["Dear Pearson:", "I am writing no autobiography, but a history of various encounters through many years with many people and I am stale-mated, not knowing what I can write, get by with, dare, or could ever be printed. The times are off, or I am, and this place, --- no one who would believe that people I write about are anything but products of a distorted imagination. For instance, you idea of a 3/4 length portrait of Mary Butts. How could one? What I write below I mainly experienced, the rest came through HD, Bryher, a la Mae Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson, etc., in their tales of Mary Butts -- ah yes, Mary Buttocks-- (As Hemingway said.)", "Ezra Pound first told me of her and of a possible apartment she might be leaving which I might want to rent, on the Rue Tombe Issoire. I went there to be met at the door by a suspicious looking and very unkempt man. (Cecil Maitland). In the center of the flooE was a red-ink EKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKX

who understands the darkness which is descending upon us', and the like.
She was getting money wherever or however she could then, and once
borrowed some from Doc Mahoney, (The Doc of Djuna's 'Nightwood'. He,
always hard up, but also always ready to help the gals in their MISES AH
miscarriages, abortions, changes of life, and whatever, was still hard
up. One day, in front of Kitty Cannell, he was asking Many to pay
him back a little of what she had borrowed so that he could eat or buy
himself an Arab at his pissor stand near the cemetary. 'My Precious,
I have nothing,' she crooned. Just then a messenger boy arrived
with a package, a gown from Poiret's, and Mary, forgetful, took her
pocketbook and paid out 500 frans for the gown, and 4 Powy, pang,
Zamb, Doc socked her cold on the jaw and she was out for three minutes.
As Mary Reynolds said she was utterly false. Her vicieux qualities
the other gals didn't mind, but her pretense of great love (My darling,
you are one of the true, the really noble. Lend me 1000 francs) did
rile the other ladies. "Forgive them for they know what what they do,
the children of the blessed lamb' she crooned at Kitty Cannel while
trying to solace her since she was at the moment without lover. -----
The last I heard of Mary was, I believe from HD and in a letter
from her which either you or Yale now have. Seems, she having married
a so boy who also took dope and later suicided, was DIVIDING herself
between dope sessions and and prayer at the altar of the English high
church. Once she cashed a post-dated check throigh me, declaming about
her pure sweet baby girl who wanted 'just pure clear sunshine and good
butter, my precious. What will become of us all, wondering in the
dark wastelands as all of our generation.) Two weeks later I ran
unto her in Villefranche. She was then with Virgil T., but left him
for the afternoon to go to a tea with a particularly slimy speciman
of male whore, and she had to take a taxi to Cannes, at about $20.,
Never did I hear of her ever paying back any debt or loan.

How much all of this V.T knew while he was with her or later I
don't know. Bryher knew, but she and VT exchanged letters after Mary's
death and got some of her stories published, but it was difficult. Mary's
mother tried to prevent all publication, she being a terrible old dame,
I gather, as Mary's brother 'Tony' was a dismal mess. But Mary had
money. NOW I ASK YOU how far could I get with a 3/4 length
picture of Mary from what I experienced or knew of her. She seemed
always to hover on the brink of being of the type who let a Aleister
crowley make the ritual of life, and that one was a foul and disgusting
beast, loathsome as a physical presence, and I never would or will
believe there was talent or intellect in him, but -- he had his devote

3

Once in a small 2nd hand English bookstore in Barcelona I picked
up a notebook of Hawthorne and at the time thought in his notes he
had conceived the 'Stream of Conscious' type of writing, and later,
remembering, believe he also beat Joyce to any idea of using the Vico
approach to life and events. Where that small size edition of Hawthorne's
notebook ever got to I dunno, unless maybe Tommie Earp swiped it, or I
gave it to him. Of course you know the notebook but I wonder if any
copies might be about there that I could get to glance at, or buy, if
not too expensive.

Yea, the Margarate Anderson has its points. You ought to talk
to Djuna Barnes if she would come through to you about how phoney she
knows Jh and Margarate to be, but still with their points, and Djuna
herself apt to put on a bit of side. However Jh and Margaret have
always sought some kind of religion and it was always so even when they
were all 'What is art?'"

There wasn't any particular mixup with Perdita. Schafnner just
sounded afraid of me, and I later thought probably she had been against
my various depictions in "Being Geniuses Together". Bryher would make
her so. HD never said anything.

"Oh, Mary B and Maitland, and most of her friends, boy or
gal, went in at times very strongly for absinthe or pernod, too. I
don't know how one could do a portrait of her without showing her on
her dope, absinthe and black magic routines, because they made up
a great portion of her existence as I observed it. There is so much
to write about but it looks as if one has to wait till after death and
many deaths before daring to publish. I dunno. I'm struggling away
but it's a job.

And Do you or has Yale a copy of the Milan, Italy, published
translation of Calvacanti, by Pound, a large red covered (Paper) book.
He gave me a copy but I lent it to Ninon Cauvet while I was staying at
the Hotel des Étoiles In London and never got it back, and it was
translation at its finest, probably better than the original, but Ezra
never answers when I ask him if it might be possible to get a copy through
someone in Italy, and maybe, as his errors in Italy and his confinement
as made Italy something he doesn't want to think about. But your note
on him suggests that he isn't having a bad life.

Here's some extracts from 'The Politics of Existence', or what
ever I may later call it -- if I get it done -- drafts and passages
on people. Don't know if I can ever find a way of 'binding it together'

4

and as an elder and domindering sister says, it may be futile writing
about futile empty people -- but they WERE -- I dunnox. Just at the
moment I am depressed and aimless. Do send these extracts back
though, and you may see, as in the case of Mary Butts, how it's a problem
to know what one can say about events and people. They are as they
are as they are and were as they were as they were and they wasn't
roses. But maybe I don't go deeply enough in them to captraure their
'souls' or their 'spiritual sides'. Certainly as regards HD I have
put down a bawdier and franker outside, realler, than she protests her-
self forever Greek and pained with beauty to be in some of her more
rhappsodic moments of exalation. The fact that she could stand for,
and seemed also to attract if not to seek, some christ awful messy
people, will persist in my mind. Brigit Patmore, Akdington, Grey,
John Cournos, --- and a few whose names mean nothing but who were
'mangey' just the same. I wonder from here if that was the times,
or if so many people are that way, or what. But of course I know.
London and Paris both had many better types, for me, and Louise Morgan
(Theiss) (Did you ever meet her and Otto), could throw parties weekly
and produce quantities of people not on the fringe of mouldiness or
grime. Just as I try now to work on a passage of the early London
years I find it hard to understand how or why I knew or permitted myself
to know such abject specimens and atmosphere as the two galsx presented
me as London and English.

Say so and I'll send you the letters and you judge what they are
worth. I know they cover an era very well, and don't think they should
go to Yale, yet. They are very personal, newsy, and George Antheil's
pseudo-naive effusions embarassing and revealing. Katherine Anne
Porters, intelligent and with wit and observation. But say so and I'll
send them on and you decide what they're worth. I've taken from them
any notes I want. Unfortunately at times I have thrown away masses of
letters, just bored with traveling them about and their weight. A great
number from Wallace Stevens, whom, having met, I found, strangely, too
Wyndham Lewisy -- not knowing it, but same cagey cautions -- and his
letters were charming. Can't remember when I chucked them, when I
moved out of our London apartment, I guess. Of course masses of letters
from Williams and Ezra went the same way, some of the best of Ezra's
when he was still writing about writing and other writingx and before
he decided I had an ironic mind and was a satirist and didn't need

5

his educational ideas. I did, and used them as I could, but also was
glad to have him take me just as person to person. But I don't want
to pack the letters any longer and certainly, when Spring arrives,
will move elsewhere, Eastwards or to Europe. Feel too cut off, too
little activity, intellectual or social, about me. This town is a spa
where the ancient decrepit and arthritic hold forth if they are just
not being -- being commonplace. Oh, the Ken Sato letters are
something. Everything that the Chinese ideograph, greek swiftness of
image and evocation -- Japanese wash drawings and their quick gentle
communication -- are in them.

Berenice Abbott suggests doing a series of photographs on some
aspect of American life or its changes. She is trying to think of a
slant, and thinks maybe I can help, and write titles to the photos.
Her collection of the Atget photographs comprise a magnificent
document, but as yet I haven't thought of the slant. Berenice, incident-
ally, along with Djuna, would as soon Kill WCW for what he says in his
autob., since she hardly knew him and he had no knowing of her to
be able to assume what he says of her in the book. She's vagueish
seeming, but one of the keenest, actually. If we were both younger I'd
suggest that she and I just strike out criss cross and hither and
thiter across continent photographing types, but Jesus, now, I want
comfort, and travelling so costs a hell of a lot of money. Wonder what
might be photographical about Yale, as of the past and now the present,
or is it Eli, Eli why hast thou forsaken me. (She did, namely Ilona,
the only New Haven female that ever came into my ken. And I fear she
forsook herself too into a damn fool marriage.)

Let's hear what opinions you have of the approach to a book
indicated in the enclosed. Curious to see Hawthorne's letters because
I think he had a mind and interests more interesting than any of his
'literature'. But of that New England 'conscience' I am incapable of
understanding as Marsden Hartley told me years ago.

Best always,

Bob McAlmon

PO Box 454
Desert Hot Springs,
California.

PLEASE RETURN THESE:

You can see by this mass of extracts -- from about twenty
one million words -- I'm in a hell of a state trying to put together
a book, as composition, or whole intent. Through this lot Mary Butts
HD Bryke r Wydham Lewis Tommy Earpe and a few others play. Peggy
Guggenheim, Laurem e Vail -- and they constitute only a few of the
hundreds of characters in the final book as I plan or TRY to plan
it. Right now all I can feel or hope is that they give a sense of
life, living, being. Naturally I have to cut out masses of it, as
I knew as I jotted it down years ago. But send it back or keep it
anyway available if I should want it. Some of the stuff I never would
remember or think of as using these days so faraway and long ago were
the events that my cowriding or gaucho days on the pampas of Europe
have gone into the grey rather than the purple or lavender.

236

Mary Butts

14

The said that Miss Todd had given instructions for
Neil to go to her room when he arrived. There he found her sitting
in her dressing gown upon her bed. Her mop of serise hair fell
in loose disarray about her head, exxaggerating the red-haired
whiteness of her flesh, as did her green dressing gown. She
lifted her hand tiredly to greet him, sighing enchantingly?

"Neil, my lamb, let me kiss you." She splashed a kiss upon his cheek, her pale face lifted as in a trance. Vivid hair fell away from her high white brow. If Amy was not a beauty she bore herself as one, sacredly. The lifted, mystically, ecstatic, pose of her head indicated other-worldly psychic and spiritual understanding, surely. Her pale blue eyes penetrated beyond the yonderness of mere human intuitiveness and insight. A bit buxom as to body Amy nevertheless conducted herself as an ethereal being. "I was too, too, you understand, to dress, until you had come and we had just one tiny drop to drink, together." Amy let a bare foot extend alluringly over the edge of the bed. Neil was uncomfortable, as he had come to take Amy dancing. In the security of bars or cabarets he felt enough at ease with her and her posturings; but in her bedroom no such feeling of safety abided within him. He was glad to take the telephone and order some whiskeys sent theft.

"Rollé Knight did consent to join us tonight," he informed.
"Poor fellow. He's discovering that friend wife isn't the shy
little mouse he thought. She has his income tied up on him, and
begins to insist that he take her with him on his jaunts

11

237

out of dear old London,

"Darling Rollo. Suck a lamb. Just a lambkins," Amy coozed praised. "He and I have such marvellous tiddles together. I haven't seen him for, off time and time. Frank didn't come home one/morning and I suspected he'd run unto Rollo. I simply asked the concierge the number of Mr. Knight's room in the morning and went in; and there were the two darlings, blind as owls. The silly dears. And Rollo piped forth, "Amy dear, just a little drink, you know." The room was such a sight. Socks, pajamas, shirts, bottles, and cocktail glasses about. They had had such a tiddle, and the dears didn't think they'd been more than half an hour drinking, though of course they'd been solving -- just things -- since eight o'clock the night before. The lambkins." Amy, having leaned tenderly upon Neil's shoulder without response, decided to slip into her evening gown. She loitered before her mirror to reveal herself to her reflection and Neil in negligee.

"Rollo's too hard up for many drinking bouts now, I guess," Neil volunteered,

"Not a bit," Amy chided. "He is, I do believe, becoming a romantic miser. In Paris I looked into his closet and he was saying croissants. Every morning he ordered coffee and croissants, and had stored some forty of them away. "One might need them some day, Amy darling," he squeaked to me. The lambkin."

"Yes, I remember his saying to me that there are definite types who become misers. Was he planning to identify himself with the type; maybe he's given up the idea of being a literary man then."

238

"It is so good to see you in Florence," Amy exolaimed.
"I do need you. I am in a mess, and do need just you to help me.
A debt of honour I must pay. I'll give you a post-dated check. I
always know you are helpful. You're one of the chaps, a real
gentleman, one of us in the greatest way. Mother and brother are
being more than ever beastly. I can't tell you what I've been
through lately, and my darling baby needs a little sweet poor
good clean sunshine, and good sweet wholesome food. Oh, what
will become of us all. You Neil, you young beautiful American
God, you with your health and youth and beauty, you don't realize
the depths of Europe. There is only England, and what they have
put us through. There's Frank, and poor Hubert, a dear too if
he won't help me support our baby, but what the war years did to
us all."

"Yes, I'm glad to be out of London. It heavier and grimmer
with soggy depression there than anywhere else, I gather. But
Hubert did the conscientious objector's camp, didn't he, and Frank
was out of England during the war, I thought," Neil said, wanting
Amy to hurry on with her dressing, wishing to avoid if possible
promising her a loan, and bothered by her gush of talk. Recalling
Frank, her lover, and his palsied hand and body gained through
years of being an old soak, Neil couldn't feel deeply touched over
that tragedy. And Amy's deserted husband looked anaemic and
beaten by birth and cowed Jewish family background.

"Derling, yes," Amy breathed. "Frank's absinthe-shocked,
poor dear. Just too many complexes; his beastly parents and
schooldays, poor lamb. And Hubert, what will become of us all.
Do we want to go on? In London Frank and I don't see many of

239

our kind, the artists, the beauty-makers. We know some darling
simple souls. Professional men, lawyers, doctors, and that sort.
They don't talk our talk, but they don't pretend to, and they do
so like to be informed, the poor pets." Neil wanted to laugh,
wondering in what way the lawyers and doctors were known
to Amy and Frank, both of whom were well known button-holers and
cadgers of the Café Royale. Surely the usual respectable
middle-class Englishman would run in terror from Amy's onslaughts.
She now was dressed and ready to start towards Ranoli's. Neil
felt relieved; Amy as a drinking companion he found an excellent
cariature of almost any class of English being at the best and
worst, but Amy intimately made him uncomfortable.

Rollo Knight was at the bar when they came to Ranoli's.
He stood droopingly stiff-armed and sheepish looking, but content-
gent shone on his glistening reddish oval face out of which peered
bead-brown eyes. "Se sorry, I didn't see you when you came in,"
Rollo quavered a needless apology when he joined them at the table.
"You will forgive me, I wasn't late really, for just this once,
my dear." A resigned sigh of bliss came from him, as though he
could now be tranquil after much torment,

"Rollo, my lamb," Amy gushed, "I am glad to see you. What
a time Frank and I did have in Paris. Such a tiddle, and ooh, so
many nice people. Only you, lambkins, were lacking. I couldn't
drag Frank away. He will join me when he gets over his next
tiddle. You are one of us, Rollo, one of the real chaps."

240

"So fortunate we found each other in Florence, Amy my dear," Rollo piped. "I had no idea Neil was here."

"Yes, the lamb," Amy chortled out of his glistening full lips. "He's getting serious, the poor darling; not at all woofy and gaga as he was in Paris. He's almost upstage."

"Rot," Neil grunted. "Florence doesn't furnish the background for balminess that's fun, and I'm working."

"Don't quarrel, you know," Rollo plead, a worried deerlike expression in his eyes.

"You darlings," Amy rhubarbized, "such a tiddle we will have tonight. You are real chaps. I can tell you what I have been through, Rollo, pet, what ideas we did have about the good of society, and organizing among ourselves to fight for the good and the sweet and the pure. What will become of us. There's poor sweet darling Frank, in Paris, waiting for me to send him fare to join me."

Neil, seeing some girl he knew, went across to ask her to dance. When he returned Rollo had an obstinate but driven look upon his face. It was not from him that Amy would manage to borrow ten pounds, and she recognized that and let the matter drop, cleverly returning to her balmy-incoherent self, vague and sweetly without purpose. "Ah Greece, Greece, my beautiful," she breathed after a silence. A rapt look was upon her pale uplifted face; her eyes were looking into the beyond. "I am in a garden and he is coming towards me. Yes, yes, I remember,"

"I know, Amy darling," Rollo quavered. Neil could hardly keep from letting out a roar of laughter, recalling the time he had visited Rollo unexpectedly to find Amy, Frank and

24L

Rollo conducting black magic rites before the body of a slaughtered rat. Properly they should have used a slaughtered goat, but Frank, absinthe soaked, Rollo nonchalant, and Amy questing for the real truth, were ready to let the rat suffice. Three English boys passed the table and stopped to say greetings to Amy; they were obvious Nancy boys of the type who foregather ecstatically at the Russian Ballet; and as they chatted, emphasizing syllables and words, they gave to English the weirdly foreign pronunciations that County English, and many Oxfordians only can give. No word to them apparently had a meaning clearly its own unless given a palpitating accent.

"They are of us," Amy sighed as the boys went to the bar, one of them kissing her hand. "They understand the impulse of evil that is loose in the world. It started in Russia, but it is throughout all Eastern Europe now. They will come here to me when I send for them. I am gradually getting together all those who are one of us, in spirit."

"Amy darling, if you don't mind," Rollo quavered with some ire in his falsetto monotone, "the Russian boy is a filthy little whores. I don't see what you gyarle see in him."

"But if you had seen him in Cornwall. As he ran up the hill one time I saw beauty ascending. Greece came back to me. And he understands. You Rollo, are one of us. Neil almost understand, but he, healthy young American pagan, what does he know of what we are made to suffer through. If I were stronger and brawr I would try to make him understand. And poor darling Penny has changed since last year, when he was with Frank. He would pay his bills if he had money, poor dear. In Brittany

242

the miracle happened. Coming out of a cathedral one day he fell
into a fit. I was there; I saw all evil depart from him. And
his beastly hotel woman, even then, told him he must leave her
hotel. She didn't like his habits. She recognized the strength
and beauty that had come into him. He is now one of the strongest
of us who are combatting the evil coming down upon this generation.
It is overtaking all who do not understand. It will undermine our
glorious civilization. I wish Neil would understand. If those
of us who have insight into the beauty of life do not pull together
it will engulf us." Amy was going strong with her holy-luminous
message. Plainly she was in something of a temper at Rollo who
hadn't responded to her request for a loan. She leaned nearer to
Neil who wanted to laugh, but listened, confused for Amy that she
should think that her line of bunk got across. "Ah Penny," she
reached out a tender clutching hand, "Ah, he has beauty. He was
a fawn as he ran up the hill in Cornwall. The wind blew through
his hair; it was scented by his beauty, a wind through wild
lovely grass, grass blowing. He has a message Neil, but Oh,
you Americans, you healthy young pagans, you do not sense the
depths. I would have you prepared to join me, armed, when the
moment comes, and I know it is time to strike, to combat the dark
forces. Rollo is one of us, aren't you, precious. Kiss me."
Amy pressed a damp kiss on Rollo's brow. Rollo looked painfully
serious, almost tormented.

"Amy dear," he squeaked, "Neil will call it superstition,
He will laugh at magic. It may not be able to get at him. He is
primitive; not effect like us. He laughs and ridicules and doesn't
care. He doesn't understand what a place like Cornwall can do to
me. I am pursued. And I'm so blood tired of suffering. We

243

go on though, Amy. But we must have another drink."

"Ooh, but I must go," Amy breathed, for the world was no longer about her. "Neil, darling, take me home." She leaned against him. What will become of us all, and poor Frank? You will see me through? Only a tiny thousand lira, and I will send you my check, later, lamkins."

Neil, cursing himself for a damned fool, slipped Amy the money; he did not however respond to her caress. Her arm rested across his shoulder as she leaned her head against his neck and stroked his arm. "Forgive them father, for they know not what they do," she sighed. Neil was uncomfortable and sure that he knew damn well he did, and cursed human weakness inability to avoid giving loans to people he didn't like, except for comedy. Amy, sensing his lack of delicate understanding, and having her money, desisted her caresses. "Yes, I must go," she sighed now, in exquisite English-lady tones. Her manner became tiredly aristocratic. "Home. No, my dears. No, lamkins, finish your tiddle. I shall get to my hotel. It is but a two minute walk. I wish to think, alone. The impulse of evil, it is strong. It vibrates ink the atmosphere tonight." She tottered slightly before wafting across the room. At the door she turned to smile refulgently back at Neil and Hollo. Then with a resigned but dramatic gesture of remuneration she tossed a kiss from her full blown glistening lips, and murmured, reincaratedly comprehensive, "Lambkins, if I could save you." With this she tossed back her flaming hair, stroking those tresses with a pale hand. Her exit was comparable to that of any great actress.

"Hell, Amy's smoking opium again, isn't she. She'll

244

probably wire Frank to get her some more in Paris," Neil
said,

"Mad, Neil," Hello quavered. "Mad, just mad, like so many of
us."

"Madder possibly; or perhaps not so mad. She plans her
campaigns anyway. She and Donald Howard ought to form an
organization for borrowing money from people who begin having no
intention lending it to them. Hell, she's taken a small fortune
off various people in Paris in the last two months."

"Frank, you know, Neil. Frank, and Amy's one of the lasses
who likes taking care of her man."

63

6

Roscoe Wallace was late arriving for his appointment, but when he came into the Cafe Monaco he said at once, looking about distrustfully, "We had better not stay here. Someone I don't want to see might come on."

Neil was thwardedly amused at Wallace's usual pursued feeling, but realized that with a drink in him Wallace would become more casual. "All right, we'll slip to the pub around the corner for a drink."

There Wallace soon began to quiz Neil, with a 'come now' older man manner, ingratiatingly seeking confidences. Neil felt prone to tantalize him a little. "You looked up my friend in Garsington, I hear. What did she have to say about me?" Wallace was elaborately casual.

"She likes you, I judge. There were a number of people about."

"Come now, she said something."

Neil chuckled inwardly at Wallace's implication that deeply secretive things had been told him. "She was femininely understanding, and said she believed you were afraid of the real tenderness in your nature. That indicates she likes you."

"Come now, she said more than that." Wallace's small mouth grinned, revealing brownish, small teeth. Neil

64

was interested to observe that if one typed people according to species that Wallace must surely fall into the rodent class, with his inquisitiveness and his distrusts; his guile was rodent-obvious too.

"She also said that you were needlessly frightened of many people who were friendly towards you, and she wondered what hurt you experienced in the past to make you so. She also agreed that you are much less of a logical and ruthless realist than you wish to be. I had said that phantasy was your line, even if you did attempt to mechanize your phantasies in paint."

