IX

October’s the pleasantest month of the year, in New York. Cool days succeed one another crescendo, like states of mind in convalescence after fever. The air is so clear that edges of tall buildings are etched against the sky, sharp and clean as lines in Chinese paintings.

On sunny days the warmth of furs and Winter tweeds is just outrageous luxury, and Fifth Avenue’s a fragrance blended of furs and tweeds and boutonnières and new leather gloves and French perfume—and the underlying scent of gasoline belongs there definitely as the smokiness in Scotch.

Evenings sparkle with a feeling of things-about-to-happen-fast-again, many theatres opening, everyone giving parties to people back from Paris with gay or ridiculous stories about everyone else who was there.

One may live October through, and never see scarlet-stained Autumn leaves, except as centrepieces on tea-room tables. Yet the fires small boys build in obscure streets at dusk—fires of three barrel staves and a soap-box—have somehow a pungency that’s reminiscent of heaped Autumn leaves burning on well-kept suburban lawns.

I went to a gymnasium most afternoons between half-past five and dinner time, because exercise kept me clear-headed writing copy in the daytime, and fresher-looking through the evening. The gymnasium had a running track on the roof. Going ’round and ’round it, regarding the view of upper Broadway electric light signs, or thinking that the person who invented the sweat shirt had no sense of design, or just counting off twenty laps to the mile, and debating detachedly whether to be energetic and run three miles, or lazy and stop at two, I felt very contented. Thump, thump, thump, around a board track. It was a simple occupation, but an absorbing one.

That feeling of running, of having been running endlessly, so that I was breathless, yet must go on running for ever, seemed to sum up my life. Running, through days of posing as an efficient young business woman, through nights of posing as a sophisticated young woman about town. Running from the memory of Peter, toward something or nothing, it did not matter which.

“You’re a success,” said Lucia, one day. “Three times out of five, when the telephone rings now, it’s for you. Ex-wife Grade A, you turned out to be.”

Ex-wife Grade A, I was. Sex-appeal, dresses well, looks young, dances lightly, can make wisecracks, and is self-supporting. Lets a man talk. Does not gold-dig, except for another round of liqueurs after dinner. Never passes out or gets raucous, or gets sick. Not susceptible to the “I want you, I want you, I want you” attitude, but likely to succumb to “pity me, my life is lonely”—once with any man.

Three men came to be fixtures among the transients.

The first was Nathaniel.

At a large and stupid tea, given by a woman in the agency for which Lucia wrote copy, I noticed a tall young man wandering about looking as if he wished himself elsewhere. I wished I were elsewhere too. The room was crowded and hot, and everyone was talking advertising shop-talk. Eventually someone presented the tall young man, and I recognized his last name as one seen frequently on signs on skyscrapers in process of construction.

“You don’t have to talk,” he said. “You look like a Drian drawing.”

That was so nice of him that I tried to talk as amusingly as possible. But he continued to look as if he wished he were somewhere else, so eventually I asked him what he was doing at the tea.

He explained that his father was a client of the agency, asked me how I got there, and I explained that I was a friend of Lucia’s, who was a friend of the hostess’s.

“Lucia,” he said, “is gorgeous but decadent looking. She hasn’t your obvious wholesomeness.”

“Wholesomeness” was a term that had not been used frequently in connexion with me, of late. It left me somewhat startled actually, but pleased.

“Let’s go take a cab,” he said, “and drive right around the city. I hate hot smoky rooms.”

Because he was such a nice scrubbed-looking young man, and also because I had nothing to do until eight o’clock anyway, I went.

By “around” the city, he had meant literally that.—West Street by the docks to the Battery, and up the far East Side, where bits of the river showed at the street ends.

I thought he himself was about the most “wholesome” looking person I had seen in months. He had brown hair that would have curled untidily, if it were not so close-clipped, wide-set gay grey eyes, a curious sensitive mouth, a good chin, a beautiful vaguely striped suit, and a necktie I did not like. It looked a little consciously vagabondish. To offset that, he had enormous, well-shaped muscular hands.

He was fun. He talked about the shapes and colours and flavours of things. I knew in half an hour that he had a passion for beauty beyond anyone I had ever met—an impersonal sort of passion for line and form and tone. He talked about the curved hulls of ships, I remember, with a warmth I had heard in other men’s voices when, over wine, they remembered some woman whom they had loved very much.

