Third Section (continued 2)

“Densch you must forgive me.... You know I rarely permit myself an observation concerning other people’s business,” Blackhead is saying slowly between sips; then suddenly he sits up in his chair. “It’s a damn fool proposition, Densch, by God it is ... by the Living Jingo it’s ridiculous.”

“I dont like dirtying my hands any more than you do.... Baldwin’s a good fellow. I think we’re safe in backing him a little.”

“What the hell’s an import and export firm got to do in politics? If any of those guys wants a handout let him come up here and get it. Our business is the price of beans ... and its goddam low. If any of you puling lawyers could restore the balance of the exchanges I’d be willing to do anything in the world.... They’re crooks every last goddam one of em ... by the Living Jingo they’re crooks.”

“Well old man,” says Mr. Densch in a tired voice, “it may have been a bad thing to do, but I’ve promised to support the reform candidate. That’s a purely private matter in no way involving the firm.”

“Like hell it dont.... How about McNiel and his gang?... They’ve always treated us all right and all we’ve ever done for em’s a couple of cases of Scotch and a few cigars now and then.... Now we have these reformers throw the whole city government into a turmoil.... By the Living Jingo ...”

Densch gets to his feet. “My dear Blackhead I consider it my duty as a citizen to help in cleaning up the filthy conditions of bribery, corruption and intrigue that exist in the city government ... I consider it my duty as a citizen ...” He starts walking to the door, his round belly stuck proudly out in front of him.

“Well allow me to say Densch that I think its a damn fool proposition,” Blackhead shouts after him. When his partner has gone he lies back a second with his eyes closed. His face takes on the mottled color of ashes, his big fleshy frame is shrinking like a deflating balloon. At length he gets to his feet with a groan. Then he takes his hat and coat and walks out of the office with a slow heavy step. The hall is empty and dimly lit. He has to wait a long while for the elevator. The thought of holdup men sneaking through the empty building suddenly makes him catch his breath. He is afraid to look behind him, like a child in the dark. At last the elevator shoots up.

“Wilmer,” he says to the night watchman who runs it, “there ought to be more light in these halls at night....

“Yassir maybe you’re right sir ... but there cant nobody get in unless I sees em first.”

“You might be overpowered by a gang Wilmer.”

“I’d like to see em try it.”

“I guess you are right ... mere question of nerve.”

Cynthia is sitting in the Packard reading a book. “Well dear did you think I was never coming.”

“I almost finished my book, dad.”

“All right Butler ... up town as fast as you can. We’re late for dinner.”

As the limousine whirs up Lafayette Street, Blackhead turns to his daughter. “If you ever hear a man talking about his duty as a citizen, by the Living Jingo dont trust him.... He’s up to some kind of monkey business nine times out of ten. You dont know what a relief it is to me that you and Joe are comfortably settled in life.”

“What’s the matter dad? Did you have a hard day at the office?” “There are no markets, there isnt a market in the goddam world that isnt shot to blazes.... I tell you Cynthia it’s nip and tuck. There’s no telling what might happen.... Look, before I forget it could you be at the bank uptown at twelve tomorrow?... I’m sending Hudgins up with certain securities, personal you understand, I want to put in your safe deposit box.”

“But it’s jammed full already dad.”

“That box at the Astor Trust is in your name isnt it?”

“Jointly in mine and Joe’s.”

“Well you take a new box at the Fifth Avenue Bank in your own name.... I’ll have the stuff get there at noon sharp.... And remember what I tell you Cynthia, if you ever hear a business associate talking about civic virtue, look lively.”

They are crossing Fourteenth. Father and daughter look out through the glass at the windbitten faces of people waiting to cross the street.

Jimmy Herf yawned and scraped back his chair. The nickel glints of the typewriter hurt his eyes. The tips of his fingers were sore. He pushed open the sliding doors a little and peeped into the cold bedroom. He could barely make out Ellie asleep in the bed in the alcove. At the far end of the room was the baby’s crib. There was a faint milkish sour smell of babyclothes. He pushed the doors to again and began to undress. If we only had more space, he was muttering; we live cramped in our squirrelcage.... He pulled the dusty cashmere off the couch and yanked his pyjamas out from under the pillow. Space space cleanness quiet; the words were gesticulating in his mind as if he were addressing a vast auditorium.

He turned out the light, opened a crack of the window and dropped wooden with sleep into bed. Immediately he was writing a letter on a linotype. Now I lay me down to sleep ... mother of the great white twilight. The arm of the linotype was a woman’s hand in a long white glove. Through the clanking from behind amber foots Ellie’s voice Dont, dont, dont, you’re hurting me so.... Mr. Herf, says a man in overalls, you’re hurting the machine and we wont be able to get out the bullgod edition thank dog. The linotype was a gulping mouth with nickelbright rows of teeth, gulped, crunched. He woke up sitting up in bed. He was cold, his teeth were chattering. He pulled the covers about him and settled to sleep again. The next time he woke up it was daylight. He was warm and happy. Snowflakes were dancing, hesitating, spinning, outside the tall window.

“Hello Jimps,” said Ellie coming towards him with a tray.

“Why have I died and gone to heaven or something?”

“No it’s Sunday morning.... I thought you needed a little luxury.... I made some corn muffins.”

“Oh you’re marvelous Ellie.... Wait a minute I must jump up and wash my teeth.” He came back with his face washed, wearing his bathrobe. Her mouth winced under his kiss. “And it’s only eleven o’clock. I’ve gained an hour on my day off.... Wont you have some coffee too?”

“In a minute.... Look here Jimps I’ve got something I want to talk about. Look dont you think we ought to get another place now that you’re working nights again all the time?”

“You mean move?”

“No. I was thinking if you could get another room to sleep in somewhere round, then nobody’d ever disturb you in the morning.”

“But Ellie we’d never see each other.... We hardly ever see each other as it is.”

“It’s terrible ... but what can we do when our office-hours are so different?”

Martin’s crying came in a gust from the other room. Jimmy sat on the edge of the bed with the empty coffeecup on his knees looking at his bare feet. “Just as you like,” he said dully. An impulse to grab her hands to crush her to him until he hurt her went up through him like a rocket and died. She picked up the coffeethings and swished away. His lips knew her lips, his arms knew the twining of her arms, he knew the deep woods of her hair, he loved her. He sat for a long time looking at his feet, lanky reddish feet with swollen blue veins, shoebound toes twisted by stairs and pavements. On each little toe there was a corn. He found his eyes filling with pitying tears. The baby had stopped crying. Jimmy went into the bathroom and started the water running in the tub.

“It was that other feller you had Anna. He got you to thinkin you didnt give a damn.... He made you a fatalist.”

“What’s at?”

“Somebody who thinks there’s no use strugglin, somebody who dont believe in human progress.”

“Do you think Bouy was like that?”

“He was a scab anyway ... None o these Southerners

“I was sick o workin a sewin machine.”

“But you could be a handworker, do fancy work and make good money. You’re not one o that kind, you’re one of us.... I’ll get you back in good standin an you kin get a good job again.... God I’d never have let you work in a dancehall the way he did. Anna it hurt me terrible to see a Jewish girl goin round with a feller like that.”

“Well he’s gone an I aint got no job.”

“Fellers like that are the greatest enemies of the workers.... They dont think of nobody but themselves.”

They are walking slowly up Second Avenue through a foggy evening. He is a rustyhaired thinfaced young Jew with sunken cheeks and livid pale skin. He has the bandy legs of a garment worker. Anna’s shoes are too small for her. She has deep rings under her eyes. The fog is full of strolling groups talking Yiddish, overaccented East Side English, Russian. Warm rifts of light from delicatessen stores and softdrink stands mark off the glistening pavement.

“If I didn’t feel so tired all the time,” mutters Anna.

“Let’s stop here an have a drink.... You take a glass o buttermilk Anna, make ye feel good.”

“I aint got the taste for it Elmer. I’ll take a chocolate soda.”

“That’ll juss make ye feel sick, but go ahead if you wanter.” She sat on the slender nickelbound stool. He stood beside her. She let herself lean back a little against him. “The trouble with the workers is” ... He was talking in a low impersonal voice. “The trouble with the workers is we dont know nothin, we dont know how to eat, we dont know how to live, we dont know how to protect our rights.... Jez Anna I want to make you think of things like that. Cant you see we’re in the middle of a battle just like in the war?” With the long sticky spoon Anna was fishing bits of icecream out of the thick foamy liquid in her glass.

George Baldwin looked at himself in the mirror as he washed his hands in the little washroom behind his office. His hair that still grew densely down to a point on his forehead was almost white. There was a deep line at each corner of his mouth and across his chin. Under his bright gimleteyes the skin was sagging and granulated. When he had wiped his hands slowly and meticulously he took a little box of strychnine pills from the upper pocket of his vest, swallowed one, and feeling the anticipated stimulus tingle through him went back into his office. A longnecked officeboy was fidgeting beside his desk with a card in his hand.

“A lady wants to speak to you sir.”

“Has she an appointment? Ask Miss Ranke.... Wait a minute. Show the lady right through into this office.” The card read Nellie Linihan McNiel. She was expensively dressed with a lot of lace in the opening of her big fur coat. Round her neck she had a lorgnette on an amethyst chain.

“Gus asked me to come to see you,” she said as he motioned her into a chair beside the desk.

“What can I do for you?” His heart for some reason was pounding hard.

She looked at him a moment through her lorgnette. “George you stand it better than Gus does.”

“What?”

“Oh all this.... I’m trying to get Gus to go away with me for a rest abroad ... Marianbad or something like that ... but he says he’s in too deep to pull up his stakes.”

“I guess that’s true of all of us,” said Baldwin with a cold smile.

They were silent a minute, then Nellie McNiel got to her feet. “Look here George, Gus is awfully cut up about this.... You know he likes to stand by his friends and have his friends stand by him.”

