A Modern Romance

When everything was broken off, he looked back, and he saw
that the window shade remained drawn on one important thing: the
reversal which had made her come to him to ask if he was not being
'reasonable' about her.

This moment on the green borrowed sofa after lunch in the
middle of winter came at the end of what seemed to him a series of
provocations.

The phone rang and he did not answer it. "This is more
important", he said, holding her hand lightly. (It was, as it turned
out the piano mover who wanted to come to move his wife's piano
out of the house to the New York for which she had departed from her
marriage.

"Are you sure the same thing will not happen again?" he asked,
meaning the anger and confusion which had come with the news that she
was in love with another man.

"No, it will not happen again".

Just before this, he began to explain that he was no
longer curious about who the man was?

"You mean," she said, compressing her lips, "that
it no longer makes any difference to you?" Her look of disappointment
came from her misunderstanding him. She thought it made no
difference because he was no longer in love with her.

"No", he explained, "What I meant was that it no longer
made any difference who the man was, since I was not the one
and since it eliminated me."

"Reasonable? Is this a per-"

Again she misunderstood him. She thought he was going to
ask her if this was a proposal? He meant to say, Is this a personal
matter, this reproach of yours to me for being reasonable??

256

As summer drew near, Richmond and Wilhelmina were drawn back from their preoccupation with the Bell circle. It was difficult for Richmond to make the long trip from Flatbush and the return late at night without an exhaustion in which he felt benumbed all day. The final examinations stood as barriers between him and the freedom of the summer.

There was much more that was difficult for Wilhelmina. This was her fifth year and once again she was not doing well enough in some subjects to be sure that she was going to pass. In two of these subjects it was necessary for her to write long and ambitious essays in order to get good grades, and grades not merely merely passing but good were necessary if she was to pass.

She sat in the Commons with Richmond and looked at her notebook and looked at Richmond and said that she knew that she was not going to be able to finish the necessary essays.

"Don't say you can't", said Richmond to her, "there is no such thing as can't". He felt always such an optimism and such freedom and such power, until a task was immediately before him. Then he understood the difficulties of other human beings, but then he forced himself to the conclusion of what was necessary and he forgot about the experience of difficulty in the relief of having finished.

"I just can't", said Wilhelmina, for there was in her a hopeless despair as irrational and as tied to unknown depths as Richmond's eviction of power and freedom.

They went for a walk in the nearby park, where played the slum children, and the unemployed sat. Nursemaid, bootblack, old man, and young married woman, surrounded by the trees, the groves, and the walks, while the children playing screamed and ran to stop the lyric of the fountain, and threw at each other water ad spontaneity.

257.

There in the mild May sunlight, all Nature amiable, they sat, not far from the rumor of the passing cars.

"The most urban thing in the living world", said Richmond, "is the park", in love with generality.

Wilhelmina forgot herself in admiration of the new green, and the new May light. They had both decided not to go to class during the next hour, but to sit in the park and then walk on Fifth Avenue.

"Let me write the essays for you", said Richmond. He had written her final essay for her the year before, just as he had helped in final examinations in McKenna's course.

"No, I can't do that", said Wilhelmina, "That would not be right. You have so much else to do", she said, and it was true that Richmond had five examinations to face, and he had not kept up with his work for a long time, because he always slid as the school year waned, and because of the yearbook and the new circle.

"You had better let me begin now, when there is still a week left", said Richmond, knowing that Wilhelmina's first thought would be noble and just and then she would become helpless and panicky when the deadline was near.

About them staccato pecked the pigeons of the city park, and made the throaty chested rumor of cooing, and rose with a sudden thrashing of wings in impulse or fear. A bootblack passed and looked at Richmond's scuffed shoes and lifelessly made the motions to show that he thought Richmond ought to have a shine. Richmond looked at his shoes and shook his head, thinking that he had to keep the nickel, although his shoes ought to have a shine.

"Darkling, brightling!" said Richmond to Wilhelmina, holding her hand, "you must get done with this". When we are married, you won't suffer from these blocks, you will see how I

259.

