V

In that asphalt sky of August, the summer sun burnt a blunt point of light, like the blinding violet-livid torch with which a worker on city mains gashes through a tough piece of pipe. A gray haze blurred the vistas of Fifth Avenue and dulled the too full-blown bushes and trees which one saw beyond Washington Arch, as if the buildings and pavements themselves, under the action of the terrible heat, were vaporizing and fogging the air.

Down a side-street, an old white truck-horse stood sleeping and stupefied, its head lowered like a lizard’s and its eyelids closed, while the driver, sluggish and sweating, piled a mountain of boxes on the dray. And farther over, on Seventh Avenue, I saw a barefoot ragged boy, who had flung himself down on his stomach above the grating that ventilates the subway, and whose coat was blown up violently behind him, like the streamers of an electric fan, by the warm, sudden gust from the trains.

My handkerchief was sopped with sweat, and I was refreshed by an unexpected breeze which washed over the butt of the island the hot, bilgy river-smell, as if, now that the people of the Village had abandoned the Village for the summer, the waterside were invading the town. I saw nobody anywhere that I knew. On the corner of Twelfth Street, where Rita had lived, the obsolete beer-saloon still bore its discolored blue Pilsener sign.

It occurred to me to examine, as I passed them, those landmarks of Abingdon Square which, the morning of my first meeting with Rita, when I had been drunk with peach-brandy and poetry, had seemed to me impressive and romantic, but which I had afterward passed so many times without ever observing them closely. I now found that what I had taken for a statue of some interesting celebrity of the quarter was merely a monument to the soldiers of the ward who had died in the European War; and that the object which had figured to my fancy as a temple or a tomb was simply a disused band-stand.

Daisy and Pete had come recently to town. Gus Dunbar, who was now in Boston, had, at Daisy’s instigation, taken steps toward getting Pete a job there; and Pete had gone on to see about it, leaving Daisy for a few days in New York. She had called me up the day before, and, with the idea of getting away from the heat, I had suggested our going to Coney Island.

She was to meet me at the pier. I had not been to Coney Island since my childhood, and for some reason, I supposed that the boat left from the foot of Christopher Street. At the docks, I learned otherwise, and took a taxi down to the Battery, along the wide cobbled avenue that runs along beside the wharves.

There was the funny high yellow façade, built of wood but with an aspect of pasteboard: it had precisely, I remembered, the quality of the amusement-places of my boyhood, and it looked faded and flimsy now.

Daisy was waiting in the cavernous anteroom. In a corner of the high, darkish space, she showed charmingly neat, small and clear. In spite of the roundness of her hips and the smartness of her clothes—her white dress and her tight cloche hat—she might almost have been mistaken for a child. How cute and how chic she looked in those short, tight skirts that cut off her slim legs just above the knees! “Well,” she greeted me with her unblinking smile, “the first twenty years of my life I spent waiting for the Coney Island boat!” I apologized and explained. “But why didn’t you find out first?” she protested. “It’s a good thing you didn’t think it left from the foot of Forty-second Street!”

“Well, how do you feel?” I inquired, as we climbed the flight of steps. “I feel pretty sassy!” she said.

I had of course missed the four-o’clock boat, and now we should have to wait for the five-o’clock one. But up-stairs, the gray-timbered shadow of the low-roofed leaving-place was tranquillizing and cool: through a low narrow opening that ran along the side, one had a glimpse of the crude, unshadowed blocks of the enormous downtown buildings, where only one sheer green roof and a steep crane, on a float that was green, broke the cliffs of colorlessness.

I had brought some gin, and I bought some ginger-ale at the refreshment stand. “I must tell you my joke,” she said, as we drank that impossible concoction—at once too bitter and too sickeningly sweet—for which I had acquired a certain affection, because I had come to associate it with Daisy. “I’ve made up an idea for a joke. There’ll be a caption that says ‘Striking a Happy Medium’—and then there’ll be a picture of a medium—you know, a spiritualistic medium—with a big piece of bogus ectoplasm coming out of her mouth and a grin of satisfaction on her face, and a man with his arm all raised, just ready to smack her down.—Don’t you think that’s pretty good?” I told her that I thought it was terrible.

There was a large, old, slot-machine phonograph standing against the wall: it was lyre-shaped and had a mirror in its belly, and seemed stationed as an outpost and siren for the frivolities and gaieties beyond. We put a nickel in and started it playing an antiquated xylophone record of the American Patrol: its patriotic gallop, half-stifled behind the glass and losing itself in the wide, gray waiting-room, woke in my heart a happy response as if to Fourth-of-July bands of my boyhood.

Then the boat was in; the doors were opened; we went down and stepped over the side. Assailed by the sunlight, we were dazed: in the brightness, we seemed merely to enter a smell of white boat-paint and to ascend to a brisk and merry tinkling of some pretty antique tune.

I pulled camp-stools beside a rail on an upper deck.—Sea and shore were rawest gray and the sky a raw, pale blue—it was not that the blue was pale, but rather that blue was lacking. The sun streaked the water to the west with a bright glaze of zinc.—I got some more ginger-ale and a couple of paper cups from the little soft-drink bar below.

On one side, as we left the dock, we looked out at the Statue of Liberty, a solid, dull slug of gray against a colorless, burning sky; and on the other, at the old red fort, round and full of holes like a mouse-trap, with its rusty and abandoned barracks.

The thin strains of linkéd sweetness, with now and then a note frailly sour, of the harp and violin—some old musical-comedy tune I remembered from my college days—seemed to me even in this false and elfin echo to keep more that was human and charming than the pace of the newer dance-music had ever allowed it to possess; and as I glanced at Daisy, gazing out like a charming, good-natured child, at the sights of the passing shore, I was touched with sentimental revery.

Then the music was blotted out by the vehement snoring of a steamer and the pert sput-sputtering of a tug.

She seemed unusually carefree to-day, and I saw that her lips were rouged an unusually pretty mauve. I told her how pretty she looked, and she replied by complimenting me on the harmony of my clothes: “With most people,” she said, “their socks, for instance, haven’t anything to do with the rest of their clothes—but your socks match your suit.” My socks, which were a grayish blue, had been given me as a Christmas present and I had worn them only by accident on the same day as a gray summer suit. “But you have the worst-looking nails I ever saw!” she went on. “They look just like mechanics’ nails, except that mechanics’ nails are dirty.” I explained that I always cut them with a pair of library shears, implying that I regarded any other method as effeminate.

I now decided to speak to Daisy of a matter which had been worrying me since I had met her at the pier. I said, “I think you’ve got some egg or something on this cheek.” She took out her little mirror: “That’s just a streak of cold-cream,” she replied. “It always does that when I leave some on and the powder sticks.” She rubbed it off. In the stunning sun of that windless, unshaded day, we were dumb for a time.

Governor’s Island, the harbor in summer, the old patriotic tune, the statue of the soldier in the park, had brought back to me another vision which for some moments loomed bright in my mind.

Once—it seemed to me long ago—on a morning in early July, I had come back to Governor’s Island when it had been green with trees and grass, and when the barracks had been low, white houses: there had been soldiers in khaki grooming horses or standing at the water’s edge, in white shirts.

I remembered how, the afternoon before, though we had not yet been in sight of land, the empty horizons of those waters had held already the presence of home. The hours had seemed to run more smoothly with the homing ship—and in that calm summer evening, the sea had scarcely breathed. The silver sun had dipped, had sent its silver path along the blue, and had sunk at the end of its path—spreading yellows and reds, which the night took.

Then at last the yellow star of a lighthouse had been winking in the black—it did not seem like the play of a machine, but a deliberate human signal; and then a lightship spangled with stars. A quarantine tug had presently come out to us from the still invisible shore, and sent out some men in a boat: they transacted their business quickly, rowed quickly back to the launch and were pulled up in their boat with such promptness that it seemed to leap over the side. One had heard American voices: that was the American way of doing things!

Then a bed of lights on the water: after nearly two years of France, Coney Island had seemed incredible!