“Nobody can say that I haven’t stood by him.... It’s simply this, I’m not a politician, and as, probably foolishly, I’ve allowed myself to be nominated for office, I have to run on a nonpartisan basis.”

“George that’s only half the story and you know it.”

“Tell him that I’ve always been and always shall be a good friend of his.... He knows that perfectly well. In this particular campaign I have pledged myself to oppose certain elements with which Gus has let himself get involved.”

“You’re a fine talker George Baldwin and you always were.”

Baldwin flushed. They stood stiff side by side at the office door. His hand lay still on the doorknob as if paralyzed. From the outer offices came the sound of typewriters and voices. From outside came the long continuous tapping of riveters at work on a new building.

“I hope your family’s all well,” he said at length with an effort.

“Oh yes they are all well thanks ... Goodby.” She had gone.

Baldwin stood for a moment looking out of the window at the gray blackwindowed building opposite. Silly to let things agitate him so. Need of relaxation. He got his hat and coat from their hook behind the washroom door and went out. “Jonas,” he said to a man with a round bald head shaped like a cantaloupe who sat poring over papers in the highceilinged library that was the central hall of the lawoffice, “bring everything up that’s on my desk.... I’ll go over it uptown tonight.”

“All right sir.”

When he got out on Broadway he felt like a small boy playing hooky. It was a sparkling winter afternoon with hurrying rifts of sun and cloud. He jumped into a taxi. Going uptown he lay back in the seat dozing. At Fortysecond Street he woke up. Everything was a confusion of bright intersecting planes of color, faces, legs, shop windows, trolleycars, automobiles. He sat up with his gloved hands on his knees, fizzling with excitement. Outside of Nevada’s apartmenthouse he paid the taxi. The driver was a negro and showed an ivory mouthful of teeth when he got a fiftycent tip. Neither elevator was there so Baldwin ran lightly up the stairs, half wondering at himself.

“My God,” she said, “I thought you were the waiter.”

He grabbed her and kissed her. “I dont know why but I feel like a threeyear old.”

“You look like you was crazy with the heat.... I dont like you to come over without telephoning, you know that.”

“You dont mind just this once I forgot.”

Baldwin caught sight of something on the settee; he found himself staring at a pair of darkblue trousers neatly folded.

“I was feeling awfully fagged down at the office Nevada. I thought I’d come up to talk to you to cheer myself up a bit.”

“I was just practicing some dancing with the phonograph.”

“Yes very interesting....” He began to walk springily up and down. “Now look here Nevada.... We’ve got to have a talk. I dont care who it is you’ve got in your bedroom.” She looked suddenly in his face and sat down on the settee beside the trousers. “In fact I’ve known for some time that you and Tony Hunter were carrying on.” She compressed her lips and crossed her legs. “In fact all this stuff and nonsense about his having to go to a psychoanalyst at twentyfive dollars an hour amused me enormously.... But just this minute I’ve decided I had enough. Quite enough.”

“George you’re crazy,” she stammered and then suddenly she began to giggle.

“I tell you what I’ll do,” went on Baldwin in a clear legal voice, “I’ll send you a check for five hundred, because you’re a nice girl and I like you. The apartment’s paid till the first of the month. Does that suit you? And please never communicate with me in any way.”

She was rolling on the settee giggling helplessly beside the neatly folded pair of darkblue trousers. Baldwin waved

Down in the street again he began to walk briskly uptown. He felt excited and talkative. He wondered who he could go to see. Telling over the names of his friends made him depressed. He began to feel lonely, deserted. He wanted to be talking to a woman, making her sorry for the barrenness of his life. He went into a cigarstore and began looking through the phonebook. There was a faint flutter in him when he found the H’s. At last he found the name Herf, Helena Oglethorpe.

Nevada Jones sat a long while on the settee giggling hysterically. At length Tony Hunter came in in his shirt and drawers with his bow necktie perfectly tied.

“Has he gone?”

“Gone? sure he’s gone, gone for good,” she shrieked. “He saw your damn pants.”

He let himself drop on a chair. “O God if I’m not the unluckiest fellow in the world.”

“Why?” she sat spluttering with laughter with the tears running down her face.

“Nothing goes right. That means it’s all off about the matinees.”

“It’s back to three a day for little Nevada.... I dont give a damn.... I never did like bein a kept woman.”

“But you’re not thinking of my career.... Women are so selfish. If you hadn’t led me on....”

“Shut up you little fool. Dont you think I dont know all about you?” She got to her feet with the kimono pulled tight about her.

“God all I needed was a chance to show what I could do, and now I’ll never get it,” Tony was groaning.

“Sure you will if you do what I tell you. I set out to make a man of you kiddo and I’m goin to do it.... We’ll get up an act. Old Hirshbein’ll give us a chance, he used to be kinder smitten.... Come on now, I’ll punch you in the jaw if you dont. Let’s start thinkin up.... We’ll come

“Is that all right for length sir,” asked the fitter busily making marks on the trousers with a piece of chalk.

James Merivale looked down at the fitter’s little greenish wizened bald head and at the brown trousers flowing amply about his feet. “A little shorter.... I think it looks a little old to have trousers too long.”

“Why hello Merivale I didn’t know you bought your clothes at Brooks’ too. Gee I’m glad to see you.”

Merivale’s blood stood still. He found himself looking straight in the blue alcoholic eyes of Jack Cunningham. He bit his lip and tried to stare at him coldly without speaking.

“God Almighty, do you know what we’ve done?” cried out Cunningham. “We’ve bought the same suit of clothes.... I tell you it’s identically the same.”

Merivale was looking in bewilderment from Cunningham’s brown trousers to his own, the same color, the same tiny stripe of red and faint mottling of green.

“Good God man two future brothersinlaw cant wear the same suit. People’ll think it’s a uniform.... It’s ridiculous.”

“Well what are we going to do about it?” Merivale found himself saying in a grumbling tone.

“We have to toss up and see who gets it that’s all.... Will you lend me a quarter please?” Cunningham turned to his salesman. “All right.... One toss, you yell.”

“Heads,” said Merivale mechanically.

“The brown suit is yours.... Now I’ve got to choose another ... God I’m glad we met when we did. Look,” he shouted out through the curtains of the booth, “why dont you have dinner with me tonight at the Salmagundi Club?... I’m going to be dining with the only man in the world who’s crazier about hydroplanes than I am.... It’s

Merivale cleared his throat. “Very well,” he said dryly.

“All right sir,” said the fitter giving Merivale a last tap on the buttocks. He went back into the booth to dress.

“All right old thing,” shouted Cunningham, “I’ve got to go pick out another suit ... I’ll expect you at seven. I’ll have a Jack Rose waiting for you.”

Merivale’s hands were trembling as he fastened his belt. Perkins, Jack Cunningham, the damn blackguard, hydroplanes, Jack Cunningham Salmagundi Perkins. He went to a phone booth in a corner of the store and called up his mother. “Hello Mother, I’m afraid I wont be up to dinner.... I’m dining with Randolph Perkins at the Salmagundi Club.... Yes it is very pleasant.... Oh well he and I have always been fairly good friends.... Oh yes it’s essential to stand in with the men higher up. And I’ve seen Jack Cunningham. I put it up to him straight from the shoulder man to man and he was very much embarrassed. He promised a full explanation within twentyfour hours.... No I kept my temper very well. I felt I owed it to Maisie. I tell you I think the man’s a blackguard but until there’s proof.... Well good night dear, in case I’m late. Oh no please dont wait up. Tell Maisie not to worry I’ll be able to give her the fullest details. Good night mother.”

They sat at a small table in the back of a dimly lighted tearoom. The shade on the lamp cut off the upper parts of their faces. Ellen had on a dress of bright peacock blue and a small blue hat with a piece of green in it. Ruth Prynne’s face had a sagging tired look under the street makeup.

“Elaine, you’ve just got to come,” she was saying in a

“No but Ruth it’s just that I’m getting to hate large parties. I guess I must be getting old. All right I’ll come for a little while.”

Ruth put down the sandwich she was nibbling at and reached for Ellen’s hand and patted it. “That’s the little trouper.... Of course I knew you were coming all along.”

“But Ruth you never told me what happened to that traveling repertory company last summer....”

“O my God,” burst out Ruth. “That was terrible. Of course it was a scream, a perfect scream. Well the first thing that happened was that Isabel Clyde’s husband Ralph Nolton who was managing the company was a dipsomaniac ... and then the lovely Isabel wouldn’t let anybody on the stage who didn’t act like a dummy for fear the rubes wouldnt know who the star was.... Oh I cant tell about it any more.... It isnt funny to me any more, it’s just horrible.... Oh Elaine I’m so discouraged. My dear I’m getting old.” She suddenly burst out crying.

“Oh Ruth please dont,” said Ellen in a little rasping voice. She laughed. “After all we’re none of us getting any younger are we?”

“Dear you dont understand ... You never will understand.”

They sat a long while without saying anything, scraps of lowvoiced conversation came to them from other corners of the dim tearoom. The palehaired waitress brought them two orders of fruit salad.

“My it must be getting late,” said Ruth eventually.

“It’s only half past eight.... We dont want to get to this party too soon.”

“By the way ... how’s Jimmy Herf. I havent seen him for ages.”

“Jimps is fine.... He’s terribly sick of newspaper work. I do wish he could get something he really enjoyed doing.”

“He’ll always be a restless sort of person. Oh Elaine I was so happy when I heard about your being married.... I acted like a damn fool. I cried and cried.... And now with Martin and everything you must be terribly happy.”

“Oh we get along all right.... Martin’s picking up, New York seems to agree with him. He was so quiet and fat for a long while we were terribly afraid we’d produced an imbecile. Do you know Ruth I don’t think I’d ever have another baby.... I was so horribly afraid he’d turn out deformed or something.... It makes me sick to think of it.”

“Oh but it must be wonderful though.”

