening. Richmond told him the whole story of his solitude and made the confrontation of Chester with the skull seem much more a factual thing than it was, saying that Chester had then wanted to take the skull himself and lie in the darkness, hold it in his hand, and pass his hand over it. Lewis was very much amused by the story, and Richmond said if Lewis had not been in Chicago he would not have

72.

had this very interesting experience. Richmond tried again to get
Lewis to speak of his mother's death, but Lewis brushed the subject
aside, and seemed not be interested in it at all.

The spring had arisen, everything about the university was
delicate, fresh, new, and in a new light, am Richmond went to the
model farm of the university and walked by himself in the woods and
felt unknown powers of great fecundity in all that he looked at, the
woods and the horses, especially the horses, and then the dead or rot-
ting leaves thick and besogged on the ground under the new green. He
began to feel a thick contentment, he slept from ten o'clock at night
in the sunlight beautiful
until late the next morning and then sat/on the terrace above the/lake
and drank chocolate malteds and felt that this was a kind of Riviera.
He did not read much, and he did not study for his subjects and in
Latin he was hopelessly behind, but he thought he would cram on the
night before the examination. He wanted to write an essay about the
new generation and send it to a national liberal weekly, for he wanted
to show that the new generation now rejected the false gods of Freud,
Marx, and Dewey, and avowed an interest and an intention of getting
to what Richmond entitled to himself the depths of being. He told "inah
that he was soon going to become famous in a way he would not tell her
about, but he thought that this essay would awaken the attention of
the whole nation.

With Lewis one day, he ate fried eggs on the green painted
Radin,
iron tables on the terrace and spoke with/a boy whom he had known at
highschool who was now a deepdyed radical, and argued once again that
truth was not inspired by one's place in society or by one's economic
status. Radin looked at the eggs Richmond was eating with obvious sat-
isfaction and said that all who were well-fed had a tendency to maintain
that the truth existed in some pure and disinterested realm. Lewis
said it was customary also to attack those who ate, would not eating

73.

add anything to the logical weight of the argument. Radin apologized for the reference to Richmond's eggs and said that he had not really meant that. Lewis pressed him, asking him to show how the truth of the mathematics was determined by/economic system, and Radin said that the great mathematical advances had been inspired by the growth and the necessities of capitalism, and Lewis asked again if the truth depended in the least upon capitalism, and then Radin shifted to other truths, moral beliefs and conceptions of the nature of things, and tried to show how they sprang from the kind of society in which the thinker lived. Radin was dogmatic, Lewis was ironic, and Richmond kept returning to the power of ideas, how each truly great new idea had been the real source of each new epoch in society.

in his

Richmond wrote of this/essay and when it came right back from the national liberal weekly, he was astonished, and thought then that he would have to publish his own works when they were written, paying for the printing with the money he was going to get from his dead uncle's estate. Dinah wanted to know why he was not famous yet, and Richmond replied that he had decided that this was not the time, and then suddenly and unexpectedly Aunt Leah came to see him, telling him that she had just been to see the bank which cared for his uncle's estate and Richmond had better make up his mind that he was not only not going to get any money from the estate, but that he would not be able to return to Jordan again. Richmond would not believe her and told her again that prosperity was bound to return very soon, the depression had already laster longer than it should have. Aunt Leah wanted to meet Dinah, and Richmond called her, afraid that Aunt Leah might guess how intimate they were, and distressed also by a feeling he did not understand. Dinah was too polite and too full of respect for Aunt Leah, the respect of a young person to an elder and a mother. Richmond told Aunt Leah that he saw Dinah only because she was a very intelligent girl, he did

74.

care for her looks, and Aunt Leah agreed to Richmond's dismay that Dinah was coarse-looking and must be brilliant indeed to get Richmond's attentions, or anyone else's. This made Richmond take out Dinah that evening when Aunt Leah left and tell her not to say anything to her parents about seeing so much of Richmond. Then in the hired car he made love to her and found in himself an intensity of fondness which had nothing to do with anything he felt in Dinah as a person. Lewis had said to Richmond that one falls in love with the woman one sleeps with for any length of time, and Richmond was then troubled that he was falling in love with Dinah and he told her this by saying that he felt it was about time for him to be in love again, but Dinah replied that he would not fall in love with her, nor/she would fall in love with him, the two of them were too sensible to misunderstand the pleasure they took of each other. Richmond was repelled by Dinah's hardness and tried to insist that he did have for her a feeling which had nothing to do with sexuality, but Dinah refused to believe him, and she told Richmond how she went out with the Brazilian whenever Richmond did not take her out.

On the pathway by the beautiful lake, Richmond passed Alice one day and tried to smile to her as if he had been coming to see her all the time, but she expressed coldness with a brief nod and went forward with the tall masculine girl she was with, and who seemed to be with her each time Richmond saw her.

Lewis started to spend much of his time playing bridge, and going out with a newcomer to the dormitory, a fellow tall, and hard-looking / handsome. His name was Russell and the boys said he looked just like Gary Cooper and he drank from early morning, two friends of his, a man and a girl, coming in a car for him in the early morning. Russell had quit the university before he graduated and gone to work as a reporter on a Chicago newspaper and had returned to Jordan now because all the newspapers were

75.

reducing their staffs. Sometimes he knocked at Richmond's door to ask him for a light and then he asked Richmond to hold the match for him, or to hold his hand which was trembled. Richmond was impressed by this intensive drunkenness and tried to get to know Russell, who was hardly able to find his room when he came back to the dormitory in the early morning. Richmond was impressed most of all because Russell drank only raw alcohol and water, beginning when he awoke, and ate almost nothing, forcing himself to eat at times.

final

The night before the of his examinations, Richmond tried to force himself to study, and when Lee knocked on his door, he was pleased and relieved, and delighted when Lee wanted to know if Richmond wanted to have a couple of beers with himself and Russell. Russell stood and shook in the hallway, and they went out then to a beer joint, and Richmond decided not to go to his examination in the morning. He drank with Russell and became very eloquent and spoke of how Lewis was wasting his life in the moral failure of being unable to get up in the morning and playing bridge all night. Russell told him that Lewis had said it would be no use for Russell to see much of Richmond, Richmond was a really brilliant and profound boy, whom Russell would not understand. Richmond was very flattered by this report, he had not known that Lewis thought as much of him, he told Russell that he was glad they had at last come to know each other, and he sang of his high-flown conceptions of the nature of things, and Russell and Lee were much impressed, saying that they knew they would be glad to have known Richmond some day. Then Russell told Richmond that he drank all the time because his best friend's wife was in love with him, and he was torn between her and his honor and it was made more difficult by the girl's coming to see him all the time. He had been in love with her before she married his best friend, and he still was, but one could not do that kind of thing to one's best friend.

