Given neither to he-man esthetics, like Hemingway, nor to the romance of self-destruction, like Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, their friend and contemporary — he was born in 1896—was a modest self-effacing person, an inveterate wanderer who liked to hike through foreign places and sit down for a drink with strangers and listen to their stories. He saw literature as reportage. He admired the plain style of Defoe, and he read Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, subtitled A Novel Without a Hero, all his life.

Dos Passos was born wandering, living out his lonely childhood with his unmarried mother, Lucy Madison, as she toured the European capitals to avoid scandal while, in the United States, his father, John R. Dos Passos, an eminent corporate lawyer and lobbyist, waited for his invalided first wife to die. When that event came about, in 1910, the mother, the father, and the boy, a strongly loving triad, were able finally to constitute themselves as a family. But the isolation of his early life left Dos Passos psychologically detached, with the feelings of a perpetual outsider.

The outside, of course, is a position of advantage for a writer. Reportage from the outside, and slightly above, is the working viewpoint of Dos Passos’s masterpiece, U.S.A. It is a nice irony that not the era’s big literary personalities, but this quiet inhibited young man, would produce the most vaultingly ambitious novel of all — a twelve-hundred-page chronicle of the historic and spiritual life of an entire country in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Not for him the portrait of a gangster, however metaphorically shimmering, or even the group portrait of a lost generation: Dos Passos goes wide — from the American incursion in the Philippines to the beginning of the talkies, from coast to coast and class to class. U.S.A. is the novel as mural, with society’s heroes standing out from the flames of history while the small-figured masses toil at their feet.

In fact, the peripatetic Dos Passos landed one day in Mexico City and was much taken with the murals of Diego Rivera colorfully spreading, story after story, up the courtyard walls of the Secretariat of Education. In later years he indicated also his love of thirteenth-and fourteenth-century European tableaux — those with the saints painted big and the ordinary people painted small, filling up the background.

He published the first installment of U.S.A., The 42nd Parallel, in 1929, having realized early on that what he was doing could not be contained in one volume. 1919 followed two years later, and the final volume, The Big Money, was published in 1936. He could have gone on — he had endless resources for the thing, having picked up its rhythm and much of the material from his own ambulating life. He’d gone up from Baltimore to Harvard, where he read and was impressed by the Imagist poets — Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg. He also made his acquaintance with the work of James Joyce, the twentieth-century writer who, though hardly given to English plain speech, would have the most enduring influence on him. After Harvard he went back to his wandering, spending a year in Spain and studying architecture. But World War I was just over the border, and in 1916 he volunteered to drive for the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service, the same organization for which Hemingway and E. E. Cummings drove. He served in France and Italy, and then with the entry of America into the conflict he enlisted in the AEF and, all told, got as much of a dose of modern war as he would need for the inspiration to portray its soldier-victims in his first novel, Three Soldiers (1921).

The reticent writer was always disposed to the action. In the postwar twenties, he managed time and again to place himself in history’s hotspots — whether the literary scene in New York and Paris, revolutionary Mexico after the death of Emiliano Zapata, the newly Communist Soviet Union, or the nativist city of Boston, where he marched for the two imprisoned and condemned immigrant anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti.

He was writing all the time, of course. He published Rosinante to the Road Again (1922), a book of essays about Spain, Manhattan Transfer (1925), a dark impressionist portrait of New York and technical precursor of the U.S.A. novels, and pieces in the New Masses, The Dial, The Nation, and The New Republic attesting to his leftist sensibility. He was a diarist and kept up an active correspondence with a variety of colleagues including Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald — all of them worried in the world, all of them news junkies arguing politics and entangling themselves in the crises of civilization.

Not until the Spanish civil war would the profound difference between Dos Passos’s humanist ideals and the doctrinaire idealism of many of his contemporaries become clear: the visible moment of separation seems to have occurred with the execution in Valencia of his friend José Robles, a Republican, by a Communist firing squad.

In his later life Dos Passos was as archly conservative as he had been radical. What remained constant, like a moral compass course that never veered, was his despair of the fate of the single human being bent into service of the institutions of modern industrial society, whatever those institutions might be.

In fact, the pervading vision of U.S.A. is of people dominated by institutions, which is to say trapped in history. The novel is without a hero. We are given narratives of the lives of a dozen men and women — Joe Williams, a seaman; Mac, a typesetter; J. Ward Moorehouse, a public relations man; Eleanor Stoddard, a stage designer; Dick Savage, a Harvard graduate and World War I ambulance driver; Charley Anderson, a wartime air ace and inventor; Margo Dowling, an actress; Ben Compton, a union organizer; and so on — and watch three decades pass through them as they reach their prime and then age and flounder, either to die or to simply disappear or, with one or two exceptions, to end in moral defeat. Living below the headlines, they’re presented as ordinaries: their lives can intersect, they can sometimes be charming or sympathetic, but they are always seen from above, as in satire, and all their irresolution, self-deceit, and haplessness, and their failure to find empowerment in love or social rebellion, is unconsoled by the moral structure of a plot. U.S.A. has no plot, only the movement forward of its multiple narratives under the presiding circumstances of history.

The circumstances themselves are occasionally flashed to us by means of the so-called “Newsreels” that interrupt the text with actual headlines from newspapers of the time, fragments of news stories, advertising slogans, and popular song lyrics, all popping up in rat-a-tat fashion, like momentary garish illuminations, as from fireworks, of the American landscape.

Early readers were dazzled, as they should have been, by these collages. But Dos Passos does not stop there. A third mode is the minute biography, the periodic insertion into the text of highly editorialized brief lives of some of the paramount figures of each of the decades he covers, including Eugene Debs and William Jennings Bryan, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, John Reed and J. P. Morgan, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, the Wright Brothers, Henry Ford, Isadora Duncan, and William Randolph Hearst — the secular saints of the Dos Passos tableau, often mocked, sometimes mourned, but in any event drawn big. Unlike the lives of his fictional characters, which flow incessantly, the breathless author saying and then this happened and then that happened, the biographies stand as firm in his annunciation as historical markers.

Through the fourth major mode of address of the book, those Joycean passages under the heading “The Camera Eye,” Dos Passos records his own nameless life of sensations beginning with his early boyhood. These are perhaps the most enigmatic interludes. Like the Newsreels and brief biographies, they give a topographical dimension to the text, as if points in the main narrative were being held under a higher lens magnification. They also implicate the narrator in the narrative, serving to underscore his moral commitment to the act of writing. But with his characteristic self-denigration, Dos Passos once justified these sections to an interviewer as planned lapses into “the subjective,” a way of keeping this terrible contaminant out of the rest of the manuscript.

Here we should remember D. H. Lawrence’s warning not to trust the writer but the book. As with Dos Passos’s self-effacement, his objectivity, which is the literary form of self-effacement, masks an imperial intelligence, an acerbic wit, a great anger, and, above all, the audacity to write a novel that breathes in the excitements of all the revolutionary art of the early twentieth century — whether Joyce’s compound word streams or Rivera’s proletarian murals or D. W. Griffith’s and Sergei Eisenstein’s film montages.

The stature of U.S.A. was immediately recognized by the critics of the day. By the time of its publication as a completed one-volume trilogy in 1938, the novel was generally regarded as a major achievement, although displaying the characteristics of a highly controlled vision. Malcolm Cowley thought of it as a “collectivist novel” perversely lacking the celebrations of common humanity that would be expected from a collectivist novel. Edmund Wilson wondered why every one of the ordinary characters of the book went down to failure, why nobody took root, raised a family, established a worthwhile career, or found any of the satisfactions that were undeniably visible in actual middle-class American life. Others objected to the characters’ lack of ideas, Dos Passos’s refusal to give them any consequential thought or reflection not connected with their appetites. And it is true these are beings occupied almost entirely with their sensations and plagued by their longings, given mightily to drinking and fornication while their flimsy thought provides no anchor against the drift of their lives.

But for Jean-Paul Sartre, writing in 1938, it was exactly in the novel’s refusal to redeem its characters that he found its greatness. Their lives are reported, their feelings and utterances put forth, says Sartre, in the style of a “statement to the Press.” And we the readers accumulate endless catalogues of individual sensory adventures, from the outside, right up to the moment the character disappears or dies — and is dissolved in the collective consciousness. And to what purpose all those feelings, all that adventure? What is the individual life against history? “The pressure exerted by a gas on the walls of its container does not depend upon the individual histories of the molecules composing it,” says the French existentialist philosopher.

But U.S.A. is an American novel after all, and we recognize the Americanness of the characters. They really do have a national specificity. In fact, the reader now, half a century further along, cannot help remark how current Dos Passos’s characters are — how we could run into Margo Dowling or Ward Moorehouse or Charley Anderson today and recognize any one of them, and how they would fit right in without any trouble. How they do. U.S.A. is a useful book to us because it is far-seeing. It seems angrier and at the same time more hopeful than it might have seemed in 1938. A moral demand is implicit in its pages. Dos Passos says in his prologue that above all, “U.S.A. is the speech of the people.” He heard our voice and recorded it, and we play it now for our solemn contemplation.

The young man walks fast by himself through the crowd that thins into the night streets; feet are tired from hours of walking; eyes greedy for warm curve of faces, answering flicker of eyes, the set of a head, the lift of a shoulder, the way hands spread and clench; blood tingles with wants; mind is a beehive of hopes buzzing and stinging; muscles ache for the knowledge of jobs, for the roadmender’s pick and shovel work, the fisherman’s knack with a hook when he hauls on the slithery net from the rail of the lurching trawler, the swing of the bridgeman’s arm as he slings down the whitehot rivet, the engineer’s slow grip wise on the throttle, the dirtfarmer’s use of his whole body when, whoaing the mules, he yanks the plow from the furrow. The young man walks by himself searching through the crowd with greedy eyes, greedy ears taut to hear, by himself, alone.

The streets are empty. People have packed into subways, climbed into streetcars and buses; in the stations they’ve scampered for suburban trains; they’ve filtered into lodgings and tenements, gone up in elevators into apartmenthouses. In a showwindow two sallow windowdressers in their shirtsleeves are bringing out a dummy girl in a red evening dress, at a corner welders in masks lean into sheets of blue flame repairing a cartrack, a few drunk bums shamble along, a sad street-walker fidgets under an arclight. From the river comes the deep rumbling whistle of a steamboat leaving dock. A tug hoots far away.

The young man walks by himself, fast but not fast enough, far but not far enough (faces slide out of sight, talk trails into tattered scraps, footsteps tap fainter in alleys); he must catch the last subway, the streetcar, the bus, run up the gangplanks of all the steamboats, register at all the hotels, work in the cities, answer the wantads, learn the trades, take up the jobs, live in all the boardinghouses, sleep in all the beds. One bed is not enough, one job is not enough, one life is not enough. At night, head swimming with wants, he walks by himself alone.

No job, no woman, no house, no city.

Only the ears busy to catch the speech are not alone; the ears are caught tight, linked tight by the tendrils of phrased words, the turn of a joke, the singsong fade of a story, the gruff fall of a sentence; linking tendrils of speech twine through the city blocks, spread over pavements, grow out along broad parked avenues, speed with the trucks leaving on their long night runs over roaring highways, whisper down sandy byroads past wornout farms, joining up cities and fillingstations, roundhouses, steamboats, planes groping along airways; words call out on mountain pastures, drift slow down rivers widening to the sea and the hushed beaches.

It was not in the long walks through jostling crowds at night that he was less alone, or in the training camp at Allentown, or in the day on the docks at Seattle, or in the empty reek of Washington City hot boyhood summer nights, or in the meal on Market Street, or in the swim off the red rocks at San Diego, or in the bed full of fleas in New Orleans, or in the cold razorwind off the lake, or in the gray faces trembling in the grind of gears in the street under Michigan Avenue, or in the smokers of limited expresstrains, or walking across country, or riding up the dry mountain canyons, or the night without a sleepingbag among frozen beartracks in the Yellowstone, or canoeing Sundays on the Quinnipiac;

but in his mother’s words telling about longago, in his father’s telling about when I was a boy, in the kidding stories of uncles, in the lies the kids told at school, the hired man’s yarns, the tall tales the doughboys told after taps;

it was speech that clung to the ears, the link that tingled in the blood; U. S. A.

U. S. A. is the slice of a continent. U. S. A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatres, a column of stockquotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a public-library full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil. U. S. A. is the world’s greatest rivervalley fringed with mountains and hills, U. S. A. is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bankaccounts. U. S. A. is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. U. S. A. is the letters at the end of an address when you are away from home. But mostly U. S. A. is the speech of the people.

It was that emancipated race

That was chargin up the hill

Up to where them insurrectos

Was afightin fit to kill

when you walk along the street you have to step carefully always on the cobbles so as not to step on the bright anxious grassblades easier if you hold Mother’s hand and hang on it that way you can kick up your toes but walking fast you have to tread on too many grassblades the poor hurt green tongues shrink under your feet maybe thats why those people are so angry and follow us shaking their fists they’re throwing stones grownup people throwing stones She’s walking fast and we’re running her pointed toes sticking out sharp among the poor trodden grassblades under the shaking folds of the brown cloth dress Englander a pebble tinkles along the cobbles

Quick darling quick in the postcard shop its quiet the angry people are outside and cant come in non nein nicht englander amerikanisch americain Hoch Amerika Vive l’Amerique She laughs My dear they had me right frightened

war on the veldt Kruger Bloemfontein Ladysmith and Queen Victoria an old lady in a pointed lace cap sent chocolate to the soldiers at Christmas

under the counter it’s dark and the lady the nice Dutch lady who loves Americans and has relations in Trenton shows you postcards that shine in the dark pretty hotels and palaces O que c’est beau schon prittie prittie and the moonlight ripple ripple under a bridge and the little reverbères are alight in the dark under the counter and the little windows of hotels around the harbor O que c’est beau la lune

and the big moon

When the wind set from the silver factories across the river the air of the gray fourfamily frame house where Fainy McCreary was born was choking all day with the smell of whaleoil soap. Other days it smelt of cabbage and babies and Mrs. McCreary’s washboilers. Fainy could never play at home because Pop, a lame cavechested man with a wispy blonde-gray mustache, was nightwatchman at the Chadwick Mills and slept all day. It was only round five o’clock that a curling whiff of tobacco smoke would seep through from the front room into the kitchen. That was a sign that Pop was up and in good spirits, and would soon be wanting his supper.

Then Fainy would be sent running out to one of two corners of the short muddy street of identical frame houses where they lived.

To the right it was half a block to Finley’s where he would have to wait at the bar in a forest of mudsplattered trouserlegs until all the rank brawling mouths of grownups had been stopped with beers and whiskeys. Then he would walk home, making each step very carefully, with the handle of the pail of suds cutting into his hand.

To the left it was half a block to Maginnis’s Fancy Groceries, Home and Imported Products. Fainy liked the cardboard Cream of Wheat darkey in the window, the glass case with different kinds of salami in it, the barrels of potatoes and cabbages, the brown smell of sugar, sawdust, ginger, kippered herring, ham, vinegar, bread, pepper, lard.

“A loaf of bread, please, mister, a half pound of butter and a box of ginger snaps.”

Some evenings, when Mom felt poorly, Fainy had to go further; round the corner past Maginnis’s, down Riverside Avenue where the trolley ran, and across the red bridge over the little river that flowed black between icy undercut snowbanks in winter, yellow and spuming in the spring thaws, brown and oily in summer. Across the river all the way to the corner of Riverside and Main, where the drugstore was, lived Bohunks and Polaks. Their kids were always fighting with the kids of the Murphys and O’Haras and O’Flanagans who lived on Orchard Street.

Fainy would walk along with his knees quaking, the medicine bottle in its white paper tight in one mittened hand. At the corner of Quince was a group of boys he’d have to pass. Passing wasn’t so bad; it was when he was about twenty yards from them that the first snowball would hum by his ear. There was no comeback. If he broke into a run, they’d chase him. If he dropped the medicine bottle he’d be beaten up when he got home. A soft one would plunk on the back of his head and the snow began to trickle down his neck. When he was a half a block from the bridge he’d take a chance and run for it.

we hurry wallowing like in a boat in the musty stably-smelling herdic cab He kept saying What would you do Lucy if I were to invite one of them to my table? They’re very lovely people Lucy the colored people and He had cloves in a little silver box and a rye whisky smell on his breath hurrying to catch the cars to New York

and She was saying Oh dolly I hope we wont be late and Scott was waiting with the tickets and we had to run up the platform of the Seventh Street Depot and all the little cannons kept falling out of the Olympia and everybody stooped to pick them up and the conductor Allaboard lady quick lady

they were little brass cannons and were bright in the sun on the platform of the Seventh Street Depot and Scott hoisted us all up and the train was moving and the engine bell was ringing and Scott put in your hand a little handful of brass tiny cannons just big enough to hold the smallest size red firecracker at the battle of Manila Bay and said Here’s the artillery Jack

and He was holding forth in the parlor car Why Lucy if it were necessary for the cause of humanity I would walk out and be shot any day you would Jack wouldn’t you? wouldn’t you porter? who was bringing appolinaris and He had a flask in the brown grip where the silk initialed handkerchiefs always smelt of bay rum

and when we got to Havre de Grace He said Remember Lucy we used to have to ferry across the Susquehanna before the bridge was built

and across Gunpowder Creek too

Russet hills, patches of woods, farmhouses, cows, a red colt kicking up its heels in a pasture, rail fences, streaks of marsh.

“Well, Tim, I feel like a whipped cur… So long as I’ve lived, Tim, I’ve tried to do the right thing,” Pop kept repeating in a rattling voice. “And now what can they be asayin’ about me?”

“Jesus God, man, there was nothin’ else you could do, was there? What the devil can you do if you haven’t any money and haven’t any job and a lot o’ doctors and undertakers and landlords come round with their bills and you with two children to support?”

“But I’ve been a quiet and respectable man, steady and misfortunate ever since I married and settled down. And now what’ll they be thinkin’ of me sneakin’ out like a whipped cur?”

“John, take it from me that I’d be the last one to want to bring disrespect on the dead that was my own sister by birth and blood… But it ain’t your fault and it ain’t my fault… it’s the fault of poverty, and poverty’s the fault of the system… Fenian, you listen to Tim O’Hara for a minute and Milly you listen too, cause a girl ought to know these things just as well as a man and for once in his life Tim O’Hara’s tellin’ the truth… It’s the fault of the system that don’t give a man the fruit of his labor… The only man that gets anything out of capitalism is a crook, an’ he gets to be a millionaire in short order… But an honest workin’ man like John or myself we can work a hundred years and not leave enough to bury us decent with.”

Smoke rolled white in front of the window shaking out of its folds trees and telegraph poles and little square shingle-roofed houses and towns and trolleycars, and long rows of buggies with steaming horses standing in line.

“And who gets the fruit of our labor, the goddam business men, agents, middlemen who never did a productive piece of work in their life.”

Fainy’s eyes are following the telegraph wires that sag and soar.

“Now, Chicago ain’t no paradise, I can promise you that, John, but it’s a better market for a workin’ man’s muscle and brains at present than the East is… And why, did you ask me why…? Supply and demand, they need workers in Chicago.”

“Tim, I tellyer I feel like a whipped cur.”

“It’s the system, John, it’s the goddam lousy system.”

A great bustle in the car woke Fainy up. It was dark. Milly was crying again. He didn’t know where he was.

“Well, gentlemen,” Uncle Tim was saying, “we’re about to arrive in little old New York.”

In the station it was light; that surprised Fainy, who thought it was already night. He and Milly were left a long time sitting on a suitcase in the waitingroom. The waitingroom was huge, full of unfamiliarlooking people, scary like people in picture-books. Milly kept crying.

“Hey, Milly, I’ll biff you one if you don’t stop crying.”

“Why?” whined Milly, crying all the more.

Fainy stood as far away from her as possible so that people wouldn’t think they were together. When he was about ready to cry himself Pop and Uncle Tim came and took them and the suitcase into the restaurant. A strong smell of fresh whisky came from their breaths, and they seemed very bright around the eyes. They all sat at a table with a white cloth and a sympathetic colored man in a white coat handed them a large card full of printing.

“Let’s eat a good supper,” said Uncle Tim, “if it’s the last thing we do on this earth.”

“Damn the expense,” said Pop, “it’s the system that’s to blame.”

“To hell with the pope,” said Uncle Tim. “We’ll make a social-democrat out of you yet.”

They gave Fainy fried oysters and chicken and icecream and cake, and when they all had to run for the train he had a terrible stitch in his side. They got into a daycoach that smelt of coalgas and armpits. “When are we going to bed?” Milly began to whine. “We’re not going to bed,” said Uncle Tim airily. “We’re going to sleep right here like little mice… like little mice in a cheese.” “I doan like mice,” yelled Milly with a new flood of tears as the train started.

Fainy’s eyes smarted; in his ears was the continuous roar, the clatter clatter over crossings, the sudden snarl under bridges. It was a tunnel, all the way to Chicago it was a tunnel. Opposite him Pop’s and Uncle Tim’s faces looked red and snarling, he didn’t like the way they looked, and the light was smoky and jiggly and outside it was all a tunnel and his eyes hurt and wheels and rails roared in his ears and he fell asleep.

When he woke up it was a town and the train was running right through the main street. It was a sunny morning. He could see people going about their business, stores, buggies and spring-wagons standing at the curb, newsboys selling newspapers, wooden Indians outside of cigarstores. At first he thought he was dreaming, but then he remembered and decided it must be Chicago. Pop and Uncle Tim were asleep on the seat opposite. Their mouths were open, their faces were splotched and he didn’t like the way they looked. Milly was curled up with a wooly shawl all over her. The train was slowing down, it was a station. If it was Chicago they ought to get off. At that moment the conductor passed, an old man who looked a little like Father O’Donnell.

“Please, mister, is this Chicago?” “Chicago’s a long way off yet, son,” said the conductor without smiling. “This is Syracuse.”

And they all woke up, and for hours and hours the telephone poles went by, and towns, frame houses, brick factories with ranks and ranks of glittering windows, dumping grounds, trainyards, plowed land, pasture, and cows, and Milly got trainsick and Fainy’s legs felt like they would drop off from sitting in the seat so long; some places it was snowing and some places it was sunny, and Milly kept getting sick and smelt dismally of vomit, and it got dark and they all slept; and light again, and then the towns and the farmhouses and the factories all started drawing together, humping into warehouses and elevators, and the trainyards spread out as far as you could see and it was Chicago.

But it was so cold and the wind blew the dust so hard in his face and his eyes were so stuck together by dust and tiredness that he couldn’t look at anything. After they had waited round a long while, Milly and Fainy huddled together in the cold, they got on a streetcar and rode and rode. They were so sleepy they never knew exactly where the train ended and the streetcar began. Uncle Tim’s voice went on talking proudly excitedly, Chicago, Chicago, Chicago. Pop sat with his chin on his crutch. “Tim, I feel like a whipped cur.”

Fainy lived ten years in Chicago.

At first he went to school and played baseball on back lots on Saturday afternoons, but then came his last commencement, and all the children sang My Country, ’Tis Of Thee, and school was over and he had to go to work. Uncle Tim at that time had his own jobprinting shop on a dusty side street off North Clark in the ground floor of a cranky old brick building. It only occupied a small section of the building that was mostly used as a warehouse and was famous for its rats. It had a single wide plateglass window made resplendent by gold Old English lettering: TIMOTHY O’HARA, JOB PRINTER.

“Now, Fainy, old sport,” said Uncle Tim, “you’ll have a chance to learn the profession from the ground up.” So he ran errands, delivered packages of circulars, throwaways, posters, was always dodging trolleycars, ducking from under the foamy bits of big truckhorses, bumming rides on delivery-wagons. When there were no errands to run he swept out under the presses, cleaned type, emptied the office wastepaper basket, or, during rush times, ran round the corner for coffee and sandwiches for the typesetter, or for a small flask of bourbon for Uncle Tim.

Pop puttered round on his crutch for several years, always looking for a job. Evenings he smoked his pipe and cursed his luck on the back stoop of Uncle Tim’s house and occasionally threatened to go back to Middletown. Then one day he got pneumonia and died quietly at the Sacred Heart Hospital. It was about the same time that Uncle Tim bought a linotype machine.

Uncle Tim was so excited he didn’t take a drink for three days. The floorboards were so rotten they had to build a brick base for the linotype all the way up from the cellar. “Well, when we get another one we’ll concrete the whole place,” Uncle Tim told everybody. For a whole day there was no work done. Everybody stood around looking at the tall black intricate machine that stood there like an organ in a church. When the machine was working and the printshop filled with the hot smell of molten metal, everybody’s eyes followed the quivering inquisitive arm that darted and flexed above the keyboard. When they handed round the warm shiny slugs of type the old German typesetter who for some reason they called Mike pushed back his glasses on his forehead and cried. “Fifty-five years a printer, and now when I’m old I’ll have to carry hods to make a living.”

The first print Uncle Tim set up on the new machine was the phrase: Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.

When Fainy was seventeen and just beginning to worry about skirts and ankles and girls’ underwear when he walked home from work in the evening and saw the lights of the city bright against the bright heady western sky, there was a strike in the Chicago printing trades. Tim O’Hara had always run a union shop and did all the union printing at cost. He even got up a handbill signed, A Citizen, entitled An Ernest Protest, which Fainy was allowed to set up on the linotype one evening after the operator had gone home. One phrase stuck in Fainy’s mind, and he repeated it to himself after he had gone to bed that night: It is time for all honest men to band together to resist the ravages of greedy privilege.

The next day was Sunday, and Fainy went along Michigan Avenue with a package of the handbills to distribute. It was a day of premature spring. Across the rotting yellow ice on the lake came little breezes that smelt unexpectedly of flowers. The girls looked terribly pretty and their skirts blew in the wind and Fainy felt the spring blood pumping hot in him, he wanted to kiss and to roll on the ground and to run out across the icecakes and to make speeches from the tops of telegraph poles and to vault over trolleycars; but instead he distributed handbills and worried about his pants being frayed and wished he had a swell looking suit and a swell looking girl to walk with.

“Hey, young feller, where’s your permit to distribute them handbills?” It was a cop’s voice growling in his ear. Fainy gave the cop one look over his shoulder, dropped the handbills and ran. He ducked through between the shiny black cabs and carriages, ran down a side street and walked and walked and didn’t look back until he managed to get across a bridge just before the draw opened. The cop wasn’t following him anyway.

He stood on the curb a long time with the whistle of a peanutstand shrilling derisively in his ear.

That night at supper his uncle asked him about the handbills.

“Sure I gave ’em out all along the lakeshore… A cop tried to stop me but I told him right where to get off.” Fainy turned burning red when a hoot went up from everybody at the table. He filled up his mouth with mashed potato and wouldn’t say any more. His aunt and his uncle and their three daughters all laughed and laughed. “Well, it’s a good thing you ran faster than the cop,” said Uncle Tim, “else I should have had to bail you out and that would have cost money.”

The next morning early Fainy was sweeping out the office, when a man with a face like a raw steak walked up the steps; he was smoking a thin black stogy of a sort Fainy had never seen before. He knocked on the ground glass door.

“I want to speak to Mr. O’Hara, Timothy O’Hara.”

“He’s not here yet, be here any minute now, sir. Will you wait?”

“You bet I’ll wait.” The man sat on the edge of a chair and spat, first taking the chewed end of the stogy out of his mouth and looking at it meditatively for a long time. When Tim O’Hara came the office door closed with a bang. Fainy hovered nervously around, a little bit afraid the man might be a detective following up the affair of the handbills. Voices rose and fell, the stranger’s voice in short rattling tirades, O’Hara’s voice in long expostulating clauses, now and then Fainy caught the word foreclose, until suddenly the door flew open and the stranger shot out, his face purpler than ever. On the iron stoop he turned and pulling a new stogy from his pocket, lit it from the old one; growling the words through the stogy and the blue puff of smoke, he said, “Mr. O’Hara, you have twenty-four hours to think it over… A word from you and proceedings stop immediately.” Then he went off down the street leaving behind him a long trail of rancid smoke.

A minute later, Uncle Tim came out of the office, his face white as paper. “Fenian, old sport,” he said, “you go get yourself a job. I’m going out of business… Keep a weather eye open. I’m going to have a drink.” And he was drunk for six days. By the end of that time a number of meeklooking men appeared with summonses, and Uncle Tim had to sober up enough to go down to the court and put in a plea of bankruptcy.

Mrs. O’Hara scolded and stormed, “Didn’t I tell you, Tim O’Hara, no good’ll ever come with your fiddlin’ round with these godless labor unions and social-democrats and knights of labor, all of ’em drunk and loafin’bums like yourself, Tim O’Hara. Of course the master printers ud have to get together and buy up your outstandin’ paper and squash you, and serve you right too, Tim O’Hara, you and your godless socialistic boosin’ ways only they might have thought of your poor wife and her helpless wee babes, and now we’ll starve all of us together, us and the dependents and hangers on you’ve brought into the house.”

“Well, I declare,” cried Fainy’s sister Milly. “If I haven’t slaved and worked my fingers to the bone for every piece of bread I’ve eaten in this house,” and she got up from the breakfast table and flounced out of the room. Fainy sat there while the storm raged above his head; then he got up, slipping a corn muffin into his pocket as he went. In the hall he found the “help wanted” section of the Chicago Tribune, took his cap and went out into a raw Sunday morning full of churchbells jangling in his ears. He boarded a streetcar and went out to Lincoln Park. There he sat on a bench for a long time munching the muffin and looking down the columns of advertisements: Boy Wanted. But they none of them looked very inviting. One thing he was bound, he wouldn’t get another job in a printing shop until the strike was over. Then his eye struck

Come on and hear

Come on and hear

Come on and hear

o qu’il a des beaux yeux said the lady in the seat opposite but She said that was no way to talk to children and the little boy felt all hot and sticky but it was dusk and the lamp shaped like half a melon was coming on dim red and the train rumbled and suddenly I’ve been asleep and it’s black dark and the blue tassel bobs on the edge of the dark shade shaped like a melon and everywhere there are pointed curved shadows (the first time He came He brought a melon and the sun was coming in through the tall lace windowcurtains and when we cut it the smell of melons filled the whole room) No don’t eat the seeds deary they give you appendicitis

but you’re peeking out of the window into the black rumbling dark suddenly ranked with squat chimneys and you’re scared of the black smoke and the puffs of flame that flare and fade out of the squat chimneys Potteries dearie they work there all night Who works there all night? Workingmen and people like that laborers travailleurs greasers

you were scared

but now the dark was all black again the lamp in the train and the sky and everything had a blueblack shade on it and She was telling a story about

Longago Beforetheworldsfair Beforeyouwereborn and they went to Mexico on a private car on the new international line and the men shot antelope off the back of the train and big rabbits jackasses they called them and once one night Longago Beforetheworldsfair Beforeyouwereborn one night Mother was so frightened on account of all the rifleshots but it was allright turned out to be nothing but a little shooting they’d been only shooting a greaser that was all

that was in the early days

Debs was a railroad man, born in a weatherboarded shack at Terre Haute.

He was one of ten children.

His father had come to America in a sailingship in ’49,

an Alsatian from Colmar; not much of a moneymaker, fond of music and reading,

he gave his children a chance to finish public school and that was about all he could do.

At fifteen Gene Debs was already working as a machinist on the Indianapolis and Terre Haute Railway.

He worked as locomotive fireman,

clerked in a store

joined the local of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, was elected secretary, traveled all over the country as organizer.

He was a tall shamblefooted man, had a sort of gusty rhetoric that set on fire the railroad workers in their pineboarded halls

made them want the world he wanted,

a world brothers might own

where everybody would split even:

I am not a labor leader. I don’t want you to follow me or anyone else. If you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of the capitalist wilderness you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into this promised land if I could, because if I could lead you in, someone else would lead you out.

That was how he talked to freighthandlers and gandywalkers, to firemen and switchmen and engineers, telling them it wasn’t enough to organize the railroadmen, that all workers must be organized, that all workers must be organized in the workers’ cooperative commonwealth.

Locomotive fireman on many a long night’s run,

under the smoke a fire burned him up, burned in gusty words that beat in pineboarded halls; he wanted his brothers to be free men.

That was what he saw in the crowd that met him at the Old Wells Street Depot when he came out of jail after the Pullman strike,

those were the men that chalked up nine hundred thousand votes for him in nineteen twelve and scared the frockcoats and the tophats and diamonded hostesses at Saratoga Springs, Bar Harbor, Lake Geneva with the bogy of a socialist president.

riding backwards through the rain in the rumbly cab looking at their two faces in the jiggly light of the four-wheeled cab and Her big trunks thumping on the roof and He reciting Othello in his lawyer’s voice

Fainy stood near the door in the crowded elevated train; against the back of the fat man who held on to the strap in front of him, he kept rereading a letter on crisp watermarked stationery:

“IT TAKES NERVE TO LIVE IN THIS WORLD” LAST WORDS OF GEORGE SMITH HANGED WITH HIS BROTHER BY MOB IN KANSAS MARQUIS OF QUEENSBERRY DEAD FLAMES WRECK SPICE PLANT COURT SETS ZOLA FREE

and we played the battle of Port Arthur in the bathtub and the water leaked down through the drawingroom ceiling and it was altogether too bad but in Kew Gardens old Mr. Garnet who was still hale and hearty although so very old came to tea and we saw him first through the window with his red face and John Bull whiskers and aunty said it was a sailor’s rolling gait and he was carrying a box under his arm and Vickie and Pompom barked and here was Mr. Garnet come to tea and he took a gramophone out of a black box and put a cylinder on the gramophone and they pushed back the tea-things off the corner of the table Be careful not to drop it now they scratch rather heasy Why a hordinary sewin’ needle would do maam but I ave special needles

and we got to talking about Hadmiral Togo and the Banyan and how the Roosians drank so much vodka and killed all those poor fisherlads in the North Sea and he wound it up very carefully so as not to break the spring and the needle went rasp rasp Yes I was a bluejacket miself miboy from the time I was a little shayver not much bigger’n you rose to be bosun’s mite on the first British hironclad the Warrior and I can dance a ornpipe yet maam and he had a mariner’s compass in red and blue on the back of his hand and his nails looked black and thick as he fumbled with the needle and the needle went rasp rasp and far away a band played and out of a grindy noise in the little black horn came God Save the King and the little dogs howled

I met my love in the Alamo

When the moon was on the rise

Her beauty quite bedimmed its light

So radiant were her eyes

Go it go it said Mr. Linwood the headmaster when one was running up the field kicking the round ball footer they called it in Hampstead and afterwards it was time to walk home and one felt good because Mr. Linwood had said Go it

Taylor said There’s another American come and he had teeth like Teddy in the newspapers and a turnedup nose and a Rough Rider suit and he said Who are you going to vote for? and one said I dunno and he stuck his chest out and said I mean who your folks for Roosevelt or Parker? and one said Judge Parker

the other American’s hair was very black and he stuck his fists up and his nose turned up and he said I’m for Roosevelt wanto fight? all trembly one said I’m for Judge Parker but Taylor said Who’s got tuppence for ginger beer? and there wasn’t any fight that time

BUGS DRIVE OUT BIOLOGIST

Next morning soon after daylight Fainy limped out of a heavy shower into the railroad station at Gaylord. There was a big swag-bellied stove burning in the station waiting room. The ticket agent’s window was closed. There was nobody in sight. Fainy took off first one drenched shoe and then the other and toasted his feet till his socks were dry. A blister had formed and broken on each heel and the socks stuck to them in a grimy scab. He put on his shoes again and stretched out on the bench. Immediately he was asleep.

Somebody tall in blue was speaking to him. He tried to raise his head but he was too sleepy.

“Hey, bo, you better not let the station agent find you,” said a voice he’d been hearing before through his sleep. Fainy opened his eyes and sat up. “Jeez, I thought you were a cop.”

A squareshouldered young man in blue denim shirt and overalls was standing over him. “I thought I’d better wake you up, station agent’s so friggin’ tough in this dump.”

“Thanks.” Fainy stretched his legs. His feet were so swollen he could hardly stand on them. “Golly, I’m stiff.”

“Say, if we each had a quarter I know a dump where we could get a bully breakfast.”

“I gotta dollar an’ a half,” said Fainy slowly. He stood with his hands in his pockets, his back to the warm stove looking carefully at the other boy’s square bulljawed face and blue eyes.

“Where are you from?”

“I’m from Duluth… I’m on the bum more or less. Where are you from?”

“Golly, I wish I knew. I had a job till last night.”

“Resigned?”

“Say, suppose we go eat that breakfast.”

“That’s slick. I didn’t eat yesterday…. My name’s George Hall… The fellers call me Ike. I ain’t exactly on the bum, you know. I want to see the world.”

“I guess I’m going to have to see the world now,” said Fainy. “My name’s McCreary. I’m from Chi. But I was born back east in Middletown, Connecticut.”

As they opened the screen door of the railroad men’s boarding house down the road they were met by a smell of ham and coffee and roachpowder. A horsetoothed blonde woman with a rusty voice set places for them.

“Where do you boys work? I don’t remember seein’ you before.”

“I worked down to the sawmill,” said Ike.

“Sawmill shet down two weeks ago because the superintendent blew out his brains.”

“Don’t I know it?”

“Maybe you boys better pay in advance.”

“I got the money,” said Fainy, waving a dollar bill in her face.

“Well, if you got the money I guess you’ll pay all right,” said the waitress, showing her long yellow teeth in a smile.

“Sure, peaches and cream, we’ll pay like millionaires,” said Ike.

They filled up on coffee and hominy and ham and eggs and big heavy white bakingpowder biscuits, and by the end of breakfast they had gotten to laughing so hard over Fainy’s stories of Doc Bingham’s life and loves that the waitress asked them if they’d been drinking. Ike kidded her into bringing them each another cup of coffee without extra charge. Then he fished up two mashed cigarettes from the pocket of his overalls. “Have a coffin nail, Mac?”

“You can’t smoke here,” said the waitress. “The missus won’t stand for smokin’.”

“All right, bright eyes, we’ll skidoo.”

“How far are you goin’?”

“Well, I’m headed for Duluth myself. That’s where my folks are…” “So you’re from Duluth, are you?” “Well, what’s the big joke about Duluth?” “It’s no joke, it’s a misfortune.”

“You don’t think you can kid me, do you?” “’Tain’t worth my while, sweetheart.” The waitress tittered as she cleared off the table. She had big red hands and thick nails white from kitchenwork.

“Hey, got any noospapers? I want somethin’ to read waitin’ for the train.” “I’ll get you some. The missus takes the American from Chicago.” “Gee, I ain’t seen a paper in three weeks.” “I like to read the paper, too,” said Mac. “I like to know what’s goin’ on in the world.”

“A lot of lies most of it… all owned by the interests.”

“Hearst’s on the side of the people.”

“I don’t trust him any more’n the rest of ’em.”

“Ever read The Appeal to Reason?”

“Say, are you a Socialist?”

“Sure; I had a job in my uncle’s printin’ shop till the big interests put him outa business because he took the side of the strikers.”

“Gee, that’s swell… put it there… me, too…. Say, Mac, this is a big day for me… I don’t often meet a guy thinks like I do.”

They went out with a roll of newspapers and sat under a big pine a little way out of town. The sun had come out warm; big white marble clouds sailed through the sky. They lay on their backs with their heads on a piece of pinkish root with bark like an alligator. In spite of last night’s rain the pine needles were warm and dry under them. In front of them stretched the singletrack line through thickets and clearings of wrecked woodland where fireweed was beginning to thrust up here and there a palegreen spike of leaves. They read sheets of the weekold paper turn and turn about and talked.

“Maybe in Russia it’ll start; that’s the most backward country where the people are oppressed worst… There was a Russian feller workin’ down to the sawmill, an educated feller who’s fled from Siberia… I used to talk to him a lot… That’s what he thought. He said the social revolution would start in Russia an’ spread all over the world. He was a swell guy. I bet he was somebody.”

“Uncle Tim thought it would start in Germany.”

“Oughter start right here in America… We got free institutions here already… All we have to do is get out from under the interests.” “Uncle Tim says we’re too well off in America… we don’t know what oppression or poverty is. Him an’ my other uncles was Fenians back in Ireland before they came to this country. That’s what they named me Fenian… Pop didn’t like it, I guess… he didn’t have much spunk, I guess.”

“Ever read Marx?”

“No… golly, I’d like to though.” “Me neither, I read Bellamy’s Looking Backward, though; that’s what made me a Socialist.” “Tell me about it; I’d just started readin’ it when I left home.” “It’s about a galoot that goes to sleep an’ wakes up in the year two thousand and the social revolution’s all happened and everything’s socialistic an’ there’s no jails or poverty and nobody works for themselves an’ there’s no way anybody can get to be a rich bondholder or capitalist and life’s pretty slick for the working class.” “That’s what I always thought… It’s the workers who create wealth and they ought to have it instead of a lot of drones.” “If you could do away with the capitalist system and the big trusts and Wall Street things ’ud be like that.”

“Gee.”

“All you’d need would be a general strike and have the workers refuse to work for a boss any longer… God damn it, if people only realized how friggin’ easy it would be. The interests own all the press and keep knowledge and education from the workin’men.”

“I know printin’, pretty good, an’ linotypin’… Golly, maybe some day I could do somethin’.”

Mac got to his feet. He was tingling all over. A cloud had covered the sun, but down the railroad track the scrawny woods were full of the goldgreen blare of young birch leaves in the sun. His blood was like fire. He stood with his feet apart looking down the railroad track. Round the bend in the far distance a handcar appeared with a section gang on it, a tiny cluster of brown and dark blue. He watched it come nearer. A speck of red flag fluttered in the front of the handcar; it grew bigger, ducking into patches of shadow, larger and more distinct each time it came out into a patch of sun.

“Say, Mac, we better keep out of sight if we want to hop that freight. There’s some friggin’ mean yard detectives on this road.” “All right.” They walked off a hundred yards into the young growth of scrub pine and birch. Beside a big green-lichened stump Mac stopped to make water. His urine flowed bright yellow in the sun, disappearing at once into the porous loam of rotten leaves and wood. He was very happy. He gave the stump a kick. It was rotten. His foot went through it and a little powder like smoke went up from it as it crashed over into the alderbushes behind.

Ike had sat down on a log and was picking his teeth with a little birchtwig.

“Say, ever been to the coast, Mac?”

“No.”

“Like to?”

“Sure.”

“Well, let’s you an’ me beat our way out to Duluth… I want to stop by and say hello to the old woman, see. Haven’t seen her in three months. Then we’ll take in the wheat harvest and make Frisco or Seattle by fall. Tell me they have good free night-schools in Seattle. I want to do some studyin’, see? I dunno a friggin’ thing yet.”

“That’s slick.”

“Ever hopped a freight or ridden blind baggage, Mac?”

“Well, not exactly.”

“You just follow me and do what I do. You’ll be all right.”

Down the track they heard the hoot of a locomotive whistle.

“There is number three comin’ round the bend now… We’ll hop her right after she starts outa the station. She’ll take us into Mackinaw City this afternoon.”

Late that afternoon, stiff and cold, they went into a little shed on the steamboat wharf at Mackinaw City to get shelter. Everything was hidden in a driving rainstreaked mist off the lake. They had bought a ten-cent package of Sweet Caps, so that they only had ninety cents left between them. They were arguing about how much they ought to spend for supper when the steamboat agent, a thin man wearing a green eyeshade and a slicker, came out of his office. “You boys lookin’ for a job?” he asked. “Cause there’s a guy here from the Lakeview House lookin’ for a coupla pearldivers. Agency didn’t send ’em enough help I guess. They’re openin’ up tomorrer.” “How much do they pay ye?” asked Ike. “I don’t reckon it’s much, but the grub’s pretty good.” “How about it, Mac? We’ll save up our fare an’ then we’ll go to Duluth like a coupla dudes on the boat.”

So they went over that night on the steamboat to Mackinac Island. It was pretty dull on Mackinac Island. There was a lot of small scenery with signs on it reading “Devil’s Cauldron,” “Sugar Loaf,” “Lover’s Leap,” and wives and children of mediumpriced business men from Detroit, Saginaw and Chicago. The grayfaced woman who ran the hotel, known as The Management, kept them working from six in the morning till way after sundown. It wasn’t only dishwashing, it was sawing wood, running errands, cleaning toilets, scrubbing floors, smashing baggage and a lot of odd chores. The waitresses were all old maids or else brokendown farmers’ wives whose husbands drank. The only other male in the place was the cook, a hypochondriac French Canadian halfbreed who insisted on being called Mr. Chef. Evenings he sat in his little log shack back of the hotel drinking paregoric and mumbling about God.

When they got their first month’s pay they packed up their few belongings in a newspaper and sneaked on board the Juniata for Duluth. The fare took all their capital, but they were happy as they stood in the stern watching the spruce and balsamcovered hill of Mackinac disappear into the lake.