They rang a bell under a small brass placque that read: Hester Voorhees Interpretation of the Dance. They went up three flights of creaky freshvarnished stairs. At the door open into a room full of people they met Cassandra Wilkins in a Greek tunic with a wreath of satin rosebuds round her head and a gilt wooden panpipe in her hand.

“Oh you darlings,” she cried and threw her arms round them both at once. “Hester said you wouldnt come but I just knew you would.... Come wight in and take off your things, we’re beginning with a few classic wythms.” They followed her through a long candlelit incensesmelling room full of men and women in dangly costumes.

“But my dear you didn’t tell us it was going to be a costume party.”

“Oh yes cant you see evewything’s Gweek, absolutely Gweek.... Here’s Hester.... Here they are darling.... Hester you know Wuth ... and this is Elaine Oglethorpe.”

“I call myself Mrs. Herf now, Cassie.”

“Oh I beg your pardon, it’s so hard to keep twack.... They’re just in time.... Hester’s going to dance an owiental dance called Wythms from the Awabian Nights.... Oh it’s too beautiful.”

When Ellen came out of the bedroom where she had left her Manners, the journal that brings the Ritz to the humblest fireside ... isnt that true?”

“Jojo you’re a horrible tease.... I’m awfully glad to see you.”

“Let’s go and sit in a corner and talk, oh only woman I have ever loved...”

“Yes do let’s ... I dont like it here much.”

“And my dear, have you heard about Tony Hunter’s being straightened out by a psychoanalyst and now he’s all sublimated and has gone on the vaudeville stage with a woman named California Jones.”

“You’d better watch out Jojo.”

They sat down on a couch in a recess between the dormer windows. Out of the corner of her eye she could see a girl dancing in green silk veils. The phonograph was playing the Cesar Frank symphony.

“We mustnt miss Cassie’s daunce. The poor girl would be dreadfully offended.”

“Jojo tell me about yourself, how have you been?”

He shook his head and made a broad gesture with his draped arm. “Ah let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings.”

“Oh Jojo I’m sick of this sort of thing.... It’s all so silly and dowdy.... I wish I hadnt let them make me take my hat off.”

“That was so that I should look upon the forbidden forests of your hair.”

“Oh Jojo do be sensible.”

“How’s your husband, Elaine or rathah Helenah?”

“Oh he’s all right.”

“You dont sound terribly enthusiastic.”

“Martin’s fine though. He’s got black hair and brown eyes and his cheeks are getting to be pink. Really he’s awfully cute.”

“My deah, spare me this exhibition of maternal bliss.... You’ll be telling me next you walked in a baby parade.”

She laughed. “Jojo it’s lots of fun to see you again.”

“I havent finished my catechism yet deah.... I saw you in the oval diningroom the other day with a very distinguished looking man with sharp features and gray hair.”

“That must have been George Baldwin. Why you knew him in the old days.”

“Of course of course. How he has changed. A much more interesting looking man than he used to be I must say.... A very strange place for the wife of a bolshevik pacifist and I. W. W. agitator to be seen taking lunch, I must say.”

“Jimps isnt exactly that. I kind of wish he were....” She wrinkled up her nose. “I’m a little fed up too with all that sort of thing.”

“I suspected it my dear.” Cassie was flitting selfconsciously by.

“Oh do come and help me.... Jojo’s teasing me terribly.”

“Well I’ll twy to sit down just for a second, I’m going to dance next.... Mr. Oglethorpe’s going to wead his twanslation of the songs of Bilitis for me to dance to.”

Ellen looked from one to the other; Oglethorpe crooked his eyebrows and nodded.

Then Ellen sat alone for a long while looking at the dancing and the chittering crowded room through a dim haze of boredom.

The record on the phonograph was Turkish. Hester Voorhees, a skinny woman with a mop of hennaed hair cut short at the level of her ears, came out holding a pot of drawling incense out in front of her preceded by two young men who unrolled a carpet as she came. She wore silk bloomers and a clinking metal girdle and brassières. Everybody was clapping and saying, “How wonderful, how marvelous,” when from another room came three tearing shrieks of a woman. Everybody jumped to his feet. A stout man in a derby hat appeared in the doorway. “All right little goils, right through into the back room. Men stay here.”

“Who are you anyway?”

“Never mind who I am, you do as I say.” The man’s face was red as a beet under the derby hat.

“It’s a detective.” “It’s outrageous. Let him show his badge.”

“It’s a holdup.”

“It’s a raid.”

The room had filled suddenly with detectives. They stood in front of the windows. A man in a checked cap with a face knobbed like a squash stood in front of the fireplace. They were pushing the women roughly into the back room. The men were herded in a little group near the door; detectives were taking their names. Ellen still sat on the couch. “... complaint phoned to headquarters,” she heard somebody say. Then she noticed that there was a phone on the little table beside the couch where she sat. She picked it up and whispered softly for a number.

“Hello is this the district attorney’s office?... I want to speak to Mr. Baldwin please.... George.... It’s lucky I knew where you were. Is the district attorney there? That’s fine ... no you tell him about it. There has been a horrible mistake. I’m at Hester Voorhees’; you know she has a dancing studio. She was presenting some dances to some friends and through some mistake the police are raiding the place ...”

The man in the derby was standing over her. “All right phoning wont do no good.... Go ’long in the other room.”

“I’ve got the district attorney’s office on the wire. You speak to him.... Hello is this Mr. Winthrop?... Yes O ... How do you do? Will you please speak to this man?” She handed the telephone to the detective and walked out into the center of the room. My I wish I hadnt taken my hat off, she was thinking.

From the other room came a sound of sobbing and Hester Voorhees’ stagy voice shrieking, “It’s a horrible mistake.... I wont be insulted like this.”

The detective put down the telephone. He came over to Ellen. “I want to apologize miss.... We acted on

“You’d better apologize to Mrs. Voorhees.... It’s her studio.”

“Well ladies and gents,” the detective began in a loud cheerful voice, “we’ve made a little mistake and we’re very sorry.... Accidents will happen ...”

Ellen slipped into the side room to get her hat and coat. She stood some time before the mirror powdering her nose. When she went out into the studio again everybody was talking at once. Men and women stood round with sheets and bathrobes draped over their scanty dancingclothes. The detectives had melted away as suddenly as they came. Oglethorpe was talking in loud impassioned tones in the middle of a group of young men.

“The scoundrels to attack women,” he was shouting, red in the face, waving his headdress in one hand. “Fortunately I was able to control myself or I might have committed an act that I should have regretted to my dying day.... It was only with the greatest selfcontrol...”

Ellen managed to slip out, ran down the stairs and out into drizzly streets. She hailed a taxi and went home. When she had got her things off she called up George Baldwin at his house. “Hello George, I’m terribly sorry I had to trouble you and Mr. Winthrop. Well if you hadnt happened to say at lunch you’d be there all the evening they probably would be just piling us out of the black maria at the Jefferson Market Court.... Of course it was funny. I’ll tell you about it sometime, but I’m so sick of all that stuff.... Oh just everything like that æsthetic dancing and literature and radicalism and psychoanalysis.... Just an overdose I guess.... Yes I guess that’s it George.... I guess I’m growing up.”

The night was one great chunk of black grinding cold. The smell of the presses still in his nose, the chirrup of

“Hello Herf, think you’ll take the job?” said a milkfaced young man who came up to him breezily and pointed to the pile of snow. “Why not, Dan. I dont know why it wouldnt be better than spending all your life rooting into other people’s affairs until you’re nothing but a goddam traveling dictograph.”

“It’d be a fine job in summer all right.... Taking the West Side?”

“I’m going to walk up.... I’ve got the heebyjeebies tonight.”

“Jez man you’ll freeze to death.”

“I dont care if I do.... You get so you dont have any private life, you’re just an automatic writing machine.”

“Well I wish I could get rid of a little of my private life.... Well goodnight. I hope you find some private life Jimmy.”

Laughing, Jimmy Herf turned his back on the snow-shovelers and started walking up Broadway, leaning into the wind with his chin buried in his coatcollar. At Houston Street he looked at his watch. Five o’clock. Gosh he was late today. Wouldnt be a place in the world where he could get a drink. He whimpered to himself at the thought of the icy blocks he still had to walk before he could get to his room. Now and then he stopped to pat some life into his numb ears. At last he got back to his room, lit the gasstove and hung over it tingling. His room was a small square bleak room on the south side of Washington Square. Its only furnishings were a bed, a chair, a table piled with books, and the gasstove. When he had begun to be a little less cold he reached under the bed for a basketcovered bottle of rum. He put some water to heat in a tin cup on the gasstove

He had finished the rum. Occasionally the room would start going round him solemnly and methodically. Suddenly he said aloud: “I’ve got to talk to her ... I’ve got to talk to her.” He shoved his hat down on his head and pulled on his coat. Outside the cold was balmy. Six milkwagons in a row passed jingling.

On West Twelfth two black cats were chasing each other. Everywhere was full of their crazy yowling. He felt that something would snap in his head, that he himself would scuttle off suddenly down the frozen street eerily caterwauling.

He stood shivering in the dark passage, ringing the bell marked Herf again and again. Then he knocked as loud as he could. Ellen came to the door in a green wrapper. “What’s the matter Jimps? Havent you got a key?” Her face was soft with sleep; there was a happy cozy suave smell of sleep about her. He talked through clenched teeth breathlessly.

“Ellie I’ve got to talk to you.”

“Are you lit, Jimps?”

“Well I know what I’m saying.”

“I’m terribly sleepy.”

He followed her into her bedroom. She kicked off her slippers and got back into bed, sat up looking at him with sleepweighted eyes.

“Dont talk too loud on account of Martin.”

“Ellie I dont know why it’s always so difficult for me to speak out about anything.... I always have to get drunk to speak out.... Look here do you like me any more?”

“You know I’m awfully fond of you and always shall be.”