76.

Richmond expressed sympathy for Russell's plight and congrat-
ulated him on his moral stamina, and the three boys drank more, and
the owner of the place gave them one on the house and took them to
the back of the house to show them his two-yearold infant who was
awakened and given a sip of beer for the comedy of it. Gray light
began to slip in through the drawn shades and they decided to go and
Richmond was very happy and paid for all that they had drunk and they
went back to the dormitory in the early and wondrous light of the June
morning, admiring the stars which blazed still in the western horizon.

Richmond woke at nine o'clock and decided to return to New York
on that very day, not only not going to his examination on that day
but not going to the two that were to come next week. He was very
happy, for the aftermath of drunkenness carried him forward, and he
was released, relieved, and liberated by having decided not to go to
the final examinations. He prepared his trunk and then found that he
did not have enough money and went to Otto Grimes and borrowed enough
to go home from him, sending a telegram to Aunt Leah in which he asked
her to send a check to Otto Grimes.

He said goodbye to all the boys he was able to find in the
dormitory and he looked for Lewis, to say goodbye to him, but no
one knew where he was. He called Dinah and told her he would see her
in New York, and that he had to go back on some urgent matter. She
wanted to know what it was, but he left the urgency a general thing,
hearing in her voice how she was impressed by it and by his part-
ure without coming to see her. Then Chester came to tell him where
Lewis was, he was playing bridge in one of the card-rooms. Richmond
went there and asked Lewis if he might speak to him a moment and Lewis
thought this was one more effort of Richmond's to get him to go with
him for long private conversations and Lewis said, What do you want?
coldly, holding his cards in his hand. Richmond recoiled, said quickly,

77.

I just wanted to say goodbye to you! the hurt look on his face. Then
Lewis arose and shook hands with Richmond, saying, The Best of luck
to you, and take care of yourself, which had the sound for Richmond
of a farewell to one newer to be seen again. He took up the suitcase
he had carried with him and went to the bus station, the joy of his
departure crumbling and the anticipation of New York fading.

The long bus trip made Richmond worn out very quickly as he
thought of all that had happened that year, how this first year would
never come again, this kind of year would never occurred again, this
freshness of going for the first time to a university and entering a
new and independent life was used and exhausted, although he would
return to Jordan in September. Much had happened which Richmond had
not expected and nothing of his expectancy had been fulfilled, and it
was evident that life was full of surprises, surprise upon surprise,
surprise such as one was unable to prepare oneself/merely by expect-
ing to be surprised.

Richmond was unable to sleep in the bus, except for a few
hours, and by the time he had reached New York and Aunt Leah's
he was exhausted, he was stupified and benumbed. No sooner had he
come than Aunt Leah became very angry with him because of the tele-
gram he had sent her, asking for money. She yelled at him that he
had to understand that he was not a rich boy, far from it, and his
uncle's estate had turned to almost nothing. Richmond was enraged
by what he entitled her pessimism and by her saying that he was not
going to be able to go back to Jordan and by her recitation, as often
before, of all the hardships she had endured in bringing up her poor
dead sister's children. She repeated once again her famous claim that
she had not married because of Richmond and Martin, and Richmond
shouted back at her that this was not true, she had not wanted to get
married after the man she was engaged to had jilted her for another

78.

girl suddenly, although Leah had paid all the money necessary to
get him through medical school, so that he might become a doctor.
And then Richmond declared that no matter what his uncle's estate
yielded in the end, and he did not admit to that it would be nothing,
he was going to make enough money to go back to Jordan by trans-
lating a very important/book into English.
the full

The summer continued with such quarrels between Aunt
Leah and Richmond, while has numbness and lack of energy did not
pass. He started to translate the important French book, which was
about how the doctrine of evolution did not contradict the exist-
ence of God, and his creation of the world, but on the contrary,
furnished the most patent proof yet. Richmond had written to the
author and asked his permission and stated his own reflections on
this book. The translation was difficult and slow, and Richmond had
no energy and he wondered when his energy would return and when he
would be inspired to write the next book of his poem, although he
thought that he would learn much in the translation which he would
be able to use in his poem.

The happiness and exaltation of the previous year
seemed as distant as childhood. He heard that Dinah had married
the Brazilian and he was surprised and relieved. Everything that
had occurred in Jordan stood in a new light, infinitely rich. He
started to yearn for the summer to pass, so that he might return.
He resolved that he would not quarrel and be angry and silent with
the other boys, and he would be a serious and faithful student during
the coming years. He wrote to Lewis and To Otto, but neither one of
them answered him, nor had he received an answer from the French
author. The only one who wrote to him was Martin, who had gone as a
junior counselor to a summer camp.

79.

He went to see Renee, but she was very different and dis-
tant, and then he began to visit very often a high school friend of
his who now lived near the apartment house. This was Albert, who was
a strange boy, devoted to the arts and intent upon being the author
of brilliant works of prose fiction. Albert lived with his sister,
mother and grandmother, the three of them supported by his mother's
rich brother in Denver. Albert's father was a drunkard who had never
done anything to support his family and now no longer lived with them.
Albert's mother was an earnest and sympathetic woman who believed in
Christian Science, and who was disturbed by her son's strangeness which
grew from year to year. He had been put out of high school after a
quarrel with his teacher and he had not done very well in any of the
subjects, but his mother thought him very brilliant because she read
the difficult modern authors and knew them by heart and spoke with
the appearance of much originality, although Mrs. Crane did not under-
stand what he said most of the time.