Duluth; girderwork along the waterfront, and the shack-covered hills and the tall thin chimneys and the huddle of hunch-shouldered grain elevators under the smoke from the mills scrolled out dark against a huge salmon-colored sunset. Ike hated to leave the boat on account of a pretty dark-haired girl he’d meant all the time to speak to. “Hell, she wouldn’t pay attention to you, Ike, she’s too swank for you,” Mac kept saying. “The old woman’ll be glad to see us anyway,” said Ike as they hurried off the gangplank. “I half expected to see her at the dock, though I didn’t write we was coming. Boy, I bet she’ll give us a swell feed.”

“Where does she live?”

“Not far. I’ll show you. Say, don’t ask anythin’ about my old man, will ye; he don’t amount to much. He’s in jail, I guess. Ole woman’s had pretty tough sleddin’ bringin’ up us kids… I got two brothers in Buffalo… I don’t get along with ’em. She does fancy needlework and preservin’ an’ bakes cakes an’ stuff like that. She used to work in a bakery but she’s got the lumbago too bad now. She’d ’a’ been a real bright woman if we hadn’t always been so friggin’ poor.”

They turned up a muddy street on a hill. At the top of the hill was a little prim house like a schoolhouse.

“That’s where we live… Gee, I wonder why there’s no light.”

They went in by a gate in the picket fence. There was sweetwilliam in bloom in the flowerbed in front of the house. They could smell it though they could hardly see, it was so dark. Ike knocked.

“Damn it, I wonder what’s the matter.” He knocked again. Then he struck a match. On the door was nailed a card “FOR SALE” and the name of a realestate agent. “Jesus Christ, that’s funny, she musta moved. Now I think of it, I haven’t had a letter in a couple of months. I hope she ain’t sick… I’ll ask at Bud Walker’s next door.”

Mac sat down on the wooden step and waited. Overhead in a gash in the clouds that still had the faintest stain of red from the afterglow his eye dropped into empty black full of stars. The smell of the sweetwilliams tickled his nose. He felt hungry.

A low whistle from Ike roused him. “Come along,” he said gruffly and started walking fast down the hill with his head sunk between his shoulders.

“Hey, what’s the matter?”

“Nothin’. The old woman’s gone to Buffalo to live with my brothers. The lousy bums got her to sell out so’s they could spend the dough, I reckon.”

“Jesus, that’s hell, Ike.”

Ike didn’t answer. They walked till they came to the corner of a street with lighted stores and trolleycars. A tune from a mechanical piano was tumbling out from a saloon. Ike turned and slapped Mac on the back. “Let’s go have a drink, kid… What the hell.”

There was only one other man at the long bar. He was a very drunken tall elderly man in lumbermen’s boots with a sou’wester on his head who kept yelling in an inaudible voice, ‘Whoop her up, boys,’ and making a pass at the air with a long grimy hand. Mac and Ike drank down two whiskies each, so strong and raw that it pretty near knocked the wind out of them. Ike put the change from a dollar in his pocket and said:

“What the hell, let’s get out of here.” In the cool air of the street they began to feel lit. “Jesus, Mac, let’s get outa here tonight… It’s terrible to come back to a town where you was a kid… I’ll be meetin’ all the crazy galoots I ever knew and girls I had crushes on… I guess I always get the dirty end of the stick, all right.”

In a lunchroom down by the freight depot they got hamburger and potatoes and bread and butter and coffee for fifteen cents each. When they’d bought some cigarettes they still had eight seventyfive between them. “Golly, we’re rich,” said Mac. “Well, where do we go?”

“Wait a minute. I’ll go scout round the freight depot. Used to be a guy I knowed worked there.”

Mac loafed round under a lamp post at the streetcorner and smoked a cigarette and waited. It was warmer since the wind had gone down. From a puddle somewhere in the freight yards came the peep peep peep of toads. Up on the hill an accordion was playing. From the yards came the heavy chugging of a freight locomotive and the clank of shunted freightcars and the singing rattle of the wheels.

After a while he heard Ike’s whistle from the dark side of the street. He ran over. “Say, Mac, we gotta hurry. I found the guy. He’s goin’ to open up a boxcar for us on the westbound freight. He says it’ll carry us clear out to the coast if we stick to it.”

“How the hell will we eat if we’re locked up in a freightcar?”

“We’ll eat fine. You leave the eatin’ to me.”

“But, Ike…”

“Keep your trap shut, can’t you… Do you want everybody in the friggin’ town to know what we’re tryin’ to do?”

They walked along tiptoe in the dark between two tracks of boxcars. Then Ike found a door half open and darted in. Mac followed and they shut the sliding door very gently after them.

“Now all we got to do is go to sleep,” whispered Ike, his lips touching Mac’s ear. “This here galoot, see, said there wasn’t any yard dicks on duty tonight.”

In the end of the car they found hay from a broken bale. The whole car smelt of hay. “Ain’t this hunky dory?” whispered Ike.

“It’s the cat’s nuts, Ike.”

Pretty soon the train started, and they lay down to sleep side by side in the sparse hay. The cold night wind streamed in through the cracks in the floor. They slept fitfully. The train started and stopped and started and shunted back and forth on sidings and the wheels rattled and rumbled in their ears and slambanged over crossings. Towards morning they fell into a warm sleep and the thin layer of hay on the boards was suddenly soft and warm. Neither of them had a watch and the day was overcast so they didn’t know what time it was when they woke up. Ike slid open the door a little so that they could peek out; the train was running through a broad valley brimfull-like with floodwater, with the green ripple of fullgrown wheat. Now and then in the distance a clump of woodland stood up like an island. At each station was the hunched blind bulk of an elevator. “Gee, this must be the Red River, but I wonder which way we’re goin’,” said Ike. “Golly, I could drink a cup of coffee,” said Mac. “We’ll have swell coffee in Seattle, damned if we won’t, Mac.”

They went to sleep again, and when they woke up they were thirsty and stiff. The train had stopped. There was no sound at all. They lay on their backs stretching and listening. “Gee, I wonder where in hell we are.” After a long while they heard the cinders crunching down the track and someone trying the fastenings of the boxcar doors down the train. They lay so still they could hear both their hearts beating. The steps on the cinders crunched nearer and nearer. The sliding door slammed open, and their car was suddenly full of sunlight. They lay still. Mac felt the rap of a stick on his chest and sat up blinking. A Scotch voice was burring in his ears:

“I thought I’d find some Pullman passengers… All right, byes, stand and deliver, or else you’ll go to the constabulary.”

“Aw hell,” said Ike, crawling forward.

“Currsin’ and swearin’ won’t help ye… If you got a couple o’ quid you can ride on to Winnipeg an’ take your chances there… If not you’ll be doin’ a tidy bit on the roads before you can say Jack Robinson.”

The brakeman was a small blackhaired man with a mean quiet manner.

“Where are we, guv’ner?” asked Ike, trying to talk like an Englishman.

“Gretna… You’re in the Dominion of Canada. You can be had up, too, for illegally crossin’ Her Majesty’s frontier as well as for bein’ vags.”

“Well, I guess we’d better shell out… You see we’re a couple of noblemen’s sons out for a bit of a bloody lark, guv’ner.”

“No use currsin’ and prevarricatin’. How much have you?”

“Coupla dollars.”

“Let’s see it quick.”

Ike pulled first one dollar, then another, out of his pocket; folded in the second dollar was a five. The Scotchman swept the three bills up with one gesture and slammed the sliding door to. They heard him slip down the catch on the outside. For a long time they sat there quiet in the dark. Finally Ike said, “Hey, Mac, gimme a sock in the jaw. That was a damn fool thing to do… Never oughta had that in my jeans anyway… oughta had it inside my belt. That leaves us with about seventyfive cents. We’re up shit creek now for fair… He’ll probably wire ahead to take us outa here at the next big town.” “Do they have mounted police on the railroad, too?” asked Mac in a hollow whisper. “Jez, I don’t know any more about it than you do.”

The train started again and Ike rolled over on his face and went glumly to sleep. Mac lay on his back behind him looking at the slit of sunlight that made its way in through the crack in the door and wondered what the inside of a Canadian jail would be like.

That night, after the train had lain still for some time in the middle of the hissing and clatter of a big freightyard, they heard the catch slipped off the door. After a while Ike got up his nerve to slide the door open and they dropped, stiff and terribly hungry, down to the cinders. There was another freight on the next track, so all they could see was a bright path of stars overhead. They got out of the freight-yards without any trouble and found themselves walking through the deserted streets of a large widescattered city.

“Winnipeg’s a pretty friggin’ lonelylookin’ place, take it from me,” said Ike.

“It must be after midnight.”

They tramped and tramped and at last found a little lunchroom kept by a Chink who was just closing up. They spent forty cents on some stew and potatoes and coffee. They asked the Chink if he’d let them sleep on the floor behind the counter, but he threw them out and they found themselves dogtired tramping through the broad deserted streets of Winnipeg again. It was too cold to sit down anywhere, and they couldn’t find anyplace that looked as if it would give them a flop for thirtyfive cents, so they walked and walked, and anyway the sky was beginning to pale into a slow northern summer dawn. When it was fully day they went back to the Chink’s and spent the thirtyfive cents on oatmeal and coffee. Then they went to the Canadian Pacific employment office and signed up for work in a construction camp at Banff. The hours they had to wait till traintime they spent in the public library. Mac read part of Bellamy’s Looking Backward and Ike, not being able to find a volume of Karl Marx, read an instalment of “When the Sleeper Wakes” in the Strand Magazine. So when they got on the train they were full of the coming Socialist revolution and started talking it up to two lanky red-faced lumberjacks who sat opposite them. One of them chewed tobacco silently all the while, but the other spat his quid out of the window and said, “You blokes ’ll keep quiet with that kinder talk if you knows what’s ’ealthy for ye.” “Hell, this is a free country, ain’t it? A guy’s free to talk, ain’t he?” said Ike. “A bloke kin talk so long as his betters don’t tell him to keep his mouth shut.” “Hell, I’m not tryin’ to pick a fight,” said Ike. “Better not,” said the other man, and didn’t speak again.

They worked for the C.P.R. all summer and by the first of October they were in Vancouver. They had new suitcases and new suits. Ike had forty-nine dollars and fifty cents and Mac had eighty-three fifteen in a brand new pigskin wallet. Mac had more because he didn’t play poker. They took a dollar and a half room between them and lay in bed like princes their first free morning. They were tanned and toughened and their hands were horny. After the smell of rank pipes and unwashed feet and the bedbugs in the railroad bunkhouses the small cleanboarded hotel room with its clean beds seemed like a palace.

When he was fully awake Mac sat up and reached for his Ingersoll. Eleven o’clock. The sunlight on the windowledge was ruddy from the smoke of forestfires up the coast. He got up and washed in cold water at the washbasin. He walked up and down the room wiping his face and arms in the towel. It made him feel good to follow the contours of his neck and the hollow between his shoulderblades and the muscles of his arms as he dried himself with the fresh coarse towel.

“Say, Ike, what do you think we oughta do? I think we oughta go down on the boat to Seattle, Wash., like a coupla dude passengers. I wanta settle down an’ get a printin’ job; there’s good money in that. I’m goin’ to study to beat hell this winter. What do you think, Ike? I want to get out of this limejuicy hole an’ get back to God’s country. What do you think, Ike?”

Ike groaned and rolled over in bed.

“Say, wake up, Ike, for crissake. We want to take a look at this burg an’ then twentythree.”

Ike sat up in bed. “God damn it, I need a woman.”

“I’ve heard tell there’s swell broads in Seattle, honest, Ike.”

Ike jumped out of bed and began splattering himself from head to foot with cold water. Then he dashed into his clothes and stood looking out the window combing the water out of his hair.

“When does the friggin’ boat go? Jez, I had two wet dreams last night, did you?”

Mac blushed. He nodded his head.

“Jez, we got to get us women. Wet dreams weakens a guy.”

“I wouldn’t want to get sick.”

“Aw, hell, a man’s not a man until he’s had his three doses.”

“Aw, come ahead, let’s go see the town.”

“Well, ain’t I been waitin’ for ye this halfhour?”

They ran down the stairs and out into the street. They walked round Vancouver, sniffing the winey smell of lumbermills along the waterfront, loafing under the big trees in the park. Then they got their tickets at the steamboat office and went to a haberdashery store and bought themselves striped neckties, colored socks and four-dollar silk shirts. They felt like millionaires when they walked up the gangplank of the boat for Victoria and Seattle, with their new suits and their new suitcases and their silk shirts. They strolled round the deck smoking cigarettes and looking at the girls. “Gee, there’s a couple looks kinda easy… I bet they’re hookers at that,” Ike whispered in Mac’s ear and gave him a dig in the ribs with his elbow as they passed two girls in Spring Maid hats who were walking round the deck the other way. “Shit, let’s try to pick ’em up.”

They had a couple of beers at the bar, then they went back on deck. The girls had gone. Mac and Ike walked disconsolately round the deck for a while, then they found the girls leaning over the rail in the stern. It was a cloudy moonlight night. The sea and the dark islands covered with spiring evergreens shone light and dark in a mottling silvery sheen. Both girls had frizzy hair and dark circles under their eyes. Mac thought they looked too old, but as Ike had gone sailing ahead it was too late to say anything. The girl he talked to was named Gladys. He liked the looks of the other one, whose name was Olive, better, but Ike got next to her first. They stayed on deck kidding and giggling until the girls said they were cold, then they went in the saloon and sat on a sofa and Ike went and bought a box of candy.

“We ate onions for dinner today,” said Olive. “Hope you fellers don’t mind. Gladys, I told you we oughtn’t to of eaten them onions, not before comin’ on the boat.”

“Gimme a kiss an’ I’ll tell ye if I mind or not,” said Ike.

“Kiddo, you can’t talk fresh like that to us, not on this boat,” snapped Olive, two mean lines appearing on either side of her mouth.

“We have to be awful careful what we do on the boat,” explained Gladys. “They’re terrible suspicious of two girls travelin’ alone nowadays. Ain’t it a crime?”

“It sure is,” Ike moved up a little closer on the seat.

“Quit that… Make a noise like a hoop an’ roll away. I mean it.” Olive went and sat on the opposite bench. Ike followed her.

“In the old days it was liberty hall on these boats, but not so any more,” Gladys said, talking to Mac in a low intimate voice. “You fellers been workin’ up in the canneries?”

“No, we been workin’ for the C.P.R. all summer.”

“You must have made big money.” As she talked to him, Mac noticed that she kept looking out of the corner of her eye at her friend.

“Yare… not so big… I saved up pretty near a century.”

“An’ now you’re going to Seattle.”

“I want to get a job linotypist.”

“That’s where we live, Seattle. Olive an’ I’ve got an apartment… Let’s go out on deck, it’s too hot in here.”

As they passed Olive and Ike, Gladys leaned over and whispered something in Olive’s ear. Then she turned to Mac with a melting smile. The deck was deserted. She let him put his arm round her waist. His fingers felt the bones of some sort of corset. He squeezed. “Oh, don’t be too rough, kiddo,” she whined in a funny little voice. He laughed. As he took his hand away he felt the contour of her breast. Walking, his leg brushed against her leg. It was the first time he’d been so close to a girl.

After a while she said she had to go to bed. “How about me goin’ down with ye?” She shook her head. “Not on this boat. See you tomorrow; maybe you and your pal ’ll come and see us at our apartment. We’ll show you the town.” “Sure,” said Mac. He walked on round the deck, his heart beating hard. He could feel the pound of the steamboat’s engines and the arrowshaped surge of broken water from the bow and he felt like that. He met Ike.

“My girl said she had to go to bed.” “So did mine.” “Get anywheres, Mac?” “They got an apartment in Seattle.” “I got a kiss off mine. She’s awful hot. Jez, I thought she was going to feel me up.” “We’ll get it tomorrow all right.”

The next day was sunny; the Seattle waterfront was sparkling, smelt of lumberyards, was noisy with rattle of carts and yells of drivers when they got off the boat. They went to the Y.M.C.A. for a room. They were through with being laborers and hobos. They were going to get clean jobs, live decently and go to school nights. They walked round the city all day, and in the evening met Olive and Gladys in front of the totempole on Pioneer Square.

Things happened fast. They went to a restaurant and had wine with a big feed and afterwards they went to a beergarden where there was a band, and drank whiskeysours. When they went to the girls’ apartment they took a quart of whiskey with them and Mac almost dropped it on the steps and the girls said, “For crissake don’t make so much noise or you’ll have the cops on us,” and the apartment smelt of musk and facepowder and there was women’s underwear around on all the chairs and the girls got fifteen bucks out of each of them first thing. Mac was in the bathroom with his girl and she smeared liprouge on his nose and they laughed and laughed until he got rough and she slapped his face. Then they all sat together round the table and drank some more and Ike danced a Solomeydance in his bare feet. Mac laughed, it was so very funny, but he was sitting on the floor and when he tried to get up he fell on his face and all of a sudden he was being sick in the bathtub and Gladys was cursing hell out of him. She got him dressed, only he couldn’t find his necktie, and everybody said he was too drunk and pushed him out and he was walking down the street singing Make a Noise Like a Hoop and Just Roll Away, Roll Away, and he asked a cop where the Y.M.C.A. was and the cop pushed him into a cell at the stationhouse and locked him up.

He woke up with his head like a big split millstone. There was vomit on his shirt and a rip in his pants. He went over all his pockets and couldn’t find his pocketbook. A cop opened the cell door and told him to make himself scarce and he walked out into the dazzling sun that cut into his eyes like a knife. The man at the desk at the Y looked at him queerly when he went in, but he got up to his room and fell into bed without anybody saying anything to him. Ike wasn’t back yet. He dozed off feeling his headache all through his sleep. When he woke up Ike was sitting on the bed. Ike’s eyes were bright and his cheeks were red. He was still a little drunk. “Say, Mac, did they roll yer? I can’t find my pocketbook an’ I tried to go back but I couldn’t find the apartment. God, I’d have beat up the goddam floosies…Shit, I’m drunk as a pissant still. Say, the galoot at the desk said we’d have to clear out. Can’t have no drunks in the Y.M.C.A.” “But jez, we paid for a week.” “He’ll give us part of it back… Aw, what the hell, Mac… We’re flat, but I feel swell… Say, I had a rough time with your Jane after they’d thrown you out.”

“Hell, I feel sick as a dog.”

“I’m afraid to go to sleep for fear of getting a hangover. Come on out, it’ll do you good.”

It was three in the afternoon. They went into a little Chinese restaurant on the waterfront and drank coffee. They had two dollars they got from hocking their suitcases. The pawnbroker wouldn’t take the silk shirts because they were dirty. Outside it was raining pitchforks.

“Jesus, why the hell didn’t we have the sense to keep sober? God, we’re a coupla big stiffs, Ike.”

“We had a good party… Jez, you looked funny with that liprouge all over your face.”

“I feel like hell… I wanta study an’ work for things; you know what I mean, not to get to be a goddam slavedriver but for socialism and the revolution an’ like that, not work an’ go on a bat an’ work an’ go on a bat like those damn yaps on the railroad.”

“Hell, another time we’ll have more sense an’ leave our wads somewhere safe… Gee, I’m beginning to sink by the bows myself.”

“If the damn house caught fire I wouldn’t have the strength to walk out.”

They sat in the Chink place as long as they could and then they went out in the rain to find a thirtycent flophouse where they spent the night, and the bedbugs ate them up. In the morning they went round looking for jobs, Mac in the printing trades and Ike at the shipping agencies. They met in the evening without having had any luck and slept in the park as it was a fine night. Eventually they both signed up to go to a lumbercamp up the Snake River. They were sent up by the agency on a car full of Swedes and Finns. Mac and Ike were the only ones who spoke English. When they got there they found the foreman so hardboiled and the grub so rotten and the bunkhouse so filthy that they lit out at the end of a couple of days, on the bum again. It was already cold in the Blue Mountains and they would have starved to death if they hadn’t been able to beg food in the cookhouses of lumbercamps along the way. They hit the railroad at Baker City, managed to beat their way back to Portland on freights. In Portland they couldn’t find jobs because their clothes were so dirty, so they hiked southward along a big endless Oregon valley full of fruit-ranches, sleeping in barns and getting an occasional meal by cutting wood or doing chores around a ranch house.

In Salem, Ike found that he had a dose and Mac couldn’t sleep nights worrying for fear he might have it too. They tried to go to a doctor in Salem. He was a big roundfaced man with a hearty laugh. When they said they didn’t have any money he guessed it was all right and that they could do some chores to pay for the consultation, but when he heard it was a venereal disease he threw them out with a hot lecture on the wages of sin.

They trudged along the road, hungry and footsore; Ike had fever and it hurt him to walk. Neither of them said anything. Finally they got to a small fruitshipping station where there were watertanks, on the main line of the Southern Pacific. There Ike said he couldn’t walk any further, that they’d have to wait for a freight. “Jesus Christ, jail ’ud be better than this.”

“When you’re outa luck in this man’s country, you certainly are outa luck,” said Mac and for some reason they both laughed.

Among the bushes back of the station they found an old tramp boiling coffee in a tin can. He gave them some coffee and bread and baconrind and they told him their troubles. He said he was headed south for the winter and that the thing to cure it up was tea made out of cherry pits and stems. “But where the hell am I going to get cherry pits and stems?” Anyway he said not to worry, it was no worse than a bad cold. He was a cheerful old man with a face so grimed with dirt it looked like a brown leather mask. He was going to take a chance on a freight that stopped there to water a little after sundown. Mac dozed off to sleep while Ike and the old man talked. When he woke up Ike was yelling at him and they were all running for the freight that had already started. In the dark Mac missed his footing and fell flat on the ties. He wrenched his knee and ground cinders into his nose and by the time he had got to his feet all he could see were the two lights on the end of the train fading into the November haze.

That was the last he saw of Ike Hall.

He got himself back on the road and limped along until he came to a ranch house. A dog barked at him and worried his ankles but he was too down and out to care. Finally a stout woman came to the door and gave him some cold biscuits and applesauce and told him he could sleep in the barn if he gave her all his matches. He limped to the barn and snuggled into a pile of dry sweetgrass and went to sleep.

In the morning the rancher, a tall ruddy man named Thomas, with a resonant voice, went over to the barn and offered him work for a few days at the price of his board and lodging. They were kind to him, and had a pretty daughter named Mona that he kinder fell in love with. She was a plump rosy-cheeked girl, strong as a boy and afraid of nothing. She punched him and wrestled with him; and, particularly after he’d gotten fattened up a little and rested, he could hardly sleep nights for thinking of her. He lay in his bed of sweetgrass telling over the touch of her bare arm that rubbed along his when she handed him back the nozzle of the sprayer for the fruittrees, or was helping him pile up the pruned twigs to burn, and the roundness of her breasts and her breath sweet as a cow’s on his neck when they romped and played tricks on each other evenings after supper. But the Thomases had other ideas for their daughter and told Mac that they didn’t need him any more. They sent him off kindly with a lot of good advice, some old clothes and a cold lunch done up in a newspaper, but no money. Mona ran after him as he walked off down the dustyrutted wagonroad and kissed him right in front of her parents. “I’m stuck on you,” she said. “You make a lot of money and come back and marry me.” “By gum, I’ll do that,” said Mac, and he walked off with tears in his eyes and feeling very good. He was particularly glad he hadn’t got the clap off that girl in Seattle.

Paris Shocked At Last

skating on the pond next the silver company’s mills where there was a funny fuzzy smell from the dump whale-oil soap somebody said it was that they used in cleaning the silver knives and spoons and forks putting shine on them for sale there was shine on the ice early black ice that rang like a sawblade just scratched white by the first skaters I couldn’t learn to skate and kept falling down look out for the muckers everybody said bohunk and polak kids put stones in their snowballs write dirty words up on walls do dirty things up alleys their folks work in the mills

we clean young American Rover Boys handy with tools Deerslayers played hockey Boy Scouts and cut figure eights on the ice Achilles Ajax Agamemnon I couldn’t learn to skate and kept falling down

Luther Burbank was born in a brick farmhouse in Lancaster Mass,

he walked round the woods one winter

crunching through the shinycrusted snow

stumbled into a little dell where a warm spring was

and found the grass green and weeds sprouting

and skunk cabbage pushing up a potent thumb,

He went home and sat by the stove and read Darwin

Struggle for Existence Origin of Species Natural

Selection that wasn’t what they taught in church,

so Luther Burbank ceased to believe moved to Lunenburg,

found a seedball in a potato plant

sowed the seed and cashed in on Mr. Darwin’s Natural Selection

on Spencer and Huxley

with the Burbank Potato.

SAYS THIS IS CENTURY WHERE BILLIONS

you sat on the bed unlacing your shoes Hey Frenchie yelled Tylor in the door you’ve got to fight the Kid doan wanna fight him gotto fight him hasn’t he got to fight him fellers? Freddie pushed his face through the crack in the door and made a long nose Gotta fight him umpyaya and all the fellows on the top floor were there if not you’re a girlboy and I had on my pyjamas and they pushed in the Kid and the Kid hit Frenchie and Frenchie hit the Kid and your mouth tasted bloody and everybody yelled Go it Kid except Gummer and he yelled Bust his jaw Jack and Frenchie had the Kid down on the bed and everybody pulled him off and they all had Frenchie against the door and he was slamming right an’ left and he couldn’t see who was hitting him and everybody started to yell the Kid licked him and Tylor and Freddy held his arms and told the Kid to come and hit him but the Kid wouldn’t and the Kid was crying

the bloody sweet puky taste and then the bell rang for lights and everybody ran to their rooms and you got into bed with your head throbbing and you were crying when Gummer tiptoed in an’ said you had him licked Jack it was a fucking shame it was Freddy hit you that time, but Hoppy was tiptoeing round the hall and caught Gummer trying to get back to his room and he got his

By Thanksgiving Mac had beaten his way to Sacramento, where he got a job smashing crates in a dried fruit warehouse. By the first of the year he’d saved up enough to buy a suit of dark clothes and take the steamboat down the river to San Francisco.

It was around eight in the evening when he got in. With his suitcase in his hand, he walked up Market Street from the dock. The streets were full of lights. Young men and pretty girls in brightcolored dresses were walking fast through a big yanking wind that fluttered dresses and scarfs, slapped color into cheeks, blew grit and papers into the air. There were Chinamen, Wops, Portuguese, Japs in the streets. People were hustling to shows and restaurants. Music came out of the doors of bars, frying, buttery foodsmells from restaurants, smells of winecasks and beer. Mac wanted to go on a party but he only had four dollars so he went and got a room at the Y and ate some soggy pie and coffee in the deserted cafeteria downstairs.

When he got up in the bare bedroom like something in a hospital he opened the window, but it only gave on an airshaft. The room smelt of some sort of cleaning fluid and when he lay down on the bed the blanket smelt of formaldehyde. He felt too well. He could feel the prancing blood steam all through him. He wanted to talk to somebody, to go to a dance or have a drink with a fellow he knew or kid a girl somewhere. The smell of rouge and musky facepowder in the room of those girls in Seattle came back to him. He got up and sat on the edge of the bed swinging his legs. Then he decided to go out, but before he went he put his money in his suitcase and locked it up. Lonely as a ghost he walked up and down the streets until he was deadtired; he walked fast not looking to the right or left, brushing past painted girls at streetcorners, touts that tried to put addresscards into his hand, drunks that tried to pick fights with him, panhandlers whining for a handout. Then, bitter and cold and tired, he went back to his room and fell into bed.

Next day he went out and got a job in a small printshop run and owned by a baldheaded Italian with big whiskers and a flowing black tie, named Bonello. Bonello told him he had been a redshirt with Garibaldi and was now an anarchist. Ferrer was his great hero; he hired Mac because he thought he might make a convert out of him. All that winter Mac worked at Bonello’s, ate spaghetti and drank red wine and talked revolution with him and his friends in the evening, went to Socialist picnics or libertarian meetings on Sundays. Saturday nights he went round to whorehouses with a fellow named Miller whom he’d met at the Y. Miller was studying to be a dentist. He got to be friends with a girl named Maisie Spencer who worked in the millinery department at the Emporium. Sundays she used to try to get him to go to church. She was a quiet girl with big blue eyes that she turned up to him with an unbelieving smile when he talked revolution to her. She had tiny regular pearly teeth and dressed prettily. After a while she got so that she did not bother him so much about church. She liked to have him take her to hear the band play at the Presidio or to look at the statuary in Sutro Park.

The morning of the earthquake Mac’s first thought, when he got over his own terrible scare, was for Maisie. The house where her folks lived on Mariposa Street was still standing when he got there, but everyone had cleared out. It was not till the third day, three days of smoke and crashing timbers and dynamiting he spent working in a firefighting squad, that he found her in a provision line at the entrance to Golden Gate Park. The Spencers were living in a tent near the shattered greenhouses.

She didn’t recognise him because his hair and eyebrows were singed and his clothes were in tatters and he was soot from head to foot. He’d never kissed her before, but he took her in his arms before everybody and kissed her. When he let her go her face was all sooty from his. Some of the people in the line laughed and clapped, but the old woman right behind, who had her hair done in a pompadour askew so that the rat showed through and who wore two padded pink silk dressing gowns one above the other, said spitefully, “Now you’ll have to go and wash your face.”

After that they considered themselves engaged, but they couldn’t get married, because Bonello’s printshop had been gutted with the rest of the block it stood in, and Mac was out of a job. Maisie used to let him kiss her and hug her in dark doorways when he took her home at night, but further than that he gave up trying to go.

In the fall he got a job on the Bulletin. That was night work and he hardly ever saw Maisie except Sundays, but they began to talk about getting married after Christmas. When he was away from her he felt somehow sore at Maisie most of the time, but when he was with her he melted absolutely. He tried to get her to read pamphlets on socialism, but she laughed and looked up at him with her big intimate blue eyes and said it was too deep for her. She liked to go to the theater and eat in restaurants where the linen was starched and there were waiters in dress suits.

About that time he went one night to hear Upton Sinclair speak about the Chicago stockyards. Next to him was a young man in dungarees. He had a nose like a hawk and gray eyes and deep creases under his cheekbones and talked in a slow drawl. His name was Fred Hoff. After the lecture they went and had a beer together and talked. Fred Hoff belonged to the new revolutionary organization called The Industrial Workers of the World. He read Mac the preamble over a second glass of beer. Fred Hoff had just hit town as donkeyengine man on a freighter. He was sick of the bum grub and hard life on the sea. He still had his pay in his pocket and he was bound he wouldn’t blow it in on a bust. He’d heard that there was a miners’ strike in Goldfield and he thought he’d go up there and see what he could do. He made Mac feel that he was leading a pretty stodgy life helping print lies against the working class. “Godalmighty, man, you’re just the kind o’ stuff we need out there. We’re goin’ to publish a paper in Goldfield, Nevada.”

That night Mac went round to the local and filled out a card, and went home to his boarding house with his head swimming. I was just on the point of selling out to the sons of bitches, he said to himself.

The next Sunday he and Maisie had been planning to go up the Scenic Railway to the top of Mount Tamalpais. Mac was terribly sleepy when his alarmclock got him out of bed. They had to start early because he had to be on the job again that night. As he walked to the ferrystation where he was going to meet her at nine the clank of the presses was still in his head, and the sour smell of ink and paper bruised under the presses, and on top of that the smell of the hall of the house he’d been in with a couple of the fellows, the smell of moldy rooms and sloppails and the smell of armpits and the dressingtable of the frizzyhaired girl he’d had on the clammy bed and the taste of the stale beer they’d drunk and the cooing mechanical voice, “Goodnight, dearie, come round soon.”

“God, I’m a swine,” he said to himself.

For once it was a clear morning, all the colors in the street shone like bits of glass. God, he was sick of whoring round. If Maisie would only be a sport, if Maisie was only a rebel you could talk to like you could to a friend. And how the hell was he going to tell her he was throwing up his job?

She was waiting for him at the ferry looking like a Gibson girl with her neat sailorblue dress and picture hat. They didn’t have time to say anything as they had to run for the ferry. Once on the ferryboat she lifted up her face to be kissed. Her lips were cool and her gloved hand rested so lightly on his. At Sausalito they took the trolleycar and changed and she kept smiling at him when they ran to get good places in the scenic car and they felt so alone in the roaring immensity of tawny mountain and blue sky and sea. They’d never been so happy together. She ran ahead of him all the way to the top. At the observatory they were both breathless. They stood against a wall out of sight of the other people and she let him kiss her all over her face, all over her face and neck.

Scraps of mist flew past cutting patches out of their view of the bay and the valleys and the shadowed mountains. When they went round to the seaward side an icy wind was shrilling through everything. A churning mass of fog was welling up from the sea like a tidal wave. She gripped his arm. “Oh, this scares me, Fainy!” Then suddenly he told her that he’d given up his job. She looked up at him frightened and shivering in the cold wind and little and helpless; tears began to run down either side of her nose. “But I thought you loved me, Fenian… Do you think it’s been easy for me waitin’ for you all this time, wantin’ you and lovin’ you? Oh, I thought you loved me!”

He put his arm round her. He couldn’t say anything. They started walking towards the gravity car.

“I don’t want all those people to see I’ve been crying. We were so happy before. Let’s walk down to Muir Woods.” “It’s pretty far, Maisie.” “I don’t care; I want to.” “Gee, you’re a good sport, Maisie.” They started down the footpath and the mist blotted out everything.

After a couple of hours they stopped to rest. They left the path and found a patch of grass in the middle of a big thicket of cistus. The mist was all around but it was bright overhead and they could feel the warmth of the sun through it. “Ouch, I’ve got blisters,” she said and made a funny face that made him laugh. “It can’t be so awful far now,” he said; “honest, Maisie.” He wanted to explain to her about the strike and the wobblies and why he was going to Goldfield, but he couldn’t. All he could do was kiss her. Her mouth clung to his lips and her arms were tight round his neck.

“Honest, it won’t make any difference about our gettin’ married; honest, it won’t… Maisie, I’m crazy about you… Maisie, do let me… You must let me… Honest, you don’t know how terrible it is for me, lovin’ you like this and you never lettin’ me.”

He got up and smoothed down her dress. She lay there with her eyes closed and her face white; he was afraid she had fainted. He kneeled down and kissed her gently on the cheek. She smiled ever so little and pulled his head down and ruffled his hair. “Little husband,” she said. After a while they got to their feet and walked through the redwood grove, without seeing it, to the trolleystation. Going home on the ferry they decided they’d get married inside of the week. Mac promised not to go to Nevada.

Next morning he got up feeling depressed. He was selling out. When he was shaving in the bathroom he looked at himself in the mirror and said, half aloud: “You bastard, you’re selling out to the sons of bitches.”

He went back to his room and wrote Maisie a letter.

all day the fertilizerfactories smelt something awful and at night the cabin was full of mosquitoes fit to carry you away but it was Crisfield on the Eastern Shore and if we had a gasoline boat to carry them across the bay here we could ship our tomatoes and corn and early peaches ship ’em clear to New York instead of being jipped by the commissionmerchants in Baltimore we’d run a truck farm ship early vegetables irrigate fertilize enrich the tobacco-exhausted land of the Northern Neck if we had a gasoline boat we’d run oysters in her in winter raise terrapin for the market

but up the freight siding I got talking to a young guy couldn’t have been much older ’n me was asleep in one of the boxcars asleep right there in the sun and the smell of cornstalks and the reek of rotting menhaden from the fertilizer factories he had curly hair and wisps of hay in it and through his open shirt you could see his body was burned brown to the waist I guess he wasn’t much account but he’d bummed all way from Minnesota he was going south and when I told him about Chesapeake Bay he wasn’t surprised but said I guess it’s too fur to swim it I’ll git a job in a menhaden boat

Big Bill Haywood was born in sixty nine in a boardinghouse in Salt Lake City.

He was raised in Utah, got his schooling in Ophir a mining camp with shooting scrapes, faro Saturday nights, whisky spilled on pokertables piled with new silver dollars.

When he was eleven his mother bound him out to a farmer, he ran away because the farmer lashed him with a whip. That was his first strike.

He lost an eye whittling a slingshot out of scruboak.

He worked for storekeepers, ran a fruitstand, ushered in the Salt Lake Theatre, was a messengerboy, bellhop at the Continental Hotel.

When he was fifteen

he went out to the mines in Humboldt County, Nevada,

his outfit was overalls, a jumper, a blue shirt, mining boots, two pair of blankets, a set of chessmen, boxinggloves and a big lunch of plum pudding his mother fixed for him.

When he married he went to live in Fort McDermitt built in the old days against the Indians, abandoned now that there was no more frontier;

there his wife bore their first baby without doctor or midwife. Bill cut the navelstring, Bill buried the afterbirth;

the child lived. Bill earned money as he could surveying, haying in Paradise Valley, breaking colts, riding a wide rangy country.

One night at Thompson’s Mill, he was one of five men who met by chance and stopped the night in the abandoned ranch. Each of them had lost an eye, they were the only one-eyed men in the county.

They lost the homestead, things went to pieces, his wife was sick, he had children to support. He went to work as a miner at Silver City.

At Silver City, Idaho, he joined the W.F.M., there he held his first union office; he was delegate of the Silver City miners to the convention of the Western Federation of Miners held in Salt Lake City in ’98.

From then on he was an organizer, a speaker, an exhorter, the wants of all the miners were his wants; he fought Coeur D’Alenes, Telluride, Cripple Creek,

joined the Socialist Party, wrote and spoke through Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Montana, Colorado to miners striking for an eight hour day, better living, a share of the wealth they hacked out of the hills.

the old major who used to take me to the Capitol when the Senate and the House of Representatives were in session had been in the commissary of the Confederate Army and had very beautiful manners so the attendants bowed to the old major except for the pages who were little boys not much older than your brother was a page in the Senate once and occasionally a Representative or a Senator would look at him with slit eyes may be somebody and bow or shake hearty or raise a hand

the old major dressed very well in a morningcoat and had muttonchop whiskers and we would walk very slowly through the flat sunlight in the Botanical Gardens and look at the little labels on the trees and shrubs and see the fat robins and the starlings hop across the grass and walk up the steps and through the flat air of the rotunda with the dead statues of different sizes and the Senate Chamber flat red and the committee room and the House flat green and the committee rooms and the Supreme Court I’ve forgotten what color the Supreme Court was and the committee rooms

and whispering behind the door of the visitors’ gallery and the dead air and a voice rattling under the glass skylights and desks slammed and the long corridors full of the dead air and our legs would get very tired and I thought of the starlings on the grass and the long streets full of dead air and my legs were tired and I had a pain between the eyes and the old men bowing with quick slit eyes

may be somebody and big slit unkind mouths and the dusty black felt and the smell of coatclosets and dead air and I wonder what the old major thought about and what I thought about maybe about that big picture at the Corcoran Art Gallery full of columns and steps and conspirators and Caesar in purple fallen flat called Caesar dead

Mac had hardly gotten off the train at Goldfield when a lanky man in khaki shirt and breeches, wearing canvas army leggins, went up to him. “If you don’t mind, what’s your business in this town, brother?” “I’m travelin’ in books.” “What kinda books?” “Schoolbooks and the like, for Truthseeker, Inc. of Chicago.” Mac rattled it off very fast, and the man seemed impressed. “I guess you’re all right,” he said. “Going up to the Eagle?” Mac nodded. “Plug’ll take ye up, the feller with the team… You see we’re looking out for these goddam agitators, the I Won’t Work outfit.”

Outside the Golden Eagle Hotel there were two soldiers on guard, toughlooking sawedoff men with their hats over their eyes. When Mac went in everybody at the bar turned and looked at him. He said “Good evening, gents,” as snappily as possible and went up to the proprietor to ask for a room. All the while he was wondering who the hell he dared ask where the office of the Nevada Workman was. “I guess I can fix you up with a bed. Travelin’ man?” “Yes,” said Mac. “In books.” Down at the end a big man with walrus whiskers was standing at the bar talking fast in a drunken whining voice, “If they’d only give me my head I’d run the bastards outa town soon enough. Too goddam many lawyers mixed up in this. Run the sonsobitches out. If they resists shoot ’em, that’s what I says to the Governor, but they’re all these sonsobitches a lawyers fussin’ everythin’ up all the time with warrants and habeas corpus and longwinded rigmarole. My ass to habeas corpus.” “All right, Joe, you tell ’em,” said the proprietor soothingly. Mac bought a cigar and sauntered out. As the door closed behind him the big man was yelling out again, “I said, My ass to habeas corpus.”

It was nearly dark. An icy wind blew through the ramshackle clapboard streets. His feet stumbling in the mud of the deep ruts, Mac walked round several blocks looking up at dark windows. He walked all over the town but no sign of a newspaper office. When he found himself passing the same Chink hashjoint for the third time, he slackened his steps and stood irresolutely on the curb. At the end of the street the great jagged shank of a hill hung over the town. Across the street a young man, his head and ears huddled into the collar of a mackinaw, was loafing against the dark window of a hardware store. Mac decided he was a squarelooking stiff and went over to speak to him.

“Say, bo, where’s the office of the Nevada Workman?” “What the hell d’you wanter know for?” Mac and the other man looked at each other. “I want to see Fred Hoff… I came on from San Fran to help in the printin’.” “Got a red card?” Mac pulled out his I.W.W. membership card. “I’ve got my union card, too, if you want to see that.”

“Hell, no… I guess you’re all right, but, as the feller said, suppose I’d been a dick, you’d be in the bullpen now, bo.”

“I told ’em I was a friggin’ bookagent to get into the damn town. Spent my last quarter on a cigar to keep up the burjwa look.”

The other man laughed. “All right, fellowworker. I’ll take you round.”

“What they got here, martial law?” asked Mac as he followed the man down an alley between two overgrown shanties.

“Every sonofabitchin’ yellerleg in the State of Nevada right here in town… Lucky if you don’t get run outa town with a bayonet in yer crotch, as the feller said.”

At the end of the alley was a small house like a shoebox with brightly lit windows. Young fellows in miners’ clothes or overalls filled up the end of the alley and sat three deep on the rickety steps. “What’s this, a poolroom?” asked Mac. “This is the Nevada Workman… Say, my name’s Ben Evans; I’ll introjuce you to the gang… Say, yous guys, this is fellowworker McCreary… he’s come on from Frisco to set up type.” “Put it there, Mac,” said a sixfooter who looked like a Swede lumberman, and gave Mac’s hand a wrench that made the bones crack.

Fred Hoff had on a green eyeshade and sat behind a desk piled with galleys. He got up and shook hands. “Oh, boy, you’re just in time. There’s hell to pay. They got the printer in the bullpen and we’ve got to get this sheet out.” Mac took off his coat and went back to look over the press. He was leaning over the typesetter’s “stone” when Fred Hoff came back and beckoned him into a corner.

“Say, Mac, I want to explain the layout here… It’s kind of a funny situation… The W.F.M.’s goin’ yellow on us… It’s a hell of a scrap. The Saint was here the other day and that bastard Mullany shot him through both arms and he’s in hospital now… They’re sore as a boil because we’re instillin’ ideas of revolutionary solidarity, see? We got the restaurant workers out and we got some of the minin’ stiffs. Now the A.F. of L.’s gettin’ wise and they’ve got a bonehead scab organizer in hobnobbin’ with the mineowners at the Montezuma Club.”

“Hey, Fred, let me take this on gradually,” said Mac.

“Then there was a little shootin’ the other day out in front of a restaurant down the line an’ the stiff that owned the joint got plugged an’ now they’ve got a couple of the boys in jail for that.” “The hell you say.” “And Big Bill Haywood’s comin’ to speak next week… That’s about the way the situation is, Mac. I’ve got to tear off an article… You’re boss printer an’ we’ll pay you seventeen fifty like we all get. Ever written any?”

“No.”

“It’s a time like this a feller regrets he didn’t work harder in school. Gosh, I wish I could write decent.”

“I’ll take a swing at an article if I get a chance.”

“Big Bill’ll write us some stuff. He writes swell.”

They set up a cot for Mac back of the press. It was a week before he could get time to go round to the Eagle to get his suitcase. Over the office and the presses was a long attic, with a stove in it, where most of the boys slept. Those that had blankets rolled up in their blankets, those that hadn’t put their jackets over their heads, those that didn’t have jackets slept as best they could. At the end of the room was a long sheet of paper where someone had printed out the Preamble in shaded block letters. On the plaster wall of the office someone had drawn a cartoon of a workingstiff labelled “I.W.W.” giving a fat man in a stovepipe hat labelled “mineowner” a kick in the seat of the pants. Above it they had started to letter “solidarity” but had only gotten as far as “S O L I D A.”