Theya rose, and walked to Fifth Avenue, to New York
grand, forthere was on the famous avenue not only the glitter of the
new spring light, but the quick taxis, the great stores and shops,
their show windows cool-looking and expensive -looking, having the
cool look, the cream and slim reserve of the very expensive. Above
them, too enormous to take in, the new pyramids, which yielded only
a sense of more and much more, more than the mind could seize, or
experience exhaust; about them, the hurrying paasersby, full of a
nervousness and rush which made them seem to be about to commit
important acts.

From all these things Richmond and Wilhelmina were
both estranged and overtaken. For the sense of the city was a part
of them and penetrated them. Yet they did not are about the things
in the expensive stores, nor in the places of the city, and they did
not expect or want to have the things of which the expensive windows
were a vivid sign. And the glitter and the hurry, stopped, and kept
beating, and then renewed by the traffic lights, left Richmond soon
exhausted of nervous energy.

He was exhausted too when Wilhelmina wished to paused
show
and look at the/window displays, for only an even pace was pleasant
and he never looked at the windows, except at the mannequins, who
interested because of their abstract quality, like dolls and other
artificial versions of the human being.
pale

They passed a handsome chestnut horse, left standing
at the curb, and Wilhelmina went over to the horse and patted his
nose, and winked at him.

But then as they walked forward, Richmond looked back
and saw that the horse had mounted the sidewalk and was following
Wilhelmina.

"Don't look back; darkling", said Richmond, "the handsome
horse has fallen in love with you and is following you."

260.

Wilhelmina turned and the horse moved calmly forward, an astounding thing for the trained horse of the police,

"Go back, go back!" said Wilhelmina to the horse, being her inimitable self in her childlike intimate whisper.

But the horse came forward, and other pedestrians had now stop to look. Wilhelmina went to the handsome horse and patted him on the nose again and said sweetly,

"What is the matter with you? Don't you know you're not suppose to do such things?"

She held the horse and he stood motionless and with noble countenance, as if content that Wilhelmina regarded him and held him. He looked at her as if with pleasure.

"What am I going to do?" said Wilhelmina to Richmond, "he will just follow me".

But the policeman came from a doorway and took the horse and drve him back into the gutter.

Richmond and Wilhelmina went away and looked back, and there was the horse, looking back at her!

"He is love with you, brightling!" said Richmond to her, fondly, very much pleased and touched, feeling a great fondness for both the horse and Wilhelmina.

"And I had no sugar to give him", said Wilhelmina, pensively and regretfully, as if it were actually a matter of grave concern. Then Richmond laughed at her and they both laughed and spoke of what a wonderful story this was going to be, what a story to tell everyone!

But five minutes after that, Wilhelmina said, "If I don't graduate this time, I am going to become a whore!"

"How can you say such a thing?" said Richmond in anger, and anguish, suddenly flooded with a sense of W's wrongness and the wrongness of his being with her.

261.

That was the end of the day for them, the whole May
sky and the glitter of the city grand was clouded over. He argued
with her, inarticulate, saying that she ought not to say such things
even when she felt them, and that it was foolish and wrong to let
herself go to her like that, like a thing throwing oneself from a great
building.

During the following week, she studied her notebook and
bit her pencil and made drawings, unable to get further than the first
few pages of her two essays, and more and more hopeless.

Richmond was in the midst of his own effort to make
up for all that he had not done the whole ruck and distracted year.
Then the day before the papers were due, she came to him and said in
a humility of humiliation that she wished he would write the papers
for her, although she knew that this was wrong.

Richmond arose, pleased as ever at the chance to be
really good and make an effort for another human being. He summoned
Basil, and he went with Wilhelmina to Basil's house. It was a day of
wet heat and grey sky. Richmond had just finished his last examination
and begun to relax and feel the liberation of the summer, nothing more
that must be done on time.

At Basil's house, he typed with rapid improvisation
Wilhelmina's two essays all evening long, reading passages to
Basil and Wilelmina. Basil disapproved in elegant phrases of the
whole procedure.