Richmond had written to Albert from Jordan and now that he
was back, he told Albert many stories of his year at Jordan, finding
himself extending and inventing what had happened until he was im-
pressed by his own effortless invention and yet persuaded himself that
the idyll and the beauty and the drama he dang of Jordan was true,
which increased the torment of his desire for the time to come to
go back. Albert described his own year in New York and how he had
decided that he did not really like girls, but only boys. Richmond
did not believe Albert, he thought Albert had talked himself into
such a belief because he had read Marcel Proust. But then Albert
told of his visit with his mother to a psychoanalyst. She had taken
him to this man because she wanted to know why Albert was peculiar
and incapable of conforming to any conventions, accepting school
discipline, or getting a job, for when he worked from time to time
as a clerk in a bookstore, he offended all by his disdain for the

80.

bestsellers and twice was caught stealing books, and fired from his
job. The psychoanalyst talked long with Albert while his mother sat
in the waiting-room, and then the psychoanalyst had a long inter-
view with Mrs. Crane, telling her that Albert was homosexual. At
first, Mrs. Crane did not know what it was to be homosexual, the doc-
tor had to explain this to her, and then she wept briefly, as the
doctor assured her that many fine persons, brilliant and gifted, were
also homosexual, and there was no necessary stigma. Thus consoled,
she shrugged her shoulders and dried her tears, and heard from Albert
an immense catalogue of the great men who had been homosexual, and
told him that she would pray for him at the Christiaan Science Temple.

Richmond went to see Albert almost every evening because he
had nothing better to do with himself, not because he really liked
Albert. Albert's sister Lucy, fourteen years of age, decided that
she liked Richmond very much and sat on his lap as he conversed with
and wetly
Albert and kissed him fatly/on his neck, while Richmond tried to
not
make out that he did/take pleasure in this, ashamed that he was
attracted by this child, four years younger than he. Lucy was unlike
Albert, she was normal in every way, she said that Albert was just
crazy, and she spoke warmly of getting married soon and having a
family as soon as possible. Albert thought Lucy was just a child,
and he did not believe that Richmond liked to have her sit on his
lap, and told her to get off and he went on speaking of modern
authors, and of how many were homosexual.

Richmond tried to resume some of the habits and friend-
ships of his highschool years, but Jordan had a gulf which made
him different and the old days different. He went once more to see
Renee, coming an hour late and finding her in tears. She told him
how Albert had made love to her during the winter and told her it
would be good for her and good for him for them to sleep with each
other and she might rescue him from his homosexuality.

ol.

Then Richmond asked Albert why he had gone after Renee, if he
really like men and not women, and Albert said that in such in-
stances he just shut his eyes and made believe he was with a
young boy, for Renee was small and like a small boy, and it was
in a summer camp that Albert had first found out about what the
real thing in love, something Richmond would never know because
he had such a narrow view. Albert explained that between a man
and a girl so many other things, such as family and pride, were
brought into play that no one normal could find out what love
really was, while his sort wanted only love and were given to it
so much that they discovered marvel upon marvel.

Richmond argued with Albert and was unable not to think
that Albert deceived himself, for the whole thing seemed inconceivable
to him as pleasure. But when Albert went to his house one summer even-
ing and Richmond was in the bathtub and Albert wanted to be permitted
to come in, speaking from behind the closed door, Richmond refused
to let him come in, and he decided to see less of Albert because he
might be looked at as peculiar too, and the boys in the neighborhood
had contempt for Albert.

He tried to write the next book of his poem and he tried
to translate the important French work, but his numbness and emptiness
of mind continued through the summer, and he began to think that he
was without any gift at all. His failure and his emptiness made him
want to see a lot of girls, and he argued long with Aunt Leah to
give him the money to take from the warehouse the big Lincoln car
which had dead uncle had left him. Having this, he would be able
to go out
and pick up girls, as he had the summer before with a fellow named
Max, who collected rents in Yonkers, White Plains, and New Rochelle
for a real estate owner. Aunt Leah did not want to give him the
money and he continued to tell him how wrong he was about his inheritance

82.

but he persuaded her at last by signing a note to her which
promised her whatever money he received for his translation,
the one sign Aunt Leah had seen of his willingness to try to
earn money. The Lincoln car was taken out, and Richmond went
with Max as he had done the summer before because Max had a
license to drive a car, while Richmond was not old enough to
have one. This was the only reason Richmond went with Max, for
he defeated many of his habits and ways, his vulgarity, his
way of taking the best-looking girl for himself, and his view
that Richmond was just putting on an act when he devoted him-
self to books and the arts, something Richmond always told a
new girl about as soon as possible that she might see that he
was different than the other boys, something apart.

The car was expensive to run, and Richmond hardly ever
had enough money to pay for the gasoline, for Aunt Leah gave him
only a dollar and a half each week as spending money. Max often
paid for the gasoline, and Richmond was soon in debt to him and
they did not have much luck in picking up girls on Riverside Drive.
The sailors were always getting the good ones, and the two boys
had a hard time understanding how they did not get more of the girls,
having such a beautiful and expensive car.

Max proposed then that Richmond drive him out when he
went on his collections, and Richmond was willing when the battery
in the car went dead and he had no money to buy a new one and Aunt
Leah refused to give him the money. Max bought a new battery for
twenty-five dollars and Richmond drove with him all day, carrying
a book in the car and trying to read it as Max when from suburban
house to another. Max spoke of making a housewife sometimes when
he took a long time to come from a house and then one day Richmond
went by himself because Max was sick, and he hoped that some house-
wife would make a gesture of invitation to him, but none of them did.

83.