I had decided that this Nathaniel person was altogether engaging, when suddenly he took off his hat, bent down, kissed the corner of my mouth, let me go instantly, and without drawing breath, announced, “You kiss very badly. I shan’t kiss you again.”

I laughed and laughed and laughed. He grew embarrassed; he blushed beautifully; I kept on laughing. When I could breathe I said, “Do you always make that speech?”

“Tell you sometime,” he said. “There’s a marvellous show of modern French painters at the Dudensing gallery. Could you leave your office a bit early tomorrow and see it?”

“Love to,” I said.

Months later he told me about the speech in the cab.

The day before he met me, his roommate at college had been jeering him about his lack of “line” with women, and had recommended kissing them within the first hour of meeting, telling them they kissed atrociously, and watching them prove how wrong that statement was. Nat said he had felt the speech might also serve to indicate that he was enormously sophisticated, and then he could go on taking women to art-galleries and Russian restaurants, without bothering further about personalities.

However, since I did not react as he had expected, he dropped the line from his repertoire.

By the time he finally explained “how badly you kiss,” I knew a great many other things about him. He was the only surviving son of a man who had gone from small-job contracting to skyscraper building, and from an Allen Street tenement to a residence in the East ’Sixties, in the course of twenty-five years or so.

His older brother had died in an automobile smash-up to which the chorus girl with him contributed a flavour of champagne and scandal, when Nat was twenty.

The father turned white-haired over night, blamed himself for having allowed the boy too much money to spend, and thereupon brought Nat home from college, put him in the business, allowed him fifty dollars a week and a charge account at a tailor’s, and administered lectures to him at intervals on the evils of drink and women.

Infrequently the old man went on Gargantuan benders of his own, locking himself and a half case of Scotch in the library his dead wife had acquired, and telephoning for meals to be left outside on trays. He was discovered usually, when Nat and the family physician forced their way in on the second or third day, sullen, silent, holding in shaking gnarled hands a silver cup his dead son had won at tennis, or some casual letter about football and the necessity for an increased allowance that the boy had written him.

When Nat was summoned home from college, at the time of his brother’s much-publicized passing, his father’s physician had told him that his father was likely to die suddenly of heart disease, at any moment, or perhaps not for twenty years, depending principally on whether he had any further shocks. He was not to be irritated or opposed in anything.

So Nathaniel grinned at the fifty dollar salary that never was increased, charged clothes nonchalantly at the tailor provided for him, and threw overboard ideas of studying architecture in Paris. He wanted to travel, to see paintings in Florence, hear Wagner in Bayreuth, feel the sun blaze down on the pyramids. He never went farther from New York than his father’s country place on Long Island.

He took me to art exhibits, concerts and concerts and concerts, beer-gardens where the Kapellmeister alternated the hilarity of “Ei, du Schöne Schnitzelbank” with the poignancy of “Nur eine Nacht.” He took me to the only Chinese restaurant on Pell Street where the chef had been trained to cook for a Mandarin. He took me ten blocks out of our way to dinner to show me the design on the wrought-iron doors of a new building on Madison Avenue. And to the Lido and Montmartre to dance, and to Pierre’s to lunch, and to speakeasies where he who had never seen France, moistened the labels of cognac bottles, hopefully, to see if the Hennessey water-mark showed through.

Once he talked to me about women. Like this. “Patricia, I’m conscious of possessing a very unfashionable virtue.”

“What do you mean ‘a very unfashionable virtue?’ ”

“I’m lightly sexed or something. Women don’t bother me a bit. I should rather go to bed alone at ten o’clock on Saturday night, so that I can get up at six Sunday and go riding in Westchester, than spend the night in the arms of any women I ever saw. Do you suppose there’s something wrong with me? Should I try to set up a coat model on Central Park West, with my fifty a week spending money, to prove I’m virile?”

“No, what for, unless you feel like it. . . . But why do you spend so much time with me, if you don’t like women?”

“I don’t think about you as female. You’re decorative, like a well bred young collie pup . . . and besides you laugh at things and like to look at pictures.”

“You’re a comfort, Nathaniel.”