Richmond was full of excitement and enervation, after
the strain of the week of examinations, studying under pressure,
forced and without true interest. He felt the lightheads of being
close to exhaustion and the hot heavy New York early summer evening
also made him more worn. But the sentences came fluently, because
he had been writing so much all week on his examination books, and

297.

Wilhelmina admired it just as a big and beautiful thing. When Richmond was excited by the idea that the bridge had cost fifty million dollars and ten men had died in building it, or when he spoke in his grandiose mode of how this was a living and powerful triumph of the mind upon Nature, Wilhelmina scolded him for such flights and generalities, and she said to him again that he always tried to see more than was present, and the present was enough, but Richmond looked through the present for something else, and that was why he did not see all that was in the present, which was the only actuality.

On this night, Richmond and Wilhelmina enjoyed a convalescent happiness, after the shock of Rose's (Rebecca's) death. And Richmond spoke more of how, when he graduated from Stuyvesant next June, they would be married, and Wilhelmina said once more that they would not be married, and she repeated that evening's conversation at home, when Mrs. Fine had said to Mr. Fine,

"To-night you are going to see your son-in-law",

"What son-in-law? Who?" said Mr. Fine, for this was a repetitive joke between them, and grew from their desire to understand their old perplexity, Were Richmond and Wilhelmina in love with each other or were they just friends?

Upon the bench, Richmond held Wilhelmina's hand, the only liberty ever permitted him, and returned to the subject of the names of the children they were going to have.

"One of them, the boy, we will name Felix, in the hope that he will know happiness!", said Richmond.

"And we must name the girl Lucy, to pray that she luminous", said Wilhelmina delightedly, willing as often before to entertain the fable of marriage, as an Arcady of the imagination.

Before this, they had toyed in this conceited style with naming the child after Mozart, and when Mrs. Fine had said

298.

to Wilhelmina that she wished her child to be named after her adored
father, Wilhelmina reported this to Richmond, and since the forbear's
name was Gottlieb, Richmond saw the bond, and said,

"We will name the boy Gottlieb Amadeus Theophile Rosel"

"He will probably hate Mozart and the art of poetry",
said Wilhelmina, for at any soaring arc of joyous imagination, she
felt the necessity of descending once more to the darkness at the
heart of her being, the motiveless despair.

"Why must you say such things?" said Richmond, helpless
in his own fabulous expectation, "what good does it do to think that
everything will be black?"

"It is good, because then one does not expect too much,
and we ought not to expect too much, and nothing will be as beautiful
as our hope desires", said Wilhelmina.

But then, her emotion lifted and she told Richmond that
she was touched because he had said that she was his only sister, a
status which grew from his not being permitted to make love to her and
from his not having a sister and Wilhelmina's not having a brother.

"You are my only brother" said Wilhelmina, and
Richmond felt himself on the verge of tears.

"You are my only butter", said Richmond,

"It is salt butter", said Wilhelmina, "or it is butter-
milk, I am your only butter milk".

"You are my only brooder", said Richmond.

"I am your only rather", said Wilhelmina.

Richmond said nothing.

"I am your only bitter", said Wilhelmina.

"You are not bitter, but you are beautiful and good"
said Richmond, who felt very serious and had had enough punning.

"You are my only rudder", said Wilhelmina,

300.

"Inez, Rita, Hershel Moussorgsky, Otto, Rudyard, Francis French, Leslie, Ferdinand and Marcus and the other boys and girls and you and I don't know anything about the important powers which preside and use our lives".

"They know enough", said Wilhelmina, "they know what they want to know".