One day of intense heat in the middle of August, Richmond did not want to drive with Max after three o'clock, and Max wanted him to go home and let him drive the car, but Richmond had refused this request because he knew that the next step would be Max's taking the car at night with some of his older friends, whom he preferred as questing companions to Richmond, although he took pride in having Richmond for a friend, a boy who owned a Lincoln and was an heir. Max said nothing when Richmond just turned the car about and went home, but then in the evening when Richmond went down to the car, the battery had been taken out. He went to the apartment where Max lived and a big fight broke out between them in front of Max's parents, who took Richmond's part. Max was especially angry because he had not made very much money for weeks, for he was paid only a percentage of the amount he collected and some of the people had just stopped paying therent at all in this summer of 1932, in the dead middle of the depression. Richmond shouted that he had been Max's chauffeur for weeks and Max might at least have told him he was taking the battery from the car. Then he accused Max of being a bounder and Max told him to take that back and Max's father said Richmond ought to have nothing more to do with a loafer like Max, and the heat, the worn-outness, and the disappointment in both boys' minds was such that a real fight broke out, Max took a looking-glass and hit Richmond on the head with it, Max's mother screamed, Max yelled that he would kill Richmond, Max's father went to get a cop, and soon the whole neighborhood was outside of the first floor apartment. Richmond returned to his own apartment in a state of humiliation and with a feeling of degradation. He felt that it was all Aunt Leah's fault, she should have lent him the money, and he told her this and he packed his things as she told him he was a foolish and peculiar boy who expected to have everything and was going to have nothing.

84.

Richmond left his aunt's house, borrowed money from Albert, who delighted in the whole affair, and went to stay at a hotel downtown. He rented a battery the next morning and went to sell his Lincoln car, and he sold it to a dealer who did not have give what it was worth, who gave him only two hundred of the four hundred dollars he promised him for it, saying that he would give him the rest when the License Bureau in Cleveland confirmed the fact that Richmond really owned the car.

Richmond stayed at the hotel, feeling his aloneness and feeling as he had at Jordan when he had stayed for three days in his room. Albert came to see him and rushed at Richmond's suitcase, saying that he wanted to see Richmond's unseen manuscript and Richmond then became very angry with him, thrusting him away from the closet where the suitcase was. Albert send then that he did not believe the poem existed, and Richmond grew white, for the night before he had read the poem and found it no good at all. He felt then that he had made a fable about himself and now it was untrue and all would think only a vain liar.

The car dealer kept putting him off about the remainder off the money and a man in the next car store who had seen Richmond come every day to ask for the money told him he was not going to get it, the car dealer was dishonest and owed money to everyone and was paying a great deal of money as alimony. Aunt Leah heard about this from Martin who had just come back from summer camp and paid Richmond a visit at the hotel. Aunt Leah tried to get the money for Richmond and she made a scene and hit the man and made such a scandal that the man gave her half of the money. Then she sent Martin to tell Richmond to come back for the few weeks before he returned to Jordan. Richmond was relieved, he had grown sick of staying at the hotel and eating out all the time and using the money he had been given for the car. He came back late one evening and nothing was said until another argument

86.

He decided that he would wait and he would get his translation published, and then he would return to Jordan as one who had begun to make his mark. He was indignant at Aunt Leah's suggestions that one of the universities supported by the city was good enough for him, since it was good enough for the other boys. She did not see how it was life at Jordan which meant so much to him.

Aunt Leah decided to move to Brooklyn and to a region where the rent would be much less, for now Richmond and Martin had to be supported by her, at least for the time being. She told Richmond she would give him his dollar and a half each week and would make an account of her expenses which the two boys were to pay her back when their uncle's estate was at last given to them, although only God knew how little would be left after the suit was over and the legal costs had been paid.

They moved to Flatbush and to a suburban street, full of two family houses and guarded by trees, and Richmond was pleased to be in such a neighborhood and not all unwilling to go from the old neighborhood, full of apartment houses. Richmond went to one publisher and another and then another with the manuscript of his translation, writing an introduction in which he explained that at least two copies of this work would be bought, such was its interest to churchman and those interested in thought, as well as many other persons. One day a letter came from Paris, a polite and brief note from the famous author, thanking Richmond and giving him permission to publish his translation. This was the first time an author had ever written to Richmond. He was extremely pleased and Aunt Leah was impressed. But every two weeks the manuscript of his translation was returned, and an editor explained how in such times especially there was no possibility of interest in such a work.

37.

With the cold brisk shining weather of early autumn, Richmond's numbness and emptiness of mind vanished and he began to write short poems and to make long entries in his journal. He read very late at night and discovered in himself a passion for the thick novels of George Eliot and of Tolstoy and hethought of how at the art so fiction was an inconceivable one for him, for he was unable to imagine how a man or a woman would act in many different kinds of circumstances.

Then on the corner of a business street in the early evening he saw Hershel, standing by a street corner speaker who addressed and even harangued a small crowd. The speaker was a Communist and placards of the Communist Party were held aloft. A man was heckling the speaker and Hershel was heckling the heckler. Richmond hesitated, then went forward and called to Hershel by his last name, not knowing if he would be answered and hence taking no chances.

Hershel greeted him with joy and when the meeting was finished went with him to have coffee and cake and was overjoyed to find that Richmond lived near him. Richmond was overjoyed also and when he heard that Roger and Seymour had also not returned to Jordan that because of a lack of money, he thought that the old circle would then exist again here in Flatbush. He went the next day with Hershel to see Seymour and Roger at Roger's house and they were polite to him, and they said they would come to see him, and Richmond's hopes arose, but then they did not come and after a time both Seymour and Roger did not want to see him.

Hershel became his daily friend, however, and came to get him every night in his father's car and took him to the Communist Unit of which he was a new member, and argued long with Richmond about Communism, explaining how Marxism gave one a whole way of life, taking everything into account, and giving everything a purpose. It was because of this that Hershel had not returned to Jordan, not because

88.

of a lack of funds. He wanted to be involved in real life and real
life was not to be found in the academic groves.

Richmond was allowed to sit at the unit meetings because
of Hershel's influence, which grew as he argued long and loud about
current questions. Hershel was sought by two factions of the organ-
ization, each of which told Hershel that the other faction was really
spying for the police, making Hershel shift between viewing both as
in the pay of the police or neither.