He was; he made me feel peaceful, usually. Rarely, he irritated me, with his habit of averting his gaze from the emotions and desires and struggles of people. He was always overlooking the ugliness of passersby, to get a better view of some tower looming black against a background of scudding clouds.

Yet he was the only practising Christian I knew. I discovered accidentally, after I had known him a very long time, that, most weeks, half of the fifty dollars which was almost all his father’s fortune that he was permitted to handle, went to an old chauffeur of theirs, who had gone half blind from drinking wood alcohol.

Nat thought it was very funny, to be the poverty-stricken heir to a million or two.

I said that fifty dollars a week was almost all he had. Besides that, the family doctor gave him a hundred dollars occasionally, adding the amount to his bill to Nat’s father. The doctor suggested that method to Nat, as preferable to endangering his father’s heart by making scenes about money. So, when Nat ached for an Anders Zorn etching or something of the sort, he got the money for it from the doctor.

Nat worked quite faithfully at the skyscraper-building business from nine to five, disposing of steel and masonry by the ton, while dreaming of skyscrapers all of glass and coloured tile, with terraces to make New York look like a taller version of the hanging gardens of Babylon.

He never asked what I did with my evenings when I was not with him. I suspected him of preferring not to know.

There was also Kenneth.

One day, lunching at the Algonquin with Lucia, I stared at the back of the head of the man at the next table, and wondered why it should remind me of Boston, and my half-forgotten cousin Roger who had gone to war and death with the Twenty-Sixth Division. The man at the next table had the most completely golden hair I ever saw. Roger’s hair had been very dark.

Roger was the first man I ever loved, I suppose. He was at Harvard Law School when I was a freshman at Radcliffe. He wanted to be a lawyer en route to being a statesman; because, he said, America needed more statesmen and fewer politicians. I was sure he would be a statesman or anything he wanted, because he was so good-looking.

When he went to Plattsburg, I took a course in the Principles of Government, so that I could be a help to him when he became a statesman. He had said, gaily, that he would marry me after the war, if I would promise to grow up nicely for him while he was gone.

The Twenty-Sixth left from Framingham, and I drove up alone through a dripping August dawn, wearing my best rose-coloured organdie dress under a raincoat, to say good-bye to him.

I was sixteen.

He kissed me in front of a whole battalion. I had never been kissed before, and was so proud, and so worried lest the organdie dress would be completely rain-soaked (I had left the raincoat in the car, of course) and I would not look pretty. He kissed me again, as he went past with his company to the train, and after that I could not see any of the soldiers marching by because the rain splashed on my face and was mixed with tears.

He was killed at Château-Thierry. I had not thought of him in years; except for an instant, if, unexpectedly, I smelt the fragrance of tea-roses. That made me remember him because I was opening a box of tea-roses, sent me to wear to a Saturday night officers’ dance at Ayer, when the telephone message came that he was dead.

“What are you remembering?” said Lucia, and I came back to the Algonquin and the eggs Benedict on my plate, and the view of the Round Table that had already seen its best days, and the golden-haired man who sat between me and it.

I told Lucia about Roger, and then we talked about Boston and Portland, Maine, where she was born, and agreed that one could not go back to either place to live, at least while one was young, although they both were pleasant cities. And Lucia said that New York’s a jail to which, once committed, the sentence is for life; but that it is such a well furnished jail, one does not mind much.

Intermittently, I continued to stare at the golden-haired man. When he stood up, I remembered him. Roger brought him for a week-end’s swimming on Cape Cod, on one of Roger’s last leaves. His name was Kenneth, and he lived in Springfield, Massachusetts. My aunt had known his step-mother and so she had liked him.

That week-end I had thought his golden hair was very wonderful with the sun shining on it, but thought also that dark hair the shade of Roger’s was really more distinguished, and that Roger was handsomer on the whole, and I had wished this man would go away, so that Roger would have more time to talk to me.

At the next table, Kenneth glanced at me, and then he stood talking to someone for a minute.

I had heard things about him since the war. My aunt had said something—story of his marrying a dancer in vaudeville, and then going out to Hollywood to be an art director, much to the disgust of his family who wanted him to be a lawyer in his father’s firm in Springfield. They had been quite formal about disowning him.