Then land on either side: there had been trees and lawns on the shore, and large, white American houses, with here and there a lighted window, set along on a little hill that sloped down to the water—and each of the houses had its boathouse and its little pier. Now soon one was to walk in such houses!—to play one’s part again in that life hidden there behind those lighted windows, in that life grown now so strange and yet the life of home!

There had come to us a sudden sweet smell through the quiet summer night: trees and flowers; the summer grass; the luxuriance and rankness of America. And then, as the ship passed on, a smell even more unmistakable, a smell even more of home, surrounded and saturated us: it was the rotten smell of the river, which, when to-day I had smelt it again in the Greenwich Village streets, had made me think of the salt bilge-water of the harbor, but which had breathed then the grease, the sour heat and the smoke of the factories, of the city. Dark chimneys were disturbing the darkness with their noiseless eruptions of red. That evening, on Riverside Drive, the benches would be full of couples, and all would be soaked from the Jersey bank by the glue-factories’ hot, heavy fumes.

Then suddenly I had almost caught my breath—I had been curiously moved by the sight of a single, solitary street-lamp on the Staten Island shore. It had merely shed a loose and whitish radiance over a few feet of the baldish road of some dark, thinly settled suburb. Above it, there had loomed an abundant and disorderly tree. But there was America, I had felt with emotion—there under that lonely suburban street-lamp, there in that raw and livid light!

Then, from somewhere behind those shadowy lawns, one heard the moan of an American train, and then its faint bell, and the swift, shuffling sounds of its progress. It was speeding away with eagerness and sureness to American cities at night—far, perhaps—to the farthest reaches of a continent without frontiers! There had been a petulance and a sadness in the piping of the French locomotives—they had spoken always of the dead hours of dawn and the carloads of wounded men. But these trains were bringing soldiers home—and far away from Europe—at night!

In the morning, off South Brooklyn, at anchor, we had seen the smoky rose of dawn come up over the black roofs of the city, and we had listened to the river-traffic waking with soft puffs and toots. The colors had begun to come out on the vermilion smoke-stacks of steamers. The gray sides of a battle-ship were clear: it was soon trimmed with live figures in white suits. We had put down a motor-boat, which sprang away, when it touched the water, as if the water had given it life: a blue sailor, standing at the tiller, and negligently and gracefully leaning to balance the tilt of the boat, was guiding it in bold easy curves.

Now the varied craft of the harbor were coughing and sneezing all about us, fully waked-up for the day: squat shouldering ferry-boats and tugs; a tiny motor-boat darting like a waterbug; railroad barges, floating freight-cars—Delaware and Lackawanna; New York, New Haven and Hartford—all those dear, square names of home!

Then the shore was moving: to the left, the docks had begun to bristle with the first thickets of the forest of masts. In a moment, the sky would be crowded, and one would behold, above the docks and the shipping, the tremendous towers of the town!

At that moment, on our way to Coney Island, the freshness of that other summer day, when I had come back to the United States with what seemed infinite freedom before me, was recreated in my mind so vividly that I tried to describe it to Daisy. But for Daisy, the things which had delighted me—the boat leaping into the tug, the sound of the train in the dark, the sailor guiding the boat, had no special significance or point, because they were things which she took for granted, and which seemed perfectly commonplace. I felt that she kept waiting for these incidents to develop into anecdotes, in which something entertaining should happen.

When I had finally given it up, she put her hand over the middle of my face and regarded me attentively. “You’d be very good-looking,” she said, “if it wasn’t for your nose.” I said, “I know I’ve got a terrible nose!” “No,” she reassured me. “It’s cute. But it interferes with any Adonis-like beauty that you might otherwise have had.”

In the harbor, the harbor of the August day which was actually about us, the lowering of the zinc-bright colorless sun had made of the water to the west a gleaming sheet of zinc; and to the east, it had begun to blue. A bell-buoy clanged and bathed. Before us, we could see the steamers moving out toward the open sea, their smoke trailing back from seaward. A fresh, easier, breezy sea-smell reached us—it was a lightening of the load of life.

“Doesn’t that feel nice, though!” said Daisy. “I think I’m going to enjoy this trip!”

I asked her about Pete and his job. “I’m so glad we’re going to Boston,” she said. “I’m tired of the country, but I don’t want to live in New York! I think New York is terrible!”

Sea Gate—and beaches rank with bathers; little brummagen summer bungalows with green or red roofs.

Then a monumental buff hotel with a blunt obelisk tower rose alone from a level shore—where, however, we could presently make out the skeletons of roller-coasters and the squirrel-cages of ferris-wheels.

Now, more quickly than in our bemusement we had expected, the boat was pulling in toward the boardwalk: we could see a row of improbable objects—the sails of a bright-red Dutch windmill; the teeth of a gigantic grinning mask; a rocking full-size Noah’s Ark, with animals sticking their heads out the windows and with curious half-clownlike figures, which made the spasmodic movements of automata and which seemed the true unearthly inhabitants of that city of enormous toys.

When the boat stopped, as we stood on deck, waiting to get off, we suddenly again felt the heat. “The sun makes me reel!” said Daisy. We walked, dazed, up a little gang-plank and down a very long white pier. The hotel, which rose now to our left, against the dazzling zinc of the sky, was a dull and solid slug, as the Statue of Liberty had been. The sea was now quite blue.

I was enchanted by the Noah’s Ark: there were an ostrich, a giraffe, and an elephant, wagging their heads out the portholes; a Noah, who, at regular intervals, threw back his Uncle Josh beard and took a swig from a bottle of whiskey; and a fisherman who, at similar intervals, jerked up an old shoe on his hook. There was also a mysterious monster, labelled “Hank,” half human and half brute, who in paroxysms shook his window-bars. An urgent and ominous fog-horn sounded at the same short intervals. I was all for going inside.

“Let’s go in swimming first,” said Daisy, “while we’ve still got the sun—then we’ll feel fine—then we’ll have another drink. Then we can go and do things, huh?” She squeezed my arm: she seemed happy.

We floated, on our way, through warm currents: the balm of hot buttered pop-corn; the fragrance of burnt molasses; the sweet-acrid odor of orange-peels.

And then, after the close, musky smell, human and marine, of the damp-and-dry gray boards of the bath-house, I met Daisy in my hired bathing-suit, and we walked out under the boardwalk to the beach.

She had brought an old bathing-suit of Pete’s which had enormous brown and white stripes and which was in places much too tight for her. With her fair skin among the tanned bathers and her hair tucked behind her ears, she looked like one of the Mack Sennett bathing girls, in the old-fashioned movie comedies. “I know it looks awful,” she said, when I kidded her about this, “but I thought it didn’t matter at Coney Island—and I couldn’t afford to get a new one.”

There were tiny children playing in the surf, in tiny slips of bathing-suits of yellow, pale green, and red, like the variously flavored fruit-drops—orange, raspberry, and lime—in the glass jars we had passed on a candy counter; or like the bottles of colored soft-drinks—cherry, orange, and lemon soda—which we had seen at a soft-drink stand—they were splashing in wild delight or fleeing from the sea with squeals.

Daisy worked, for a few minutes, squinting, in an ineffective under-water side-stroke. I, still partly bemused by my drinks, flung myself with abandon to the waves, and swam around a small stone breakwater in what—although I unexpectedly ran into the breakwater—I thought was pretty good order.

“That was a marvellous wallow of yours!” said Daisy. “I thought you were trying to push the breakwater over! I was just going to yell out and tell you to stop, it was built there on purpose!”

She had brought out of the surf, about her shoulders, a great strip of glossy gold-brown seaweed, and she wore it as a boa: it went beautifully with her hair and with the taffy-colored stripes of Pete’s bathing-suit, both darkened by the wet. Her slim legs below her full hips looked almost like the legs of a bird.

We lay on the sand for awhile. “Your hair seems a different color,” I said. “In fact—I don’t know whether it’s just my imagination or not—but it always seems a different color every time that I see you.” “It is, I guess,” she replied. “They put white henna on it when they bleached it for the Gambols—and I always used to put peroxide and lemon-juice on it every so often, but I haven’t been able to lately. That’s why it’s pink, I guess.” I asked what color it had originally been. “Oh, Gee: I don’t know,” she said. “It’s so long ago!—Mouse-color, I guess!”