“I mean love, you know what I mean, whatever it is ...” he broke in harshly.

“I guess I dont love anybody for long unless they’re dead....

“I knew it. You knew I knew it. O God things are pretty rotten for me Ellie.”

She sat with her knees hunched up and her hands clasped round them looking at him with wide eyes. “Are you really so crazy about me Jimps?”

“Look here lets get a divorce and be done with it.”

“Dont be in such a hurry, Jimps.... And there’s Martin. What about him?”

“I can scrape up enough money for him occasionally, poor little kid.”

“I make more than you do, Jimps.... You shouldnt do that yet.”

“I know. I know. Dont I know it?”

They sat looking at each other without speaking. Their eyes burned from looking at each other. Suddenly Jimmy wanted terribly to be asleep, not to remember anything, to let his head sink into blackness, as into his mother’s lap when he was a kid.

“Well I’m going home.” He gave a little dry laugh. “We didn’t think it’d all go pop like this, did we?”

“Goodnight Jimps,” she whined in the middle of a yawn. “But things dont end.... If only I weren’ so terribly sleepy.... Will you put out the light?”

He groped his way in the dark to the door. Outside the arctic morning was growing gray with dawn. He hurried back to his room. He wanted to get into bed and be asleep before it was light.

A long low room with long tables down the middle piled with silk and crêpe fabrics, brown, salmonpink, emeraldgreen. A smell of snipped thread and dress materials. All down the tables bowed heads auburn, blond, black, brown of girls sewing. Errandboys pushing rolling stands of hung

Anna gets up and stretches out her arms. “My I’ve got a head,” she says to the girl next her.

“Up last night?”

She nods.

“Ought to quit it dearie, it’ll spoil your looks. A girl cant burn the candle at both ends like a feller can.” The other girl is thin and blond and has a crooked nose. She puts her arm round Anna’s waist. “My I wish I could put on a little of your weight.”

“I wish you could,” says Anna. “Dont matter what I eat it turns to fat.”

“Still you aint too fat.... You’re juss plump so’s they like to squeeze ye. You try wearing boyishform like I told an you’ll look fine.”

“My boyfriend says he likes a girl to have shape.”

On the stairs they push their way through a group of girls listening to a little girl with red hair who talks fast, opening her mouth wide and rolling her eyes. “... She lived just on the next block at 2230 Cameron Avenue an she’d been to the Hippodrome with some girlfriends and when they got home it was late an they let her go home alone, up Cameron Avenue, see? An the next morning when her folks began looking for her they found her behind a Spearmint sign in a back lot.”

“Was she dead?”

“Sure she was.... A negro had done somethin terrible to her and then he’d strangled her.... I felt terrible. I used to go to school with her. An there aint a girl on Cameron Avenue been out after dark they’re so scared.”

“Sure I saw all about it in the paper last night. Imagine livin right on the next block.”

“Did you see me touch that hump back?” cried Rosie as

They sat in two deep armchairs and whispered with their heads together. Step by step, she got nearer, listening. “Warrant ... Department of Justice ... using the mails to defraud ...” She couldnt hear what Jake said in between. He kept nodding his head as if agreeing. Then suddenly he spoke out smoothly, smiling.

“Well I’ve heard your side Mr. Rogers.... Here’s mine. If you arrest me now I shall be ruined and a great many people who have put their money in this enterprise will be ruined.... In a week I can liquidate the whole concern with a profit.... Mr. Rogers I am a man who has been deeply wronged through foolishness in misplacing confidence in others.”

“I cant help that.... My duty is to execute the warrant.... I’m afraid I’ll have to search your room.... You see we have several little items ...” The man flicked the ash off his cigar and began to read in a monotonous voice. “Jacob Silverman, alias Edward Faversham, Simeon J. Arbuthnot, Jack Hinkley, J. J. Gold.... Oh we’ve got a pretty little list.... We’ve done some very pretty work on your case, if I do say it what shouldnt.”

They got to their feet. The man with the cigar jerked his head at a lean man in a cap who sat reading a paper on the opposite side of the lobby.

Silverman walked over to the desk. “I’m called away on business,” he said to the clerk. “Will you please have my bill prepared? Mrs. Silverman will keep the room for a few days.”

Rosie couldnt speak. She followed the three men into the elevator. “Sorry to have to do this maam,” said the lean detective pulling at the visor of his cap. Silverman opened the room door for them and closed it carefully behind him. “Thank you for your consideration, gentlemen.... My wife thanks you.” Rosie sat in a straight chair in the corner of the room. She was biting her tongue hard, harder to try to keep her lips from twitching.

“We realize Mr. Silverman that this is not quite the ordinary criminal case.”

“Wont you have a drink gentlemen?”

They shook their heads. The thickset man was lighting a fresh cigar.

“Allright Mike,” he said to the lean man. “Go through the drawers and closet.”

“Is that regular?”

“If this was regular we’d have the handcuffs on you and be running the lady here as an accessory.”

Rosie sat with her icy hands clasped between her knees swaying her body from side to side. Her eyes were closed. While the detectives were rummaging in the closet, Silverman took the opportunity to put his hand on her shoulder. She opened her eyes. “The minute the goddam dicks take me out phone Schatz and tell him everything. Get hold of him if you have to wake up everybody in New York.” He spoke low and fast, his lips barely moving.

Almost immediately he was gone, followed by the two detectives with a satchel full of letters. His kiss was still wet on her lips. She looked dazedly round the empty deathly quiet room. She noticed some writing on the lavender

IV. Skyscraper

The young man without legs has stopped still in the middle of the south sidewalk of Fourteenth Street. He wears a blue knitted sweater and a blue stocking cap. His eyes staring up widen until they fill the paperwhite face. Drifts across the sky a dirigible, bright tinfoil cigar misted with height, gently prodding the rainwashed sky and the soft clouds. The young man without legs stops still propped on his arms in the middle of the south sidewalk of Fourteenth Street. Among striding legs, lean legs, waddling legs, legs in skirts and pants and knickerbockers, he stops perfectly still, propped on his arms, looking up at the dirigible.

Jobless, Jimmy Herf came out of the Pulizter Building. He stood beside a pile of pink newspapers on the curb, taking deep breaths, looking up the glistening shaft of the Woolworth. It was a sunny day, the sky was a robin’s egg blue. He turned north and began to walk uptown. As he got away from it the Woolworth pulled out like a telescope. He walked north through the city of shiny windows, through the city of scrambled alphabets, through the city of gilt letter signs.

Spring rich in gluten.... Chockful of golden richness, delight in every bite, THE DADDY OF THEM ALL, spring rich in gluten. Nobody can buy better bread than PRINCE ALBERT. Wrought steel, monel, copper, nickel, wrought iron. All the world loves natural beauty. Love’s bargain that suit at Gumpel’s best value in town. Keep that schoolgirl complexion.... Joe kiss, starting, lightning, ignition and generators.

Everything made him bubble with repressed giggles. It was eleven o’clock. He hadnt been to bed. Life was upside down, he was a fly walking on the ceiling of a topsy-turvy city. He’d thrown up his job, he had nothing to do today, tomorrow, next day, day after. Whatever goes up

He went into a lunchroom, ordered bacon and eggs, toast and coffee, sat eating them happily, tasting thoroughly every mouthful. His thoughts ran wild like a pasture full of yearling colts crazy with sundown. At the next table a voice was expounding monotonously:

“Jilted ... and I tell you we had to do some cleaning. They were all members of your church you know. We knew the whole story. He was advised to put her away. He said, ‘No I’m going to see it through’.”

Herf got to his feet. He must be walking again. He went out with a taste of bacon in his teeth.

Express service meets the demands of spring. O God to meet the demands of spring. No tins, no sir, but there’s rich quality in every mellow pipeful.... Socony. One taste tells more than a million words. The yellow pencil with the red band. Than a million words, than a million words. “All right hand over that million.... Keep him covered Ben.” The Yonkers gang left him for dead on a bench in the park. They stuck him up, but all they got was a million words.... “But Jimps I’m so tired of booktalk and the proletariat, cant you understand?”

Chockful of golden richness, spring.

Dick Snow’s mother owned a shoebox factory. She failed and he came out of school and took to standing on streetcorners. The guy in the softdrink stand put him wise. He’d made two payments on pearl earings for a blackhaired Jewish girl with a shape like a mandolin. They waited for the bankmessenger in the L station. He pitched over the turnstile and hung there. They went off with the satchel in a Ford sedan. Dick Snow stayed behind emptying his gun into the dead man. In the deathhouse he met the demands of spring by writing a poem to his mother that they published in the Evening Graphic.

With every deep breath Herf breathed in rumble and grind and painted phrases until he began to swell, felt himself Evening Graphic?

He shrank until he was of the smallness of dust, picking his way over crags and bowlders in the roaring gutter, climbing straws, skirting motoroil lakes.

He sat in Washington Square, pink with noon, looking up Fifth Avenue through the arch. The fever had seeped out of him. He felt cool and tired. Another spring, God how many springs ago, walking from the cemetery up the blue macadam road where fieldsparrows sang and the sign said: Yonkers. In Yonkers I buried my boyhood, in Marseilles with the wind in my face I dumped my calf years into the harbor. Where in New York shall I bury my twenties? Maybe they were deported and went out to sea on the Ellis Island ferry singing the International. The growl of the International over the water, fading sighing into the mist.

DEPORTED

James Herf young newspaper man of 190 West 12th Street recently lost his twenties. Appearing before Judge Merivale they were remanded to Ellis Island for deportation as undesirable aliens. The younger four Sasha Michael Nicholas and Vladimir had been held for some time on a charge of criminal anarchy. The fifth and sixth were held on a technical charge of vagrancy. The later ones Bill Tony and Joe were held under various indictments including wifebeating, arson, assault, and prostitution. All were convicted on counts of misfeasance, malfeasance, and nonfeasance.