"Come, come, you're pulling my leg." Wallace's eyes glittered. He was sure that ultimately he would draw forth some choice bit of talk carried back.

"I did most of the talking, because some idiot there talked of abstract painting in England, and I retorted that England had no painture who wasn't illustrative or literary."

Wallace chuckled. "What did she say?"

"She didn't stick to the theme. She said you needed friendship as nobody she knew of, but that for some reason you always turned finally on people with abuse. She asked if I was being loyal to you after attack, or hadn't you attacked me yet."

"Come, come, nothing will come between us. I haven't seen that bitch since I've known you. I'm anxious that this friendship we've struck up should continue," Wallace said, giving Neil's arm a fumbling pat.

"She didn't impress me anyway, and she did neigh and blow bubbles as she spoke. I'm not too keen on some of

65

your English eccentrics and celebrities. They seem to have
much less importance than they're supposed to have."

"Didn't she say anything about --- you know --- that
cockney, Harris."

"Oh yes, she asked how you tolerated my knowing him,
and I assured her that I didn't consult you or anybody else
about who I know, or how. You quarrel with Harris is between
yourselves. I don't mind his cockneyism, and I think he's
aniable. He doesn't try to use or misuse me so far as I
know, and if I can be used without detriment to myself,
why not? We all need each other's help."

Wallace, sensing that he was antagonizing Neil, said
gently, "You and I are friends. Nothing will come between
us. I knew that bitch would make trouble and try to set
you against me. Of course you don't realize that Harris
wants to get at --- er --- your rich relatives, through you.
He's a wiley politician. As I understand that since I've
given him up, he's bowing and scraping to the Bloomsburyites.
Well, they need new blood. They're a precious crew."

"Poor Harris is out of luck if he thinks I could persuade
Sir Charles to buy his sort of painting. The old boy likes
broady young ladies, of pretty sunlight and twilight
meadows and verdant groves. He's also prejudiced for
French painting, not modern, but Salon and calendar adver-
tisement in quality."

Wallace soon surprised Neil by suggesting that they go
to the Maison d'or, which place he generally abhorred. He
discovered that Adolph had actually bought a sketch of
Wallace's, or rather had taken it in payment of a bill.

66

"The trouble with our times," Wallace talked en route in a taxi, "is that the people with money aren't educated up to what to appreciate in art. Now you, with your connections, are in a position to influence your -- relatives. Your -- father-in-law that is -- might like his portrait done. Not that it would interest me to do, but still, not that I respect capitalist, a man who has made so much money as he will have more force or character in his face, be more interesting to do than, let us say, a society debutante."

"I don't think he'll educate, Wallace. It's too late. And he has tricky little habits. The other day he wished to give me a gift, of money, and his check was for seven pounds and ten shilling. Why it wasn't for five pounds, or ten pounds, if he couldn't make it fifty or a hundred, I don't gather. But he figured that I was in favour to just the extent of seven pounds ten shillings. I'm not much good at coping with that kind of psychology."

"Work on him quietly: that is, ha ha," Wallace cut short between his tight small lips. "That's it. Quietly. You might present him to some of your artist friends."

Neil was silent, helpless before Wallace's naive faith that self-made capitalists are so easily swayed and so ready to believe in the importance of art that it is not utilitarian or sentimental. Seated in the Maison d'Or Wallace talked in subdued tones. Nobody sat near them, and a huge crook of flowers dulled and dampened the atmosphere. The secretive, going-to-a-mans, quality of London's gay night life found its fullest expression here.

67

Though they talked of nothing that anybody might not hear
Wallace touched Neil's arm and whispered, "Quiet. They'll
hear what you're saying," as he poked over his shoulder
with quiet significance.

"That Hilda Gay over in the corner, isn't it?"
Neil asked.

"Yes, she has one of her guardsmen with her. By now
she's received a poke in her well-used fanfario by most men
of her set, so she's taking to the army."

"She's rather decorative though. She might as well
travel as fast as men do anyway, so long as she has money
to take care of herself. If she finds the experimenting
amusing."

"She hasn't spotted you yet? She's quick-eyed."

"I met her with Mavis Dearborn, but she didn't indicate
much interest except to suggest that we might see each other
about somewhere again. I judge she keeps tab on people so
as to always have available companions when any of the old
guard fail her."

Rollo Knight entered, and seeing Neil, stood, awkwardly
shy, his woodeny arms dangling. Quite surely he'd come
from some pub and wanted companionship. He looked pinned to
the floor, or weighted down. Neil went over and asked him
to join them, having decided that Wallace would get too
intent upon his educating Sir Charles up to what to patronize
in art.

"Really, Neil," Rollo squeaked his falsetto quaver and
drawl, "I rather fancy Wallace doesn't approve of me."

"I do though, Rollo, or at least I don't disapprove.

68

Wallace will be a merrier companion if there are more of us,
and drinking. You don't care what he thinks do you?"

Rollo came slowly, his beady brown eyes peering out of
an alcoholically rosy face, that seemed to beam with a possi-
ble mirth. At Wallace's suggestion the three went to the
small dining room upstairs where they could be more detached
in the conversation and drinking. There the waiter informed
them that Mavis Dearborn had come in downstairs.

"Mees Dearborn is alone. She asked if anybody she
knew was here. Mees Gay is engaged."

"Poor Mavis," Rollo quavered. "She is so hating
London. She wants company."

"Tell her to come up," Neil told the waiter.

"Ah--er," Wallace protested, "We three were just
beginning to have a good discussion. I don't know Miss
Dearborn. I'm sure she's charming, but ---"

"You'll like her, Wallace. She doesn't bite and I
want people around," Neil answered, too well aware of
Wallace's fear of people. Also Neil had suddenly
decided he had an aversion to the London manner of drinking
grimly on through in unsociable groups that all appear to
eye the other with disdain.

Mavis came into the room squinting through her nearsighted eyes. Her tall, thin, body, appeared too heavy for her brittle thin legs and she swayed fragilely as she walked. "Do give me some champagne," she wailed, a bewildered child expression on her face. Her face was strawberry spotted, but that did not rob her of a whimsical child quality. "I'm so glad someone is here. It's been too

69

awful the last two days. Do you think we are going to have
a thunder storm? I woke up last night and thought I was
going to faint in bed. I was sure there was going to be a
thunderstorm. They terrify me, and my heart beats so weakly.
I was terrified. She looked around, her eyes bothered by
the light, and then smiled a wistful, understanding, and
sympathy-asking smile. Neil felt an impulse of protective
affection and wondered if Wallace caught the charm of her
mixed childlikeness and whimsical worldliness. She suggested
an eternal wonder that she should be alive.

"Mavis darling, I understand how you feel," Rollo
quavered, But I do assure you it isn't going to thunder."

"I should so have liked to dance tonight," Mavis
was plaintiff. "I so didn't want to go home early tonight.
I get terrified in my room, and the hotel people aren't nice.
There is nobody I can call if I feel ill. It was too
dreadful tonight at the Cafe Royale. Themost dreadful fat
man sat at the table next ours. I thought, well,
this really is too much, and left. Rollo, do tell Delix
to bring me some plover's eggs."

"Mavis darling, there aren't any. I wanted some myself,"
Rollo was bravely sympathetic.

Mavis stamped her foot and nearly wept. "I did so want
plover's eggs. I so much didn't want a dull night."

"You mustn't, really you mustn't stress the horrible
things we can feel. It becomes too much for a man to bear,"
Rollo wailed to imply how much he did put up with.

"Yes, I am sure if one were a scientist this would be an
interesting age to live in, but one isn't a scientist and so

20

it isn't amusing," Mavis struggled towards philosophy.

"War," Wallace said prophetically, jeering a brown-toothed grin at the complaints of Rollo and Mavis.

"We need war. A revolution directed by intelligent minds, that blasts all this economic-bourgeois gas out of existence. By that I mean the bourgeois-aristocratic idea. An internal war of revolution. It must happen every second or third generation."

"Hell, you're spouting old Sorel again. With Russia and Italy in hellish messes can you still go on hoping that mass action does anything for individuals," Neil was impatient,

"No, no, not that," Rollo's penetrant voice was violent and panicky.

"I should die. I should simply die." Mavis contributed.

"It could be arranged to have machines fight the war," Wallace explained with a wicked gleeful smile, tauntingly devilish. "We could have machines live our lives and lead contemplative existences ourselves. The West knows nothing of contemplation. There is the United States with her cult of the child mind."

"We'd have to have machines to castrate us and to remove our emotions too, Wallace. Your idea is old enough a one to be a bit childish, if maturity indicates the ability to originate. And where would our ego-imagined superiorities come in?" Neil defended.

"How funny," Mavis laughed strangely, striving to think.

"To laugh at. Yes, we could have machines to do our

71

laughing too," Wallace, with champagne was becoming
expansively jovial and scoffing.

"Bloody laughing machines, what, eh?" Neil micomed
an English Army accent. "Hell, must we talk ximuck the lowdown
on humanity and civilization? I'd go dancing with Mavis,
but there's no place in this bloody town, at this hour.
Wallace ought to write Fairy tale satires for the machine
age, but he's so damned vitriolic, but he'd give the
machines frustrated impulses of thwarted genius. That, once
again, would be just too much, don't you think. Some things
are, really, what I mean to say."

Fritz the waiter, bringing Mavis some caviar, and always
communicative, informed her that Oswald Tremaine was down-
stairs. Wallace became serious, sensing that Fritz wished
to have as many people as possible in this private room, as
it meant more champagne drinking and more free tables down-
stairs for the after-theatre gathering. Oswald, Wallace
explained, had used the portrait of him done by Wallace, but
neither Oswald nor the publisher had paid for the sketch.
"Does he think an artist lives on nothing."

"Poor Oswald," Mavis solaced, "he would pay if he
thought about it. Neil do go and tell him to join us."

"I hardly know him and he's fidgity with me."

"He is with everyone, but tell him I am here."

Oswald hid hid face behind his long hands when Neil
spoke to him. He tittered, "Oh, I couldn't come up. I
couldn't. I should bore you all."

Neil sat down to let him get past his exaggerated

72

nervousness. Adolph, the Austrian patron of the place, came up, chest pompous and prtruding stomach yet more pompous. "Aeg, dis man," he said, "vot vill ve do vit him? He drinks always de cocktails, und more cocktails, und he eats caviarrre und pairhaps de strawberries, but nefer he eats a meal. Und such gut food ve haf. Neffer have I seen Meester Tremaine eat a meal. He vill pe ill. It is no goot vor a man to trink always de cocktail und eat neffer."

"Come up and help us drink champagane. Mavis wants you," Neil said when Adolph had gone. "We'll order sandwiches too. That'll do your throat consumption more good than alcohol alone."

"I couldn't. I couldn't," Oswald exclaimed. "Wallace is there, and he is angry at me."

"No, he isn't. He thinks your or your publisher might pay him for his sketch of you, so long as it's being used. Give him a check and he will fall on your neck with fondness."

"Te he he, I'm afraid," Oswald tittered. "He might tear up the check and throw it in my face."

"Not Wallace. He reveres money too much. Let me hand it to him. He won't throw it in my face."

"If I do come up I'll be terrified."

"You exxaggerate your nervousness a little, don't you. There's no need to be nervous with me. I'm a lot enough."

Upstairs Oswald gave Wallace a check for ten pounds. He would not however sit at the table. Instead he seated himself in the corner, on the floor, and drank champagne quickly. Emaciated, his highnosed and cheekboned face was overcoloured, perhaps artificially. As he drank he fumbled

73

his coat buttons with long nervous fingers. Soon he was completely intoxicated and talked constantly, as though to himself. "I love me hands. They are too beautiful. Don't you love my hands?" he minced, draping them before his face gracefully. Pursing his lips to look delicately coquettish he continued. "When I am alone I am never lonely, because my hands are beautiful."

"They are Oswald, really," Mavis encouraged.

"But don't say the word really to me. Where would I be if I ever admitted reality. You need not laugh. It is so. But I do love my hands and my lovely books that are exquisitely obscene, but the censors don't understand them and never bother me. But reality is too awful." His mouth gaped. He turned his head birdlike to the side, tormentedly registering tragic reflective frustration. Life is too awful, too tragic. How do I bear it? I have only my beautiful hands. I love to sit alone before a mirror and watch their gestures. See, how beautiful." Again he made graceful gestures.

"Ladies und chentlemen, ve close. Meester Tremaine, it iss time you go," Adolph spoke from the doorway.

"Fritz, you ged de taxi vor Meester Tremaine. He iss a goot man und a goot customer vor Adolph, put he iss drunk."

Oswald let Fritz get him into a taxi, and Adolph, who had been drinking with other customers downstairs, consented to have champagne with the party. "I don't sleep. All de time people comes here, und it is Adolph, vot haff you, Adolph ve must haff one more drink, und Adolph stays, put

54

no sleep he gets. Not a man, Meester Tremaine. He will die
for not eating, und such goot food. Alvays I must haff
Fritz put him into de taxi. Dis pizness of being a
restaurant keeper. Vot people. Und to Lena all de time
I say dat she should neffer haff opinions about de clients,
but Lena always she lets somebody know ven she don'd like
them. But all de same I loff my wife. Where would Adolph
pe if it vasn't vor Lena? Ven dey looked me up during the
var Lena she keeps the business. Such a goot pizness head
has Lena. If sje vas here I vould kiss her."

Mavis had Fritz invite Lena to join them. She was
a blond Jewish-cockney who undoubtedly had charms for
Adolph although she was amazingly plain to unadoring eyes.
At present she had been drinking. Hereyes were misty. She
looked indifferently at the others and gulped her champagne.
Adolph slumped his corpulent figure into a chair. Wallace
laughed silently, to be sardonic, but drink had given him
an added charm and humanness. Lena began to decide she
liked Neil. She leaned towards him and sputtered bubbles
into his face as she confided with holy confidence,
"I love Americans. Do you know Mr. Shepherd in Philadelphia?
He was a nice man. I loved that man. During the war he told
me that if I went to America he would see that I had a
good time. He was sweet."

Adolph, sensing that Lena was talking too much, spoke.
"Lena, it iss time you should go to ped. Go to ped, Lena."
His wife ignored his existence.

Always, during the war, the Americans came to me. They
loved me," Lena talked on. "We did have such times."

75

But Dickie Shepherd, I loved that man. He hadn't any
show about him."

"Lena, ped it should be vor you. You've been
trinking," Adolph persuaded, but Lena was overcome with
sentiment.

"He was a grand man. He would say, Lena what would
we do without you?"

"Let's go on," Wallace suggested to Neil. "The old
bonrajay will be up if we stay."

"Who is that?" Neil asked.

"That half-American bitch, Hilda Gay."

"She talked well of you the other night. Do you
dislike her much. She doesn't you."

2Ha, ha," Wallace chuckled with distrustful knowing-
ness, and whispered, 2What did she say? But not here, not
here. Remember, with her for example as with the others
that as an information bureau she is very corrupt and
unreliable. If you see her don't mention that I will be in
Paris next month when you are there."

"I probably won't see her. But I'm having Adolph
give me a room here tonight. The apartments in a mess."

Wallace departed. *Hm,hm.* "Hell," Neil soon
said, *xix* "the eccentricities of the '90's had to produce
their progeny. Oswald of course is one, but I wonder if
Wallace isn't saturated with mauve manias too."

"Neil darling, you are healthy and young," Mavis
crooned, "Most of us daren't judge others any more."

"Am I so damned healthy?" Neil brooded. "I only know
that I don't get England. By the time it and the English

["76", "are explained to me by your country people, I can't judge\neither, yet.\"", "Lena was nodding over her glass; Adolph had fallen\nasleep, his head upon his bosom, which rested in folds\nupon his abdomen. Once he muttered, \"Time to go to ped,\nladies and chentlemen, brudders und sisters, I ask you.\nGed oud. De sooner you go the petter I like you. (I\nwant to go to ped.\"", "\"Come to my room for a nightcap,\" Rolle Knight\nquavered. \"I can't x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x

87

"I did need to talk tonight. I had to talk to somebody who isn't a bloody fool. It's that boy in Paris. He wants more money, and I do assure you I've given the lad four-fifths of my income for the last year, and I do assure you there isn't the sort of thing people think between us. I can't see him suffer, that is all. I'm so bloody tired of suffering. He is a whore, but human."

"I thought you were done with him. His kinds gets on, and Rollo. It's your suffering or his and his isn't so much as you visualize, possibly."

"I can't see his bitch eyes fall with tears when he is afraid I won't send him money. And he is so pretty." Rollo's eyes were mournful-dog pleading. His lethargic frame slumped into an easy chair. "It's too much. One doesn't do a portion of the things one is credited with and scoffed at for. My life is so stupid. Only weak, promiscuous, affairs, with never a romance. And there are the lasses too. Ronda is mighty good company, but she and I drink too much when we are together. Elaine is sympathetic, and I had a great lech on Beatrice, but they all take it out of one, I do assure you."

"You didn't do the war, didn't you?" Neil asked, to divert Rollo. "I suppose conscientious objection is even more tormenting than battle."

Rollo chucked. "I didn't pass the medical examination. I was at Oxford, and didn't drink much, then, but when I knew I was going up for the exam I drank absinthe for weeks ahead. I didn't qualify. The bloody war. The bloody war years." Rollo's voice was harsh with old-haggish

73

bitterness.

"Yes, ghastly."

"But you are lucky Neil. You aren't effete and decayed inside and out. You have had adventure in your life."

"Possibly, but it doesn't strike me so now."

"You aren't bothered by things in England that are too much, classes, and ideas. They can't let a chap be himself. It's getting so a man can't find a simple six-penny Sextin Blake story to thrill him any more. We are effete, Neil." There was a twinkle in Rollo's beadily-inten-e eyes. "The bloody English pattern, you know."

"But you don't have to stay in England. You have an income?"

"One gets drugged into it," Rollo defended. "One laughs quietly to oneself."

"Yes, I suppose so. I'm going to bed, Rollo." Neil went to the room assigned to him. In the hallway he encountered Mavis who was coming to join them.

"I'll come in and talk to you," Mavis said. "Poor Rollo. I hope he sleeps."

In Neil's room Mavis lay on the bed. Neil slipped into pajamas and rested beside her. He didn't know what she wanted. She struck him as childlike and bewildered and fragile; not at all physical. Still, she seemed to indicate that she wanted to be caressed. He however did not feel moved to do that. Drowsiness was coming on. Mavis moved nearer to him and he put his arm about her shoulder,

79

and soon she was asleep. Simply then all she wanted was affection, and so many of her friends had been destroyed by the war that her loneliness was dismal. Wondering if there was no escape for types such as her Neil finally fell asleep too. In the morning he felt fresh and alive, planning to get away to Paris as quickly as possible. A hatred for the London quality that he had had the night before seemed unimportant. London was only one small bit of the world, and Paris didn't depress him.

84

- 7 -

On the Dome corner Rollo Knight was standing forlornly duck-postured; he had, as usually, books under his arm. Neil greeted him, asking if he never lost his books when in the process of imbibing spirits.

"I find not, Neil, you know. I find not" Rollo's tremulo squaked. "One looks about, but after all it's the books which count. The books and the lasses. I must say the lasses get me. They do, you know."

"But Rollo, you don't concentrate. Your heart palpitates over so many you lose out in the end."

"That's it of course the one I'm keenest on is Steve, but I don't fancy I count there," he chuckled dolefully. She had her own eye for the lasses; but there are so many gyarls that need to be looked into. They do get me. There was one tonight that said she would like to see me really drunk. Will you come to Montmartre. I'm on the way, but not really drunk, you know. I left Matthews after I saw you and had a bit of a nap. I'll get drunk so that even she must recognize sincere, orthodox, downright, drunkeness, and I'll call on her in the morning."

"She might be upset."

"I must say, if a lass will taunt a man, what can he do? A right comely lass too." Rollo's voice complained; his face gleamed red, and his timid bead-brown eyes had a twinkle that might mean mirth, irony, malice, hurt vanity, or sorrow.

85

The whole gesture of his body was one of awkward diffidence and
his clothes fitted him badly, his trousers having that balloon
bottomed coyness effected by some English tailors. His arms
hung woodenly. Standing more erect now that he was not lonely
he stood like a pelican.

They went to stand at the Dome bar, and there encountered Henry Harris, Wallace's one time protégé, friend, and present rival and enemy, according to Wallace. Standing beside him was a young American, Hugh Greenwood, one of the first of the collegiate type to have arrived in Paris in the so-called deracination exodus after the war. As all four men felt congenial with drink and knew that there was no use going to bed they went in a taxi to Le Grand Duc in Montmartre.

No other guests were there when they arrived. Lottie Plant, the Irish-Negro entertainer, sat gloomily at a table talking to her pianists and drummer. Her freckled, high-yellow, face lighted with expectancy when the door opened, and she glided across the floor with amazing ease for so large and compactly cerseted a body. She embraced Hugh Greenwood exuberantly, saying "Where you bin all this time, not coming to see me? This boy's my best friend and customer in town. He ain't got no money, but he knows the people that has and who does he bring them to. To Lottie. I'll say. I'd a died the first few months in Paris if he hadn't brought around people. You're sure going to have beer with me, if you wants it, or any other drink." She turned to embrace Neil too. "He, he, he, this one's a card. Sometimes I bin sitting here and that door would blow open and in comes Neil as if a cyclone

86

was blowing him. He don't care if the King of England is
here. Nobody impresses him. Give me a beer, he hollers and
staggers to a table. Goodness, I'd want to yell laughing.
Some of my stuck-up society customers would want to know who
that person was, and I'd have to explain, but did he care?
No sir. Give me a beer, he'd holler, and I saw that he got
it. I was feeling lowdown bluw till you came in. Garcon,
fêve whiskeys and toute suite."

"I've been in Norway since I saw you last," Hugh
Greenwood told her, "and I certainly want to hear some of your
songs again!" He had a small boy manner, and seemed petulant
that Lottie fussed over Neil as much as over him. That her
grand greeting was but her business manner wasn't too evident;
she probably was humanly fond of the young men, but not to the
extent, Neil knew, of refraining from discipline if they got
rowdy in her cabaret when some of her swell guests were there.

"Ain't you the traveler? I'll bet you known the lowdown
joints in all them towns you visit. I bin travelling too. I
went to Turin to sing for the Italian nobility, and the Crown
Prince of Italy, he just loves my songs. He gave me a swell
photograph of himself, and I had it framed in gold, and it's
my favorite property sure. Excuse me, while I go upstairs."

Rollo beamed when Lottie was gone. "She's one of the
real girls, really."

"I got acquainted with another one of your real girls
tonight," Neil commented, "Diana Lambert."

"Yes," Rollo complained, "she's one of the lasses,
but she will like such horrible men. I fancy Diana likes to

87

be beaten. One scoundrel that she was about with gave her
a black eye, but what could a man say. She rather liked it,
one gathered. Gyarls are funny that way."

"I hear my friend Wallace is in town," Henry Harris
said with a whistle through his large, protruding teeth, some
of which were missing. His beak nose shone, and there was the
light of intended abandon in his eye. "He won't want to run
unto me. What a silly fool he is. I haven't done any of the
things against him he thinks I have, or claims he thinks. It's
just that he saw I was beginning to get along so that he
couldn't patronize me anymore."