I inquired about a system of vivid blue veins on her thigh. “That’s my charley-horse,” she explained; “I got it in the first Gambols.” I asked her why she didn’t go back on the stage. “I’m too short,” she replied, “and my feet are too small for me to dance well—and I don’t like it, anyway: I always get independent and cut too many rehearsals. That was why I got fired the last time.”

Beside us, a brown young man had his arm about the shoulders of a young woman in an old-rose bathing-suit, with large carpet-like flower-patterns, which richly harmonized with the purple tan of her skin: she presently slipped a hand beneath the top of her companion’s bathing-suit and affectionately rubbed his back. A handsome blond girl in blue, who seemed to have two men in attendance, was pawing the sand with one foot. Another girl, in a turquoise costume, had stretched out on her back on the sand, with her shoulders between a man’s knees: he was passionately stroking her arm.

I watched one really beautiful woman, very blond and rather Germanic: she wore a pair of red bathing-trunks with an orange stripe down the side, belted and athletically faded, and a plain white bathing-shirt. She lay voluptuously, one knee elevated and her head on the knees of a barrel-shaped man, who wore horn-rimmed spectacles. Her skin was extremely white, only toasted a little about the shoulders; and she had smiling darkish brown eyes. I watched her as, presently, she got up and walked over to the water, and—while her companion bobbed in the surf—with an easy and graceful crawl, lay voluptuously along the swell.

“This is all artificial sand, you know,” said Daisy,—“Oh, yes: they spent half a million dollars fixing up this beach. There didn’t used to be any beach at all. That was the same time they put up the hotel. I wonder if they’re making money.”

Gray steamers were passing quite close along the gray line of the water—they made me think of summers in Europe, of coming back from abroad in the fall—at the age when I had been last to Coney Island, there had always been uncles and aunts sailing to or from France—there had been an uncle who brought home from Paris silk stockings for my cousins and aunts—he had had a bluff and ironical way of retorting, “You don’t say!” which was precisely the way Daisy said things—it was the American way.—The Americans went to Paris, and then they came back again with silk stockings and things they had bought, and that frank American smile, and that straightforward way of speaking.—The people who interested me most were, almost all, I reflected, now abroad: Grosbeake was in England for the summer; Hugo, in spite of his enthusiasm for the American Middle Western cities, was still in Afghanistan; and Rita was still in Paris—yet I did not at the moment seem to miss them and did not want to go abroad myself. What fun we had had together after all—Rita and I—though we had never been easy and friendly together, as Daisy and I were to-day: there had been one evening—we had been drinking raw gin—Rita would never have drunk the gin and ginger-ale to which Daisy was addicted—when we had told each other things about ourselves which had seemed at the time to mean a great deal—I couldn’t quite remember what they were—she had told me something about her girlhood, it was that night she had sung me the song about the foggy, foggy dew—and I had told her how my father had died of tuberculosis—and what a rotten time I had had at boarding-school, and how I intended to write a novel about it. Those nocturnal drunken conversations which seemed to mean so much!—which did, no doubt, mean so much. All literature, perhaps—and not poetry alone, but even the systematized facts of Hugo’s documented novels, even the formulas of Grosbeake’s logic—was in the nature of a drunken language, expressing, by certain symbols, sensations and emotions merely—the readjustments, that would be, of our little corner of nature to the universe of which we were part—which was forever passing into new phases and where each phase meant a new adjustment for every part—where, then, a new art or idea was something more than the mere compensation for an individual weakness or disaster, it was a necessity of universal development—I would think it all out some time—the sun was hot on the sand.

“Well,” said Daisy, “now that we’ve earned that other drink, how about going in?”

Hot dogs were being roasted twenty at a time, on wide polished iron slabs: they were crisp, with a delicious stink. At an oilcloth-covered table, Daisy and I ate one apiece, dabbing them gamboge with a little long-handled wooden spoon from the common mustard pot.

“I’m ravenous!” said Daisy, biting into the pulp of her roll.

Dim and languid from the swim, I was watching the reflections of girls, in wide hats and bright summer colors, shine briefly in the silver high myriad-paned mirror, in the sun that bleached whites whiter and blues and yellows white.

“Do you want another?” I asked, when she had bolted the last morsel. “Not now; maybe later,” she replied.

We did the shooting-galleries after this, and the ring-throwing and ball-rolling games. We were both quite good: we knocked over any number of moving ducks, which was what we had decided to concentrate on; and we won a baby-doll in a chemise, a miniature roulette-wheel, an harmonica, an atomizer and a trick pistol which shot off a snake. Daisy was so delighted with the snake that she kept shooting it down the ball-rolling table, so that the Jap had to find it and bring it back. Every time, with oriental patience, he would stuff it into the pistol, hand it back to Daisy, and caution her politely with a smile, as he indicated the trigger: “Now don’t put your finger on that!”—whereupon Daisy would shoot it off again. I was somehow obscurely reminded of that horrible night at Sue Borglum’s, and I took a dislike to the Jap and made Daisy move on.

“Let’s send some goofy post-cards,” said Daisy, in front of a post-card store. We went inside and selected several with fastidious care. I sent cards to Hugo and Rita; and Daisy sent cards to Gus Dunbar and Sue Borglum. “I’m going to be dirty,” she said, putting a cross on a bathing beauty, and writing, “X marks my room.”

I asked her if she would care for a pin-cushion heavily encrusted with sea-shells and inscribed, “Souvenir of Coney Island,” or if there were anything else she would like. “I’d like some moccasins,” she said. “Very well,” I replied. “Will you really buy me some?” she asked eagerly. “You great big munificent old thing!—I haven’t got any slippers now, and I used to keep getting my feet full of splinters and thumb-tacks in the country.”

It turned out that her feet were so small that the man had to get a special size out of the stockroom at the back. The woman in the shop, fat and sharp-eyed, became very friendly with Daisy and, while the man was looking for the moccasins, tried to engage her in conversation. “Do you mind my asking what kind of lipstick that is?” the woman inquired with interest. Rather to my surprise, this seemed to embarrass Daisy: she explained that it was called “carnation,” but when the woman asked her how much it cost, Daisy said that she had forgotten, and became markedly unresponsive. “If they can’t find the right size,” she presently remarked to me pointedly, “we might as well go!” The moccasins, however, were forthcoming: they were moccasins for a child and I did not suppose they could fit her; but they did. She looked down at her little blunt-toed foot with its border, at the throat, of gray fur: “That’s all right,” she said shortly.

“That woman certainly took a friendly interest,” I remarked, when we were out on the boardwalk. “Yes,” said Daisy. “I never know what to do when people like that get chummy.”

I had been surprised at Daisy’s shrinking from the familiarity of the woman in the shop, and I was now to be surprised again. I had lingered in front of a side-show, where there were posters of a Hula-Hula Dancer, a Dog-faced Boy, a Mermaid, an Hermaphrodite and a Magician, and I suggested going in. But Daisy evidently did not care to. “My mother would never let me see any freaks,” she said. “They’re all fakes, aren’t they?” she asked, a little timidly.

As we walked on, she shot the snake off again, and I had to go and get it out of an umbrella-stand bristling with pennants and canes.

Then I discovered the Eden Musée—I had forgotten that it had moved to Coney Island and had thought of it as having perished. I had not visited it since my childhood, when, coming up to New York with my father, he had used to take me to see it in the days when it had still been on Twenty-third Street: there I had seen for the first time moving-pictures, along with the automatic chess-player and the manipulator of liquid air. And now here was the same old policeman in his high obsolete helmet; the same refined widow in black, with the tight waist of the early nineteen-hundreds; the same old hayseed with his spectacles, his flopping wide-brimmed straw hat and his flaccid carpet-bag—but now no longer posed inside, where they could no longer be mistaken for real people, but set out in front as a guarantee of the authentic antiquity of the show.

I induced Daisy to go in.—There they were, that awful group of my youth, though it seemed to me their number was diminished: Jenny Lind, Mary Queen of Scots, Anna Held, Oliver Cromwell, Beethoven, Brigham Young, General Grant, Napoleon and Booker T. Washington: I was sorry to see that Marshall P. Wilder no longer had a place among them.