He turned to leave, and looked at me again. He was very tall indeed, and extraordinarily thin. He had forget-me-not blue eyes like a little boy’s that looked strange in a face so dissipated. He would not remember me, of course.

But he did.

He came over, and said, “You used to be a child in a scarlet bathing suit; and besides, Roger carried half a dozen snapshots of you through the war.” I had never known that.

“You’re Kenneth,” I said, and introduced him to Lucia. He sat down. . . .

Once he read me three sentences of Galsworthy’s, from the Forsyte Saga. They were, “All are under sentence of death: Jolyon, whose sentence was but a little more precise and pressing, had become so used to it that he thought habitually, like other people, of other things.”

Kenneth had travelled a little too swiftly and too far from the tranquil sort of life to which he had been born. Had the Love of his Life been a serene-eyed New England débutante with a cool voice, as she might well have been, Kenneth would be practising law in Boston, with the proper connexions to do well at it, the next forty years, and satisfying his interest in art by the purchase of a Sargent, occasionally.

But the Love of his Life turned out to be a little Hungarian dancer, compounded of passion and beauty and viciousness in equal proportions. She fled to him from the beatings of her dancing partner, and Kenneth married her because she thought she was with child. In Paris, she left him for an Argentine; and came back, because she had pneumonia (and a more lasting illness, as it developed). She recovered from the pneumonia. They went to Algiers. She had a relapse, and coughed out her life against Kenneth’s shoulder, protesting bitterly to the end against the necessity of dying—with no apologies for having sentenced him also to death.

Whatever she was, he had endowed her with all the illusions of a romantic young man. She was to him pure high romance. He said he would not have missed it. When he spoke of her, as one speaks of a dead child, gently, things young and ardent stirred behind his tired face, and I remembered how alive he had looked that summer week-end nearly ten years past.

He was to die, in two or three years, because to his illness was added the complication of an old lung trouble caused by gas in the Argonne. They told him that if he went West to live, that if he stopped drinking, the two or three years might be prolonged to six or seven.

“But I should be so bored and lonely,” he said. And he stayed in New York.

He knew no women, except me. He spoke to me that day only because I had made him remember Roger, whom he had loved, too (“in another life,” he said).

He asked me to dinner, because he had a sudden desire to talk to someone once more about Roger and cool New England summers, and the sedate streets of little Massachusetts towns.

But something in his unhappy face, that first night we dined, stirred me to talk, not of Roger, dim figure on the far shore of youth, but of Peter. I never spoke of Peter to any men I met, nowadays, usually.

Kenneth looked as if he would understand about Peter, and the men one kissed to cure one of the memory of Peter, and the little hope one cherished about Peter, in spite of judgment and the commonsense and the well-meant advice of one’s friends. He looked as if he understood that one did not love a man because he was worth loving, or because one felt worthy of his love in return, or for any reason that one’s acquaintances would think was sound.

I did tell Kenneth about Peter, not in one evening, but over many evenings. He could not help me. I could not help him when he talked of that girl dancing in the moonlight of a garden in Algiers. But we were curiously happy together.

He had a little money; enough, he said, to last his lifetime, an inheritance from an uncle who seemed to have felt that Hungarian dancers are among men’s inescapable destinies.

He spent it on theatres and the merrier night-clubs. He went to every new moving picture from Germany, and was fascinated by the technique of their photography. That was a single interest surviving from the four years he had dreamed, between the dancer’s kisses and their consequences, of directing a moving picture that would be a really significant contribution to modern art.

So near the end of dealing with things significant or not, done with ambition and desire, he was sometimes completely gay.

Then we went to Harlem. Not the Harlem of the big Negro cabarets frequented by whites, cabarets notable principally for good orchestras, indifferent chow mein, a carefully sinister atmosphere, and a general air of everyone self-conscious except those who are so drunk they should go home, but the Harlem of the little unpretentious dance halls.

There, the very few white people who enter are ignored more or less, are given service no better and sometimes slightly worse than the service given negroes. Whites are not particularly wanted. But, if they are unobtrusive, they can travel a thousand miles south in latitude and as many years back in time, while a bass drummer remembers his ancestors who rubbed the tomtoms calling the tribes to war, and a girl dancer struts muscles no European woman’s used since Rome was old.