"What they want to know is wrong", said Richmond, "and what they think they know is untrue, and desire distorts all that The girls they are and have. I/ do not know how to make love, except for Rebecca, who does not have to know that anymore, and they don't what it is to be in America, this strange new dominion--"

"What is it to be in America?" asked Wilhelmina,

"I don't know!" said Richmond in triumph and example, and then he continued, speaking for the sake of himself and his emotion,

"The ones who are Jews don't know what it is to be a Jew and the infinite knowledge and history of the wandering/people is shut behind them, as if their parents shut a door when they sailed the gulf of the Atlantic. And most of the boys don't know how to make love, and they marry the wrong girl because she was the first one or the second to be easy, like Ferdinand and his used discussed bride, Eva Bell does not know why no one will marry her, and Otto Ort does not know why he can't get a job as a teacher of philosophy. Rudyard does not know how he has wasted his gift because of spiritual pride, and Bertram does not know the character of his character, that he is a weakling who wants a father. And Bertram does not know that he is going to marry that fat and vulgar girl".

"He is not", said Wilhelmina, because of her fondness for Bertram, "How do you know all this about the ignorance of the boys and girls?"

"What a foolish question", said Richmond, "it is easy to see in the growing shadow and the dark that one is in the dark".

301.

Wilhelmina said nothing.

"Rose did not know", Richmond continued, "That she was
going to be dead this year when she first fell in love--"

"I wonder what Professor Beauregard thinks about at night",
Said Wilhelmina, "I wonder if he wakes up in the middle of the night--"

"He knew more than any of the boys and girls", said Richmond, obsessed with ignorance, "and that is his guilt is more. He knew how to make love and he knew that it was wrong to let Rebecca think that he was going to marry her--"

"It was her fault, and not his", said Wilhelmina, "she took her own life and she knew what she was doing and she went after him and when he tried to stop seeing him, she waited for him".

"But he is a good example of what it is to be educated and prepared, because he was French, and he knew, in a certain way, how to live and what to do, how to eat, how to drink, how to make love, how to think of himself as a Frenchman and as a human being: this is what we don't know, nor any of the boys and girls, although some know something, a fragment--"

"But it did no good, none of his knowledge helped him at the right time, and now he had to think about Rebecca for the rest of his natural life, and perhaps after that. And if his knowledge did him no good, then what of the ignorance of the boys and the girls?" Wilhelmina said,

"At least he knew enough to be good or evil", said Richmond, moved by his study of Thomism, "but most of us do not have that knowledge which is the beginning of freedom. And look at me, I was made to feel sure that I would be rich, and that everything would be easy. My whole idea of Life was made by that, and with a crack, it turns out to be untres. Not a crack, but a slow stain in my consciousness for look how many years I refused to believe that everything was going to be good again"

Then he was silent and the couple looked at the stars,
small, and more and more, always giving the sense of moreness and of
being inexhaustible. Directly overhead the vague whiteness of the Milky
Way shone down.

"O who shall halt the stars in their courses", said
Richmond, "who shall understand their silence and their infinity?"

"You are an Old Testament character", said Wilhelmina,
amused by Richmond's elevated tone, "you would like to be a prophet
and cry out against the ignorance of the generations and the peoples".

"No", said Richmond, pleased and flattered, however,
to be mocked as a prophet, for this was an important thing, "no, I
would like to understand myself and my life, and hold it in my hand
like a book and open the book and read, This is good, this is evil,
this is true, this is beautiful, and then write on the pages, Yes,
and in Brooklyn on Ocean Parkway on the 20th of December 1920--"

"You will do that", said Wilhelmina, "I know that
you will", for she really had a faith in Richmond equalled only by
her motiveless despair about herself.

"Maybe I will", said Richmond, "because I have moral
stamina, and I fail again and again, but then I come back and try
again and again. But my body befalls me all the time, I am always
getting worn out, and when I get started, the very excitement makes
me worn out too quickly".

"You will be stronger when you are 25", said Wilhelm-
ina, with perfect faith.

"But look how much I do not know", said Richmond,
"how I am awkward and shy because I did not have a family life with
many relatives, to teach the child by example, And perhaps this will
last, perhaps it is an inherited nervous trait? My grandmother was shy
until she was fifty years of age! Just think, shy until fifty years

303.

of age! What a long time to wait! how patient I must be and how
patient my friends! But I am patient, and I will be patient to wait
for you to marry me--"

"You are not patient enough for that, Richmond", said
Wilhelmina in a tone at once nervous and seeking to be kind, "it is
time to go home".