I did not examine them closely, however, for Daisy, who seemed never to have seen wax-works before, hurried on to the more dramatic tableaux set back in compartments along the side. She passed before them, gazing in silence. The groups were not particularly interesting, but they presently led us to the “Crypt.” We entered a darkened curving passage. I was delighted: it was the old “Chamber of Horrors,” which in the Twenty-third Street days had used to be downstairs in the basement. We gazed at the Opium Den; the Execution of a Burmese Criminal (it seemed to me now that the elephant who steps on the criminal’s head had shrunk since I was a boy); the Cannibal Feast; the Whipping Post, “still in use in the State of Delaware”; and, the electrocution of poor Lina Lemberg, who had finally, a few weeks before, been executed for the murder of her husband. The witnesses, in the Death Chamber, were regarding the proceedings with simpers, and I wondered whether they had not been borrowed from an old tableau of a lobster-and-champagne supper, with Mephistopheles in the background, of which the personnel of revellers seemed to me, like the Burmese elephant, to have dwindled since the Twenty-third Street days. I suggested this to Daisy. “I don’t think this is very exciting,” she replied. She seemed to look at everything so perfunctorily that I was afraid she was being bored: as she had never seen the Musée in her childhood, I could not expect her to share my interest in it.

Several tableaux farther on, I found that I had turned a corner and left Daisy behind—still staring, no doubt, at Lina Lemberg. I was before a group of the Spanish Inquisition, and I had a sudden happy inspiration for enlivening the entertainment for Daisy. I climbed quickly over the railing, put my straw hat on the head of the presiding inquisitor—he had a lean and sallow face, and the hat came down over his eyes—and, with my back to the railing, struck an energetic pose among the torturers with red-hot irons, myself applying to the victim’s blood-streaked shoulder the cork-screw I had brought for the gin. In a moment, I heard distinct light steps, which stopped—then, after an instant’s pause: “Come on out of there, you old cut-up!” I climbed back over the railing. “I thought you were real at first,” she said, as we reached the exit. “You gave me quite a turn!”

On our way out, I caught a glimpse of Roosevelt, the Teddy Roosevelt of San Juan Hill, who, with his handkerchief knotted about his neck, his Rough-Rider puttees, his felt hat, his mustache, his glaring teeth and his eye-glasses, made me think of that younger America which I had assumed we had forever left behind, but which to-day seemed quite close to me again. It had been a boy’s America—and not merely because it had been the America of my boyhood. Roosevelt, who had been so charming with his children, had become the idol of the Americans of that time for very much the same reasons—he had been everything that a boy could imagine: Dan Beard, Old and Young King Brady, Frank Merriwell, and Stanley in Africa, all rolled into one. I asked Daisy whether she remembered the time when Roosevelt had been a great hero. She said, “No,”—and showed so little interest that for a time I relapsed into silence. Then she let me see what she had been thinking about: “I’ve never seen a dead person,” she said, “except an aunt of mine that died.”

“By the way,” I asked, after a moment, “what became of that thief that Ray Coleman caught—the one that didn’t steal anything of yours, but stole the bathrobe of the man next door, or something?” She was silent. “Don’t you remember?” “Yes, I remember,” she replied. “But I don’t know what became of him. I was thinking too much about myself at that time to pay much attention to anything else.”

“Would you mind taking me to dinner?” she said presently. “I’m absolutely starved!” I asked her where she wanted to go. “I’d like to go to the old Seaview, if you don’t mind. I don’t know how the food there is now—but I’d just like to see the place.—I went there with Phil Meissner,” she added, “when we first came on from Pittsburgh.”

The Seaview was quite remote—beyond a kind of grassy common, criss-crossed with bald paths. It was an old-fashioned summer hotel, of the cupolaed and pillared design of the days before concrete and brick: like all wooden hotels by the shore, it had a flimsy discolored look, and seemed peculiarly desolate and dry. The dining-room was entirely empty: only a few of the tables were set. One side was all high narrow windows, separated by thin wooden frames, which looked out on the boardwalk and the sea; and on the other, an old closed piano stood against the wall, and space had been left for a dance-floor; slim pillars from floor to roof at intervals threaded the room. We waited, but no one came. I finally hallo’d; and a waiter appeared from the pantry. He came forward without inspiration, as if he expected to be asked for cigarettes or to be asked to direct us to Luna Park. When he learned that we wanted dinner, his eagerness to serve us was extreme.

“Well,” said Daisy, as we sat down, “the table linen’s nice and clean, anyway.” It was true: very white large napkins had been folded into angles and stuck into large clear goblets.

“I’m going to have clams,” said Daisy. “They used to have the most wonderful clam-cocktails here.” I ordered a melon for myself, and bluefish for both of us afterwards. I also ordered some ginger-ale and poured out what was left of the gin. “I don’t think I’ll have any,” said Daisy, “until after I’ve had something to eat.” She looked a little pale and was silent for some time, and I hoped that the Chamber of Horrors hadn’t upset her. She smiled broadly, however, at last, and proclaimed: “Look out, Food: I’m coming!”

I asked her how she and Phil had ever happened to come to the Seaview. “Phil knew the manager,” she explained. “The manager gave a party in my honor—just some of his men friends. We had champagne, and I’d never had anything to drink before—I was awfully young—I was only seventeen. I thought it was swell, and I got lit. They kept filling up my glass with champagne. You know how men are when they’ve got a girl that’s young and kind of cute, and they’re trying to get her tight. I had on a little black dress like they wore then, that buttoned up the back, and the bottom buttons got unbuttoned—and then every man that danced with me would unbutton another button—so that pretty soon it was unbuttoned all the way up to the waist. I didn’t know anything about it and just went on smiling and dancing, and thinking I was cutting quite a figure, with my legs hanging out all the time!”

I laughed about this.

“I certainly enjoyed those clams!” she said, when all the little hollows in her plate were empty around the red-splashed glass of sauce. She smiled: “After all,” she declared, “say what you please—there’s nothing like a good plate of food!” I asked her if she would like some more clams. “Yes,” she answered, after a moment’s thought, “I believe that I would.” I ordered another clam-cocktail.

I asked if it weren’t true, as I had heard from Hugo Bamman, the night of Ray Coleman’s party, that she and her husband, on their honeymoon, had ridden on a motor-cycle all the way from Pittsburgh to Atlantic City: this had seemed to me tremendously romantic. “It wasn’t Atlantic City,” Daisy explained. “It was here.”

“What was Phil Meissner like?” I inquired. “He had a lot of charm,” said Daisy, “and a lot of brains, too—but he never did anything with them except perfectly foolish things. For instance, he’d spend days inventing something that worked by electricity to make the blinds open in the morning—he could lie in bed and press a button and make the water-basin fill, and when it was full, the faucet would turn itself off, and everything!”

“Were you very much in love with him?” I asked. She shook her head, as if in scorn. “I didn’t know anything about anything then. He was the first regular beau I’d ever had: my father wouldn’t let me go with the boys. I was all excited aboutum at first.—I was so much impressed withum when I first marriedum that it was just ridiculous! I couldn’t even go to the drug-store to get a tube of tooth-paste without askingum what kind to buy. But I wasn’t really in love withum—I didn’t know what it was all about—and then, by the time I might have been in love, everything was pretty well wrecked.—My father followed us here and burst in on us with a detective at four o’clock in the morning. He made us get up and get married then and there—we hadn’t gotten married before we left because Phil didn’t want to attract attention. Dad said I’d either have to marry Phil or go back to Pittsburgh. So we got up and got married at four o’clock in the morning—it was the night after the champagne party and we both felt like nobody’s business. Phil was sore as a crab, because Dad had a Catholic priest marry us, and Phil wasn’t a Catholic—but Dad threatened to havum arrested for abducting a minor, and he had the detective right there.

“Things were never quite the same after that. I don’t blame Phil for being sore: nobody likes to be forced into a thing like that—especially with a hangover, at four o’clock in the morning!”