On other nights, the two boys went to the Socialist Party
and Hershel heckled them. Richmond saw a plump blackhaired girl there
whom he wanted to know, but for a time it was difficult to go up to
her and speak to her. On Saturday nights, Hershel and Richmond went
to a speakeasy named Jack's Atlantic Grove and here too he was the
life of the party, playing the piano, reciting, and performing a solo
ballet in which he enacted the Russian Revolution with themes stamped
out upon the piano. The owner of the speakeasy was always drunk and
he was always delighted to see Hershel.

Richmond kept asking Hershel to get some girls and Hershel
put him off and then at last secured two, explaining with much
apology that he would get better ones next time. Richmond did not
like his girl who was very fat, and he sat in silence at Jack's,
as Hershel spoke of his hauteur, impressing Richmond's girlwho was
to move home cuddled next to Richmond, who did not want to hurt
her feelings and made mild gestures/just before they left the two
girls.

Often, at any hour of the night, Hershel came to see
Richmond, coming at the door which was at the side of the red-
brick house and arguing loudly with him until Aunt Leah knocked
on the wall. Richmond came to know Hershel's family. His father
was like Hershel, he was always arguing, and he was a lovable
character who argued with Hershel about Communism and America,

89.

and with Richmond about education. He wanted to know why he should send his son to the university, since every step of his son's education merely made it more difficult for him to speak to his son. Hershel's mother was a domineering woman, who ruled her whole family with an iron hand, and she had had the upper hand over her husband ever since he had been caught with another man's wife and sent to jail for a month by the man. This had occurred fifteen years before, but Hershel's mother kept the event a living thing, both in the household and in the business, where she was as much a boss as her husband and refused to permit the working-girls in the shop to dress in a way she regarded as immoral.

At last, after much frustration, Richmond managed to get into a conversation with the girl at the Socialist Party meetings who had caught his eye. Her name was Clara Little and she was a typist and as soon as she talked with him, her whole appearance was changed, the dark beauty and gravity Richmond thought he had seen in her was changed to commonplace cockiness of thought and language. Richmond was disappointed, but he was glad to have a girl to think about once more, and he went with her and Hershel to Jack's place on Saturday night and she became tipsy with the beer and when they drove back, she became passionate and excited until as the liquor wore off she thrust him away from her. Hershel had regarded this as he sat in conversation with his girl and he told Richmond in time that he had certainly made a big hit with Clara, she looked as if she were crazy about him. The week after that, Richmond asked Clara to get a girl for Hershel and they came to her house and she introduced the two boys to her sister Evelyn and then they sat about and talked and Richmond saw that Evelyn was the girl Clara intended for Hershel, but Hershel did not see this at all. Richmond tried to signal to Hershel, but it did no good, Hershel was engrossed in broad bland remarks. But Clara saw Hershel's

92.

was talked by Hershel's delight. Hershel said that to hear one of these stories was like hearing a symphony of Beethoven. This was the judgement of a story in which Richmond told of an evening with Lewis at a speakeasy in which Lewis' girl had flung herself at Richmond and the drunken Lewis had knocked down Richmond, a fable which sprang from Alice's preference for Richmond. Richmond described Lewis' anger so that it became an expression of his resentment of his failure in life, a failure renewed and signified by the preference of the girl in the speak-easy. And when Lewis knocked down Richmond and then began to cry and hold his head in his hands and beg Richmond's forgiveness and speak of the essence of his life, while the girl tried to get Richmond to go away with her, Hershel arose and said that this was one of the most powerful stories he had ever heard. Richmond was flattered to such an extent that he told Hershel that it was not true, his vanity making him wish to have the credit for the invention as such. This made Hershel turned in scepticism and doubt, asking how he was to know that Richmond was not a pure fraud.

Richmond began to write a poem each day, forcing himself. He was unable to write any further of his great poem, but he felt that he must begin, now that he was nineteen years of age, an age which seemed very late to him.

Hershel decided to go to Stuvesant and Richmond decided to go there too, but to return to Jordan next year. Hershel said that he was determined never again to quarrel with Richmond, for he learned a great deal from him. Their arguments about God and Communism were such that they were often on the verge of a quarrel and Richmond's anger at Hershel's stubbornness made him often call Hershel a big fool. Then, with a suddenness equal to all previous changes. Hershel decided that he was the son of a capitalist and ought to be in favor of capitalism also, for was this not one of the dictates of Marxism? He was done with the class struggle, he resigned his office in the Communist unit,

93.

and he felt now that not participation in the major crises of society,
but the loss of his virginity would give him the knowledge and ex-
perience necessary to an author. He sent many stories to all the
periodicals, and they came back so quickly that Hershel explained to
Richmond that the editors had hardly had the time to cut open the
envelope and put the rejected story in the return stamped and self-
addressed envelope. He secured an author's agent who told him that
one reason his stories came right back was the frequency of the sex-
ual act in them, especially the event of a young man's first inter-
course with a woman. You see, said Hershel to Richmond, this shows
that my failure comes from an ignorance of the experience itself. The
two boys then had long arguments about the necessity of experience and
Richmond cited many instances of authors who had written about kinds
of experience of which they could not have had any direct experience.
He mentioned such a one as Emily Dickinson, who had never slept with
a man, but who had been a great poet nonetheless.

Then the two boys began to go to Stuyvesant. They were in
the same class in Philosophy and they came to school together often on
the Interborough subway, and they saw with each other in the Rathskellar
through the afternoons. A new period of intense excitement began for
both of them, for there were famous teachers at Stuyvesant and a sense of
being close to the important tendencies in though5 and in the arts, a
sense which rose from the fact that this was a university in the metrop-
olis.

Richmond was a great success in most of his classes, attract-
ing the attention of his teachers by speaking long and learnedly and
with an intense self-consciousness which did not keep him from contin-
uing at much length. He was asked to speak on Modern Poetry, to give
a whole class, in English, and he was asked by the French teacher to
lecture to the class on Pascal, and both of these invitations made him
feel that he had known what a remarkable mind he had.