Oyez oyez oyez prisoner at the bar.... I find the evidence dubious said the judge pouring himself out a snifter. The clerk of the court who was stirring an oldfashioned cocktail became overgrown with vineleaves and the courtroom reeked with the smell of flowering grapes and the Shining Bootlegger took the bulls by the horns and led them lowing gently down the courthouse steps. “Court is adjourned by hicky,” shouted the judge when he found gin in his waterbottle. The reporters discovered the mayor dressed in a leopard skin posing as Civic Virtue with his foot on the back of Princess Fifi the oriental dancer. Your correspondent was leaning out of the window of the Banker’s Club in the company of his uncle, Jefferson T. Merivale, wellknown clubman of this city and two lamb chops well peppered. Meanwhile the waiters were hastily organizing an orchestra, using the potbellies of the Gausenheimers for snaredrums. The head waiter gave a truly delightful rendition of My Old Kentucky Home, utilizing for the first time the resonant bald heads of the seven directors of the Well Watered Gasoline Company of Delaware as a xylophone. And all the while the Shining Bootlegger in purple running drawers and a blue-ribbon silk hat was leading the bulls up Broadway to the number of two million, threehundred and fortytwo thousand, five hundred and one. As they reached the Spuyten Duyvil, they were incontinently drowned, rank after rank, in an attempt to swim to Yonkers.

And as I sit here, thought Jimmy Herf, print itches like a rash inside me. I sit here pockmarked with print. He got to his feet. A little yellow dog was curled up asleep under the bench. The little yellow dog looked very happy. “What I need’s a good sleep,” Jimmy said aloud.

“What are you goin to do with it, Dutch, are you goin to hock it?”

“Francie I wouldnt take a million dollars for that little gun.”

“For Gawd’s sake dont start talkin about money, now.... Next thing some cop’ll see it on your hip and arrest you for the Sullivan law.”

“The cop who’s goin to arrest me’s not born yet.... Just you forget that stuff.”

Francie began to whimper. “But Dutch what are we goin to do, what are we goin to do?”

Dutch suddenly rammed the pistol into his pocket and jumped to his feet. He walked jerkily back and forth on the asphalt path. It was a foggy evening, raw; automobiles moving along the slushy road made an endless interweaving flicker of cobwebby light among the skeleton shrubberies.

“Jez you make me nervous with your whimperin an cryin.... Cant you shut up?” He sat down beside her sullenly again. “I thought I heard somebody movin in the bushes.... This goddam park’s full of plainclothes men.... There’s nowhere you can go in the whole crummy city without people watchin you.”

“I wouldnt mind it if I didnt feel so rotten. I cant eat anythin without throwin up an I’m so scared all the time the other girls’ll notice something.”

“But I’ve told you I had a way o fixin everythin, aint I? I promise you I’ll fix everythin fine in a couple of days.... We’ll go away an git married. We’ll go down South.... I bet there’s lots of jobs in other places.... I’m gettin cold, let’s get the hell outa here.”

“Oh Dutch,” said Francie in a tired voice as they walked down the muddyglistening asphalt path, “do you think we’re ever goin to have a good time again like we used to?”

“We’re S.O.L. now but that dont mean we’re always goin to be. I lived through those gas attacks in the Oregon forest didnt I? I been dopin out a lot of things these last few days.”

“Dutch if you go and get arrested there’ll be nothin left for me to do but jump in the river.”

“Didnt I tell you I wasnt goin to get arrested?”

Mrs. Cohen, a bent old woman with a face brown and blotched like a russet apple, stands beside the kitchen table with her gnarled hands folded over her belly. She sways from the hips as she scolds in an endless querulous stream of Yiddish at Anna sitting blearyeyed with sleep over a cup of coffee: “If you had been blasted in the cradle it would have been better, if you had been born dead.... Oy what for have I raised four children that they should all of them be no good, agitators and streetwalkers and bums...? Benny in jail twice, and Sol God knows where making trouble, and Sarah accursed given up to sin kicking up her legs at Minski’s, and now you, may you wither in your chair, picketing for the garment workers, walking along the street shameless with a sign on your back.”

Anna dipped a piece of bread in the coffee and put it in her mouth. “Aw mommer you dont understand,” she said with her mouth full.

“Understand, understand harlotry and sinfulness...? Oy why dont you attend to your work and keep your mouth shut, and draw your pay quietly? You used to make good money and could have got married decent before you took to running wild in dance halls with a goy. Oy oy that I’ve raised daughters in my old age no decent man’d want to take to his house and marry....”

Anna got to her feet shrieking “It’s no business of yours.... I’ve always paid my part of the rent regular. You think a girl’s worth nothin but for a slave and to grind her fingers off workin all her life.... I think different, do you hear? Dont you dare scold at me....”

“Oy you will talk back to your old mother. If Solomon was alive he’d take a stick to you. Better to have been born dead than talk back to your mother like a goy. Get out of the house and quick before I blast you.”

“All right I will.” Anna ran through the narrow trunk-obstructed hallway to the bedroom and threw herself on her bed. Her cheeks were burning. She lay quiet trying to think. From the kitchen came the old woman’s fierce monotonous sobbing.

Anna raised herself to a sitting posture on the bed. She caught sight in the mirror opposite of a strained teardabbled face and rumpled stringy hair. “My Gawd I’m a sight,” she sighed. As she got to her feet her heel caught on the braid of her dress. The dress tore sharply. Anna sat on the edge of the bed and cried and cried. Then she sewed the rent in the dress up carefully with tiny meticulous stitches. Sewing made her feel calmer. She put on her hat, powdered her nose copiously, put a little rouge on her lips, got into her coat and went out. April was coaxing unexpected colors out of the East Side streets. Sweet voluptuous freshness came from a pushcart full of pineapples. At the corner she found Rose Segal and Lillian Diamond drinking coca-cola at the softdrink stand.

“Anna have a coke with us,” they chimed.

“I will if you’ll blow me.... I’m broke.”

“Vy, didnt you get your strike pay?”

“I gave it all to the old woman.... Dont do no good though. She goes on scoldin all day long. She’s too old.”

“Did you hear how gunmen broke in and busted up Ike Goldstein’s shop? Busted up everythin wid hammers an left him unconscious on top of a lot of dressgoods.”

“Oh that’s terrible.”

“Soive him right I say.”

“But they oughtnt to destroy property like that. We make our livin by it as much as he does.”

“A pretty fine livin.... I’m near dead wid it,” said Anna banging her empty glass down on the counter.

“Easy easy,” said the man in the stand. “Look out for the crockery.”

“But the worst thing was,” went on Rose Segal, “that while they was fightin up in Goldstein’s a rivet flew out the winder an fell nine stories an killed a fireman passin on a truck so’s he dropped dead in the street.”

“What for did they do that?”

“Some guy must have slung it at some other guy and it pitched out of the winder.”

“And killed a fireman.”

Anna saw Elmer coming towards them down the avenue, his thin face stuck forward, his hands hidden in the pockets of his frayed overcoat. She left the two girls and walked towards him. “Was you goin down to the house? Dont lets go, cause the old woman’s scoldin somethin terrible.... I wish I could get her into the Daughters of Israel. I cant stand her no more.”

“Then let’s walk over and sit in the square,” said Elmer. “Dont you feel the spring?”

She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “Dont I? Oh Elmer I wish this strike was over.... It gets me crazy doin nothin all day.”

“But Anna the strike is the worker’s great opportunity, the worker’s university. It gives you a chance to study and read and go to the Public Library.”

“But you always think it’ll be over in a day or two, an what’s the use anyway?”

“The more educated a feller is the more use he is to his class.”

They sat down on a bench with their backs to the playground. The sky overhead was glittering with motherofpearl flakes of sunset. Dirty children yelled and racketed about the asphalt paths.

“Oh,” said Anna looking up at the sky, “I’d like to have a Paris evening dress an you have a dress suit and go out to dinner at a swell restaurant an go to the theater an everything.”

“If we lived in a decent society we might be able to.... There’d be gayety for the workers then, after the revolution.”

“But Elmer what’s the use if we’re old and scoldin like the old woman?”

“Our children will have those things.”

Anna sat bolt upright on the seat. “I aint never goin to have any children,” she said between her teeth, “never, never, never.”

Alice touched his arm as they turned to look in the window of an Italian pastryshop. On each cake ornamented with bright analin flowers and flutings stood a sugar lamb for Easter and the resurrection banner. “Jimmy,” she said turning up to him her little oval face with her lips too red like the roses on the cakes, “you’ve got to do something about Roy.... He’s got to get to work. I’ll go crazy if I have him sitting round the house any more reading the papers wearing that dreadful adenoid expression.... You know what I mean.... He respects you.”

“But he’s trying to get a job.”

“He doesnt really try, you know it.”

“He thinks he does. I guess he’s got a funny idea about himself.... But I’m a fine person to talk about jobs ...”

“Oh I know, I think it’s wonderful. Everybody says you’ve given up newspaper work and are going to write.”

Jimmy found himself looking down into her widening brown eyes, that had a glimmer at the bottom like the glimmer of water in a well. He turned his head away; there was a catch in his throat; he coughed. They walked on along the lilting brightcolored street.

At the door of the restaurant they found Roy and Martin Schiff waiting for them. They went through an outer room into a long hall crowded with tables packed between two greenish bluish paintings of the Bay of Naples. The air was heavy with a smell of parmesan cheese and cigarettesmoke and tomato sauce. Alice made a little face as she settled herself in a chair.

“Ou I want a cocktail right away quick.”

“I must be kinder simpleminded,” said Herf, “but these boats coquetting in front of Vesuvius always make me feel like getting a move on somewhere.... I think I’ll be getting along out of here in a couple of weeks.”

“But Jimmy where are you going?” asked Roy. “Isnt this something new?”

“Hasnt Helena got something to say about that?” put in Alice.