One November night Big Bill Haywood spoke at the miners’ union. Mac and Fred Hoff went to report the speech for the paper. The town looked lonely as an old trashdump in the huge valley full of shrill wind and driving snow. The hall was hot and steamy with the steam of big bodies and plug tobacco and thick mountaineer clothes that gave off the shanty smell of oil lamps and charred firewood and greasy fryingpans and raw whisky. At the beginning of the meeting men moved round uneasily, shuffling their feet and clearing the phlegm out of their throats. Mac was uncomfortable himself. In his pocket was a letter from Maisie. He knew it by heart:

Prof Ferrer, former director of the Modern School in Barcelona who has been on trial there on the charge of having been the principal instigator of the recent revolutionary movement has been sentenced to death and will be shot Wednesday unless

Cook still pins faith on esquimaux says interior of the Island of Luzon most beautiful place on earth

the Pennypackers went to the Presbyterian church and the Pennypacker girls sang chilly shrill soprano in the choir and everybody was greeted when they went into church and outside the summer leaves on the trees wigwagged greenblueyellow through the windows and we all filed into the pew and I’d asked Mr. Pennypacker he was a deacon in the church who were the Molly Maguires?

a squirrel was scolding in the whiteoak but the Pennypacker girls all the young ladies in their best hats singing the anthem who were the Molly Maguires? thoughts, bulletholes in an old barn abandoned mine pits black skeleton tipples weedgrown dumps who were the Molly Maguires? but it was too late you couldn’t talk in church and all the young ladies best hats and pretty pink green blue yellow dresses and the squirrel scolding who were the Molly Maguires?

and before I knew it it was communion and I wanted to say I hadn’t been baptized but all eyes looked shut up when I started to whisper to Con

communion was grape juice in little glasses and little squares of stale bread and you had to gulp the bread and put your handkerchief over your mouth and look holy and the little glasses made a funny sucking noise and all the quiet church in the middle of the sunny brightblue sunday in the middle of whiteoaks wigwagging and the smell of fries from the white house and the blue quiet sunday smoke of chimneys from stoves where fried chicken sizzled and fritters and brown gravy set back to keep hot

in the middle of squirrels and minetipples in the middle of the blue Pennsylvania summer sunday the little glasses sucking to get the last drop of communion

and I felt itchy in the back of my neck would I be struck by lightning eating the bread drinking the communion me not believing or baptized or Presbyterian and who were the Molly Maguires? masked men riding at night shooting bullets into barns at night what were they after in the oldtime night?

church was over and everybody was filing out and being greeted as they went out and everybody had a good appetite after communion but I couldn’t eat much itchy in the back of the neck scary with masked men riding Molly Maguires

FORFEIT STARS BY DRINKING

Mac went down to the watertank beyond the yards to wait for a chance to hop a freight. The old man’s hat and his ruptured shoes were ashen gray with dust; he was sitting all hunched up with his head between his knees and didn’t make a move until Mac was right up to him. Mac sat down beside him. A rank smell of feverish sweat came from the old man. “What’s the trouble, daddy?”

“I’m through, that’s all… I been a lunger all my life an’ I guess it’s got me now.” His mouth twisted in a spasm of pain. He let his head droop between his knees. After a minute he raised his head again, making little feeble gasps with his mouth like a dying fish. When he got his breath he said, “It’s a razor a’ slicin’ off my lungs every time. Stand by, will you, kid?” “Sure I will,” said Mac.

“Listen, kid, I wanna go West to where there’s trees an’ stuff… You got to help me into one o’ them cars. I’m too weak for the rods… Don’t let me lay down… I’ll start bleedin’ if I lay down, see.” He choked again.

“I got a coupla bucks. I’ll square it with the brakeman maybe.”

“You don’t talk like no vag.”

“I’m a printer. I wanta make San Francisco soon as I can.”

“A workin’ man; I’ll be a son of a bitch. Listen here, kid… I ain’t worked in seventeen years.”

The train came in and the engine stood hissing by the watertank.

Mac helped the old man to his feet and got him propped in the corner of a flatcar that was loaded with machine parts covered with a tarpaulin. He saw the fireman and the engineer looking at them out of the cab, but they didn’t say anything.

When the train started the wind was cold. Mac took off his coat and put it behind the old man’s head to keep it from jiggling with the rattling of the car. The old man sat with his eyes closed and his head thrown back. Mac didn’t know whether he was dead or not. It got to be night. Mac was terribly cold and huddled shivering in a fold of tarpaulin in the other end of the car.

In the gray of dawn Mac woke up from a doze with his teeth chattering. The train had stopped on a siding. His legs were so numb it was some time before he could stand on them. He went to look at the old man, but he couldn’t tell whether he was dead or not. It got a little lighter and the east began to glow like the edge of a piece of iron in a forge. Mac jumped to the ground and walked back along the train to the caboose.

The brakeman was drowsing beside his lantern. Mac told him that an old tramp was dying in one of the flatcars. The brakeman had a small flask of whisky in his good coat that hung on a nail in the caboose. They walked together up the track again. When they got to the flatcar it was almost day. The old man had flopped over on his side. His face looked white and grave like the face of a statue of a Civil War general. Mac opened his coat and the filthy torn shirts and underclothes and put his hand on the old man’s chest. It was cold and lifeless as a board. When he took his hand away there was sticky blood on it.

“Hemorrhage,” said the brakeman, making a perfunctory clucking noise in his mouth.

The brakeman said they’d have to get the body off the train. They laid him down flat in the ditch beside the ballast with his hat over his face. Mac asked the brakeman if he had a spade so that they could bury him, so that the buzzards wouldn’t get him, but he said no, the gandywalkers would find him and bury him. He took Mac back to the caboose and gave him a drink and asked him all about how the old man had died.

Mac beat his way to San Francisco.

Maisie was cold and bitter at first, but after they’d talked a little while she said he looked thin and ragged as a bum and burst into tears and kissed him. They went to get her savings out of the bank and bought Mac a suit and went down to City Hall and got married without saying anything to her folks. They were both very happy going down on the train to San Diego, and they got a furnished room there with kitchen privileges and told the landlady they’d been married a year. They wired Maisie’s folks that they were down there on their honeymoon and would be back soon.

Mac got work there at a job printer’s and they started payments on a bungalow at Pacific Beach. The work wasn’t bad and he was pretty happy in his quiet life with Maisie. After all, he’d had enough bumming for a while. When Maisie went to the hospital to have the baby, Mac had to beg a two months’ advance of pay from Ed Balderston, his boss. Even at that they had to take out a second mortgage on the bungalow to pay the doctor’s bill. The baby was a girl and had blue eyes and they named her Rose.

Life in San Diego was sunny and quiet. Mac went to work mornings on the steamcar and came back evenings on the steamcar and Sundays he puttered round the house or sometimes sat on one of the beaches with Maisie and the kid. It was understood between them now that he had to do everything that Maisie wanted because he’d given her such a tough time before they were married. The next year they had another kid and Maisie was sick and in hospital a long time after, so that now all that he could do with his pay each week was cover the interest on his debts, and he was always having to kid the grocerystore along and the milkman and the bakery to keep their chargeaccounts going from week to week. Maisie read a lot of magazines and always wanted new things for the house, a pianola, or a new icebox, or a fireless cooker. Her brothers were making good money in the real estate business in Los Angeles and her folks were coming up in the world. Whenever she got a letter from them she’d worry Mac about striking his boss for more pay or moving to a better job.

When there was anybody of the wobbly crowd in town down on his uppers or when they were raising money for strike funds or anything like that he’d help them out with a couple of dollars, but he never could do much for fear Maisie would find out about it. Whenever she found The Appeal to Reason or any other radical paper round the house she’d burn it up, and then they’d quarrel and be sulky and make each other’s lives miserable for a few days, until Mac decided what was the use, and never spoke to her about it. But it kept them apart almost as if she thought he was going out with some other woman.

One Saturday afternoon Mac and Maisie had managed to get a neighbor to take care of the kids and were going into a vaudeville theater when they noticed a crowd at the corner in front of Marshall’s drugstore. Mac elbowed his way through. A thin young man in blue denim was standing close to the corner lamppost where the firealarm was, reading the Declaration of Independence: When in the course of human events… A cop came up and told him to move on… inalienable right… life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Now there were two cops. One of them had the young man by the shoulders and was trying to pull him loose from the lamppost.

“Come on, Fainy, we’ll be late for the show,” Maisie kept saying.

“Hey, get a file; the bastard’s locked himself to the post,” he heard one cop say to the other. By that time Maisie had managed to hustle him to the theater boxoffice. After all, he’d promised to take her to the show and she hadn’t been out all winter. The last thing he saw the cop had hauled off and hit the young guy in the corner of the jaw.

Mac sat there in the dark stuffy theater all afternoon. He didn’t see the acts or the pictures between the acts. He didn’t speak to Maisie. He sat there feeling sick in the pit of his stomach. The boys must be staging a free-speech fight right here in town. Now and then he glanced at Maisie’s face in the dim glow from the stage. It had puffed out a little in wellsatisfied curves like a cat sitting by a warm stove, but she was still a good looker. She’d already forgotten everything and was completely happy looking at the show, her lips parted, her eyes bright, like a little girl at a party. “I guess I’ve sold out to the sonsobitches allright, allright,” he kept saying to himself.

The last number on the programme was Eva Tanguay. The nasal voice singing I’m Eva Tanguay, I don’t care brought Mac out of his sullen trance. Everything suddenly looked bright and clear to him, the proscenium with its heavy gold fluting, the people’s faces in the boxes, the heads in front of him, the tawdry powdery mingling of amber and blue lights on the stage, the scrawny woman flinging herself around inside the rainbow hoop of the spotlight.

when everybody went away for a trip Jeanne took us out to play every day in Farragut Square and told you about how in the Jura in winter the wolves come down and howl through the streets of the villages

and sometimes we’d see President Roosevelt ride by all alone on a bay horse and once we were very proud because when we took off our hats we were very proud because he smiled and showed his teeth like in the newspaper and touched his hat and we were very proud and he had an aide de camp

but we had a cloth duck that we used to play with on the steps until it began to get dark and the wolves howled ran with little children’s blood dripping from their snout through the streets of the villages only it was summer and between dog and wolf we’d be put to bed and Jeanne was a young French girl from the Jura where the wolves howled ran through the streets and when everybody had gone to bed she would take you into her bed

and it was a very long scary story and the worst of the wolves howled through the streets gloaming to freeze little children’s blood was the Loup Garou howling in the Jura and we were scared and she had breasts under her nightgown and the Loup Garou was terrible scary and black hair and rub against her and outside the wolves howled in the streets and it was wet there and she said it was nothing she had just washed herself

but the Loup Garou was really a man hold me close cheri a man howled through streets with a bloody snout that tore up the bellies of girls and little children Loup Garou

and afterwards you knew what girls were made like and she was very silly and made you promise not to tell but you wouldn’t have anyway

MOON’S PATENT IS FIZZLE

he was a towboat captain and he knew the river blindfold from Indian Head to the Virginia Capes and the bay and the Eastan Shoa up to Baltima’ for that matter and he lived in a redbrick house in Alexandria the pilothouse smelt of a hundred burntout pipes

that’s the Mayflower the president’s yacht and that there’s the Dolphin and that’s the ole monitor Tippecanoe and that there’s the revenoo cutter and we’re just passin’ the po-lice boat

when Cap’n Keen reaches up to pull the whistle on the ceiling of the pilothouse you can see the red and green bracelet tattooed under the black hairs on his wrist

Ma soul an’ body ole Cap’n Gifford used ter be a frien’ o’ mahne many’s the time we been oysterin’ together on the Eastan Shoa an’ oysterpirates used to shanghai young fellers in those days an’ make ’em work all winter you couldn’ git away less you swam ashoa and the water was too damnation cole an’ the ole man used to take the fellers’ clothes away so’s they couldn’t git ashoa when they was anchored up in a crik or near a house or somethin’ boy they was mean customers the oysterpirates ma soul and body onct there was a young feller they worked till he dropped and then they’d just sling him overboard tongin’ for oysters or dredgin’ like them oysterpirates did’s the meanest kinda work in winter with the spray freezin’ on the lines an’ cuttin’ your hands to shreds an’ the dredge foulin’ every minute an’ us havin’ to haul it up an’ fix it with our hands in the icy water hauled up a stiff onct What’s a stiff? Ma soul an’ body a stiff’s a dead man ma boy a young feller it was too without a stitch on him an’ the body looked like it had been beat with a belayin’ pin somethin’ terrible or an’ oar mebbe reckon he wouldn’t work or was sick or somethin’ an’ the ole man jus’ beat him till he died sure couldn’t a been nothin’ but an oysterpirate

When Janey was little she lived in an old flatface brick house a couple of doors up the hill from M Street in Georgetown. The front part of the house was always dark because Mommer kept the heavy lace curtains drawn to and the yellow linen shades with lace inset bands down. Sunday afternoons Janey and Joe and Ellen and Francie had to sit in the front room and look at pictures or read books. Janey and Joe read the funnypaper together because they were the oldest and the other two were just babies and not old enough to know what was funny anyway. They couldn’t laugh outloud because Popper sat with the rest of The Sunday Star on his lap and usually went to sleep after dinner with the editorial section crumpled in one big blueveined hand. Tiny curds of sunlight flickering through the lace insets in the window shade would lie on his bald head and on one big red flange of his nose and on the droop of one mustache and on his speckled sundayvest and on the white starched shirtsleeves with shiny cuffs, held up above the elbow by a rubber band. Janey and Joe would sit on the same chair feeling each other’s ribs jiggle when they laughed about the Katzenjammer kids setting off a cannon-cracker under the captain’s stool. The little ones would see them laughing and start laughing too, “Shut up, can’t you,” Joe would hiss at them out of the corner of his mouth. “You don’t know what we’re laughing at.” Once in a while, if there was no sound from Mommer who was taking her Sunday afternoon nap upstairs stretched out in the back bedroom in a faded lilac sack with frills on it, after they’d listened for a long time to the drawnout snort that ended in a little hiss of Popper’s snores, Joe would slip off his chair and Janey would follow him without breathing into the front hall and out the front door. Once they’d closed it very carefully so that the knocker wouldn’t bang, Joe would give her a slap, yell “You’re it” and run off down the hill towards M Street, and she’d have to run after him, her heart pounding, her hands cold for fear he’d run away and leave her.

Winters the brick sidewalks were icy and there were colored women out spreading cinders outside their doors when the children went to school mornings. Joe never would walk with the rest of them because they were girls, he lagged behind or ran ahead. Janey wished she could walk with him but she couldn’t leave her little sisters who held tight onto her hands. One winter they got in the habit of walking up the hill with a little yaller girl who lived directly across the street and whose name was Pearl. Afternoons Janey and Pearl walked home together. Pearl usually had a couple of pennies to buy bullseyes or candy bananas with at a little store on Wisconsin Avenue, and she always gave Janey half so Janey was very fond of her. One afternoon she asked Pearl to come in and they played dolls together under the big rose of sharon bush in the back yard. When Pearl had gone Mommer’s voice called from the kitchen. Mommer had her sleeves rolled up on her faded pale arms and a checked apron on and was rolling piecrust for supper so that her hands were covered with flour.

“Janey, come here,” she said. Janey knew from the cold quaver in her voice that something was wrong.

“Yes, Mommer.” Janey stood in front of her mother shaking her head about so that the two stiff sandy pigtails lashed from side to side. “Stand still, child, for gracious sake… Jane, I want to talk to you about something. That little colored girl you brought in this afternoon…” Janey’s heart was dropping. She had a sick feeling and felt herself blushing, she hardly knew why. “Now, don’t misunderstand me; I like and respect the colored people; some of them are fine self-respecting people in their place… But you mustn’t bring that little colored girl in the house again. Treating colored people kindly and with respect is one of the signs of good breeding… You mustn’t forget that your mother’s people were wellborn every inch of them… Georgetown was very different in those days. We lived in a big house with most lovely lawns… but you must never associate with colored people on an equal basis. Living in this neighborhood it’s all the more important to be careful about those things… Neither the whites nor the blacks respect those who do… That’s all, Janey, you understand; now run out and play, it’ll soon be time for your supper.” Janey tried to speak but she couldn’t. She stood stiff in the middle of the yard on the grating that covered the drainpipe, staring at the back fence. “Niggerlover,” yelled Joe in her ear. “Niggerlover ump-mya-mya… Niggerlover niggerlover ump-mya-mya.” Janey began to cry.

Joe was an untalkative sandyhaired boy who could pitch a mean outcurve when he was still little. He learned to swim and dive in Rock Creek and used to say he wanted to be motorman on a streetcar when he grew up. For several years his best friend was Alec McPherson whose father was a locomotive engineer on the B. and O. After that Joe wanted to be a locomotive engineer. Janey used to tag around after the two boys whenever they’d let her, to the carbarns at the head of Pennsylvania Avenue where they made friends with some of the conductors and motormen who used to let them ride on the platform a couple of blocks sometimes if there wasn’t any inspector around, down along the canal or up Rock Creek where they caught tadpoles and fell in the water and splashed each other with mud.

Summer evenings when the twilight was long after supper they played lions and tigers with other kids from the neighborhood in the long grass of some empty lots near Oak Hill Cemetery. There were long periods when there was measles or scarlet fever around and Mommer wouldn’t let them out. Then Alec would come down and they’d play three-o-cat in the back yard. Those were the times Janey liked best. Then the boys treated her as one of them. Summer dusk would come down on them sultry and full of lightningbugs. If Popper was feeling in a good mood he’d send them up the hill to the drugstore on N Street to buy icecream, there’d be young men in their shirtsleeves and straw hats strolling with girls who wore a stick of punk in their hair to keep off the mosquitoes, a rankness and a smell of cheap perfume from the colored families crowded on their doorsteps, laughing, talking softly with an occasional flash of teeth, rolling of a white eyeball. The dense sweaty night was scary, hummed, rumbled with distant thunder, with junebugs, with the clatter of traffic from M Street, the air of the street dense and breathless under the thick trees; but when she was with Alec and Joe she wasn’t scared, not even of drunks or big shamblefooted colored-men. When they got back Popper would smoke a cigar and they’d sit out in the back yard and the mosquitoes ’ud eat them up and Mommer and Aunt Francine and the kids ’ud eat the icecream and Popper would just smoke a cigar and tell them stories of when he’d been a towboat captain down on the Chesapeake in his younger days and he’d saved the barkentine Nancy Q in distress on the Kettlebottoms in a sou’west gale. Then it’d get time to go to bed and Alec ’ud be sent home and Janey’d have to go to bed in the stuffy little back room on the top floor with her two little sisters in their cribs against the opposite wall. Maybe a thunderstorm would come up and she’d lie awake staring up at the ceiling cold with fright, listening to her little sisters whimper as they slept until she heard the reassuring sound of Mommer scurrying about the house closing windows, the slam of a door, the whine of wind and rattle of rain and the thunder rolling terribly loud and near overhead like a thousand beer-trucks roaring over the bridge. Times like that she thought of going down to Joe’s room and crawling into bed with him, but for some reason she was afraid to, though sometimes she got as far as the landing. He’d laugh at her and call her a softie.

About once a week Joe would get spanked. Popper would come home from the Patent Office where he worked, angry and out of sorts, and the girls would be scared of him and go about the house quiet as mice; but Joe seemed to like to provoke him, he’d run whistling through the back hall or clatter up and down stairs making a tremendous racket with his stub-toed ironplated shoes. Then Popper would start scolding him and Joe would stand in front of him without saying a word glaring at the floor with bitter blue eyes. Janey’s insides knotted up and froze when Popper would start up the stairs to the bathroom pushing Joe in front of him. She knew what would happen. He’d take down the razorstrop from behind the door and put the boy’s head and shoulders under his arm and beat him. Joe would clench his teeth and flush and not say a word and when Popper was tired of beating him they’d look at each other and Joe would be sent up to his room and Popper would come down stairs trembling all over and pretend nothing had happened, and Janey would slip out into the yard with her fists clenched whispering to herself, “I hate him… I hate him… I hate him.”

Once a drizzly Saturday night she stood against the fence in the dark looking up at the lighted window. She could hear Popper’s voice and Joe’s in an argument. She thought maybe she’d fall down dead at the first thwack of the razorstrop. She couldn’t hear what they were saying. Then suddenly it came, the leather sound of blows and Joe stifling a gasp. She was eleven years old. Something broke loose. She rushed into the kitchen with her hair all wet from the rain, “Mommer, he’s killing Joe. Stop it.” Her mother turned up a withered helpless drooping face from a pan she was scouring. “Oh, you can’t do anything.” Janey ran upstairs and started beating on the bathroom door. “Stop it, stop it,” her voice kept yelling. She was scared but something stronger than she was had hold of her. The door opened; there was Joe looking sheepish and Popper with his face all flushed and the razorstrop in his hand.

“Beat me… it’s me that’s bad… I won’t have you beating Joe like that.” She was scared. She didn’t know what to do, tears stung in her eyes.

Popper’s voice was unexpectedly kind:

“You go straight up to bed without any supper and remember that you have enough to do to fight your own battles, Janey.” She ran up to her room and lay on the bed shaking. When she’d gone to sleep Joe’s voice woke her up with a start.

He was standing in his nightgown in the door. “Say, Janey,” he whispered. “Don’t you do that again, see. I can take care of myself, see. A girl can’t butt in between men like that. When I get a job and make enough dough I’ll get me a gun and if Popper tries to beat me up I’ll shoot him dead.” Janey began to sniffle. “What you wanna cry for; this ain’t no Johnstown flood.”

She could hear him tiptoe down the stairs again in his bare feet.

At highschool she took the commercial course and learned stenography and typewriting. She was a plain thinfaced sandyhaired girl, quiet and popular with the teachers. Her fingers were quick and she picked up typing and shorthand easily. She liked to read and used to get books like The Inside of the Cup, The Battle of the Strong, The Winning of Barbara Worth out of the library. Her mother kept telling her that she’d spoil her eyes if she read so much. When she read she used to imagine she was the heroine, that the weak brother who went to the bad but was a gentleman at core and capable of every sacrifice, like Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, was Joe and that the hero was Alec.

She thought Alec was the bestlooking boy in Georgetown and the strongest. He had black closecropped hair and a very white skin with a few freckles and a strong squareshouldered way of walking. After him Joe was the bestlooking and the strongest and the best baseball player anyway. Everybody said he ought to go on through highschool on account of being such a good baseball player, but at the end of his first year Popper said he had three girls to support and that Joe would have to get to work; so he got a job as a Western Union messenger. Janey was pretty proud of him in his uniform until the girls at highschool kidded her about it. Alec’s folks had promised to put him through college if he made good in highschool, so Alec worked hard. He wasn’t tough and dirty-talking like most of the boys Joe knew. He was always nice to Janey though he never seemed to want to be left alone with her. She pretty well admitted to herself that she had a terrible crush on Alec.

The best day of her life was the sweltering summer Sunday they all went canoeing up to Great Falls. She had put up the lunch the night before. In the morning she added a steak she found in the icebox. There was blue haze at the end of every street of brick houses and dark summergreen trees when before anybody else was awake she and Joe crept out of the house round seven that morning.

They met Alec at the corner in front of the depot. He stood waiting for them with his feet wide apart and a skillet in his hand.

They all ran and caught the car that was just leaving for Cabin John’s Bridge. They had the car all to themselves like it was a private car. The car hummed over the rails past whitewashed shanties and nigger cabins along the canal, skirting hillsides where the sixfoot tall waving corn marched in ranks like soldiers. The sunlight glanced in bluewhite glare on the wavingdrooping leaves of the tassling corn; glare, and a whirring and tinkling of grasshoppers and dryflies rose in hot smoke into the pale sky round the clattering shaking electric car. They ate sweet summerapples Joe had bought off a colored woman in the station and chased each other round the car and flopped down on top of each other in the cornerseats; and they laughed and giggled till they were weak. Then the car was running through woods; they could see the trestlework of the rollercoasters of Glen Echo through the trees and they piled off the car at Cabin John’s having more fun than a barrel of monkeys.

They ran down to the bridge to look up and down the river brown and dark in the white glary morning between foliage-sodden banks; then they found the canoe that belonged to a friend of Alec’s in a house by the canal, bought some cream soda and rootbeer and some packages of neccos and started out. Alec and Joe paddled and Janey sat in the bottom with her sweater rolled round a thwart for a pillow. Alec was paddling in the bow. It was sweltering hot. The sweat made the shirt cling to the hollow of his chunky back that curved with every stroke of the paddle. After a while the boys stripped to their bathingsuits that they wore under their clothes. It made Janey’s throat tremble to watch Alec’s back and the bulging muscles of his arm as he paddled, made her feel happy and scared. She sat there in her white dimity dress, trailing her hand in the weedy browngreen water. They stopped to pick waterlilies and the white flowers of arrowhead that glistened like ice and everything smelt wet rank of the muddy roots of waterlilies. The cream soda got warm and they drank it that way and kidded each other back and forth and Alec caught a crab and covered Janey’s dress with greenslimy splashes and Janey didn’t care a bit and they called Joe skipper and he loosened up and said he was going to join the navy and Alec said he’d be a civil engineer and build a motorboat and take them all cruising and Janey was happy because they included her when they talked just like she was a boy too. At a place below the Falls where there were locks in the canal they had a long portage down to the river. Janey carried the grub and the paddles and the frying pan and the boys sweated and cussed under the canoe. Then they paddled across to the Virginia side and made a fire in a little hollow among gray rusty bowlders. Joe cooked the steak and Janey unpacked the sandwiches and cookies she’d made and nursed some murphies baking in the ashes. They roasted ears of corn too that they had swiped out of a field beside the canal. Everything turned out fine except that they hadn’t brought enough butter. Afterwards they sat eating cookies and drinking rootbeer quietly talking round the embers. Alec and Joe brought out pipes and she felt pretty good sitting there at the Great Falls of the Potomac with two men smoking pipes.

“Geewhiz, Janey, Joe cooked that steak fine.”

“When we was kids we used to ketch frogs and broil ’em up in Rock Creek… Remember, Alec?”

“Damned if I don’t, and Janey she was along once; geewhiz, the fuss you kicked up then, Janey.”

“I don’t like seeing you skin them.”

“We thought we was regular wildwest hunters then. We had packs of fun then.”

“I like this better, Alec,” said Janey hesitatingly.

“So do I…” said Alec. “Dod gast it, I wisht we had a watermelon.”

“Maybe we’ll see some along the riverbank somewhere goin’ home.”

“Jiminy crickets, what I couldn’t do to a watermelon, Joe.” “Mommer had a watermelon on ice,” said Janey; “maybe there’ll be some yet when we get home.”

“I don’t never want to go home,” said Joe, suddenly bitter serious. “Joe, you oughtn’t to talk like that.” She felt girlish and frightened. “I’ll talk how I goddam please… Kerist, I hate the scrimpy dump.” “Joe, you oughtn’t to talk like that.” Janey felt she was going to cry. “Dod gast it,” said Alec. “It’s time we shoved… What you say, bo…? We’ll take one more dip and then make tracks for home.” When the boys were through swimming they all went up to look at the Falls and then they started off. They went along fast in the swift stream under the steep treehung bank. The afternoon was very sultry, they went through layers of hot steamy air. Big cloudheads were piling up in the north. It wasn’t fun any more for Janey. She was afraid it was going to rain. Inside she felt sick and drained out. She was afraid her period was coming on. She’d only had the curse a few times yet and the thought of it scared her and took all the strength out of her, made her want to crawl away out of sight like an old sick mangy cat. She didn’t want Joe and Alec to notice how she felt. She thought how would it be if she turned the canoe over. The boys could swim ashore all right, and she’d drown and they’d drag the river for her body and everybody’d cry and feel so sorry about it.

Purplegray murk rose steadily and drowned the white summits of the cloudheads. Everything got to be livid white and purple. The boys paddled as hard as they could. They could hear the advancing rumble of thunder. The bridge was well in sight when the wind hit them, a hot stormwind full of dust and dead leaves and bits of chaff and straw, churning the riverwater.

They made the shore just in time. “Dod gast it, this is goin’ to be some storm,” said Alec; “Janey, get under the boat.” They turned the canoe over on the pebbly shore in the lee of a big bowlder and huddled up under it. Janey sat in the middle with the waterlilies they had picked that morning all shriveled and clammy from the heat in her hand. The boys lay in their damp bathingsuits on either side of her. Alec’s towsled black hair was against her cheek. The other side of her Joe lay with his head in the end of the canoe and his lean brown feet and legs in their rolledup pants tucked under her dress. The smell of sweat and riverwater and the warm boysmell of Alec’s hair and shoulders made her dizzy. When the rain came drumming on the bottom of the canoe curtaining them in with lashing white spray, she slipped her arm round Alec’s neck and let her hand rest timidly on his bare shoulder. He didn’t move.

The rain passed after a while. “Gee, that wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be,” said Alec. They were pretty wet and chilly but they felt good in the fresh rainwashed air. They put the canoe back in the water and went on down as far as the bridge. Then they carried it back to the house they’d gotten it from, and went to the little shelter to wait for the electric car. They were tired and sunburned and sticky. The car was packed with a damp Sunday afternoon crowd, picnickers caught by the shower at Great Falls and Glen Echo. Janey thought she’d never stand it till she got home. Her belly was all knotted up with a cramp. When they got to Georgetown the boys still had fifty cents between them and wanted to go to a movie, but Janey ran off and left them. Her only thought was to get to bed so that she could put her face into the pillow and cry.

After that Janey never cried much; things upset her but she got a cold hard feeling all over instead. Highschool went by fast, with hot thunderstormy Washington summers in between terms, punctuated by an occasional picnic at Marshall Hall or a party at some house in the neighborhood. Joe got a job at the Adams Express. She didn’t see him much as he didn’t eat home any more. Alec had bought a motorcycle and although he was still in highschool Janey heard little about him. Sometimes she sat up to get a word with Joe when he came home at night. He smelt of tobacco and liquor though he never seemed to be drunk. He went to his job at seven and when he got out in the evenings he went out with the bunch hanging round poolrooms on 4½ Street or playing craps or bowling. Sundays he played baseball in Maryland. Janey would sit up for him, but when he came she’d ask him how things were going where he worked and he’d say “Fine” and he’d ask her how things were going at school and she’d say “Fine” and then they’d both go off to bed. Once in a while she’d ask if he’d seen Alec and he’d say “Yes” with a scrap of a smile and she’d ask how Alec was and he’d say “Fine.”

She had one friend, Alice Dick, a dark stubby girl with glasses who took all the same classes with her at highschool. Saturday afternoons they’d dress up in their best and go window-shopping down F Street way. They’d buy a few little things, stop in for a soda and come home on the streetcar feeling they’d had a busy afternoon. Once in a very long while they went to a matinee at Poli’s and Janey would take Alice Dick home to supper. Alice Dick liked the Williamses and they liked her. She said it made her feel freer to spend a few hours with broadminded people. Her own folks were Southern Methodists and very narrow. Her father was a clerk in the Government Printing Office and was in daily dread that his job would come under the civil service regulations. He was a stout shortwinded man, fond of playing practical jokes on his wife and daughter, and suffered from chronic dyspepsia.

Alice Dick and Janey planned that as soon as they got through highschool they’d get jobs and leave home. They even picked out the house where they’d board, a greenstone house near Thomas Circle, run by a Mrs. Jenks, widow of a naval officer, who was very refined and had southern cooking and charged moderately for tableboard.

One Sunday night during the spring of her last term in highschool Janey was in her room getting undressed. Francie and Ellen were still playing in the backyard. Their voices came in through the open window with a spicy waft of lilacs from the lilacbushes in the next yard. She had just let down her hair and was looking in the mirror imagining how she’d look if she was a peach and had auburn hair, when there was a knock at the door and Joe’s voice outside. There was something funny about his voice.

“Come in,” she called. “I’m just fixin’ my hair.”

She first saw his face in the mirror. It was very white and the skin was drawn back tight over the cheekbones and round the mouth.

“Why, what’s the matter, Joe?” She jumped up and faced him.

“It’s like this, Janey,” said Joe, drawling his words out painfully. “Alec was killed. He smashed up on his motorbike. I just come from the hospital. He’s dead, all right.”

Janey seemed to be writing the words on a white pad in her mind. She couldn’t say anything.

“He smashed up comin’ home from Chevy Chase… He’d gone out to the ballgame to see me pitch. You oughter seen him all smashed to hell.”

Janey kept trying to say something.

“He was your best…”

“He was the best guy I’ll ever know,” Joe went on gently. “Well, that’s that, Janey… But I wanted to tell you I don’t want to hang round this lousy dump now that Alec’s gone. I’m goin’ to enlist in the navy. You tell the folks, see… I don’t wanna talk to ’em. That’s it; I’ll join the navy and see the world.”

“But, Joe…”

“I’ll write you, Janey; honest, I will… I’ll write you a hell of a lot. You an’ me… Well, goodby, Janey.” He grabbed her by the shoulders and kissed her awkwardly on the nose and cheek. All she could do was whisper. “Do be careful, Joe,” and stand there in front of the bureau in the gust of lilacs and the yelling of the kids that came through the open window. She heard Joe’s steps light quick down the stairs and heard the frontdoor shut.

She turned out the light, took off her clothes in the dark, and got into bed. She lay there without crying.

Graduation came and commencement and she and Alice went out to parties and even once with a big crowd on one of the moonlight trips down the river to Indian Head on the steamboat Charles McAlister. The crowd was rougher than Janey and Alice liked. Some of the boys were drinking a good deal and there were couples kissing and hugging in every shadow; still the moonlight was beautiful rippling on the river and she and Janey put two chairs together and talked. There was a band and dancing, but they didn’t dance on account of the rough men who stood round the dancefloor making remarks. They talked and on the way home up the river, Janey, talking very low and standing by the rail very close to Alice, told her about Alec. Alice had read about it in the paper but hadn’t dreamed that Janey had known him so well or felt that way about him. She began to cry and Janey felt very strong comforting her and they felt that they’d be very close friends after that. Janey whispered that she’d never be able to love anybody else and Alice said she didn’t think she could ever love a man anyway, they all drank and smoked and talked dirty among themselves and had only one idea.

In July Alice and Janey got jobs in the office of Mrs. Robinson, public stenographer in the Riggs Building, to replace girls away on their vacations. Mrs. Robinson was a small grayhaired pigeonbreasted woman with a Kentucky shriek in her voice, that made Janey think of a parrot’s. She was very precise and all the proprieties were observed in her office. “Miss Williams,” she would chirp, leaning back from her desk, “that em ess of Judge Roberts’s has absolutely got to be finished today… My dear, we’ve given our word and we’ll deliver if we have to stay till midnight. Noblesse oblige, my dear,” and the typewriters would trill and jingle and all the girls’ fingers would go like mad typing briefs, manuscripts of undelivered speeches by lobbyists, occasional overflow from a newspaperman or a scientist, or prospectuses from realestate offices or patent promoters, dunning letters for dentists and doctors.

Sunday nights when we had fishballs and baked beans and Mr. Garfield read to us in a very beautiful reading voice and everybody was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop because he was reading The Man Without a Country and it was a very terrible story and Aaron Burr had been a very dangerous man and this poor young man had said “Damn the United States; I never hope to hear her name again” and it was a very terrible thing to say and the grayhaired judge was so kind and good

and the judge sentenced me and they took me far away to foreign lands on a frigate and the officers were kind and good and spoke in kind grave very sorry reading voices like Mr. Garfield and everything was very kind and grave and very sorry and frigates and the blue Mediterranean and islands and when I was dead I began to cry and I was afraid the other boys would see I had tears in my eyes

American shouldn’t cry he should look kind and grave and very sorry when they wrapped me in the stars and stripes and brought me home on a frigate to be buried I was so sorry I never remembered whether they brought me home or buried me at sea but anyway I was wrapped in Old Glory

the government of the United States must insist and demand that American citizens who may be taken prisoner whether by one party or the other as participants in the present insurrectionary disturbances shall be dealt with in accordance with the broad principles of international law

“But it’s so interesting, mommer,” Janey would say when her mother bewailed the fact that she had to work. “In my day it wasn’t considered ladylike, it was thought to be demeaning.” “But it isn’t now,” Janey would say getting into a temper. Then it would be a great relief to get out of the stuffy house and the stuffy treeshaded streets of Georgetown and to stop by for Alice Dick and go down town to the moving pictures and to see the pictures of foreign countries, and the crowds on F Street and to stop in at a drugstore for a soda afterwards, before getting on the Georgetown car, and to sit up at the fountain talking about the picture they’d seen and Olive Thomas and Charley Chaplin and John Bunny. She began to read the paper every day and to take an interest in politics. She began to feel that there was a great throbbing arclighted world somewhere outside and that only living in Georgetown where everything was so poky and oldfashioned, and Mommer and Popper were so poky and oldfashioned, kept her from breaking into it.

Postcards from Joe made her feel like that too. He was a sailor on the battleship Connecticut. There’d be a picture of the waterfront at Havana or the harbor of Marseille or Villefranche or a photograph of a girl in peasant costume inside a tinsel horseshoe and a few lines hoping she was well and liked her job, never a word about himself. She wrote him long letters full of questions about himself and foreign countries but he never answered them. Still it gave her a sort of feeling of adventure to get the postcards. Whenever she saw a navy man on the street or marines from Quantico she thought of Joe and wondered how he was getting on. The sight of a gob lurching along in blue with his cap on one side took a funny twist at her heart.

Sundays Alice almost always came out to Georgetown. The house was different now, Joe gone, her mother and father older and quieter, Francie and Ellen blooming out into pretty giggly highschool girls, popular with the boys in the neighborhood, going out to parties, all the time complaining because they didn’t have any money to spend. Sitting at the table with them, helping Mommer with the gravy, bringing in the potatoes or the Brussels sprouts for Sunday dinner, Janey felt grownup, almost an old maid. She was on the side of her father and mother now against the sisters. Popper began to look old and shrunkup. He talked often about retiring, and was looking forward to his pension.

When she’d been eight months with Mrs. Robinson she got an offer from Dreyfus and Carroll, the patent lawyers up on the top floor of the Riggs Building, to work for them for seventeen a week, which was five dollars more than she was getting from Mrs. Robinson. It made her feel fine. She realized now that she was good at her work and that she could support herself whatever happened. On the strength of it she went down to Woodward and Lothrop’s with Alice Dick to buy a dress. She wanted a silk grownup dress with embroidery on it. She was twentyone and was going to make seventeen dollars a week and thought she had a right to one nice dress. Alice said it ought to be a bronzy gold color to match her hair. They went in all the stores down F Street, but they couldn’t find anything that suited that wasn’t too expensive, so all they could do was buy some materials and some fashion magazines and take it home to Janey’s mother to make up. It galled Janey still being dependent on her mother this way, but there was nothing for it; so Mrs. Williams had to make up Janey’s new dress the way she had made all her children’s dresses since they were born. Janey had never had the patience to learn to sew the way Mommer could. They bought enough material so that Alice could have one too, so Mrs. Williams had to make up two dresses.

Working at Dreyfus and Carroll’s was quite different from working at Mrs. Robinson’s. There were mostly men in the office. Mr. Dreyfus was a small thinfaced man with a small black moustache and small black twinkly eyes and a touch of accent that gave him a distinguished foreign diplomat manner. He carried yellow wash gloves and a yellow cane and had a great variety of very much tailored overcoats. He was the brains of the firm, Jerry Burnham said. Mr. Carroll was a stout redfaced man who smoked many cigars and cleared his throat a great deal and had a very oldtimey Southern Godblessmysoul way of talking. Jerry Burnham said he was the firm’s bay window. Jerry Burnham was a wrinklefaced young man with dissipated eyes who was the firm’s adviser in technical and engineering matters. He laughed a great deal, always got into the office late, and for some reason took a fancy to Janey and used to joke about things to her while he was dictating. She liked him, though the dissipated look under his eyes scared her off a little. She’d have liked to have talked to him like a sister, and gotten him to stop burning the candle at both ends. Then there was an elderly accountant, Mr. Sills, a shriveled man who lived in Anacostia and never said a word to anybody. At noon he didn’t go out for lunch, but sat at his desk eating a sandwich and an apple wrapped in waxed paper which he carefully folded afterwards and put back in his pocket. Then there were two fresh errandboys and a little plainfaced typist named Miss Simonds who only got twelve a week. All sorts of people in every sort of seedyrespectable or Peacock Alley clothes came in during the day and stood round in the outer office listening to Mr. Carroll’s rich boom from behind the groundglass door. Mr. Dreyfus slipped in and out without a word, smiling faintly at his acquaintances, always in a great mysterious hurry. At lunch in the little cafeteria or at a soda-fountain Janey ’ud tell Alice all about it and Alice would look up at her admiringly. Alice always waited for her in the vestibule at one. They’d arranged to go out then because there was less of a crowd. Neither of them ever spent more than twenty cents, so lunch didn’t take them very long and they’d have time to take a turn round Lafayette Square or sometimes round the White House grounds before going back to the office.

There was one Saturday night when she had to work late to finish up typing the description of an outboard motor that had to be in at the Patent Office first thing Monday morning. Everybody else had left the office. She was making out the complicated technical wording as best she could, but her mind was on a postcard showing the Christ of the Andes she’d gotten from Joe that day. All it said was:

“To hell with Uncle Sam’s tin ships. Coming home soon.”

It wasn’t signed but she knew the writing. It worried her. Jerry Burnham sat at the telephone switchboard going over the pages as she finished them. Now and then he went out to the washroom; when he came back each time a hot breath of whisky wafted across the office. Janey was nervous. She typed till the little black letters squirmed before her eyes. She was worried about Joe. How could he be coming home before his enlistment was up? Something must be the matter. And Jerry Burnham moving restlessly round on the telephone girl’s seat made her uncomfortable. She and Alice had talked about the danger of staying in an office alone with a man like this. Late like this and drinking, a man had just one idea.

When she handed him the next to the last sheet his eye, bright and moist, caught hers. “I bet you’re tired, Miss Williams,” he said. “It’s a darned shame to keep you in like this and Saturday night too.” “It’s quite all right, Mr. Burnham,” she said icily and her fingers chirruped. “It’s the damned old baywindow’s fault. He chewed the rag so much about politics all day, nobody could get any work done.” “Well, it doesn’t matter now,” said Janey. “Nothing matters any more…. It’s almost eight o’clock. I had to pass up a date with my best girl… or thereabouts. I bet you passed up a date too, Miss Williams.” “I was going to meet another girl, that’s all.” “Now I’ll tell one…” He laughed so easily that she found herself laughing too.

When the last page was done and in the envelope, Janey got up to get her hat. “Look, Miss Williams, we’ll drop this in the mail and then you’d better come and have a bite with me.”

Going down in the elevator Janey intended to excuse herself and go home but somehow she didn’t and found herself, everything aflutter inside of her, sitting coolly down with him in a French restaurant on H Street.

“Well, what do you think of the New Freedom, Miss Williams?” asked Jerry Burnham with a laugh after he’d sat down. He handed her the menu. “Here’s the scorecard… Let your conscience be your guide.”

“Why, I hardly know, Mr. Burnham.”

“Well, I’m for it, frankly. I think Wilson’s a big man… Nothing like change anyway, the best thing in the world, don’t you think so? Bryan’s a big bellowing blatherskite but even he represents something and even Josephus Daniels filling the navy with grapejuice. I think there’s a chance we may get back to being a democracy… Maybe there won’t have to be a revolution; what do you think?”

He never waited for her to answer a question, he just talked and laughed all by himself.

When Janey tried to tell Alice about it afterwards the things Jerry Burnham said didn’t seem so funny, nor the food so good nor everything so jolly. Alice was pretty bitter about it. “Oh, Janey, how could you go out late at night with a drunken man and to a place like that and here I was crazy anxious… You know a man like that has only one idea… I declare I think it was heartless and light… I wouldn’t have thought you capable of such a thing.” “But, Alice, it wasn’t like that at all,” Janey kept saying, but Alice cried and went round looking hurt for a whole week; so that after that Janey kept off the subject of Jerry Burnham. It was the first disagreement she’d ever had with Alice and it made her feel bad.

Still she got to be friends with Jerry Burnham. He seemed to like taking her out and having her listen to him talk. Even after he’d thrown up his job at Dreyfus and Carroll, he sometimes called for her Saturday afternoons to take her to Keith’s. Janey arranged a meeting with Alice out in Rock Creek Park but it wasn’t much of a success. Jerry set the girls up to tea at the old stone mill. He was working for an engineering paper and writing a weekly letter for The New York Sun. He upset Alice by calling Washington a cesspool and a sink of boredom and saying he was rotting there and that most of the inhabitants were dead from the neck up anyway. When he put them on the car to go back to Georgetown Alice said emphatically that young Burnham was not the sort of boy a respectable girl ought to know. Janey sat back happily in the seat of the open car, looking out at trees, girls in summer dresses, men in straw hats, mailboxes, storefronts sliding by and said, “But, Alice, he’s smart as a whip…. Gosh, I like brainy people, don’t you?” Alice looked at her and shook her head sadly and said nothing.