Neil had noticed that Harris was dressing up to his
success. Apparently he fancied himself as a well-groomed
English gentlemen. He now carried a cane; only a monocle
was missing; and his accent he certainly was grooming.
Amiable and good-willed her certainly was, and he liked being
with people. His thin, Cookney, face was wreathed with smiles.

88

When Lottie Plant came downstairs all the men sat at a table with her. "I hear there was a fight up here because of Isabel?" Hugh Greenwood asked her.

Lottie's whimsical, speckled, face twitched and she began to prepare to lose her hearty manner. "Garcon," she called commandingly, "give me a whiskey sec, and make it snappy. You see, that woman, Isabel, has been nagging at her husband, Houston, for bout ten years, and he jest gets tired hearing her sreach around, so he just talks back to her. And he's jest a lamb regularly. But she calls him every kind of name. There ain't no word in the whole vocabulary she don't call him, and what I say is, if she knows about all them words so well what's she been doing herself, but when they gets to their room he jest gets tired listening to her and bangs her on the jaw. And a little later, when he's sleeping, she starts slicing him with a razor. I hears about it and tries to save her so that the police won't hear nothing about it. There's no good letting them there gendarmes start on us folks, but Isabel starts talking at me. Me. And I been doing cabaret work since I was twelve and I'm thirty now and I put myself where I am. Lottie, she sez to me -- and I ain't taking nothing from nobody when I got my rights,--- Child labour laws or no child labour laws I worked to put me where I got. But Lottie, she sez to me, you ain't no nigger and you ain't no white woman. You'st a bastard sonofabitch. I didn't hit her. I jest looked at her, and she ain't chalk white, ner Spanish, but she ain't coalblack neither, but I jest sez, woman, you're crazy, and I walked away and I didn't want no more to do with

89

her. We all likes Houston, and I didn't hit her because of
him, but she thinks jest cause a few dukes and princes hears
her sing, and some society pimps kiss her hand, she's too
good for the rest of us coloured folks. None of us likes her,
and she knows it, and she was mad because everybody likes
Houston but don't hand her nothing but the open gate mongst us
folks."

Lottie was wrought up, but a sense of comedy struck her
and she ran her hands through her oil sleeked hair which
snapped into crinkles as she did so. Still her husky voice did
not lose its wrath, and the scar on her upper lip showed
decisively. As she had talked a party came in who wished to
hear her sing.

"Jest a moment, I'll come back after I sings these
people a few songs," she said and called to her pianist, a
refined looking, ashyellow, boy to play for her. She sang
of "Twelve o'clock at night I feel so lonely and blue,
Struggling up the stairs"... the coke dope and the dip ...
all the weary wanderers," and of the "Ace in the hole"
which every foreflusher and pimp has to support him when a run
of bad luck forces him to fall back on mother, a faithful
sweetheart, or keeper. Her tragic song streak by she sang
"Bon bon buddy, the chocolate man. Just because my hair is
curly, just because my teeth are pearly." When she danced
her large frame flitted about with great lightness and she
revealed more of her beautifully formed legs. Coming back to
the table she called for another whiskey.

"And as I was tellin' you," she began her story at

90

once, "Isabel comes in here a few nights later, and I look
at her as though she was a hunk of mud, but she sez she wants
to apologize to me. I sez I don't want no apology, I jest
wants that she leave me alone, and she sez, I know everybody
likes you Lottie, and you and I's always ban friends, and I
sez, when's we bin friends, and she sez, why Lottie, I've
always liked you, and I sez, thanks, I ain't ever asked for
your liking me! I ain't needing it. I jest wants to be left
alone. Well, she keeps naggin' at me about our being friends
and I never went to her place. And Margaret, that big black
woman, she don't like Isabel now, and when Margaret's
likkered up she don't care about nobody, and she grabs a
table knife and shakes it in Isabel's face, and sez, you
stuck up --- and you know the rest, cause when Margaret
starts using language she uses it and nothing but, but she
told Isabel what us folks thinks of people of us that thinks
they's better than their own race. We don't want no Isabel
strutting round with white folks and when they's tired of her
thinking she'll come back and we'll kiss her. No sir. I
don't know how it was, but I was mad and drinking lots of
whiskey, and Isabel kept nagging at me, and I jest hauled off
and soaked her bang in the jaw and I packs something in my
arm. I soaked her, and a few days later she went off to
Cairo with Houston's band, and I hears she don't make no hit
there with the public, and none of them boys like her, and
if she starts any more of her razor work with Houston there's
no telling what'll happen. She's been naggin' at him for ten
years, and he's sweet and gentle like a lamb, but boy, when
he'

91

he's mad, he's sure mad, and there ain't going to be none of
us folks blame him if he jest tells her he don't want no
more of her naggin'. Jest what'd Isabel done if she was
my colour? Lookit my skin. They don't want me in shows in
Paris cause I'm too white and they likes coffee colour in this
country more'n they likes talent. And talent's jest what I
got. I ain't never gone round saying I was Spanish, acting
better'n my own people. She says she don't like coloured men
as well as white. I never heard the like, saying she don't
like her own kind of man. No sir, I don't take none of
Isabel's stuff, and I don't fall for her saying she's part
Indian. She ain't got no white folks that likes to come in
and sit and talk with her like they talks to me, and if I told
what they tells me I could tell an earful, but they trusts me,
and they're right. It ain't as if I don't like a white man if
he's a gentleman and don't talk, but I got no time for this
thinking you're better'n you own kind. No sir, hey, hey,
Jemmy, play them ivories. Do that thing. I say." Lottie
was feeling relieved and joyous now. "Why, it's my mother
that's white, and there ain't nobody means as much to me as
my mother, and she's just a baby, and she's a better woman
than her daughter is right now. I'll say. She ain't poured
so much likker into her, and she aint had so many lovers.
But Isabel, say, I'm dinge and Irish, and she don't want to
start nothing on that combination because I'll knock her sure."

92

Lottie put down another whiskey with a gulp and went to a table of wealthy night-lifers, "cause I know where the money is, and if I don't come back with a cool thousand in my stocking, my name ain't Lottie. They's bored, but I ain't."
Lottie was more dignified as more paying guests came into the room. Each new-coming party that she knew she drifted across the floor to meet, lightly balancing on her ankles, with the society-cabaret hostess manner. Jemmy, the ashyellow pianist, was playing classical music, snatches from Stravinsky and *The Rhapsody in Blue*. His touch as he played was delicate and subtle, and Lottie was sure he would be a famous concert pianist if it weren't for his colour. He might though readily have passed as white.

"It's their energy, Neil," Rolle Knight quavered. "The coloured girls get me. She's one of the lasses. She enjoys herself. It's energy that counts. I envy them, and you too, Neil. You aren't effete."

Dodo, a stumpy, gorilla-sage, negro slouched in beaming sheepishly, his long arms dangling. Seeing Neil he ran up and embraced him. "How are you, Mister Neil. Is you buying me gin tonight?" Neil had various impressions fleet through his drink-dedazzled mind. He remembered an old grand-daddy negro who had used to whittle him toy when he was a child in Canada; but he felt himself recalled to the primitive too;

93

the jungle; away from the wooden-correct sightseeing party
across the room; away from the tophat, after-a-dinner-party
English group in the corner. It was as if when the door had
opened on Dodo a jungle clearing was revealing, and Dodo was
a crouched, heavy-shouldered, old gorilla puttering through
the underbruch. And Dodo embracing him was an old gorilla
hermit, running up in gladness of recognition, body crouching,
long arms dangling, happy to remember more by instinct than
by memory. The cabaret was a jungle, jungle dance, jungle
laughter, jungle tang. Dodo, who played the drums marvellously,
was for the moment out of work, and Neil, hardly remembering
him did recall having bought him gin at Zelli's bar one night.

"All the gin you want, Dodo," Neil said, pleased to
be remembered fondly. We have a great ginship between us,
haven't we?" Dodo, already ginned up apparently felt lonely
and gloomy because of being out of work; he feared possibly
that old age was getting him too. Dodo leaned against Neil
who patted his kinky, bullet, head. Soon Dodo was in the
centre of the floor, a bass drum in front of him and a trap
drum to the side. There was a footworked attachment to the
larger drum. He began pounding slowly, and worked up to a
mad rhythm of drumming, beating the big drum with the foot
lever, and jiggling his sticks to make a screeees-elicking
sound. Then he sang with gleeful abandon.

94

I'm in love again and the spring is coming,
I'm in love again and the bees are humming,
I'm in love again and I can't rise above it,
I'm in love again and I'm darned glad of it,
Good news.

His white teeth shone, his round black face glistened. It
was a droll, insinuating, gorilla-child-lecherous, mask, half
shamed, half bold, and pop-eyed. As he was playing with
ecstacy a man from one table walked over to him with a half
bottle of champagne. Back went Dodo's head; his thick lips
opened, and he gulped the entire champagne, all the while
beating the drums. When he finished the baiet resounded with
shouts and applause.

"I've got to take these girls home," a man whispered to
Lottie. "I'll come back. They're friends of mothers, and
want to see all of Paris. The naughtier it is the better they
like it, so they can go back to Podunk and tell how shocking
Paris is. But they'll tell on me too. It's no place for girls
just under sixty like them."

"You're talking," Lottie said, mechanically the hostess.

Other guests departed as Lottie said her throat was bad so
she couldn't sing any more. Hugh Greenwood went to the piano
and played rippling jazz, as Jenny, the pianist was outside.
"He's fighting with that French woman he's married to," Lottie
explained. "She goes off with other men, but she don't like it
if he does a little chasing himself. Then French girls don't
mean nothing to me. I wonder how I'll like them Spanish ones
when I get to Madrid next month."

99

"Be sure and see a bullfight," Neil advised her.
"It's bad when the horses are gored but it's a good show."

"Will I see a bullfight? I won't do nothing but.
That's where bullfights are, and it's Spain I'll be in. I
ain't going to miss nothing. When I travels, I looks to see
what there is, but," she was gleeful, "I travels cold.
Nothing but. When I took my first long trip from Chicago
to San Francisco I was jest fourteen, but I sez I was eighteen
cause I was to do cabaret work. On the train the porter, he was
some dinge, that boy, leastwise he thought he was the real shine.
I was scared and sorta lonely and we talked but I didn't get
what he was driving at. That night I felt a hand slip into my
birth. I was froze cold I was that scared, and I lets out a
holler and the hand disappeared and he didn't bother me now
more. When I travels now I'm scared. I don't pick up with
no strangers. I travels cold, dawgoned sure."

A negro chorus girl from Stepping Along was doing the
Charleston furiously to Greenwood's and Dode's playing.
"Charleston, Esther, I sez, Charleston. Can that girl
dance? Nothing but. Garcon, a whiskey, and sec," Lottie
exclaimed,

"Have her sit with us, do," Rollo plead.

"Esther's going to be happy to," Lottie said. "You
know, us folks got our social sets. When I was in Washington
I was jest Lottie, a cabaret entertainer, and I wasn't nobody.
But I puts me where I am. In Washington I entertained only for
coloured people, and in some black, half coloured, coffee,

100

high-yaller, cream, and them that passes, but I can always
spot them. They don't none of them think none of the other's
fit to speak to. Course I wasn't in on them snootin' high-class
distinction. I was jest Lottie Plant, an entertainer, and
them folks with all their shades was high-stepping, stuck-up,
society broads with snifty noses. What I knows about them
society ladies though. They comes in so ladylike but when
they gets a little drink in them they cuts up with their men
like Lottie Plant, jest a cabaret entertainer, don't let no
man cut up with her. In public. Unless the party's hot and
I'm liking 'em hot."

Esther sat at the table and drank the champagne as no-body else drank anything but whiskey. She soon felt at home and began to confide herself. "Theah's jest one things I wants to know about and you gentlemen can probably tell me how I's to go about it. I told my mammy I'd sure go to Rome and see the pope before I came back to St. Louis. I's a good catholic, and that's the one ideal of man life. I sure has to see the pope if I dies right after." Esther was more negroid than Lottie, and her voice had a timbre and dialect which Lottie's had only when she was excited. Her bronze face gleamed. Her thick, blackberry lips were open and her lustrous eyes had a trance eestacy in them. When the music started a drunken man wanted her to dance with him.

"No thanks, I's tired. I's been working and will rest if you don't mind."

"Are you being well kept?" the man asked insolently.

101

"You niggers thinks too much of yourself in this town."

"Put that man out," Lottie called demandingly to the
writers, and turned to the man, "you no count, drunken pimp,
you don't pull that stuff in my cabaret. You acts a gentlemen
or I'll knock you down sure. We don't want none of your kind."

"What I likes about Frenchmen," Esther confided after
the man was gone, "is, if they insults you they does it like
gentlemen, but I never bin kept. I got my ideals, and the way
I looks at it is this. If a man treats one of us girls real
nice, and spend a money, or gives us a necklace, or a nice
dress --- and I'd jest love to have a real penial necklace ---
so's nobody can think I's jest cheap, I don't know's I wouldn't
be friendly. But I got my ideals and there's nobody can have
me for jest nothing. Of course, if I likes a man," she titter-
ed, "I'm not meaning you gentlemen, cause if you wanted any-
thing you'd act nice, but I jest ain't no fool. I've seen
enough of these here French girls, and the way I looks at it,
I's a lady, and they, well, I don't say nothing against them,
but they jest ain't got ideals." Certainly mulatto, Esther
had a negro slouchiness when relaxed and her guile was
transparent. The acrid, beehive-like race odour of her was
pronounced. Lottie's odour was concealed by a sandalwood
smelling perfume that blended with her scent.

By five-thirty there were only coloured people in the
hoite, except for the four white men. At the bar a violinist
with a head that might have been beautifully carved out of
black marble was nursing his violin with an air distantly
sad and romantic. Some ten negroes were around the bar,

102

most of them from various orchestras about town. They drank
whiskey or gin, straight, and carried on a discussion: Did
musicians have to return to America ever so often to keep up
with the latest in jazz?

"I'm a bull, I'm a bull, moo, moo, moo," Lottie suddenly stampeded about the room waving a shawl. "I'm a bad bad bull, Mistah bullfighter, if you comes near me, you's going to git hooked shure." As she bullfought, stamping and bellowing, she ran her hands through her hair that she had resleeked. It was again a mass of crinkley, half-dry, hair, and immeasurably more attractive than when sleek. Lottie was not made to be a chie negress. Her bullfight subsided and she stood at the bar teasing the handsome violinist. He tried to combat her wit, and his even white teeth revealed themselves in pleased chagrin. Lottie and he liked to handle each other, in spite of the fact that Lottie's husband sat looking morose in the corner. He and Lottie had fought the night before but that had not quelled his passion for Lottie. Ashamed to ask direct he got Neil to ask her to sing "You left me standing out in the rain." "She'll do it for you, Master Neil. She sure likes you." He was too mounrful to smile but he did reveal three marvelous gold teeth. Lottie looked wicked when asked to sing the song.

"I'll do it for you; but I know who's asking for it.
I never left nobody standing out in the rain, but him and me
jest had things to say to each other last night. I was loaded
with likker, and you knows how it is. I sez things. I was
born saying things, cause I don't take nothing from nobody

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notime, and I felt blue. I told him I don't want no man
messing round my room that night. There's times when I want
to be alone, yes, all a-lone, and when I sez alone I don't
mean nothing but."

"Business isn't good this season, is it Lottie?" Neil
asked, "That makes you blue."

"It wasn't that. I told Louis I always wanted a baby
and he said I'd have one if I'd leave them French basins
alone, but no sir, I told him. I can't abide not washing, get
me. I jest can't help it, so he sez I can't never have no
baby. I jest washes 'em all away, but it's clean like my
mammy taught me to be. I jest didn't want no man messing
round my room last night. I gets that way. Mamma's the
person I care most about and it's only for her I works to
send her money. Lottie, she used to say to me, don't you
ever go outside the house to do things you wouldn't do inside.
If you got anybody you wants to see you jest brings them
home, and then nobody can say nothing, because your mammy's
right here, and people can't talk. Yes sir, my mammy ain't
practical. She'd see an ermine coat and go in and buy it if
she had only five dollars on her. She'd think it was the
same as cotton. She's jest a baby that way, but Lottie, she
always says to me, don't you do nothing you think your
mammy's unamed of, and jest you tell her, and she had a
home for you to live in. Man. They's all right, but
when it comes to caring for anybody there ain't nobody for
me but her. But I gotta sing my song. I ain't always
sentimental but I'll begin reading poems I've collected when

104

I get home if I keep thinking about mammy. Hoo, hoo, she's a card. She's got no ideas about the kind of life I live and she ain't going to have. I jest wants to keep her a big baby always and I'll take care of her."

Lottie sang the sad sad song about, "I took your part, gave you your start, and now you leave me with a broken heart;" Out of the corner of her wicked eye she saw how wrought up with sorrow Louis was. She didn't feel tragic, but he felt completely lowdown blue, and wanted to make up and be friends like always with Lottie. She was having a grand moment of realizing how she could handle her man anyway, and have him back at the snap of her finger. A few minutes later she was sitting at his table. His ebony face was losing its look of misery and his gold teeth flashed in smiles that grew less wistful as Lottie and he drank out of each other's glasses. The reconciliation was under way, but Lottie, feeling sentimental, began to recite poetry. "Is it to be or not to was?" she intoned, as she got up to stride across the floor and pace. "Marabeta, you're a cheat, way down from your head to your feet. Lookit that fool man of mine," she gloated, as his fond eyes watched her. "He's that sentimental. Koochy, koochy," she tickled his chin. He beamed. One more scrap had been patched up and if he was careful Lottie might not fight with him again that night.

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8

Logan Draper entered the Cafe Royale, surreptitiously looking for somebody to talk with. His yellow hair was a mop above a soft, disintegrating face, in which watery blue eyes floated. Seeing Neil reading an evening paper he joined him. "When did you get back to town? I've been here a week but this is the first time in four days I've ventured away from the house."

"What brought you over?? I thought your years at Oxford put you off London forever."

"Doris is to have a baby, and it would be liable to military service if a boy and born in France. Both dad and I were born there. Can you come out to dinner with me? Helen Gardner's there, and some others."

"Good. I was dismally on the loose tonight. What'll you have."

"Gin and bitters. I feel hellish. The baby coming depresses me, and the servants we took over with the house disapprove of us."

The men finished their drink and went to drive towards Kensington in Logan's car. Logan laughed his nervous-wreck giggle that ended on falsetto notes, and started the car with a jerk. To ride with him was to take one's life in chance. Several times the car barely missed a collision.

"Goddamned that bus," Logan swore, his long yellow

114

hair flopping recklessly in the wind. I felt like running
into it. Hope the traffic cop didn't get my number.
I've had three smashups with this car. Going to sell it
if we go to Egypt this winter."

"What came of the Montmartre smashup we we in last
winter. Did you hear more of it."

"We paid for having torn the horses neck," Logan
said shortly, not wanting to talk of past mishaps since
there had been so many in his life. "Muriel Gibson's with
us too. She and Helen don't hit it off well together."

"They're both too female. Helen might have been
a fairly placid wife if the war hadn't got her husband."

"No she wouldn't," Logan giggled. "He bored her.
It was only when she heard that he was dead that she decid-
ed she loved him and turned tragic."

When the men arrived at the Drapers Helen Gardner
was reclining her handsome body on a couch. Alfred Burnett
sat at her feet. She was too really lazy to bother about
her kiltz decorativeness. "Neil, darling," she drawled,
"You here. You're always travelling. Where do you get the
interest and the vitality? Come and kiss me. London is
killing me, and that bounder, Eric Branch, is helping.
He took us to Limehouse last night and did nothing but
quarrel. In Paris I'm fond of him, but here he gets too
Oxford-street in manner and accent to bear. I want
want to cry when he talks names and tâtes. It's awful
of me, because I love Bertie so much, and I'm not the
kind of woman to break up the happy marriage of two nice
boys."

115

"You're looking grand anyway," Neil complimented her. "As your hair gets more grey in it you look more distinguished, and you remain as much a destroying female as ever."

"Do preach to me, Neil. Make me believe that I should be a purposeful woman."

"As you attack any fainting efforts one might make to believe at least in energy."

Doris Draper came down the stairs, her willow-thin body swollen with the baby she carried. "No cocktail for me," she told her husband. "Not that any extra cocktail won't be taken care of," she added, caustically revealing her Jewish economic streak at once. With a large fortune Doris was easily the most regardful of money of any person in the room. Perhaps too she was bewildered. She looked wistful and pathetic, and perhaps incapable of adapting herself to the life Logan's circumstances brought about.

"What's your child going to want," Alfred Burnett queried. "Cocktails instead of the milk bottle from birth, or will it be an honest to god bourgeois."

"I hope she will have balance, anyway," Doris answered, her manner revealing little of whether she was bitter or tartly humourous. When Lesley Draper came down Doris was quiet, and Lesley's gaity seemed forced.

"Lesley would have to come over. She can't let Doris have Logan to herself even while she's giving birth to a baby," Helen Gardner said softly to Neil, in a saccharine feline voice. "But it's all true sisterly love."

116

"It is. It's always been fairly obvious that no third person wouldn't be actually secondary to either Logan, and more particularly to Lesley. I know you and she quarrel."

"I never do," Helen complained sweetly charming, as though she were the most gracious and giving of women.

They went to dinner in a small, oblong, room, the walls of which were covered with hunting and racing prints. They gave the room a rakish feel. "Who'd you sub-let this house from?" Neil asked.

"An Irish racing Major. He wouldn't let us have it until we'd snowed him under with references. But the housekeeper doesn't think much of us. She refuses to melt, or to speak to us except when addressed."

The housekeeper, austerely neat, began to serve the meal. Her teeth were small and perfect, and she was prim. "Kelly," Helen wanted to make her talk, "Who's responsible for the hunting prints?"

"My master, madame. He is fond of horses."

"And of drinking?" Logan tittered to tease Kelly.

"Not too much sir," Kelly implied disdain.

"How long have you been in the family?" Helen persisted.

"Twenty years, Madam. Twenty years with my master." Surely Kelly believed these present people interlopers.

117

"You won't get a rise out of Kelly," Neil said when she had left the room. "She's too well trained, and to a servant snobbish that is absolute."

"Logan, do give me another cocktail. I don't want wine. I must be spiffy. I'm so depressed."

"You will say what you feel, Helen," Doris Draper told her. "Let's all admit that we get depressed and get on to something else. Give Helen a strong cocktail Logan."

"I'm not as bad as Neil anyway. He's so serious."

"How, and how?" Neil asked wonderingly, feeling inclined to be gay.

"I feel it in you. You don't get drunk and you've had more cocktails than I. You believe in holding your drink. You believe in progress and reform, I'm sure. How can people have such oldfashioned ideas anymore?"

"Rats Helen, a laxative would do you a lot of good," Neil countered. "Or are you a real romantic?"

"I'll serve us all cocktails," Lesley said, getting up from the table. "There's a critical tension in the atmosphere." She stopped before a mirror in the front room and arranged her tawny blond hair, restive within herself. Her short, feminine body, had litheness beneath a white beaded dressed, and she swayed alertly on her ankles.

"Neil, I'm going to Milan to study for the opera, in a month," Lesley said, coming back to the room with a cocktail shaker and a tray of glasses. "One has to keep changing the scene of one's pasttimes frequently."