I had been thinking: her father from Pittsburgh—why had they named her Daisy?—I remembered that old song of my boyhood,

—that old song of an earlier time to which Daisy’s name seemed to relate her—and her large hips, too—I had never been aware how round they were till I had seen her in her bathing-suit—they were the kind that had been admired at the time when the song had been new—they went in for slender hips to-day—but I liked Daisy’s none the less—how bicycles had gone out, too—but she and Phil, appropriately enough, had spent their honeymoon on a motor-cycle.

“Are you happy now with Pete?” I asked. She shook her head: “I don’t know if I’ve really ever been happy—but I’ve sworn to go through with this with Pete: I’m tired of leaving people.” “Are you and Pete married now?” She shook her head again and grunted negatively, “uh-uh!”

“I know I’m not happy now,” she went on, “because I keep having these dreams where some kind of a great piece of good fortune is just about to befall me—and they’re the goofiest dreams!—When Prince Charming comes along, he’s always just a great, big, strong, clean-limbed American who gathers me up in his arms. It’s so silly! I feel ashamed of myself after I wake up.—And I’m always dressed in the costume that I wore in the first Gambols, when I came out in a white old-fashioned dress, with curls and pantalettes and everything. I loved it—Gus Dunbar used to say that I looked so sweet and dewy that he wanted to smack me down. But you know one night the boys from Notre Dame came and stole my picture in that costume that was on show in front of the theatre—and they published it in the college paper. They sent me a copy of the paper: I was tickled to death. That was the only one they stole!”

I had been watching, through the tall, open windows, the double, white, pearly globes of the boardwalk lamps, so pale, so chaste and so bright, hanging gracefully, like lilies-of-the-valley, from their straight, slender stalks, against the background of the paler blue, now the cooler blue, of the sea, where a buoy shone ruby-red.

When we came down the steps of the hotel, all was in deep blue dusk, with the lamps a double rope of moons. “Have you noticed this?” I asked, waving my hand toward the lamps.—“I suppose the last time I was happy,” she said, “was back there in the old Seaview dining-room!”

We were confronted, when we turned back toward the amusements, by a large and very garish electric sign in the form of a gigantic human foot, on which a red Mephistopheles was standing: by means of alternate systems of bulbs, the arm of the Mephistopheles was made to jerk back and forth, prodding energetically with a spear an illuminated corn on the big toe, which at each jab changed the color of its light, first blue, then purple, then green. The legend, which flashed on and off, proclaimed, in contorted, striking letters: “Take a Walk with Clancy’s Corn Fix. Knocks the Devil Out of Sore Feet.”

“Oh, do you see that sign?” said Daisy. “That was Larry Mickler’s idea. He’s making a lot of money out of it: they’ve got them all over the country.” I was glad to know that Larry Mickler, through a truly Dostoevskian device, had constrained his sadistic instincts to serve this beneficent end.

“I hope we get somewhere soon!” said Daisy presently. “I’ve got to go to about eighteen ladies’-rooms!” We had been walking along the boardwalk and were only just reaching the shops again. Daisy presently disappeared in a small and rather sordid-looking restaurant.

There was a penny-in-the-slot place next door, and as I walked back and forth in front of the restaurant, I stopped and looked in. I saw, standing before me in the doorway, a tall, young man with a stoop, who had a darkish tooth-brush mustache, which I considered a little silly, and rather large brown eyes of the kind usually described as spaniel-like: he was wearing, like everybody else, a straw hat with a black band, which, it seemed to me, he had pulled too far down on his forehead. I had a feeling of mild irritation that he should be standing and staring so innocently, so well-meaningly, and so lackadaisically, square in the middle of the doorway, where he made it difficult for people to pass. He was laden down, I saw, with packages: no doubt some woman had made him carry them.—Then sharply I pulled myself up from that vague and absent moment: the man was my own reflection in a mirror opposite the door. On either side were other mirrors which distorted people’s shapes.

I continued to gaze at myself: how had I ever failed to recognize—especially after Daisy had remarked on it—my ridiculous bulbous nose? My eyes, which I had hoped were intelligent, had only appeared to me canine—and my mustache was unsuccessful. My pockets were bulging with the atomizer, the mouth-organ, the baby-doll, and the pistol with the snake; and I was carrying the roulette-wheel and the moccasins, which had been wrapped up in pasteboard boxes. I seemed to myself a figure from the funny-papers: Mr. Suburban American, at the sea-side, with packages and a straw hat.

I went back to the door of the restaurant: Daisy had not yet emerged. There was a radio playing outside, and for some reason the programme included some vaudeville or night-club woman soloist singing Mamie Rose, that popular song of several years ago which Daisy had started on the phonograph when Rita had been reading her poems and which had desolated me so on the day when I had seen Rita off at the station and had been waiting for Daisy in her rooms. Now I listened idly for the words, parts of which, on that horrible record, I had never been able to catch. The contralto, whose voice was rich and deep, delivered them with a masterly casual emphasis, in that nondescript dialect—perhaps the result of Irish actors learning from Jewish comedians how to sing Negro songs—which has become the language of American jazz:

That was the line that I’d never been able to hear!—That song, but a few years old, seemed already to belong to the past, like Daisy and the American Patrol, and the old musical-comedy tune which the musicians had played on the boat, and I found that I had at last come to feel for it a certain familiar affection. Furthermore, I now thought it quite good: there was something rather unexpected, something even quite original about the manipulation of the tune: what was original and unexpected was the repetition, in some sort of minor, of the pattern which had just gone before—recommencing, with She’s proud and snooty, what one had thought was entirely finished—and recommencing it agreeably and queerly, so that for a moment one always paused to listen. I wondered how the composer had arrived at it. He was a man named Harry Hirsch, I remembered: I imagined him: a small, young Jew with very large, intense, black eyes, like motor headlights; after the success of the musical comedy in which Mamie Rose had been sung, he had probably taken to wearing spats. He was no doubt the son of a Rabbi or of the Cantor in a Synagogue: the base of his music was German, and I imagined some dark room of a stifling apartment on the East Side, in which his youth had been fed on Schubert and on the light opera of Vienna and Berlin, cities which his eyes had never seen. But what had he done to this music?—what had made him repeat those bars of the sweet German melody with which he had begun, but transforming them abruptly, by daring what any hack worker in the field would have told him a priori was impossible, what would have lasted in commonplace hands impossibly too long? By carrying us beyond expectation, by breaking into that new accent, half agonized and half thrilling, he had enchanted the public so completely that not merely had Mamie Rose turned out to be one of the principal factors in the success of the musical comedy in which it had first appeared (and where, as a matter of fact, the director had been afraid to feature it), but it had been heard on every radio and phonograph; at every college prom, at every Greenwich Village ball; from the most perfunctory chirpings of the orchestras of restaurants to the jazz-bands de luxe of roof-gardens; on the vaudeville circuits of small towns and in the scores of feature moving-pictures; worked up for the Elks summer fair; struck up, with the words thrown on a screen, during the intermissions of burlesque shows; ground out at “dancing academies” where, from New York to Los Angeles, clumsy and inarticulate young men pushed wary and inarticulate girls about a crowded, monotonous floor—and as I had heard it once, late at night, sung strangely from a summer street by a child’s voice, nasal and shrill, following subtly and with marvellous accuracy the deviating minor strain, and repeating it again and again!

Where had he got it?—from the sounds of the streets? the taxis creaking to a stop? the interrogatory squeak of a street-car? some distant and obscure city-sound in which a plaintive high note, bitten sharp, follows a lower note, strongly clanged and solidly based? Or had he got it from Schoenberg or Stravinsky?—or simply from his own nostalgia, among the dark cells and the raspings of New York, for those orchestras and open squares which his parents had left behind?—or for the cadence, half-chanted and despairing, of the tongue which the father had known, but which the child had forgotten and was never to know again?