That same afternoon they went to the Georgetown hospital to see Popper. It was pretty horrible. Mommer and Janey and the doctor and the wardnurse knew that he had cancer of the bladder and couldn’t live very long but they didn’t admit it even to themselves. They had just moved him into a private room where he would be more comfortable. It was costing lots of money and they’d had to put a second mortgage on the house. They’d already spent all Janey’s savings that she had in a bankaccount of her own against a rainy day. That afternoon they had to wait quite a while. When the nurse came out with a glass urinal under a towel Janey went in alone. “Hello, Popper,” she said with a forced smile. The smell of disinfectant in the room sickened her. Through the open window came warm air of sunwilted trees, drowsy Sundayafternoon noises, the caw of a crow, a distant sound of traffic. Popper’s face was drawn in and twisted to one side. His big moustaches looked pathetically silky and white. Janey knew that she loved him better than anybody else in the world… His voice was feeble but fairly firm. “Janey, I’m in drydock, girl, and I guess I’ll never… you know better’n I do, the sonsobitches won’t tell me… Say, tell me about Joe. You hear from him, don’t you? I wish he hadn’t joined the navy; no future for a boy there without pull higher up; but I’m glad he went to sea, takes after me… I’d been three times round the Horn in the old days before I was twenty. That was before I settled down in the towboat business, you understand… But I been thinkin’ here lyin’ in bed that Joe done just what I’d ’a’ done, a chip of the old block, and I’m glad of it. I don’t worry about him, but I wish you girls was married an’ off my hands. I’d feel easier. I don’t trust girls nowadays with these here anklelength skirts an’ all that.” Popper’s eyes traveled all over her with a chilly feeble gleam that made her throat stiffen when she tried to speak. “I guess I can take care of myself,” she said. “You got to take care of me now. I done my best by you kids. You don’t know what life is, none of you, been sheltered and now you ship me off to die in the hospital.” “But, Popper, you said yourself you thought it would be best to go where you’d get better care.” “I don’t like that night nurse, Janey, she handles me too rough… You tell ’em down at the office.”

It was a relief when it was time to go. She and Alice walked along the street without saying anything. Finally Janey said, “For goodness’ sake, Alice, don’t get sulky. If you only knew how I hated it all too… oh, goodness, I wish…” “What do you wish, Janey?” “Oh, I dunno.”

July was hot that summer, in the office they worked in a continual whir of electric fans, the men’s collars wilted and the girls kept themselves overplastered with powder; only Mr. Dreyfus still looked cool and crisply tailored as if he’d just stepped out of a bandbox. The last day of the month Janey was sitting a minute at her desk getting up energy to go home along the simmering streets when Jerry Burnham came in. He had his shirtsleeves rolled above the elbow and white duck pants on and carried his coat. He asked her how her father was and said he was all excited about the European news and would have to take her out to supper to talk to somebody soothing. “I’ve got a car belongs to Bugs Dolan and I haven’t any driver’s license, but I guess we can sneak round the Speedway and get cooled off all the same.” She tried to refuse because she ought to go home to supper and Alice was always so sulky when she went out with Jerry, but he could see that she really wanted to come and insisted.

They both sat in the front seat of the Ford and dropped their coats in the back. They went once round the Speedway but the asphalt was like a griddle. The trees and the brown stagnant river stewed in late afternoon murk like meat and vegetables in a pot. The heat from the engine suffocated them. Jerry, his face red, talked incessantly about war brewing in Europe and how it would be the end of civilization and the signal for a general workingclass revolution and how he didn’t care and anything that got him out of Washington, where he was drinking himself silly with his brains addled by the heat and the Congressional Record, would be gravy to him, and how tired he was of women who didn’t want anything but to get money out of him or parties or marriage or some goddam thing or other and how cool and soothing it was to talk to Janey who wasn’t like that.

It was too hot so they put off driving till later and went to the Willard to get something to eat. He insisted on going to the Willard because he said he had his pockets full of money and would just spend it anyhow and Janey was very much awed because she’d never been in a big hotel before and felt she wasn’t dressed for it and said she was afraid she’d disgrace him and he laughed and said it couldn’t be done. They sat in the big long gilt dining room and Jerry said it looked like a millionaire morgue and the waiter was very polite and Janey couldn’t find what she wanted to eat on the big bill-of-fare and took a salad. Jerry made her take a gin fizz because he said it was cooling; it made her feel lightheaded and tall and gawky. She followed his talk breathless the way she used to tag along after Joe and Alec down to the carbarns when she was little.

After supper they drove round some more and Jerry got quiet and she felt constrained and couldn’t think of what to say. They went way out Rhode Island Avenue and circled round back by the Old Soldiers’ Home. There was no air anywhere and the staring identical streetlights went by on either side, lighting segments of monotonous unrustling trees. Even out on the hills there was not a breath stirring.

Out in the dark roads beyond the streetlamps it was better. Janey lost all sense of direction and lay back breathing in an occasional patch of freshness from a cornfield or a copse of woods. In a spot where a faint marshy dampness almost cool drifted across the road Jerry suddenly stopped the car and leaned over and kissed her. Her heart began to beat very fast. She wanted to tell him not to, but she couldn’t.

“I didn’t mean to, but I can’t help it,” he whispered. “It’s living in Washington undermines the will… Or maybe I’m in love with you, Janey. I don’t know… Let’s sit in the back seat where it’s cooler.” Weakness started in the pit of her stomach and welled up through her. As she stepped out he caught her in his arms. She let her head droop on his shoulder, her lips against his neck. His arms were burning hot round her shoulders, she could feel his ribs through his shirt pressing against her. Her head started going round in a reek of tobacco and liquor and male sweat. His legs began pressing up to hers. She yanked herself away and got into the back seat. She was trembling. He was right after her. “No, no,” she said. He sat down beside her with his arm round her waist. “Lez have a cigarette,” he said in a shaky voice.

Smoking gave her something to do, made her feel even with him. The two granulated red ends of the cigarettes glowed side by side.

“Do you mean you like me, Jerry?” “I’m crazy about you, kid.” “Do you mean you…?” “Want to marry you… Why the hell not? I dunno… Suppose we were engaged?” “You mean you want me to marry you?” “If you like… But don’t you understand the way a feller feels… a night like this… the smell of the swamp… God, I’d give anything to have you.”

They’d smoked out their cigarettes. They sat a long time without saying a word. She could feel the hairs on his bare arm against her bare arm.

“I’m worried about my brother Joe… He’s in the navy, Jerry, and I’m afraid he’s going to desert or something… I think you’d like him. He’s a wonderful baseball player.”

“What made you think of him? Do you feel that way towards me? Love’s a swell thing; goddam it, don’t you realize it’s not the way you feel towards your brother?”

He put his hand on her knee. She could feel him looking at her in the dark. He leaned over and kissed her very gently. She liked his lips gentle against hers that way. She was kissing them. She was falling through centuries of swampy night. His hot chest was against her breasts bearing her down. She would cling to him bearing her down through centuries of swampy night. Then all at once in a cold spasm she felt sick, choking for breath like drowning. She began to fight him. She got her leg up and pushed him hard in the groin with her knee.

He let go of her and got out of the car. She could hear him walking up and down the road in the dark behind her. She was trembling and scared and sick. After a while he got in, switched on the light and drove on without looking at her. He was smoking a cigarette and little sparks came from it as he drove.

When he got to the corner of M Street below the Williams house in Georgetown he stopped and got out and opened the door for her. She got out not knowing what to say, afraid to look at him.

“I suppose you think I ought to apologize to you for being a swine,” he said.

“Jerry, I’m sorry,” she said.

“I’ll be damned if I will… I thought we were friends. I might have known there wouldn’t be a woman in this muck hole with a human spark in her… I suppose you think you ought to hold out for the wedding bells. Go ahead; that’s your business. I can get what I want with any nigger prostitute down the street here… Good night.” Janey didn’t say anything. He drove off. She went home and went to bed.

All that August her father was dying, full of morphine, in the Georgetown hospital. The papers came out every day with big headlines about war in Europe, Liége, Louvain, Mons. Dreyfus and Carroll’s was in a fever. Big lawsuits over munitions patents were on. It began to be whispered about that the immaculate Mr. Dreyfus was an agent of the German government. Jerry came to see Janey one noon to apologize for having been so rude that night and to tell her that he had a job as a war correspondent and was leaving in a week for the front. They had a good lunch together. He talked about spies and British intrigue and pan-Slavism and the assassination of Jaurès and the socialist revolution and laughed all the time and said everything was well on its way to ballyhack. She thought he was wonderful and wanted to say something about their being engaged and felt very tender towards him and scared he’d be killed, but suddenly it was time for her to go back to the office and neither of them had brought the matter up. He walked back to the Riggs Building with her and said good-bye and gave her a big kiss right there in front of everybody and ran off promising he’d write from New York. At that moment Alice came up on her way to Mrs. Robinson’s and Janey found herself telling her that she was engaged to be married to Jerry Burnham and that he was going to Europe to the war as a war correspondent.

When her father died in early September it was a great relief to all concerned. Only, coming back from Oak Hill Cemetery all the things she’d wanted as a girl came back to her, and the thought of Alec, and everything seemed so unhappy that she couldn’t stand it. Her mother was very quiet and her eyes were very red and she kept saying that she was so glad that there’d be room on the lot for her to be buried in Oak Hill too. She’d have hated for him to be buried in any other cemetery than Oak Hill. It was so beautiful and all the nicest people in Georgetown were buried there.

With the insurance money Mrs. Williams did over the house and fixed up the two top floors to rent out as apartments. That was the chance Janey had been waiting for for so long to get a place of her own and she and Alice got a room in a house on Massachusetts Avenue near the Carnegie Library, with cooking privileges. So one Saturday afternoon she phoned from the drugstore for a taxicab and set out with her suitcase and trunk and a pile of framed pictures from her room on the seat beside her. The pictures were two color prints of Indians by Remington, a Gibson girl, a photograph of the battleship Connecticut in the harbor of Villefranche that Joe had sent her and an enlarged photograph of her father in uniform standing at the wheel of an imaginary ship against a stormy sky furnished by a photographer in Norfolk, Va. Then there were two unframed colorprints by Maxfield Parrish that she’d bought recently and a framed snapshot of Joe in baseball clothes. The little picture of Alec she’d wrapped among her things in her suitcase. The cab smelt musty and rumbled along the streets. It was a crisp autumn day, the gutters were full of dry leaves. Janey felt scared and excited as if she were starting out all alone on a journey.

That fall she read a great many newspapers and magazines and The Beloved Vagabond, by W. J. Locke. She began to hate the Germans that were destroying art and culture, civilization, Louvain. She waited for a letter from Jerry but a letter never came.

One afternoon she was coming out of the office a little late, who should be standing in the hall by the elevator but Joe. “Hello, Janey,” he said. “Gee, you look like a million dollars.” She was so glad to see him she could hardly speak, could only squeeze his arm tight. “I just got paid off… I thought I better come up here and see the folks before I spent all my jack… I’ll take you out and set you up to a big feed an’ a show if you want…” He was sunburned and his shoulders were broader than when he left. His big hands and knotty wrists stuck out of a newlooking blue suit that was too tight for him at the waist. The sleeves were too short too.

“Did you go to Georgetown?” she asked him.

“Yare.”

“Did you go up to the cemetery?”

“Mommer wanted me to go, but what’s the use?”

“Poor mother, she’s so sentimental about it…”

They walked along. Joe didn’t say anything. It was a hot day. Dust blew down the street.

Janey said: “Joe, dear, you must tell me all about your adventures… You must have been to some wonderful places. It’s thrilling having a brother in the navy.”

“Janey, pipe down about the navy, will yer?… I don’t want to hear about it. I deserted in B A, see, and shipped out east on a limey, on an English boat… That’s a dog’s life too, but anything’s better than the U.S.N.”

“But, Joe…”

“Ain’t nothin’ to worry about…”

“But, Joe, what happened?”

“You won’t say a word to a livin’ soul, will you, Janey? You see I got in a scrap with a petty officer tried to ride me too damn hard. I socked him in the jaw an’ kinda mauled him, see, an’ things looked pretty bad for me, so I made tracks for the tall timber…. That’s all.” “Oh, Joe, and I was hoping you’d get to be an officer.”

“A gob get to be an officer…? A fat chance.”

She took him to the Mabillion, where Jerry had taken her. At the door Joe peered in critically. “Is this the swellest joint you know, Janey? I got a hundred iron men in my pocket.” “Oh, this is dreadfully expensive… It’s a French restaurant. And you oughtn’t to spend all your money on me.” “Who the hell else do you want me to spend it on?” Joe sat down at a table and Janey went back to ’phone Alice that she wouldn’t be home till late. When she got back to the table, Joe was pulling some little packages wrapped in red and greenstriped tissuepaper out of his pockets. “Oh, what’s that?” “You open ’em, Janey… It’s yours.” She opened the packages. They were some lace collars and an embroidered tablecloth. “The lace is Irish and that other’s from Madeira… I had a Chinese vase for you too but some son of a bit… son of a gun snitched it on me.” “That was awful sweet of you to think of me… I appreciate it.” Joe fidgeted with his knife and fork. “We gotta git a move on, Janey, or we’ll be late for the show… I got tickets for ‘The Garden of Allah.’”

When they came out of the Belasco onto Lafayette Square that was cool and quiet with a rustle of wind in the trees Joe said, “Ain’t so much; I seen a real sandstorm onct,” and Janey felt bad about her brother being so rough and uneducated. The play made her feel like when she was little, full of uneasy yearn for foreign countries and a smell of incense and dark eyes and dukes in tailcoats tossing money away on the gaming tables of Monte Carlo, monks and the mysterious east. If Joe was only a little better educated he’d be able to really appreciate all the interesting ports he visited. He left her on the stoop of the house on Massachusetts Avenue. “Where are you going to stay, Joe?” she asked. “I guess I’ll shove along back to New York an’ pick up a berth…. Sailoring’s a pretty good graft with this war on.” “You mean tonight?” He nodded. “I wish I had a bed for you but I couldn’t very well on account of Alice.” “Naw, I doan want to hang round this dump… I jus’ came up to say hello.” “Well, goodnight, Joe, be sure and write.” “Goodnight, Janey, I sure will.” She watched him walk off down the street until he went out of sight in the shadows of the trees. It made her unhappy to see him go all alone down the shadowed street. It wasn’t quite the shambling walk of a sailor, but he looked like a working man all right. She sighed and went into the house. Alice was waiting up for her. She showed Alice the lace and they tried on the collars and agreed that it was very pretty and quite valuable.

Janey and Alice had a good time that winter. They took to smoking cigarettes and serving tea to their friends Sunday afternoons. They read novels by Arnold Bennett and thought of themselves as bachelor girls. They learned to play bridge and shortened their skirts. At Christmas Janey got a hundred dollar bonus and a raise to twenty a week from Dreyfus and Carroll. She began telling Alice that she was an old stickinthemud to stay on at Mrs. Robinson’s. For herself she began to have ambitions of a business career. She wasn’t afraid of men any more and kidded back and forth with young clerks in the elevator about things that would have made her blush the year before. When Johnny Edwards or Morris Byer took her out to the movies in the evening she didn’t mind having them put their arms around her, or having them kiss her once or twice while she was fumbling in her bag for her latchkey. She knew just how to catch a boy’s hand by the wrist and push it away without making any scene when he tried to get too intimate. When Alice used to talk warningly about men having just one idea, she’d laugh and say, “Oh, they’re not so smart.” She discovered that just a little peroxide in the water when she washed her hair made it blonder and took away that mousey look. Sometimes when she was getting ready to go out in the evening she’d put a speck of rouge on her little finger and rub it very carefully on her lips.

in the mouth of the Schuylkill Mr. Pierce came on board ninety-six years old and sound as a dollar He’d been officeboy in Mr. Pierce’s office about the time He’d enlisted and missed the battle of Antietam on account of having dysentery so bad and Mr. Pierce’s daughter Mrs. Black called Him Jack and smoked little brown cigarettes and we played Fra Diavolo on the phonograph and everybody was very jolly when Mr. Pierce tugged at his dundrearies and took a toddy and Mrs. Black lit cigarettes one after another and they talked about old days and about how His father had wanted Him to be a priest and His poor mother had had such trouble getting together enough to eat for that family of greedy boys and His father was a silent man and spoke mostly Portugee and when he didn’t like the way a dish was cooked that came on the table he’d pick it up and sling it out of the window and He wanted to go to sea and studied law at the University and in Mr. Pierce’s office and He sang

GREEKS IN BATTLE FLEE BEFORE COPS

It was in the Chicago Convention in ’96 that the prizewinning boy orator the minister’s son whose lips had never touched liquor let out his silver voice so that it filled the gigantic hall, filled the ears of the plain people:

it was hot as a bakeoven going through the canal from Delaware City and turtles sunning themselves tumbled off into the thick ocher ripple we made in passing and He was very gay and She was feeling well for once and He made us punch of tea and mint and a little Saint Croix rum but it was hot as the hinges of Delaware and we saw scarlet tanagers and redwing blackbirds and kingfishers cackled wrathfully as the yellow wave from the white bow rustled the reeds and the cattails and the sweetflag and He talked about lawreform and what politicians were like and where were the Good Men in this country and said Why thinking the way I think I couldn’t get elected to be notary public in any county in the state not with all the money in the world no not even dogcatcher

He was born in Wilmington, Delaware, on the Fourth of July. Poor Mrs. Moorehouse could hear the firecrackers popping and crackling outside the hospital all through her laborpains. And when she came to a little and they brought the baby to her she asked the nurse in a trembling husky whisper if she thought it could have a bad effect on the baby all that noise, prenatal influence you know. The nurse said the little boy ought to grow up to be very patriotic and probably president being born on the Glorious Fourth and went on to tell a long story about a woman who’d been frightened by having a beggar stick his hand out suddenly right under her nose just before the child was born and the child had been born with six fingers, but Mrs. Moorehouse was too weak to listen and went off to sleep. Later Mr. Moorehouse came by on his way home from the depot where he worked as stationagent and they decided to call the kid John Ward after Mrs. Moorehouse’s father who was a farmer in Iowa and pretty well off. Then Mr. Moorehouse went round to Healy’s to get tanked up because he was a father and because it was the Glorious Fourth and Mrs. Moorehouse went off to sleep again.

Johnny grew up in Wilmington. He had two brothers, Ben and Ed, and three sisters, Myrtle, Edith and Hazel, but everybody said he was the bright boy of the family as well as the eldest. Ben and Ed were stronger and bigger than he was, but he was the marbles champion of the public school, getting considerable fame one term by a corner in agates he maneuvered with the help of a little Jewish boy named Ike Goldberg; they managed to rent out agates to other boys for a cent a week for ten.

When the Spanish War came on everybody in Wilmington was filled with martial enthusiasm, all the boys bothered their parents to buy them Rough Rider suits and played filibusters and Pawnee Indian wars and Colonel Roosevelt and Remember the Maine and the White Fleet and the Oregon steaming through the Straits of Magellan. Johnny was down on the wharf one summer evening when Admiral Cervera’s squadron was sighted in battle formation passing through the Delaware Capes by a detachment of the state militia who immediately opened fire on an old colored man crabbing out in the river. Johnny ran home like Paul Revere and Mrs. Moorehouse gathered up her six children and pushing two of them in a babycarriage and dragging the other four after her, made for the railway station to find her husband. By the time they’d decided to hop on the next train to Philadelphia news went round that the Spanish squadron was just some boats fishing for menhaden and that the militiamen were being confined in barracks for drunkenness. When the old colored man had hauled in his last crabline he sculled back to shore and exhibited to his cronies several splintery bulletholes in the side of his skiff.

When Johnny graduated from highschool as head of the debating team, class orator and winner of the prize essay contest with an essay entitled “Roosevelt, the Man of the Hour,” everybody felt he ought to go to college. But the financial situation of the family was none too good, his father said, shaking his head. Poor Mrs. Moorehouse who had been sickly since the birth of her last child had taken to the hospital to have an operation and would stay there for some time to come. The younger children had had measles, whooping cough, scarlet fever and mumps all year. The amortization on the house was due and Mr. Moorehouse had not gotten the expected raise that New Year’s. So instead of getting a job as assistant freight agent or picking peaches down near Dover the way he had other summers Johnny went round Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania as agent for a bookdistributing firm. In September he received a congratulatory note from them saying that he was the first agent they had ever had who sold a hundred consecutive sets of Bryant’s History of the United States. On the strength of it he went out to West Philadelphia and applied for a scholarship at the U of P. He got the scholarship, passed the exams and enrolled himself as a freshman, indicating BS as the degree he was working for. The first term he commuted from Wilmington to save the expense of a room. Saturdays and Sundays he picked up a little money taking subscriptions for Stoddard’s Lectures. Everything would have gone right if his father hadn’t slipped on the ice on the station steps one January morning in Johnny’s sophomore year and broken his hip. He was taken to the hospital and one complication after another ensued. A little shyster lawyer, Ike Goldberg’s father, in fact, went to see Moorehouse, who lay with his leg in the air in a Balkan frame, and induced him to sue the railroad for a hundred thousand dollars under the employers’ liability law. The railroad lawyers got up witnesses to prove that Moorehouse had been drinking heavily and the doctor who had examined him testified that he showed traces of having used liquor the morning of the fall, so by midsummer he hobbled out of hospital on crutches, without a job and without any compensation. That was the end of Johnny’s college education. The incident left in his mind a lasting bitterness against drink and against his father.

Mrs. Moorehouse had to write for help from her father to save the house, but his answer took so long that the bank foreclosed before it came and it wouldn’t have done much good anyway because it was only a hundred dollars in ten dollar bills in a registered envelope and just about paid the cost of moving to a floor in a fourfamily frame house down by the Pennsylvania freightyards. Ben left highschool and got a job as assistant freightagent and Johnny went into the office of Hillyard and Miller, Real Estate. Myrtle and her mother baked pies evenings and made angelcake to send to the Woman’s Exchange and Mr. Moorehouse sat in an invalid chair in the front parlor cursing shyster lawyers and the lawcourts and the Pennsylvania Railroad.

This was a bad year for Johnny Moorehouse. He was twenty and didn’t drink or smoke and was keeping himself clean for the lovely girl he was going to marry, a girl in pink organdy with golden curls and a sunshade. He’d sit in the musty little office of Hillyard and Miller, listing tenements for rent, furnished rooms, apartments, desirable lots for sale, and think of the Boer war and the Strenuous Life and prospecting for gold. From his desk he could see a section of a street of frame houses and a couple of elmtrees through a grimy windowpane. In front of the window was in summer a conical wiremesh flytrap where caught flies buzzed and sizzled, and in winter a little openface gas-stove that had a peculiar feeble whistle all its own. Behind him, back of a groundglass screen that went part way to the ceiling Mr. Hillyard and Mr. Miller sat facing each other at a big double desk, smoking cigars and fiddling with papers. Mr. Hillyard was a sallowfaced man with black hair a little too long who had been on the way to making a reputation for himself as a criminal lawyer when, through some scandal that nobody ever mentioned as it was generally agreed in Wilmington that he had lived it down, he had been disbarred. Mr. Miller was a little roundfaced man who lived with his elderly mother. He had been forced into the realestate business by the fact that his father had died leaving him building lots scattered over Wilmington and the outskirts of Philadelphia and nothing else to make a living from. Johnny’s job was to sit in the outer office and be polite to prospective buyers, to list the properties, attend to advertising, type the firm’s letters, empty the wastebaskets and the dead flies out of the flytrap, take customers to visit apartments, houses and buildinglots and generally make himself useful and agreeable. It was on this job that he found out that he had a pair of bright blue eyes and that he could put on an engaging boyish look that people liked. Old ladies looking for houses used to ask specially to have that nice young man show them round, and business men who dropped in for a chat with Mr. Hillyard or Mr. Miller would nod their heads and look wise and say, “Bright boy, that.” He made eight dollars a week.

Outside of the Strenuous Life and a lovely girl to fall in love with him there was one thing Johnny Moorehouse’s mind dwelt on as he sat at his desk listing desirable five and sevenroom dwelling-houses, drawingroom, diningroom, kitchen and buder’s pantry, three master’s bedrooms and bath, maid’s room, water, electricity, gas, healthy location on gravelly soil in restricted residential area: He wanted to be a songwriter. He had a fair tenor voice and could carry Larboard Watch Ahoy or I Dreamed I Dwelt in Marble Halls or Through Pleasures and Palaces Sadly I Roam very adequately. Sunday afternoons he took music lessons with Miss O’Higgins, a shriveled little Irishwoman, unmarried, of about thirtyfive, who taught him the elements of the piano and listened with rapture to his original compositions that she took down for him on musicpaper that she had all ready ruled when he came. One song that began

the spring you could see Halley’s Comet over the elms from the back topfloor windows of the Upper House Mr. Greenleaf said you would have to go to confirmation class and be confirmed when the bishop came and next time you went canoeing you told Skinny that you wouldn’t be confirmed because you believed in camping and canoeing and Halley’s Comet and the Universe and the sound the rain made on the tent the night you’d both read The Hound of the Baskervilles and you’d hung out the steak on a tree and a hound must have smelt it because he kept circling round you and howling something terrible and you were so scared (but you didn’t say that, you don’t know what you said)

and not in church and Skinny said if you’d never been baptized you couldn’t be confirmed and you went and told Mr. Greenleaf and he looked very chilly and said you’d better not go to confirmation class any more and after that you had to go to church Sundays but you could go to either one you liked so sometimes you went to the Congregational and sometimes to the Episcopalian and the Sunday the bishop came you couldn’t see Halley’s Comet any more and you saw the others being confirmed and it lasted for hours because there were a lot of little girls being confirmed too and all you could hear was mumble mumble this thy child mumble mumble this thy child and you wondered if you’d be alive next time Halley’s Comet came round

I was in front of the national palace when the firing began. I ran across the Plaza with other thousands of scurrying men women and children scores of whom fell in their flight to cover

When she was small she hated everything. She hated her father, a stout redhaired man smelling of whiskers and stale pipetobacco. He worked in an office in the stockyards and came home with the stockyards stench on his clothes and told bloody jokes about butchering sheep and steers and hogs and men. Eleanor hated smells and the sight of blood. Nights she used to dream she lived alone with her mother in a big clean white house in Oak Park in winter when there was snow on the ground and she’d been setting a white linen tablecloth with bright white silver and she’d set white flowers and the white meat of chicken before her mother who was a society lady in a dress of white samite, but there’d suddenly be a tiny red speck on the table and it would grow and grow and her mother would make helpless fluttering motions with her hands and she’d try to brush it off but it would grow a spot of blood welling into a bloody blot spreading over the tablecloth and she’d wake up out of the nightmare smelling the stockyards and screaming.

When she was sixteen in highschool she and a girl named Isabelle swore together that if a boy ever touched them they’d kill themselves. But that fall the girl got pneumonia after scarlet fever and died.

The only other person Eleanor liked was Miss Oliphant, her English teacher. Miss Oliphant had been born in England. Her parents had come to Chicago when she was a girl in her teens. She was a great enthusiast for the English language, tried to get her pupils to use the broad “a” and felt that she had a right to some authority in matters pertaining to English literature due to being distantly related to a certain Mrs. Oliphant who’d been an English literary lady in the middle nineteenth century and had written so beautifully about Florence. So she’d occasionally have her more promising pupils, those who seemed the children of nicer parents, to tea in her little flat where she lived all alone with a sleepy blue Persian cat and a bullfinch, and talk to them about Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson’s pithy sayings and Keats and cor cordium and how terrible it was he died so young and Tennyson and how rude he’d been to women and about how they changed the guard at Whitehall and the grapevine Henry the Eighth planted at Hampton Court and the illfated Mary Queen of Scots. Miss Oliphant’s parents had been Catholics and had considered the Stuarts the rightful heirs to the British throne, and used to pass their wineglasses over the waterpitcher when they drank to the king. All this thrilled the boys and girls very much and particularly Eleanor and Isabelle, and Miss Oliphant used to give them high grades for their compositions and encourage them to read. Eleanor was very fond of her and very attentive in class. Just to hear Miss Oliphant pronounce a phrase like “The Great Monuments of English Prose,” or “The Little Princes in the Tower” or “St. George and Merrie England” made small chills go up and down her spine. When Isabelle died, Miss Oliphant was so lovely about it, had her to tea with her all alone and read her “Lycidas” in a clear crisp voice and told her to read “Adonais” when she got home, but that she couldn’t read it to her because she knew she’d break down if she did. Then she talked about her best friend when she’d been a girl who’d been an Irish girl with red hair and a clear warm white skin like Crown Darby, my dear, and how she’d gone to India and died of the fever, and how Miss Oliphant had never thought to survive her grief and how Crown Darby had been invented and the inventor had spent his last penny working on the formula for this wonderful china and had needed some gold as the last ingredient, and they had been starving to death and there had been nothing left but his wife’s wedding ring and how they kept the fire in the furnace going with their chairs and tables and at least he had produced this wonderful china that the royal family used exclusively.

It was Miss Oliphant who induced Eleanor to take courses at the Art Institute. She had reproductions on her walls of pictures by Rossetti and Burne-Jones and talked to Eleanor about the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. She made her feel that Art was something ivory white and very pure and noble and distant and sad.

When her mother died of pernicious anaemia Eleanor was a thin girl of eighteen, working days in a laceshop in the Loop and studying commercial art evenings at the Art Institute. After the funeral she went home and packed her belongings and moved to Moody House. She hardly ever went to see her father. He sometimes called her up on the phone but whenever she could she avoided answering. She wanted to forget all about him.

In the laceshop they liked her because she was so refined and gave the place what old Mrs. Lang who owned the store called “an indefinable air of chic,” but they only paid her ten dollars a week and five of that went for rent and board. She didn’t eat much, but the food was so bad in the dining hall and she hated sitting with the other girls so that sometimes she had to get an extra bottle of milk to drink in her room and some weeks she’d find herself without money to buy pencils and drawingpaper with and would have to go by to see her father and get a couple of dollars from him. He gave it to her gladly enough, but somehow that made her hate him more than ever.

Evenings she used to sit in her little sordid cubbyhole of a room with its ugly bedspread and ugly iron bed, while a sound of hymnsinging came up from the common hall, reading Ruskin and Pater out of the public library. Sometimes she would let the book drop on her knees and sit all evening staring at the dim reddish electriclight bulb that was all the management allowed.

Whenever she asked for a raise Mrs. Lang said, “Why, you’ll be marrying soon and leaving me, dear; a girl with your style, indefinable chic can’t stay single long, and then you won’t need it.”

Sundays she usually took the train out to Pullman where her mother’s sister had a little house. Aunt Betty was a quiet housewifely little woman who laid all Eleanor’s peculiarities to girlish fancies and kept a bright lookout for a suitable young man she could corral as a beau for her. Her husband, Uncle Joe, was foreman in a rolling mill. Many years in the rolling mill had made him completely deaf, but he claimed that actually in the mill he could hear what was said perfectly. If it was summer he spent Sunday hoeing his gardenpatch where he specialized in lettuce and asters. In winter or in bad weather he’d be sitting in the front room reading The Railroad Man’s Magazine. Aunt Betty would cook an elaborate dinner from recipes out of The Ladies’ Home Journal and they’d ask Eleanor to arrange the flowers for them on the dinnertable. After dinner Aunt Betty would wash the dishes and Eleanor would wipe them, and while the old people took their nap she would sit in the front room reading the society section of The Chicago Tribune. After supper if it was fine the old people would walk down to the station with her and put her on the train, and Aunt Betty would say that it was a shocking shame for a lovely girl like her to be living all alone in the big city. Eleanor would smile a bright bitter smile and say that she wasn’t afraid.

The cars going home would be crowded Sunday nights with young men and girls sticky and mussed up and sunburned from an outing in the country or on the dunes. Eleanor hated them and the Italian families with squalling brats that filled the air with a reek of wine and garlic and the Germans redfaced from a long afternoon’s beer-drinking and the drunk Finn and Swedish workmen who stared at her with a blue alcoholic gleam out of wooden faces. Sometimes a man would try to start something and she’d have to move into another car.

Once, when the car was very crowded a curlyhaired man rubbed himself up against her suggestively. The crowd was so thick she couldn’t pull herself away from him. She could hardly keep from screaming out for help; it was only that she felt it was so vulgar to make a fuss. Uncontrollable dizziness came over her when she finally forced her way out at her station, and she had to stop at a drugstore on the way home for a little aromatic spirits of ammonia. She rushed through the hall of Moody House and up to her room still trembling. She was nauseated and one of the other girls found her being sick in the bathroom and looked at her so queerly. She was very unhappy at times like that and thought of suicide. She had painful cramps during her monthly periods and used to have to stay in bed at least one day every month. Often she felt miserable for a whole week.

One Fall day she had phoned Mrs. Lang that she was sick and would have to stay in bed. She went back up to her room and lay down on the bed and read Romola. She was reading through the complete works of George Eliot that were in the Moody House library. When the old scrubwoman opened the door to make the bed she said, “Sick… I’ll clean up, Mrs. Koontz.” In the afternoon she got hungry and the sheets were all rumply under her back and although she felt rather ashamed of herself for feeling able to go out when she’d told Mrs. Lang she was too sick to move she suddenly felt she would suffocate if she stayed in her room another minute. She dressed carefully and went downstairs feeling a little furtive. “So you’re not so sick after all,” said Mrs. Biggs, the matron, when she passed her in the hall. “I just felt I needed a breath of air.” “Too bad about you,” she heard Mrs. Biggs say under her breath as she went out the door. Mrs. Biggs was very suspicious of Eleanor because she was an art student.

Feeling a little faint she stopped at a drugstore and had some aromatic spirits of ammonia in water. Then she took a car down to Grant Park. A tremendous northwest wind was blowing grit and papers in whirls along the lakefront.

She went into the Art Institute and up into the Stickney Room to see the Whistlers. She liked the Art Institute better than anything else in Chicago, better than anything else in the world, the quiet, the absence of annoying men, the smooth smell of varnish from the paintings. Except on Sundays when the crowd came and it was horrid. Today there was no one in the Stickney Room but another girl welldressed in a gray fox neckpiece and a little gray hat with a feather in it. The other girl was looking fixedly at the portrait of Manet. Eleanor was interested; she rather pretended to look at the Whistlers than look at them. Whenever she could she looked at the other girl. She found herself standing beside the other girl also looking at the portrait of Manet. Suddenly their eyes met. The other girl had palebrown almondshaped eyes rather far apart. “I think he’s the best painter in the world,” she said combatively as if she wanted somebody to deny it. “I think he’s a lovely painter,” said Eleanor, trying to keep her voice from trembling. “I love that picture.” “You know that’s not by Manet himself, that’s by Fantin-Latour,” said the other girl. “Oh, yes, of course,” said Eleanor.

There was a pause. Eleanor was afraid that would be all, but the other girl said, “What other pictures do you like?” Eleanor looked carefully at the Whistler; then she said slowly, “I like Whistler and Corot.” “I do, too, but I like Millet best. He’s so round and warm… Have you ever been to Barbizon?” “No, but I’d love to.” There was a pause. “But I think Millet’s a little coarse, don’t you?” Eleanor ventured. “You mean that chromo of the Angelus? Yes, I simply loathe and despise religious feeling in a picture, don’t you?” Eleanor didn’t quite know what to say to that, so she shook her head and said, “I love Whistler so; when I’ve been looking at them I can look out of the window and everything looks, you know, pastelly like that.”

“I have an idea,” said the other girl who had been looking at a little watch she had in her handbag. “I don’t have to be home till six. Why don’t you come and have tea with me? I know a little place where you can get very good tea, a German pastry shop. I don’t have to be home till six and we can have a nice long chat. You won’t think it’s unconventional of me asking you, will you? I like unconventionality, don’t you? Don’t you hate Chicago?”

Yes, Eleanor did hate Chicago and conventional people and all that. They went to the pastryshop and drank tea and the girl in gray, whose name was Eveline Hutchins, took hers with lemon in it. Eleanor talked a great deal and made the other girl laugh. Her father, Eleanor found herself explaining, was a painter who lived in Florence and whom she hadn’t seen since she was a little girl. There had been a divorce and her mother had married again, a business man connected with Armour and Company, and now her mother was dead and she had only some relatives at Lake Forest; she studied at the Art Institute but was thinking of giving it up because the teachers didn’t suit her. She thought living in Chicago was just too horrible and wanted to go East. “Why don’t you go to Florence and live with your father?” asked Eveline Hutchins.

“Well, I might some day, when my ship comes in,” said Eleanor.

“Oh, well, I’ll never be rich,” said Eveline. “My father’s a clergyman

… Let’s go to Florence together, Eleanor, and call on your father. If we arrived there he couldn’t very well throw us out.”

“I’d love to take a trip some day.”

“It’s time I was home. By the way, where do you live? Let’s meet tomorrow afternoon and look at all the pictures together.”

“I’m afraid I’ll be busy tomorrow.”

“Well, maybe you can come to supper some night. I’ll ask mother when I can have you. It’s so rare to meet a girl you can talk to. We live on Drexel Boulevard. Here’s my card. I’ll send you a postcard and you’ll promise to come, won’t you?”

“I’d love to, if it’s not earlier than seven… You see I have an occupation that keeps me busy every afternoon except Sunday, and Sundays I usually go out to see my relatives in…”

“In Lake Forest?”

“Yes… When I’m in town I live at a sort of Y.W.C.A. place, Moody House; it’s plebeian but convenient… I’ll write down the address on this card.” The card was of Mrs. Lang’s, “Imported Laces and Hand-Embroidered Fabrics.” She wrote her address on it, scratched out the other side and handed it to Eveline. “That’s lovely,” she said, “I’ll drop you a card this very night and you’ll promise to come, won’t you?”

Eleanor saw her onto the streetcar and started to walk slowly along the street. She had forgotten all about feeling sick, but now that the other girl had gone she felt let down and shabbily dressed and lonely picking her way through the windy evening bustle of the streets.

Eleanor made several friends through Eveline Hutchins. The first time she went to the Hutchinses she was too awed to notice much, but later she felt freer with them, particularly as she discovered that they all thought her an interesting girl and very refined. There were Dr. and Mrs. Hutchins and two daughters and a son away at college. Dr. Hutchins was a Unitarian minister and very broadminded and Mrs. Hutchins did watercolors of flowers that were declared to show great talent. The elder daughter, Grace, had been at school in the East, at Vassar, and was thought to have shown ability in a literary way, the son was taking postgraduate Greek at Harvard and Eveline was taking the most interesting courses right there at Northwestern. Dr. Hutchins was a softvoiced man with a large smooth pinkish face and large smooth white deadlooking hands. The Hutchinses were all planning to go abroad next year which would be Dr. Hutchins’ sabbatical. Eleanor had never heard talk like that before and it thrilled her.

Then one evening Eveline took her to Mrs. Shuster’s. “You mustn’t say anything about Mrs. Shuster at home, will you?” said Eveline as they were coming down from the Elevated. “Mr. Shuster is an art dealer and my father thinks they’re a little too Bohemian… It’s just because Annie Shuster came to our house one night and smoked all through dinner…. I said we’d go to the concert at the Auditorium.”

Eleanor had made herself a new dress, a very simple white dress, with a little green on it, not exactly an evening dress, but one she could wear any time, for the occasion, and when Annie Shuster, a dumpy little redhaired woman with a bouncy manner of walking and talking helped them off with their wraps in the hall she exclaimed how pretty it was. “Why, yes, it’s lovely,” said Eveline. “In fact, you’re looking pretty as a peach tonight, Eleanor.” “I bet that dress wasn’t made in this town… Looks like Paris to me,” said Mrs. Shuster. Eleanor smiled deprecatingly and blushed a little and looked handsomer than ever.

There were a great many people packed into two small rooms and cigarette smoke and coffeecups and smell of some kind of punch. Mr. Shuster was a whitehaired grayfaced man with a head too large for his body and a tired manner. He talked like an Englishman. There were several young men standing round him; one of them Eleanor had known casually when she had studied at the Art Institute. His name was Eric Egstrom and she had always liked him; he was tow-haired and blue-eyed and had a little blond mustache. She could see that Mr. Shuster thought a lot of him. Eveline took her around and introduced her to everybody and asked everybody questions that seemed sometimes disconcerting. Men and women both smoked and talked about books and pictures and about people Eleanor had never heard of. She looked around and didn’t say much and noticed the Greek silhouettes on the orange lampshades and the pictures on the walls which looked very odd indeed and the two rows of yellowbacked French books on the shelves and felt that she might learn a great deal there.

They went away early because Eveline had to go by the Auditorium to see what the program at the concert was for fear she might be asked about it, and Eric and another young man took them home. After they’d left Eveline at her house they asked Eleanor where she lived and she hated to say Moody House because it was in such a horridlooking street, so she made them walk with her to an Elevated station and ran up the steps quickly and wouldn’t let them come with her, although it scared her to go home alone as late as it was.

Many of Mrs. Lang’s customers thought Eleanor was French, on account of her dark hair, her thin oval face and her transparent skin. In fact, one day when a Mrs. McCormick that Mrs. Lang suspected might be one of “the” McCormicks asked after that lovely French girl who waited on her before, Mrs. Lang got an idea. Eleanor would have to be French from now on; so she bought her twenty tickets at the Berlitz School and said she could have the hour off in the morning between nine and ten if she would go and take French lessons there. So all through December and January Eleanor studied French three times a week with an old man in a smelly alpaca jacket and began to slip a phrase in now and then as unconcernedly as she could when she was talking to the customers, and when there was anybody in the shop Mrs. Lang always called her “Mademoiselle.”

She worked hard and borrowed yellowbacked books from the Shusters to read in the evenings with a dictionary and soon she knew more French than Eveline did who had had a French governess when she was little. One day at the Berlitz School she found she had a new teacher. The old man had pneumonia and she had a young Frenchman instead. He was a thin young man with a sharp blueshaved chin and large brown eyes with long lashes. Eleanor liked him at once, his thin aristocratic hands and his aloof manner. After half an hour they had forgotten all about the lesson and were talking English. He spoke English with a funny accent but fluently. She particularly liked the throaty way he pronounced “r.”

Next time she was all tingling going up the stairs to see if it would be the same young man. It was. He told her that the old man had died. She felt she ought to be sorry but she wasn’t. The young man noticed how she felt and screwed his face up into a funny half laughing, half crying expression and said, “Vae victis.” Then he told her about his home in France and how he hated the conventional bourgeois life there and how he’d come to America because it was the land of youth and the future and skyscrapers and the Twentieth Century Limited and how beautiful he thought Chicago was. Eleanor had never heard anyone talk like that and told him he must have gone through Ireland and kissed the blarney stone. Then he looked very aggrieved and said, “Mademoiselle, c’est la pure vérité,” and she said she believed him absolutely and how interesting it was to meet him and how she must introduce him to her friend Eveline Hutchins. Then he went on to tell her how he’d lived in New Orleans and how he’d come as a steward on a French Line boat and how he’d worked as dishwasher and busboy and played the piano in cabarets and worse places than that and how much he loved Negroes and how he was a painter and wanted so much to get a studio and paint but that he hadn’t the money yet. Eleanor was a little chilled by the part about dishwashing and cabarets and colored people, but when he said he was interested in art she felt she really would have to introduce him to Eveline and she felt very bold and unconventional when she asked him to meet them at the Art Institute Sunday afternoon. After all if they decided against it they wouldn’t have to go.

Eveline was thrilled to death but they got Eric Egstrom to come along too, on account of Frenchmen having such a bad reputation. The Frenchman was very late and they began to be afraid he wasn’t coming or that they’d missed him in the crowd but at last Eleanor saw him coming up the big staircase. His name was Maurice Millet — no, no relation of the painter’s — and he shocked them all very much by refusing to look at any paintings in the Art Institute and saying that he thought it ought to be burned down and used a lot of words like cubism and futurism that Eleanor had never heard before. But she could see at once that he had made a great hit with Eveline and Eric; in fact, they hung on his every word and all through tea neither of them paid any attention to Eleanor. Eveline invited Maurice to the house and they all went to supper to Drexel Boulevard where Maurice was very polite to Dr. and Mrs. Hutchins, and on to the Shusters afterwards. They left the Shusters together and Maurice said that the Shusters were impossible and had very bad paintings on their walls, “Tout ça c’est affreusement pompier,” he said. Eleanor was puzzled but Eveline and Eric said that they understood perfectly that he meant they knew as little about art as a firemen’s convention, and they laughed a great deal.

The next time she saw Eveline, Eveline confessed that she was madly in love with Maurice and they both cried a good deal and decided that after all their beautiful friendship could stand even that. It was up in Eveline’s room at Drexel Boulevard. On the mantel was a portrait Eveline was trying to do of him in pastels from memory. They sat side by side on the bed, very close, with their arms round each other and talked solemnly about each other and Eleanor told about how she felt about men; Eveline didn’t feel quite that way but nothing could ever break up their beautiful friendship and they’d always tell each other everything.