118

Why let ourselves go stale?"

"It's that fat Italian impresario with his light opera black who is leading you on with hope," Logan told her.

Lesley trilled a short hugh. "Yes, but don't talk of that. Those Italians are great liars. He should have made the offer through my voice teacher, whose a friend of his. He asked me not to speak of his offer."

"And it had no strings to it?" Neil said.

Lesley smiled with guarded significance. "No, well--- yes, I suppose in the end." She grimaced and shrugged her shoulders. "He wanted to hear me sing, in his room, of course."

"But why, of all places, Milan? It's do deadly," Helen Gardner asked.

"Yes, full of eternal students, but that's best for most people in the singing world. The town's full of pathetic cases. But what they don't know saves them, and they hope on. Singers don't know the world. It's a bad professions, but all professions are bad."

"The opera tradition is a bore with its dull artificiality. Some of those fat tenors who tear tender sounds from their fat fungus throats ought to be doing slapstick comedy," Neil said.

Lesley thought with her voice. "Um, nobody hates it more than I do, but the idea amuses me for the timebeing. Diseases can be nice too. Pate de foise is goose liver that's disused, and it's pretty fine."

119

"Surely, and circumstances alter even opera music.
I stomach Puccini when I've plenty of wine in me, and
Viennese waltzes. They are the same quality."

"That's clever of you, since you aren't a musician.
But Puccini is one man whose works I don't sing."

"But the Italian men, and in Milan: They always try
to pinch a woman's fanny. I'm old enough to feel compliment-
ed, because they'd never pinch a whores fanny. They only
pick on what they think are ladies." Helen Gardner spoke.

Lesley trilled her voluptuous laugh. "Did you hear
of the two tarts in Milan? AEXZUMAXXAY One tried to
make a passing man, and the other said, 'not him dearie.
He's married. He only strikes his match on his own
matchbox."

Dinner over they went back to the lounge room.
Helen slouched the divan and scolded Alfred Burnett
as soon as she was settled. "Stop complaining, Alfred.
What nonsense you talk. You didn't live with his wife for
years before you met me, and now you pretend you gave her up
for me. If you can't stand what I do, Alfred, go away.
Do go away. You bore me with your talk of wanting a child.
Why don't you call on some of the little bastards you have
scattered around America. Of course their mothers are
all wage-earning women and won't let you have them, but you
might get a sight of them. Think of Enoch Arden."

"Since when has Alfred developed a paternal impulse?"
Logan Draper said from across the room.

Alfred, slight and serious looking, answered, "I've
always had it. But I haven't the guts not to let my women

120

bully me. Helen's not a woman though. She's a hardboiled
boy, really. She likes destroying her man. That's why
I like her, perhaps."

"Now Alfred, people aren't interested in love scene
between us," Helen said, and went to the table for a
whiskey soda.

Amy Todd, her pale skin albino-luminous beneath cerise
hair, drifted ethereally into the room. Her plump hungs
hung awkwardly, by intention, against a bright green dress.
"Logan, you lamb," she cooed, floating across the room.
"Bless you. How is a really first class chap tonight?
You're a real one Logan, one of us gentlemen." Amy,
rather buxom, affected exquisite English lady mannerisms.

"Amy darling," Helen crooned sweetly from her lounge.

"Helen, bless you, my sweet," Amy breathed. "Such
good chaps we have here tonight." Her ecstatic pale eyes
turned upon Bartie Saunders, and Neil. Her head was
uplifted. Her large, thin-skinned lips shone with
rhapsodic fellowman love, 'Helen," she was soon confiding to Mrs. Gardner, "you great,
healthy, American goddess. You come from the country of
wide spaces and bousing vitality. You have health. You
belong to youth. You know nothing of the depths of Europe."

"A tiny bit, Amy darling. A teeny weeny bit,"
Helen repulsed Amy's wrapped-in-a-cloud state of trance.

"Helen, you are one of the real chaps, a gentleman.
You understand us, if you are American. I love you, Lamb."

"Amy love," Helen played her role.

121

"Oh, the terror of it, the horror of it. I don't know what will become of us all. Helen, you good fellow, I weep to think of asking you, but I must. Can you let me have five pounds for a week. My darling little baby is ill. She needs so much good sound English butter, and good sweet clean sunshine. The horror of it. Next week I will have money."

"Amy darling, I can't," Helen wailed. "I'm sorry. I haven't enough money to get me back to Paris. It's too awful."

"Well, my sweet, what will become of us all?" Amy said, abstrActedly and drifted across the room to Logan Draper, to whom she talked of the terror and horror of it all. Logan was sheepish, but listened with sympathy.

"Poor Logan," Helen said. "Amy has him cornered. He can't resist giving her money. She gets me cornered too, but I know she's tricky and pretentious. I can't pay for the opium she smokes."

"I know. She got four thousand francs from me in Paris on the dying child plea, and I saw her at places I couldn't afford with a gigolo in tow constantly afterwards."

"Neil, do tell me, how does a woman without energy get rid of a lover who bores her? Alfred is so much nothing."

"There's somebody else you're liking then?"

"Bertie Saunders."

"Rats, that's your perversity. He doesn't like women. I doubt that he would. You have to pick on somebody not to

122

be had."

"But he loves me. We get on so well together. With me he thinks he might."

"He's been with Eric for years. That seems to mean they get on well together."

"You are so sure of everything, Neil. You still talk of liking or of respecting people. I thought we'd all given that up."

"For what new snobism or fake idea. I don't do the "we" sort of thing. I'm I: too much I, but I'm darned if I'd be one of the various you's there are about."

"You're scolding me again. You're so moral," Helen whimpered, sweetly-voiced teasing.

"You started on me. Jhaysus Helen, the only people you fight for are the pimps and the baby dolls."

"I must stand by my own kind. I'm an old whore, all tired and worn out, but I must have company."

"You are snug as hell when you retire into that sweetly-tolerant, destroyed attitude."

"What am I good for. I can't be faithful to my lovers. I can't hold down a job."

"I can't solve you. You're too dangerously insidious. I'm not ready to admit decay yet."

"Play the Vistrola, Neil. I want to dance."

Eric Branch came over towards Helen. "Are we going to continue our quarrel of last night, Eric?" Helen cooed. Branch, a tall lily Englishman of poster beauty, looked pained, and answered.

123

"I wish Helen darling you would not insist that I am quarrelsome. I simply had to protect the young lady with us. You were rude to her and she isn't accustomed to American rudeness."

"And I won't tolerate English rudeness. She kept attacking France and America, and she was a disgusting cheksea-ite. If she likes London with its same/celebrities, all being hangovers of the 90's, wearing arty clothes, and going Royal Academy if they can, she can, but at least she could be polite to foreigners in her own country. At least I was personal, and not nationalistic. If she is a lady the poor darling shouldn't talk so much about being one. It's out of fashion to be a lady now. We would find no male mates, and who wants to be a recluse."

Neil joined Rollo Knight who sat smiling enigmatically over a drink. "A man just wants to drink in peace, Neil. No racket or fuss or bother." His quaver was as tiredly resigned and patient.

"How's Janie?"

"Well, really. She used to fuss when I first married her if I stayed out too late, but she's over that now," Rollo was comfortably complacent. "I do really like her, you know. It wasn't just to be married as you all thought, or were you one who didn't. I didn't have one of my great leches, but I feel protective. She cuddly and quiet. I like taking care of her. Restful, you know." Rollo said the last as a man in a haven of rest after a voyage of torment.

"You didn't stay long in Cornwall."

"Two days, Neil," Rollo was

124

perturbed now. "It is too much. There is no place a man can stand in England. When the wind began blowing over those black cliffs I feel magic deviltry about. I'm really terrified. You don't understand."

"Wind is always upsetting, but I'm not bothered by the idea of magic forces. I call it nerves."

Rollo was shyly frank. "I've played with magic, you know. Just as a game. My mother too, have I told you, used to tell fortunes. But now that we've become friends again that is off my mind. There was some feeling in me."

"Yes, she was a mother," Neil answered.

"And she may leave me her money. She may. Janie wouldn't marry me until I'd signed a good sum of my bit over to her. And that boy in France, he I'm through with. Such a relief."

"And Janie might began to manage your life now."

"Yes, a relief you know," Rollo squeaked. "If she only doesn't stop my drinking. That would be too much."

"Helen; you're a nuisance of a woman," Bertie Saunders said as they danced by. "You can't sit still and let anyone enjoy a quiet drink."

"I won't sit listening to Eric tell Doris what is or isn't done in England."

"Why will you be malicious, Helen," Eric asked.

"I like that. You've been telling servant hall stories on all the society people you've ever heard of. How you must follow the society columns."

125

"I hadn't realized what a cat you are, Helen darling," Eric responded.

"Can't you control your woman, Alfred?" Bertie asked Burnett. "She's had more than her poor head will holds and wants to fight everybody."

"I'm about through with her," Alfred brooded. "I can stand a whole lot, but I won't stand all the gigoloes and fairies she has around and supports."

Bertie, not vulnerable to hurt in his present state, sipped a gin fizz and was naively bitter. "Let Helen and Eric fight it out so long as they leave me alone."

"I'll go back to Paris if she isn't reasonable," Alfred decided.

"That's what she wants you to do," Bertie said, darkly, "and I can't do anything for her."

"My pet," Amy Todd was telling Doris Draper, the most ordinary people sense it. Vitya, my Russian boy, has in the past taken money my darling baby needed. I told him he must not. That whatever he did to me he should spare my poor, sick, baby. But in Brittany, this summer, all that was evil left him. He went into a church one day, and people thought he had a fit of epilepsy, but he had merely been re-born for the clean and the pure and the good. His very landlady recognized that he was a force against her mercenary vices. She asked him to leave the hotel, claiming not to like the way he acted with the fishermen. "Please," Doris, you are one of us, a real gentlemen, a sound chap. I must send Vitya money, or he will starve. You do help the Russian refugees, and Vitya is so real, and

126

intent on the good cause. He may starve. The horror of
it, that I need to ask you, but can you let me have ten
pounds? What will become of us all?

Helen glided across the room holding aloft her
whiskey glass. "Bertie," she crooned sweetly. "Save me
from your wife. He drives me wild." She came close to
Bertie and they kissed. "Don't you think you could really
like me, Bertie?"

Drink had not affected Bertie till now but he suddenly
went under. He mumbled helplessly and wobbled. It was
clear that as often before he would have to be carried to
a taxi and escorted home by Eric.

"Hell, Logan, or Neil, take me out somewhere to
dance," Helen said, swaying. "Is there no life in this
hellhole of a town. It will make an abandoned woman of
me." Seeing Neil and Bello talking she picked up a
sofa cushion and threw it at them. It did not fly straight.
Instead it hit Doris Draper in the abdomen. The pillow
was light, but within a minute Doris was gasping.

"Heavens, the child is coming, now. I knew it would
happen tonight. I shouldn't have come down stairs. No,
Helen, the pillow didn't hurt me. It just hurried
proceedings."

Logan Draper became excitedly anxious. "Where's the
phone. What's the doctor's number. Come on Neil, drive
over to the doctor's with me. Where's the housekeeper.
Let's carry Doris upstairs."

"Be careful, Logan," Doris warned. "It's best for
me to walk if I can. I mustn't keep moving. You and Neil
give me your arms. And Helen, stop having hysterics."

127

"You have done no harm."

Lesley Dreper came in from the garden and was competently calm. "There's the doctor's phone number. I'll call him... He'll be over as quickly as he can get here. Doris can rest where she is till he comes."

"My check books, Logan," Doris spoke from the lounge. "All of them, American, English, and French. I must write out checks, to the baby, to you, to myself. They will try to get my money away from me. They will hold it back."

"Doris, whatever do you want to write checks for?" Lesley said. "You will be all right."

"I must have them. I am going to lose all my fortune. I will make out checks that can be cashed at once, tomorrow, before they get at my money. Logan can put it all into a secret account."

Doris was given her several check books and began to scribble out checks for various amounts, and insisted that they be mailed at once, with instructions to deliver the money to her in the morning. Her face was drawn, not so much with a look of pain as with a child's pathetic loneliness."

The guests all departed as soon as the doctor had arrived. In the morning Neil called up Logan to learn whether everything was well. "Doris had a ten pound boy, and she's resting well," Lesley told Neil over the phone. "She didn't take things badly at all."

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A week later Doris was laughing because all the banks had sent her radiographs of the checks which she had made that night. "They wished to protect me. I wrote them all saying they couldn't expect the the签名 signatures to look very real; that I was having hallucinations before going into labour pains. I thought everybody was deserting me that night. At least I was calm about not letting myself be carried upstairs."

274

Forest Pemberton was on the train, going to Constanti-
nople, when Neil boarded in Venice. "It's no fun when a
guy has to leave his wife all the time to do lousy journalism,"
Forest commented when they had gone to the dining car for a
bucking up whisky.

"No, it's no fun," Neil answered, distraitly noting
Forest's hurt boy manner of speach.

"We'll have a whiskey."

"Yes, we'll have a whiskey."

"It's no fun if you can't be with who you want to while
you're young," Forest again asserted, at the table. "I
think 'why do I ever leave featherkitty.' But a guy has to
make money."

"Yes, we have to have money."

But it isn't so bad when there's a good guy to talk
to on the train, Cam. I'm danned fond of you."

Neil's volition struggled away from Pemberton's approach,
and he wondered why he so definitely sensed a false note in
Forest's maimed-phrased conversation. "We can get drunk, any-
way," he responded. "I hate train journeys, but drunk one
may sleep in spite of the rhythm of the train wheels."

275

"And I didn't want to leave kitten either, now,
particularly. She thinks maybe she's caught."

"With child, you mean."

"Yes, and it isn't any fun if we can't bat around
together. We can't if we have to nurse babies. Featherkitty
a swell companion, for skeeing, and hiking, but it won't be
any fun if we start having kids right away."

"That can be taken care of, can't it, or does she want
a child?"

"How can a guy say. She knows it isn't any fun for me
if we can't bat around like two guys together, but maybe she
really wants a baby. I don't want her to do what she doesn't
want. I don't want her to take chances. It won't be fun
for a few years though if she goes on through."

"You'll have to leave it up to her then, won't you. She
could be taken care of, in Switzerland, I think, or even in
France."

"Hell, Cam, let's have another whiskey. Things aren't
any fun any more." Pemberton's smooth rosy face seemed to
Neil to dramatize anxiety, young boy manner, rather than to
express it actually. His red large mouth quivered with
a boyish loose bitterness, that, less sentimental, might
have been snarlish. Neil felt that essentially Pemberton was
asking that his declared deep love for Olive be accepted,
but his kitten and featherkitty utterances robbed his
remarks of authenticity.

"Why don't you both toss coins to see whether you do
anything about stopping the child or not. It's done

276

often enough, God knows. If you aren't careful, and you
can't humanly be every time, you have to take one kind of
chance or the other."

"A guy's always caught biologically."

"Hell, so is a woman."

Pemberton brooded and drank his whiskey. "A guy's got
to put up with a hell of a lot."

"He sure does!"

The train stopped beside a track upon which rested a
freight train. "Look Cam, a dead dog," Pemberton said,
looking out the window at the maggoty eaten corpse of a
dog which lay upon a flat car.

"Ya, Jesus, I have a hangover. I don't want to see that
thing."

"Hell Cam, we got to look at things scientifically. In
the army I used to see corpses eaten up like that; lots of
them. Look at the worms. I bet if you turned the dog
over there's a thousand white worms underneath."

"Balls," Neil exploded, "I've seen dead animals before.
We don't have to stick our noses into them to know that they
are there. We're not in a laboratory cutting dog corpses to
bits."

"Hell Cam, I thought you weren't a romantic. I thought
you took things as they come."

"By Christ no, not if I can avoid stinks and sights I
don't like. You're not being a realist. You're trying to
act hardboiled, like my dear boy. You're talking crap."

"Don't dear boy me," Pemberton said harshly. "You

277

give me a pain in the ass."

Neil froze into silence, and finally called the waiter to pay him. "Hell Cam, I hope you don't hold it against me that I snapped back at you. I know you're a swell guy. It was the whiskey."

"Forget it," Neil answered. "It doesn't count. Your tone was unexpectedly vehement and there seemed no reason to go on talking then. What wine do you want, red or white."

"Yes, we got to have wine, and we'll drink some brandy afterwards, when the others clear out of the dining room."

Across the table a young man was searching for a match for his cigarette. Pemberton gave him a match. "You are American, aren't you?" the man asked, with a slight French accent.

"That's it."

"I should like to be one," the Frenchman said, smiling with a gesture of ennui. "To be out of France anyway?"

"Where are you heading now, Vienna or Berlin."

"First Vienna, and then Berlin, but I don't think I will like it. They won't like us Frenchmen for a long time."

"Yes, but why tell them you're French. They don't like any foreigners now, I take it though!"

"It's America I'd like to go to, if I had money."

"Jesus, we hear that from all you French and Italians. It's not so easy to get on in America if you want to have your own thoughts. I understand you though. The sense of futility and of ennui can overcome one in Paris readily, if one's inclined to go under. We all are these

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times too. The drive in America is exciting, or stimulating, if you will, but it shatters one. You have to believe in the purposes they value there to make it worth while, and believe me, doubts assail on there as much as they do in France. So much purposefulness and activity seems to be whirling in a vacuum sometimes," Neil spoke.

Pemberton was looking at the Frenchman with potential resentment, as a type he had not as yet sized up. Neil suspected that Pemberton probably thought the Frenchman another gigolo, because he was sleekly groomed. After dinner Pemberton slouched up from his seat and mumbled, "I'm shoving off. Want to sleep." As he walked away his gait was lopsided as though he was crippled in his left foot. Just as he got to the doorway he swang his shoulders back and forth and danced on his feet, making a shadow boxing gesture with his fists. Then he was gone. Neil offered the Frenchman, Marc Gautier a drink.

"I can't sleep yet. Can't anyway, probably, but I need a drink," he offered.

"Were you in the war?" Gautier asked.

"Not on this side. Pemberton was. He was wounded, I think."

"He is a <u>boxeur</u>, isn't he?"

Neil chuckled. "I don't know. He goes in for it as an amateur. He's always shadow boxing, but maybe he's only boxing shadows that exist in his mind. I've never known a professional who did so much shadow boxing in public as he does. He's young."

"Here," Gautier said, indicating his brain.

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He sat, heavy shouldered, and lethargic with an ennui rather
than because of physical lethargy. His frame was athletic;
there was a sulLENness and intensity beneath his ennui,
nevertheless. "You bore yourself too?" he asked Neil
after a silence. "French people make me disgusted. Do you
feel that way about your countrymen?"

"No, and not about a good many people. I like people,
even if I don't like persons, or I do if I'm not in a bad
mood."

"I only want now to know Americans. They live."

"Cherish the idea then, but they're not so different as
you may think beneath the glitter, for you, of foreignness.
They're just more people."

"Vous etez tres sympathique," Gautier smiled over
Marm white teeth, revealing boyishness beneath his tired-
worldliness. "You are -- what -- abandonee -- not at all
careful."

Neil smiled back. "Have another drink. No, I damned
well am not careful enough to have more practical sense. But
activity is better than brooding, isn't it?"

"I wondered whether you were as bored as you look."

"That's physiognomy. Mainly I don't let boredom obsess
me. I drink."

"I feel empty. It is too much to feel more, and as to
thinking, I have given that up."

"Really, or did you ever think? Maybe you only brooded."
Neil gr

280

"I was a dadaist, once. Now --" Gautier shrugged his shoulders.

"Hell, you haven't become unremittantly resigned, while retaining a splash of temper. As dadaism is nothing you weren't taking an attitude then."

"But what attitude is there to take, to believe in. Could you be interested in politics? Could you have revolutionary ideas? What is there to believe in?"

"I don't know. To the devil with beliefs. Christian, social, political, economic. I'm bored with movements and leaders and great men, but we live."

Gautier made a helpless gesture, as of a man nerve-shattered. "I like being drunk. There are more intersecting planes."

"And more splintering lights, with the consciousness in a world of varied if distorted forms, with bodies and flesh moving about.. The are illuminated moments. We ought to insist upon remembering them more, when sober."

"But life is a disease."

"Yes, but with each of us our own particular kind of disease."

"I knew that as a little boy, in school, nights I cried myself to sleep I hated it so. Yes, cried," Gautier said this with naive emphasis, as if it were not to be believed. "I am too bored for that now. I would like to tell you something, to know if you disapprove. Why I am going to Berlin, away from France."

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"It isn't my business to approve or disapprove. Tell me, if you wish."

Gautier hesitated, for emphasis, before saying, "I am a thief. I want to tell somebody who does not know of me to learn if I am all wrong."

"We are all thieves and liars in some ways, and it might be a catastrophe if we weren't."

"I was drinking, two years ago, with a friend who was rich. We went to his home. The family was away. I found two thousand francs in his pocket and took it, believing he would think he had lost it. He knew though. Only two days ago my father found out that I had stole. He talked to me, and wept before me. That was upsetting, for him, my father, to weep. I said I would never do it again. He wanted me to go away and lead a different life, out of Paris. Later he may have money to let me go to America. He is a detective. To him a thief is worse perhaps than to other men. But I do not judge myself at all. Was I wrong?"

"I would not try to say. How rich was your friend? How badly did you need the money? What were the circumstances? And mainly, how do rich people get masses of money? Always honestly, do you think? Call it the past and forget it. If you don't feel conscience you may do it again. At least, I haven't an opinion."

"I wish you were stopping in Vienna."

"I almost might, for a day."

"And I would go on to Berlin with you the next day."

Neil hesitated. "We'll see in the morning. I won't if I have a hangover or feel restless. I would, but without

232

drink we might bore each other. Sometimes I can buck up
other people's spirits, but I can't if I feel low myself.
Why don't you stay on the train on through to Berlin. Broken
journeys are a bore."

"But you have friends there?"

"One, maybe, but I'm only going for about ten days, to
do some newspaper articles, and to see what's happening. It
would be nice having companionship."

"Well then, we will say you stop in Vienna or I go
on to Berlin, as we feel in the morning."

"Good," Hell said, getting up to go back to his
berth. He sat wondering about Gautier who had, without
speaking of it, given him the sensation of being on the verge
of suicide. The man wasn't, quite at least, a gigolo, and he
was likeably direct, with a muffled despondency. Pemberton
came into the berth for a moment.

"What kind of a guy is that Frenchman, Cam?" he asked.
"He's a dopehead, isn't he?"

"I wondered. Probably, but that doesn't mean much these
days with a lot who are around Paris. I liked him. Why
in hell wouldn't anybody who was eighteen when the war ended
take to dope. He's only twenty-four now."

"Those damned frogs aren't any good. He's too smooth."

"Balls, I like French **palîtasse** as well as I like the
American assumed hardboiled manner. He isn't any more able
to observe us than we are him."

"I don't like the way they assume we've got all the
money in the world. They expect us to pay for all their
drinks."

"That's not so uniquely French."

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Coming into a restaurant on Kurfurstendamm Neil saw
Chloe Andrews and Steve Rath at a table and joined them.
"You haven't gone on yet?" Chloe said, shaking a repulsing
finger at him mockingly.