Herf turned red. “Why should she?” he said sharply.

“I just found there was nothing in it for me,” he found himself saying a little later.

“Oh we none of us know what we want,” burst out Martin. “That’s why we’re such a peewee generation.”

“I’m beginning to learn a few of the things I dont want,” said Herf quietly. “At least I’m beginning to have the nerve to admit to myself how much I dislike all the things I dont want.”

“But it’s wonderful,” cried Alice, “throwing away a career for an ideal.”

“Excuse me,” said Herf pushing back his chair. In the toilet he looked himself in the eye in the wavy lookingglass.

“Dont talk,” he whispered. “What you talk about you never do....” His face had a drunken look. He filled the hollow of his two hands with water and washed it. At the table they cheered when he sat down.

“Yea for the wanderer,” said Roy.

Alice was eating cheese on long slices of pear. “I think it’s thrilling,” she said.

“Roy is bored,” shouted Martin Schiff after a silence. His face with its big eyes and bone glasses swam through the smoke of the restaurant like a fish in a murky aquarium.

“I was just thinking of all the places I had to go to look for a job tomorrow.”

“You want a job?” Martin went on melodramatically. “You want to sell your soul to the highest bidder?”

“Jez if that’s all you had to sell....” moaned Roy.

“It’s my morning sleep that worries me.... Still it is lousy putting over your personality and all that stuff. It’s not your ability to do the work it’s your personality.”

“Prostitutes are the only honest ...”

“But good Lord a prostitute sells her personality.”

“She only rents it.”

“But Roy is bored.... You are all bored.... I’m boring you all.”

“We’re having the time of our lives,” insisted Alice. “Now Martin we wouldn’t be sitting here if we were bored,

“No, you are saying to yourselves what a bore he is, what use is he to society? He has no money, he has no pretty wife, no good conversation, no tips on the stockmarket. He’s a useless fardel on society.... The artist is a fardel.”

“That’s not so Martin.... You’re talking through your hat.”

Martin waved an arm across the table. Two wineglasses upset. A scaredlooking waiter laid a napkin over the red streams. Without noticing, Martin went on, “It’s all pretense.... When you talk you talk with the little lying tips of your tongues. You dont dare lay bare your real souls.... But now you must listen to me for the last time.... For the last time I say.... Come here waiter you too, lean over and look into the black pit of the soul of man. And Herf is bored. You are all bored, bored flies buzzing on the windowpane. You think the windowpane is the room. You dont know what there is deep black inside.... I am very drunk. Waiter another bottle.”

“Say hold your horses Martin.... I dont know if we can pay the bill as it is.... We dont need any more.”

“Waiter another bottle of wine and four grappas.”

“Well it looks as if we were in for a rough night,” groaned Roy.

“If there is need my body can pay.... Alice take off your mask.... You are a beautiful little child behind your mask.... Come with me to the edge of the pit.... O I am too drunk to tell you what I feel.” He brushed off his tortoiseshell glasses and crumpled them in his hand, the lenses shot glittering across the floor. The gaping waiter ducked among the tables after them.

For a moment Martin sat blinking. The rest of them looked at each other. Then he shot to his feet. “I see your little smirking supercil-superciliosity. No wonder we can no longer have decent dinners, decent conversations.... I

“Say Martin old man, pipe down,” Roy was reiterating.

“Nobody shall stop me.... I must run into the sincerity of black.... I must run to the end of the black wharf on the East River and throw myself off.”

Herf ran after him through the restaurant to the street. At the door he threw off his coat, at the corner his vest.

“Gosh he runs like a deer,” panted Roy staggering against Herf’s shoulder. Herf picked up the coat and vest, folded them under his arm and went back to the restaurant. They were pale when they sat down on either side of Alice.

“Will he really do it? Will he really do it?” she kept asking.

“No of course not,” said Roy. “He’ll go home; he was making fools of us because we played up to him.”

“Suppose he really did it?”

“I’d hate to see him.... I like him very much. We named our kid after him,” said Jimmy gloomily. “But if he really feels so terribly unhappy what right have we to stop him?”

“Oh Jimmy,” sighed Alice, “do order some coffee.”

Outside a fire engine moaned throbbed roared down the street. Their hands were cold. They sipped the coffee without speaking.

Francie came out of the side door of the Five and Ten into the six o’clock goinghome end of the day crowd. Dutch Robertson was waiting for her. He was smiling; there was color in his face.

“Why Dutch what’s ...” The words stuck in her throat.

“Dont you like it...?” They walked on down Fourteenth, a blur of faces streamed by on either side of them. “Everything’s jake Francie,” he was saying quietly. He wore a light gray spring overcoat and a light felt hat to

“But Dutch how did you get it?”

“Stuck up a guy in a cigar store. Jez it was a cinch.”

“Ssh dont talk so loud; somebody might hear ye.”

“They wouldnt know what I was talkin about.”

Mr. Densch sat in the corner of Mrs. Densch’s Louis XIV boudoir. He sat all hunched up on a little gilt pinkbacked chair with his potbelly resting on his knees. In his green sagging face the pudgy nose and the folds that led from the flanges of the nostrils to the corners of the wide mouth made two triangles. He had a pile of telegrams in his hand, on top a decoded message on a blue slip that read: Deficit Hamburg branch approximately $500,000; signed Heintz. Everywhere he looked about the little room crowded with fluffy glittery objects he saw the purple letters of approximately jiggling in the air. Then he noticed that the maid, a pale mulatto in a ruffled cap, had come into the room and was staring at him. His eye lit on a large flat cardboard box she held in her hand.

“What’s that?”

“Somethin for the misses sir.”

“Bring it here.... Hickson’s ... and what does she want to be buying more dresses for will you tell me that.... Hickson’s.... Open it up. If it looks expensive I’ll send it back.”

The maid gingerly pulled off a layer of tissuepaper, uncovering a peach and peagreen evening dress.

Mr. Densch got to his feet spluttering, “She must think the war’s still on.... Tell em we will not receive it. Tell em there’s no such party livin here.”

The maid picked up the box with a toss of the head and went out with her nose in the air. Mr. Densch sat down in the little chair and began looking over the telegrams again.

“Ann-ee, Ann-ee,” came a shrill voice from the inner room; this was followed by a head in a lace cap shaped like a libertycap and a big body in a shapeless ruffled negligée. “Why J. D. what are you doing here at this time of the morning? I’m waiting for my hairdresser.”

“It’s very important.... I just had a cable from Heintz. Serena my dear, Blackhead and Densch is in a very bad way on both sides of the water.”

“Yes ma’am,” came the maid’s voice from behind him.

He gave his shoulders a shrug and walked to the window. He felt tired and sick and heavy with flesh. An errand boy on a bicycle passed along the street; he was laughing and his cheeks were pink. Densch saw himself, felt himself for a second hot and slender running bareheaded down Pine Street years ago catching the girls’ ankles in the corner of his eye. He turned back into the room. The maid had gone.

“Serena,” he began, “cant you understand the seriousness...? It’s this slump. And on top of it all the bean market has gone to hell. It’s ruin I tell you....”

“Well my dear I dont see what you expect me to do about it.”

“Economize ... economize. Look where the price of rubber’s gone to.... That dress from Hickson’s....”

“Well you wouldnt have me going to the Blackhead’s party looking like a country schoolteacher, would you?”

Mr. Densch groaned and shook his head. “O you wont understand; probably there wont be any party.... Look Serena there’s no nonsense about this.... I want you to have a trunk packed so that we can sail any day.... I need a rest. I’m thinking of going to Marienbad for the cure.... It’ll do you good too.”

Her eye suddenly caught his. All the little wrinkles on her face deepened; the skin under her eyes was like the skin of a shrunken toy balloon. He went over to her and put his hand on her shoulder and was puckering his lips to kiss her when suddenly she flared up.

“I wont have you meddling between me and my dressmakers.... I wont have it ... I wont have it....”

“Oh have it your own way.” He left the room with his head hunched between his thick sloping shoulders.

“Ann-ee!”

“Yes ma’am.” The maid came back into the room.

Mrs. Densch had sunk down in the middle of a little spindlelegged sofa. Her face was green. “Annie please get me that bottle of sweet spirits of ammonia and a little water.... And Annie you can call up Hickson’s and tell them that that dress was sent back through a mistake of ... of the butler’s and please to send it right back as I’ve got to wear it tonight.”

Pursuit of happiness, unalienable pursuit ... right to life liberty and.... A black moonless night; Jimmy Herf is walking alone up South Street. Behind the wharfhouses ships raise shadowy skeletons against the night. “By Jesus I admit that I’m stumped,” he says aloud. All these April nights combing the streets alone a skyscraper has obsessed him, a grooved building jutting up with uncountable bright windows falling onto him out of a scudding sky. Typewriters rain continual nickelplated confetti in his ears. Faces of Follies girls, glorified by Ziegfeld, smile and beckon to him from the windows. Ellie in a gold dress, Ellie made of thin gold foil absolutely lifelike beckoning from every window. And he walks round blocks and blocks looking for the door of the humming tinselwindowed skyscraper, round blocks and blocks and still no door. Every time he closes his eyes the dream has hold of him, every time he stops arguing audibly with himself in pompous reasonable phrases the dream has hold of him. Young man to save your sanity you’ve got to do one of two things.... Please mister where’s the door to this building? Round the block? Just round the block ... one of two unalienable alternatives: go

“How do you do Mr. Goldstein?” the reporter breezily chanted as he squeezed the thick flipper held out to him over the counter of the cigar store. “My name’s Brewster.... I’m writing up the crime wave for the News.”

Mr. Goldstein was a larvashaped man with a hooked nose a little crooked in a gray face, behind which pink attentive ears stood out unexpectedly. He looked at the reporter out of suspicious screwedup eyes.

“If you’d be so good I’d like to have your story of last night’s little ... misadventure ...”