About that time Eric Egstrom got a job in the interior decorating department at Marshall Field’s that paid him fifty a week. He got a fine studio with a northlight in an alley off North Clark Street and Maurice went to live with him there. The girls were there a great deal and they had many friends in and tea in glasses Russian style and sometimes a little Virginia Dare wine, so they didn’t have to go to the Shusters any more. Eleanor was always trying to get in a word alone with Eveline; and the fact that Maurice didn’t like Eveline the way Eveline liked him made Eveline very unhappy, but Maurice and Eric seemed to be thoroughly happy. They slept in the same bed and were always together. Eleanor used to wonder about them sometimes but it was so nice to know boys who weren’t horrid about women. They all went to the opera together and to concerts and art exhibitions — it was Eveline or Eric who usually bought the tickets and paid when they ate in restaurants — and Eleanor had a better time those few months than she’d ever had in her life before. She never went out to Pullman any more and she and Eveline talked about getting a studio together when the Hutchinses came back from their trip abroad. The thought that every day brought June nearer and that then she would lose Eveline and have to face the horrid gritty dusty sweaty Chicago Summer alone made Eleanor a little miserable sometimes, but Eric was trying to get her a job in his department at Marshall Field’s, and she and Eveline were following a course of lectures on interior decorating at the University evenings, and that gave her something to look forward to.

Maurice painted the loveliest pictures in pale buffs and violets of longfaced boys with big luminous eyes and long lashes, and longfaced girls that looked like boys, and Russian wolfhounds with big luminous eyes, and always in the back there were a few girders or a white skyscraper and a big puff of white clouds and Eveline and Eleanor thought it was such a shame that he had to go on teaching at the Berlitz School.

The day before Eveline sailed for Europe they had a little party at Egstrom’s place. Maurice’s pictures were around the walls and they were all glad and sorry and excited and tittered a great deal. Then Egstrom came in with the news that he had told his boss about Eleanor and how she knew French and had studied art and was so goodlooking and everything and Mr. Spotmann had said to bring her around at noon tomorrow, and that the job, if she could hold it down, would pay at least twentyfive a week. There had been an old lady in to see Maurice’s paintings and she was thinking of buying one; they all felt very gay and drank quite a lot of wine, so that in the end when it was time for goodbyes it was Eveline who felt lonesome at going away from them all, instead of Eleanor feeling lonesome at being left behind as she had expected.

When Eleanor walked back along the platform from seeing the Hutchinses all off for New York the next evening, and their bags all labelled for the steamship Baltic and their eyes all bright with the excitement of going East and going abroad and the smell of coalsmoke and the clang of engine bells and scurry of feet, she walked with her fists clenched and her sharppointed nails dug into the palms of her hands, saying to herself over and over again: “I’ll be going, too; it’s only a question of time; I’ll be going, too.”

she was a very fashionable lady and adored bullterriers and had a gentleman friend who was famous for his resemblance to King Edward

she was a very fashionable lady and there were white lilies in the hall No my dear I can’t bear the scent of them in the room and the bullterriers bit the tradespeople and the little newsy No my dear they never bit nice people and they’re quite topping with Billy and his friends

we all went coaching in a fourinhand and the man in the back blew a long horn and that’s where Dick Whittington stood with his cat and the bells there were hampers full of luncheon and she had gray eyes and was very kind to her friend’s little boy though she loathed simply loathed most children and her gentleman friend who was famous for his resemblance to King Edward couldn’t bear them or the bullterriers and she kept asking Why do you call him that?

and you thought of Dick Whittington and the big bells of Bow, three times Lord Mayor of London and looked into her gray eyes and said Maybe because I called him that the first time I saw him and I didn’t like her and I didn’t like the bullterriers and I didn’t like the fourinhand but I wished Dick Whittington three times Lord Mayor of London boomed the big bells of Bow and I wished Dick Whittington I wished I was home but I hadn’t any home and the man in the back blew a long horn

Working at Marshall Field’s was very different from working at Mrs. Lang’s. At Mrs. Lang’s she had only one boss but in the big store she seemed to have everybody in the department over her. Still she was so refined and cold and had such a bright definite little way of talking that although people didn’t like her much, she got along well. Even Mrs. Potter and Mr. Spotmann, the department heads, were a little afraid of her. News got around that she was a society girl and didn’t really have to earn a living at all. She was very sympathetic with the customers about their problems of homemaking and had a little humble-condescending way with Mrs. Potter and admired her clothes, so that at the end of a month Mrs. Potter said to Mr. Spotmann, “I think we have quite a find in the Stoddard girl,” and Mr. Spotmann without opening his white trap of an old woman’s mouth said, “I’ve thought so all along.”

When Eleanor stepped out on Randolph one sunny afternoon with her first week’s pay envelope in her hand she felt pretty happy. She had such a sharp little smile on her thin lips that a couple of people turned to look at her as she walked along ducking her head into the gusty wind to keep her hat from being blown off. She turned down Michigan Avenue towards the Auditorium looking at the bright shop windows and the verypale blue sky and the piles of dovegray fluffy clouds over the lake and the white blobs of steam from the locomotives. She went into the deep amberlit lobby of the Auditorium Annex, sat down all by herself at a wicker table in the corner of the lounge and sat there a long while all by herself drinking a cup of tea and eating buttered toast, ordering the waiter about with a crisp little refined monied voice.

Then she went to Moody House, packed her things and moved to the Eleanor Club, where she got a room for seven-fifty with board. But the room wasn’t much better and everything still had the gray smell of a charitable institution, so the next week she moved again to a small residential hotel on the North Side where she got room and board for fifteen a week. As that only left her a balance of three-fifty — it had turned out that the job only paid twenty, which actually only meant eighteen-fifty when insurance was taken off — she had to go to see her father again. She so impressed him with her rise in the world and the chances of a raise that he promised her five a week, although he was only making twenty himself and was planning to marry again, to a Mrs. O’Toole, a widow with five children who kept a boardinghouse out Elsdon way.

Eleanor refused to go to see her future stepmother, and made her father promise to send her the money in a moneyorder each week, as he couldn’t expect her to go all the way out to Elsdon to get it. When she left him she kissed him on the forehead and made him feel quite happy. All the time she was telling herself that this was the very last time.

Then she went back to the Hotel Ivanhoe and went up to her room and lay on her back on the comfortable brass bed looking round at her little room with its white woodwork and its pale yellow wallpaper with darker satiny stripes and the lace curtains in the window and the heavy hangings. There was a crack in the plaster of the ceiling and the carpet was worn, but the hotel was very refined, she could see that, full of old couples living on small incomes and the help were very elderly and polite and she felt at home for the first time in her life.

When Eveline Hutchins came back from Europe the next Spring wearing a broad hat with a plume on it, full of talk of the Salon des Tuileries and the Rue de la Paix and museums and art exhibitions and the opera, she found Eleanor a changed girl. She looked older than she was, dressed quietly and fashionably, had a new bitter sharp way of talking. She was thoroughly established in the interior decorating department at Marshall Field’s and expected a raise any day, but she wouldn’t talk about it. She had given up going to classes or haunting the Art Institute and spent a great deal of time with an old maiden lady who also lived at the Ivanhoe who was reputed to be very rich and very stingy, a Miss Eliza Perkins.

The first Sunday she was back Eleanor had Eveline to tea at the hotel and they sat in the stuffy lounge talking in refined whispers with the old lady. Eveline asked about Eric and Maurice, and Eleanor supposed that they were all right, but hadn’t seen them much since Eric had lost his job at Marshall Field’s. He wasn’t turning out so well as she had hoped, she said. He and Maurice had taken to drinking a great deal and going round with questionable companions, and Eleanor rarely got a chance to see them. She had dinner every evening with Miss Perkins and Miss Perkins thought a great deal of her and bought her clothes and took her with her driving in the park and sometimes to the theater when there was something really worth while on, Minnie Maddern Fiske or Guy Bates Post in an interesting play. Miss Perkins was the daughter of a wealthy saloon keeper and had been played false in her youth by a young lawyer whom she had trusted to invest some money for her and whom she had fallen in love with. He had run away with another girl and a number of cash certificates. Just how much she had left Eleanor hadn’t been able to find out, but as she always took the best seats at the theater and liked going to dinner at expensive hotels and restaurants and hired a carriage by the half day whenever she wanted one, she gathered that she must still be well off.

After they had left Miss Perkins to go to the Hutchinses for supper, Eveline said: “Well, I declare — I don’t see what you see in that… that little old maid… And here I was just bursting to tell you a million things and to ask you a million questions… I think it was mean of you.”

“I’m very devoted to her, Eveline. I thought you’d be interested in meeting any dear friend of mine.”

“Oh, of course I am, dear, but, gracious, I can’t make you out.” “Well, you won’t have to see her again, though I could tell by her manner that she thought you were lovely.”

Walking from the Elevated station to the Hutchinses it was more like old times again. Eleanor told about the hard feelings that were growing between Mr. Spotmann and Mrs. Potter and how they both wanted her to be on their side, and made Eveline laugh, and Eveline confessed that on the Kroonland coming back she had fallen very much in love with a man from Salt Lake City, such a relief after all those foreigners, and Eleanor teased her about it and said he was probably a Mormon and Eveline laughed and said, No, he was a judge, and admitted that he was married already. “You see,” said Eleanor, “of course he’s a Mormon.” But Eveline said that she knew he wasn’t and that if he’d divorce his wife she’d marry him in a minute. Then Eleanor said she didn’t believe in divorce and if they hadn’t gotten to the door they would have started quarrelling.

That winter she didn’t see much of Eveline. Eveline had many beaux and went out a great deal to parties and Eleanor used to read about her on the society page Sunday mornings. She was very busy and often too tired at night even to go to the theater with Miss Perkins. The row between Mrs. Potter and Mr. Spotmann had come to a head and the management had moved Mrs. Potter to another department and she had let herself plunk into an old Spanish chair and had broken down and cried right in front of the customers and Eleanor had had to take her to the dressing room and borrow smelling salts for her and help her do up her peroxide hair into the big pompadour again and consoled her by saying that she would probably like it much better over in the other building anyway. After that Mr. Spotmann was very goodnatured for several months. He occasionally took Eleanor out to lunch with him and they had a little joke that they laughed about together about Mrs. Potter’s pompadour wobbling when she’d cried in front of the customers. He sent Eleanor out on many little errands to wealthy homes, and the customers liked her because she was so refined and sympathetic and the other employees in the department hated her and nicknamed her “teacher’s pet.” Mr. Spotmann even said that he’d try to get her a percentage on commissions and talked often about giving her that raise to twenty-five a week.

Then one day Eleanor got home late to supper and the old clerk at the hotel told her that Miss Perkins had been stricken with heartfailure while eating steak and kidney pie for lunch and had died right in the hotel dining room and that the body had been removed to the Irving Funeral Chapel and asked her if she knew any of her relatives that should be notified. Eleanor knew nothing except that her financial business was handled by the Corn Exchange Bank and that she thought that she had nieces in Mound City, but didn’t know their names. Their clerk was very worried about who would pay for the removal of the body and the doctor and a week’s unpaid hotel bill and said that all her things would be held under seal until some qualified person appeared to claim them. He seemed to think Miss Perkins had died especially to spite the hotel management.

Eleanor went up to her room and locked the door and threw herself on the bed and cried a little, because she’d been fond of Miss Perkins.

Then a thought crept into her mind that made her heart beat fast. Suppose Miss Perkins had left her a fortune in her will. Things like that happened. Young men who opened church pews, coachman who picked up a handbag; old ladies were always leaving their fortunes to people like that.

She could see it in headlines MARSHALL FIELD EMPLOYEE INHERITS MILLION.

She couldn’t sleep all night and in the morning she found the manager of the hotel and offered to do anything she could. She called up Mr. Spotmann and coaxed him to give her the day off, explaining that she was virtually prostrated by Miss Perkins’s death. Then she called up the Corn Exchange Bank and talked to a Mr. Smith who had been in charge of the Perkins estate. He assured her that the bank would do everything in its power to protect the heirs and the residuary legatees and said that the will was in Miss Perkins’s safe deposit box and that he was sure everything was in proper legal form.

Eleanor had nothing to do all day, so she got hold of Eveline for lunch and afterwards they went to Keith’s together. She felt it wasn’t just proper to go to the theater with her old friend still lying at the undertaker’s, but she was so nervous and hysterical she had to do something to take her mind off this horrible shock. Eveline was very sympathetic and they felt closer than they had since the Hutchinses had gone abroad. Eleanor didn’t say anything about her hopes.

At the funeral there were only Eleanor and the Irish chambermaid at the hotel, an old woman who sniffled and crossed herself a great deal, and Mr. Smith and a Mr. Sullivan who was representing the Mound City relatives. Eleanor wore black and the undertaker came up to her and said, “Excuse me, miss, but I can’t refrain from remarking how lovely you look, just like a Bermuda lily.” It wasn’t as bad as she had expected and afterwards Eleanor and Mr. Smith and Mr. Sullivan, the representative of the law firm who had charge of the interests of the relatives, were quite jolly together coming out of the crematorium.

It was a sparkling October day and everybody agreed that October was the best month in the year and that the minister had read the funeral service very beautifully. Mr. Smith asked Eleanor wouldn’t she eat lunch with them as she was mentioned in the will, and Eleanor’s heart almost stopped beating and she cast down her eyes and said she’d be very pleased.

They all got into a taxi. Mr. Sullivan said it was pleasant to roll away from the funeral chapel and such gloomy thoughts. They went to lunch at de Yonghe’s and Eleanor made them laugh telling them about how they’d acted at the hotel and what a scurry everybody had been in, but when they handed her the menu said that she couldn’t eat a thing. Still when she saw the planked whitefish she said that she’d take just a little to pick to pieces on her plate. It turned out that the windy October air had made them all hungry and the long ride in the taxi. Eleanor enjoyed her lunch very much and after the whitefish she ate a little Waldorf salad and then a peach melba.

The gentlemen asked her whether she would mind if they smoked cigars and Mr. Smith put on a rakish look and said would she have a cigarette and she blushed and said no, she never smoked and Mr. Sullivan said he’d never respect a woman who smoked and Mr. Smith said some of the girls of the best families in Chicago smoked and as for himself he didn’t see the harm in it if they didn’t make chimneys of themselves. After lunch they walked across the street and went up in the elevator to Mr. Sullivan’s office and there they sat down in big leather chairs and Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Smith put on solemn faces and Mr. Smith cleared his throat and began to read the will. Eleanor couldn’t make it out at first and Mr. Smith had to explain to her that the bulk of the fortune of three million dollars was left to the Florence Crittenton home for wayward girls, but that the sum of one thousand dollars each was to the three nieces in Mound City and that a handsome diamond brooch in the form of a locomotive was left to Eleanor Stoddard and, “If you call at the Corn Exchange Bank some time tomorrow, Miss Stoddard,” said Mr. Smith, “I shall be very glad to deliver it to you.”

Eleanor burst out crying.

They both were very sympathetic and so touched that Miss Stoddard should be so touched by the remembrance of her old friend. As she left the office, promising to call for the brooch tomorrow, Mr. Sullivan was just saying in the friendliest voice, “Mr. Smith, you understand that I shall have to endeavor to break that will in the interests of the Mound City Perkinses,” and Mr. Smith said in the friendliest voice, “I suppose so, Mr. Sullivan, but I don’t see that you can get very far with it. It’s an ironclad, copper-riveted document if I do say so as shouldn’t, because I drew it up myself.”

So next day at eight Eleanor was on her way down to Marshall Field’s again and there she stayed for several years. She got the raise and the percentages on commissions and she and Mr. Spotmann got to be quite thick, but he never tried to make love to her and their relations were always formal; that was a relief to Eleanor because she kept hearing stories about floorwalkers and department heads forcing their attentions on the young girl employees and Mr. Elwood of the furniture department had been discharged for that very reason, when it came out that little Lizzie Dukes was going to have a baby, but perhaps that hadn’t been all Mr. Elwood’s fault as Lizzie Dukes didn’t look as if she was any better than she should be; anyway it seemed to Eleanor as if she’d spend the rest of her life furnishing other people’s new drawingrooms and diningrooms, matching curtains and samples of upholstery and wallpaper, smoothing down indignant women customers who’d been sent an oriental china dog instead of an inlaid teak teatable or who even after they’d chosen it themselves weren’t satisfied with the pattern on that cretonne.

She found Eveline Hutchins waiting for her one evening when the store closed. Eveline wasn’t crying but was deathly pale. She said she hadn’t had anything to eat for two days and wouldn’t Eleanor have some tea with her over at the Sherman House or anywhere.

They went to the Auditorium Annex and sat in the lounge and ordered tea and cinnamon toast and then Eveline told her that she’d broken off her engagement with Dirk McArthur and that she’d decided not to kill herself but to go to work. “I’ll never fall in love with anybody again, that’s all, but I’ve got to do something and you’re just wasting yourself in that stuffy department store, Eleanor; you know you never get a chance to show what you can do; you’re just wasting your ability.”

Eleanor said that she hated it like poison but what was she to do? “Why not do what we’ve been talking about all these years… Oh, people make me so mad, they never will have any nerve or do anything that’s fun or interesting… I bet you if we started a decorating business we’d have lots of orders. Sally Emerson’ll give us her new house to decorate and then everybody else’ll just have to have us to be in the swim… I don’t think people really want to live in the horrible stuffy places they live in; it’s just that they don’t know any better.”

Eleanor lifted her teacup and drank several little sips. She looked at her little white carefully manicured hand with pointed nails holding the teacup. Then she said, “But where’d we get the capital? We’d have to have a little capital to start on.”

“Dad’ll let us have something, I think, and maybe Sally Emerson might; she’s an awfully good sport and then our first commission’ll launch us… Oh, do come on, Eleanor; it’ll be such fun.”

“‘Hutchins and Stoddard, Interior Decorating,’” said Eleanor, putting down her teacup, “or maybe ‘Miss Hutchins and Miss Stoddard’; why, my dear, I think it’s a grand idea!” “Don’t you think just ‘Eleanor Stoddard and Eveline Hutchins’ would be better?”

“Oh, well, we can decide on the name when we hire a studio and have put it in the telephone book. Why don’t we put it this way, Eveline dear… if you can get your friend Mrs. Emerson to give us the decorating of her new house, we’ll go in for it, if not we’ll wait until we have a genuine order to start off on.” “All right; I know she will. I’ll run right out and see her now.” Eveline had a high color now. She got to her feet and leaned over Eleanor and kissed her. “Oh, Eleanor, you’re a darling.” “Wait a minute, we haven’t paid for our tea,” said Eleanor.

The next month the office was unbearable, and the customers’ complaints and leaving the Ivanhoe in a hurry every morning and being polite to Mr. Spotmann and thinking up little jokes to make him laugh. Her room at the Ivanhoe seemed small and sordid and the smell of cooking that came up through the window and the greasesmell of the old elevator. Several days she called up that she was sick and then found that she couldn’t stay in her room and roamed about the city going to shops and moving pictureshows and then getting suddenly dead tired and having to come home in a taxi that she couldn’t afford. She even went back to the Art Institute once in a while, but she knew all the pictures by heart and hadn’t the patience to look at them any more. Then at last Eveline got Mrs. Philip Paine Emerson to feeling that her new house couldn’t do without a novel note in the diningroom and they got her up an estimate much less than any of the established decorators was asking, and Eleanor had the pleasure of watching Mr. Spotmann’s astonished face when she refused to stay even with a raise to forty a week and said that she had a commission with a friend to decorate the new Paine Emerson mansion in Lake Forest.

“Well, my dear,” said Mr. Spotmann, snapping his square white mouth, “if you want to commit suicide of your career I won’t be the one to stop you. You can leave right this minute if you want to. Of course you forfeit the Christmas bonus.” Eleanor’s heart beat fast. She looked at the gray light that came through the office, and the yellow cardcatalogue case and the letters on a file and the little samples dangling from them. In the outer office Ella Bowen the stenographer had stopped typing; she was probably listening. Eleanor sniffed the lifeless air that smelt of chintz and furniturevarnish and steamheat and people’s breath and then she said, “All right, Mr. Spotmann, I will.”

It took her all day to get her pay and to collect the insurance money due her and she had a long wrangle with a cashier about the amount, so that it was late afternoon before she stepped out into the driving snow of the streets and went into a drugstore to call up Eveline.

Eveline had already rented two floors of an old Victorian house off Chicago Avenue, and they were busy all winter decorating the office and showrooms downstairs and the apartment upstairs where they were going to live, and doing Sally Emerson’s diningroom. They got a colored maid named Amelia who was a very good cook although she drank a little, and they had cigarettes and cocktails at the end of the afternoon and little dinners with wine, and found a downattheheels French dressmaker to make them evening gowns to wear when they went out with Sally Emerson and her set, and rode in taxis and got to know a lot of really interesting people. By Spring when they finally got a check for five hundred dollars out of Philip Paine Emerson they were a thousand dollars in the hole, but they were living the way they liked. The diningroom was considered a little extreme, but some people liked it, and a few more orders came. They made many friends and started going round with artists again and with special writers on The Daily News and The American who took them out to dinner in foreign restaurants that were very smoky and where they talked a great deal about modern French painting and the Middle West and going to New York. They went to the Armory Show and had a photograph of Brancusi’s Golden Bird over the desk in the office and copies of the Little Review and Poetry among the files of letters from clients and unpaid bills from wholesalers.

Eleanor went out a great deal with Tom Custis who was an elderly redfaced man, fond of music and chorusgirls and drinking, who belonged to all the clubs and for years had been a great admirer of Mary Garden. He had a box at the opera and a Stevens-Duryea and nothing to do except go to tailors and visit specialists and occasionally blackball a Jew or a newcomer applying for membership in some club he belonged to. The Armours had bought out his father’s meatpacking concern when he was still a college athlete and he hadn’t done a stroke of work since. He claimed to be thoroughly sick of social life and enjoyed taking an interest in the girls’ decorating business. He kept in close touch with Wall Street and would occasionally turn over to Eleanor a couple of shares that he was trading in. If they rose it was her gain, if they fell it was his loss. He had a wife in a private sanitarium and he and Eleanor decided they’d be just friends. Sometimes he was a little too affectionate coming home in a taxicab in the evening, but Eleanor would scold him and he’d be very contrite the next day, and send her great boxes of white flowers.

Eveline had several beaux, writers and illustrators and people like that, but they never had any money and ate and drank everything in the house when they came to dinner. One of them, Freddy Seargeant, was an actor and producer temporarily stranded in Chicago. He had friends in the Shubert office and his great ambition was to put on a pantomime like Reinhardt’s Sumurun, only based on Maya Indian stories. He had a lot of photographs of Maya ruins, and Eleanor and Eveline began to design costumes for it and settings. They hoped to get Tom Custis or the Paine Emersons to put up money for a production in Chicago.

The main trouble was with the music. A young pianist whom Tom Custis had sent to Paris to study began to write it and came and played it one night. They had quite a party for him. Sally Emerson came and a lot of fashionable people, but Tom Custis drank too many cocktails to be able to hear a note and Amelia the cook got drunk and spoiled the dinner and Eveline told the young pianist that his music sounded like movie music and he went off in a huff. When everybody had gone Freddy Seargeant and Eveline and Eleanor roamed around the ravaged apartment feeling very bad indeed. Freddy Seargeant twisted his black hair, slightly splotched with gray, in his long hands and said he was going to kill himself, and Eleanor and Eveline quarrelled violently.

“But it did sound like movingpicture music and, after all, why shouldn’t it?” Eveline kept saying. Then Freddy Seargeant got his hat and went out saying, “You women are making life a hell for me,” and Eveline burst out crying and got hysterical and Eleanor had to send for a doctor.

The next day they scraped up fifty dollars to send Freddy back to New York, and Eveline went back to live at the house on Drexel Boulevard, leaving Eleanor to carry on the decorating business all alone.

Next Spring Eleanor and Eveline sold for five hundred some chandeliers that they had picked up in a junk shop on the west side for twentyfive dollars and were just writing out checks for their more pressing debts when a telegram arrived.

the methodist minister’s wife was a tall thin woman who sang little songs at the piano in a spindly lost voice who’d heard you liked books and grew flowers and vegetables and was so interested because she’d once been an episcopalian and loved beautiful things and had had stories she had written published in a magazine and she was younger than her husband who was a silent blackhaired man with a mouth like a mousetrap and tobaccojuice on his chin and she wore thin white dresses and used perfume and talked in a bell-like voice about how things were lovely as a lily and the moon was bright as a bubble full to bursting behind the big pine when we walked back along the shore and you felt you ought to put your arm round her and kiss her only you didn’t want to and anyway you wouldn’t have had the nerve walking slow through the sand and the pine needles under the big moon swelled to bursting like an enormous drop of quicksilver and she talked awful sad about the things she had hoped for and you thought it was too bad

you liked books and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Captain Marryat’s novels and wanted to go away and to sea and to foreign cities Carcassonne Marakesh Isfahan and liked things to be beautiful and wished you had the nerve to hug and kiss Martha the colored girl they said was half Indian old Emma’s daughter and little redheaded Mary I taught how to swim if I only had the nerve breathless nights when the moon was full but Oh God not lilies

BOMBARDIER STOPS AUSTRALIAN

When Minor C. Keith died all the newspapers carried his picture, a brighteyed man with a hawknose and a respectable bay window, and an uneasy look under the eyes.

Minor C. Keith was a rich man’s son, born in a family that liked the smell of money, they could smell money half way round the globe in that family.

His Uncle was Henry Meiggs, the Don Enrique of the West Coast. His father had a big lumber business and handled realestate in Brooklyn;

young Keith was a chip of the old block

when the streetcarmen went out on strike in Lawrence in sympathy with what the hell they were a lot of wops anyway bohunks hunkies that didn’t wash their necks ate garlic with squalling brats and fat oily wives the damn dagoes they put up a notice for volunteers good clean young

to man the streetcars and show the foreign agitators this was still a white man’s

well this fellow lived in Matthews and he’d always wanted to be a streetcar conductor they said Mr. Grover had been a streetcar conductor in Albany and drank and was seen on the street with floosies

well this fellow lived in Matthews and he went over to Lawrence with his roommate and they reported in Lawrence and people yelled at them Blacklegs Scabs but those that weren’t wops were muckers a low element they liked each other a lot this fellow did and his roommate and he got up on the platform and twirled the bright brass handle and clanged the bell

it was in the carbarn his roommate was fiddling with something between the bumpers and this fellow twirled the shiny brass handle and the car started and he ran down his roommate and his head was mashed just like that between the bumpers killed him dead just like that right there in the carbarn and now the fellow’s got to face his roommate’s folks

In Pittsburgh Ward Moorehouse got a job as a reporter on The Times Dispatch and spent six months writing up Italian weddings, local conventions of Elks, obscure deaths, murders and suicides among Lithuanians, Albanians, Croats, Poles, the difficulties over naturalization papers of Greek restaurant keepers, dinners of the Sons of Italy. He lived in a big red frame house, at the lower end of Highland Avenue, kept by a Mrs. Cook, a crotchety old woman from Belfast who had been forced to take lodgers since her husband, who had been a foreman in one of the Homestead mills, had been crushed by a crane dropping a load of pigiron over him. She made Ward his breakfasts and his Sunday dinners and stood over him while he was eating them alone in the stuffy furniture-crowded diningroom telling him about her youth in the north of Ireland and the treachery of papists and the virtues of the defunct Mr. Cook.

It was a bad time for Ward. He had no friends in Pittsburgh and he had colds and sore throats all through the cold grimy sleety winter. He hated the newspaper office and the inclines and the overcast skies and the breakneck wooden stairs he was always scrambling up and down, and the smell of poverty and cabbage and children and washing in the rattletrap tenements where he was always seeking out Mrs. Piretti whose husband had been killed in a rumpus in a saloon on Locust Street or Sam Burkovich who’d been elected president of the Ukrainian singing society, or some woman with sudsy hands whose child had been slashed by a degenerate. He never got home to the house before three or four in the morning and by the time he had breakfasted round noon there never seemed to be any time to do anything before he had to call up the office for assignments again. When he had first gotten to Pittsburgh he had called to see Mr. McGill, whom he’d met with Jarvis Oppenheimer in Paris. Mr. McGill remembered him and took down his address and told him to keep in touch because he hoped to find an opening for him in the new information bureau that was being organized by the Chamber of Commerce, but the weeks went by and he got no word from Mr. McGill. He got an occasional dry note from Annabelle Marie about legal technicalities; she would divorce him charging nonsupport, desertion and cruelty. All he had to do was to refuse to go to Philadelphia when the papers were served on him. The perfume on the blue notepaper raised a faint rancor of desire for women in him. But he must keep himself clean and think of his career.

The worst time was his weekly day off. Often he’d stay all day sprawled on the bed, too depressed to go out into the black slush of the streets. He sent to correspondence schools for courses in journalism and advertising and even for a course in the care of fruit trees on the impulse to throw up everything and go West and get a job on a ranch or something; but he felt too listless to follow them and the little booklets accumulated week by week on the table in his room. Nothing seemed to be leading anywhere. He’d go over and over again his whole course of action since he’d left Wilmington that day on the train to go down to Ocean City. He must have made a mistake somewhere but he couldn’t see where. He took to playing solitaire, but he couldn’t even keep his mind on that. He’d forget the cards and sit at the table with a gingerbread-colored velveteen cloth on it, looking past the pot of dusty artificial ferns ornamented with a crepe paper cover and a dusty pink bow off a candybox, down into the broad street where trolleycars went by continually scraping round the curve and where the arclights coming on in the midafternoon murk shimmered a little in the black ice of the gutters. He thought a lot about the old days at Wilmington and Marie O’Higgins and his piano lessons and fishing in an old skiff along the Delaware when he’d been a kid; he’d get so nervous that he’d have to go out and would go and drink a hot chocolate at the sodafountain on the next corner and then go down town to a cheap movie or vaudeville show. He took to smoking three stogies a day, one after each meal. It gave him something he could vaguely look forward to.

He called once or twice to see Mr. McGill at his office in the Frick Building. Each time he was away on a business trip. He’d have a little chat with the girl at the desk while waiting and then go away reluctantly, saying, “Oh, yes, he said he was going on a trip,” or, “He must have forgotten the appointment,” to cover his embarrassment when he had to go away. He was loath to leave the brightly lit office anteroom, with its great shiny mahogany chairs with lions’ heads on the arms and the tables with lions’ claws for feet and the chirrup of typewriters from behind partitions, and telephone bells ringing and welldressed clerks and executives bustling in and out. Down at the newspaper office it was noisy with clanging presses and smelt sour of printer’s ink and moist rolls of paper and sweating copyboys running round in green eyeshades. And not to know any really nice people, never to get an assignment that wasn’t connected with working people or foreigners or criminals; he hated it.

One day in the Spring he went to the Schenley to interview a visiting travel lecturer. He felt good about it as he hoped to wheedle a byline out of the city editor. He was picking his way through the lobby crowded by the arrival of a state convention of Kiwanians when he ran into Mr. McGill. “Why, hello, Moorehouse,” said Mr. McGill in a casual tone as if he’d been seeing him all along, “I’m glad I ran into you. Those fools at the office mislaid your address. Have you a minute to spare?” “Yes, indeed, Mr. McGill,” said Ward. “I have an appointment to see a man but he can wait.” “Never make a man wait if you have an appointment with him,” said Mr. McGill. “Well, this isn’t a business appointment,” said Ward, looking up into Mr. McGill’s face with his boyish blue-eyed smile. “He won’t mind waiting a minute.”

They went into the writing room and sat down on a tapestried sofa. Mr. McGill explained that he had just been appointed temporary general manager to reorganize the Bessemer Metallic Furnishings and Products Company that handled a big line of byproducts of the Homestead Mills. He was looking for an ambitious and energetic man to handle the advertising and promotion. “I remember that booklet you showed me in Paris, Moorehouse, and I think you’re the man.” Ward looked at the floor. “Of course that would mean giving up my present work.” “What’s that?” “Newspaper work.” “Oh, drop that; there’s no future in that… We’d have to make someone else nominal advertising manager for reasons we won’t go into now… but you’ll be the actual executive. What kind of a salary would you expect?”

Ward looked Mr. McGill in the eyes, the blood stopped in his ears while he heard his own voice saying casually:

“How about a hundred a week?”

Mr. McGill stroked his moustache and smiled. “Well, we’ll thrash that out later,” he said, getting to his feet. “I think I can advise you strongly to give up your present work… I’ll call up Mr. Bateman about it… so that he’ll understand why we’re taking you away from him… No hard feelings, you understand, on account of your resigning suddenly… never want hard feelings… Come down and see me tomorrow at ten. You know the office in the Frick Building.”

“I think I’ve got some valuable ideas about advertising, Mr. McGill. It’s the work I’m most interested in doing,” said Ward. Mr. McGill wasn’t looking at him any more. He nodded and went off. Ward went on up to interview his lecturer, afraid to let himself feel too jubilant yet.

The next day was his last in a newspaper office. He accepted a salary of seventyfive with a promise of a raise as soon as returns warranted it, took a room and bath at the Schenley, had an office of his own in the Frick Building where he sat at a desk with a young man named Oliver Taylor who was a nephew of one of the directors who was being worked up through the organization. Oliver Taylor was a firstrate tennis player and belonged to all the clubs and was only too glad to let Moorehouse do the work. When he found that Moorehouse had been abroad and had had his clothes made in England he put him up at the Sewickley Country Club and took him out with him for drinks after officehours. Little by little Moorehouse got to know people and to be invited out as an eligible bachelor. He started to play golf with an instructor on a small course over in Allegheny where he hoped nobody he knew would go. When he could play a fair game he went over to Sewickley to try it out.

One Sunday afternoon Oliver Taylor went with him and pointed out all the big executives of the steel mills and the mining properties and the oil industry out on the links on a Sunday afternoon, making ribald remarks about each one that Ward tittered at a little bit, but that seemed to him in very bad taste. It was a sunny May afternoon and he could smell locustblossoms on the breeze off the fat lands along the Ohio, and there were the sharp whang of the golfballs and the flutter of bright dresses on the lawn round the clubhouse, and frazzles of laughter and baritone snatches of the safe talk of business men coming on the sunny breeze that still had a little scorch of furnace smoke in it. It was hard to keep the men he was introduced to from seeing how good he felt.

The rest of the time he did nothing but work. He got his stenographer, Miss Rodgers, a plainfaced spinster who knew the metal products business inside out from having worked fifteen years in Pittsburgh offices, to get him books on the industry that he read at his hotel in the evenings, so that at executive conferences he astonished them by his knowledge of the processes and products of the industry. His mind was full of augerbits, canthooks, mauls, sashweights, axes, hatchets, monkeywrenches; sometimes in the lunch hour he’d stop in to a hardware store on the pretext of buying a few brads or tacks and talk to the storekeeper. He read Crowds Jr and various books on psychology, tried to imagine himself a hardware merchant or the executive of Hammacher Schlemmer or some other big hardware house, and puzzled over what kind of literature from a factory would be appealing to him. Shaving while his bath was running in the morning he would see long processions of andirons, grates, furnace fittings, pumps, sausagegrinders, drills, calipers, vises, casters, drawerpulls pass between his face and the mirror and wonder how they could be made attractive to the retail trade. He was shaving himself with a Gillette; why was he shaving with a Gillette instead of some other kind of razor? “Bessemer” was a good name, smelt of money and mighty rolling mills and great executives stepping out of limousines. The thing to do was to interest the hardware buyer, to make him feel a part of something mighty and strong, he would think as he picked out a necktie. “Bessemer,” he’d say to himself as he ate breakfast. Why should our cotterpins appeal more than any other cotterpins, he’d ask himself as he stepped on the streetcar. Jolting in the straphanging crowd on the way downtown, staring at the headlines in the paper without seeing them, chainlinks and anchors and ironcouplings and malleable elbows and unions and bushings and nipples and pipecaps would jostle in his head. “Bessemer.”

When he asked for a raise he got it, to $125.

At a country club dance he met a blond girl who danced very well. Her name was Gertrude Staple and she was the only daughter of old Horace Staple who was director of several corporations, and was reputed to own a big slice of Standard Oil stock. Gertrude was engaged to Oliver Taylor, though they did nothing but quarrel when they were together, so she confided to Ward while they were sitting out a dance. Ward’s dress suit fitted well and he looked much younger than most of the men at the dance. Gertrude said that the men in Pittsburgh had no allure. Ward talked about Paris and she said that she was bored to tears and would rather live in Nome, Alaska, than in Pittsburgh. She was awfully pleased that he knew Paris and he talked about the Tour d’Argent and the Hotel Wagram and the Ritz bar and he felt very sore that he hadn’t a car, because he noticed that she was making it easy for him to ask her to let him take her home. But next day he sent her some flowers with a little note in French that he thought would make her laugh. The next Saturday afternoon he went to an automobile school to take lessons in driving a car, and strolled past the Stutz sales agency to see what kind of terms he could get to buy a roadster on.

One day Oliver Taylor came into the office with a funny smile on his face and said, “Ward, Gertrude’s got a crush on you. She can’t talk about anything else… Go ahead; I don’t give a damn. She’s too goddam much trouble for me to handle. She tires me out in a half an hour.”

“It’s probably just because she doesn’t know me,” said Ward, blushing a little.

“Too bad her old man won’t let her marry anything but a millionaire. You might get some lovin’ out of it, though.”

“I haven’t got the time for that stuff,” said Ward.

“It don’t leave me time for anything else,” said Taylor. “Well, so long… You hold down the fort; I’ve got a luncheon date with a swell girl… she’s a warm baby an’ she’s dancing in the ‘Red Mill,’ first row, third from the left.” He winked, and slapped Ward on the back and went off.

The next time that Ward went to call at the big house of the Staples that lay back from the trees he went in a red Stutz roadster that he’d taken out on trial. He handled it well enough, although he turned in too quickly at the drive and slaughtered some tulips in a flowerbed. Gertrude saw him from the library window and kidded him about it. He said he was a rotten driver, always had been and always would be. She gave him tea and a cocktail at a little table under an appletree back of the house and he wondered all the time he was talking to her whether he ought to tell her about his divorce. He told her about his unhappy life with Annabelle Strang. She was very sympathetic. She knew of Dr. Strang. “And I was hoping you were just an adventurer… from plowboy to president, you know… that sort of thing.”

“But I am,” he said and they both laughed and he could see that she was really crazy about him.

That night they met at a dance and walked down to the end of the conservatory where it was very steamy among the orchids, and he kissed her and told her that she looked like a pale yellow orchid. After that they always sneaked off whenever they got a chance. She had a way of going limp suddenly in his arms under his kisses that made him sure that she loved him. But when he got home after those evenings he’d be too nervous and excited to sleep, and would pace up and down the room wanting a woman to sleep with, and cursing himself out. Often he’d take a cold bath and tell himself he must attend to business and not worry about those things or let a girl get under his skin that way. The streets in the lower part of town were full of prostitutes, but he was afraid of catching a disease or being blackmailed. Then one night after a party Taylor took him to a house that he said was thoroughly reliable where he met a pretty dark Polish girl who couldn’t have been more than eighteen, but he didn’t go there very often as it cost fifty dollars, and he was always nervous when he was in the place for fear there’d be a police raid and he’d have blackmail to pay.

One Sunday afternoon Gertrude told him that her mother had scolded her for being seen about with him so much on account of his having a wife in Philadelphia. The notice of the decree had come the morning before. Ward was in high spirits and told her about it and asked her to marry him. They were at the free organ recital in Carnegie Institute, a good place to meet because nobody who was anybody ever went there. “Come over to the Schenley and I’ll show you the decree.” The music had started. She shook her head, but patted his hand that lay on the plush seat beside her knee. They went out in the middle of the number. The music got on their nerves. They stood talking a long while in the vestibule. Gertrude looked miserable and haggard. She said she was in wretched health and that her father and mother would never consent to her marrying a man who didn’t have as much income as she did and she wished she was a poor stenographer or telephone girl that could do as she liked and that she loved him very much and would always love him and thought she’d take to drink or dope or something because life was just too terrible.

Ward was very cold and kept his jaw set square and said that she couldn’t really care for him and that as far as he was concerned that was the end and that if they met they’d be good friends. He drove her out Highland Avenue in the Stutz that wasn’t paid for yet and showed her the house he’d lived in when he first came to Pittsburgh and talked of going out West and starting an advertising business of his own and finally left her at a friend’s house in Highland Park where she’d told her chauffeur to pick her up at six.

He went back to the Schenley and had a cup of black coffee sent up to his room and felt very bitter and settled down to work on some copy he was getting out, saying, “To hell with the bitch,” all the time under his breath.

He didn’t worry much about Gertrude in the months that followed because a strike came on at Homestead and there were strikers killed by the mine guards and certain writers from New York and Chicago who were sentimentalists began to take a good deal of space in the press with articles flaying the steel industry and the feudal conditions in Pittsburgh as they called them, and the progressives in Congress were making a howl, and it was rumored that people wanting to make politics out of it were calling for a congressional investigation. Mr. McGill and Ward had dinner together all alone at the Schenley to talk about the situation, and Ward said that what was necessary was an entirely new line in the publicity of the industry. It was the business of the industry to educate the public by carefully planned publicity extending over a term of years. Mr. McGill was very much impressed and said he’d talk around at directors’ meetings about the feasibility of founding a joint information bureau for the entire industry. Ward said he felt he ought to be at the head of it, because he was just wasting his time at the Bessemer Products; that had all simmered down to a routine job that anybody could take care of. He talked of going to Chicago and starting an advertising agency of his own. Mr. McGill smiled and stroked his steelgray mustache and said, “Not so fast, young man; you stay around here a while yet and on my honor you won’t regret it,” and Ward said that he was willing, but here he’d been in Pittsburgh five years and where was he getting?

The information bureau was founded, and Ward was put in charge of the actual work at $10,000 a year and began to play stocks a little with his surplus money, but there were several men over him earning larger salaries who didn’t do anything but get in his way, and he was very restless. He felt he ought to be married and have an establishment of his own. He had many contacts in different branches of the casting and steel and oil industries, and felt he ought to entertain. Giving dinners at the Fort Pitt or the Schenley was expensive and somehow didn’t seem solid.

Then one morning he opened his newspaper to find that Horace Staple had died of angina pectoris the day before while going up in the elevator of the Carnegie Building, and that Gertrude and her mother were prostrated at their palatial residence in Sewickley. He immediately sat down in the writing room, although it would make him late at the office, and wrote Gertrude a note:

that August it never rained a drop and it had hardly rained in July the truck garden was in a terrible state and all through the Northern Neck of Virginia it was no use pulling cornfodder because the lower leaves were all withered and curled up at the edges only the tomatoes gave a crop

when they weren’t using Rattler on the farm you’d ride him (he was a gelding sorrel threeyear old and stumbled) through the tall woods of white pine and the sandbed roads on fire with trumpetvine and through swamps dry and cracked crisscross like alligator hide

past the Morris’s house where all the Morris children looked dry and dusty and brown

and round along the rivershore past Harmony Hall where Sydnor a big sixfoot-six barefoot man with a long face and a long nose with a big wart on his nose ’ud be ashamblin’ around and not knowin’ what to do on account of the drought and his wife sick and ready to have another baby and the children with hoopin’ cough and his stomach trouble

and past Sandy Pint agin past the big pine

and Miss Emily ’ud be alookin’ over the fence astandin’ beside the crapemyrtle (Miss Emily wore poke bonnets and always had a few flowers and a couple of broilers for sale and the best blood in the south flowed in her veins Tancheford that’s how we spell it but we pronounce it Tofford if only the boys warnt so so noaccount always drinkin’ an’ carryin’ on down by the rivershoa an’ runnin’ whisky over from Mar’land instead o’ fishin’ an’ agoin’ out blind drunk and gettin’ the trapnets cut up or lost Miss Emily took a drop herself now and then but she always put a good face on things lookin’ over the picket fence astandin’ by the crapemyrtle bush visitin’ with the people passin’ along the road)

then down to Lynch’s Pint where old Bowie Franklin was (he warn’t much account neither looked like a bantam rooster Bowie Franklin did with his long scrawny neck an’ his ruptured walk couldn’t do much work and he didn’t have money to spend on liquor so he just fed his gray fowls that warn’t much account and looked just like Bowie did and hung round the wharf and sometimes when the boat was in or there were some fisherman in the crick on account of it blowin’ so hard down the bay somebody’d slip him a drink o’ whisky an’ he’d be a whole day asleepin’ it off)

Rattler sweat somethin’ awful on account o’ bein’ fed corn in this hot weather and the old saddle stank and the horsedoctors buzzed round his flanks and it was time for supper and you’d ride slowly home hating the goddam exhausted land and the drought that wouldn’t let the garden grow and the katydids and the dryflies jeering out of the sapling gums and persimmons ghostly with dust along the road and the sickleshaped beach where the seanettles stung you when you tried to swim out and the chiggers and the little scraps of talk about what was going on up to the Hague or Warsaw or Pekatone and the phone down at the cottage that kept ringing whenever any farmer’s wife along the line took up the receiver to talk to any other farmer’s wife and all down the line you could hear the receivers click as they all ran to the receiver to listen to what was said

and the land between the rivers was flat drained of all strength by tobacco in the early Walter Raleigh Captain John Smith Pocahontas days but what was it before the war that drained out the men and women?

and I rode Rattler the threeyearold sorrel gelding who stumbled so much and I hated the suncaked hardpan and the clay subsoil and the soughing pines and the noaccount gums and persimmonbushes and the brambles

there was only the bay you could like sparkling to the horizon and the southeast wind that freshened every afternoon and the white sails of bugeyes

lights go out as Home Sweet Home is played to patrons low wages cause unrest, woman says

Andrew Carnegie

was born in Dunfermline in Scotland,

came over to the States in an immigrant

ship worked as bobbinboy in a textile factory

fired boilers

clerked in a bobbin factory at $2.50 a week

ran round Philadelphia with telegrams as a Western Union messenger

learned the Morse code was telegraph operator on the Pennsy lines

was a military telegraph operator in the Civil War and

all week the fog clung to the sea and the cliffs at noon there was just enough warmth of the sun through the fog to keep the salt cod drying on the flakes gray flakes green sea gray houses white fog at noon there was just enough sun to ripen bakeapple and wildpear on the moorlands to warm the bayberry and sweetfern mealtimes in the boardinghouse everybody waited for the radio operators the radio operators could hardly eat yes it was war

Will we go in? will Britain go in?