"Not yet", said Richmond, although it was after midnight,
for a little while longer --
"let me enjoy some more this rhetoric and speechifying--"

"My parents will think we have been necking--", said
Wilhelmina, withdrawing her hand from Richmond's clasp.

"I wish they were right", said Richmond, placing his
arm about Wilhelmina's shoulder, and then withdrawing it when he
felt the tensing and withdrawal in Wilhelmina.

"How strong I would be", he said, "if you were in love
with me--"

"But I am not", she replied, "and you must not get used
to the idea that I will marry you. I will not marry anyone."

"I will be angry when I see the children you have given
some other fellow who is not as worthy as I am", he said, with mockery.

"All of my children are dead", said Wilhelmina with
intense seriousness.

"Just look at your self", said Richmond, "your whole
body has prepared itself, it is beautiful, warm, and full of health.
I wonder what it is in the pit of the past which contradicts this
beautiful fact"

"Perhaps I ought to go to a psychoanalyst", said
Wilhelmina sadly.

Richmond did not like this idea, which she had
mentioned before, because he thought that Freud was wrong, and the
the libido was not the energy of being.

"All that such a doctor can do", said Richmond,

306.

"To you know, Wilhelmina, some people get marry and are happy?"

"But not you add not me", chanted Wilhelmina.

"O happy, happy folk", responded Richmond,

"What is that quotation?" asked Wilhelmina, forgetting every-
ing else.

"I don't know", said Richmond, "I'm happy happy folk", he
said again, and searched amid the sounds of his memory,

"More happy love! more happy, happy love!

Forever young and still to be enjoyed,

Forever panting, and forever young--', "

"O it is Keats", said Wilhelmina joyously.

"Will you marry me, Wilhelmina?" said Richmond hopefully.

"No", said Wilhelmina in a low tone, "Poor Richmond, why
don't you get a real girl?"

"Now let us go back to the apartment where you live with
your parents", said Richmond hopelessly, "and end this voluble evening,
in which we have been so full of complacency about our literary quo-
tations", he said self-consciously.

They strove up a great and curving empty avenue, abstract
and deserted after midnight, possessed by the insane white of enormous
incandescent globes of electric light, a whiteness cold-white and dominant
so much that the night, the handsome Hudson, the bridge with carystid poise
and all else were annihilated. The avenue was a highway as blank and
dead as chromium, and cars rushed on it, high-powered and with a soaring
sound, the strain and the climb of second gear. But now, after midnight,
they came only one at a time, and this sharpen the occasion and accent
of their ascent.

Richmond and "ilhelmina were empty also, exhausted by the
free liberation of emotion, like a summer storm.

At the doorway, Richmond said,

"Maybe I will get a new girl", ( he had said this often

307
before).

Wilhelmina touched his face lightly, with light affection.
She changed when he spoke of absenting himself from her infelicity, and
she showed her fondness.

in despair.

"You have spoilt me for all other girls", said Richmond,
"You are my only butter", said Wilhelmina.

Richmond turned away, touching Wilhelmina's hand and saying
nothing, but making his departure. He did this because it was dramatic
to him, and he often did this when, by shifts of emotions, he had secured
from Wilhelmina a little articulate fondness.

As September came near, and it was time to go to Stuyvesant
again, the Bank wrote to say that it was not possible at present to give
Richmond any more money. Richmond was left in dismay by this news, for
he had only one more year to go. Aunt Leah said again, playing the part
of the heroine,

"I will see to it that you go to school for your last year".

And she went to Cleveland to visit the officials of the
Bank, and when she said to them how foolish it seemed to stop a boy who
had only one year to go before he was graduated. One of the officials said
to her then that they were all in the same boat, that Roosevelt seemed
to be intent on giving the country back to the Indians, and that the boy
ought to go to work for a year. Perhaps then the suits which kept them
from a liquidation of the estate would be decided and Richmond might then
return to school; a year in the real world might do the boy a great deal
of good.