"No, hell, when I do go back to England I'm in for six
months of the bloody town and family, if I don't decide to
break away completely. I planned to stay here ten days and
have stayed four months. That's not a bad record as plans
go for me."

Chloe looked tired. Neil knew she was worried about
Steve, who had been doing night life in Berlin extensively,
as had he. Chloe refused to believe, or admit that she
knew, how much Steve did get about, and the quantities of
people she took up with. "Do you think Steve looks Seedy?"
Chloe asked protectively of Neil. "The foolish baby. Some-
times when I look at her I think she is beginning to look
tough and fast. I could scream. She terrifies me when she
gets drunk. I think any day I'll hear of her dropping in the
street of heart failure."

Steve looked obstinately driven by Chloe's maternal
solicititiousness. She left the table, saying she was going
to visit a friend elsewhere.

"Steve doesn't drink so much, you needn't worry," Neil
said.

"Don't," Chloe said gruffly. "Neil, is that

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child taking snow, or some other dope." "

"Not much, if she is. You drive her with your
trying to mother her."

"I know, and I know too now that all I feel towards her
is maternal."

"Rot Chloe, be yourself. If that is all you feel you'd
be a damn fool to stand the suffering you do because of her.
She gets a kick out of disturbing you too. It makes her
think she's a worldbeating heartbreaker."

"She is. Every one that looks at her falls at once."

"Yes? I haven't. I like her but we battle when we're
likkered-up."

"You're the hard boy," Chloe grimaced. "What's wrong
with me? I believe I'm not fit for any life but that of a
hermit. I can't stand people. They make me scream. But
Steve can be just as happy with a chauffeur, a char-woman,
a street beggar, or any bar room bum she picks up. She sits
down and they tell her the story of their lives at once, and
she gives them the hard-earned money I make."

"You're too exclusive Chloe. As much as any one person
as you can stand would drive me crazy. It's too bad you
can't vary more. There are lots of people mildly interesting,
and almost nobody so wonderful that they're worth concentrat-
ing on exclusively."

"But look at Steve. Did you ever see anything more
beautiful in your life. The first time I saw her I began
to notice, and I haven't been able to stop since."

"So I've observed. You let her observe it too much too."

"You and Steve don't seem to like each other any more."

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Steve and Hugh Greenwood are the same type, and the
type is riling me now. Steve knows people by the hundreds,
but if she thinks you are even casually interested in some-
body else she gets petulant on you. Hugh tries the same
thing with me, but I call him. The only reason Steve went
away is because she thinks you and I get on too well, and
because we've known each other before she came along she can't
justify herself if she kicks about your being chummy with me.
Hell, the other night I put my arm about a girl, and Steve
batted my arm away, saying "keep your hands off her. She's
my girl." I told her to go chase herself, but she does like
to claim everybody she likes as her exclusive property."

"Neil, you don't suppose Steve really goes with anybody
but me. Everybody tells me I'm a fool not to know, but she
tells me everything. She's just a baby. She's just ready
to drink with and buy drinks for anybody."

"You know Chloe, as well as I," Neil evaded. "I've
never seen her sleeping with anybody else, but then I don't
follow her to find out."

"I suppose I'd stand for it if I knew."

"So don't know. She bates around gregariously more than
anything else."

"And she's such a weak baby."

"And you drive her to drink pulling that tone on her."

"I know," Chloe began collecting her wraps. "I'm
going on to Freiburg tomorrow, to do an article on twilight
sleep. I suppose I'll see you in Paris before I go back to
the states."

"Probably. I go back in about a month, to stay for only

286

a few days though."

"I ran unto Gautier," Hugh Greenwood said, coming
up to the table when Neil was half ways through lunch.

"How does he look? Disappated? As He's been doing
the heavy social for a long time."

"Sure, he's out to marry some woman with money."

"He'll get there too."

"What do you see in that simp," Hugh saidulkily.
"He's pretty pallid."

"He doesn't have to be babied all the time. He doesn't
talk of destroying himself, and when I get drunk with him I
can enjoy my own drunk-ons. You act pathetic to get sympathy,
and then you're bitchy because I don't want you dragging
lousy bores to my rooms."

"You aren't off me as much as you think you are," Hugh
said gaily, smiling to tantalize Neil.

"But I'm off Berlin night life anyway. To hell with the
goddamed dope dives and dens. I may not suffer such a change
of life as to give up drink when I leave Berlin, but I'll
lay off dope and will get some work done."

"You don't understand anything. I like kidding you,"
Hugh said. "You're so damned serious you need to be jostled
into being a human being."

"Balls to you, boy. I'm wiser to myself than you
think; wise enough to call a halt when things have been
lousy for too long a period. Don't take my education upon
your shoulders because you have a job on your hands."

They left the cafe and started down the street. Neil
was angry at Hugh, who the last two months had not worked
at his job as cabaret musician, and had borrowed money and

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maneuvered continual drinkings parties. Neil did not know
what to say, because he knew but for his emotions as regards
Hugh he would not have stayed in Berlin. He knew too that
he would have drunk as freely without Hugh, but he would not
have suffered rebellious and jealous torments. His mind
strained to break the obsession that his emotions had for
Hugh, but he found himself too completely in the same state
of minds as Chloe was in regards to Steve. In his case
however there was not the compensating belief that Hugh was
beautiful, or marvellous, or even talented. There was only
the fear that held him that if he didn't take care of Hugh
nobody would, and he wanted him. Hugh sensed a brooding
fury of gloom in Neil and walked along silently, now unable
to twit his companion.

"I guess you are fed up with me," Hugh finally said
humbly, but his voice was wistful. "I won't go back to
France with you. I don't do you any good."

"I don't know, I'm damned if either of us is worth
a fart as we are now and I have had moments of thinking I was
somebody."

"I'm no good."

"For Christ's sake, lay off that line. It isn't you
any more or as much as it's me. At first I resisted what I
felt, but once I really knew the emotion had me I was the
aggressive one about drink, dope, and schotty emotional scenes.
If you'd lay off the talk about destroying yourself it might
help some. So much as life matters a goddamn either of us

288

has as much ability to make it interesting as anybody."

"You think you're precious and rare. It's been damned good that you've suffered a little over somebody," Hugh said, gloating.

"A few more cracks of that kind and I'll knock you for a loop," Neil answered, grimly humourous now. "You bastard. Where do you get the idea that you can tell me what's good for me? "

"You never act human."

"Thanks for the compliment. If you represent the human give us machinery. Because I don't get off with half of Berlin doesn't humiliate me."

"You're a damned cold fish. You don't know what it is to have a feeling about anybody," Hugh said, and as Neil was silent for over a minute, he added, "Do you? You don't give a damn about anybody, do you?"

"Oh, I thought you were bright enough a boy to take on my education. If you don't know whether I have a feeling about anybody, you're not so alert. But I'm going up and see Gaylord, and alone. We'll probably run unto each other later in the day."

As Neil continued down the street he heard his name called, and turned. At first he did not recognize the faded and tired looking blond girl addressing him; then he saw that it was Sonia, Bing Tower's girl, of Paris.

289

"Mister Cameron, I am so happy to see you," she said, breathlessly. "I want to ask you to help me. Have you seen Bing, Mr. Towers. He went away three days ago, saying he would be back in the evening. I haven't seen him since. He did not leave me money, and I am so worried. He was cross with me, and I know nobody in Berlin."

Neil did not know that Bing was in Berlin, or where he was. He himself was short of money but he wanted to offer Sonia a little. She took it, feverishly anxious, and continued pouring out her helpless lady tale. Bing had been drunk one night and had struck her; he said he did not want to marry her, and didn't want to live with her anymore. What could she do in Berlin? She might play as an extra in the movies, but until she got started, what could she do.

"Give me your address and I'll let you know if I find Bing," Neil said, hoping that she would not weep too hysterically until he could get away without being brutal. "I know his friend, Elkins Geylord, and may locate Bing through him."

"That man," Sonia said, "He tries to get Bing to desert me. He gets him to drink and stay away from me. Please make Bing come back to me. Mr. Geylord is a bad man for him."

"I can't make Bing do anything, but I'll see what I can do," Neil said, and retreated. Heading towards a booming house on In den Zeiten, in the Tiergarten, he went to Gaylord's room. Gaylord, dressed in a black suit, was in. He looked much the bon vivante, the river-boat gambler and lothario of the 90's. His loose, froggy mouth blubbered greetings to Neil, burlesque comedianly. His huge, brown-goggle eyes

290

had now a haunted, beseeching look. It was obvious that he
had been drinking. Bing was in the room next to his
Elkins informed Neil. He seated himself on a chair, and
his small paunch of a belly relaxed towards his knees as,
wine glass in hand, he began to bemoan the lousy state of
his health, of Berlin conditions, and of the ghastly state
of civilization in general.

"Do you know Portugal, Neil. That's where we should
go," Gaylord diverged. "I was reading in the paper they
still don't wear shoes there, even in Lisbon. They must be
pretty balmy. The real primitive. None of this lousy stuff
we get shoved on us here. Types. Have some wine."

"We might venture into Portugal for a sightseeing trip.
As I feel now I'd start a bunting trip around the world on
a half moment's notice. I feel decayed and fed up with
everything," Neil agreed. "A little roughing it would do us
all good."

"Can leprosy be once?" Gaylord suddenly blurted forth,
holding out a hand before his eyes. He rubbed the hand.
"It scares me. I'm frightened. I know it's a complex, but
when I've been drinking I always get a terror of leprosy. I
saw a loper once. Don't leave me alone."

"Hot," Neil solaced, "you haven't leprosy, and it's
definitely curable now, I understand. Stockbrokers Get
to that piano and pounds out some songs. Backwater
Stackalse, Willie the weeper, Frankie and Johnnie, or
something sad but tough. I'm low as hell. Where's your
brandy bottle. I don't want wine."

"There's whiskey in the cupboard," Gaylord answered.
"Let's have

291

dinner together. To hell with Bing. He wants to dish his broad. He's in front of his mirror quoting Shakespear or Landour to himself. Oh boy, sorrow doth pierce him in every gaping wound. He's bought himself a black cape and struts his petty day before his mirror every hour. That boy's the melanohely kid himself. Oi, oi. Give me a shot of that whiskey too." Gaylord began, with company, to feel gay, and did a yiddisher ballet dance, with a coy entrance, a stumbling exit, and a sweetly-frivolous mailion's bow.

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
to the last syllable of recorded time;

sounded dolorously from the half open door of the adjoining room. Heil want to open the door wide. Ring Towers was scrunched up on a chair with a copy of Macbeth in his hands, and watched his gestures in a mirror as he recited eloquently.

"Hello Ring."

"You Heil. I say, this guy Shakespear wasn't a bad writer. Him and Landour both."

"And all our yesterday have lighted fools
the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Ah! Fool that I am," Bing struck his forehead, and then mournfully buried his head in the folds of a black cape which shrouded his small figure. Tragically he lifted his head to gaze with sad brown eyes into the mirror that revealed him to himself as a figure of epic tragedy. His hair flopped greasily about a brown face, and his mistache dxappux drooped without discipline.

292

"Stop croaking the raven Bing and have a drink with us,"
Neil advised. "I come, a harbinger of greetings from Sonia.
She's on your trail and sent me to retrieve her absent
cavalier."

"What ho. What says the damsel? By the way, she is a
bitch, a bit too much to bear, that hunk of flesh and lean
lank hair."

"She says you've deserted her, leaving her penniless.
After a while she admitted having a few marks and a Russian
friend she could stay with, but she sent me to retrieve her
own true love."

"Dastard. It was you who introduced the wench to me."

"Bulls. I was talking to her and her mother, or that
older dame, just to improve my French. You had to come up
and get romantic. You begged for an introduction when I
didn't even know their names. Your trials are on your own
head."

"She's a lusty wench. She don't let me step outside the
house without telling her when I'll be back, and it has to
be within an hour always."

"You'd better slip her fare back to Paris though if you
are through with her. You brought her here."

"Scoundrel, suggest me no such suggestions. The
wench followed me to Berlin. I thought I was rid of her, but
she turned up. It is marriage she plans for me. What ho.
Merry, merry, no, no, I shall not marry. I haven't the kopex
to give her anyway. I had to find Gaylord to borrow money
from him, and he is plunkety-plunk broke and flattened to
the pavement."

293

"Dearie, keep the towel wet.

Holy Jesus, ain't you come yet?

Cause it's the last time

I'm going to wrinkle up the sheets with you.

Say guys," Gaylord sang, and said, coming into the room,
"let's finish up this whiskey and go to Gus' beer shop and
have gangebraten and red cabbage. If we're all as broke as
we say we are we can stand up the meal there. Bing's broad
can wait till tomorrow for him to quit Shakspear and return
to her downy couch."

"Not me, not me. I've been twice caught in the damsel's
clutches, and she cracked me on the onion with a hairbrush the
other night. There's a German guy who'll take her on. I
give up. Weara, weara me, there comes a tide in the affairs
of men which if taken with plenty of drink gives a man
right hearty courage, cheerio."

"Here's the rest of the whiskey. Drink up and let's
out into the night. I leave tomorrow night so I'm ready to
get well oiled," Neil said.

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"Neil darling, I have so longed to see you," Hilda started her tender mechanical wail as soon as the train had left her at Theoule. "Rome was vivid and hectic for a time, and then it was too, too awful. I was miserable, and angry at myself that we hadn't met in Berlin as we planned."

"I was there," Neil answered.

"I know bless you. But you understand. One took up with people one had hopes about, and the thought of Berlin was something of a devastating fancy too. Your notes did tell me it was grim. After the dullness of London, I did hesitate. But now I actually have felt and suffered boredom. Why must we come back to these longish periods. Something must happen. I am not alone in feeling that. But it is good to see you."

Hilda's pinched face was white and her maquillage was badly applied today, but as they started down the road to the hotel a kilometre away her stride took on elasticity. "And Theoule, will I like it, Neil?" she queried, a dismal will-to-mirth in her tones.

"I have liked it. You may, for a time. But we might as well resign ourselves to being wanderers. The hotel is high, with a huge, glass-encased dining room that overlooks a great vista of sea. The food is sound."

295

Hilda caught Neil's hand and arm to press as she swung
along closer to him. "I am so glad we are together again."

"Yes, and I'll show you my sculpturing."

"Not really, you aren't sculpturing," Hilda chortled.

"Hell no. A kid idea: Every morning I walk along the
beach and pick up stones for their form and colour, and plan
to give a dada show of sculpturing the sea has done. It will
probably be censored as obscene. It's great here, morning,
and I've liked being alone, but when the mistral blows it's
disintegrating. I go crazy night times, sitting in front of
the fireplace."

"And your writing?" Hilda was brightly interested.

"I've done volumes of first draft work. Whatever else
it is, it has given me a kick. Anyway, after Berlin, I was
fed up with seeing people and wanted to be alone. Hugh
Greenwood came here with me, but didn't go on the water wagon.
I did, pretty much, and we fought, so he went back to Paris.
After two days of adjusting myself to being alone it was fine.
For taking long walks, watching the fishermen, and being just
a seaside vegetable or mineral without too many complicated
emotions."

"I could walk miles," Hilda sang. "Let's do, and have
a real hunger for dinner. I do some some good ordinary yin
du days too."

"Before the fireplace, when night chill has come on.
We'll be the only guests in the hotel. Every morning the
femme du chambre brings me mimosa or some flowers with my
breakfast. After three months I'm an old friend and star

296

boarder."

They walked past the hotel de la Terrace. "It is wonderful, wild and stark," Hilda said. "Why haven't I known of this place before. This bit struck me as too savage to attempt, except with somebody one can endure. It's so good you're here. This wonderful road."

"It winds up for miles, and you get a great view of sea and coast. There's a Robinson Crusoe patch and a tunnel basin down the beach, if you're ready for some climbing up and down. Crags, and caves, with the sea sweeping in. There's one huge rock that might be an archaic skyscraper covered with sea mold. Let's go there. The fishermen may be drawing in their nets. Afterwards we can go to the bistro and play the mechanical piano and dance with the fishermen."

"Neil, you angel," Hilda said, her driven voice stifled with lushness. "I don't know how I'd have gone on the last few months if I hadn't you to write letters too. It has been too ghastly. Why is life so awful, or why does one have to feel it so?"

"Hell, it seems simple when you watch the people in this village. If it is awful, let's not be indecent enough to remind each other. We bitch it up ourselves, some. Just keep on walking. There's a wind now to break against, and the taste of the sea. To hell with breaking against our own frustrations."

Hilda laughed with sharp gaity as she strode on, electric, deer-gaited, and lean. "Things aren't so bad, I can tell you, as they were a few months back." There was no rueful plaint in her voice now. She had taken on hardness and wildness

297

as she swung into a steady pace up the mountain path. They both felt healthy animals covering space with a tireless lope. The atmosphere braced them. Far below was a small peninsula, to be reached by climbing down the crags.

"It's a steep climb, Do you mind?" Neil asked.

"Of course not. I must get to the top of that skyscraper rock." Hilda's eyes were chilled blue, with a wild abstraction in them. Down the path they saw a group of fishermen pulling in a net, rhythmically. "We'll see what their haul is."

The net came up and the catch was mainly of sea-pulp, sea dogs, a few small octopus, and small fish. "Pas trop grand," Neil said to one fisherman, wondering how these men lived on the small catches they seemed always to get.

The fisherman shrugged his shoulder and answered, "Mais pas toujours. Une autre fois."

"They're sweet. I love them," Hilda cooed, of the fishermen, as her eyes smiled into Neil's. "I love them, just for being. They are. What do we want of people?"

An older fisherman was cooking fresh sardines or whitebait in a frying pan. Seeing that he was observed he flipped the pan, and the whole mass of small fish flopped over, efficiently. "Pas mal?" he chuckled, turning to have Hilda and Neil admire his competence. Neil left Hilda, and went to hunt in shallow water, around rocks, for sea urchins. Minnows swarmed away from his hands. He looked up, hearing Hilda call. She stood two hundred feet above him, on the peak of the skyscraper rock. The wind blew her garments into the thin curves of her emaciated body. Yes, she knew she looked

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effective there. She felt herself being free and wild.

"I see," Neil called back. "I'll come up, but I want to get some **nursing** to give to the fishermen." He did not care whether the wind drowned his call. Hilda was not the only person who had climbed to the top of that rock, to feel conquest because the scabreeze swept through her. The sea, rolling over the earth. The sea, a mother, a ruthless force, a maw, a monster; the sea, and the aged, ever-giving, ever destroying mother earth; nature, and time, and nature knows best. To hell with literature and sublime ideas and the cosmos, and to hell with Hilda. She didn't mean much to him at the moment. Neil yelled when his hand clutched a sea urchin too forcefully. He wondered how much fishermen got for octupus, or sea urchins, and how they managed to live, have families, drink wine, get drunk at bistrots.

Hilda joined him after a time. "What to hell, Bill. Let's go! and toss a drink into us," she said merrily, mimic-
ing Neil's and Gerry's drunken manner of talk. "You devil, I feel devilish. We're two bitches together. It's nice, nice. I'm glad it's you and I who are here together."

"I think we can be less happy towards each other away from cities, and people. We cramp each other's style, each wanting to corner more attention than the other allows."

"I won't believe that I'm different than other people," Hilda said. "Once I might have been faithful. I almost believe I could be yet. Do you want you and me to have a longish try at a relationship together?"

"You wouldn't have married your husband if you hadn't had a lech on him. You and I would be

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together if we wished it. We both wander off with somebody else when we're among people for any period. Hell, there isn't any solution."

Madame Camille was working in her tiny kitchen, back of her bistrot bar, when they came into the place. Three fishermen, and two gardeners from the American's chateau down the road were loitering over pennots. At the one little table sat Marcel, and Greta, a young Frenchman who lived in a villa down the road with his Serbian sweetheart. Neil greeted them.

"These young men," Mme. Camille said as she came buxomly to serve the newcomers drinks. M. Marcel is leaving us for Paris. You young men are never tranquil. And the weather only now will become beautiful."

"Paris," Neil gloated. "Jesus, Marcel, don't make me restless too. When do you go on?"

"Tonight."

Greta's plump blond face looked dismal. Obviously she had been weeping. Through three months Neil had observed that Greta, well over thirty, made frequent scenes on Marcel, who was not yet twenty. She wanted marriage. He wanted to travel. He had little money and had heard that Brazil was a great country for penniless young men.

As Marcel was drinking an aperitif Greta departed, to run down the road, declaring that she wanted to be alone to think. Marcel grimaced pathetically. "It is difficult to know what to do in the life," Marcel confided. "Sometimes I feel it is best to marry her, and then she may let me go. She makes more money than I have."

$00

"She's staying here while you go to Paris, is she?"

"She does not wish to," Marcel was discouraged.

"She says that she must go to take care of me."

"Why don't you say you're staying with your family."

Marcel looked worn and hopeless with childish uncon-
viction.

"What to hell boys, let's have another drink," Hilda
said gaily, laughing at Marcel. "She may get enough of
wanting to take care of people, some day. I've had enough
I can tell you," she confided the last to Neil.

"Yes, I get you," Neil answered, <u>unknowingly</u> "but also,
I have watched <u>that look</u> develop on your face a good many
time, when you began to get one of you major, or even minor
leches. Lay off Marcel. He's a baby. Greta has given him
enough trouble for the time-being. Come on to dinner."

"Hilda and Neil went across the road to their hotel.
"He's nice, but too young. But that weeping, horrible,
woman with me made me angry. Don't you suppose we could have
him come in for coffee, after dinner. We might walk to the
station with him. He hasn't that bored quality, yet, that
one encounters, everywhere, it seems."

"I'm no partner to the scheme. Greta would turn on me.
Besides, don't be a serpent in our Eden. You need rest from
your neurotic and erotic excitations. But I can't stop what
you do, and won't try."

"Neil, bless you, you are understanding. Of course, we
won't bother about that boy. It was only the periot that
made me feel a fanciful, almost pre-war youth and gaity again."

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The maid brought Neil three letters in the morning. One was from Roscoe Wallace commenting that "realize that should any of the financial transactions between us become voiced about it would be to my disadvantage." Neil felt irritated, and amused too, at Wallace's obvious guile for their had been no transactions financially between them except his cashing post-dated checks for Wallace that he'd never had hope enough to present to the bank. A second letter was from Katherine, who worried that he hadn't written to her mother, that word of their not being together might reach her family because he was so much about Paris. The third letter was from his own elederly mother who wrote him a sermon on God and good, and trusting in Him who only could give design and reason to life. Neil climbed out of bed, his mind a kaleidoscope of innumerable memories, and his emotions neutral within him. He was shaving when a knock sounded on the door, and at his call, Forest Pemberton bolted into the room.

"Hello Cam," Pemberton said hurriedly, and disturbed about something. Neil greeted him distraitly, still not lively minded. "Here's that can of opium Elihu said to get you," Pemberton said, and almost banged a can on the mantle piece.

"Is it prepared?"

"No, it's raw."

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"Hell, I don't know how to cook. I wouldn't take the responsibility of giving that to Bozo. If anything happened there'd be hell to pay for all of us, possibly."

"I can't involve Olive, you know that Cam.," Pemberton said, apologetically explanatory.

"Hell no, and I won't involve myself. Leave the opium and if I run unto anybody who knows how to prepare it, we'll se." Neil's tone was curt, but with tiredness. He wasn't thinking much of Bozo or of Pemberton. His mind was intent on his forthcoming trip to England, and the dully cemented Morn family environment there.