“Vont get no story from me young man. Vat vill you do but print it so that other boys and goils vill get the same idear.”

“It’s too bad you feel that way Mr. Goldstein ... Will you give me a Robert Burns please...? Publicity it seems to me is as necessary as ventilation.... It lets in fresh air.” The reporter bit off the end of the cigar, lit it, and stood looking thoughtfully at Mr. Goldstein through a swirling ring of blue smoke. “You see Mr. Goldstein it’s this way,” he began impressively. “We are handling this matter from the human interest angle ... pity and tears ... you understand. A photographer was on his way out here to get your photograph.... I bet you it would increase your volume of business for the next couple of weeks.... I suppose I’ll have to phone him not to come now.”

“Well this guy,” began Mr. Goldstein abruptly, “he’s a welldressed lookin feller, new spring overcoat an all that and he comes in to buy a package o Camels.... ‘A nice night,’

“Then she didnt have bobbed hair?”

“All I seen was a kind o mournin veil. The foist thing I knew she was behind the counter an had a gun stuck in my ribs an began talkin ... you know kinder kiddin like ... and afore I knew what to think the guy’d cleaned out the cashregister an says to me, ‘Got any cash in your jeans Buddy?’ I’ll tell ye I was sweatin some ...”

“And that’s all?”

“Sure by the time I’d got hold of a cop they vere off to hell an gone.”

“How much did they get?”

“Oh about fifty berries an six dollars off me.”

“Was the girl pretty?”

“I dunno, maybe she was. I’d like to smashed her face in. They ought to make it the electric chair for those babies.... Aint no security nowhere. Vy should anybody voirk if all you’ve got to do is get a gun an stick up your neighbors?”

“You say they were welldressed ... like welltodo people?”

“Yare.”

“I’m working on the theory that he’s a college boy and that she’s a society girl and that they do it for sport.”

“The feller vas a hardlookin bastard.”

“Well there are hardlooking college men.... You wait for the story called ‘The Gilded Bandits’ in next Sunday’s paper Mr. Goldstein.... You take the News dont you?”

Mr. Goldstein shook his head.

“I’ll send you a copy anyway.”

“I want to see those babies convicted, do you understand? If there’s anythin I can do I sure vill do it ... Aint no security no more.... I dont care about no Sunday supplement publicity.”

“Well the photographer’ll be right along. I’m sure you’ll consent to pose Mr. Goldstein.... Well thank you very much.... Good day Mr. Goldstein.”

Mr. Goldstein suddenly produced a shiny new revolver from under the counter and pointed it at the reporter.

“Hay go easy with that.”

Mr. Goldstein laughed a sardonic laugh. “I’m ready for em next time they come,” he shouted after the reporter who was already making for the Subway.

“Our business, my dear Mrs. Herf,” declaimed Mr. Harpsicourt, looking sweetly in her eyes and smiling his gray Cheshire cat smile, “is to roll ashore on the wave of fashion the second before it breaks, like riding a surfboard.”

Ellen was delicately digging with her spoon into half an alligator pear; she kept her eyes on her plate, her lips a little parted; she felt cool and slender in the tightfitting darkblue dress, shyly alert in the middle of the tangle of sideways glances and the singsong modish talk of the restaurant.

“It’s a knack that I can prophesy in you more than in any girl, and more charmingly than any girl I’ve ever known.”

“Prophesy?” asked Ellen, looking up at him laughing.

“You shouldnt pick up an old man’s word.... I’m expressing myself badly.... That’s always a dangerous sign. No, you understand so perfectly, though you disdain it a little ... admit that.... What we need on such a periodical, that I’m sure you could explain it to me far better.”

“Of course what you want to do is make every reader feel Johnny on the spot in the center of things.”

“As if she were having lunch right here at the Algonquin.”

“Not today but tomorrow,” added Ellen.

Mr. Harpsicourt laughed his creaky little laugh and tried to look deep among the laughing gold specs in her gray eyes. Blushing she looked down into the gutted half of an alligator pear in her plate. Like the sense of a mirror behind her she felt the smart probing glances of men and women at the tables round about.

The pancakes were comfortably furry against his gin-bitten tongue. Jimmy Herf sat in Child’s in the middle of a noisy drunken company. Eyes, lips, evening dresses, the smell of bacon and coffee blurred and throbbed about him. He ate the pancakes painstakingly, called for more coffee. He felt better. He had been afraid he was going to feel sick. He began reading the paper. The print swam and spread like Japanese flowers. Then it was sharp again, orderly, running in a smooth black and white paste over his orderly black and white brain:

Misguided youth again took its toll of tragedy amid the tinsel gayeties of Coney Island fresh painted for the season when plainclothes men arrested “Dutch” Robinson and a girl companion alleged to be the Flapper Bandit. The pair are accused of committing more than a score of holdups in Brooklyn and Queens. The police had been watching the couple for some days. They had rented a small kitchenette apartment at 7356 Seacroft Avenue. Suspicion was first aroused when the girl, about to become a mother, was taken in an ambulance to the Canarsie Presbyterian Hospital. Hospital attendants were surprised by Robinson’s seemingly endless supply of money. The girl had a private room, expensive flowers and fruit were sent in to her daily, and a well-known physician was called into consultation at the man’s request. When it came to the point of registering the name of the baby girl the young man admitted to the physician that they were not married. One of the hospital attendants, noticing that the woman answered to the description published in the Evening Times of the flapper bandit and her pal, telephoned the police. Plainclothes men sleuthed the couple for some days after they had returned to the apartment on Seacroft Avenue and this afternoon made the arrests.

The arrest of the flapper bandit ...

A hot biscuit landed on Herf’s paper. He looked up with a start; a darkeyed Jewish girl at the next table was making a face at him. He nodded and took off an imaginary hat. “I thank thee lovely nymph,” he said thickly and began eating the biscuit.

“Quit dat djer hear?” the young man who sat beside her, who looked like a prizefighter’s trainer, bellowed in her ear.

The people at Herf’s table all had their mouths open laughing. He picked up his check, vaguely said good night

Meanwhile a rumpus had started behind him in Child’s. He went back and looked through the window across the griddle where sizzled three abandoned buttercakes. The waiters were struggling to eject a tall man in a dress suit. The thickjawed friend of the Jewish girl who had thrown the biscuit was being held back by his friends. Then the bouncer elbowed his way through the crowd. He was a small broadshouldered man with deepset tired monkey eyes. Calmly and without enthusiasm he took hold of the tall man. In a flash he had him shooting through the door. Out on the pavement the tall man looked about him dazedly and tried to straighten his collar. At that moment a police-wagon drove up jingling. Two policemen jumped out and quickly arrested three Italians who stood chatting quietly on the corner. Herf and the tall man in the dress suit looked at each other, almost spoke and walked off greatly sobered in opposite directions.

V. The Burthen of Nineveh

Seeping in red twilight out of the Gulf Stream fog, throbbing brassthroat that howls through the stiff-fingered streets, prying open glazed eyes of skyscrapers, splashing red lead on the girdered thighs of the five bridges, teasing caterwauling tugboats into heat under the toppling smoketrees of the harbor.

Spring puckering our mouths, spring giving us gooseflesh grows gigantic out of the droning of sirens, crashes with enormous scaring din through the halted traffic, between attentive frozen tiptoe blocks.

Mr. Densch with the collar of his woolly ulster up round his ears and a big English cap pulled down far over his eyes, walked nervously back and forth on the damp boat deck of the Volendam. He looked out through a drizzly rain at the gray wharf houses and the waterfront buildings etched against a sky of inconceivable bitterness. A ruined man, a ruined man, he kept whispering to himself. At last the ship’s whistle boomed out for the third time. Mr. Densch, his fingers in his ears, stood screened by a lifeboat watching the rift of dirty water between the ship’s side and the wharf widen, widen. The deck trembled under his feet as the screws bit into the current. Gray like a photograph the buildings of Manhattan began sliding by. Below decks the band was playing O Titin-e Titin-e. Red ferryboats, carferries, tugs, sandscows, lumberschooners, tramp steamers drifted between him and the steaming towering city that gathered itself into a pyramid and began to sink mistily into the browngreen water of the bay.

Mr. Densch went below to his stateroom. Mrs. Densch in a cloche hat hung with a yellow veil was crying quietly with her head on a basket of fruit. “Dont Serena,” he said huskily. “Dont.... We like Marienbad.... We need a

Mother’s face swoops down and kisses him; his hands clutch her dress, and she has gone leaving him in the dark, leaving a frail lingering fragrance in the dark that makes him cry. Little Martin lies tossing within the iron bars of his crib. Outside dark, and beyond walls and outside again the horrible great dark of grownup people, rumbling, jiggling, creeping in chunks through the windows, putting fingers through the crack in the door. From outside above the roar of wheels comes a strangling wail clutching his throat. Pyramids of dark piled above him fall crumpling on top of him. He yells, gagging between yells. Nounou walks towards the crib along a saving gangplank of light “Dont you be scared ... that aint nothin.” Her black face grins at him, her black hand straightens the covers. “Just a fire engine passin.... You wouldn’t be sceered of a fire engine.”

Ellen leaned back in the taxi and closed her eyes for a second. Not even the bath and the halfhour’s nap had washed out the fagging memory of the office, the smell of it, the chirruping of typewriters, the endlessly repeated phrases,

George Baldwin was walking back and forth in the lobby of the hotel, taking short puffs of a cigarette. Now and then he glanced at the clock. His whole body was screwed up taut like a high violinstring. He was hungry and full up with things he wanted to say; he hated waiting for people. When she walked in, cool and silky and smiling, he wanted to go up to her and hit her in the face.

“George do you realize that it’s only because numbers are so cold and emotionless that we’re not all crazy?” she said giving him a little pat on the arm.

“Fortyfive minutes waiting is enough to drive anybody crazy, that’s all I know.”