94.

He impressed the instructor in Philosophy, Mr. Long, also, but in this class, he felt that there was much that he did not know, and he tried to get ahead quickly by reading the whole textbook from beginning to end, but his effort to read it through in one night made him fail to do it at all. And in the class in Medieval History he impressed the teacher very much too, until one day he said that the instructor's interpretation of the mystics of the middle ages was an vulgar interpretation because it emphasized the sexual motivation of the mystics. The instructor was offended. Richmond had not intended to say that the instructor was vulgar, but et only that was the vulgar and obvious interpretation. But the instructor did not like him after that, and made ironic remarks about the delicacy of Mr. Rose for the remainder of the term.

His two lectures on Pascal and on Modern Poetry did not go well because he had not prepared them and to speak a whole hour before a class was not the same easy thing as raising one's hand and making a long commentary on what the teacher had just said.

And now in the Rathskellar he began to know different intellectual circles among the students, and different students who had some intellectual pretension. First there was Maurice Ludovizi, a small handsome boy who worked at one of the Public Libraries and seemed to be able to refer to many different kinds of books very learnedly. Maurice sat with a knowing smile upon his face, no matter what was discussed, and at some juncture asked the conversationalist if he had read this and that book on the subject. Richmond was much impressed with Maurice and asked him to Flatbush one evening where Aunt Leah liked him and said after that he was a dreamer. Maurice was very polite and gentle, and only his knowing smile showed how thought authoritative he felt himself. He was much amused with Hershel who taunted him and yet was also impressed.

251.

Eva declared at the top of her voice. This declaration caused an
immediate upsurge, and then intensive discussion and analysis, in
the midst of which neither Eva nor Richmond managed to be heard.

"Buzz, buzz", said Eva, who had been drinking since
late afternoon.

"What are you buzzing about?" asked Herbert De Leon
after a time.

"That buzz is just me trying to get a word in edge-
wise", said Eva, quickly granted a hailing, celebrating response.
Her triumphs were always of such a nature, remarks inspired by
the edge of exasperation.

And then an old story was revived and renewed, with
variations and interpolations. It had been told the first time
at a dinner given to a departing professor by his students, and
Edmund and Rudyard had been among these students, and Herbert and
Ferdinand had come too because they liked to go with Edmund and
Rudyard, although often Rudyard felt that his individuality was
violated by their presence, for then he was seen as one of them.
At other times too, and on other occasions, Rudyard was grateful
that they were present too, this was so at times and parties where
he existed at the fringe of the party and not enough attention was
paid to him, and he felt he was a stranger. Then the boys of the
circle taunted whomever they found to listen with their private
jokes and riddles.

At this dinner for Professor Mooney, who was about to
go to be the head of the department in a university in the West,
the boys of the circle had begun to tell a long story about Ed-
mund's five-year old niece, who did not exist and who was named
Mariana. The real purpose of this story was to strike at Professor
Mooney's humorless seriousness.

252.

Little Mariana had been sent downtown to meet her father. (It was Edmund who told the story, plump, slow in speech, leading his audience to laughter with broken chuckles.) "He had been given two nickels for her fare, but as she reached to place one of them into the turnstile slot, she dropped the coin and a big matronly woman behind her picked it up,

"Give me my nickel", said Mariana politely.

"Finder's keepers!", said the big lady.

Then Mariana shrugged her small shoulders, drew forth her other nickel, and descended into the subway, taking care to go into the same car as the one woman who had found the nickel.

After four stations had passed the big woman arose and stood at the sliding door, and left her big package on the seat. Mariana arose and quickly took hold of the lady's package. The woman turned, remembered her package, and asked Mariana for it, to which Mariana replied,

"Finder's keepers!", sternely, and the big woman shrugged her shoulders and left the train, while Mariana held the package.

As was to be expected and desired, Professor Mooney said then, troubled by silence and the conclusion,

"What was in the package?"

Towhich in an uproar the four boys cried, "Applesauce! That's just it: applesauce!"

This was supposed an attack upon credulity, and the patient listener. "Since it was a story told most often to welcome strangers who listened from politeness and newness, it was unjust, and considered unjust, and if it had been just, it would have been useless for the purpose of comic superiority which was the necessity they felt.

Now at this new telling of the story, Ferdinand declared that not applesauce, but banana oil had been the triumphant finale and denouement, while Rudyard said that the cat's pajamas had been the ending.

253.

Then Richmond heard for the first time another old device, often used against strangers.

"Do you want to hear a dirty joke?" Ferdinand might inquire, and coldly.

"Yes", the pāāite sātāanger often replied.

"The girl fell in the mud!" Ferdinand said then quietly and with an expressionless face, turning away.

But if the stranger was a girl, the game was more complex, for often the girl said no.

Then Ferdinand went from person to person, beginning with his intimates, and saying,

"She does not want to hear a dirty joke!" as who should say, she was born in Omsk, or has six fingers on her righthand.

Wilhelmina, in whom the boys delighted, full of admiration for her beauty and charm, said no, and then the communication of her refusal was broadcast from person to person, but without the usual effect of the denier becoming impatient, upset, and willing to hear or say anything in order that the pointing out might stop. Wilhelmina, however, smiled, dimpling, and said as Ferdinand went from person to person,

"Yes, it is true, I do not want to hear a dirty joke, I really do not!", chiming with Ferdinand, to his delight.

Rudyard, Ferdinand, and Samund became attentive to Wilhelmina and made much of her, and she came to the Bell house-hold sometimes by herself, and on one such occasion, the boys discovered that she did not know the new meaning of the colloquialism, to bang, which meant in the new slang, to copulate.

"Bang", said Ferdinand, "bang! bang!"

"Bang yourself!" cried Wilhelmina spiritedly, for she always responded with energy and attack to a challenge.