"I'm going," Pemberton said, and banged out of the room. Neil felt a resentment at the way Pemberton banged the door, as though he has implied that Bozo's problem was anymore Pemberton's than his, or that it was actually either's problem except as either accepted it.

At the Dome where he was having breakfast coffee Neil learned from a model that Bozo Watts was back in his studio, and that his concierge was threatening to send for the police and have him taken away if he kept making so much noise.

"Hell, if they put him into an asylum in Paris he won't get out, and they won't bother to let him lay off the dope gradually," Neil said to the model, a tubercular looking little English girl, daughter of a jockey and just another quarterite who managed to exist in ways that would be well nigh possible to explain.

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"I helped get him to the American Hospital yesterday. I will again today if you like. Bozo doesn't distrust me," Mae volunteered.

"Come with me then. He's suspected people of trying to poison his food for years. I offered him hot milk once and he wouldn't touch it. But someone has to make an effort to get him taken care of. I'll damn well tell the American Hospital that he's an American citizen, and that they know an opium fiend can't stop taking it short. They have to take care of him. They hate venereal and dope cases, I know, but sick people are sick people whatever they have." Neil said.

Bozo's studio was reached through a long passageway leading into a courtyard, in the corner of which, up a flight of rickety stairs was the studio door. Upon it was written in chalk, "Hot humility but scorn." "That's Bozo dope cult religion motto, is it?" Neil laughed to Mae. When he knocked on the door a frightened voice asked, "Who's there?"

Without waiting to answer Neil entered. Bozo sat on his unmade cot in the midst of a messy and tiny room. Bozo was sallow and lean, with faded eyes that now had a frightened look of distrust. "It's you is it," Bozo asked. "You're after me too."

"Elihu tells me you're feeling rotten, Bozo," Neil answered. "He goes on to Italy today and asked me to come and see you."

"Who's that talking outside the door? Who came in with you?" Bozo challenged.

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"There's nobody but Neil and me," Mae persuaded.

"I heard somebody call me a dirty skunk. Was it you?"

"Nonsense Bozo," Neil said.

"You have always been against me. Why? I've never done anything against you," Bozo accused.

"Bozo, I know you only by sight and we haven't exchanged ten sentences together. Why would I be against you. You just feel rotten and have ideas. Maybe you'd be happier for a few days away from this studio. It's dismal and damp and needs cleaning and drying out." Neil solaced. The studio was filthy. Cobwebs were on the ceiling. Musty heaps of old clothes covered by newspapers set in corners of the room. Upon the walls were written various phrases, in Bozo's hieroglyphics. About the room, in piles, on shelves, and on the dusty trunk top, were various books on the occult, Buddhism, magic; books of Chinese poetry, and lumps of Bozo's own verse in black shiny notebooks. Various figures having significance, no doubt, to Bozo, were drawn upon the wall.

"No, I don't want to go away. They took me to the hospital yesterday, but I came back."

"I know. You see they don't keep you there, but you are nearly delirious. You need to be taken care of by a doctor, to get strong again. We only want to help you."

After much persuasion and because of Mae, mainly, Bozo finally consented to return to the American hospital, to which the three then drove in a taxi. At the hospital the matron was severe and complained that Mame Bozo should have been brought them a third time, since she would not

371

stay," And could not be held by force under French law unless
declared insane.

"Can't he be called merely delirious."

"I don't see how we can take your friend in," the
woman said austerely. Neil was angry.

"What is this American hospital for, and why are there
continual appeals for money contributions, if you don't care
for American invalids. He's not particularly my friend, but
he can't be let to wander about alone in his condition. Let
me see the head doctor."

"He is busy."

"I'll get in touch with the Embassy then and find out
what responsibility you have towards this case. It's a serious
one. I understand that without treatment, soon, his heart
might burst."

"I

"I am/have no responsibility," the woman said. "I can
do nothing.

"You are an employee and I'm not interested in what
your responsibility is except as the Hospital presumes to
take care of Americans needing treatment."

The woman looked as though she wished to throw Neil
out on the street, but a Doctor appeared, and got into the
conversation. After much discussion the Doctor and the
woman superintendent grudgingly agreed to take Bozo in for
one more night and to attempt to keep him there for sufficient
number of days to treat him. Bozo was put into the hands of
a comely nurse, who handled him as though he were a child.
Her casual cheerful manner quelled Bozo's distrusts.

"That's an institution!" Neil commented as he drove

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away. "If Bozo stays it will be only because it was great luck in the nurse that she was assigned him. She has a damned good manner with patients. Why in hell though must they put old vultures like that female at the head of every institution which has to do with health, religion, orphanage, or education. If her veins don't flow with carbolic acid, I'm a liar. I am, but not such a liar as that."

At four o'clock Neil was again sitting on the terrace of the Dome, before a glass of beer. Few people were about. A funeral procession passed down Boulevard Raspail, with its inevitable followers trodding after the two main carriages, and conversing sociably as they walked. The procession was long enough to hold up the traffic on this corner of eight streets. When it was by the dazzle of traffic splintered in the bright air, and was vertiginous to the eye. Neil restfully waited for something to happen. Before long he saw Sari Goldberg coming from the rue Vavin. She came to his table, her wax-smooth face distorted with young sullenness.

"How goes it, Sari?"

"Horrible." Sari complained. "I have no money and I have no appointments to pose for three days. I am sick with it. It is no fun having to be *une femme du monde* when I am only a child. You will buy me a drink? I want to get drunk."

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Sari was a sixteen year old Polish Jewess, brought up in Hol-
land, and left by her father within the last few months.
With an older sister she managed to survive, somehow. Her
eyebrows were pencil lined. Her large, exotic eyes, were
exaggerated by lavender maquillage, and her skin had a
smooth pallor which gave a ivory figurette sensation. She
ordered gin fizz and after drinking some felt relaxed.

"Hoh, I am angry at Nella. She always gives me advice to her little sister, Sari. If it weren't for me she would know nobody. People do not like her. She thinks she can play the intellectual lady, but she follows me like a little dog on a chain. I would be better alone. We do not help each other, and we are jealous."

"Can't you chuck her?" Neil sympathized, tickled at Sari's combative child worldliness.

"Oh, I am comical," Sari exploded. "Merde to having no money. I want to dance. I am young. Take me dancing. Take me to the Boeuf. I want to get drunk, dancing." Sari was insistant with youngness.

"Sure, we'll get a taxi," Neil agreed.

"I am happy now," Sari said, and danced as she got up from the table. "What do things matter? But I will tell you something. If I hadn't found somebody to take me to the Boeuf I would have walked there."

"Why?"

"Nella, she is fou. She tells me I should not become
une femme experiments unless it makes me rich, but she never
has feelings. I tell myself it is not so, but I am always

374

terrornee if I can not meetax somebody, Eduoard Bossard
at the Boeuf, every day. We like each other."

"Poor Sari, have you already started? But he's
Andre Clerval's boy. Does he like women too."

"He likes me," Sari was grimly triumphant. "But
Andre gives me the frights too. Some nights I know he follows
us to Eduoard's hotel. I am afraid that he will see that
my passport is examined, and that I can't stay in France as
I work, and have no money. But also he is afraid of displeas-
ing Eduoard."

As they started to enter a taxi Maimie Garnett came up
to greet Neil. He told her to get in and come along.
"I've news to tell you," Maimie talked. "I've run unto a
rich old American dame and I think she'll buy one of my
pictures. What ho!" Maimie chattered on, full of plans for
knowing new rich, or titled, people, selling her masterpieces,
finding somebody new to buy her drinks. Maimie did not
believe in slumping. Within any twelve hour period she was
apt to play a repertoire of English types, from titled snob,
new rich poseur, refayned county, hearty barmaid, down to
garrulous and gunned up old char-woman. Her resistence to
poverty and hard luck and her eternal capacity to expect and
to create new hopes for herself was amazing.

At the Boeuf the two piece orchestra was playing when
they entered. The coloured violinist showed his dazzling
white teeth in a smile of greeting and played with greater
abandon, as Sari was a marvellous dancer and appeared much
at the Boeuf. Soon Sari was content to rest from dancing
long enough to have a gin fizz at the bar.

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Soon the Boeuf was full of young men and women off about the town, and in their varieties of writhings under the name of dancing they so crowded the floor that Neil gave up; and as Edouard Bossard arrived and was talking intently to Sari Neil and Maimie Garnett talked. "I've had luck. That rich American dame asked if I was too proud to accept an evening dress that she didn't like. I look the swell in it too. You must take me to the hill some night soon."

"I suppose she thinks you'll paint her portrait for less then," Neil teased Maimie. Her face looked glum for a second and she ordered another cocktail.

"I know those people. I was silly not to ask for a deposit before starting the portrait."

Edouard went out of the place and Sari came to stand by Neil. "Il est fou," she said despondently of Bossard. "He tells me Andre if furtieux at me, that Edouard should like a woman. He is more jealous of me than of men. He is afraid of me. I don't care. I want to get drunk."

"You can have dinner with me, Sari. Edouard may come around to the quarter later in the evening if he can give Andre the slip."

"But Nella will be there. Always she follows me like un petit chien. Why does she not have her own friends? Now she has followed me here."

Nella came to the bar from the doorway where she had been talking to Jacques, a friend of Edouard's. She was plump and blond and slant-eyed, and effected the same sort of wax like make-up that Sari used, but her presence was dull. She

376

emanated a white worm like sensation and tried to act the
sympathetic woman of the world. Sari was capable of running
starkly into trouble through her emotions. Nella was a
calculating but lazy Jewess. Shrotly after Nella's arrival
Eduard Bossard returned, looking determined. He and Sari
talked quietly together and finally departed, with Nella
trailing after them. She had managed, Sari whispered to Neil
before departing, to be asked to dinner with them and Andre
Derval.

"Let's go back to the Quarter, and have dinner at the
Stryx," Neil suggested to Maimie. "You need a drink to
snap you into higher spirits."

"Yes," Maimie was philosophic, "I was thinking that I
do get it in the neck, but I have higher moments than most
people; higher than my damned family would have helped me to."

"Are you having hard luck now?"

"I may tell you later. It's going to mean a change in my
life, but it means too much to me now. I must have another
drink. I did felt angry this morning. Had a letter from pop
wondering what I was doing with myself. He never worried when
I was young."

"Family letters have a way of upsetting one's subconscious."

"Well, I was through with my old man when I was sixteen
and that was some years ago. One day I sat on the pigsty, and
I was a wise young lady even then. I sat and planned out my
life. Dad had booted me. I saw it all mapped out before me
and I wasn't romantis either. I knew what I was up against.
I knew I could draw and that pleased me. If I'd seen far ahead

377

I wouldn't have been so pleased, but what was happening to
me then couldn't continue."

At the Stryx they ordered hot wine. It was hot and sweet
and spicy. Its pungency curled insinuatingly into the
brain cells, so they had a second glass. "I have a hunch that
it will be a gay night in the Quarter," Neil was hopeful.

"Dearie," Maimie began to talk cockney, narrating, "h'as
I was telling you, it's this way. H'lm in trouble. You know
how it is with us girls, what love does to us. Look at that
mark on my arm, and see here," Maimie lifted up her waist,
"there on my back is another mark. I'm marked all over."
She looked worried, but enjoyed this chance to exhibit her
scars also. Chuckling bitterly she continued, "The way it
kime about is this. I hear that a man is canoeing from Le
Havre to Rome, and when I sees a huskie, I says, what ho, that's
the man, and I was right. I always spots me bird. It was
him, and he thought I was a little bit of all right, and so
I says, come on then. And 'e came along. Just my luck, he
hand't any money and 'e borrowed off me when I had or could
gets it. And now he's put me in a family way for a daughter
or a son.

Silly girl was I not meaning any harm,
Climbed in beside him to keep that sailor warm.

And it comes to this. One night I has no money when 'e wants
money. 'E gets drunk at the bar off of friends I'd interduced
him too, and when he comes to my hotel he says I'm a hell of
a woman. Got no sympathy for 'er man, I hasn't, and first
thing I knows he was beating me up. I crawls downstairs,
thinkin' I'd evade him, but he comes outside and bangs me
against the hotel walls. But I gets away. And the next day I
'ad no more to do with him. That's the kind of man 'e was,

378

dearie, waiting for money to take his canoe on to Rome and
beating me up because I couldn't get money for 'im."

Maimie thought for a time and gloomily mumbled to herself,
unable to think the right of the matter. Again she exhibited
her battle scars. "Well, h'I 'ad sez to sim, you can sleep
alongside me sir, sez the fair young maiden. But I si, we'll
'ave another o' them red hot wines. Right cheering, I calls
them."

"And you'll manage to be out of trouble in the usual way
Maimie?"

"He,he,he," Maimie tittered thinly, having come to the
stage of drinking where she kept repeating stories and phrases.
"And 'e sez I 'ad no sympathy for a man when I'd kept him for
a month. He, he, he. Not sympathetic sez 'e, and 'ad 'e
ever bought me a drink. Not 'im."

"How's your work going?" Neil asked, wanting to chuckle
at Maimie for her sorrowful glée in her troubles. She might
however as readily weep as titter.

"To bloody hell with my work," Maimie said vehemently.
"I paints, and I paints well, but does I sell it? What ho. Not
much. My work can take care of itself. He sez I wasn't
sympathetic. He,he,he, whatcha think o' that buddie."

Neil saw Terri Garden going through the hallway and was
going up to greet her when Maimie stopped him. "Wait a
minute. You don't know the half of what's happened in Paris
since you left. Miss Garden is that grand now. She comes
up to the Dome in a taxi one day and says, haughty like, to
the garçon. "Payez pour mon taxi." When Norah and I get
through calling her for the Ritzy line in our

379

Quarter she decided not to tell the garcon to pay for her
taxi anymore. But she'd out you if she knew you had that
little Goldberg with you this afternoon. She's that bitter."

"Why?"

"Haven't you heard. Well, Miss Garden tries to suicide
herself one night, with veronal, but she gets scared and sends
for the doctor. Veronal isn't the best way to do it. Terri
was that romantic about Edouard Bossard, when along comes
young Sari and goes off with him, and Terri says to Edouard
that she doesn't meet gutter snipes or models. So young
Bossard rather tells her highness that he doesn't think her
so much and that she's bored him for two months. And since
Terri has taken up with a sculptor and charges clothes that
aren't likely to be paid for, and she's too elegant to come
into this quarter except to slum, y'know. But we know too
much about her to let her get refined on us."

Norah Parson rushed into the Stryx to embrace Neil. "I just heard you were back. Where are those drinks you're going to buy me. Lesley and Logan and Helen Gardner and the whole town is out tonight. They're coming over. What's that you're drinking," she sipped out of Neil's glass.

"Gardeon, encore three of the same chose, toute suite. By Jesus, Miss Parsons is going to get cock-eyed again tonight."

"Don't start off so heavy we can't do the hill if we
feel like it," Neil advised.

"No, goddamn it," Norah swore. "It's about time that we descend on Lottie Plant and tell her she's got to come through with that negro pajama party she says she's going to stage. She says she'll put me in the tub and cover me

380

with enough champagne to make Earl Carroll look like a piker."

"Te, he, he," Maimie tittered, "it will take champagne by the barrel rather than by the bottle to cover you." Norah looked disdainfully at Maimie, and recognized orthodox drunkenness, and as she was still sober she nobly forebore to curse Maimie out. At moments of sobriety the two ladies were little wont to show to each other how much each valued the legend of being the Quarter's queen. Before long the Stryx began to fill with guests, most of whom were known to each other. Another rampant night of long and heavy drinking was on.

233

14

Old man Campbell had come back to Betti's and sat aside with Neil, to whom he had something to say. It was to ask for a loan of money, subtly, but as he'd been drinking he got to it directly. "Always drink this and you'll never have a sick head," Roland explained thickly of the red _likk Chianti_. "It's my special wine. It is spirits that are poison."

Neil, already feeling leaden stomached from the dust in the red wine, ignored Campbell's remark and said, "If you're fed up with Italy, why not try France for a while?"

"Can't stand it. The French, in their way, are as bad as the English. Claim to have logical minds, but that's bosh. You can see it in the way they handle their colonies. Dirty places, French colonies. These Italians are stupid but they have emotions, and they're goodlooking. This country has been the seat of great civilizations and it will be again. You have to get away from the cities to get the best of Italy; go where tourists don't go. I can't find young boys I like and dare take up with in France." Campbell grimaced, leering, but too thick-witted with drink to make his remark light. "By the way, about those two women -- funny creatures -- Katherine and Daphne. How do they happen to be together? Strange combination."

"They like each other," Neil answered curtly, not wanting Campbell to discuss his own relation with the two women. "I'm ready to get back to France myself. No love

234

for Italy in me, and my interests aren't in history, or grave-
yards, or old and past things. Rotten as what we have now is
I'm in for it, because it's alive, even if it's stinking."

"It's the fachisti who bother you," Campbell surmised.
"They should be strung up or locked up. Some good looking boys
among them too, if they knew what they were good for, I have to
get away myself. A man must have a little freedom." Neil
was uncomfortable as Campbell moved closer to him and put his
hand on the back of his chair. The old man swallowed, of
flesh, of wine, of old age that was not too clean. Neil
wondered whether Katherine had no fastidious sense whatever
that she could be so intimately fond of Campbell as she declar-
ed she was; or was that only another of her myths, to prove to
him and Taphne that she was a daring, unmoral, go-ahead soul?
She spoke so significantly, indicating secret depths of mean-
ing about there being "understanding" between them.

"I'd better join the others," Neil said, to escape.
"Said I would wander about the town with Drayton."

"Humph, well, I'll visit the house I spoke of. Don't
think those people and I like each other," Campbell answered,
and was gone soon after Neil moved to the table with Ballorme,
Gerry, and Mrs. Pemberton and his wife, Olive and Forest,

"You don't like me as well as you did," Olive Pemberton was saying to Mike Ballorme. She was pouting, trying to seem flapperish; it struck Neil, and surely she was years older than her bulky milk-maid skinned husband who gazed out of wax-doll brown eyes with a surprised, ready-to-be-hurt expression,

236

"How dell," Forest Pemberton placated his wife, with an over-solicitous manner, "Mike's just feeling good with drink. You know Mike's a swell guy. Of course he likes you. He's just talking to these new guys. We're all swell guys."

"Oh, beery papa," Olive sighed, "you always try to make me think everybody likes me. I know Mike's a swell guy. I just know though he thinks I ought to let you men be alone to go on drinking."

"And why not?" Gerry Drayton said largely, looking ironically irritated.

"Featherkitty, you know Mike and I always like having you drink with us. We know you're one of the swell guys. We all know there's so many sonofbitches in the world, we won't act that way ourselves."

Olive was nearly tearful, but somehow the wail of teariness in her voice struck Neil as affected; as did her husbands exaggerated terms of affection. Everybody was too swell a guy, and their "featherkitty" and "beery papa" names for each other rang strangely on Neil's ears after conversation with Campbell, Maizie, and Gerry, all of whom were hardboiled to an abstreperous degree. "Let's have another bottle of wine," Neil suggested.

"I'm no illiterate bastard who can't use more than ten words of four phrases to say what I have to say," Gerry Drayton announced out of the silence for reasons only known to himself.

"Well, pipe down," Neil answered him. "Youre like most painters; you have a constipated vocabulary and more

236

emotions or emotions than you know how to speak of intelli-
gently. But talk doesn't get us anywhere anyway."

"Who to hell are you, you bastard?? I'm nursing a pack
of resentment against you and I'm just drunk enough to tell you
about it. You're all right. I like you. I know you got a
brain and are a good friend, but you talk to me as if I was
an ignorant sonofabitch that hadn't been to school and didn't
know his own horseshitty language."

"Drink up and dry up," Neil responded. "You're drunk, but for Christ's sake don't began pulling that old aggressive line on me. I thought you were one bird that didn't have an inferiority complex, but you have to began farting around getting abusive and defending yourself before you're attacked. You're not so tough."

"What you trying to do, intimidate me, you bastard?"
Gerry combatted on. "Hell, I know you don't bother about
being a swell guy; you don't ask or give a damn who likes you;
you make them like you if you like them, and if you don't you
tell them to chicken-shit off. But I hate your guts too. Your
tastes on some things stink, but I do have to say your ideas
and morals are your own. You aren't one of the boys who have
to read the ads or consult somebody to know if you're doing
what the right people expect."

Forest Pemberton's red loose mouth puckered bitterly,
and he looked aside towards Gerry with a small boy snarling
glance, sure that he was being attacked. It was obvious that
he antagonized Gerry and Gerry, speaking, as he thought subtly,
to relieve his emotions, was sure to turn finally upon him and
speak his mind. Olive Pemberton fidgited and made signs at

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her husband who spoke.

"Come on featherkitty. Let's shove off. You're tired. There isn't any use our trying to talk up with these guys; they've been drinking ahead of us. We can't compete with drunk guys." Forest shifted on his chair, indecisively. He wanted to get back at Gerry; he didn't want trouble. SI'll pay the bill." He hesitated and protestetd when Mike Ballorme said he'd get it later if Forest and Olive wanted to go on. "Hell Mike, you're always staking me for drinks.® He allowed himself however to be persuaded that Mike would pay for their drinks, and mumbling about being short of money for the timebeing departed. As Gerry was slouched back in his chair watching with his cynical, appraising, fish eyes, Forest didn't bother to shake hands goodnight with anybody. Gerry's gaze was ironic, challenging, and patronizing too. Clearly he wasn't in a state of mind to retreat in any argument that might take place.

"What nice people," Gerry commonted as the Pembertons departed. "Just to love and ducky, featherkitty, and whoops baby, does papa love mamma! I can size that guy up. Every-body he can use is a swell guy and everybody else is a son-ofabitch, and he's just a naive clean-minded young American who can't get to know the people who will give him a start in life soon enough. Just a sweet-natured boy. He was in the war too. It's too awful what that war did to all the nice young men's lives. If he hadn't been in it over here he would have been President of his hometown booster club by now. And such a sweet wife. Everybody/is too dear and sweet. Dear, dux dear, oh dearie me. Carmekitty, bring me some whiskey quick."

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Maizie was leaning back in her chair, her face fiery red, a dead cigarette hanging listlessly in her hand. She looked dreawily at Gerry, and gradullay smiled her illumined crinkle, and shortling, staggered to his feet and put her arms about his neck. "Hell Gerry, you think you're a tough guy too." Almost at once she crimpled back into her chair and was asleep. No efforts on the part of the three men would waken her more than to procure an indistinct mumble. None of them knew surely what hotel she stayed at, or in which room, if she stayed at the Baglioni.

"Hell, I'm going to stay out most of the night," Neil said. "Let's get a taxi and take her to my room and dump her on the bed. I can tip the porter if he's there to object. Maizie and I slept off a drunk-on together on the news year's eve in New York when we first met. There couldn't be scandal about anybody as mummified with liquor as we were, and are now, and to hell with appearances in Florence or anywhere."

"She's going to pass out of heart failure," Gerry surmised grimly.

"That's rouge, look here, white," Neil argued, wiping a part of Maizie's face with a wine soaked napkin. "Maizie's got a stronger heart than any of us."