There, Kenneth woke to animation over absinthe, and discoursed on Stravinsky’s music or Mussolini’s future, the style of Marcel Proust, or the eyes of his lost dancer, or the meaning of love and death.

He bought his absinthe from an Italian boat. For a long time, he would not let me drink it. Then one night, with him, across a theatre lobby I saw Peter and Judith, looking happy, looking absorbed in each other, not seeing me. Kenneth watched my face change.

That night, and on rare nights after, he gave me absinthe. At first, he was dubious as to whether I was a type that would react happily to it. I was.

Drinking it, I could summon to life and warmth days, incidents, moments out of other years when Peter loved me. I could go farther back, and summon the look and the voice and the laughter of Roger. Even live again the gay breathlessness of tobogganing, and the exciting feeling of skating along a shining river as the stars came out, while that child who I had been knew guiltily that she should have started home an hour before.

Sipping slowly, slowly, watching Kenneth’s gold head droop above his glass, listening to saxophones and drums and shouting of dancers that seemed very far away, there was neither pain nor regret nor weariness. I sat wrapped in peace as in a Spanish shawl.

Kenneth asked me to promise not to drink absinthe except with him; a long time afterward he asked me never to drink absinthe at all, because I was not as nearly freed from life as he.

I never have, since.

Besides Nathaniel and Kenneth, there was Bill. On a night soon after I went to live with Lucia, a night when nothing was happening, Lucia said, “Let’s summon Bill.”

“What is it,” I said, “a bootlegger?”

“It’s a gentleman of the old school, darling, and a great help in small doses.” She telephoned the Racquet club.

In ten minutes Bill appeared, with Scotch and soda and Racquet club cigarettes, and three medium grade club stories he told before he had his coat off.

When he looked at me, he said, “Lord, you remind me of a woman I knew in Honolulu in 1906. Damn nice woman too, she was.” He sighed, gustily, sat down, and talked to us about how he made gin, where he bought Scotch, how far and how fast he had driven through Rhode Island the Sunday before, the condition of the stock market, and how pretty we both were.

He was bald and pink-cheeked as a baby, had a smile that must have been irresistible in 1906 and thereabouts, and manners as nice as his manicured hands.

After an hour, Lucia stifled a yawn. He got up, kissed us both matter-of-factly, thanked us for letting him call, and trotted off.

“It’s all right, but I don’t see exactly why—” I began.

“Oh, he’s as comfortable occasionally, as an old rocking chair,” said Lucia. “There’s a man who never got lost among the nuances, for he wouldn’t know a nuance if he saw it. His life’s been good wine and good food and a good-sized quota of pretty women, and the code of a gentleman of his time, defined as paying his card debts, carrying his drinks well, and never letting his wife and his current mistress meet.”

“What would he do if you began to talk to him about the single standard—or the single tax for that matter?”

“Pat me on the head, and say a girl as pretty as I shouldn’t bother her head with nonsense. If I kept on, he’d go to sleep. Bill’s grand and healthy and simple.”

“What does he think about modern women?”

“Never heard of ’em. Thinks women are three sorts, the women one marries and keeps, the women who should have got married and kept, but gummed their chances somehow, and the women one takes to bed for a night and pays well.”

“Is he ever interesting?”

“Yes, he was being up to date tonight to impress you, that’s why he was so awful. Take him back thirty years, and get him to tell you how the young bloods rode to the Brevoort Sunday mornings, and tied their horses outside while they breakfasted on a magnum of champagne and a beefsteak apiece. On things like that he’s good.”

In time Bill told me that story. He told me also the story of the woman in Honolulu in 1906; also of a Chinese girl he bought in Shanghai, in the course of that trip to the Orient that summed up far horizons for him. “You know,” he said of her, “she couldn’t speak a word of English, yet I felt always she was the best-bred woman I’d ever met in my life.”

Some men at sixty are the total of experiences had and philosophies considered. Bill was the total of recollected meals and wine, and of women kissed. Now, contentedly, he surveyed other people’s youth.

Among complex and tiring and tired men, he was solace to the heart, asking no more of me or Lucia or any woman, than that she be pretty, and speak in a “lady’s” voice.

Nathaniel, Kenneth and Bill were my three friends. Stepan was a man who hated me.