IV The Midget

Like great stone boxes, the apartment houses surrounded us,
bestowing their silence. No one near us, our steps sounded hollow
amid the stillness. And I waited, hoping without patience, anxious
as never before, and then I said:

"How soon will we look for him? For it is late and I have not
slept for so long and my mother, when she wakes up, will be anxious,
both of her children being absent."

"A person", he replied, "even a young boy, is not a simple
thing. He is not a misplaced book, nor a wallet lost in a
restaurant. He moves himself, that is, he has motives. Besides/he
is valuable, even more than the wallet, and someone may take him,
drawing him with a present, a game or a promise."

"It will not be easy to find your brother. It is very difficult
to find a person. It depends upon you and what you do and what
you know. Mainly it depends upon what you do and yet it depen
g mostly, on the other hand, upon what you know, or rather, on what
you do not know, because your doing flows from your ignorance or
knowledge./I do not know whether or not we will find him. But I
help you, so far as I can help you, even if I am not sure that I
can help you. For I will surely help you merely by being with
you and suffering with you the labor of looking for him. For I
know more than you do even if there is a great deal which I do not
know. You do not know your brother although you have slept beside
him for fifteen years. Remember his heart, which has been beating
beside yours, always hidden beneath his young breast and his
young boy's blouse."

IV (2)

"He is only a young boy, concerned only with his games and with Saturday, when there is no school, and the latest fad among children, and the teacher's frown. Perhaps you make a mystery where there is none, as if to increase my fear, which is heavy enough."

But I felt, as I said this, the justice of what he said, gazing upon the scene before me, the midnight air, dun, dim, chill under the pointing starlight of the winter sky.

Then a small man approached and we met him under the pale electric of the street-lamp, and I saw that he was a midget, plump, rosy, an adult, and yet like a dressed-up child.

"How do you do!", he said in a falsetto voice, almost soprano, which yet attempted to seem mature. "Perhaps I can make your acquaintance, since I am unable to sleep and it is lonely at this hour."

"Unfortunately", said my courteous friend, "we are engaged in a very serious task at present and are unable to indulge in social pleasures. This young boy is looking for his younger brother, who was absent from his bed at midnight, without reason."

"Oh yes! I know his brother and I have just seen!"

Naturally this was a sensational statement. "Where did you see him?" I asked in a passionate voice.

"A few blocks away", the midget replied, "He was lounging before a store-window, although it was darkened. I did not speak to him because I prefer older companions at this hour."

"He is not telling the truth", said my friend, "he did not see your brother. Do not lie," he said to the midget, "to this troubled young man, whose head is already swollen with grief."

The midget paled at this accusation.

IV (3)

"Why do you call me a liar? Are you in the habit of
addressing insults to whomever you meet? You do not know me:
how can you know whether or not I am telling the truth? It
seems that when one is a man smaller than most one must
expect the worst treatment on all sides."

Saying this, he shrugged his shoulders and drew a
banana: from his pocket and peeled slots it down, as if to
restore his composure. This made me laughed, being so
ridiculous at this hour and in this place. What will happen next,
I said to myself: what will **not** happen next.

"Now you are laughing at me, now you are laughing at me",
said the midget, "why are you laughing? Is there anything
wrong with eating a banana, especially this one, so soft, so fat,
and so white?"

"Nothing is wrong with eating", said my friend, "but
you should not have pretended to have seen this young boy's brother".

"But I did see him. You were not with me and have no means
of knowing what I did or did not see. You will antagonize
everyone if you approach them with this attitude of doubt and
suspicion."

"He is lying", said Dr. Levy, "because he wishes to
appear knowing. He is the kind that seizes every opportunity
and when asked a question always provides a learned answer. It
is vanity, which has taken this form, which makes him claim know-
ledge when he has none. But he is lying, and this should make
clear to you one of the things that you have to deal with, that
people do not tell the truth, but some desire distorts their
word and even their vision."

Meanwhile the midget continued to eat his banana with aplomb, listening, however, with great interest to what was being said about him.

"Come, let us go away", said my friend.

"Do you still say you saw him", I asked.

"Yes", said the midget, smiling and confident.

"Maybe he did see him" said I, as my friend dragged me away unwillingly. And I looked backward as the small man diminished. I looked backward until he turned the corner.

26.

Because Richmond had arrived a week after the beginning of school, he had not had a medical examination with the other boys. But after some weeks, he was summoned to the school hospital, and with five other latecomers, he went from interne to interne, naked and feeling the ugliness of nakedness, and depressed by the nakedness of the other boys, sickly white and strange. When the examination had ended at last, he dressed and felt the relief of being dressed again, and he went with his card to the office of the chief physician. The chief physician was a hale and bluff middle-aged man who looked at Richmond's card, then leaned back in his chair, measured Richmond with his gaze, and then said in a King Cole voice:

"Have you ever fucked a woman?" Richmond turned white. He was truly shocked, for no one not his own age had ever used this word to him. He said that he had, and then the doctor said pleasantly and blandly,

"Well when you do again, use a contraceptive. Don't be a fool. Any woman who sleeps with one man sleeps with other men!"

"O I don't know", said Richmond, who felt always that he must affirm the ideal,

"And if you don't use a contraceptive", said the hale doctor, disregarding Richmond's protestation, "come to us when you get sick. That what's we're here for, and we don't give a damn about your health."

Richmond told the other boys about this, and they said they had not been asked this question, so that maybe some of the boys had been sick since then. This was one of the impressions which made Richmond eager to go out on dates, until David Koster, who came from Brooklyn, asked him one evening if he and Lewis wanted to go out on a triple date. Lewis did not want to go, but Richmond persuaded him. They went with the three girls to a place named Panetti's, a private house where the Italian family gave dinner and wine to the

27.

students. The wine was against the law then, and Richmond had never
had wine before this evening. As they drank, they talked a great deal
with rising happiness, and Richmond talked too much, thinking that he
was very fluent and clever. Lewis had taken the young st and best
looking girl, Alice Loeb, for himself, but she did not seem to like
him, and when they took the girls back to their different rooming
houses, Alice asked Richmond if she might walk with him. Richmond grew
more and more high-flown in speech, flattered by Alice's choice. He
spoke with joyous assurance about the mystery and secrecy of his ideas,
and Alice told him he was just trying very hard to impress her, and
Richmond made this a part of the uniqueness he celebrated, he said that
he knew she would say just that, and that was the impression he wanted
to make, so that she would see how much he liked her.