"On to the hotel then and let's get back to another bottle of wine, and visit a cathouse. See how they are run in Italy. To hell, I can't sleep now. We might as well tell each other about our gut-aches; We all got them mentally. This damned country's going bourgeois too, with the

239

Fachisti telling all the citizens how to lead their lives.
I suppose even the wherehouses close here by midnight.
There aren't any theatres, or cabarets. What to hell is
there. Museums, and more museums, and of course my dear, you
must see this or that cathedral. Italy's a graveyard."

"It's great to be able to blame the bourgeois for
every misery in life," Neil commented. "You solve things
easily. Come on, get a taxi. I'll carry Maizie. She doesn't
weigh much more than the drink she's poured into her tonight.
I'm carrying more than that already."

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16

Passing the Café Moderne Gerry noticed Hilda Gay; sitting with an Italian. "She doesn't let herself be neglected does she?" he muttered to Neil.

"You don't care anyway, do you. Give her time and she'll do all the literary men in Europe. She may begin taking on painters, having given you a try."

"Hell, I don't take her seriously. She has to be amused. Where'd she get hold of that box of paperclips?"

"That's Braccio, the dramatist that was at tea this afternoon. I guess he'd met her somewhere."

"Hell, he looks pathetic, wistful. She has to amuse herself. After keeping him a while, petting and cajoling and brushing back his black locks, she'll decide he's just another Italian. He's probably quite a romantic figure for the ladies, and she falls for pathetic manly poverty in a bitched up shattered Italy."

"Well, you don't care, so what of it. You say she's no good,"

"Hell though, I thought she'd picked you for her next find. She talked to me an hour after -- you know, after. Poor girl. She'll be hunting always, for satisfaction, for the man that has that ability to arouse her, to hold her. It's all psychologic. She's about as passionate, physically, as a piece of chilly liver. That's why she's hunting, I suppose."

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The men went down a side street and into a dimly lighted alley, where, further down, they saw a brighter light in front of a doorway. "We'll have to stand in line if we want to get in," Mike Ballorne chuckled. "It's like during the war, but the line's not so long."

"We just want to go in a have a drink and see the girls, for a onceover," Gerzy said.

Mike talked to the Madame at the door, who assured him that other men were ahead of them. They must wait. When he explained that they only wished to visit the house, to buy champagne for the girls and for Madame, she was distant. It was beyond her understanding. Why should men visit a bourdelle if not for service? They could see that four men were waiting outside the door until some of the girls were again free.

"Hell, let's go back to the Moderno," Neil said impatiently. "This isn't like France. Italian men haven't any sense of humour about sex. They do their fucking like they eat spaghetti, by the yard. The wenches in that house wouldn't be sociable and chatty the way they are in Marseilles."

Back at the Moderno Hilda Gay nodded brightly to Gerry when the three men passed her table. Soon she was saying goodnight to Braccio. She was tall, sharp, mechanical. With gay Abruptness she was away from Braccio, and heading towards the door stopped to say brightly, "What to hell? Still pouring it into you."

"You've had enough to feel like not sleeping too,"
Gerry questioned, sheepish mannered. "Have a drink with us."

"What to hell," Hilda brightly social mimicked

242

Gerry's breezy nonchalant American boy mode of speaking. He
"I don't care if I do. Who can step it. Sure kid, let's
toss a drink into us. What to hell, boys?" Hilda was tall,
skinny, with almost a bone-rattling look, still she was electric.
As she had walked sharply swinging across the room the silk
cord tassels hanging from her waist swung vigorously about her
thin hips and legs. Her pinched blond white face had a
metal luminosity; her pale blue eyes, rimmed with dark maquillage
did their best to look tigerishly intense, alert, and bright.
A bandeau held her clipped strawblond hair close to her head.

"And you, Gerry tells me you too, like so many of us,
find Italy just too devastating now. Too awful. What do we
do, all of us, with so much time?" Hilda addressed Neil,
gay-sinister-bright. "But no, there is no answer. Indeed,
how often one feels that about so many things. And what are
you drinking?"

Neil felt uncomfortable. Hilda's curt nod to Mike
when she had been introduced had negated him; and her present
so brightly sympathetic approach to him was disconcerting in
the light of Gerry's warning that she was sure to make a go at
him. He didn't mind, but neither he nor Gerry wanted actually
to joke about her, or to be rivals if either liked her too
well. If she chose to go out and get her men, gregariously and
without much selection, she wasn't more comic than men doing
brothels or taking on café tarts.

Mike Ballome looked diffendently at Hilda who barely
noticed him. Soon he said he was going home. "A tiresome
English army type," Hilda commented as soon as he was gone.
"I had my fill of them, during the war, I can tell you," her

243

voice wailed pathetically. "My husband was a guardsmen, a
filthy type. It was too awful, too uncivilized too awful, when
I stayed with him in a miserable barracks town. The ghastly
wives of the other officers; and the men's attitude towards
me because I would go about alone. As if their disgusting
attitudes towards a woman and what a woman can do disturbed me."

"I don't mind Ballrome. He's all right," Gerry defend-
ed, kindly placing, "You just got fed up on army men."

"You darling, bless you. You are so understanding," Hilda said quickly, casting a quick, penetrating, probing, glance at Gerry. "You American are kind, so much kinder than English men. Bless you. It's strange, but I do feel tonight that we -- just we three -- and we've seen almost nothing of each other -- but we are the sort meant to be together. It's perfect now, as we are, we three talking. I couldn't stand a fourth person; bless you both, you darlings," She held out her hands to take them both by the wrists and give them firm assuring pressures. "But now I must go on. I am so really, really, tired. But tomorrow. You will both have lunch with me tomorrow? Do. Come to my hotel, anytime in the morning, after eleven of course. Bless you. I wouldn't be up before, but just come up." Quickly, with a decisive staccato movement Hilda arose and stood swaying, arrogantly aware and trainedly indifferent to, the appraisal of various Italians about the restaurant. Then she swung with a long-striding swagger, across the room and through the revolving door.

"She keeps her days scheduled, I take it," Neil
surmised. "Hellfire, I bet her mind if dialogue indexed

244

ahead, with time allotted to the new lovers she intends to
make if she can. She doesn't like failure."

"Tag, you're next," Gerry grinned.

"It looks so. Poor Hilda. She's not a bad number,
only, having wealth she can get by with being hellishly
arrogant without knowing that it's not talent that keeps her
from being snooted."

"Let's polish off another bottle of wine and then turn
in," Gerry suggested. "Hell, I want to talk, and you're
the only bird around I can throw off on with any feeling of
freedom."

"I admit, we do manage to wander around together for
long stretches without wanting to kill each other. I'm not
good at being around much with most people."

"We get what each other's grunts means. We know when
the other's feeling bitched up. Hell, we don't have to talk
together when we don't feel that way."

"It sounds like love."

"Why not, you bastard," Gerry cursed, grinning and
then becoming serious. "Hell, it'd be a damned good thing for
both of us if we could solve things that way together, but
we can't. Some woman is always going to be bitching up my
life anyway. I love them, but they make a mess of things, for
me. I'm too selfish. I don't want to be possessed or
petted or faithful. It doesn't matter a damn what people
do about their sex if they can keep things dignified, but
personal relationships of that sort are so goddamed lousy,
generally. One bastard or the other has to be jealous or
picking at the other. But that christly puritan attitude

245

towards sex isn't any good. All that crap about being non-animal is blabbed by sonofbitches who damn well are more animal than any decent animal is, if they mean being filthy minded by their animal lingo. They try to make us scared of life, and then they want more people born to be scared of life so there can be more people to blow to hell in more wars. By the time I buried my hundredth stinking corpse, puking around in the mud, waiting for mydischarge, I goddamned well lost any idea that life as life was precious. Christ, I can smell the stink of some of those putrid corpses yet, and imagine that I'm stepping on a decayed body buried in mud; but where's that wine? I'm going to get drunker than hell. & Whale-shit, I'm no swell guy, I'm a carp, a sonofabitch. I pack a million resentments against everybody and everything. I wanted to baste that Pemberton guy in the mug with his patronizing crap about not being able to talk to us because we were too drunk."

"Hell, you just took a drunk antagonism toward him. He wasn't so bad; just another young-boy American. He was trying to live up to the extra years of his wife, I thought."

"Balls to him. I'd like to go dancing. I'd like to see some goodlooking women. Jesus, they treat their women like cattle in this country though. I'd like to be in France where a tart has some standing and hasn't eyes like a sick cow. What I like about you, now, is that you don't get optimistic on me when I'm in this state of mind. But we'll stand what we have to. Who to hell are we anyway?"

"Yes, but who's anybody else. Don't get humble on me. And let's clear out of this dump. Cammerieri," Neil called

246

out in a clear, impatient voice. The waiter came over and
Neil started to hand him a hundred lira note when a man at
the next table called the waiter. The waiter hesitated and
turned to the next table. "Here, wait till I've paid you,"
Neil said, resentfully. As though a button had been pressed
Neil, Gerry, and the man at the next table, arose. Before
Neil realized what was happened the man had struck Gerry in
the face, which was soon covered with blood. The waiter lead
Gerry away to the washroom. Waiters rushed in to separate
Neil and the man.

"You'd better be quiet or the police or the fachisti will
get after you," an Italian, in fair English, said to Neil.

"Shit on the police and the fachisti both," Neil said,
in a fury. "We don't have to stand for letting a man hit us in
the face for no reason whatever."

"Have you a passport."

"That's none of your goddamned business. I have, an
American passport, but you won't see it."

"This is a friend of mine, Gino," Neil heard and saw
Braccio talking to the other Italian. "He's in the right, I
am sure."

"Where's that bastard who hit my friend?" Neil
insisted, looking around and failing to find Gerry's assailant.
Various Italian men looked about, but the man was gone.

"I think he was an American," one of the Italians
commented.

"The bastard. It probably was," Neil hesitated, and
chuckled reluctantly. "Hope too many of your countrymen
don't understand English to have got what I said. I

247

don't want to be fed caster oil."

Gerry came back grinning largely, to explain that he had merely received a biff in the lobe of his ear which had caused him to bleed so freely. With Gerry's arrival and placating smile the sympathies of Italians who had collected were with him; they all wanted to locate his assailant; and willingly accepted drinks which Gerry swaggeringly offered them. Later Neil and Gerry swung out of the restaurant, arm in arm, bidding fond farewells to some twenty Italian men, all of whom agreed to meet them next day at cocktail time for a drink.

"Would you remember that bastard who hit you if he showed up?" Neil asked.

"I'd kill him if I did," Gerry swore.

"We'll keep our eyes pealed for him tomorrow."

"He had on plus fours. He didn't hit out like an Italian. Let's go to that damned cabaret and see if the girl I saw the other night's still there."

"Come on," Neil agreed, striding forth with unsure gait, holding each other up. In the morning Gerry awoke firmly first and put up the blinds. As he was going out for coffee he turned to see if Neil was awake. A mass of mattressy hair was on the pillow next to Neil's head, so Gerry discreetly slipped out of the room. When Neil awoke he looked with some amazement the the girl beside him, and when she awakened, suggested their going out for breakfast.

"Where did I get her?" Neil asked Gerry later.

"Jesus, I don't know. I thought you and me came home together, alone, last night, after leaving the

211

13

It was nearing seven, Daphne's nerve-insisted upon dinner hour, but Mrs. Forbes, a "vital and peppy old American dame" Katherine had gleefully discovered was still staying on over the tea hour. Daphne looked driven; Katherine thwarted, as Mrs. Forbes lectured on.

"You must get the two books I speak of," she said. "Full of meat; purpose in them. Helps you to find yourself. There is none of the cynicism so common to our generation in them." Her tan knitted hat nodded emphatically while her restless eyes peer out of her leathery countenance. "They emphasize the fact that marriage is a duty, to the race and to children, not to the man or the woman. There'd be no man or woman if it weren't for the children, no race either. The race is to the young," she was triumphantly gay over her witticism until she thought, "Of course they must be taught discipline. Self-control; to be fit members society, proper parents. Marriage?" there was a question in her voice, as though she didn't think marriage much to boast of, but she wasn't allowed to continue.

"How can intelligent people not be intelligent," Daphne Ware said, taut with nerves.

"But these books give a new value to religious experience. We should learn to adjust ourselves spiritually; to be able to give a hand to people less fortunate; to have strength for other members of our own family, at times. Don't you agree, I'm so glad I encountered you. Of course, in America we've gone

212

on from Monteserri, in education ---" Mrs. Forbes was actually
preparing to leave,

"Montesouri is a nuisam e. Her methods would keep a child
an infant for ever," Katherine snapped, grimly, while Daphne
hastened to get Mrs; Forbes into her wraps.

"That horrible female," Katherine said as soon as her
guest had disappeared,

"Don't say a word," Daphne shrieked. "You were wild with
enthusiasm about her yestetday; you asked her here. Again like
a little coward you made me suggest every topic of conversation
when she wasn't rattling off her sermons. I left America to avoid
people like her,"

"Help, help," Katherine begged. 3Brother monkey, Fido's
getting his tail bit." She said the last to her brother, Ben,
who was spending a month with her. Neil and Ben both laughed at
her chagrin. Mrs. Foster, Daphne's seventy-three year old mother
was pacific, but Daphne still scolded at Katherine who finally
bolted to wash for dinner. Soon her voice was sounding from another
room, as she instructed Beverly, Daphne's seven year old child.
"Now woofkins, where do elephants come from, Mainly? Quick now,
Hippe whip if you are dumb." Beverly evidently was dumb and cay
as usual, for Katherine's voice complained to the household, "It's
Montruez and the sticky old dama who tell woofkins she's a dear
little girl that make her act dumb. I wish I could keep them
from babying her." At dinner Katherine continued her persistant
picking and nagging instruction of Beverly who seemed to ignore
remarks made at her. The child merely squashed spaghetti in her
plate and when made to speak lisped, "I don't know," gaspingly,
not in fright, but teasingly obstinate,

213

"Now Katherine, not at the dinner table. Leave Beverly
alone for a few minutes. You've been driving her all day. She
knows you're not as fierce as you sound, of course," Mrs. Foster said,
a helpless tone of grandmotherly apology and giggle in her
voice.

"Hyacinth, don't you begin spoiling woofkins. I won't have k
her dumb. Woofkins, what people had the first known code of laws?
Quick, or hippo, hippo whip."

"I don't know," Beverly giggled and squirmed as her
Pekingese eyes twinkled obstinately.

"Hippo, hippo then. Why do you suppose I spent an hour
teaching you if you can't remember. I won't have you dumb."

"Leave the lump alone for a few minutes," Daphne said
sharply.

"I don't care. You gave her to me to educate and I won't
have my discipline interfered with. She knows. Answer quickly,
Woofkins."

"Sumer," Beverly answered, fidgiting and looked coyly
at Neil.

"It's easy to see that somebody thinks an awful lot of
somebody," Hyacinth Foster said sentimentally.

"Grandma, don't put silly ideas into somebody's head.
That's all right pet," the last to her child, "Woofkins hasn't
seen many men before, has she, and why shouldn't she like Uncle
Neil? We all like him."

"I won't have Woofkins dumb. She's to be my exhibit A
when I explain my educational theories. I expect when I'm an old
dame to stand on a platform and talk education, and then bring

214

her forth to show what my methods have produced."

"She won't be yours to use in that way if your methods have achieved results," Neil teased Katherine. "You can't expect individuals to waste time on the insects who helped them express individuality. She'll have her own ideas and talents."

"Woofkins, wipe your mouth. Don't be a baby. You have been taught to eat properly. Hippo if you act dumb," Katherine gloated over the youngster to exhibit to Neil her supposed authority.

"Katherine, I think you're terrible," Grandmother placed. "I know you're right, and you do spend so much time educating her, and she knows so much she frightens her grandma. But anybody hearing would think you are cruel to her. What do you know?" Mrs. Foster's tone was false-horrified, "this morning when I said something to her she answered "you're a liar," and when I told her she mustn't use that word she just repeated it. I think it's awful, and you teach her she should know how to lie to people. I do declare Katherine, I think you are mistaken about some things. I know you're the kindest little person too."

Katherine looked proudly at Beverly. "It is a good thing she understand early that most people are liars, and that any intelligent person must lie to the dumb horde, most of the time. I want Woofkins to be clever. I she is dumb I will give her the hippo whip, hard, hard, HARD."

Beverly left the table and went to the nursery room as her meal was finished. Daphne got up to follow and remove the napkins from the child's neck. "Giraffe, make her do it herself. Don't spoil my discipline," Katherine called.

215

Daphne turned in a nervous temper. "Keep still, do. One would think you were the child's mother. Can't you let me have a few minutes a day with my own baby. It is too much. I will go mad. You positively glout over having somebody to bully, but even the Lump knows that you can't do anything but play doll house with your life. Woofkins isn't going to have millions to act the spoiled rich-child tyrant all her life as you do."

"I don't care," Katherine whimpered, "I can't teach her anything if everybody babies her and makes her thinks she's doing what other children can't. It's as easy for her to learn history and languages and arithmetic as it is for her to learn silly nursery rimes and baby talk. Hyacinth and Moonie poor-baby her and tell her she's advanced, and she acts babyish. Every time I leave her for a few weeks she acts dumb. Why will people spoil children?"

"Oh you, you are a baby yourself," Daphne scoffed. "What do you know about education. She might learn to use her senses normally as an alert little animal first. Do you suppose all the infants in the world can have somebody with heaps of money spending it on every idea that occurs, I almost get jealous of her. Dalerose teachers, language teachers, horseback riding and swimming teachers, and books, books, toys, toys. I never had the advantages as a child and I can't recall being less bright than Woofkins is now. She positively talks like a three year old with her lisp. But I will speak to my own child when I want to,"

"Yow, you, puppy's having his tail bit," Katherine plead, as they all left the table to go to the front room. Heil stood

216

by the window looking out at the Ponte Vecchio and watching the
muddy water of the Arno flowing through the bridge. He felt pent-
up and restless; irritated as was Daphne with Katherine obstinate
child insistences and blanknesses. It wasn't any use thinking or
foolish
knowing he'd been/fatking to take on marriage with her, because
he wasn't bound. However, her requests that he write letters to
her mother, and keep wj the deception of always being with Katherine
oppressed him. Thinking of pictures in Florence, the Pitti and
Browning and other
the Uffizi galleries, of Dante,/nx poets who had lived there, he
wondered. Had the town for him now any glamour, or would it ever
have had?

"Florence is beautiful to look at now, with a muddy yellow
light over it," he spoke to Katherine. "I'll be glad to get on
to Berlin though. I don't like city Italians; feel like slugging
most of the strutting males who do the via Tournabona. If they
are the beautiful officers many American women rave about, I'm
blind. I suppose they release the girls to love, however, and that
is a service; except American husbands don't strike the ladies as
satisfactory loves afterwards."

"The Lee is restless," Katherine patronized. "The Leo's
American and has too much current of electricity in him. "We
will give him books to read. Daphne has a good many of the Greeks
in the Loeb library translation; try Athaneaus. He gives you a
marvelous picture of the age. The dissipations too." She was
pleased with her last idea.

"I don't need any Greeks or Elizabethans to tell me about
drink and dissipation generally," Neil chucked.

"And I have journals on Crete, Sumer, Ancient Egypt. I
think I'll give you lessons in Egyptology. I'm learning it, after

217

today. I can instruct more than Woofkins."

"I might be hard to use the hippo whip on though," Neil joked. Katherine's eyes beamed.

"I've always wanted to whip some men. I'd like to prove to myself that I was strong enough to whip a man; not you; but I'd like beating someonisly Englishman. I'll study jiu-jitsu when next in London so I can defend myself."

Neil chuckled, regarding Katherine/small almost bent frame, her posture like a duck, walk like a pelican, and hand gestures like a broken fingered baby monkey. "Aren't you liking to take on desires according to psychoanalytic text books. Old Doc Ferson may have done you wrong, putting ideas into your head," he said. Katherine seemed not to hear; so intent upon her own idea was she.

"I wrote some limericks this afternoon to help Woofkins learn hieroglyphics. I have three verses written now. You learn them too," Katherine said, taking a paper from a schoolbook. Neil read the paper:

> A is a hawk,
> remember too
> M is an owl,
> the quail is U.

> A leg and a foot
> are used for B,
> a simple square
> is put for P.

"You learn them. I'll type you a copy," Katherine insisted, not much at ease commanding Neil. Daphne came into the room to pour coffee. Fletcher took two cigars from his pocket,

"Don't give Katherine a cigar, Neil," Daphne said, "They are too heavy. Shall I tell you something?"

"Giraffe, I think you're mean, no, no. Please, Giraffe, don't tease the puppy," Katherine plead infantilely.

£13

"The little liar," Daphne continued, mischievously, "pre-
tends she loves cigars just to prove she can do what you do. She
was sick last night and begged me not to tell you. She tried this
morning to pretend that she had a germ."

"I won't be done by a cigar. I don't care," Katherine
puttested feebly, but did not insist when Neil quietly slipped
the second cigar back into his pocket, saying, "these are probably
heavier than cigars you're used to." Soon she leapt joyously to
Beverly's boom, declaring herself afraid the child would be playing
rather than going to bed. She was back soon, exclaiming:

"It's a naughty, bright, Woofkins. She says she will throw
me out the window and skin me and wear my skin at her belt. I like
her when she says things like that. I won't have her dumb."

"But Katherine, you really are too hard on her," Mrs.
Foster sighed as she carefully segged heavily into her rocker.
Forgively her tone apologized for herself, explaining that she made
a brave effort to adjust herself to the attitudes of Katherine and
Daphne.

"Hyacinth," Katherine reproved, "to shop with you are
wonderful. I wouldn't have anybody else in the world to go bargain
hunting with. You were marvellous in the bazaars at Constantinople;
you nearly beat the Turks and Arabs at their own game, and I'm Jew,
with the East in my blood. But you leave Woofkins to me."

"Why do you suppose she hates Delcroze and won't have
anything to do with the other children?" Mrs. Foster asked.

"That sister of yours, Moonie. She's an old hypocrite,"
Daphne told her mother.

219

"Yes, she disobeyed my instructions," Katherine scolded. "I told her how to handle Woofkins, but she did everything that had not ought to be done for a child. One time Moonie made Woofkins stay and dance at a party when she was afraid. Just as she was becoming a little individual and not one of the horde. She takes Dalcroze to be graceful and to know how to handle her body, not to be frightened by being forced to act friendly to children whose mothers make dumb babies of them. Why should she like the other children? She can't play with them. I'm glad Moonie is gone."

"Why, don't talk that way," Mrs. Foster gasped protest. "My sister, my own, dear sister."

"Hyacinth, you're a hypocrite yourself," Daphne told her mother, hysterical voiced but amused. "You know you hate your family. Don't lie. Moonie's an old ghoul, a poor relation, a hanger-on, a simpering, smirking, self-sacrificing, snooper. She is a leach, a corpse layer-out. She's been the family death bed attendant for forty, sixty, six hundred years. "Dear Harold has gone to his rest," of "Poor Edith, the end is near," or "Dear Charles will never return to his researches.' She drives me wild. She hangs around waiting for news ofxxx that some member of the family is near the end so that she can do him up for the coffin. Family, family, family. How did I ever escape, or have I escaped? Great Uncle this, grand uncle that, dear sister Roberta, Cousin James, Brother James, Auntie Hyacinth ---- don't pretend to me you like the family any better than I do. You smirk and smile but you never wanted the family to stay together anymore than I did. You're over here with me because

420

you have more freedom from family than you can get it in America
with any of the others. One or two of us had a little guts and
got out but the rest are ghouls, hypocritical pretended martyrs.
They sit decaying inside themselves, but they not only decay
themselves, they question my life. Don't "dear sister Moonie"
me. I nearly went mad when she was with us in London." Daphne
end with a shrill and prolonged shriek of laughter.