He was handsome, if you like the heavy-jowled, close-clipped black-moustached type, that is so stockily built it looks lumbering, but walks, disconcertingly, like a cat. He was a Russian, obviously—Russian Jew, perhaps. His last name was not revelatory, neither was he. I heard that he had a good deal of money—he was seen about at theatres and good restaurants and the more conglomerate parties.

I met him at one of those. He was quite drunk, but that was not apparent as he circulated about a room full of guests. He was introduced, danced with me in a manner too intimate, but difficult to protest against, and took me into an empty room adjoining, on the pretense of finding cigarettes.

There, with no preliminaries, he enclosed me in arms that felt strong as an ape’s, kissed my shoulders, and said, “You were made to my measure. You’re going home with me tonight.”

I said, “How do you get asked to places anyway? I suppose you bribe the butler to let you in, and trust that the hostess will remember your face, without remembering that she saw it in some inferior speakeasy.”

“Don’t underrate me, stupidly,” he said. “I am cosmopolitan. I have no illusions about you American women with your pretense of superiority. Like any women, you have one function. What do you make a month . . . in your silly job? Two hundred dollars? Three hundred dollars? I will pay you that. I can pay for my satisfactions. Get your wraps.”

“I know now,” I said, “what they mean by ‘scratch a Slav and find a Tartar.’ ” And then I wished I had not said that, for it flicked something in him, and he regarded me with such hate in his eyes I was frightened.

A man and a girl came in looking for privacy. I walked past Stepan and said, softly, “If we meet in some theatre lobby, please don’t bother to bow,” and found Lucia.

Later that night he came to me for an instant, while I was waiting for the men who were taking us home. “You will come with me, I am very sure,” he said, “but, perhaps not this week.”

Thereafter, he watched me, on the occasional evenings when we met.

I thought him absurdly melodramatic; forgot him when he was not present; and tried to ignore him, when he was. Yet, he affected me for months with a sense of uneasiness.

Then, one night, a man named Henry decided to devote himself to me. I had met Henry a dozen times. People told unpleasant stories about him, to the effect that he had been kept by a succession of women approaching dowagerdom, while he was in process of writing a novel still unfinished. He was a pretty-faced, curly haired blond boy, with something rather tragic underlying the obvious weakness of his mouth and hands.

On the evening when I noticed him following me about like a helpless sort of pup in search of ownership, I was feeling very tired. I had an especially trying week at the office. Nat was on Long Island, and Kenneth had vanished on one of his occasional three-day absinthe binges.

Henry progressed to: “You are so warm and clean-looking, and young. You can’t imagine how it helps me to talk to you.”

That was average inanity, yet he was the sort of young man most women would pity. That trait must have been very useful to him, on many occasions beside this.

“I’m staying alone in a friend’s apartment for the week-end,” he said. “If you would come there, for an hour—just let me talk to you, it would be kindness more than you could guess.”

I was appallingly tired and thought he was innocuous, and went. At the door of a rather magnificent apartment on Madison Avenue, it occurred to me that Henry was curiously nervous. I wondered if he expected either a telephone call or a personal descent by some woman or other; decided that if it happened, at the worst it could only result in an amusing tale to tell Lucia, and took off my coat and hat.

I laid my gloves and purse on a desk, glanced down, and was confronted by a snapshot of this man Henry, and Stepan. I felt as if a little cold wind had blown, suddenly, across the back of my neck.

“Is this Stepan’s apartment by any chance?”

“Yes, he’s gone to Chicago for two or three days.”

I wanted to go home, instantly. I thought then, that I was being silly. Ultimately I stayed with this man Henry. Because he had said: “If I could hold someone clean and strong and young in my arms, I believe it would make me feel clean and strong and young, again.”

No one was any good for me. There arose, occasionally, the desire to be good for someone.

I woke, to find the bed empty beside me; thought Henry had gone to get himself a drink; and slept again. I woke to strong arms around me, a mouth kissing mine, a horrible hard voice saying, “It’s just Stepan, don’t be frightened, lie still.” He put a heavy hand across my mouth.

I thought I should die of terror in the dark. I bit his hand, I struggled. In the end I lay still.