Obligations according to the treaty of… handed the ambassador his passports every morning they put out the cod on the flakes spreading them even in the faint glow of the sun through the fog

a steamer blowing in the distance the lap of the waves against piles along the seaweedy rocks scream of gulls clatter of boardinghouse dishes

War declared expedit… Big battle in the North Sea German Fleet Destroyed BRITISH FLEET DESTROYED GERMAN SQUADRON OFF CAPE RACE loyal Newfoundlanders to the colors Port closed at St. Johns Port aux Basques

and every evening they brought in the cod off the flakes clatter of boardinghouse dishes and everybody waiting for the radio operators

lap of the waves against the piles of the wharf, scream of gulls circling and swooping white in the white fog a steamer blowing in the distance and every morning they spread out the cod on the flakes

When Ward came back from his second honeymoon abroad he was thirtytwo, but he looked older. He had the capital and the connections and felt that the big moment had come. The war talk in July had decided him to cut short his trip. In London he’d picked up a young man named Edgar Robbins who was in Europe for International News. Edgar Robbins drank too much and was a fool about the women, but Ward and Gertrude took him around with them everywhere and confided in each other that they wanted to straighten him out. Then one day Robbins took Ward aside and said that he had syphilis and would have to follow the straight and narrow. Ward thought the matter over a little and offered him a job in the New York office that he was going to open as soon as he got home. They told Gertrude it was liver trouble and she scolded him like a child when he took a drink and on the boat back to America they felt he was completely devoted to both of them. Ward didn’t have to write any copy after that and could put in all his time organizing the business. Old Mrs. Staple had been induced to put fifty thousand dollars into the firm. Ward rented an office at 100 Fifth Avenue, fitted it up with Chinese porcelain vases and cloisonné ashtrays from Vantine’s and had a tigerskin rug in his private office. He served tea in the English style every afternoon and put himself in the telephone book as J. Ward Moorehouse, Public Relations Counsel. While Robbins was drafting the literature to be sent out, Ward went to Pittsburgh and Chicago and Bethlehem and Philadelphia to reëstablish contacts.

In Philadelphia he was walking into the lobby of the Bellevue Stratford when he met Annabelle Marie. She greeted him amiably and said she’d heard of him and his publicity business and they had dinner together, talking about old times. “You certainly have improved,” Annabelle Marie kept saying. Ward could see that she regretted the divorce a little but he felt he couldn’t say the same for her. The lines on her face had deepened and she didn’t finish her sentences, and had a parrot screech to her voice. She was tremendously made up and he wondered if she took drugs. She was busy divorcing Beale who she said had turned homosexual on her. Ward said dryly that he had married again and was very happy. “Who wouldn’t be with the Staple fortune back of them?” she said. Her little air of ownership irritated Ward and he excused himself right after dinner, saying he had work to do. Annabelle looked at him through halfclosed eyes with her head to one side, said “I wish you luck,” and went up in the hotel elevator in a shrill cackle of laughter.

Next day he took the Pennsylvania to Chicago, traveling in a drawing room. Miss Rosenthal, his secretary, and Morton, his English valet, went with him. He had his dinner in the drawing room with Miss Rosenthal, a sallowfaced girl, shrewd and plain, who he felt was devoted to his interests. She had been with him in Pittsburgh with Bessemer Products. When the coffee had been cleared away and Morton had poured them each out a swallow of brandy that Miss Rosenthal giggled over a great deal declaring it would go to her head, he started to dictate. The train rumbled and lurched and now and then he could smell coalsmoke and the hot steamygreasy body of the engine up ahead, hot shiny steel charging through the dark Appalachians. He had to talk loudly to be heard. The rumble of the train made the cords of his voice vibrate. He forgot everything in his own words… American industry like a steamengine, like a highpower locomotive on a great express train charging through the night of old individualistic methods…. What does a steamengine require? Coöperation, coördination of the inventor’s brain, the promoter’s brain that made the development of these highpower products possible… Coördination of capital, the storedup energy of the race in the form of credit intelligently directed… labor, the prosperous contented American working man to whom the unprecedented possibilities of capital collected in great corporations had given the full dinnerpail, cheap motor transport, insurance, short working hours… a measure of comfort and prosperity unequaled before or since in the tragic procession of recorded history or in the known regions of the habitable globe.

But he had to stop dictating because he found he’d lost his voice. He sent Miss Rosenthal to bed and went to bed himself, but he couldn’t sleep; words, ideas, plans, stockquotations kept unrolling in endless tickertape in his head.

Next afternoon at the LaSalle he had a call from Judge Bowie C. Planet. Ward sat waiting for him to come up, looking out at the very pale blue Lake Michigan sky. In his hand he had a little filing card on which was written:

the Philadelphian had completed the thirteenth lap and was two miles away on the fourteenth. His speed it is thought must have been between a hundred and a hundred and ten miles an hour. His car wavered for a flash and then careered to the left. It struck a slight elevation and jumped. When the car alighted it was on four wheels atop of a high embankment. Its rush apparently was unimpeded. Wishart turned the car off the embankment and attempted to regain the road. The speed would not permit the slight turn necessary, however, and the car plowed through the frontyard of a farmer residing on the course. He escaped one tree but was brought up sideways against another. The legs being impeded by the steering gear they were torn from the trunk as he was thrown through

this friend of mother’s was a very lovely woman with lovely blond hair and she had two lovely daughters the blond one married an oil man who was bald as the palm of your hand and went to live in Sumatra the dark one married a man from Bogota and it was a long trip in a dugout canoe up the Magdalena River and the natives were Indians and slept in hammocks and had such horrible diseases and when the woman had a baby it was the husband who went to bed and used poisoned arrows and if you got a wound in that country it never healed but festered white and maturated and the dugout tipped over so easily into the warm steamy water full of ravenous fish that if you had a scratch on you or an unhealed wound it was the smell of blood attracted them sometimes they tore people to pieces

it was eight weeks up the Magdalena River in dugout canoes and then you got to Bogota

poor Jonas Fenimore came home from Bogota a very sick man and they said it was elephantiasis he was a good fellow and told stories about the steamy jungle and the thunderstorms and the crocodiles and the horrible diseases and the ravenous fish and he drank up all the whisky in the sideboard and when he went in swimming you could see that there were brown thick blotches on his legs like the scale on an apple and he liked to drink whisky and he talked about Colombia becoming one of the richest countries in the world and oil and rare woods for veneering and tropical butterflies

but the trip up the Magdalena River was too long and too hot and too dangerous and he died

they said it was whisky and elephantiasis

and the Magdalena River

When they first arrived in New York, Eleanor, who’d never been East before, had to rely on Eveline for everything. Freddy met them at the train and took them to get rooms at the Brevoort. He said it was a little far from the theater but much more interesting than an uptown hotel, all the artists and radicals and really interesting people stayed there and it was very French. Going down in the taxi he chattered about the lovely magnificent play and his grand part, and what a fool the director Ben Freelby was, and how one of the backers had only put up half the money he’d promised; but that Josephine Gilchrist, the business manager, had the sum virtually lined up now and the Shuberts were interested and they would open out of town at Greenwich exactly a month from today. Eleanor looked out at Fifth Avenue and the chilly Spring wind blowing women’s skirts, a man chasing a derby hat, the green buses, taxicabs, the shine on shopwindows; after all, this wasn’t so very different from Chicago. But at lunch at the Brevoort it was very different, Freddy seemed to know so many people and introduced them to everybody as if he was very proud of them. They were all names she had heard or read of in the book column of The Daily News. Everybody seemed very friendly. Freddy talked French to the waiter and the hollandaise sauce was the most delicious she had ever eaten.

That afternoon on the way to rehearsal, Eleanor had her first glimpse of Times Square out of the taxicab window. In the dark theater they found the company sitting waiting for Mr. Freelby. It was very mysterious, with just a single big electric light bulb hanging over the stage and the set for some other play looking all flat and dusty.

A grayhaired man with a broad sad face and big circles under his eyes came in. That was the famous Benjamin Freelby; he had a tired fatherly manner and asked Eveline and Eleanor up to his apartment to dinner with Freddy that night so that they could talk at their ease about the settings and the costumes. Eleanor was relieved that he was so kind and tired and thought that after all she and Eveline were much better dressed than any of those New York actresses. Mr. Freelby made a great fuss about there being no lights; did they expect him to rehearse in the dark? The stagemanager with the manuscript in his hand ran round looking for the electrician and somebody was sent to call up the office. Mr. Freelby walked about the stage and fretted and fumed and said, “This is monstrous.” When the electrician arrived wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and finally switched on the houselights and some spots, Mr. Freelby had to have a table and chair and a reading light on the table. Nobody seemed to be able to find a chair the right height for him. He kept fuming up and down, tugging at his coarse gray hair and saying, “This is monstrous.” At last he got settled and he said to Mr. Stein, the stagemanager, a lanky man who sat in another chair near him, “We’ll start with act one, Mr. Stein. Has everybody their parts?” Several actors got on the stage and stood around and the rest talked in low voices. Mr. Freelby “shushed” them and said, “Please, children, we’ve got to be quiet,” and the rehearsal was in progress.

From that time on everything was a terrible rush. Eleanor never seemed to get to bed. The scenepainter, Mr. Bridgeman, at whose studios the scenery was painted found objections to everything; it turned out that someone else, a pale young man with glasses who worked for Mr. Bridgeman, would have to design the scenery from their sketches and that they couldn’t have their names in the program at all except for the costumes on account of not belonging to the scene designers’ union. When they weren’t wrangling at the Bridgeman Studios they were dashing about the streets in taxicabs with samples of materials. They never seemed to get to bed before four or five in the morning. Everybody was so temperamental and Eleanor had quite a siege each week to get a check out of Miss Gilchrist.

When the costumes were ready, all in early Victorian style, and Eleanor and Freddy and Mr. Freelby went to see them at the costumers’ they really looked lovely but the costumers wouldn’t deliver them without a check and nobody could find Miss Gilchrist and everybody was running round in taxis and at last late that night Mr. Freelby said he’d give his personal check. The transfer company had its trucks at the door with the scenery but wouldn’t let the flats be carried into the theater until they had a check. Mr. Bridgeman was there, too, saying his check had come back marked no funds and he and Mr. Freelby had words in the boxoffice. At last Josephine Gilchrist appeared in a taxi with five hundred dollars in bills on account for Mr. Bridgeman and for the transfer company. Everybody smiled when they saw the crisp orangebacked bills. It was a great relief.

When they had made sure that the scenery was going into the theater, Eleanor and Eveline and Freddy Seargeant and Josephine Gilchrist and Mr. Freelby all went to Bustanoby’s to get a bite to eat and Mr. Freelby set them up to a couple of bottles of Pol Roger and Josephine Gilchrist said that she felt it in her bones that the play would be a hit and that didn’t often happen with her, and Freddy said the stagehands liked it and that was always a good sign and Mr. Freelby said Ike Gold, the Shuberts’ officeboy, had sat through the runthrough with the tears running down his cheeks, but nobody knew what theater they’d open in after a week in Greenwich and a week in Hartford and Mr. Freelby said he’d go and talk to J. J. about it personally first thing in the morning.

Friends from Chicago called up who wanted to get into the dress rehearsal. It made Eleanor feel quite important, especially when Sally Emerson called up. The dress rehearsal dragged terribly, half the scenery hadn’t come and the Wessex villagers didn’t have any costumes, but everybody said that it was a good sign to have a bad dress rehearsal.

Opening night Eleanor didn’t get any supper and had only a half an hour to dress in. She was icy all over with excitement. She hoped the new chartreuse tulle evening dress she’d charged at Tappé’s looked well but she didn’t have time to worry. She drank a cup of black coffee and it seemed as if the taxi never would get uptown. When she got to the theater the lobby was all lit up and full of silk hats and bare powdered backs and diamonds and eveningwraps and all the firstnighters looked at each other and waved to their friends and talked about who was there and kept trooping up the aisle half way through the first act. Eleanor and Eveline stood stiffly side by side in the back of the theater and nudged each other when a costume looked good and agreed that the actors were too dreadful and that Freddy Seargeant was the worst. At the party that Sally Emerson gave for them afterwards at the duplex apartment of her friends the Careys everybody said that the scenery and costumes were lovely and that they were sure the play would be a great success. Eleanor and Eveline were the center of everything and Eleanor was annoyed because Eveline drank a little too much and was noisy. Eleanor met a great many interesting people and decided that she’d stay on in New York whatever happened.

The play failed after two weeks and Eleanor and Eveline never did get seven hundred and fifty dollars that the management owed them. Eveline went back to Chicago, and Eleanor rented an apartment on Eighth Street. Sally Emerson had decided that Eleanor had great talent and got her husband to put up a thousand dollars to start her New York decorating business on. Eveline Hutchins’ father was sick, but she wrote from Chicago that she’d be on whenever she could.

While Sally Emerson was in New York that summer Eleanor went out with her all the time and got to know many rich people. It was through Alexander Parsons that she got the job to decorate the house the J. Ward Moorehouses were building near Great Neck. Mrs. Moorehouse walked round the unfinished house with her. She was a washedout blonde who kept explaining that she’d do the decorating herself only she hadn’t the strength since her operation. She’d been in bed most of the time since her second child was born and told Eleanor all about her operation. Eleanor hated to hear about women’s complaints and nodded coldly from time to time, making businesslike comments about furniture and draperies and now and then jotting notes on the decoration down on a piece of paper. Mrs. Moorehouse asked her to stay to lunch in the little cottage where they were living until they got the house finished. The little cottage was a large house in Dutch Colonial style full of pekinese dogs and maids in flounced aprons and a butler. As they went into the diningroom Eleanor heard a man’s voice in an adjoining room and smelt cigarsmoke. At lunch she was introduced to Mr. Moorehouse and a Mr. Perry. They had been playing golf and were talking about Tampico and oilwells. Mr. Moorehouse offered to drive her back to town after lunch and she was relieved to get away from Mrs. Moorehouse. She hadn’t had a chance to talk about her ideas for decorating the new house yet, but, going in, Mr. Moorehouse asked her many questions about it and they laughed together about how ugly most people’s houses were, and Eleanor thought that it was very interesting to find a business man who cared about those things. Mr. Moorehouse suggested that she prepare the estimates and bring them to his office. “How will Thursday do?” Thursday would be fine and he had no date that day and they’d have a bite of lunch together if she cared to. “Mealtime’s the only time I get to devote to the things of the spirit,” he said with a blue twinkle in his eye, so they both said “Thursday” again when he let Eleanor out at the corner of Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue and Eleanor thought he looked as if he had a sense of humor and thought she liked him much better than Tom Custis.

Eleanor found that she had to have many interviews with Ward Moorehouse as the work went on. She had him to dinner at her place on Eighth Street and she had her Martinique maid Augustine cook sauté chicken with red peppers and tomatoes. They had cocktails with absinthe in them and a bottle of very good burgundy and Ward Moorehouse enjoyed sitting back on the sofa and talking and she enjoyed listening and began to call him J. W. After that they were friends quite apart from the work on the house at Great Neck.

He told Eleanor about how he’d been a boy in Wilmington, Delaware, and the day the militia fired on the old darkey and thought it was the Spanish fleet and about his unhappy first marriage and about how his second wife was an invalid and about his work as a newspaperman and in advertising offices, and Eleanor, in a gray dress with just a touch of sparkly something on one shoulder and acting the discreet little homebody, led him on to explain about the work he was doing keeping the public informed about the state of relations between capital and labor and stemming the propaganda of sentimentalists and reformers, upholding American ideas against crazy German socialistic ideas and the panaceas of discontented dirtfarmers in the Northwest. Eleanor thought his ideas were very interesting, but she liked better to hear about the stockexchange and how the Steel Corporation was founded and the difficulties of the oil companies in Mexico, and Hearst and great fortunes. She asked him about some small investment she was making, and he looked up at her with twinkly blue eyes in a white square face where prosperity was just beginning to curve over the squareness of the jowl and said, “Miss Stoddard, may I have the honor of being your financial adviser?”

Eleanor thought his slight southern accent and oldschool gentlemanly manners very attractive. She wished she had a more distinctivelooking apartment and that she’d kept some of the crystal chandeliers instead of selling them. It was twelve o’clock before he left, saying he’d had a very pleasant evening but that he must go to answer some longdistance calls. Eleanor sat before the mirror at her dressingtable rubbing cold cream on her face by the light of two candles. She wished her neck wasn’t so scrawny and wondered how it would be to start getting a henna rinse now and then when she got her hair washed.

raining in historic Quebec it was raining on the Château in historic Quebec where gallant Wolfe in a three cornered hat sat in a boat in a lithograph and read Gray’s “Elegy” to his men gallant Wolfe climbing up the cliffs to meet gallant Montcalm in a threecornered hat on the plains of Abraham with elaborate bows and lace ruffles on the uniforms in the hollow squares and the gallantry and the command to fire and the lace ruffles ruined in the mud on the plains of Abraham

but the Château was the Château Frontenac world-famous hostelry historic in the gray rain in historic gray Quebec and we were climbing up from the Saguenay River Scenic Steamer Greatest Scenic Route in the World the Chautauqua Lecturer and his wife and the baritone from Athens Kentucky where they have a hill called the Acropolis exactly the way it is in Athens Greece and culture and a reproduction of the Parthenon exactly the way it is in Athens Greece

stony rain on stony streets and out onto the platform and the St. Lawrence people with umbrellas up walking back and forth on the broad wooden rainy platform looking over the slatepointed roofs of Quebec and the coalwharves and the grainelevators and the ferries and the Empress of Ireland with creamcolored funnels steaming in from the Other Side and Levis and green hills across the river and the Isle of Orléans green against green and the stony rain on the shining gray slatepointed roofs of Quebec

but the Chautauqua Lecturer wants his dinner and quarrels with his wife and makes a scene in the historic diningroom of the historic Château Frontenac and the headwaiter comes and the Chautauqua Lecturer’s a big thick curlyhaired angry man with a voice used to bawling in tents about the Acropolis just like it is in Athens Greece and the Parthenon just like it is in Athens Greece and the Winged Victory and the baritone is too attentive to the small boy who wants to get away and wishes he hadn’t said he’d come and wants to shake the whole bunch

but it’s raining in historic Quebec and walking down the street alone with the baritone he kept saying about how there were bad girls in a town like this and boys shouldn’t go with bad girls and the Acropolis and the bel canto and the Parthenon and voice culture and the beautiful statues of Greek boys and the Winged Victory and the beautiful statues

but I finally shook him and went out on the cars to see the falls of Montmorency famous in song and story and a church full of crutches left by the sick in St. Anne de Beaupré

and the gray rainy streets full of girls

In the second year of the European War Mr. Carroll sold out his interest in the firm of Dreyfus and Carroll to Mr. Dreyfus and went home to Baltimore. There was a chance that the state Democratic convention would nominate him for Governor. Janey missed him in the office and followed all the reports of Maryland politics with great interest. When Mr. Carroll didn’t get the nomination Janey felt quite sorry about it. Round the office there got to be more and more foreigners and talk there took on a distinctly pro-German trend that she didn’t at all like. Mr. Dreyfus was very polite and generous with his employees but Janey kept thinking of the ruthless invasion of Belgium and the horrible atrocities and didn’t like to be working for a Hun, so she began looking round for another job. Business was slack in Washington and she knew it was foolish to leave Mr. Dreyfus but she couldn’t help it so she went to work for Smedley Richards, a realestate operator on Connecticut Avenue, at a dollar less a week. Mr. Richards was a stout man who talked a great deal about the gentleman’s code and made love to her. For a couple of weeks she kept him off, but the third week he took to drinking and kept putting his big beefy hands on her and borrowed a dollar one day and at the end of the week said he wouldn’t be able to pay her for a day or two, so she just didn’t go back and there she was out of a job.

It was scary being out of a job; she dreaded having to go back to live at her mother’s with the boarders and her sisters’ noisy ways. She read the ads in The Star and The Post every day and answered any she saw, but someone had always been there ahead of her, although she got to the address the first thing in the morning. She even put her name down at an employment agency. The woman at the desk was a stout woman with bad teeth and a mean smile, she made Janey pay two dollars as a registration fee and showed her the waiting list of expert stenographers she had and said that girls ought to marry and that trying to earn their own living was stuff and nonsense because it couldn’t be done. The bad air and the pinched faces of the girls waiting on benches made her feel quite sick so she went and sat a little while in the sun in Lafayette Square getting her courage up to tell Alice, who was still at Mrs. Robinson’s, that she hadn’t found a job yet. A young man with a red face sat down beside her and tried to start talking to her, so she had to walk on. She went into a drugstore and had a chocolate milk, but the sodajerker tried to kid her a little, and she burst out crying. The sodajerker looked scared to death and said, “Beg pardon, miss, I didn’t mean no offence.” Her eyes were still red when she met Alice coming out of the Riggs Building; Alice insisted on paying for a thirtyfive cent lunch for her at The Brown Teapot, although Janey couldn’t eat a thing. Alice had an Itoldyouso manner that made Janey mad, and she said that it was too late now for her to try to go back to Mrs. Robinson’s because Mrs. Robinson didn’t have work for the girls she had there as it was. That afternoon Janey felt too discouraged to look for work and roamed round the Smithsonian Institution trying to interest herself in the specimens of Indian beadwork and war canoes and totempoles, but everything gave her the creeps and she went up to the room and had a good cry. She thought of Joe and Jerry Burnham and wondered why she never got letters from them, and thought of the poor soldiers in the trenches and felt very lonely. By the time Alice came home she’d washed her face and put on powder and rouge and was bustling briskly about their room; she joked Alice about the business depression and said that if she couldn’t get a job in Washington she’d go to Baltimore or New York or Chicago to get a job. Alice said that sort of talk made her miserable. They went out and ate a ham sandwich and a glass of milk for supper to save money.

All that fall Janey went round trying to get work. She got so that the first thing she was conscious of in the morning when she woke up was the black depression of having nothing to do. She ate Christmas dinner with her mother and sisters and told them that she’d been promised twentyfive a week after the first of the year to keep them from sympathizing with her. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.

At Christmas she got a torn paper package from Joe through the mail with an embroidered kimono in it. She went through the package again and again hoping to find a letter, but there was nothing but a little piece of paper with Merry Xmas scrawled on it. The package was postmarked St. Nazaire in France and was stamped OUVERT PAR LA CENSURE. It made the war seem very near to her and she hoped Joe wasn’t in any danger over there.

One icy afternoon in January when Janey was lying on the bed reading The Old Wives’ Tale, she heard the voice of Mrs. Baghot, the landlady, calling her. She was afraid it was about the rent that they hadn’t paid that month yet, but it was Alice on the phone. Alice said for her to come right over because there was a man calling up who wanted a stenographer for a few days and none of the girls were in and she thought Janey might just as well go over and see if she wanted the job. “What’s the address? I’ll go right over.” Alice told her the address. Her voice was stuttering excitedly at the other end of the line. “I’m so scared… if Mrs. Robinson finds out she’ll be furious.” “Don’t worry, and I’ll explain it to the man,” said Janey.

The man was at the Hotel Continental on Pennsylvania Avenue. He had a bedroom and a parlor littered with typewritten sheets and papercovered pamphlets. He wore shellrimmed spectacles that he kept pulling off and putting on as if he wasn’t sure whether he saw better with them or without them. He started to dictate without looking at Janey, as soon as she’d taken off her hat and gotten pad and pencil out of her handbag. He talked in jerks as if delivering a speech, striding back and forth on long thin legs all the while. It was some sort of article to be marked “For immediate release,” all about capital and labor and the eighthour day and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. It was with a little feeling of worry that she worked out that he must be a laborleader. When he’d finished dictating he went out of the room abruptly and told her please to type it out as soon as she could that he’d be back in a minute. There was a Remington on the table but she had to change the ribbon and typed in a great hurry for fear he would come back and find her not finished. Then she sat there waiting, with the article and the carbon copies all piled on the table looking neat and crisp. An hour passed and he didn’t come. Janey got restless, roamed about the room, looked into the pamphlets. They were all about labor and economics and didn’t interest her. Then she looked out of the window and tried to crane her neck out to see what time it said by the clock on the postoffice tower. But she couldn’t see it, so she went over to the phone to ask the office if Mr. Barrow was in the hotel please to tell him his manuscript was ready. The desk said it was five o’clock and that Mr. Barrow hadn’t come in yet, although he’d left word that he’d be back immediately. As she set down the receiver she knocked a letter on lavender paper off the stand. When she picked it up, as she had nothing to do and was tired of playing naughts and crosses with herself, she read it. She was ashamed of herself but once she’d started she couldn’t stop.

Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, in eighteen fortyseven;

Milan was a little town on the Huron River that for a while was the wheatshipping port for the whole Western Reserve; the railroads took away the carrying trade, the Edison family went up to Port Huron in Michigan to grow up with the country;

his father was a shinglemaker who puttered round with various small speculations; he dealt in grain and feed and lumber and built a wooden tower a hundred feet high; tourists and excursionists paid a quarter each to go up the tower and look at the view over Lake Huron and the St. Clair River and Sam Edison became a solid and respected citizen of Port Huron.

those spring nights the streetcarwheels screech grinding in a rattle of loose trucks round the curved tracks of Harvard Square dust hangs in the powdery arclight glare allnight till dawn can’t sleep

haven’t got the nerve to break out of the bellglass

four years under the ethercone breathe deep gently now that’s the way be a good boy one two three four five six get A’s in some courses but don’t be a grind be interested in literature but remain a gentleman don’t be seen with Jews or socialists

and all the pleasant contacts will be useful in Later Life say hello pleasantly to everybody crossing the yard

sit looking out into the twilight of the pleasantest four years of your life

grow cold with culture like a cup of tea forgotten between an incenseburner and a volume of Oscar Wilde cold and not strong like a claret lemonade drunk at a Pop Concert in Symphony Hall

four years I didn’t know you could do what you Michaelangelo wanted say

Marx

to all

the professors with a small Swift break all the Greenoughs in the shooting gallery

but tossed with eyes smarting all the spring night reading The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus and went mad listening to the streetcarwheels screech grinding in a rattle of loose trucks round Harvard Square and the trains crying across the saltmarshes and the rumbling siren of a steamboat leaving dock and the blue peter flying and millworkers marching with a red brass band through the streets of Lawrence Massachusetts

it was like the Magdeburg spheres the pressure outside sustained the vacuum within

and I hadn’t the nerve

to jump up and walk out of doors and tell them all to

go take a flying

Rimbaud

at the moon

an attack by a number of hostile airships developed before midnight. Bombs were dropped somewhat indiscriminately over localities possessing no military importance

The rebels took Juarez and Huerta fled and the steamboats to Europe were packed with cientificos making for Paris and Venustiano Carranza was president in Mexico City. Somebody got Mac a pass on the Mexican Central down to the capital. Encarnacion cried when he left and all the anarchists came down to the station to see him off. Mac wanted to join Zapata. He’d picked up a little Spanish from Encarnacion and a vague idea of the politics of the revolution. The train took five days. Five times it was held up while the section hands repaired the track ahead. Occasionally at night bullets came through the windows. Near Caballos a bunch of men on horses rode the whole length of the train waving their big hats and firing as they went. The soldiers in the caboose woke up and returned the fire and the men rode off in a driving dustcloud. The passengers had to duck under the seats when the firing began or lie flat in the aisle. After the attack had been driven off an old woman started to shriek and it was found that a child had been hit through the head. The mother was a stout dark woman in a flowered dress. She went up and down the train with the tiny bloody body wrapped in a shawl asking for a doctor, but anybody could see that the child was dead.

Mac thought the trip would never end. He bought peppery food and lukewarm beer from old Indian women at stations, tried to drink pulque and to carry on conversations with his fellowpassengers. At last they passed Queretaro and the train began going fast down long grades in the cold bright air. Then the peaks of the great volcanos began to take shape in the blue beyond endless crisscrosspatterned fields of century-plants and suddenly the train was rattling between garden walls, through feathery trees. It came to a stop with a clang of couplings: Mexico City.

Mac felt lost wandering round the bright streets among the lowvoiced crowds, the men all dressed in white and the women all in black or dark blue. The streets were dusty and sunny and quiet. There were stores open and cabs and trolleycars and polished limousines. Mac was worried. He only had two dollars. He’d been on the train so long he’d forgotten what he intended to do when he reached his destination. He wanted clean clothes and a bath. When he’d wandered round a good deal he saw a place marked “American Bar.” His legs were tired. He sat down at a table. A waiter came over and asked him in English what he wanted. He couldn’t think of anything else so he ordered a whisky. He drank the whisky and sat there with his head in his hands. At the bar were a lot of Americans and a couple of Mexicans in tengallon hats rolling dice for drinks. Mac ordered another whisky. A beefy redeyed man in a rumpled khaki shirt was roaming uneasily about the bar. His eye lit on Mac and he sat down at his table. “Mind if I set here awhile, pardner?” he asked. “Those sonsobitches too damn noisy. Here, sombrero… wheresat damn waiter? Gimme a glassbeer. Well, I got the old woman an’ the kids off today… When are you pullin’ out?”

“Why, I just pulled in,” said Mac.

“The hell you say… This ain’t no place for a white man… These bandits’ll be on the town any day… It’ll be horrible, I tell you. There won’t be a white man left alive… I’ll get some of ’em before they croak me, though… By God, I can account for twentyfive of ’em, no, twentyfour.” He pulled a Colt out of his back pocket, emptied the chamber into his hand and started counting the cartridges, “Eight,” then he started going through his pockets and ranged the cartridges in a row on the deal table. There were only twenty. “Some sonvabitch robbed me.” A tall lanky man came over from the bar and put his hand on the redeyed man’s shoulder. “Eustace, you’d better put that away till we need it… You know what to do, don’t you?” he turned to Mac; “as soon as the shooting begins all American citizens concentrate at the embassy. There we’ll sell our lives to the last man.” Somebody yelled from the bar, “Hey, big boy, have another round,” and the tall man went back to the bar.

“You fellers seem to expect trouble,” said Mac.

“Trouble — my God! You don’t know this country. Did you just come in?”

“Blew in from Juarez just now.”

“You can’t have. Railroad’s all tore up at Queretaro.”

“Well, they musta got it fixed,” said Mac. “Say, what do they say round here about Zapata?”

“My God, he’s the bloodthirstiest villain of the lot… They roasted a feller was foreman of a sugar mill down in Morelos on a slow fire and raped his wife and daughters right before his eyes… My God, pardner, you don’t know what kind of country this is! Do you know what we ought to do… d’you know what we’d do if we had a man in the White House instead of a yellowbellied potatomouthed reformer? We’d get up an army of a hundred thousand men and clean this place up… It’s a hell of a fine country but there’s not one of these damn greasers worth the powder and shot to shoot ’em… smoke ’em out like vermin, that’s what I say… Every mother’s sonvabitch of ’em’s a Zapata under the skin.”

“What business are you in?”

“I’m an oil prospector, and I’ve been in this lousy hole fifteen years and I’m through. I’d have gotten out on the train to Vera Cruz today only I have some claims to settle up an’ my furniture to sell… You can’t tell when they’ll cut the railroad and then we won’t be able to get out and President Wilson’ll let us be shot down right here like rats in a trap… If the American public realized conditions down here… My God, we’re the laughing stock of all the other nations… What’s your line o’ work, pardner?”

“Printer… linotype operator.”

“Looking for a job?”

Mac had brought out a dollar to pay for his drinks. “I guess I’ll have to,” he said. “That’s my last dollar but one.” “Why don’t you go round to The Mexican Herald? They’re always needin’ English language printers… They can’t keep anybody down here… Ain’t fit for a white man down here no more… Look here, pardner, that drink’s on me.”

“Well, we’ll have another then, on me.”

“The fat’s in the fire in this country now, pardner… everything’s gone to hell… might as well have a drink while we can.”

That evening, after he’d eaten some supper in a little American lunchroom, Mac walked round the alameda to get the whisky out of his head before going up to The Mexican Herald to see if he could get a job. It would only be for a couple of weeks, he told himself, till he could get wise to the lay of the land. The tall trees on the alameda and the white statues and the fountains and the welldressed couples strolling round in the gloaming and the cabs clattering over the cobbles looked quiet enough, and the row of stonyeyed Indian women selling fruit and nuts and pink and yellow and green candies in booths along the curb. Mac decided that the man he’d talked to in the bar had been stringing him along because he was a tenderfoot.

He got a job all right at The Mexican Herald at thirty mex dollars a week, but round the printing plant everybody talked just like the man in the bar. That night an old Polish American who was a proofreader there took him round to a small hotel to get him a flop and lent him a couple of cartwheels till payday. “You get your wages in advance as much as you can,” said the old Pole, “one of these days there will be revolution and then goodby Mexican Herald… unless Wilson makes intervention mighty quick.” “Sounds all right to me; I want to see the social revolution,” said Mac. The old Pole laid his finger along his nose and shook his head in a peculiar way and left him.

When Mac woke up in the morning he was in a small room calsomined bright yellow. The furniture was painted blue and there were red curtains in the window. Between the curtains the long shutters were barred with vivid violet sunlight that cut a warm path across the bedclothes. A canary was singing somewhere and he could hear the flap pat flap pat of a woman making tortillas. He got up and threw open the shutters. The sky was cloudless above the redtile roofs. The street was empty and full of sunlight. He filled his lungs with cool thin air and felt the sun burning his face and arms and neck as he stood there. It must be early. He went back to bed and fell asleep again.

When Wilson ordered the Americans out of Mexico several months later Mac was settled in a little apartment in the Plaza del Carmen with a girl named Concha and two white Persian cats. Concha had been a stenographer and interpreter with an American firm and had been the mistress of an oilman for three years so she spoke pretty good English. The oilman had jumped on the train for Vera Cruz in the panic at the time of the flight of Huerta, leaving Concha high and dry. She had taken a fancy to Mac from the moment she had first seen him going into the postoffice. She made him very comfortable, and when he talked to her about going out to join Zapata, she only laughed and said peons were ignorant savages and fit only to be ruled with the whip. Her mother, an old woman with a black shawl perpetually over her head, came to cook for them and Mac began to like Mexican food, turkey with thick chocolate brown sauce and encheladas with cheese. The cats were named Porfirio and Venustiano and always slept on the foot of their bed. Concha was very thrifty and made Mac’s pay go much further than he could and never complained when he went out batting round town and came home late and with a headache from drinking tequila. Instead of trying to get on the crowded trains to Vera Cruz, Mac took a little money he had saved up and bought up the office furniture that wildeyed American businessmen were selling out for anything they could get for it. He had it piled in the courtyard back of the house where they lived. Buying it had been Concha’s idea in the first place and he used to tease her about how they’d ever get rid of it again, but she’d nod her head and say, “Wait a minute.”

Concha liked it very much when he’d have friends in to eat with him Sundays. She would wait on them very pleasantly and send her little brother Antonio round for beer and cognac and always have cakes in the house to bring out if anybody dropped in. Mac would sometimes think how much pleasanter this was than when he’d lived with Maisie in San Diego, and began to think less often about going out to join Zapata.

The Polish proofreader, whose name was Korski, turned out to be a political exile, a socialist and a wellinformed man. He would sit all afternoon over a half a glass of cognac talking about European politics; since the collapse of the European socialist parties at the beginning of the war he had taken no part in anything; from now on he’d be an onlooker. He had a theory that civilization and a mixed diet were causing the collapse of the human race.

Then there was Ben Stowell, an independent oil promotor who was trying to put through a deal with Carranza’s government to operate some oilwells according to the law. He was broke most of the time and Mac used to lend him money, but he always talked in millions. He called himself a progressive in politics and thought that Zapata and Villa were honest men. Ben Stowell would always take the opposite side of any argument from Korski and would infuriate the old man by his antisocial attitude. Mac wanted to make some money to send up to Maisie for the kids’ schooling. It made him feel good to send Rose up a box of toys now and then. He and Ben would have long talks about the chances of making money in Mexico. Ben Stowell brought round a couple of young radical politicians who enjoyed sitting through the afternoon talking about socialism and drinking and learning English. Mac usually didn’t say much but sometimes he got sore and gave them a broadside of straight I.W.W. doctrine. Concha would finish all arguments by bringing on supper and saying with a shake of her head, “Every poor man socialista… a como no? But when you get rich, quick you all very much capitalista.”

One Sunday Mac and Concha and some Mexican newspaper men and Ben Stowell and his girl, Angustias, who was a chorusgirl at the Lirico, went out on the trolley to Xochimilco. They hired a boat with a table in it and an awning and an Indian to pole them round through the poplarbordered canals among the rich flowerpatches and vegetablegardens. They drank pulque and they had a bottle of whisky with them, and they bought the girls calla lilies. One of the Mexicans played a guitar and sang.

In the afternoon the Indian brought the boat back to a landing and they strolled off in couples into the woods. Mac suddenly felt very homesick and told Concha about his children in the U. S. and about Rose particularly, and she burst into tears and told him how much she loved children, but that when she was seventeen she had been very very sick and they’d thought she was going to die and now she couldn’t have any children, only Porfirio and Venustiano. Mac kissed her and told her that he’d always look after her.

When they got back to the trolleystation, loaded down with flowers, Mac and Ben let the girls go home alone and went to a cantina to have a drink. Ben said he was pretty tired of this sort of thing and wished he could make his pile and go back to the States to marry and have a home and a family. “You see, Mac,” he said, “I’m forty years old. Christ, a man can’t bat around all his life.” “Well, I’m not far from it,” said Mac. They didn’t say much, but Ben walked up with Mac as far as the office of The Mexican Herald and then went down town to the Iturbide to see some oilmen who were staying there. “Well, it’s a great life if you don’t weaken,” he said as he waved his hand at Mac and started down the street. He was a stocky bullnecked man with a bowlegged walk.

Several days later Ben came around to the Plaza del Carmen before Mac was out of bed. “Mac, you come and eat with me this noon,” he said. “There’s a guy named G. H. Barrow here I want to kinda show the town a little bit. He might be useful to us… I want to know what he’s after anyway.” The man was writing articles on the Mexican situation and was said to have some connection with the A. F. of L. At lunch he asked anxiously if the water was safe and whether it wasn’t dangerous to walk round the streets after nightfall. Ben Stowell kidded him along a little and told him stories of generals and their friends breaking into a bar and shooting into the floor to make the customers dance and then using the place for a shooting gallery. “The shooting gallery, that’s what they call congress here,” said Mac. Barrow said he was going to a meeting of the Union Nacional de Trabajadores that afternoon and would they mind going with him to interpret for him. It was Mac’s day off so they said, “All right.” He said he’d been instructed to try to make contacts with stable labor elements in Mexico with the hope of joining them up with the Pan-American Federation of Labor. Gompers would come down himself if something could be lined up. He said he’d been a shipping clerk and a Pullman conductor and had been in the office of the Railroad Brotherhood, but now he was working for the A. F. of L. He wished American workers had more ideas about the art of life. He’d been at the Second International meetings at Amsterdam and felt the European workers understood the art of life. When Mac asked him why the hell the Second International hadn’t done something to stop the World War, he said the time wasn’t ripe yet and spoke about German atrocities.

“The German atrocities are a Sundayschool picnic to what goes on every day in Mexico,” said Ben. Then Barrow went to ask whether Mexicans were as immoral as it was made out. The beer they were drinking with their lunch was pretty strong and they all loosened up a little. Barrow wanted to know whether it wasn’t pretty risky going out with girls here on account of the high percentage of syphilis. Mac said yes, but that he and Ben could show him some places that were all right if he wanted to look ’em over. Barrow tittered and looked embarrassed and said he’d just as soon look ’em over. “A man ought to see every side of things when he’s investigating conditions.” Ben Stowell slapped his hand on the edge of the table and said that Mac was just the man to show him the backside of Mexico.

They went to the meeting that was crowded with slender dark men in blue denim. At first they couldn’t get in on account of the crowd packed in the aisles and in the back of the hall, but Mac found an official he knew who gave them seats in a box. The hall was very stuffy and the band played and there was singing and the speeches were very long. Barrow said listening to a foreign language made him sleepy, and suggested that they walk around town; he’d heard that the red light district was… he was interested in conditions.

Outside the hall they ran across Enrique Salvador, a newspaperman that Ben knew. He had a car and a chauffeur. He shook hands and laughed and said the car belonged to the chief of police who was a friend of his and wouldn’t they like to ride out to San Angel? They went out the long avenue past Chapultepec, the Champs Elysées of Mexico, Salvador called it. Near Tacubaya Salvador pointed out the spot where Carranza’s troops had had a skirmish with the Zapatistas the week before and a corner where a rich clothing merchant had been murdered by bandits, and G. H. Barrow kept asking was it quite safe to go so far out in the country, and Salvador said, “I am a newspaperman. I am everybody’s friend.”

Out at San Angel they had some drinks and when they got back to the city they drove round the Pajaritos district. G. H. Barrow got very quiet and his eyes got a watery look when he saw the little lighted cribhouses, each one with a bed and some paperflowers and a crucifix that you could see through the open door, past a red or blue curtain, and the dark quiet Indian girls in short chemises standing outside their doors or sitting on the sill.

“You see,” said Ben Stowell, “it’s easy as rolling off a log… But I don’t advise you to get too careless round here… Salvador’ll show us a good joint after supper. He ought to know because he’s a friend of the chief of police and he runs most of them.”

But Barrow wanted to go into one of the cribs so they got out and talked to one of the girls and Salvador sent the chauffeur to get a couple of bottles of beer. The girl received them very politely and Barrow tried to get Mac to ask her questions, but Mac didn’t like asking her questions so he let Salvador do it. When G. H. Barrow put his hand on her bare shoulder and tried to pull her chemise off and asked how much did she want to let him see her all naked, the girl didn’t understand and tore herself away from him and yelled and cursed at him and Salvador wouldn’t translate what she said. “Let’s get this bastard outa here,” said Ben in a low voice to Mac, “before we have to get in a fight or somethin’.”

They had a tequila each before dinner at a little bar where nothing was sold but tequila out of varnished kegs. Salvador showed G. H. Barrow how to drink it, first putting salt on the hollow between his thumb and forefinger and then gulping the little glass of tequila, licking up the salt and swallowing some chile sauce to finish up with, but he got it down the wrong way and choked.

At supper they were pretty drunk and G. H. Barrow kept saying that Mexicans understood the art of life and that was meat for Salvador who talked about the Indian genius and the Latin genius and said that Mac and Ben were the only gringos he ever met he could get along with, and insisted on their not paying for their meal. He’d charge it to his friend the chief of police. Next they went to a cantina beside a theater where there were said to be French girls, but the French girls weren’t there. There were three old men in the cantina playing a cello, a violin and a piccolo. Salvador made them play La Adelita and everybody sang it and then La Cucaracha. There was an old man in a broadbrimmed hat with a huge shiny pistolholster on his back, who drank up his drink quickly when they came in and left the bar. Salvador whispered to Mac that he was General Gonzales and had left in order not to be seen drinking with gringos.

Ben and Barrow sat with their heads together at a table in the corner talking about the oil business. Barrow was saying that there was an investigator for certain oil interests coming down; he’d be at the Regis almost any day now and Ben was saying he wanted to meet him and Barrow put his arm around his shoulder and said he was sure Ben was just the man this investigator would want to meet to get an actual working knowledge of conditions. Meanwhile Mac and Salvador were dancing the Cuban danzon with the girls. Then Barrow got to his feet a little unsteadily and said he didn’t want to wait for the French girls but why not go to that place where they’d been and try some of the dark meat, but Salvador insisted on taking them to the house of Remedios near the American embassy. “Quelquecosa de chic,” he’d say in bad French. It was a big house with a marble stairway and crystal chandeliers and salmonbrocaded draperies and lace curtains and mirrors everywhere. “Personne que les henerales vieng aqui,” he said when he’d introduced them to the madam, who was a darkeyed grayhaired woman in black with a black shawl who looked rather like a nun. There was only one girl left unoccupied so they fixed up Barrow with her and arranged about the price and left him. “Whew, that’s a relief,” said Ben when they came out. The air was cold and the sky was all stars.