But the relations between Schoenberg, the taxi-brakes, and the Synagogue, baffled further speculation.—And, in any case, what charmed and surprised one, in this as in all works of art, was no mere combination of elements, however picturesque or novel, but some distinctive individual quality which the artist himself supplied. Of all the young Jews in New York who had listened to the service in the Synagogue or who had been kept awake at night by taxis, how many had written good music, even good popular music? I thought of that personal color or rhythm which, the night when I had been dressing in Bank Street to take Daisy out to a night-club, had seemed to me, in the work of an artist, as little important or interesting as the color of his hair or eyes, or his way of mispronouncing certain words; but I could recognize now that it was precious. And as I recalled my gloomy meditations of the night of Sue Borglum’s party, I remembered how the Greeks had given Sophocles the name of “the Attic Bee.”

Yes: I saw it: there it was: it was acrid, but still honey; and it was something more than beauty of verse. The Greeks’ idea of sweetness had been as different as possible from Stevenson and the “honey-dripping style.” I saw it now, not merely in the nightingales and the ivy of that chorus at Colonus for which the jury had applauded Sophocles, when his competence to dispose of his property had been called in question by his son; but in the passionate frankness of Antigone, even in the asperity of Œdipus, even in the guile of Odysseus. I thought now of the exquisite proportion, of the style with its unique combination of modulation and pith, of the strong and sensitive hand placing with so firm and light an emphasis those culminating scenes where the nobler instincts of humanity reassert or declare themselves: Electra when she speaks to the urn which she believes contains her brother’s ashes, Neoptolemus confessing at last that he cannot act against his nature to deceive even an outcast who has trusted him—as, in the case of Dostoevsky, I remembered, no longer the contention and the horror, but the brightness of the high comic sense which interpenetrates all that is turbid, which flowers constantly in such charming passages as that in The Idiot, for example, where the young girl buys the hedgehog from the boys and sends it to the Prince for a peace-offering, and which makes even of Crime and Punishment a comedy rather than a tragedy. It was not that the Athenian jury had merely demonstrated their gratitude for—that the crowds at Dostoevsky’s funeral had merely regretted being deprived of—a sedative to which they had become addicted; but that both had been ravished by the taste—and by it had been partly repaid for the harshness of the common life—of that miraculous secretion of the mind which there was only one man to supply. And so every sort of good literature, so every sort of good art, provided an aliment, a stimulant, as natural and necessary as food and drink themselves! Even the tannic tincture of Poe, which seemed to turn the throat to leather and to petrify the taste, had its own peculiar tonic value, and even from the coarse, used mash of Byron it was possible to extract a strong brandy—even the writer of popular music—The radio was hawking and halting; I had already been waiting a long time—much too long, I began to think. And I suddenly remembered how Daisy had slit her wrist on the night when I had left her at Gus Dunbar’s apartment.

I was on the point of going in to look for her when she finally appeared: I was so much relieved to see her that I did not at first notice how pale she was. She said that she was sorry to have kept me waiting, and we walked on for a moment in silence: then I asked her whether she had been ill. “No: I’m all right,” she replied. “You were such a long time in there,” I said.—“Are you sure that you’re all right?” “Yes, I’m all right,” she said again. “You were sick in there,” I challenged her, stopping. “Did you throw up?” “I’m all right!” she repeated. “It was just the smell of that place, I guess!”

I made her sit down on a bench: she wouldn’t let me get her anything, and neither of us spoke for a time. A fresh, fishy breeze was blowing in: I hoped that it would make her feel better. A lighthouse was winking punctually; the ocean was grayest blue, and the low waves were pale as porcelain on the sands of palest buff: the late bathers were coral limbs. Some children, still playing on the beach, were holding out into the ocean and the night the brass-bristling frost-crystals of sparklers.

I asked Daisy presently how she felt. “All right: fine!” she replied.—I tried to find out whether there were anything seriously wrong with her. “No,” she said. “To tell the truth, we haven’t had very much to eat out in the country lately: the grocer and the butcher in the village wouldn’t give us any more credit, and we had to live on the things that we already had in the house—which were mostly corn-flakes—corn-flakes without cream or anything—that was about all we’d had for a week before we came in. I guess I overdid it with those clams.”

I said I thought that the gin had been rotten and that the ginger-ale had been inferior. I began to produce the toys from my pockets. She took a sudden interest in the harmonica and amused herself by working out tunes on it: her most conspicuous success, from which she seemed to derive a good deal of satisfaction, was Nearer My God to Thee. After a while, she said: “Well, let’s go on!” I asked her whether she wanted to go home. “No,” she declared, “not yet: I want to do some more things!—don’t you?”

We explored Luna Park—all bright minarets and festoons of white imitation pearls. I offered to take her on the “Thunderbolt”; the “Shoot-the-Chutes”; the “Dragon’s Gorge”; but she did not seem very eager. “Why don’t we try that Noah’s Ark thing?” she suggested, as we were wandering a little aimlessly, “that thing that you wanted to go into when we first came.”

We went back to the steamboat pier and found the Noah’s Ark still rocking and sounding its sombre fog-horn; it was lighted up now with green ship’s lanterns, which revealed the elephant, the ostrich, and the giraffe, the fisherman pulling up the shoe, the old patriarch hitting his bottle, and the monster shaking his bars. “Do you think you can stand it?” I asked. “Oh, yes,” insisted Daisy, smiling. “I want to go in, don’t you?”

We bought tickets and mounted the gang-plank. Inside, the Ark was rather a sell, as there was nothing amusing to see—the animals and the monster turned out to have been constructed so as to be visible merely from the outside. We found that we had been let in for an assortment of banal and disconcerting sensations. We had to walk on a shifting platform—pass along a wobbly corridor—climb a flight of quaking stairs. Our hats were almost blown off by a violent blast of air and when we tried to catch hold of the railing, we received an electric shock. I was afraid that it might make Daisy sick again, and asked her whether she wanted to go back: “No, I’m all right,” she replied. We went through with it to the end, in silence and rather solemnly. I felt protective and tender toward Daisy, and contrite at having brought her in: I was only just beginning fully to realize that she had probably, when we first started out, been faint for lack of food; that she had been drinking on an empty stomach; that she had been sickened by the Eden Musée and upset by my stupid joke; and that revisiting the Seaview Hotel, which had brought back her first days with Phil Meissner, had finally overcome her. I became acutely aware, too late, that if she had insisted on going in for the Noah’s Ark, it had been entirely because she thought I wanted to.—The last stunt was a spiral slide which landed us on a whirling platform: in my efforts to rescue Daisy, I fell on the roulette-wheel and broke it.

It was now time to go home, we decided—but as it turned out that the last boat had left, we were obliged to go back by the bus.

On our way to the place where the buses stopped, we passed the poster of a spiritualist fortuneteller. “Did I tell you my joke?” asked Daisy. “About ‘Striking a Happy Medium’?” “Yes,” I said. “I think it’s fine!”

As the bus left Coney Island behind, a cluster of bright, pearly globes among the vivid red pumps of a filling-station repeated the pearls of Luna Park and the drooping white lamps of the boardwalk.

Along the boulevard to New York, were aligned little sections of shops, bright-windowed and built in new concrete: drug-stores; grocery-stores; automobile show-rooms; a bank.

There were girls in summer dresses, hatless, with bobbed heads and pink or tan stockings, strolling out, alone or in couples. Down side-streets, I could see little houses with compact and screened porches giving way to the wastes of building-lots, where a lonely and random street-lamp would light untidy bushes and trees. That was the America to which I had returned when, coming back after the War from France, I had been greeted by that other suburban street-lamp on the Staten Island shore! That was the America to which to-night I felt myself returning again—those neat and new little shops, those girls wandering out in the evening between the drug-store and the building-lots—hardly knowing what they expected but half hoping for some new turn to their lives! Had not Daisy been once such a girl, walking out in the streets of Pittsburgh—had not Rita, in her up-state town?

I asked Daisy about her father, of whom she had told me at dinner that he had not let her go out with boys. “He was Irish,” she explained. “He lost all his money when we were just kids. But he was determined that the fact that he’d lost his money shouldn’t make any difference about our being well brought up—I guess it did all right, though.” She smiled her candid smile. “That’s one reason they used to send me to my aunt’s in Nova Scotia so much.” I remembered her timidity about the freaks, her “independence” about rehearsals, and her coldness with the woman in the store. “That was one trouble about Phil and me,” she went on. “Phil’s father and my father had known each other very well when they first came to Pittsburgh. We used to live next door to the Meissners, before they made money and moved. And in those days, Dad had a much more important position than Mr. Meissner: he was one of the principal men in the Billings Company and Mr. Meissner was just a clerk in a bank. Then when the Meissners made money and Dad was down and out, they got snooty about us—and Dad didn’t want me to go with Phil—Phil had the reputation of being the wildest boy in Pittsburgh. Dad was fit to be tied when I ran away withum!”