He brought me some brandy. I blinked at him in the light. He was wearing a red velvet robe with ermine on it, and I thought that he had bought it among the bloody loot of some old-regime Russian palace, and it made him more dreadful than he was.

“Now we can talk,” he said. He talked. “You young women think you can be, in the American phrase ‘hard-boiled.’ You don’t know what ‘hard-boiled’ means. I do.”

I did not answer him.

He rubbed his finger across my cheek, and I knew that if I winced or screamed it would please him. So I did not wince or scream.

“You are very pretty,” he said. “I like your type. It is near enough the type of superior Russian women, whom I used to watch, from far off, when I was a boy . . . and with whom of late years one can have dealings.”

He sat in gloating reverie, and I wondered, if I did scream, whether the elevator boy would hear me. But Stepan probably paid the elevator boy well.

He spoke again. “A pretty woman, but a fool, to set herself up against the strength of a man who knows what he wants. I will tell you a story, so that you will know you are a fool, and we shall understand each other better.”

I said nothing.

“In Russia, in the village where I was born, there was a pogrom, when I was six years old. My father drove my mother and myself to a hut in the forest, for safety, and went back to look after his affairs. He came, by night, to bring us food, until for three days it snowed, and he could not come.”

He paused, and smiled at me with wet red lips.

I thought, “He is telling me this story to frighten me. He’s inventing it. It’s going to be frightening, but I must remember he’s just inventing it.”

“For three days we had no food, and it was silent in the forest, and I cried with hunger and fear. On the third evening we heard a scratching at the door—”

His eyes had a strange green light in them. He sat, heavy and savage and amused—

“My mother said, ‘who is there?’

“There was no answer—but we heard something sigh.

“ ‘It will be a messenger from your father, Stepan,’ my mother said. But she got the revolver he had left with her.

“There was another scratching at the door. She opened it—and a black wolf leapt at her. I lay on the floor. My mother fired the revolver into his open jaws, and he dropped, writhed a moment, and was dead. She barricaded the door, while I lay screaming.

“ ‘Never cry again, never scream, Stepan, my son,’ she said. ‘The wolf is only food from the forest.’ She got a carving knife from the dresser, and cut the dead wolf’s throat and said ‘Drink, my son. His blood will make you strong.’ ”

He flung back his head, and laughed deep in his throat.

“I remember how warm and good the blood tasted. . . . Does the story amuse you,—little girl who thinks she is ‘hard-boiled?’ ” He ran his huge hand through my hair.

I thought, “He is insane, and I am going insane . . . his green eyes are like a wolf’s,” and I broke. I said; “Can’t I go home now . . . please let me go home now, and I will come back, if you want me to . . . but let me go now . . .”

He laughed again, “So polite the independent little girl grows . . . but you can’t go home quite yet . . . I will tell you more stories.”

I covered my face from the sight of those shining eyes. He snarled and tore my hands away.

He slept, panting a little, panting like a wolf. Slowly, inch by inch, I moved away from him; got up, and found I could not stand. It was cold. I wrapped the velvet robe around me, sat down on a chair beside a table; remembered he had left brandy on the table, and groped for it. There was no sound in the room but that faint sound of panting. The brandy steadied me, and I dressed, thinking, “If I had a knife . . . to slide across his throat as he sleeps, so soundly—”

Dressed, I crept to the door in the dark, closed it as softly as possible, and rang for a sleepy, insolently grinning elevator boy.

It was only two blocks home. I wanted to walk; the cold air made me sane. On the first street-corner, a policeman was yawning.

“Isn’t it late for a young lady like yourself to be walking about?” he said.

“I’ve been seeing a sick friend, officer . . . and I’m only walking two blocks home.”

“I’ll put you on your doorstep then, if you’d like,” he said, and talked cheerfully, about the cold, and his wife who did not like his new hours of work. And I was grateful for the sound of his comfortable Irish voice.

Next morning, making up my face, I thought: “It was a nightmare. It couldn’t have happened. I must have dreamed it.” But there was a blue bruise on my throat where Stepan had gripped it, and my hands were shaking, still.

Lucia came in, looking very fresh. “Pat, my child, if I take an extra day off to go to Portland and see the family for the week-end, would you go as far as Boston with me? You haven’t seen your aged parent for months, have you?”

“Let’s take the five o’clock tonight,” I said.