Salvador had made the three old men with their instruments get into the back of the car and said he felt romantic and wanted to serenade his novia and they went out towards Guadalupe speeding like mad along the broad causeway. Mac and the chauffeur and Ben and Salvador and the three old men singing La Adelita and the instruments chirping all off key. In Guadalupe they stopped under some buttonball trees against the wall of a house with big grated windows and sang Cielito lindo and La Adelita and Cuatro milpas, and Ben and Mac sang just to keep her from the foggy foggy dew and were just starting Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie when a girl came to the window and talked a long time in low Spanish to Salvador.

Salvador said, “Ella dit que nous make escandalo and must go away. Très chic."

By that time a patrol of soldiers had come up and were about to arrest them all when the officer arrived and recognized the car and Salvador and took them to have a drink with him at his billet. When they all got home to Mac’s place they were very drunk. Concha, whose face was drawn from waiting up, made up a mattress for Ben in the diningroom and as they were all going to turn in Ben said, “By heavens, Concha, you’re a swell girl. When I make my pile I’ll buy you the handsomest pair of diamond earrings in the Federal District.” The last they saw of Salvador he was standing up in the front seat of the car as it went round the corner on two wheels conducting the three old men in La Adelita with big gestures like an orchestra leader.

Before Christmas Ben Stowell came back from a trip to Tamaulipas feeling fine. Things were looking up for him. He’d made an arrangement with a local general near Tampico to run an oil well on a fifty-fifty basis. Through Salvador he’d made friends with some members of Carranza’s cabinet and was hoping to be able to turn over a deal with some of the big claimholders up in the States. He had plenty of cash and took a room at the Regis. One day he went round to the printing plant and asked Mac to step out in the alley with him for a minute.

“Look here, Mac,” he said, “I’ve got an offer for you… You know old Worthington’s bookstore? Well, I got drunk last night and bought him out for two thousand pesos… He’s pulling up stakes and going home to blighty, he says.”

“The hell you did!”

“Well, I’m just as glad to have him out of the way.”

“Why, you old whoremaster, you’re after Lisa.”

“Well, maybe she’s just as glad to have him out of the way too.”

“She’s certainly a goodlooker.”

“I got a lot a news I’ll tell you later… Ain’t goin’ to be so healthy round The Mexican Herald maybe… I’ve got a proposition for you, Mac… Christ knows I owe you a hellova lot… You know that load of office furniture you have out back Concha made you buy that time?” Mac nodded. “Well, I’ll take it off your hands and give you a half interest in that bookstore. I’m opening an office. You know the book business… you told me yourself you did… the profits for the first year are yours and after that we split two ways, see? You certainly ought to make it pay. That old fool Worthington did, and kept Lisa into the bargain… Are you on?”

“Jez, lemme think it over, Ben… but I got to go back to the daily bunksheet.”

So Mac found himself running a bookstore on the Calle Independencia with a line of stationery and a few typewriters. It felt good to be his own boss for the first time in his life. Concha, who was a storekeeper’s daughter, was delighted. She kept the books and talked to the customers so that Mac didn’t have much to do but sit in the back and read and talk to his friends. That Christmas Ben and Lisa, who was a tall Spanish girl said to have been a dancer in Malaga, with a white skin like a camellia and ebony hair, gave all sorts of parties in an apartment with Americanstyle bath and kitchen that Ben rented out in the new quarter towards Chapultepec. The day the Asociacion de Publicistas had its annual banquet, Ben stopped into the bookstore feeling fine and told Mac he wanted him and Concha to come up after supper and wouldn’t Concha bring a couple of friends, nice wellbehaved girls not too choosy, like she knew. He was giving a party for G. H. Barrow who was back from Vera Cruz and a big contact man from New York who was wangling something, Ben didn’t know just what. He’d seen Carranza yesterday and at the banquet everybody’d kowtowed to him.

“Jez, Mac, you oughta been at that banquet; they took one of the streetcars and had a table the whole length of it and an orchestra and rode us out to San Angel and back and then all round town.”

“I saw ’em starting out,” said Mac, “looked too much like a funeral to me.”

“Jez, it was swell though. Salvador an’ everybody was there and this guy Moorehouse, the big hombre from New York, jez, he looked like he didn’t know if he was comin’ or goin’. Looked like he expected a bomb to go off under the seat any minute… hellova good thing for Mexico if one had, when you come to think of it. All the worst crooks in town were there."

The party at Ben’s didn’t come off so well. J. Ward Moorehouse didn’t make up to the girls as Ben had hoped. He brought his secretary, a tired blond girl, and they both looked scared to death. They had a dinner Mexican style and champagne and a great deal of cognac and a victrola played records by Victor Herbert and Irving Berlin and a little itinerant band attracted by the crowd played Mexican airs on the street outside. After dinner things were getting a little noisy inside so Ben and Moorehouse took chairs out on the balcony and had a long talk about the oil situation over their cigars. J. Ward Moorehouse explained that he had come down in a purely unofficial capacity you understand to make contacts, to find out what the situation was and just what there was behind Carranza’s stubborn opposition to American investors and that the big businessmen he was in touch with in the States desired only fair play and that he felt that if their point of view could be thoroughly understood through some information bureau or the friendly coöperation of Mexican newspapermen.

Ben went back in the diningroom and brought out Enrique Salvador and Mac. They all talked over the situation and J. Ward Moorehouse said that speaking as an old newspaperman himself he thoroughly understood the situation of the press, probably not so different in Mexico City from that in Chicago or Pittsburgh and that all the newspaperman wanted was to give each fresh angle of the situation its proper significance in a spirit of fair play and friendly coöperation, but that he felt that the Mexican papers had been misinformed about the aims of American business in Mexico just as the American press was misinformed about the aims of Mexican politics. If Mr. Enrique would call by the Regis he’d be delighted to talk to him more fully, or to any one of you gentlemen and if he wasn’t in, due to the great press of appointments and the very few days he had to spend in the Mexican capital, his secretary, Miss Williams, would be only too willing to give them any information they wanted and a few specially prepared strictly confidential notes on the attitude of the big American corporations with which he was purely informally in touch.

After that he said he was sorry but he had telegrams waiting for him at the Regis and Salvador took him and Miss Williams, his secretary, home in the chief of police’s automobile.

“Jez, Ben, that’s a smooth bastard,” said Mac to Ben after J. Ward Moorehouse had gone.

“Mac,” said Ben, “that baby’s got a slick cream of millions all over him. By gum, I’d like to make some of these contacts he talks about… By gorry, I may do it yet… You just watch your Uncle Dudley, Mac. I’m goin’ to associate with the big hombres after this.”

After that the party was not so refined. Ben brought out a lot more cognac and the men started taking the girls into the bedrooms and hallways and even into the pantry and kitchen. Barrow cottoned onto a blonde named Nadia who was half English and talked to her all evening about the art of life. After everybody had gone Ben found them locked up in his bedroom.

Mac got to like the life of a storekeeper. He got up when he wanted to and walked up the sunny streets past the cathedral and the façade of the national palace and up Independencia where the sidewalks had been freshly sprinkled with water and a morning wind was blowing through, sweet with the smell of flowers and roasting coffee. Concha’s little brother Antonio would have the shutters down and be sweeping out the store by the time he got there. Mac would sit in the back reading or would roam about the store chatting with people in English and Spanish. He didn’t sell many books, but he kept all the American and European papers and magazines and they sold well, especially The Police Gazette and La Vie Parisienne. He started a bank account and was planning to take on some typewriter agencies. Salvador kept telling him he’d get him a contract to supply stationery to some government department and make him a rich man.

One morning he noticed a big crowd in the square in front of the National Palace. He went into one of the cantinas under the arcade and ordered a glass of beer. The waiter told him that Carranza’s troops had lost Torreón and that Villa and Zapata were closing in on the Federal District. When he got to the bookstore news was going down the street that Carranza’s government had fled and that the revolutionists would be in the city before night. The storekeepers began to put up their shutters. Concha and her mother came in crying saying that it would be worse than the terrible week when Madero fell and that the revolutionists had sworn to burn and loot the city. Antonio ran in saying that the Zapatistas were bombarding Tacuba. Mac got a cab and went over to the Chamber of Deputies to see if he could find anybody he knew. All the doors were open to the street and there were papers littered along the corridors. There was nobody in the theater but an old Indian and his wife who were walking round hand in hand looking reverently at the gilded ceiling and the paintings and the tables covered with green plush. The old man carried his hat in his hand as if he were in church.

Mac told the cabman to drive to the paper where Salvador worked, but the janitor there told him with a wink that Salvador had gone to Vera Cruz with the chief of police. Then he went to the Embassy where he couldn’t get a word with anybody. All the anterooms were full of Americans who had come in from ranches and concessions and who were cursing out President Wilson and giving each other the horrors with stories of the revolutionists. At the consulate Mac met a Syrian who offered to buy his stock of books. “No, you don’t,” said Mac and went back down Independencia.

When he got back to the store newsboys were already running through the street crying, “Viva la revolucion revindicadora.” Concha and her mother were in a panic and said they must get on the train to Vera Cruz or they’d all be murdered. The revolutionists were sacking convents and murdering priests and nuns. The old woman dropped on her knees in the corner of the room and began chanting “Ave Marias.”

“Aw, hell!” said Mac, “let’s sell out and go back to the States. Want to go to the States, Concha?” Concha nodded vigorously and began to smile through her tears. “But what the devil can we do with your mother and Antonio?” Concha said she had a married sister in Vera Cruz. They could leave them there if they could ever get to Vera Cruz.

Mac, the sweat pouring off him, hurried back to the consulate to find the Syrian. They couldn’t decide on the price. Mac was desperate because the banks were all closed and there was no way of getting any money. The Syrian said that he was from the Lebanon and an American citizen and a Christian and that he’d lend Mac a hundred dollars if Mac would give him a sixtyday note hypothecating his share in the bookstore for two hundred dollars. He said that he was an American citizen and a Christian and was risking his life to save Mac’s wife and children. Mac was so flustered he noticed just in time that the Syrian was giving him a hundred dollars mex and that the note was made out in American dollars. The Syrian called upon God to protect them both and said it was an error and Mac went off with two hundred pesos in gold.

He found Concha all packed. She had closed up the store and was standing on the pavement outside with some bundles, the two cats in a basket, and Antonio and her mother, each wrapped in a blanket.

They found the station so packed full of people and baggage they couldn’t get in the door. Mac went round to the yards and found a man named McGrath he knew who worked for the railroad. McGrath said he could fix them up but that they must hurry. He put them into a secondclass coach out in the yards and said he’d buy their tickets but would probably have to pay double for them. Sweat was pouring from under Mac’s hatband when he finally got the two women seated and the basket of cats and the bundles and Antonio stowed away. The train was already full, although it hadn’t backed into the station yet. After several hours the train pulled out, a line of dusty soldiers fighting back the people on the platform who tried to rush the train as it left. Every seat was taken, the aisles were full of priests and nuns, there were welldressed people hanging onto the platforms.

Mac didn’t have much to say sitting next to Concha in the dense heat of the slowmoving train. Concha sighed a great deal and her mother sighed, “Ay de mi dios,” and they gnawed on chickenwings and ate almond paste. The train was often stopped by groups of soldiers patrolling the line. On sidings were many boxcars loaded with troops, but nobody seemed to know what side they were on. Mac looked out at the endless crisscross ranks of centuryplants and the crumbling churches and watched the two huge snowy volcanos, Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihatl, change places on the horizon; then there was another goldenbrown cone of an extinct volcano slowly turning before the train; then it was the bluewhite peak of Orizaba in the distance growing up taller and taller into the cloudless sky.

After Huamantla they ran down through clouds. The rails rang under the merry clatter of the wheels curving down steep grades in the misty winding valley through moist forestgrowth. They began to feel easier. With every loop of the train the air became warmer and damper. They began to see orange and lemontrees. The windows were all open. At stations women came through selling beer and pulque and chicken and tortillas.

At Orizaba it was sunny again. The train stopped a long time. Mac sat drinking beer by himself in the station restaurant. The other passengers were laughing and talking but Mac felt sore.

When the bell rang he didn’t want to go back to Concha and her mother and their sighs and their greasy fingers and their chickenwings.

He got on another car. Night was coming on full of the smells of flowers and warm earth.

It was late the next day when they got into Vera Cruz. The town was full of flags and big red banners stretched from wall to wall of the orange and lemon and bananacolored streets with their green shutters and the palms waving in the seawind. The banners read: “Viva Obregon,” “Viva La Revolucion Revindicadora,” “Viva El Partido Laborista.”

In the main square a band was playing and people were dancing. Scared daws flew cawing among the dark umbrella-shaped trees.

Mac left Concha and her bundles and the old woman and Antonio on a bench and went to the Ward Line office to see about passage to the States. There everybody was talking about submarine warfare and America entering the Great War and German atrocities and Mac found that there was no boat for a week and that he didn’t have enough cash even for two steerage passages. He bought himself a single steerage passage. He’d begun to suspect that he was making a damn fool of himself and decided to go without Concha.

When he got back to where she was sitting she’d bought custard-apples and mangos. The old woman and Antonio had gone off with the bundles to find her sister’s house. The white cats were out of their basket and were curled up on the bench beside her. She looked up at Mac with a quick confident blackeyed smile and said that Porfirio and Venustiano were happy because they smelt fish. He gave her both hands to help her to her feet. At that moment he couldn’t tell her he’d decided to go back to the States without her. Antonio came running up and said that they’d found his aunt and that she’d put them up and that everybody in Vera Cruz was for the revolution.

Going through the main square again Concha said she was thirsty and wanted a drink. They were looking around for an empty table outside of one of the cafés when they caught sight of Salvador. He jumped to his feet and embraced Mac and cried, “Viva Obregon,” and they had a mint julep American style. Salvador said that Carranza had been murdered in the mountains by his own staffofficers and that onearmed Obregon had ridden into Mexico City dressed in white cotton like a peon wearing a big peon hat at the head of his Yaqui Indians and that there’d been no disorder and that the principles of Madero and Juarez were to be reëstablished and that a new era was to dawn.

They drank several mint juleps and Mac didn’t say anything about going back to America.

He asked Salvador where his friend, the chief of police, was but Salvador didn’t hear him. Then Mac said to Concha suppose he went back to America without her, but she said he was only joking. She said she liked Vera Cruz and would like to live there. Salvador said that great days for Mexico were coming, that he was going back up the next day. That night they all ate supper at Concha’s sister’s house. Mac furnished the cognac. They all drank to the workers, to the trade-unions, to the partido laborista, to the social revolution and the agraristas.

Next morning Mac woke up early with a slight headache. He slipped out of the house alone and walked out along the breakwater. He was beginning to think it was silly to give up his bookstore like that. He went to the Ward Line office and took his ticket back. The clerk refunded him the money and he got back to Concha’s sister’s house in time to have chocolate and pastry with them for breakfast.

Steinmetz was a hunchback,

son of a hunchback lithographer.

He was born in Breslau in eighteen sixtyfive, graduated with highest honors at seventeen from the Breslau Gymnasium, went to the University of Breslau to study mathematics;

mathematics to Steinmetz was muscular strength and long walks over the hills and the kiss of a girl in love and big evenings spent swilling beer with your friends;

on his broken back he felt the topheavy weight of society the way workingmen felt it on their straight backs, the way poor students felt it, was a member of a socialist club, editor of a paper called The People’s Voice.

The trip to Mexico and the private car the Mexican government put at the disposal of J. Ward Moorehouse to go back north in was lovely but a little tiresome, and it was so dusty going across the desert. Janey bought some very pretty things so cheap, some turquoise jewelry and pink onyx to take home to Alice and her mother and sisters as presents. Going up in the private car J. Ward kept her busy dictating and there was a big bunch of men always drinking and smoking cigars and laughing at smutty stories in the smokingroom or on the observation platform. One of them was that man Barrow she’d done some work for in Washington. He always stopped to talk to her now and she didn’t like the way his eyes were when he stood over her table talking to her, still he was an interesting man and quite different from what she’d imagined a laborleader would be like, and it amused her to think that she knew about Queenie and how startled he’d be if he knew she knew. She kidded him a good deal and she thought maybe he was getting a crush on her, but he was the sort of man who’d be like that with any woman.

They didn’t have a private car after Laredo and the trip wasn’t so nice. They went straight through to New York. She had a lower in a different car from J. Ward and his friends, and in the upper berth there was a young fellow she took quite a fancy to. His name was Buck Saunders and he was from the panhandle of Texas and talked with the funniest drawl. He’d punched cows and worked in the Oklahoma oilfields and had saved up some money and was going to see Washington City. He was tickled to death when she said she was from Washington and she told him all about what he ought to see, the Capitol and the White House and the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument and the Old Soldiers’ Home and Mount Vernon. She said to be sure to go out to Great Falls and told him about canoeing on the canal and how she’d been caught in a terrible thunderstorm once near Cabin John’s Bridge. They ate several meals together in the dining car and he told her she was a dandy girl and awful easy to talk to and how he had a girl in Tulsa, Ok., and how he was going to get a job in Venezuela, down at Maracaibo in the oilfields because she’d thrown him over to marry a rich dirtfarmer who struck oil in his cowpasture. G. H. Barrow kidded Janey about her fine handsome pickup and she said what about him and the redheaded lady who got off in St. Louis, and they laughed and she felt quite devilish and that G. H. Barrow wasn’t so bad after all. When Buck got off the train in Washington he gave her a snapshot of himself taken beside an oilderrick and said he’d write her every day and would come to New York to see her if she’d let him, but she never heard from him.

She liked Morton, the cockney valet, too, because he always spoke to her so respectfully. Every morning he’d come and report on how J. Ward was feeling, “’E looks pretty black this mornin’, Miss Williams,” or, “’E was whistlin’ while ’e was shavin’. Is ’e feelin’ good? Rath-er.”

When they got to the Pennsylvania Station, New York, she had to stay with Morton to see that the box of files was sent to the office at 100 Fifth Avenue and not out to Long Island where J. Ward’s home was. She saw Morton off in a Pierce Arrow that had come all the way in from Great Neck to get the baggage, and went alone to the office in a taxicab with her typewriter and the papers and files. She felt scared and excited looking out of the taxicab window at the tall white buildings and the round watertanks against the sky and the puffs of steam way up and the sidewalks crowded with people and all the taxicabs and trucks and the shine and jostle and clatter. She wondered where she’d get a room to live, and how she’d find friends and where she’d eat. It seemed terribly scary being all alone in the big city like that and she wondered that she’d had the nerve to come. She decided she’d try to find Alice a job and that they’d take an apartment together, but where would she go tonight?

When she got to the office, everything seemed natural and reassuring and so handsomely furnished and polished so bright and typewriters going so fast and much more stir and bustle than there’d been in the offices of Dreyfus and Carroll; but everybody looked Jewish and she was afraid they wouldn’t like her and afraid she wouldn’t be able to hold down the job.

A girl named Gladys Compton showed her her desk, that she said had been Miss Rosenthal’s desk. It was in a little passage just outside J. Ward’s private office opposite the door to Mr. Robbins’ office. Gladys Compton was Jewish and was Mr. Robbins’ stenographer and said what a lovely girl Miss Rosenthal had been and how sorry they all were in the office about her accident and Janey felt that she was stepping into a dead man’s shoes and would have a stiff row to hoe. Gladys Compton stared at her with resentful brown eyes that had a slight squint in them when she looked hard at anything and said she hoped she’d be able to get through the work, that sometimes the work was simply killing, and left her.

When things were closing up at five, J. Ward came out of his private office. Janey was so pleased to see him standing by her desk. He said he’d talked to Miss Compton and asked her to look out for Janey a little at first and that he knew it was hard for a young girl finding her way around a new city, finding a suitable place to live and that sort of thing, but that Miss Compton was a very nice girl and would help her out and he was sure everything would work out fine. He gave her a blueeyed smile and handed her a closely written packet of notes and said would she mind coming in the office a little early in the morning and having them all copied and on his desk by nine o’clock. He wouldn’t usually ask her to do work like that but all the typists were so stupid and everything was in confusion owing to his absence. Janey felt only too happy to do it and warm all over from his smile.

She and Gladys Compton left the office together. Gladys Compton suggested that seeing as she didn’t know the city hadn’t she better come home with her. She lived in Flatbush with her father and mother and of course it wouldn’t be what Miss Williams was accustomed to but they had a spare room that they could let her have until she could find her way around that it was clean at least and that was more than you could say about many places. They went by the station to get her bag. Janey felt relieved not to have to find her way alone in all that crowd. Then they went down into the subway and got on an expresstrain that was packed to the doors and Janey didn’t think she could stand it being packed in close with so many people. She thought she’d never get there and the trains made so much noise in the tunnel she couldn’t hear what the other girl was saying.

At last they got out into a wide street with an elevated running down it where the buildings were all one or two stories and the stores were groceries and vegetable and fruit stores. Gladys Compton said, “We eat kosher, Miss Williams, on account of the old people. I hope you don’t mind; of course Benny — Benny’s my brudder — and I haven’t any prejudices.” Janey didn’t know what kosher was but she said of course she didn’t mind and told the other girl about how funny the food was down in Mexico, so peppery you couldn’t hardly eat it.

When they got to the house Gladys Compton began to pronounce her words less precisely and was very kind and thoughtful. Her father was a little old man with glasses on the end of his nose and her mother was a fat pearshaped woman in a wig. They talked Yiddish among themselves. They did everything they could to make Janey comfortable and gave her a nice room and said they’d give her board and lodging for ten dollars a week as long as she wanted to stay and when she wanted to move she could go away and no hard feelings. The house was a yellow twofamily frame house on a long block of houses all exactly alike, but it was well heated and the bed was comfortable. The old man was a watchmaker and worked at a Fifth Avenue jeweler’s. In the old country their name had been Kompshchski but they said that in New York nobody could pronounce it. The old man had wanted to take the name of Freedman but his wife thought Compton sounded more refined. They had a good supper with tea in glasses and soup with dumplings and red caviar and gefültefisch and Janey thought it was very nice knowing people like that. The boy Benny was still in highschool, a gangling youth with heavy glasses who ate with his head hung over his plate and had a rude way of contradicting anything anybody said. Gladys said not to mind him, that he was very good in his studies and was going to study law. When the strangeness had worn off a little Janey got to like the Comptons, particularly old Mr. Compton, who was very kind and treated everything that happened with gentle heartbroken humor.

The work at the office was so interesting. J. Ward was beginning to rely on her for things. Janey felt it was going to be a good year for her.

The worst thing was the threequarters of an hour ride in the subway to Union Square mornings. Janey would try to read the paper and to keep herself in a corner away from the press of bodies. She liked to get to the office feeling bright and crisp with her dress feeling neat and her hair in nice order, but the long jolting ride fagged her out, made her feel as if she wanted to get dressed and take a bath all over again. She liked walking along Fourteenth Street all garish and shimmery in the sunny early morning dust and up Fifth Avenue to the office. She and Gladys were always among the first to get in. Janey kept flowers on her desk and would sometimes slip in and put a couple of roses in a silver vase on J. Ward’s broad mahogany desk. Then she’d sort the mail, lay his personal letters in a neat pile on the corner of the blotter-pad that was in a sort of frame of red illuminated Italian leather, read the other letters, look over his engagement book and make up a small typewritten list of engagements, interviews, copy to be got out, statements to the press. She laid the list in the middle of the blotter under a rawcopper paperweight from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, checking off with a neat W. the items she could attend to without consulting him.

By the time she was back at her desk correcting the spelling in the copy that had emanated from Mr. Robbins’ office the day before she began to feel a funny tingle inside her; soon J. Ward would be coming in. She told herself it was all nonsense but every time the outer office door opened she looked up expectantly. She began to worry a little; he might have had an accident driving in from Great Neck. Then when she’d given up expecting him he’d walk hurriedly through with a quick smile all around and the groundglass door of his private office would close behind him. Janey would notice whether he wore a dark or a light suit, what color his necktie was, whether he had a fresh haircut or not. One day he had a splatter of mud on the trouserleg of his blue serge suit and she couldn’t keep her mind off it all morning trying to think of a pretext to go in and tell him about it. Rarely he’d look at her directly with a flash of blue eyes as he passed, or stop and ask her a question. Then she’d feel fine.

The work at the office was so interesting. It put her right in the midst of headlines like when she used to talk to Jerry Burnham back at Dreyfus and Carroll’s. There was the Onondaga Salt Products account and literature about bathsalts and chemicals and the employees’ baseball team and cafeteria and old age pensions, and Marigold Copper and combating subversive tendencies among the miners who were mostly foreigners who had to be educated in the principles of Americanism, and the Citrus Center Chamber of Commerce’s campaign to educate the small investors in the North in the stable building qualities of the Florida fruit industry, and the slogan to be launched, “Put an Alligator Pear on Every Breakfast Table” for the Avocado Producers Coöperative. That concern occasionally sent up a case so that everybody in the office had an alligator pear to take home, except Mr. Robbins who wouldn’t take his, but said they tasted like soap. Now the biggest account of all was Southwestern Oil campaign to counter the insidious anti-American propaganda of the British oilcompanies in Mexico and to oppose the intervention lobby of the Hearst interests in Washington.

In June Janey went to her sister Ellen’s wedding. It was funny being in Washington again. Going on the train Janey looked forward a whole lot to seeing Alice, but when she saw her they couldn’t seem to find much to talk about. She felt out of place at her mother’s. Ellen was marrying a law student at Georgetown University who had been a lodger and the house was full of college boys and young girls after the wedding. They all laughed and giggled around and Mrs. Williams and Francie seemed to enjoy it all right, but Janey was glad when it was time for her to go down to the station and take the train to New York again. When she said goodby to Alice she didn’t say anything about her coming down to New York to get an apartment.

She felt pretty miserable on the train sitting in the stuffy parlorcar looking out at towns and fields and signboards. Getting back to the office the next morning was like getting home.

It was exciting in New York. The sinking of the Lusitania had made everybody feel that America’s going into the war was only a question of months. There were many flags up on Fifth Avenue. Janey thought a great deal about the war. She had a letter from Joe from Scotland that he’d been torpedoed on the steamer Marchioness and that they’d been ten hours in an open boat in a snowstorm off Pentland Firth with the current carrying them out to sea, but that they’d landed and he was feeling fine and that the crew had gotten bonuses and that he was making big money anyway. When she’d read the letter she went in to see J. Ward with a telegram that had just come from Colorado and told him about her brother being torpedoed and he was very much interested. He talked about being patriotic and saving civilization and the historic beauties of Rheims cathedral. He said he was ready to do his duty when the time came, and that he thought America’s entering the war was only a question of months.

A very welldressed woman came often to see J. Ward. Janey looked enviously at her lovely complexion and her neat dresses, not ostentatious but very chic, and her manicured nails and her tiny feet. One day the door swung open so that she could hear her and J. Ward talking familiarly together. “But, J.W., my darling,” she was saying, “this office is a fright. It’s the way they used to have their offices in Chicago in the early eighties.” He was laughing. “Well, Eleanor, why don’t you redecorate it for me? Only the work would have to be done without interfering with business. I can’t move, not with the press of important business just now.”

Janey felt quite indignant about it. The office was lovely the way it was, quite distinctive, everybody said so. She wondered who this woman was who was putting ideas into J. Ward’s head. Next day when she had to make out a check for two hundred and fifty dollars on account to Stoddard and Hutchins, Interior Decorators, she almost spoke her mind, but after all it was hardly her business. After that Miss Stoddard seemed to be around the office all the time. The work was done at night so that every morning when Janey came in, she found something changed. It was all being done over in black and white with curtains and upholstery of a funny claret-color. Janey didn’t like it at all but Gladys said it was in the modern style and very interesting. Mr. Robbins refused to have his private cubbyhole touched and he and J. Ward almost had words about it, but in the end he had his own way and the rumor went round that J. Ward had to increase his salary to keep him from going to another agency.

Labor Day Janey moved. She was sorry to leave the Comptons but she’d met a middleaged woman named Eliza Tingley who worked for a lawyer on the same floor as J. Ward’s office. Eliza Tingley was a Baltimorean, had passed a bar examination herself and Janey said to herself that she was a woman of the world. She and her twin brother, who was a certified accountant, had taken a floor of a house on West 23rd Street in the Chelsea district and they asked Janey to come in with them. It meant being free from the subway and Janey felt that the little walk over to Fifth Avenue every morning would do her good. The minute she’d seen Eliza Tingley in the lunchcounter downstairs she’d taken a fancy to her. Things at the Tingleys were free and easy and Janey felt at home there. Sometimes they had a drink in the evening. Eliza was a good cook and they’d take a long time over dinner and play a couple of rubbers of threehanded bridge before going to bed. Saturday night they’d almost always go to the theater. Eddy Tingley would get the seats at a cutrate agency he knew. They subscribed to The Literary Digest and to The Century and The Ladies’ Home Journal and Sundays they had roast chicken or duck and read the magazine section of The New York Times.

The Tingleys had a good many friends and they liked Janey and included her in everything and she felt that she was living the way she’d like to live. It was exciting too that winter with rumors of war all the time. They had a big map of Europe hung up on the livingroom wall and marked the positions of the Allied armies with little flags. They were heart and soul for the Allies and names like Verdun or Chemin des Dames started little shivers running down their spines. Eliza wanted to travel and made Janey tell her over and over again every detail of her trip to Mexico; they began to plan a trip abroad together when the war was over and Janey began to save money for it. When Alice wrote from Washington that maybe she would pull up stakes in Washington and go down to New York, Janey wrote saying that it was so hard for a girl to get a job in New York just at present and that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea.

All that fall J. Ward’s face looked white and drawn. He got in the habit of coming into the office Sunday afternoons and Janey was only too glad to run around there after dinner to help him out. They’d talk over the events of the week in the office and J. Ward would dictate a lot of private letters to her and tell her she was a treasure and leave her there typing away happily. Janey was worried too. Although new accounts came in all the time the firm wasn’t in a very good financial condition. J. Ward had made some unfortunate plunges in the Street and was having a hard time holding things together. He was anxious to buy out the large interest still held by old Mrs. Staple and talked of notes his wife had gotten hold of and that he was afraid his wife would use unwisely. Janey could see that his wife was a disagreeable peevish woman trying to use her mother’s money as a means of keeping a hold on J. Ward. She never said anything to the Tingleys about J. Ward personally, but she talked a great deal about the business and they agreed with her that the work was so interesting. She was looking forward to this Christmas because J. Ward had hinted that he would give her a raise.

A rainy Sunday afternoon she was typing off a confidential letter to Judge Planet inclosing a pamphlet from a detective agency describing the activities of labor agitators among the Colorado miners, and J. Ward was walking up and down in front of the desk staring with bent brows at the polished toes of his shoes when there was a knock on the outer office door. “I wonder who that could be?” said J. Ward. There was something puzzled and nervous about the way he spoke. “It may be Mr. Robbins forgotten his key,” said Janey. She went to see. When she opened the door Mrs. Moorehouse brushed past her. She wore a wet slicker and carried an umbrella, her face was pale and her nostrils were twitching. Janey closed the door gently and went to her own desk and sat down. She was worried. She took up a pencil and started drawing scrolls round the edge of a piece of typewriter paper. She couldn’t help hearing what was going on in J. Ward’s private office. Mrs. Moorehouse had shot in slamming the groundglass door behind her. “Ward, I can’t stand it… I won’t stand it another minute,” she was screaming at the top of her voice. Janey’s heart started beating very fast. She heard J. Ward’s voice low and conciliatory, then Mrs. Moorehouse’s. “I won’t be treated like that, I tell you. I’m not a child to be treated like that… You’re taking advantage of my condition. My health won’t stand being treated like that.”

“Now look here, Gertrude, on my honor as a gentleman,” J. Ward was saying. “There’s nothing in it, Gertrude. You lie there in bed imagining things and you shouldn’t break in like this. I’m a very busy man. I have important transactions that demand my complete attention.”

Of course it’s outrageous, Janey was saying to herself.

“You’d still be in Pittsburgh working for Bessemer Products, Ward, if it wasn’t for me and you know it… You may despise me but you don’t despise dad’s money… but I’m through, I tell you. I’m going to start divorce…” “But, Gertrude, you know very well there’s no other woman in my life.” “How about this woman you’re seen round with all the time… what’s her name… Stoddard? You see, I know more than you think… I’m not the kind of woman you think I am, Ward. You can’t make a fool of me, do you hear?”

Mrs. Moorehouse’s voice rose into a rasping shriek. Then she seemed to break down and Janey could hear her sobbing. “Now, Gertrude,” came Ward’s voice soothingly, “you’ve gotten yourself all wrought up over nothing… Eleanor Stoddard and I have had a few business dealings… She’s a bright woman and I find her stimulating… intellectually, you understand… We’ve occasionally eaten dinner together, usually with mutual friends, and that’s absolutely…” Then his voice sunk so low that Janey couldn’t hear what he was saying. She began to think she ought to slip out. She didn’t know what to do.

She’d half gotten to her feet when Mrs. Moorehouse’s voice soared to a hysterical shriek again. “Oh, you’re cold as a fish… You’re just a fish. I’d like you better if it was true, if you were having an affair with her… But I don’t care; I won’t be used as a tool to use dad’s money.” The door of the private office opened and Mrs. Moorehouse came out, gave Janey a bitter glare as if she suspected her relations with J. Ward too, and went out. Janey sat down at her desk again trying to look unconcerned. Inside the private office she could hear J. Ward striding up and down with a heavy step. When he called her his voice sounded weak:

“Miss Williams.”

She got up and went into the private office with her pencil and pad in one hand. J. Ward started to dictate as if nothing had happened but half way through a letter to the president of the Ansonia Carbide Corporation he suddenly said, “Oh, hell,” and gave the wastebasket a kick that sent it spinning against the wall.

“Excuse me, Miss Williams; I’m very much worried… Miss Williams, I’m sure I can trust you not to mention it to a soul… You understand, my wife is not quite herself; she’s been ill… the last baby… you know those things sometimes happen to women.”

Janey looked up at him. Tears had started into her eyes. “Oh, Mr. Moorehouse, how can you think I’d not understand?… Oh, it must be dreadful for you, and this is a great work and so interesting.” She couldn’t say any more. Her lips couldn’t form any words. “Miss Williams,” J. Ward was saying, “I… er… appreciate… er.” Then he picked up the wastepaper basket. Janey jumped up and helped him pick up the crumpled papers and trash that had scattered over the floor. His face was flushed from stooping. “Grave responsibilities… Irresponsible woman may do a hell of a lot of damage, you understand.” Janey nodded and nodded. “Well, where were we? Let’s finish up and get out of here.”

They set the wastebasket under the desk and started in on the letters again.

All the way home to Chelsea, picking her way through the slush and pools of water on the streets, Janey was thinking of what she’d liked to have said to J. Ward to make him understand that everybody in the office would stand by him whatever happened.

When she got in the apartment, Eliza Tingley said a man had called her up. “Sounded like a rather rough type; wouldn’t give his name; just said to say Joe had called up and that he’d call up again.” Janey felt Eliza’s eyes on her inquisitively.

“That’s my brother Joe, I guess… He’s a… he’s in the merchant marine.”

Some friends of the Tingleys came in, they had two tables of bridge and were having a very jolly evening when the telephone rang again, and it was Joe. Janey felt herself blushing as she talked to him. She couldn’t ask him up and still she wanted to see him. The others were calling to her to play her hand. He said he had just got in and that he had some presents for her and he’d been clear out to Flatbush and that the yids there had told him she lived in Chelsea now and he was in the cigar store at the corner of Eighth Avenue. The others were calling to her to play her hand. She found herself saying that she was very busy doing some work and wouldn’t he meet her at five tomorrow at the office building where she worked. She asked him again how he was and he said, “Fine,” but he sounded disappointed. When she went back to her table they all kidded her about the boyfriend and she laughed and blushed, but inside she felt mean because she hadn’t asked him to come up.

Next evening it snowed. When she stepped out of the elevator crowded to the doors at five o’clock she looked eagerly round the vestibule. Joe wasn’t there. As she was saying goodnight to Gladys she saw him through the door. He was standing outside with his hands deep in the pockets of a blue peajacket. Big blobs of snowflakes spun round his face that looked lined and red and weatherbeaten.

“Hello, Joe,” she said.

“Hello, Janey.”

“When did you get in?”

“A couple days ago.”

“Are you in good shape, Joe? How do you feel?”

“I gotta rotten head today… Got stinkin’ last night.”

“Joe, I was so sorry about last night but there were a lot of people there and I wanted to see you alone so we could talk.”

Joe grunted.

“That’s awright, Janey… Gee, you’re lookin’ swell. If any of the guys saw me with you they’d think I’d picked up somethin’ pretty swell awright.”

Janey felt uncomfortable. Joe had on heavy workshoes and there were splatters of gray paint on his trouserlegs. He had a package wrapped in newspaper under his arm.

“Let’s go eat somewheres… Jez, I’m sorry I’m not rigged up better. We lost all our duffle, see, when we was torpedoed.”

“Were you torpedoed again?”

Joe laughed, “Sure, right off Cape Race. It’s a great life… Well, that’s strike two… I brought along your shawl though, by God if I didn’t… I know where we’ll eat; we’ll eat at Lüchow’s.”

“Isn’t Fourteenth Street a little…”

“Naw, they got a room for ladies… Janey, you don’t think I’d take you to a dump wasn’t all on the up an’ up?”

Crossing Union Square a seedylooking young man in a red sweater said, “Hi, Joe.” Joe dropped back of Janey for a minute and he and the young man talked with their heads together. Then Joe slipped a bill in his hand, said, “So long, Tex,” and ran after Janey who was walking along feeling a little uncomfortable. She didn’t like Fourteenth Street after dark. “Who was that, Joe?” “Some damn AB or other. I knew him down New Orleans… I call him Tex. I don’t know what his name is… He’s down on his uppers.” “Were you down in New Orleans?” Joe nodded. “Took a load a molasses out on the Henry B. Higginbotham… Piginbottom we called her. Well, she’s layin’ easy now on the bottom awright… on the bottom of the Grand Banks.” When they went in the restaurant the headwaiter looked at them sharply and put them at a table in the corner of a little inside room. Joe ordered a big meal and some beer, but Janey didn’t like beer so he had to drink hers too. After Janey had told him all the news about the family and how she liked her job and expected a raise Christmas and was so happy living with the Tingleys who were so lovely to her, there didn’t seem to be much to say. Joe had bought tickets to the Hippodrome but they had plenty of time before that started. They sat silent over their coffee and Joe puffed at a cigar. Janey finally said it was a shame the weather was so mean and that it must be terrible for the poor soldiers in the trenches and she thought the Huns were just too barbarous and the Lusitania and how silly the Ford peace ship idea was. Joe laughed in the funny abrupt way he had of laughing now, and said: “Pity the poor sailors out at sea on a night like this.” He got up to get another cigar.

Janey thought what a shame it was he’d had his neck shaved when he had a haircut; his neck was red and had little wrinkles in it and she thought of the rough life he must be leading and when he came back she asked him why he didn’t get a different job. “You mean in a shipyard? They’re making big money in shipyards, but hell, Janey, I’d rather knock around… It’s all for the experience, as the feller said when they blew his block off.” “No, but there are boys not half so bright as you are with nice clean jobs right in my office… and a future to look forward to.”

“All my future’s behind me,” said Joe with a laugh. “Might go down to Perth Amboy get a job in a munitions factory, but I rather be blowed up in the open, see?”

Janey went on to talk about the war and how she wished we were in it to save civilization and poor little helpless Belgium. “Can that stuff, Janey,” said Joe. He made a cutting gesture with his big red hand above the tablecloth. “You people don’t understand it, see… The whole damn war’s crooked from start to finish. Why don’t they torpedo any French Line boats? Because the Frogs have it all set with the Jerries, see, that if the Jerries leave their boats alone they won’t shell the German factories back of the front. What we wanta do’s sit back and sell ’em munitions and let ’em blow ’emselves to hell. An’ those babies are makin’ big money in Bordeaux and Toulouse or Marseilles while their own kin are shootin’ daylight into each other at the front, and it’s the same thing with the limeys… I’m tellin’ ye, Janey, this war’s crooked, like every other goddam thing.”

Janey started to cry. “Well, you needn’t curse and swear all the time.” “I’m sorry, sister,” said Joe humbly, “but I’m just a bum an’ that’s about the size of it an’ not fit to associate with a nicedressed girl like you.” “No, I didn’t mean that,” said Janey, wiping her eyes.

“Gee, but I forgot to show you the shawl.” He unwrapped the paper package. Two Spanish shawls spilled out on the table, one of black lace and the other green silk embroidered with big flowers. “Oh, Joe, you oughtn’t to give me both of them… You ought to give one to your best girl.” “The kinda girls I go with ain’t fit to have things like that… I bought those for you, Janey.” Janey thought the shawls were lovely and decided she’d give one of them to Eliza Tingley.

They went to the Hippodrome but they didn’t have a very good time. Janey didn’t like shows like that much and Joe kept falling asleep. When they came out of the theater it was bitterly cold. Gritty snow was driving hard down Sixth Avenue almost wiping the “L” out of sight. Joe took her home in a taxi and left her at her door with an abrupt, “So long, Janey.” She stood a moment on the step with her key in her hand and watched him walking west towards Tenth Avenue and the wharves, with his head sunk in his peajacket.

That winter the flags flew every day on Fifth Avenue. Janey read the paper eagerly at breakfast; at the office there was talk of German spies and submarines and atrocities and propaganda. One morning a French military mission came to call on J. Ward, handsome pale officers with blue uniforms and red trousers and decorations. The youngest of them was on crutches. They’d all of them been severely wounded at the front. When they’d left, Janey and Gladys almost had words because Gladys said officers were a lot of lazy loafers and she’d rather see a mission of private soldiers. Janey wondered if she oughtn’t to tell J. Ward about Gladys’s pro-Germanism, whether it mightn’t be her patriotic duty. The Comptons might be spies; weren’t they going under an assumed name? Benny was a socialist or worse, she knew that. She decided she’d keep her eyes right open.

The same day G. H. Barrow came in. Janey was in the private office with them all the time. They talked about President Wilson and neutrality and the stockmarket and the delay in transmission in the Lusitania note. G. H. Barrow had had an interview with the president. He was a member of a committee endeavoring to mediate between the railroads and the Brotherhoods that were threatening a strike. Janey liked him better than she had on the private car coming up from Mexico, so that when he met her in the hall just as he was leaving the office she was quite glad to talk to him and when he asked her to come out to dinner with him, she accepted and felt very devilish.

All the time G. H. Barrow was in New York he took Janey out to dinner and the theater. Janey had a good time and she could always kid him about Queenie if he tried to get too friendly going home in a taxi. He couldn’t make out where she’d found out about Queenie and he told her the whole story and how the woman kept hounding him for money, but he said that now he was divorced from his wife and there was nothing she could do. After making Janey swear she’d never tell a soul, he explained that through a legal technicality he’d been married to two women at the same time and that Queenie was one of them and that now he’d divorced them both, and there was nothing on earth Queenie could do but the newspapers were always looking for dirt and particularly liked to get something on a liberal like himself devoted to the cause of labor. Then he talked about the art of life and said American women didn’t understand the art of life; at least women like Queenie didn’t. Janey felt very sorry for him but when he asked her to marry him she laughed and said she really would have to consult counsel before replying. He told her all about his life and how poor he’d been as a boy and then about jobs as stationagent and freightagent and conductor and the enthusiasm with which he’d gone into work for the Brotherhood and how his muckraking articles on conditions in the railroads had made him a name and money so that all his old associates felt he’d sold out, but that, so help me, it wasn’t true. Janey went home and told the Tingleys all about the proposal, only she was careful not to say anything about Queenie or bigamy, and they all laughed and joked about it and it made Janey feel good to have been proposed to by such an important man and she wondered why it was such interesting men always fell for her and regretted they always had that dissipated look, but she didn’t know whether she wanted to marry G. H. Barrow or not.

At the office next morning, she looked him up in Who’s Who and there he was, Barrow, George Henry, publicist… but she didn’t think she could ever love him. At the office that day J. Ward looked very worried and sick and Janey felt so sorry for him and quite forgot about G. H. Barrow. She was called into a private conference J. Ward was having with Mr. Robbins and an Irish lawyer named O’Grady, and they said did she mind if they rented a safe deposit box in her name to keep certain securities in and started a private account for her at the Bankers Trust. They were forming a new corporation. There were business reasons why something of the sort might become imperative. Mr. Robbins and J. Ward would own more than half the stock of a new concern and would work for it on a salary basis. Mr. Robbins looked very worried and a little drunk and kept lighting cigarettes and forgetting them on the edge of the desk and kept saying, “You know very well, J.W., that anything you do is O.K. by me.” J. Ward explained to Janey that she’d be an officer of the new corporation but of course would in no way be personally liable. It came out that old Mrs. Staple was suing J. Ward to recover a large sum of money and that his wife had started divorce proceedings in Pennsylvania and that she was refusing to let him go home to see the children and that he was living at the McAlpin.