I marked another filling-station: a crowd of great white stars, which seemed uttered by a rocket’s detonation.

Now we were passing a row of small houses with tapestry-brick façades and, in front of them, little green lawns enclosed by little hedges.

“Dad was really a bright man, though,” Daisy presently went on. “He was one of the first people in the country to design certain kinds of trucks.—He invented all kinds of things—he invented a kind of siren.”

A filling-station where the lights were dimmer and the pumps a duller red was outshone by the lunar beauty of the radiant white pergola which followed it.

“Did you ever hear them talk about auto-horns—in a store or anywhere, I mean?” she asked. “It’s a shout. There’s a toot-toot, and a beep-beep—and an oorah—and a blah-blah, and a blurp-blurp.—Dad’s was a kind of a oorah—and it was a humdinger, too!—it had an authoritative sound and it wasn’t ugly like most sirens.”

In the show-rooms on either side appeared the present-day glories of the motor industry: the Lancerd was celebrating its “Silver Anniversary” with a new model in “distinctive” apple-green, posed with dignity behind its plate-glass pane, in a white-balconied Colonial salon.

“It was getting indicted for manslaughter,” Daisy went on, “that really ruined Dad: he and another man ran into each other as Dad was coming out of a garage. It was really both’s fault—but the man was killed and they indicted Dad—though he’d been a month in the hospital himself. They made him pay a big fine and he lost his job—and he never could get back after that.—He used to come home drunk and sit down on the edge of my bed and hold directors’ meetings all by himself—I used to think it was funny, but my mother used to be so worried!”

I had been brooding on the name of Meissner, which seemed to raise for me vague associations. “Did they ever call Phil Meissner, ‘Junior’?” I finally asked. “The family always calledum that,” she answered. “Why?—did you ever knowum?” “Did they live in a great big house with green and blue stained-glass windows?” “Yes,” said Daisy. “Why? Did you ever knowum? They lived on Aylesworth Avenue. That was where they moved to after they lived next door to us.”

Phil and his family were the people, then, whom I had visited as a child, when I had gone to Pittsburgh with my mother, and who had come back into my mind, when Hugo, at Ray Coleman’s party, had said that Daisy came from Pittsburgh! I told Daisy how much I had envied Phil Meissner’s elaborate toy railroad and his device for making dinner-plates jump, but how obnoxious, on the whole, I had thought him. “He was spoiled to death,” said Daisy. “That was what was the trouble withum, I guess.”

And this discovery that Daisy had married a boy I had myself known in my childhood had an effect out of all proportion to its apparent importance or interest. Hitherto, I now fully took account, I had regarded Daisy as an alien—first, as a denizen of Broadway, and afterwards, as a product of the Village. But she seemed now to have taken her place in the world which I had always known. She was no longer of a different race—of an exotic glamor or guile: she was simply an American girl, who had grown up in an American town like other American towns, lived in a house like other houses, gone to a school like other schools. I seemed to have been given a new vision of the fluidity of manners in America, the plasticity of social position—of the swiftness and adventitiousness of the way in which such things changed. If Daisy’s family had gone down in the world, the Meissners had obviously come up. But the human material was the same; and in the face of its constant fluctuations, attempts to fix social differences became ludicrous and futile. Americans might turn into anything!

What, for example, might not be made of Daisy? On each of the occasions when I had met her, I had seen in her something different, as my own mind had been differently disposed by my personal situation at the time and by the influences by which I had been affected—by Hugo, first; then, by Rita; then, by my disgust and disillusion the night of Sue Borglum’s party; then, by my evening with the Grosbeakes. And I could see how she herself had taken the color of each of the men with whom she had lived since she left Pittsburgh: Phil Meissner’s extravagant tastes; Ray Coleman’s constrained correctitude; and Pete Bird’s engaging humor. She had even, I noted, begun lately to talk exactly like Pete. She had been eager to accept whatever they gave, and how little they had had to give her! Phil with his inherited money, his egoism, and his silly jokes; Ray with his substantial salary, his ignoble employment and his meanness; and Pete with his pennilessness and uselessness, his gentlemanly hobbies and his charm—they seemed now to me like figures of comedy for familiar American types.—But what hope was there for Daisy with any of them?

“I declare,” I said finally aloud, “I don’t see why you haven’t been able to do better than Pete and Ray! Haven’t you ever found anybody in the Village that really amounted to something and that you liked at the same time?” She shook her head, not turning from the window. Then, after a moment, she turned: “You know the only person,” she said, “that I ever thought I could get a real crush on was your friend Hugo Bamman. I actually got all hopped up, that night he was sailing for Egypt, or wherever it was, about the idea of going away withum. I think he’s good-looking, too—especially since he’s stopped wearing spectacles. Some people think that scar spoils his face, but I think it’s smart-looking.—But he’s certainly cagy about women—Myra Busch was crazy aboutum, you know.—Either that or he’s afraid of them.—He’s so sure of himself, too—he knows what he wants to do.—None of the men I’ve ever lived with were sure of themselves.—You know what you told me out in the country, about my knowing about everything better than anybody—well, I wanted to say at the time that that isn’t true at all. That’s just the trouble: I don’t know what it’s all about. I want somebody to tell me!”

Daisy’s mentioning Hugo reminded me of the world as I had seen it through his eyes when I had first come down to Greenwich Village: then, like him, I had thought myself a rebel against the standards of a bourgeoisie—that is, in a country like America, where there was really only one class, or rather, as I had just been reflecting, no classes, properly speaking, at all, against an abstraction of all the worst qualities attributable to respectable Americans; then later, when I had been in love with Rita, all the interests and occupations of the common life had seemed to me on so low a plane and of so lax an impulse, that I could feel for them nothing but contempt. Now my trip to Europe since the War had had the effect of making me more content with America, even at her worst; and my conversation with Grosbeake à propos of Lewis’s Babbitt, though Grosbeake’s opinions had surprised me at the time, had in the long run had the effect of helping me to approach America from a different point of view than the point of view which, at the time when I had thought like Hugo, had allowed me to take account only of American mediocrity and timidity. To-day I seemed to have re-entered that world and to find myself perfectly at home there: now I found that it no longer inspired either hatred, apprehension, or scorn.

“By the way,” I presently asked, “where did you get that line about ‘the downfall of western civilization’?—You know, that night I took you to the movies, you said that you probably looked like the downfall of western civilization.” “Oh,” she said, “that was just something I picked up at the Ritz Bar in Paris!”

The little tapestry-brick houses had been supplanted by apartment-buildings, also in tapestry-brick, and with attractive green or brown awnings at the doorways and windows; but now the awnings came closer together and the crowded house-fronts were laced by zigzagging fire-escapes: they got dingier, balder, denser. We were in Brooklyn, and now Brooklyn Bridge repeated the fire-escape zigzags.

Delancey Street, with its car-tracks and hooded subway entrances; the Bowery, with its El.

We got out at Astor Place. I asked Daisy what she wanted to do. “I think I’d like a drink,” she said. “It’s so long since I’ve been absolutely free, without any housework or anything, that I feel like making the most of it!” “Have you gotten over your sinking-spell?” I asked. “Sure,” she replied with conviction. “I feel fine!”

The oppression of summer, again, hung over and hushed the city-streets: the very taxi horns seemed muted. The greenery in Washington Square, behind the arc-lights, looked heavy and dark; and the benches overflowed with Italians, dirty and sweaty, swarming to the air, giving out the sounds of life, but heavy-footed, slowed down and subdued.

My rooms in Bank Street were stuffy and messy: the colored woman who took care of them had abandoned me without warning and they had not been cleaned for a week. I threw open all the windows. In the house across the court, the people were sitting on the fire-escape in their undershirts. A baby was howling and sobbing.