Then Richmond tried to persuade Alice to stay out in front
of the house after midnight, the hour when the girls had to be home,
for if they came after that, they were suspended by the Dean of women.
Alice told Richmond this, and yet he tried to persuade her once more
as a mark of his conquest, and he told her how pretty the leaf shadows
were on her face, and she said that she must go now, then saw the look
of disappointment on his face and told him that she really was impress-
ed with him, running into the house as the chapel tolled midnight.

In joy overflowing, exultation, and exaltation, Richmond start-
ed to return to the dormitory, but lost his way in the deceptive streets
of the old academic town, and only after a half hour of going in a
circle did he find the right way to the dormitory. He went to Lewis'
room where Lweis and David were discussing the evening, and they
wanted to know where he had been, and he lied joyously, saying that
Alice had stayed out after hours with him, and both boys were amazed
and said that he had certainly made a hit with Alice. The wine had
worn off, but Richmond was still very happy. He wanted to go out to

28.

to have something to eat, he was too happy to want to go to sleep,
but the other two did not want to go, they did not feel his happin-
ess.

Thinking of his lie about "lice, Richard wrote in his commonplace book, "Reality must blush with shame at every lie. For every lie accuses Reality of being inadequate".

All week Richmond thought of Alice, and of his eloquence with
her, and then on Sunday, he called and asked her to go to dinner with
him, for on Sunday night all the dining-rooms of the university were
shut and the students dined in the restaurants. But then when he came
to her house, she looked upset and she explained that she had thought
he had said six, and not seven o'clock, and she had thought until
a moment ago that she had been stood up, while the other girls in her
house looked at her.

At dinner, the conversation was forced, and Richmond was unable
to talk impressively without wine, and Alice said that she did not
get much attention because she was unwilling to be pmiscuous like some
of the other girls. She grew angry as she said this, and angry when they
walked by the beautiful lake, where couples sat or wprawled in the dark
groves. Alice pointed to this, and spoke self-righteously about not
permitting liberties as payment for being asked to go out. When Rich-
mond took her hand unthinkingly as they crossed a street, she with-
drew it quickly, reminding him of what she had been saying. Then she
told Richmond about her family in Philadelphia, and her mother, who
lectured to women's clubs about D.H. Lawrence and other modern authors.
He returned to the dormitory, his expectancy turned to emptiness.

Richmond wrote in his commonplace book, "Wine brings forth
the fullness of the mind".

Lewis asked him how the evening had been, and Richmond told
him, and Lewis said that Alice was a very inhibited girl.

29.

A causeless emotion of extreme happiness mounted in Richmond from day to day. The excitement of apening abook or walking in the park in the thick woods by the beautiful lake was sometimes unbearable excitement. Every poem he looked at seemed beautiful, and what the boys said or did astonishing ly clever or significant. When they studied flowers in the Botany class, a plain girl came late to class and said to the instructor, "-I have no flower", and this seemed a profound and beautiful accident to Richmond.

He wrote in his journal, "Now at last I understand Blake's maxim, 'Everything that lives is holy'". He looked at this sentence and it seemed pompous to him, but he let it stay, knowing that he would write nothing at all, if he permitted his self-consciousness to take hold of him. But he was disturbed also because everything seemed equally beautiful without decree or difference.

Soon there were conflicts of temperament, when the newness of friendship had worn off. Richmond returned to Edwin the French book he had borrowed, the stain of a zwatted fly on the title page.

"Edwin pointed this out with his would-be jovial smile, in which his tongue stuck out against his cheek as if he had a toothache, and Richmond said he had not done it, and Edwin replied that he knew Richmond had not done it, but not to do it again. Richmond was wounded because Edwin did not believe him. It was true but how did Edwin know? the book was second-hand, it might have been done before.

He insisted that he had not killed the fly on the page, and Edwin kept saying judiciously that he believed him, but not to do it again, and they continued like this, each stubborn, until Richmond became petulant, especially pricked by Edwin's knowingness and forgiveness.

He wrote in his journal, "It is best to over-estimate how much other persons know about you, because they often know more than you think".

30.

Lewis told Richmond of his cousin, a beautiful girl of saintly character whom he liked more than ether person he had known. She had been a model for him when he was trying to be a sculptor. Richmond was then full of his new high spirits, and his new aphisation, and he said, Why don't you sleep with her, and Lewis said, I wish you would not say that, which made Richmond say it again and again, astonished when Lewis became very angry with him, for this seemed to Richmond the same as the boys' obscenity in the dining-room.

He wrote, "When I am high and happy, I lack imagination of the minds of other persons. My own thoughts block my view. I must try to prevent this; But I will fail". Richmond thought if he said he would fail, failure would be less likely. But he often failed.

Hershel came often to see Lewis and Richmond. He was now outlandish in his infatuation with James Joyce. He cried out, Joys is conflagrious! and, Time has three plots, the pressant, the fugitive, and the passed! and, No noose is goodness!

Richmond was taken aback and annoyed to see how Hershel had surrendered himself to Joyce's style much more than he had. He told Hershel that there were other styles, much more important. Hershel denied this, Joyce was the latest word, and the apotheosis of English. He had annihilated the English language in a blaaze of glory. Then the two boys argued more and more about the existence of God and the necessity of Communism, to which Hershel tried to persuade Richmond, attacking him as a bourgeois laureate and an apostle of the middle class. Richmond was against Communism because it made the economic system the most important thing and not the beliefs and ideas of man, which were the most important thing because man was a rational animal. Hershel yelled back that man certainly was an animal, and God was no gut because he was the drug and the drag of the poor peer pure peoples, rip rippling in