Aunt Leah returned from Cleveland with this message and
said once more what sacrifices she had made for her sister's children,
and how she had exhausted herself in the offices of lawyers, just for
Richmond's sake.

Richmond was enraged. Nothing seemed to him more ridiculous
than that, when money which belonged to him existed, it should be

the same floor as Hershey in theapa

played with him and talked with him for years, although Arnold was
two years younger, a great gulf of which Hershey had often reminded
himself. In a week, Arnold was dead of a streptococcus infection.

Hershey was taken by his mother to the funeral in a downtown chapel,
and he looked with his old fear at the coffin where his crony lay.

The first night after the funeral Hershey dreamed all night that Arnold was living, he was not dead. His mother permitted him to keep on the hallway light all night. But after that, the obsession with death and the fear of his own death did not last. The previous fall it had lasted for six weeks after the anonymous girl had been killed by a passing car.

Hershey was ashamed to meet the boy's mother on the stair
or in the hallway because he thought she must be thinking when she saw
him that her son was dead while another boy lived.

During this time there was talk about going to the new camp where Uncle Robert and Uncle Noses were going, angry with the camp owners for paying them less than they were promised. But Jack Green had sent the boy's expenses to the old camp in May when the camp owners had written him, as if with the boys' consent. When the boys decided to change and go with Uncle Robert and Uncle Noses, the camp owners refused to give back the money and Jack Green refused to pay again. Eva Green became very angry and the boys did not go to camp at all and the camp owners were sued by Jack Green.

Until the last day in June, Hershey expected his father with his customary guilty generosity to forget about the money paid the old camp and give him money for the new camp. But he did not. He was disappointed most of all because he wanted to discuss Spengler with his two intellectual counsellors, and show them what an immense advance he had made as an intellectual.

100.

In July when he had given up hope of going to camp, he went to Rockaway where his aunt and uncle-in-law were living. He talked to Arthur a good deal with his uncle Arthur, especially about baseball. Arthur began to tell him jokes about sex, jokes which were in that year's "Ziegfield Follies", and Hershey was very embarrassed for this was the first time an adult had ever spoken of such matters with him.

He pretended at first not to understand the jokes and Arthur asked him if he did not know how children were born. There seemed no reason to pretend innocence any longer. After that, he and Arthur had long conversations about sex, even though Arthur was almost thirty and Hershey was not yet fourteen. Standing with Arthur and a friend of by a newstand, his one day Hershey listened to them talk about the Giants' chances that year. Nothing interested Hershey more than that, not even himself, not even himself in relationship to Spengler. A girl whom Arthur knew passed by and said hello to Arthur and his friend. Arthur knew her family too and she was a respectable girl in every way. Consequently Hershey was amazed when Arthur said to his friend, How would you like to pluck her? He looked at everyone after that as if she might hide depths of sex no matter how respectable she looked. He took his uncle's idle imaginative query as a declaration that the girl was really ready to receive anyone who wanted her and the occasion became a kind of moonlight, shining upon many women everywhere.

Hershey spent long hours on the boardwalk during the weeks at his aunt's house. He sat upon a bench and looked at the bathers and the Atlantic ocean, and his thoughts came back always to Spengler's paradigm of History, from which he wanted to escape. Hershey had dreamed recurrently of falling in the street among passing cars, unable to move because his limbs were paralyzed. Sometimes the car of History seemed to be coming down on him just as in that dream. He tried to do all the things which would make him a great culture-person.

Theya rose, and walked to Fifth Avenue, to New York
grand, forthere was on the famous avenue not only the glitter of the
new spring light, but the quick taxis, the great stores and shops,
their show windows cool-looking and expensive-looking, having the
cool look, the cream and slim reserve of the very expensive. Above
them, too enormous to take in, the new pyramids, which yielded only
a sense of more and much more, more than the mind could seize, or
experience exhaust; about them, the hurrying paasersby, full of a
nervousness and rush which made them seem to be about to commit
important acts.