I had brought in some ice from a drug-store, and this time we had Scotch instead of gin. It was pretty good Scotch, as it went, and we had highballs with mineral water. It was pleasant to relax on the couch, with the cold misted glasses in our hands, alone, with nowhere to go, with no buses or boats to catch.

“Who did you say you were staying with?” I asked.

“Sue Borglum,” Daisy replied—and added: “I think she’s going nuts. Have you seen her lately? She’s turned green!—She’s turned absolutely green!—But I can’t worry about her!—I’ve got all the worrying I can do with Pete and myself!”

“Did you ever know Peter Kester?” I asked. “No,” said Daisy, “Who is he?” “He’s a great friend of Rita Cavanagh’s—she always used to be telling me about him. I met him yesterday for the first time—he’s just come back from New Mexico.—He’s just a nice old bozo, who paints rather mediocre landscapes. He’s just like all the American painters of that generation that you meet at the Washington Irving Club.—He wears tortoise-shell-rimmed eye-glasses with a big black ribbon—and he thinks that Picasso is a clown!”

The electric lights were hot, and I got up to turn one out. “Why don’t you turn them all out,” said Daisy, “and just turn on that lamp in the alcove? It would be a lot cooler.” I turned on the table-lamp in my study and put the others out. I was glad that the things in the room were obscured by the shadow now: I had been feeling that that Leonardo was not a particularly suitable picture for New York in the summer time.

When I came back, she had stretched out along the couch, with her head propped up on a pillow against the arm and her highball clasped in her hand. “I hope you don’t mind my lying down,” she said. I sat down on the edge of the couch beside her.

The voice of a radio, dimly muttering or hoarsely warbling, came in to us from across the back yard. I was reminded of my recent meditations while I had been waiting for Daisy in front of the restaurant, and I told her now about looking in the mirror and mistaking myself for some one else.

“You’re not so bad!” said Daisy. “I think your mustache is all right. In fact, I’ve always liked the way you look.” I replied, “Well, I’ve often told you how much I like the way you look!”

Encouraged, I began to describe to her my consoling æsthetic revelations in connection with the popular song.—I had always thought of her, I told her, also, ever since that first night I had met her, whenever I had heard Mamie Rose.—I talked on, and even got as far as the Attic Bee.

But all the time that I was talking, she was looking at me, serious and flushed, as if I had been making love to her. At last I stopped and said, “You’re such a darling!” and kissed her. We said little after that....

When, from the profuse delight of that love, hot, moist, mucilaginous and melting, I found my thoughts springing up again, they seemed unfolding like fresh new leaves in an atmosphere of gentleness and peace.

I thought of Daisy under her different aspects, as she had seemed to me at different times—and I remembered the literary productions which at one time or another she had inspired—all so different from my present vision of her, from our present reality: first, the night that I had met her at Ray Coleman’s, the cool Gallic short story I had imagined, with its humanitarian irony—then, the night that we had gone to the movies, the romantic apostrophe of the sonnet—then, the night that I was to take her to a night-club, when my alienation from Rita had had the effect of thrusting away from me all the rest of the world as well—Daisy along with the others—the desperate exposure of literature itself, on which my mind had run so furiously and interminably—then, when I had visited Pete and Daisy in the country, the savage moralistic satire which the letter I had received from Rita and the spectacle of Grosbeake’s equanimity had prevented me from writing. I had, in fact, rejected all these projects—as I had outgrown those phases of myself of which my successive conceptions of Daisy had been merely the reflections in another.

And now I felt that I should be content if I could only make some sketches of Daisy, as I remembered her at different times and places—if I could only hit off, in prose, her attitudes, her gestures, her expressions, the intonations of her voice—preserve them so they should not vanish, as Degas had done for his dancers—as Toulouse-Lautrec had done for the women of cabarets.... I dreamed a whole series of Daisy....

So I should perhaps save myself at last from that dreadful isolation of the artist which had appalled me in Hugo and Rita—both forever, it seemed to me now, occupying impregnable solitudes with the creation of impossible worlds—so, by the way of literature itself, I should break through into the real world—as to-night I had seemed at last, with Daisy, as if by a simple mutual transfusion, to come so naturally into contact with life.... Such pictures as I imagined of Daisy would grow directly and freshly from life. And it seemed to me to-night that literature was as amiable as writing ballads, as necessary as making tables—and indeed that, when one came right down to it, there was really no difference in kind between carpentry and literature.

I bent over Daisy—her head on the pillow had that look—the little soft round chin and the soft bare throat—of women in those moments when they have dropped off, along with their garments, all the ruses and resolutions with which they meet the world—when we see them just awakened or lying thinking at night, with wide eyes and anxious mouth, and we realize how gentle they are, how much they wonder, and how tender toward them we must be.... I wondered whether she would leave Pete for me....

“Let’s run away together!” I suggested.

“Oh, I couldn’t—now,” she replied. “I told Pete that if he got a job, I’d stay withum.”

It seemed to me now that I wanted above everything to go away somewhere with Daisy.

“I’ll take you on a motor-cycle!” I proposed.

“No, you won’t!” she promptly replied. “I’ve done my last motor-cycle elopement!”

“Still you must have had a lot of fun!”

“I didn’t know whether I was ever going to get there alive. We had about six accidents.... The real reason for the motor-cycle, I found out afterwards, was that I was afraid I was pregnant and Phil wanted to bring me around. He thought that a motor-cycle trip would be just the thing.... There! I’d told you that we weren’t married! Oh, well—never mind!” She was silent a moment, then went on: “That’s something that nobody but Phil would think of—taking a girl on a motor-cycle trip to bring her around!... He wouldn’t even let me ride in a side-car—he carried me all the way on the handle-bars!”

I made her turn and embraced her anew, kissing her with pleasure and compassion. When she told me of the rejection and death of her love, I recognized the fate of my own. And it was so sweet to include in my arms that warmth, that solidity, that slenderness—and to feel that she followed me!...

In the peace and silence again, I could hear that poor child still crying, and I remembered how once, as a child, I myself had lain awake with the heat, and suffered and complained.—Then, in a moment, I remembered, also, how those same children of the Village had figured in the poem which Rita had recited the night of Ray Coleman’s party and which she told us she had written that day. On that very day when she had filled my imagination with the splendor of her genius and her beauty, when she had seemed to me a goddess or a muse—on that day, her own mind had been haunted by visions of imbecility and deformity—she had seen only, among those children of the streets, the most wretched and the most afflicted, and she had seen in them only the crippling of the spirit and the clouding of the mind by love....

What relief and what a rebirth, our only real birth into this world, when from the fears and snobberies of youth, from all our preconceived ideas, from all those foolish abstractions we learn, all those things that we think we think, we find at last in these beings who have crowded, offended, disgusted or fought us, that interest and that value which we have found only in a few or in one—when, youth’s passion and anguish spent, we see rising about us that reality of those we have looked on as strangers, and know that it is our reality—that what is strange to us is strange to them, that what hurts them hurts us, that what is good for them is good for us—when we no longer dread the fool nor hate the one who wounds us, but can sleep in our beds in peace and in peace face the waking world!...

I kept telling Daisy how smooth her skin was, and she was finally moved to retort: “Are you used to women with scales?”

“I suppose I ought to go,” she said presently. “I don’t want Sue Borglum to have it on me that I stayed out all night.”

“I’ve been so happy with you to-day,” I said, “and I’m afraid that you haven’t been happy.”

“Oh, yes, I have,” she replied. “But I’ve been depressed about the Boston business. I don’t want to go to Boston, damn it!”

She sat up on the edge of the bed. “Now you go into the other room while I put on my dress!”

When she came back, her dress wasn’t hung very well, and her lipstick, newly applied, had a look of fresh paint.

“I don’t care about any of those things,” she said, “except the mouth-organ and the pistol.”

I couldn’t find the mouth-organ: I looked for it all over in vain. “Confound it!” I exclaimed, “I must have left the mouth-organ in the taxi!” “Oh,” she said, “I wanted to show Pete how I could play Nearer My God to Thee! But I guess that the snake will amuse him!”

[The End]