“Gertrude’s lost her mind,” said Mr. Robbins genially. Then he slapped J. Ward on the back. “Looks like the fat was in the fire now,” he roared. “Well, I’m goin’ out to lunch; a man must eat… and drink… even if he’s a putative bankrupt.” J. Ward scowled and said nothing and Janey thought it was in very bad taste to talk like that and so loud too.

When she went home that evening she told the Tingleys that she was going to be a director of the new corporation and they thought it was wonderful that she was getting ahead so fast and that she really ought to ask for a raise even if business was in a depressed state. Janey smiled, and said, “All in good time.” On the way home she had stopped in the telegraph office on Twentythird Street and wired G. H. Barrow, who had gone up to Washington: let’s just be friends.

Eddy Tingley brought out a bottle of sherry and at dinner he and Eliza drank a toast, “To the new executive,” and Janey blushed crimson and was very pleased. Afterwards they played a rubber of dummy bridge.

the garden was crowded and outside Madison Square was full of cops that made everybody move on and the bombsquad all turned out

we couldn’t get a seat so we ran up the stairs to the top gallery and looked down through the blue air at the faces thick as gravel and above them on the speakers’ stand tiny black figures and a man was speaking and whenever he said war there were hisses and whenever he said Russia there was clapping on account of the revolution I didn’t know who was speaking somebody said Max Eastman and somebody said another guy but we clapped and yelled for the revolution and hissed for Morgan and the capitalist war and there was a dick looking into our faces as if he was trying to remember them

then we went to hear Emma Goldman at the Bronx Casino but the meeting was forbidden and the streets around were very crowded and there were moving vans moving through the crowd and they said the moving vans were full of cops with machineguns and there were little policedepartment Fords with searchlights and they charged the crowd with the Fords and the searchlights everybody talked machineguns revolution civil liberty freedom of speech but occasionally somebody got into the way of a cop and was beaten up and shoved into a patrol wagon and the cops were scared and they said they were calling out the fire department to disperse the crowd and everybody said it was an outrage and what about Washington and Jefferson and Patrick Henry?

afterwards we went to the Brevoort it was much nicer everybody who was anybody was there and there was Emma Goldman eating frankfurters and sauerkraut and everybody looked at Emma Goldman and at everybody else that was anybody and everybody was for peace and the coöperative commonwealth and the Russian revolution and we talked about red flags and barricades and suitable posts for machineguns

and we had several drinks and welsh rabbits and paid our bill and went home, and opened the door with a latchkey and put on pajamas and went to bed and it was comfortable in bed

Goodby Piccadilly, farewell Leicester Square

It’s a long long way to Tipperary

Eleanor thought that things were very exciting that winter. She and J.W. went out a great deal together, to all the French operas and to first nights. There was a little French restaurant where they ate hors d’œuvres way east in Fiftysixth Street. They went to see French paintings in the galleries up Madison Avenue. J.W. began to get interested in art, and Eleanor loved going round with him because he had such a romantic manner about everything and he used to tell her she was his inspiration and that he always got good ideas when he’d been talking to her. They often talked about how silly people were who said that a man and a woman couldn’t have a platonic friendship. They wrote each other little notes in French every day. Eleanor often thought it was a shame J.W. had such a stupid wife who was an invalid too, but she thought that the children were lovely and it was nice that they both had lovely blue eyes like their father.

She had an office now all by herself and had two girls working with her to learn the business and had quite a lot of work to do. The office was in the first block above Madison Square on Madison Avenue and she just had her own name on it. Eveline Hutchins didn’t have anything to do with it any more as Dr. Hutchins had retired and the Hutchinses had all moved out to Santa Fe. Eveline sent her an occasional box of Indian curios or pottery and the watercolors the Indian children did in the schools, and Eleanor found they sold very well. In the afternoon she’d ride downtown in a taxi and look up at the Metropolitan Life tower and the Flatiron Building and the lights against the steely Manhattan sky and think of crystals and artificial flowers and gilt patterns on indigo and claretcolored brocade.

The maid would have tea ready for her and often there would be friends waiting for her, young architects or painters. There’d always be flowers, calla lilies with the texture of icecream or a bowl of freesias. She’d talk a while before slipping off to dress for dinner. When J.W. phoned that he couldn’t come she’d feel very bad. If there was still anybody there who’d come to tea she’d ask him to stay and have potluck with her.

The sight of the French flag excited her always or when a band played Tipperary; and one evening when they were going to see The Yellow Jacket for the third time, she had on a new fur coat that she was wondering how she was going to pay for, and she thought of all the bills at her office and the house on Sutton Place she was remodeling on a speculation and wanted to ask J.W. about a thousand he’d said he’d invested for her and wondered if there’d been any turnover yet. They’d been talking about the air raids and poison gas and the effect of the war news downtown and the Bowmen of Mons and the Maid of Orleans and she said she believed in the supernatural, and J.W. was hinting something about reverses on the Street and his face looked drawn and worried; but they were crossing Times Square through the eight o’clock crowds and the skysigns flashing on and off. The fine little triangular men were doing exercises on the Wrigley sign and suddenly a grindorgan began to play The Marseillaise and it was too beautiful; she burst into tears and they talked about Sacrifice and Dedication and J.W. held her arm tight through the fur coat and gave the organgrinder man a dollar. When they got to the theater Eleanor hurried down to the ladies’ room to see if her eyes had got red. But when she looked in the mirror they weren’t red at all and there was a flash of heartfelt feeling in her eyes, so she just freshened up her face and went back up to the lobby, where J.W. was waiting for her with the tickets in his hand; her gray eyes were flashing and had tears in them.

Then one evening J.W. looked very worried indeed and said when he was taking her home from the opera where they’d seen Manon that his wife didn’t understand their relations and was making scenes and threatening to divorce him. Eleanor was indignant and said she must have a very coarse nature not to understand that their relations were pure as driven snow. J.W. said she had and that he was very worried and he explained that most of the capital invested in his agency was his mother-in-law’s and that she could bankrupt him if she wanted to, which was much worse than a divorce. At that Eleanor felt very cold and crisp and said that she would rather go out of his life entirely than break up his home and that he owed something to his lovely children. J.W. said she was his inspiration and he had to have her in his life and when they got back to Eighth Street they walked back and forth in Eleanor’s white glittering drawingroom in the heavy smell of lilies wondering what could be done. They smoked many cigarettes but they couldn’t seem to come to any decision. When J.W. left he said with a sigh, “She may have detectives shadowing me this very minute,” and he went away very despondent.

After he’d gone Eleanor walked back and forth in front of the long Venetian mirror between the windows. She didn’t know what to do. The decorating business was barely breaking even. She had the amortization to pay off on the house on Sutton Place. The rent of her apartment was two months overdue and there was her fur coat to pay for. She’d counted on the thousand dollars’ worth of shares J.W. had said would be hers if he made the killing he expected in that Venezuela Oil stock. Something must have gone wrong or else he would have spoken of it. When Eleanor went to bed she didn’t sleep. She felt very miserable and lonely. She’d have to go back to the drudgery of a department store. She was losing her looks and her friends and now if she had to give up J.W. it would be terrible. She thought of her colored maid Augustine with her unfortunate loves that she always told Eleanor about and she wished she’d been like that. Maybe she’d been wrong from the start to want everything so justright and beautiful. She didn’t cry but she lay all night with her eyes wide and smarting staring at the flowered molding round the ceiling that she could see in the light that filtered in from the street through her lavender tulle curtains.

A couple of days later at the office she was looking at some antique Spanish chairs an old furniture dealer was trying to sell her when a telegram came: DISAGREEABLE DEVELOPMENTS MUST SEE YOU INADVISABLE USE TELEPHONE MEET ME TEA FIVE OCLOCK PRINCE GEORGE HOTEL It wasn’t signed. She told the man to leave the chairs and when he’d gone stood a long time looking down at a pot of lavender crocuses with yellow pistils she had on her desk. She was wondering if it would do any good if she went out to Great Neck and talked to Gertrude Moorehouse. She called Miss Lee who was making up some curtains in the other room and asked her to take charge of the office and that she’d phone during the afternoon.

She got into a taxi and went up to the Pennsylvania Station. It was a premature Spring day. People were walking along the street with their overcoats unbuttoned. The sky was a soft mauve with frail clouds like milkweed floss. In the smell of furs and overcoats and exhausts and bundledup bodies came an unexpected scent of birchbark. Eleanor sat bolt upright in the back of the taxi driving her sharp nails into the palms of her graygloved hands. She hated these treacherous days when winter felt like Spring. They made the lines come out on her face, made everything seem to crumble about her, there seemed to be no firm footing any more. She’d go out and talk to Gertrude Moorehouse as one woman to another. A scandal would ruin everything. If she talked to her a while she’d make her realize that there had never been anything between her and J.W. A divorce scandal would ruin everything. She’d lose her clients and have to go into bankruptcy and the only thing to do would be to go back to Pullman to live with her uncle and aunt.

She paid the taximan and went down the stairs to the Long Island Railroad. Her knees were shaky and she felt desperately tired as she pushed her way through the crowd to the information desk. No, she couldn’t get a train to Great Neck till 2:13. She stood in line a long time for a ticket. A man stepped on her foot. The line of people moved maddeningly slowly past the ticketwindow. When she got to the window it was several seconds before she could remember the name of the place she wanted a ticket for. The man looked at her through the window, with peevish shoebutton eyes. He wore a green eyeshade and his lips were too red for his pale face. The people behind were getting impatient. A man with a tweed coat and a heavy suitcase was already trying to brush past her. “Great Neck and return.” As soon as she’d bought the ticket the thought came to her that she wouldn’t have time to get out there and back by five o’clock. She put the ticket in her gray silk purse that had a little design in jet on it. She thought of killing herself. She would take the subway downtown and go up in the elevator to the top of the Woolworth Building and throw herself off.

Instead she went out to the taxistation. Russet sunlight was pouring through the gray colonnade, the blue smoke of exhausts rose into it crinkled like watered silk. She got into a taxi and told the driver to take her round Central Park. Some of the twigs were red and there was a glint on the long buds of beeches but the grass was still brown and there were piles of dirty snow in the gutters. A shivery raw wind blew across the ponds. The taximan kept talking to her. She couldn’t catch what he said and got tired of making random answers and told him to leave her at the Metropolitan Art Museum. While she was paying him a newsboy ran by crying “Extra!” Eleanor bought a paper for a nickel and the taximan bought a paper. “I’ll be a sonova…” she heard the taximan exclaim, but she ran up the steps fast for fear she’d have to talk to him. When she got in the quiet silvery light of the museum she opened up the paper. A rancid smell of printer’s ink came from it; the ink was still sticky and came off on her gloves.

U. S. AT WAR

there were priests and nuns on the Espagne the Atlantic was glassgreen and stormy covers were clamped on the portholes and all the decklights were screened and you couldn’t light a match on deck

but the stewards were very brave and said the Boche wouldn’t sink a boat of the Compagnie Generale anyway, because of the priests and nuns and the Jesuits and the Comité des Forges promising not to bombard the Bassin de la Brieye where the big smelters were and stock in the company being owned by the Prince de Bourbon and the Jesuits and the priests and nuns

anyhow everybody was very brave except for Colonel and Mrs. Knowlton of the American Red Cross who had waterproof coldproof submarineproof suits like eskimosuits and they wore them and they sat up on deck with the suits all blown up and only their faces showing and there were firstaid kits in the pockets and in the belt there was a waterproof container with milkchocolate and crackers and maltedmilk tablets

and in the morning you’d walk round the deck and there would be Mr. Knowlton blowing up Mrs. Knowlton

or Mrs. Knowlton blowing up Mr. Knowlton

the Roosevelt boys were very brave in stiff visored new American army caps and sharpshooter medals on the khaki whipcord and they talked all day about We must come in We must come in

as if the war were a swimming pool

and the barman was brave and the stewards were brave they’d all been wounded and they were very glad that they were stewards and not in the trenches

and the pastry was magnificent

at last it was the zone and a zigzag course we sat quiet in the bar and then it was the mouth of the Gironde and a French torpedoboat circling round the ship in the early pearl soft morning and the steamers following the little patrolboat on account of the minefields the sun was rising red over the ruddy winegrowing land and the Gironde was full of freighters and airplanes in the sun and battleships

the Garonne was red it was autumn there were barrels of new wine and shellcases along the quays in front of the grayfaced houses and the masts of stocky sailboats packed in against the great red iron bridge

at the Hotel of the Seven Sisters everybody was in mourning but business was brisk on account of the war and every minute they expected the government to come down from Paris

up north they were dying in the mud and the trenches but business was good in Bordeaux and the winegrowers and the shipping agents and the munitionsmakers crowded into the Chapon Fin and ate ortolans and mushrooms and truffles and there was a big sign

La Follette was born in the town limits of Primrose; he worked on a farm in Dane County, Wisconsin, until he was nineteen.

At the university of Wisconsin he worked his way through. He wanted to be an actor, studied elocution and Robert Ingersoll and Shakespeare and Burke;

(who will ever explain the influence of Shakespeare in the last century, Marc Antony over Caesar’s bier, Othello to the Venetian Senate and Polonius, everywhere Polonius?)

riding home in a buggy after commencement he was Booth and Wilkes writing the Junius papers and Daniel Webster and Ingersoll defying God and the togaed great grave and incorruptible as statues magnificently spouting through the capitoline centuries;

Charley Anderson’s mother kept a railroad boardinghouse near the Northern Pacific station at Fargo, N. D. It was a gabled frame house with porches all round, painted mustard yellow with chocolatebrown trim and out back there was always washing hanging out on sagging lines that ran from a pole near the kitchen door to a row of brokendown chickenhouses. Mrs. Anderson was a quietspoken grayhaired woman with glasses; the boarders were afraid of her and did their complaining about the beds, or the food, or that the eggs weren’t fresh to waddling bigarmed Lizzie Green from the north of Ireland who was the help and cooked and did all the housework. When any of the boys came home drunk it was Lizzie with a threadbare man’s overcoat pulled over her nightgown who came out to make them shut up. One of the brakemen tried to get fresh with Lizzie one night and got such a sock in the jaw that he fell clear off the front porch. It was Lizzie who washed and scrubbed Charley when he was little, who made him get to school on time and put arnica on his knees when he skinned them and soft soap on his chilblains and mended the rents in his clothes. Mrs. Anderson had already raised three children who had grown up and left home before Charley came, so that she couldn’t seem to keep her mind on Charley. Mr. Anderson had also left home about the time Charley was born; he’d had to go West on account of his weak lungs, couldn’t stand the hard winters, was how Mrs. Anderson put it. Mrs. Anderson kept the accounts, preserved or canned strawberries, peas, peaches, beans, tomatoes, pears, plums, applesauce as each season came round, made Charley read a chapter of the Bible every day and did a lot of churchwork.

Charley was a chunky little boy with untidy towhair and gray eyes. He was a pet with the boarders and liked things allright except Sundays when he’d have to go to church twice and to sundayschool and then right after dinner his mother would read him her favorite sections of Matthew or Esther or Ruth and ask him questions about the chapters he’d been assigned for the week. This lesson took place at a table with a red tablecloth next to a window that Mrs. Anderson kept banked with pots of patienceplant, wandering jew, begonias and ferns summer and winter. Charley would have pins and needles in his legs and the big dinner he’d eaten would have made him drowsy and he was terribly afraid of committing the sin against the holy ghost which his mother hinted was inattention in church or in sundayschool or when she was reading him the Bible. Winters the kitchen was absolutely quiet except for the faint roaring of the stove or Lizzie’s heavy step or puffing breath as she stacked the dinnerdishes she’d just washed back in the cupboard. Summers it was much worse. The other kids would have told him about going swimming down in the Red River or fishing or playing follow my leader in the lumberyard or on the coalbunkers back of the roundhouse and the caught flies would buzz thinly in the festooned tapes of flypaper and he’d hear the yardengine shunting freightcars or the through train for Winnipeg whistling for the station and the bell clanging, and he’d feel sticky and itchy in his stiff collar and he’d keep looking up at the loudticking porcelain clock on the wall. It made the time go too slowly to look up at the clock often, so he wouldn’t let himself look until he thought fifteen minutes had gone by, but when he looked again it’d only be five minutes and he’d feel desperate. Maybe it’d be better to commit the sin against the holy ghost right there and be damned good and proper once and for all and run away with a tramp the way Dolphy Olsen did, but he didn’t have the nerve.

By the time he was ready for highschool he began to find funny things in the Bible, things like the kids talked about when they got tired playing toad in the hole in the deep weeds back of the lumberyard fence, the part about Onan and the Levite and his concubine and the Song of Solomon, it made him feel funny and made his heart pound when he read it, like listening to scraps of talk among the railroad men in the boardinghouse, and he knew what hookers were and what was happening when women got so fat in front and it worried him and he was careful when he talked to his mother not to let her know he knew about things like that.

Charley’s brother Jim had married the daughter of a liverystable owner in Minneapolis. The spring Charley was getting ready to graduate from the eighth grade they came to visit Mrs. Anderson. Jim smoked cigars right in the house and jollied his mother and while he was there there was no talk of biblereading. Jim took Charley fishing one Sunday up the Sheyenne and told him that if he came down to the Twin Cities when school was over he’d give him a job helping round the garage he was starting up in part of his fatherinlaw’s liverystable. It sounded good when he told the other guys in school that he had a job in the city for the summer. He was glad to get out as his sister Esther had just come back from taking a course in nursing and nagged him all the time about talking slang and not keeping his clothes neat and eating too much pie.

He felt fine the morning he went over to Moorhead all alone, carrying a suitcase Esther had lent him, to take the train for the Twin Cities. At the station he tried to buy a package of cigarettes but the man at the newsstand kidded him and said he was too young. When he started it was a fine spring day a little too hot. There was sweat on the flanks of the big horses pulling the long line of flourwagons that was crossing the bridge. While he was waiting in the station the air became stifling and a steamy mist came up. The sunlight shone red on the broad backs of the grain elevators along the track. He heard one man say to another, “Looks to me like it might be a tornado,” and when he got on the train he half leaned out of the open window watching purple thunderheads building up in the northwest beyond the brightgreen wheat that stretched clear to the clouds. He kinda hoped it would be a tornado because he’d never seen one, but when the lightning began cracking like a whip out of the clouds he felt a little scared, though being on the train with the conductor and the other passengers made it seem safer. It wasn’t a tornado but it was a heavy thundershower and the wheatfields turned to zinc as great trampling hissing sheets of rain advanced slowly across them. Afterwards the sun came out and Charley opened the window and everything smelt like spring and there were birds singing in all the birchwoods and in the dark firs round all the little shining lakes.

Jim was there to meet him at the Union Depot in a Ford truck. They stopped at the freight station and Charley had to help load a lot of heavy packages of spare parts shipped from Detroit and marked “Vogel’s Garage.” Charley tried to look as if he’d lived in a big city all his life, but the clanging trolleycars and the roughshod hoofs of truckhorses striking sparks out of the cobbles and the goodlooking blond girls and the stores and the big German beersaloons and the hum that came from mills and machineshops went to his head. Jim looked tall and thin in his overalls and had a new curt way of talking. “Kid, you see you mind yourself a little up to the house; the old man’s an old German, Hedwig’s old man, an’ a little pernickety, like all old Germans are,” said Jim when they’d filled the truck and were moving slowly through the heavy traffic. “Sure, Jim,” said Charley and he began to feel a little uneasy about what it ’ud be like living in Minneapolis. He wished Jim ’ud smile a little more.

Old man Vogel was a stocky redfaced man with untidy gray hair and a potbelly, fond of dumpling and stews with plenty of rich sauce on them and beer, and Jim’s wife Hedwig was his only daughter. His wife was dead but he had a middleaged German woman everybody addressed as Aunt Hartmann to keep house for him. She followed the men around all the time with a mop and between her and Hedwig, whose blue eyes had a peevish look because she was going to have a baby in the fall, the house was so spotless that you could have eaten a fried egg off the linoleum anywhere. They never let the windows be opened for fear of the dust coming in. The house was right on the street and the livery stable was in the yard behind, entered through an alley beyond which was the old saddler’s shop that had just been done over as a garage. When Jim and Charley drove up the signpainters were on a stepladder out front putting up the new shiny red and white sign that read “vogel’s garage.” “The old bastard,” muttered Jim. “He said he’d call it Vogel and Anderson’s, but what the hell!” Everything smelt of stables and a colored man was leading a skinny horse around with a blanket over him.

All that summer Charley washed cars and drained transmissions and relined brakes. He was always dirty and greasy in greasy overalls, in the garage by seven every morning and not through till late in the evening when he was too tired to do anything but drop into the cot that had been fixed for him in the attic over the garage. Jim gave him a dollar a week for pocket money and explained that he was mighty generous to do it as it was to Charley’s advantage to learn the business. Saturday nights he was the last one to get a bath and there usually wasn’t anything but lukewarm water left so that he’d have a hard time getting cleaned up. Old man Vogel was a socialist and no churchgoer and spent all day Sunday drinking beer with his cronies. At Sunday dinner everybody talked German, and Jim and Charley sat at the table glumly without saying anything, but old Vogel plied them with beer and made jokes at which Hedwig and Aunt Hartmann always laughed uproariously, and after dinner Charley’s head would be swimming from the beer that tasted awful bitter to him, but he felt he had to drink it, and old man Vogel would tease him to smoke a cigar and then tell him to go out and see the town. He’d walk out feeling overfed and a little dizzy and take the streetcar to St. Paul to see the new state capitol or to Lake Harriet or go out to Big Island Park and ride on the rollercoaster or walk around the Parkway until his feet felt like they’d drop off. He didn’t know any kids his own age at first, so he took to reading for company. He’d buy every number of Popular Mechanics and The Scientific American and Adventure and The Wide World Magazine. He had it all planned to start building a yawlboat from the plans in The Scientific American and to take a trip down to the Mississippi River to the Gulf. He’d live by shooting ducks and fishing for catfish. He started saving up his dollars to buy himself a shotgun.

He liked it all right at old man Vogel’s, though, on account of not having to read the Bible or go to church, and he liked tinkering with motors and learned to drive the Ford truck. After a while he got to know Buck and Slim Jones, two brothers about his age who lived down the block. He was a pretty big guy to them on account of working in a garage. Buck sold newspapers and had a system of getting into movingpicture shows by the exit doors and knew all the best fences to see ballgames from. Once Charley got to know the Jones boys he’d run round to their place as soon as he was through dinner Sundays and they’d have a whale of a time getting hitches all over the place on graintrucks, riding on the back bumpers of streetcars and getting chased by cops and going out on the lumber booms and going swimming and climbing round above the falls and he’d get back all sweaty and with his good suit dirty and be bawled out by Hedwig for being late for supper. Whenever old Vogel found the Jones boys hanging round the garage he’d chase them out, but when he and Jim were away, Gus the colored stableman would come over smelling of horses and tell them stories about horseraces and fast women and whiskydrinking down at Louisville and the proper way to take a girl the first time and how he and his steady girl just did it all night without stopping not even for a minute.

Labor Day old man Vogel took Jim and his daughter and Aunt Hartmann out driving in the surrey behind a fine pair of bays that had been left with him to sell and Charley was left to take care of the garage in case somebody came along who wanted gas or oil. Buck and Slim came round and they all talked about how it was Labor Day and wasn’t it hell to pay that they weren’t going out anywhere. There was a doubleheader out at the Fair Grounds and lots of other ballgames around. The trouble started by Charley showing Buck how to drive the truck, then to show him better he had to crank her up, then before he knew it he was telling them he’d take them for a ride round the block. After they’d ridden round the block he went back and closed up the garage and they went joyriding out towards Minnehaha. Charley said to himself he’d drive very carefully and be home hours before the folks got back, but somehow he found himself speeding down an asphalt boulevard and almost ran into a ponycart full of little girls that turned in suddenly from a side road. Then on the way home they were drinking sarsaparilla out of the bottles and having a fine time when Buck suddenly said there was a cop on a motorcycle following them. Charley speeded up to get away from the cop, made a turn too sharp and stopped with a crash against a telegraph pole. Buck and Slim beat it as fast as they could run and there was Charley left to face the cop.

The cop was a Swede and cursed and swore and bawled him out and said he’d take him to the hoosegow for driving without a license, but Charley found his brother Jim’s license under the seat and said his brother had told him to take the car back to the garage after they’d delivered a load of apples out at Minnehaha and the cop let him off and said to drive more carefully another time. The car ran all right except one fender was crumpled up and the steering wheel was a little funny. Charley drove home so slow that the radiator was boiling over when he got back and there was the surrey standing in front of the house and Gus holding the bays by the head and all the family just getting out.

There was nothing he could say. The first thing they saw was the crumpled fender. They all lit into him and Aunt Hartmann yelled the loudest and old Vogel was purple in the face and they all talked German at him and Hedwig yanked at his coat and slapped his face and they all said Jim’d have to give him a licking. Charley got sore and said nobody was going to give him a licking and then Jim said he reckoned he’d better go back to Fargo anyway, and Charley went up and packed his suitcase and went off without saying goodby to any of them that evening with his suitcase in one hand and five back numbers of The Argosy under his arm. He had just enough jack saved up to get a ticket to Barnesville. After that he had to play hide and seek with the conductor until he dropped off the train at Moorhead. His mother was glad to see him and said he was a good boy to get back in time to visit with her a little before highschool opened and talked about his being confirmed. Charley didn’t say anything about the Ford truck and decided in his mind he wouldn’t be confirmed in any damned church. He ate a big breakfast that Lizzie fixed for him and went into his room and lay down on the bed. He wondered if not wanting to be confirmed was the sin against the holy ghost but the thought didn’t scare him as much as it used to. He was sleepy from sitting up on the train all night and fell asleep right away.

Charley dragged through a couple of years of highschool, making a little money helping round the Moorhead Garage evenings, but he didn’t like it home any more after he got back from his trip to the Twin Cities. His mother wouldn’t let him work Sundays and nagged him about being confirmed and his sister Esther nagged him about everything and Lizzie treated him as if he was still a little kid, calling him “Pet” before the boarders and he was sick of schooling, so the spring when he was seventeen, after commencement, he went down to Minneapolis again looking for a job on his own this time. As he had money to keep him for a few days the first thing he did was to go down to Big Island Park. He wanted to ride on the rollercoasters and shoot in the shootinggalleries and go swimming and pick up girls. He was through with hick towns like Fargo and Moorhead where nothing ever happened.

It was almost dark when he got to the lake. As the little steamboat drew up to the wharf he could hear the jazzband through the trees, and the rasp and rattle of the rollercoaster and yells as a car took a dip. There were a dancing pavilion and colored lights among the trees and a smell of girls’ perfumery and popcorn and molasses candy and powder from the shooting gallery and the barkers were at it in front of their booths. As it was Monday evening there weren’t very many people. Charley went round the rollercoaster a couple of times and got to talking with the young guy who ran it about what the chances were of getting a job round there.

The guy said to stick around, Svenson the manager would be there when they closed up at eleven, and he thought he might be looking for a guy. The guy’s name was Ed Walters; he said it wasn’t much of a graft but that Svenson was pretty straight; he let Charley take a couple of free rides to see how the rollercoaster worked and handed him out a bottle of cream soda and told him to keep his shirt on. This was his second year in the amusement game and he had a sharp foxface and a wise manner.

Charley’s heart was thumping when a big hollowfaced man with coarse sandy hair came round to collect the receipts at the ticket booth. That was Svenson. He looked Charley up and down and said he’d try him out for a week and to remember that this was a quiet family amusement park and that he wouldn’t stand for any rough stuff and told him to come round at ten the next morning. Charley said “So long” to Ed Walters and caught the last boat and car back to town. When he got out of the car it was too late to take his bag out of the station parcelroom; he didn’t want to spend money on a room or to go out to Jim’s place so he slept on a bench in front of the City Hall. It was a warm night and it made him feel good to be sleeping on a bench like a regular hobo. The arclights kept getting in his eyes, though, and he was nervous about the cop; it’d be a hell of a note to get pinched for a vag and lose the job out at the park. His teeth were chattering when he woke up in the gray early morning. The arclights spluttered pink against a pale lemonyellow sky; the big business blocks with all their empty windows looked funny and gray and deserted. He had to walk fast pounding the pavement with his heels to get the blood going through his veins again.

He found a stand where he could get a cup of coffee and a doughnut for five cents and went out to Lake Minnetonka on the first car. It was a bright summer day with a little north in the wind. The lake was very blue and the birchtrunks looked very white and the little leaves danced in the wind greenyellow against the dark evergreens and the dark blue of the sky. Charley thought it was the most beautiful place he’d ever seen. He waited a long time drowsing in the sun on the end of the wharf for the boat to start over to the island. When he got there the park was all locked up, there were shutters on all the booths and the motionless red and blue cars of the rollercoaster looked forlorn in the morning light. Charley roamed round for a while but his eyes smarted and his legs ached and his suitcase was too heavy, so he found a place sheltered by the wall of a shack from the wind and lay down in the warm sun on the pineneedles and went to sleep with his suitcase beside him.

He woke up with a start. His Ingersoll said eleven. He had a cold sinking feeling. It’d be lousy to lose the job by being late. Svenson was there sitting in the ticket booth at the rollercoaster with a straw hat on the back of his head. He didn’t say anything about the time. He just told Charley to take his coat off and help MacDonald the engineer oil up the motor.

Charley worked on that rollercoaster all summer until the park closed in September. He lived in a little camp over at Excelsior with Ed Walters and a wop named Spagnolo who had a candy concession.

In the next camp Svenson lived with his six daughters. His wife was dead. Anna the eldest was about thirty and was cashier at the amusement park, two of them were waitresses at the Tonka Bay Hotel and the others were in highschool and didn’t work. They were all tall and blond and had nice complexions. Charley fell for the youngest, Emiscah, who was just about his age. They had a float and a springboard and they all went in swimming together. Charley wore a bathingsuit upper and a pair of khaki pants all summer and got very sunburned. Ed’s girl was Zona and all four of them used to go out canoeing after the amusement park closed, particularly warm nights when there was a moon. They didn’t drink but they smoked cigarettes and played the phonograph and kissed and cuddled up together in the bottom of the canoe. When they’d got back to the boys’ camp, Spagnolo would be in bed and they’d haze him a little and put junebugs under his blankets and he’d curse and swear and toss around. Emiscah was a great hand for making fudge, and Charley was crazy about her and she seemed to like him. She taught him how to frenchkiss and would stroke his hair and rub herself up against him like a cat but she never let him go too far and he wouldn’t have thought it was right anyway. One night all four of them went out and built a fire under a pine in a patch of big woods up the hill back of the camps. They toasted marshmallows and sat round the fire telling ghoststories. They had blankets and Ed knew how to make a bed with hemlock twigs stuck in the ground and they all four of them slept in the same blankets and tickled each other and roughhoused around and it took them a long time to get to sleep. Part of the time Charley lay between the two girls and they cuddled up close to him, but he got a hard on and couldn’t sleep and was worried for fear the girls would notice.

He learned to dance and to play poker and when laborday came he hadn’t saved any money but he felt he’d had a wonderful summer.

He and Ed got a room together in St. Paul. He got a job as machinist’s assistant in the Northern Pacific shops and made fair money. He learned to run an electric lathe and started a course in nightschool to prepare for civil engineering at the Mechanical Arts High. Ed didn’t seem to have much luck about jobs, all he seemed to be able to do was pick up a few dollars now and then as attendant at a bowling alley. Sundays they often ate dinner with the Svensons. Mr. Svenson was running a small movie house called the Leif Ericsson on Fourth Street but things weren’t going well. He took it for granted that the boys were engaged to two of his daughters and was only too glad to see them come around. Charley took Emiscah out every Saturday night and spent a lot on candy and taking her to vaudeville shows and to a Chink restaurant where you could dance afterwards. At Christmas he gave her his seal ring and after that she admitted that she was engaged to him. They’d go back to the Svensons’ and sit on the sofa in the parlor hugging and kissing.

She seemed to enjoy getting him all wrought up, then she’d run off and go and fix her hair or put some rouge on her face and be gone a long time and he’d hear her upstairs giggling with her sisters. He’d walk up and down in the parlor, where there was only one light in a flowered shade, feeling nervous and jumpy. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to get married because that ’ud keep him from traveling round the country and getting ahead in studying engineering. The other guys at the shop who weren’t married went down the line or picked up streetwalkers, but Charley was afraid of getting a disease and he never seemed to have any time what with nightschool and all, and besides it was Emiscah he wanted.

After he’d given her a last rough kiss, feeling her tongue in his mouth and his nostrils full of her hair and the taste of her mouth in his mouth he’d walk home with his ears ringing, feeling sick and weak; when he got to bed he couldn’t sleep but would toss around all night thinking he was going mad and Ed’d grunt at him from the other side of the bed for crissake to keep still.

In February Charley got a bad sore throat and the doctor he went to said it was diphtheria and sent him to the hospital. He was terribly sick for several days after they gave him the antitoxin. When he was getting better Ed and Emiscah came to see him and sat on the edge of his bed and made him feel good. Ed was all dressed up and said he had a new job and was making big money but he wouldn’t tell what it was. Charley got the idea that Ed and Emiscah were going round together a little since he’d been sick but he didn’t think anything of it.

The man in the next cot, who was also recovering from diphtheria, was a lean grayhaired man named Michaelson. He’d been working in a hardware store that winter and was having a hard time. Up to a couple of years before he’d had a farm in Iowa in the cornbelt, but a series of bad crops had ruined him, the bank had foreclosed and taken the farm and offered to let him work it as a tenant but he’d said he’d be damned if he’d work as a tenant for any man and had pulled up his stakes and come to the city, and here he was fifty years old with a wife and three small children to support trying to start from the ground up again. He was a great admirer of Bob La Follette and had a theory that the Wall Street bankers were conspiring to seize the government and run the country by pauperizing the farmer. He talked all day in a thin wheezy voice until the nurse made him shut up, about the NonPartisan League and the Farmer-Labor party and the destiny of the great northwest and the need for workingmen and farmers to stick together to elect honest men like Bob La Follette. Charley had joined a local of an A. F. of L. union that fall and Michaelson’s talk, broken by spells of wheezing and coughing, made him feel excited and curious about politics. He decided he’d read the papers more and keep up with what was going on in the world. What with this war and everything you couldn’t tell what might happen.

When Michaelson’s wife and children came to see him he introduced them to Charley and said that being laid up next to a bright young fellow like that made being sick a pleasure. It made Charley feel bad to see how miserably pale and illfed they looked and what poor clothes they had on in this zero weather. He left the hospital before Michaelson did and the last thing Michaelson said when Charley leaned over him to shake his dry bony hand was “Boy, you read Henry George, do you hear…? He knows what’s the trouble with this country; damme if he don’t.”

Charley was so glad to be walking on his pins down the snowy street in the dryicecold wind and to get the smell of iodoform and sick people out of his head that he forgot all about it.

First thing he did was to go to Svenson’s. Emiscah asked him where Ed Walters was. He said he hadn’t been home and didn’t know. She looked worried when he said that and he wondered about it. “Don’t Zona know?” asked Charley. “No, Zona’s got a new feller; that’s all she thinks about.” Then she smiled and patted his hand and babied him a little bit and they sat on the sofa and she brought out some fudge she’d made and they held hands and gave each other sticky kisses and Charley felt happy. When Anna came in she said how thin he looked and that they’d have to feed him up, and he stayed to supper. Mr. Svenson said to come and eat supper with them every night for a while until he was on his feet again. After supper they all played hearts in the front parlor and had a fine time.

When Charley got back to his lodging house he met the landlady in the hall. She said his friend had left without paying the rent and that he’d pay up right here and now or else she wouldn’t let him go up to his room. He argued with her and said he’d just come out of the hospital and she finally said she’d let him stay another week. She was a big softlooking woman with puckered cheeks and a yellow chintz apron full of little pockets. When Charley got up to the hall bedroom where he’d slept all winter with Ed, it was miserably cold and lonely. He got into the bed between the icy sheets and lay shivering, feeling weak and kiddish and almost ready to cry, wondering why the hell Ed had gone off without leaving him word and why Emiscah had looked so funny when he said he didn’t know where Ed was.

Next day he went to the shop and got his old job back, though he was so weak he wasn’t much good. The foreman was pretty decent about it and told him to go easy for a few days, but he wouldn’t pay him for the time he was sick because he wasn’t an old employee and hadn’t gotten a certificate from the company doctor. That evening he went to the bowling-alley where Ed used to work. The barkeep upstairs said Ed had beaten it to Chi on account of some flimflam about raffling off a watch. “Good riddance, if you ask me,” he said. “That bozo has all the makin’s of a bad egg.”

He had a letter from Jim saying that ma had written from Fargo that she was worried about him and that Charley had better let Jim take a look at him so he went over to the Vogels’ next Sunday. First thing he did when he saw Jim was to say that busting up the Ford had been a damn fool kid’s trick and they shook hands on it and Jim said nobody would say anything about it and that he’d better stay and eat with them. The meal was fine and the beer was fine. Jim’s kid was darn cute; it was funny to think that he was an uncle. Even Hedwig didn’t seem so peevish as before. The garage was making good money and old man Vogel was going to give up the liverystable and retire. When Charley said he was studying at nightschool old Vogel began to pay more attention to him. Somebody said something about La Follette and Charley said he was a big man.

“Vat is the use being a big man if you are wrong?” said old Vogel with beersuds in his mustache. He took another draft out of his stein and looked at Charley with sparkling blue eyes. “But dot’s only a beginning… ve vill make a sozialist out of you yet.” Charley blushed and said, “Well, I don’t know about that,” and Aunt Hartmann piled another helping of hasenpfeffer and noodles and mashed potatoes on his plate.

One raw March evening he took Emiscah to see “The Birth of a Nation.” The battles and the music and the bugles made them all jelly inside. They both had tears in their eyes when the two boys met on the battlefield and died in each other’s arms on the battlefield. When the Ku Klux Klan charged across the screen Charley had his leg against Emiscah’s leg and she dug her fingers into his knee so hard it hurt. When they came out Charley said by heck he thought he wanted to go up to Canada and enlist and go over and see the Great War. Emiscah said not to be silly and then looked at him kinda funny and asked him if he was pro-British. He said he didn’t care and that the only fellows that would gain would be the bankers, whoever won. She said, “Isn’t it terrible? Let’s not talk about it any more.”

When they got back to the Svensons’, Mr. Svenson was sitting in the parlor in his shirtsleeves reading the paper. He got up and went to meet Charley with a worried frown on his face and was just about to say something when Emiscah shook her head. He shrugged his shoulders and went out. Charley asked Emiscah what was eating the old man. She grabbed hold of him and put her head on his shoulder and burst out crying. “What’s the matter, kitten; what’s the matter, kitten?” he kept asking. She just cried and cried until he could feel her tears on his cheek and neck and said, “For crissake, snap out of it, kitten; you’re wilting my collar.”

She let herself drop on the sofa and he could see that she was working hard to pull herself together. He sat down beside her and kept patting her hand. Suddenly she got up and stood in the middle of the floor. He tried to put his arms around her to pet her but she pushed him off. “Charley,” she said in a hard strained voice, “lemme tellye somethin’… I think I’m goin’ to have a baby.”

“But you’re crazy. We haven’t ever…”

“Maybe it’s somebody else… Oh, God, I’m going to kill myself.” Charley took her by the arms and made her sit down on the sofa. “Now pull yourself together, and tell me what the trouble is.”

“I wish you’d beat me up,” Emiscah said, laughing crazily. “Go ahead; hit me with your fist.”

Charley went weak all over.

“Tell me what the trouble is,” he said. “By Jez, it couldn’t be Ed.”

She looked up at him with scared eyes, her face drawn like an old woman’s. “No, no… Here’s how it is. I’m a month past my time, see, and I don’t know enough about things like that, so I asks Anna about it and she says I’m goin’ to have a baby sure and that we’ve got to get married right away and she told dad, the dirty little sneak, and I couldn’t tell ’em it wasn’t you… They think it’s you, see, and dad says it’s all right, young folks bein’ like that nowadays an’ everythin’ an’ says we’ll have to get married and I thought I wouldn’t let on an’ you’d never know, but, kid, I had to tell you.”

“Oh, Jez,” said Charley. He looked at the flowered pink shade with a fringe over the lamp on the table beside him and the tablecover with a fringe and at his shoes and the roses on the carpet. “Who was it?”

“It was when you were in the hospital, Charley. We had a lot of beer to drink an’ he took me to a hotel. I guess I’m just bad, that’s all. He was throwin’ money around an’ we went in a taxicab and I guess I was crazy. No, I’m a bad woman through and through, Charley. I went out with him every night when you were in the hospital.”

“By God, it was Ed.”

She nodded and then hid her face and started to cry again.

“The lousy little bastard,” Charley kept saying. She crumpled up on the sofa with her face in her hands.

“He’s gone to Chicago… He’s a bad egg allright,” said Charley.

He felt he had to get out in the air. He picked up his coat and hat and started to put them on. Then she got to her feet and threw herself against him. She held him close and her arms were tight round his neck. “Honestly, Charley, I loved you all the time… I pretended to myself it was you.” She kissed him on the mouth. He pushed her away, but he felt weak and tired and thought of the icy streets walking home and his cold hallbedroom and thought, what the hell did it matter anyway? and took off his hat and coat again. She kissed him and loved him up and locked the parlor door and they loved each other up on the sofa and she let him do everything he wanted. Then after a while she turned on the light and straightened her clothes and went over to the mirror to fix her hair and he tied his necktie again and she smoothed down his hair as best she could with her fingers and they unlocked the parlor door very carefully and she went out in the hall to call dad. Her face was flushed and she looked very pretty again. Mr. Svenson and Anna and all the girls were out in the kitchen and Emiscah said, “Dad, Charley and I are going to get married next month,” and everybody said, “Congratulations,” and all the girls kissed Charley and Mr. Svenson broke out a bottle of whisky and they had a drink all round and Charley went home feeling like a whipped dog.

There was a fellow named Hendriks at the shop seemed a pretty wise guy; Charley asked him next noon whether he didn’t know of anything a girl could take and he said he had a prescription for some pills and next day he brought it and told Charley not to tell the druggist what he wanted them for. It was payday and Hendriks came round to Charley’s room after he’d gotten cleaned up that night and asked him if he’d gotten the pills allright. Charley had the package right in his pocket and was going to cut nightschool that night and take it to Emiscah. First he and Hendriks went to have a drink at the corner. He didn’t like whisky straight and Hendriks said to take it with ginger ale. It tasted great and Charley felt sore and miserable inside and didn’t want to see Emiscah anyway. They had some more drinks and then went and bowled for a while. Charley beat him four out of five and Hendriks said the party was on him from now on.

Hendriks was a squareshouldered redheaded guy with a freckled face and a twisted nose and he began telling stories about funny things that had happened with the ribs and how that was his long suit anyway. He’d been all over and had had high yallers and sealskin browns down New Orleans and Chink girls in Seattle, Wash., and a fullblooded Indian squaw in Butte, Montana, and French girls and German Jewish girls in Colon and a Caribee woman more than ninety years old in Port of Spain. He said that the Twin Cities was the bunk and what a guy ought to do was to go down an’ get a job in the oilfields at Tampico or in Oklahoma where you could make decent money and live like a white man. Charley said he’d pull out of St. Paul in a minute if it wasn’t that he wanted to finish his course in nightschool and Hendriks told him he was a damn fool, that book learnin’ never got nobody nowhere and what he wanted was to have a good time when he had his strength and after that to hell wid ’em. Charley said he felt like saying to hell wid ’em anyway.

They went to several bars, and Charley who wasn’t used to drinking anything much except beer began to reel a little, but it was swell barging round with Hendriks from bar to bar. Hendriks sang My Mother Was a Lady in one place and The Bastard King of England in another where an old redfaced guy with a cigar set them up to some drinks. Then they tried to get into a dancehall but the guy at the door said they were too drunk and threw them out on their ear and that seemed funny as hell and they went to a back room of a place Hendriks knew and there were two girls there Hendriks knew and Hendriks fixed it up for ten dollars each for all night, then they had one more drink before going to the girls’ place and Hendriks sang:

Born in Chicago on January 14, 1896, JOHN DOS PASSOS is one of the most well known writers of our time. He graduated cum laude from Harvard College in 1916 and went on to serve in the United States Medical Corps during the remainder of World War I. Upon his return Dos Passos began writing for several newspapers and magazines. His first novel, One Man’s Initiation, published in 1920, was inspired by his involvement in World War I. Dos Passos went on to publish more than forty books, fiction and nonfiction, focusing on social and political issues and customarily taking an extreme leftist approach. He was one of the most adept chroniclers in the twentieth century of the difficulties of the American working class and the decadence of the well-to-do. While his political views eventually grew more conservative, in his writing he still strove to create an accurate reflection of American culture throughout his career. Some consider Dos Passos’s most important work to be the U.S.A. trilogy. Among his other well-known titles are Three Soldiers, Manhattan Transfer, and District of Columbia. In his later years he made his home with his wife on a Westmoreland County, Virginia, property previously owned by his father. John Dos Passos died in 1970 at the age of seventy-four.