"Daphne," Mrs. Foster defended weakly, "I do like my
family. How can you say such things?"

"Bosh and tosh," Daphne said, broadly calm now. "You
know you take delight in staying here to torment me, and to be
free."

"I'd go tomorrow if I thought you didn't want me. It won't
be long at the best," Mrs. Foster responded firmly, her lip
trembling as she righteously suggested her end.

"Hyacinth, you'll outlast us all," Katherine soothed,

"It's a sign that your vitality is at a high ebb when you
intimate the end," Neil sympathized,

"But Neil, you won't turn against me? You won't let
them say such things to me?" Mrs. Foster quavered, a befuddled,
unimoginative, old lady, quite pleased to be the center of
attention. She loved being teased.

"The times I saw Moonie she said she never touched
liquor, but she took her hot whiskey punch with the rest. The
stronger it was the more cheerful it made her,"

Mrs. Foster gasped helplessly. Daphne leaned back to
shriek with laughter, as she sputtered, "Poor, dear, Hyacinth.
Of course you love your sister, --- away. Yes, yes, away,

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away off away. Poor dear Moonie. Do you remember when you were
ill last fall? She was so hopeful that she might have a chance
to prepare you for the coffin. It was her hope that cured you,
I'm sure. When she came into your room mirroring, "dear sister
Hyacinth, and I have seen so many of them when the end came," you
got up and walked. You haven't been sick since. You are an old
bluff, Hyacinth."

Mrs. Foster sat, hands resignedly folded in her lap.
"Now Daphne, I do try to keep up with you. I do try to talk to
Woofkins as Katherine says I should. It's very difficult. I do
think she does wonders for the baby, but every minute-- of
course the baby knows Katherine doesn't mean it, but her voice
sounds as though she was driving the child."

"Katherine leaps to education with a rocky mountain goat
agility, but she hasn't the infant fooled," Neil declared.

"Good for you," Daphne cried. "Katherine is a bluff and
you caught her bluff at once. If she ever whipped the lump as she
talks of doing. But when the Lump really needs discipline it is
me who gives it to her. Me, Me, And Fido comes running to ask my
help. The infant knows it. It's Katherine who is dumb, not
the Lump. She is delighted when baby yells, "I'll kill you. I'll
kill you." I don't want my child to talk that way. Why should she
be taught to dislike people who Katherine condemns as the horde,
without daring to know anybody. Who is Katherine? What has
she ever done except cling to ideas and people who keep her from
having to face experience or things as they are? She's
afraid of everybody and always wakes my help when somebody with more
wit gets her cornered. Now she thinks she has you in the same
net. If she had ever had to work to live she might talk of

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the horde's failings, but she's afraid of individuals who don't pamper and pet her.

"Giraffe, you're mean. Don't bite the puppy's tail so hard," Katherine whined.

Daphne brooded, her long body slumped into an east chair, her slender long legs stretched towards the fireplace. Her blue dress against her blue chair neutralized the form of her body. She began fingering the small glass ball which hung at the end of a black silk ribbon about her neck. Looking keenly at Katherine her face crinkled into a smile and she laughed, "Poor, dear, little Katherine. Did she have her tail bitten? Somebody has to do it, and Hyacinth won't, and Neil isn't interested enough to bother. I know you mean well, you sweet innocent." Daphne's tones were warblingly tender and sympathetic as she got up to go to Beverly's room.

"Don't pet Woofkins tonight," Katherine called down the hall in a shrill and ineffectual attempt to be tyrannical. "It's a naughty woofkin. Woofkin, remember, Hippo� was the father of medicine? Say the name. Hippo, tomorrow, if you don't remember," Katherine subordinated and took Princess Nephila, the Siamese cat, upon her lap. Nephila didn't feel affectionate towards Katherine, who handled her ineptly. Suddenly she clawed viciously as Katherine tried awkwardly to tickle her belly. Katherine howled.

"It serves you right," Daphne said, returning to the room. "If you will upset Nephila's dignity by asking her why she doesn't have kittens, when you knew from the beginning she was a gentleman, what can you expect. One doesn't ask that question of Royalty or of gentlemen."

223

"I don't care. I bought her to be the wife to Tiger, and she acted amorous with him. I wanted to see what Siamese Kittens are like. I thought Tiger was letting that grey cat get too attentive to Nephat. It's too much. I never get anything I want."

"I won't have the cats the center of conversation again tonight," Daphne scolded. "It's too ridiculous. They scramble around, and we sit like mindless, giggling, fools. You know Neil goes on to Berlin soon; entertain him. You take your fancies to people and then want them to entertain you, while you sit blank as a stone wall, if you're not talking baby talk to Woofkins."
Daphne caught Nephat and held him upon her lap, where the cat soon cuddled, contentedly purring. "See, even Nephat knows when a person understands her."

Katherine looked up from a book she was burrowing into. Her eyes were expressionless but she exalted delight. "Yow, yow, a great piece of meat, Dynamic theory of history. That sounds good to Vido. The listen of the words."

"What does it mean?" Daphne asked indifferently.

"I don't know, Ask Neil. He's American."

"It means the author would be good on advertising and newspaper headlines that don't mean a hell of a lot."

"I glanced at the chapter before dinner, but what I got was, like my understanding of relativity, vague," Katherine said. "I wish you'd explain Einstein to me. Somebody said you explainedigelously."

"When I'm drunk I probably do. Time and space certainly alter then. It's a safe subject to explain anyway, because

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nobody can catch you up."

"I'm convinced," Katherine argued, "there's nothing so bad as letting information remain in the hands of so-called specialists. They form schools and formulas and then close up tight. You ought to do an article on relativity for the mob."

Neil laughed nervously, "and get chased into a corner by a real mathematician? Don't be naive. The mob doesn't need convictions about the subject any more than about gravity or evolution. Anyway, I'm not the person to explain for the mob."

"What a depressing outlook," Katherine mourned, "You and the giraffe are twins. You will believe that everything happens inside. I won't have it that way. One can change things."

"Hot, you handle Nephat and get scratched and howl for help," Daphne said, breezily. "What is, is there. Take it or leave it. You couldn't change anything. You run to somebody, me or Neil, as soon as you run into the slightest barrier. If it's about money you run to your father. You can't even handle that. How can you change things if you can't take care of yourself and what you own. Nonsense. You'll always have to be taken care of."

Ern; Foster, not listening, looked at Neil and asked, "Beverly wanted to know today why you didn't come in last night to say goodnight to her. She said she wouldn't be dumb anymore. She asked if you thought she was dumb, and doesn't want to be with you." Hyacinth beamed with half-shamed grandmotherly pride.

"Hyacinth, don't spoil the infant by getting sentimental, One Moonie in the family is enough," Daphne remarked, "I won't have the lump getting ideas that people must pay court to her. Why should Neil stay and talk with her? She's only a boring little girl. He's nice to bother ever to say goodnight."

225

Mrs. Foster giggled in helpless self-defense, running her hand across her face to conceal her giggle. "I was just telling Neil how Beverly adored him. Don't take me up on everything."

"She isn't the only one adores him," Daphne shrilled. "You are as coquettish as a silly girl whenever you hear him's coming in to dinner; because he wears trousers. Poor Hyacinth. You do have a time of it. I have to keep her disciplined," Daphne told Neil. "She will slump otherwise. She makes me do everything to keep her interested. Why don't you make friends with a few of the old dames about, Hyacinth? Ask them up to tea."

"Why Daphne," Hyacinth faltered, "I don't want to. They would bore me."

"Bore you?" Daphne shrieked. "You would bore them. Do you think you don't bore us? There are some very nice people around. I don't ask them in because I can't take the responsibility of knowing them, and having them interfere with my work. I come here to dig in and write such bits as I can out of despair and ennui. I have to. I am lazy. It's my inheritance. But I can't use my little energy keeping you amused."

"You are lazy," Katherine blurted forth. "If it weren't for me you'd propagate infants into the world without an idea of how they should be taken care of."

"That isn't fair," Daphne wailed. "How did I know he would leave me, when he sobbed and sobbed at my suggestion that I avoid having the baby. His baby. I'm proud of having had her. It's the best thing I've ever done in my life. He'd have managed my divorce for me and would have married me. I'm proud I said so. But I needn't be proud. I didn't want him. I wanted freedom."

226

"How did you think the baby and you'd get taken care of
in London, during the war?" Katherine began her questioning
pursuit. The shatter of neurotic combat began its vibration. Neil
wished he were away from the two women, possibly they liked each
other and got a cat-love satisfaction out of their attacks on each
other, but it was uncomfortable for him, for Lyacinth too, he
supposed.

"You might be fair," Daphne parried. "Tom said he'd accept
the child as his until it was too late. Then you saved my life."

"And if I hand't?" Katherine was ruthless.

"Naturally," Daphne said simply, "I suppose I should have
died. I had influenza, the doctor as much as said that women bear-
ing children were of no value during the war crises. I was afraid
I might produce a boy, who might later be blasted in some war,

Don't nag me. I wake nights seeing all of those healthy
beautiful-limbed, clear-eyed, boys, marching, marching, to
war to protect the miserable money-made securities that are
all you know how to respect. Tom was shellshocked, and you
condemn him without knowing him, actually. Still you talk
of adventure. Don't speak to me." Daphne screamed more than
usual, passionately hysterical.

"And if you'd died where we worked, we'd been,
Katherine pursued with questions sternly as a vindictive prosecutor.

"She would have died too. But you did come along; you
did see that she was taken care of; don't think I will apologize to
you for having had the lump. I did what anybody who ever has
guts does, I went ahead. Didn't I rescue you from that hellhole
of a museum museum where your mother and father, you say,
stiffled your life. But I know now you always clutched at your
mother. She had temperament. She wanted life, rather than a
musty little rabbit hovel. Now you clutch at me and the lump

226

"How did you think the baby and you'd get taken care of
in London, during the war?" Katherine began her questioning
pursuit. The shatter of neurotic combat began its vibration. Neil
wished he were away from the two women; possibly they liked each
other and got a cat-love satisfaction out of their attacks on each
other, but it was uncomfortable for him, for Kyacinth too, he
supposed.

't nag me. I wake nights yet seeing all of those young men,
se healthy, beautiful limbs, blue eyes, you know, men's limbs,
being/... don't talk to me," Daphne was screaming above usual.

"And if you'd died where would Woofkins have been."
Katherine pursued with questions sternly as a vindictive prosecutor.

"She would have died too. But you did come along; you
did see that she was taken care of; don't think I will apologize to
you for having had the Lump. I did what anybody who ever has
guts does, I went ahead. Didn't I rescue you from that hellhole
of a博物馆 museum where your mother and father, you say,
stiffled your life. But I know now you always clutched at your
mother. She had temperament. She wanted life, rather than a
musty little rabbit hovel. Now you clutched at me and the lump

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in terror that without us you can't have life otherwise. You can't
cope with people or facts. Oh, I shan't retreat from you. You
never dare; you had Neil's life investigated, by detective I
think, to be sure he wouldn't trick you, or get at your father's
miserable money. If baby and I had both died we would have done
something decisive anyway."

"Birth control," Katherine started, but Daphne's shriek
shattered her comment.

"Stop, stop, I shall go mad. You are an insane little
coward. You leave me nothing; neither the miserable little
intelligent ability to re-make a life for myself; nor my emotions;
and all the world has for centuries been trying to make emotions
appear unclean. I wanted once only to regain the simple tenderness
of my nice animals; to hurt nobody; to help some in the little
way I could. I wanted later to believe in poetry or art or in the
intellect, or in beauty of some kind. Must I be crucified by that,
by you, you, who say that the world torments you. You with your
little level, your plans ahead for years, for yourself and me,
you belong only to the same my God! capitalistic brute type as your
father. You want me blinded to my right to my own life and my own
manner of destroying myself if I wish. Leave me alone a few hours
a day. Step degging my footsteps. I am wild. You object to every-
body I know and like. Leave me alone. Go away."

"I'll make a whiskey punch," Neil said, pitying both
Daphne and Katherine but not knowing what to say or do. Again
they would rehearse the past indiserations of Daphne's life; and
Mrs. Foster hearing, did not seem to understand what was being
said. She was so calmly sure that Daphne should, and would return
some day to her husband; didn't hear to note that Beverly was

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child of another man who'd deserted Daphne as soon as she was with child. The hysteria of Daphne, the calculating, ferreting pursuit of Katherine, and the meek unawareness and dumbness of Hyacinth, made him want to laugh foolishly at the slapstick comic pathos of this circumstance. Katherine followed him into the kitchen.

"Help, Daphne is being difficult tonight," she said. "Because I told her I wouldn't have her knowing some mangey Englishman she met on the train. She does get excited about the most awful people. She doesn't understand Englishmen."

Neil, reflecting that Katherine's horror of the pursuing male came possibly from the fact that no man had ever really tried to woo her, answered, "I don't blame her. She's right to feel oppressed when all the backwash of her life is swept before her conscious eternally. We make mistakes and have our right to forget them in our own way."

"I don't care. She doesn't know how to take care of herself and Fido doesn't want to share the Giraffe with the horde. She's as wonderful to me as she was when I first saw her, four years back, but she will like the filthiest people. I can't understand you Americans."

"Do you want her in a harem. If you think she's wonderful why not take her as she is? Daphne wasn't born to have isolated obsessions or infatuations for just one or two persons. She's gregarious and sociable. She has nerves too." Neil talked, sure that Katherine hadn't nerves and didn't realize what they meant to either him, or Daphne. With a feeling of oppression he realized now that Katherine didn't want freedom or release; she didn't want to escape her family; and Daphne was probably right, she was and would remain terrified of knowing people for fear they might use

229

her.

"A letter came from Mother today," Katherine diverted,

"Good or bad news?"

"Great yelps, because I took Dora Harper to mamma's hairdresser. Apparently Miss Harper talked democracy or socialism to the barber. Barbers and servants are the worst snobs in the world, but she thought democratic ideas would please him. Now mamma says she can't go to that hairdresser any more. She won't have my friends talking their *mommies* weird ideas to *mommies* her tradesmen."

"Servants and barbers and mamma and English in general are great snobs, I take it. The butler sets the manner for the table of life of mamma then. The good old roast beef of old England," Neil said, feeling caged and wanting to be rude. Katherine's mother had been the daughter of an illiterate farmer, if Katherine's tale was to be believed.

"And dada evidently again suggested that he'd have a higher title had he not married her, and if I hadn't been born before their marriage, One would think he has enough real power to be very satisfied; they all know-tow to him about most things that interest him."

Neil called Ben Morn from his room, where he was playing with his small theatre. "If you really intend to have your first whiskey tonight Ben, come on in." Ben arrived in the front room with a preoccupied air and started to talk about his theatre at once.

"Ben," Daphne scolded sharply, "you've been on that silly play for two weeks and you haven't done anything original except play with cardboard figures; Let's not talk theatre to-

230

night. I'm sorry to be cranky, but after Katharine today, I can't stand any more of Morn manias and concentrations on an idea that has died twenty deaths."

"I saw Amy Todd on the Via Tournabonna this afternoon," Neil changed the conversation. "Said I'd see her later and we'd try a dance or so at Renoli's."

Katherine sat up with a glitter in her eye. "I'll look her up. Of course I can't see her in London. She's too weird to be seen there, but she amuses me. She tells the most amazing stories, all lies, but they're screamingly funny."

"Why not know her in London then and be amused there too, or must London be reserved for boredom. That's no luxury," Neil commented.

"Last year I used to devote one hour every morning to Amy. She generally was in bed, and so was Frank. He was always suffering from a hangover. Amy, one day, greeted me in nothing but a bright green corset. I pretended not to mind, and got the brandy bottle before her, but Amy was trying to fascinate me. I did laugh."

Soon Ben Morn was pretending to be intoxicated, but Neil had put little whiskey into Ben's punch. However the drink made everybody merrier. Ben made a dive for the kitten's milk bowl and pretended to drink it. Katherine screamed with laughter at her brother-monkey's antics, but soon Daphne put an end to them by telling Ben he'd better go to bed. Ben retreated, having during the day become aware that Daphne's norves were in a bad way. The kitten, Nephant, jumped upon Mrs. Foster's lap.

21

"How Hyacinth," Daphne chided, knowing her mother disliked cats, "I cleaned puspy well today. With water too."

Water, help," Katherine squealed. "Nephtah hates water as much as I do. No wonder she's cross today. Baths are most depressing. It takes me a day to recover from one. The English make a fetich of baths. They must be a dirty race to have developed such a bath complex."

"If you say that many more time Katherine I will go mad. You hate baths, and combing your hair, and clothes. You don't know what you like or hate. Forget some of the ideas you thought bright as a child and cling to now as though they were precious," Daphne said. "This punch is strong. I'm glad. I'm in a bad way today. And why do I ever work,"

"To avoid ennui, I suppose," Neil volunteered.

"Or to avoid fear arises that I'll slump or be drawn back into family, the morass of mediocrity. Work does force another diverse into existence."

"How depressing," Katherine asserted, "but Fido doesn't care. He has his punch. It's a good Lee. He knows how essential drink is, and his punch give a golden glow."

"But Neil will have to drink most of mine," Mrs. Foster quavered, "I wonder if sister Moonie will go back to America."

"I'll write and find out if you like," Daphne teased, "Did you want to go back with your dear sister Moonie."

"Daphne, stop teasing me or I'll take my drink to my room."

"Yes, I won't have hyacinth teased," Katherine said complacently.

232

"But Hyacinth may be yearning for the family atmosphere,
and for dear Philadelphia. My God, Ed 1, if you had ever experienc-
ed Philadelphia. You don't know your America without that."

"Really," Mrs. Foster gasped, "I know you don't mean what
you say, but I think you're terrible."

"By hell, I do mean it. I do mean it," Daphne shrieked
laughingly. "Haven't I spent my life escaping the family and
Philadelphia, and then you catapulted Moonie, the family under-
taker, upon me for six months. Really, really, come now. You
know you aren't curious about Moonie's plans. It's sheer complex
and hyperCritical the way you go on about having to see your dear
family again. And poor little Katherine needs you; she wants
you with us; she wants Neil; and Ben; and the Lump; with us. She
wants anybody with us she thinks furnishes us any kind of pro-
tection, cover; anyone who defends her little rabbit run and
hutch; and Neil is wonderful. He doesn't give a damn about
dada's money. He despises dada. Katherine thinks it's funny.
Neil's so reckless and America and go ahead. Dear Hyacinth, you
can't go to America." The drink was going quickly to Daphne's
head.

"I'm going to my room," Mrs. Foster pouted and did take
her punch and depart. The others sat silent for a time, amused at
the old woman's petulence, for generally she was pleased when
Daphne teased her. Her fuddled mind didn't catch the import of
what Daphne said, Neil assumed.

"I'm thinking of Corfu," Daphne said.

"Help," Katherine answered. "That's one place I had
to take you away from; where you couldn't take care of yourself."

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"Yes, poor, dear, little Katherine, you did save me then,
perhaps, Of maybe I should have stayed. But Neil will think
we're mystics."

"What happened?" Neil asked.

"Writing on the wall; definite figures; I didn't understand, but lights and figures stood out and moved."

"Moonlight and shadows don't you suppose?" Neil surprised.

"I don't want to talk about it. I am rational; I want to be rational; but I saw hieroglyphics signs on the wall, and I knew that a little more nervous state and I would understand; I might never come back to the world."

"Of course," Katherine conceded, "they may have been putting poison in our food. The natives in Corfu didn't like visitors, then, just the year after the war. The eyed us resentfully, but both Daphne and I saw things. I got the first boat possible and we fled to Italy."

Neil didn't answer anything for a time, but felt withdrawn, not believing or disbelieving; simply not interested. He was curious to understand how he had ever become, let himself become, associated with these two strange women. Katherine surely made life a pathologic or psychoanalytic laboratory, full of obsessions, phobes, manias, and frights. Many of them he suspected she treasured and invented to give herself an interest, but her tight withdrawal and terrors were not among these. Daphne, except for over-wrought nerves, had a capacity for robust humour, and almost Rabelaisian vulgarity, at times.

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"Poor little Katherine. I do attack her," Daphne said gently after a silence, "but she doesn't want freedom for me, or for herself; for anyone. She tries to be kind and fair too."

"They wouldn't let me study painting. I had to go to school. I didn't want to go to school," Katherine began to snivel, childishly, apparently forgetful of her surroundings. Her voice was infantile. "I wanted to stay in Sicily too; those little dolls on the string fascinated me, but mamma said I couldn't stay in the streets. I might get a disease. Mamma wouldn't let me play with those children in the hotel, the children with the puppy and the grandma. She told me they'd gone away. They hadn't gone away."

Neil and Daphne looked curiously at each other. "She's gone off like this once before; she completely reverts to some time of years back and remembers every detail. It frightens me." Daphne said, and took Katherine's shoulder. "Off to bed you go," she persuaded firmly. "I'm sorry for her, but what can I do. She frightens me with these child phantasy trances. I'm too nearly done in and mad myself to stand it. Come Lido."

Katherine got up from her chair as Daphne directed, but stood stamping her feet as though she were a five year old child. "No, no," she whimpered, weeping. "I don't want to go to bed. I don't want to go to bed." In spite of her tears she followed Daphne, helplessly doodle with all her babyish protestations. Neil waited till Daphne returned and said goodnight to him.

"I guess she's really a near mental case. I thought a drink might release her; that she was only tired with people because not used to them. At moments she seems to be coming out of herself, but maybe it's no use," he commented.

235

"I've had four years of it. At times she's so sure and goes ahead, but always she reverts. If one only knew what she wanted. Is it me? Is it you, now, perhaps? I am fond of her now. In the beginning I was beaten and she was good to me; I had to be taken care of, but I was beaten and despairing. Nothing mattered. She needs to be loved, to be broken into, somehow, but she's afraid," Daphne related.

"She makes anybody else afraid if she doesn't repell them. I get the feeling that obstinately she chooses to create the impression of herself as a dwarf or as a child."

"She can't claim to be afraid of her father's imprisonment her now, though. She's American by marriage to you; she had enough money; she's free. But I don't know what she wants."

"I can't or won't bother to find out, much. But goodnight. I'll see you tomorrow before leaving for Berlin; and I suppose Katherine will have innumerable ideas about letters I must write to pretend that we're together. Why she will bother keeping in touch with people she doesn't like, and in consequence having, she thinks, to carry on the deception for them, I don't get, but it's her concern. I'm sorry for her, wearily, but --- she doesn't really matter to me. I'm not fond of her. For a while her funny little mentality aroused my curiosity, but that's gone now."

"Poor little Katherine."

"And maybe poor you, and me too, if I don't look out. She plans and calculates where we act on impulse."