He was exhausted too when Wilhelmina wished to paused
and lookat the/window displays, for only an even pace was pleasnt
and he never looked at the windows, except at the mannequins, who
interested because of their abstract quality, like dolls and other
artificial versions of the human being.

But then as they walked forward, Richmond looked back
and saw tht the horse had mounted the sidewalk and was following
Wilhelmina.

260.

"What is the matter with you? Don't you know you are
not suppose to do such things?"

But the policeman came from a doorway and took the
horse and drove him back into the gutter.

But five minutes after that, Wilhelmina said, "If I
don't graduate this time, I am going to become a whores!"

261.

During the following week, she studied her notebook and
bit her pencil and made drawings, unable to get further than the first
few pages of her two essays, and more and more hepeless.

Richmond was in the midst of his own effort to make
up for all that he had not done the whole ruck and distracted year.
Then the day before the papers were due, she came to him ad said in
a humility of humiliation that she wished he would write the papers
for her, although she knew that this was wrong.

Richmond arose, pleased as ever at the chance to be
really good and make an effort for another human being. He summoned
Basil, and he went with Wilhelmina to Basil's house. It was a day of
wet heat and grey sky. Richmond had just finished his last examination
and begun to relax and feel the libation of the summer, nothing more
that must be done on time.

At Basil's house, he typed with rapid improvisation
Wilhelmina's two essays all evening long, reading passages to
Basil and Wilhelmina. Basil disapproved in elegant phrases of the
whole procedure.

Richmond was full of excitement and enervation, after
the strain of the week of examinations, studying under pressure,
forced and without true interest. He felt the lightness of being
close to exhaustion and the hot heavy New York early summer evening
also made him more worn. But the sentences came fluently, because
he had been writing so much all week on his examination books, and

262.

what he said did not matter very much. Basil and Richmond marvelled
at his speed, and he was pleased, and Wilhelmina expressed her feeling
of guilt that he should have to do this for her, after his own task
was finished. Exalted by a righteousness, Richmond thrust aside her
idle protestation, and then when he took her home at midnight, she
held her had for the first time as if he really were fond of him,
and when Richmond rode the subway the long rocking hour home to Flat-
bush, he thought of how this might mean how little she really cared for
him, for she had known him for a long time now, and this was the first
genuine affection she had ever expressed.

In July when he had given up hope of going to camp, he and grandmother went to Rockaway where his aunt and uncle-in-law were living. He talked with Arthur a good deal with his uncle Arthur, especially about baseball. Arthur began to tell him jokes about sex, jokes which were in that year's "Ziegfield Follies", and Hershey was very embarrassed for this was the first time an adult had ever spoken of such matters with him.

He pretended at first not to understand the jokes and Arthur asked him if he did not know how children were born. There seemed no reason to pretend. He did not know how children were born. After that, he and Arthur had long conversations about sex, even though Arthur was almost thirty and Hershey was not yet fourteen. Standing with Arthur and a friend of his one day, Hershey listened to them talk about the Giants' chances that year. Nothing interested Hershey more than that, not even himself, not even himself in relationship to Spengler. A girl whom Arthur knew passed by and said hello to Arthur and his friend. Arthur knew her family too, and she was a respectable girl in every way. Consequently Hershey was amazed when Arthur said to his friend, "How would you like to pluck her? He looked at everyone after that as if she might hide depths of sex no matter how respectable she looked. He took his uncle's idle imaginative query as a declaration that the girl was really ready to receive anyone who wanted her and the occasion became a kind of moonlight, shining upon many women everywhere."

Hershey spent long hours on the boardwalk during the weeks at his aunt's house. He sat upon a bench and looked at the bathers and the Atlantic ocean, and his thoughts came back always to Spengler's paradigms of History, from which he wanted to escape. Hershey had dreamed recurrently of falling in the street among passing cars, unable to move because his limbs were paralyzed. Sometimes the car of History seemed to be coming down on him just as in that dream. He tried to do all the things which would make him a great culture-man.