“I must explain it. It’s a system. I thought it all up coming up in the taxi.... You go in and order anything you

“You poor little thing, of course I will.... And dont be long please.”

His knees were weak under him, he felt like melting ice as he went into the gilt ponderously ornamented diningroom. Good lord Baldwin you’re acting like a hobbledehoy of seventeen ... after all these years too. Never get anywhere that way.... “Well Joseph what are you going to give us to eat tonight? I’m hungry.... But first you can get Fred to make the best Martini cocktail he ever made in his life.”

“Tres bien monsieur,” said the longnosed Roumanian waiter and handed him the menu with a flourish.

Ellen stayed a long time looking in the mirror, dabbing a little superfluous powder off her face, trying to make up her mind. She kept winding up a hypothetical dollself and setting it in various positions. Tiny gestures ensued, acted out on various model stages. Suddenly she turned away from the mirror with a shrug of her toowhite shoulders and hurried to the diningroom.

“Oh George I’m starved, simply starved.”

“So am I” he said in a crackling voice. “And Elaine I’ve got news for you,” he went on hurriedly as if he were afraid she’d interrupt him.

“Cecily has consented to a divorce. We’re going to rush it through quietly in Paris this summer. Now what I want to know is, will you...?”

She leaned over and patted his hand that grasped the edge of the table. “George lets eat our dinner first.... We’ve got to be sensible. God knows we’ve messed things up enough in the past both of us.... Let’s drink to the crime wave.” The smooth infinitesimal foam of the cocktail was soothing in her tongue and throat, glowed gradually warmly through her. She looked at him laughing with sparkling eyes. He drank his at a gulp.

“By gad Elaine,” he said flaming up helplessly, “you’re the most wonderful thing in the world.”

Through dinner she felt a gradual icy coldness stealing through her like novocaine. She had made up her mind. It seemed as if she had set the photograph of herself in her own place, forever frozen into a single gesture. An invisible silk band of bitterness was tightening round her throat, strangling. Beyond the plates, the ivory pink lamp, the broken pieces of bread, his face above the blank shirtfront jerked and nodded; the flush grew on his cheeks; his nose caught the light now on one side, now on the other, his taut lips moved eloquently over his yellow teeth. Ellen felt herself sitting with her ankles crossed, rigid as a porcelain figure under her clothes, everything about her seemed to be growing hard and enameled, the air bluestreaked with cigarettesmoke, was turning to glass. His wooden face of a marionette waggled senselessly in front of her. She shuddered and hunched up her shoulders.

“What’s the matter, Elaine?” he burst out. She lied:

“Nothing George.... Somebody walked over my grave I guess.”

“Couldnt I get you a wrap or something?”

She shook her head.

“Well what about it?” he said as they got up from the table.

“What?” she asked smiling. “After Paris?”

“I guess I can stand it if you can George,” she said quietly.

He was waiting for her, standing at the open door of a taxi. She saw him poised spry against the darkness in a tan felt hat and a light tan overcoat, smiling like some celebrity in the rotogravure section of a Sunday paper. Mechanically she squeezed the hand that helped her into the cab.

“Elaine,” he said shakily, “life’s going to mean something to me now.... God if you knew how empty life had been for so many years. I’ve been like a tin mechanical toy, all hollow inside.”

“Let’s not talk about mechanical toys,” she said in a strangled voice.

“No let’s talk about our happiness,” he shouted.

Inexorably his lips closed on to hers. Beyond the shaking glass window of the taxi, like someone drowning, she saw out of a corner of an eye whirling faces, streetlights, zooming nickleglinting wheels.

The old man in the checked cap sits on the brownstone stoop with his face in his hands. With the glare of Broadway in their backs there is a continual flickering of people past him towards the theaters down the street. The old man is sobbing through his fingers in a sour reek of gin. Once in a while he raises his head and shouts hoarsely, “I cant, dont you see I cant?” The voice is inhuman like the splitting of a plank. Footsteps quicken. Middleaged people look the other way. Two girls giggle shrilly as they look at him. Streeturchins nudging each other peer in and out through the dark crowd. “Bum Hootch.” “He’ll get his when the cop on the block comes by.” “Prohibition liquor.” The old man lifts his wet face out of his hands, staring out of sightless bloodyrimmed eyes. People back off, step on the feet of the people behind them. Like splintering wood the voice comes out of him. “Don’t you see I cant...? I cant ... I cant.”

When Alice Sheffield dropped into the stream of women going through the doors of Lord & Taylor’s and felt the close smell of stuffs in her nostrils something went click in her head. First she went to the glovecounter. The girl was very young and had long curved black lashes and a pretty smile; they talked of permanent waves while Alice tried on gray kids, white kids with a little fringe like a gauntlet. Before she tried it on, the girl deftly powdered the inside of each glove out of a longnecked wooden shaker. Alice ordered six pairs.

“Yes, Mrs. Roy Sheffield.... Yes I have a charge account,

At Maillard’s she met a tall blond Englishman with a coneshaped head and pointed wisps of towcolored mustaches under his long nose.

“Oh Buck I’m having the grandest time. I’ve been going berserk in Lord & Taylor’s. Do you know that it must be a year and a half since I’ve bought any clothes?”

“Poor old thing,” he said as he motioned her to a table. “Tell me about it.”

She let herself flop into a chair suddenly whimpering, “Oh Buck I’m so tired of it all.... I dont know how much longer I can stand it.”

“Well you cant blame me.... You know what I want you to do....”

“Well suppose I did?”

“It’d be topping, we’d hit it off like anything.... But you must have a bit of beef tea or something. You need picking up.” She giggled. “You old dear that’s just what I do need.”

“Well how about making tracks for Calgary? I know a fellow there who’ll give me a job I think.”

“Oh let’s go right away. I dont care about clothes or anything.... Roy can send those things back to Lord & Taylor’s.... Got any money Buck?”

A flush started on his cheekbones and spread over his temples to his flat irregular ears. “I confess, Al darling, that I havent a penny. I can pay for lunch.”

“Oh hell I’ll cash a check; the account’s in both our names.”

“They’ll cash it for me at the Biltmore, they know me there. When we get to Canada everything will be quite all right I can assure you. In His Majesty’s Dominion, the name of Buckminster has rather more weight than in the U.S.”

“Oh I know darling, it’s nothing but money in New York.”

When they were walking up Fifth Avenue she hooked her arm in his suddenly. “O Buck I have the most horrible thing to tell you. It made me deathly ill.... You know what I told you about the awful smell we had in the apartment we thought was rats? This morning I met the woman who lives on the ground floor.... O it makes me sick to think of it. Her face was green as that bus.... It seems they’ve been having the plumbing examined by an inspector.... They arrested the woman upstairs. O it’s too disgusting. I cant tell you about it.... I’ll never go back there. I’d die if I did.... There wasnt a drop of water in the house all day yesterday.”

“What was the matter?”

“It’s too horrible.”

“Tell it to popper.”

“Buck they wont know you when you get back home to Orpen Manor.”

“But what was it?”

“There was a woman upstairs who did illegal operations, abortions.... That was what stopped up the plumbing.”

“Good God.”

“Somehow that’s the last straw.... And Roy sitting limp over his damn paper in the middle of that stench with that horrible adenoid expression on his face.”

“Poor little girl.”

“But Buck I couldn’t cash a check for more than two hundred.... It’ll be an overdraft as it is. Will that get us to Calgary?”

“Not very comfortably.... There’s a man I know in Montreal who’ll give me a job writing society notes....

She stood waiting for him beside the information desk while he went to get the tickets. She felt alone and tiny in the middle of the great white vault of the station. All her life with Roy was going by her like a movie reeled off backwards, faster and faster. Buck came back looking happy and masterful, his hands full of greenbacks and railway tickets. “No train till seven ten Al,” he said. “Suppose you go to the Palace and leave me a seat at the boxoffice.... I’ll run up and fetch my kit. Wont take a sec.... Here’s a fiver.” And he had gone, and she was walking alone across Fortythird Street on a hot May afternoon. For some reason she began to cry. People stared at her; she couldnt help it. She walked on doggedly with the tears streaming down her face.

“Earthquake insurance, that’s what they calls it! A whole lot of good it’ll do ’em when the anger of the Lord smokes out the city like you would a hornet’s nest and he picks it up and shakes it like a cat shakes a rat.... Earthquake insurance!”

Joe and Skinny wished that the man with whiskers like a bottlecleaner who stood over their campfire mumbling and shouting would go away. They didn’t know whether he was talking to them or to himself. They pretended he wasnt there and went on nervously preparing to grill a piece of ham on a gridiron made of an old umbrellaframe. Below them beyond a sulphurgreen lace of budding trees was the Hudson going silver with evening and the white palisade of apartment-houses of upper Manhattan.

“Dont say nutten,” whispered Joe, making a swift cranking motion in the region of his ear. “He’s nuts.”

Skinny had gooseflesh down the back, he felt his lips getting cold, he wanted to run.

“That ham?” Suddenly the man addressed them in a purring benevolent voice.

“Yessir,” said Joe shakily after a pause.

“Dont you know that the Lord God forbad his chillun to eat the flesh of swine?” His voice went to its singsong mumbling and shouting. “Gabriel, Brother Gabriel ... is it all right for these kids to eat ham?... Sure. The angel Gabriel, he’s a good frien o mine see, he said it’s all right this once if you dont do it no more.... Look out brother you’ll burn it.” Skinny had got to his feet. “Sit down brother. I wont hurt you. I understand kids. We like kids me an the Lord God.... Scared of me cause I’m a tramp aint you? Well lemme tell you somethin, dont you never be afraid of a tramp. Tramps wont hurt ye, they’re good people. The Lord God was a tramp when he lived on earth. My buddy the angel Gabriel says he’s been a tramp many a time.... Look I got some fried chicken an old colored woman gave me.... O Lordy me!” groaning he sat down on a rock beside the two boys.