That’s it, that’s it! You walk along a dark street, in the dark. The dark is close and intimate about you, holding all things, anything—you need only put out your hand to touch life to feel the beating heart of life. Beauty: a thing unseen, suggested: natural and fecund and foul-you don’t stop for it; you pass on.
(The Semitic man drew him onward after Gordon’s tall striding.) I love three things. Rats like dull and cunning silver, keen and plump as death, steal out to gnaw the crust held loosely by the beggar beneath the stone gate. Unreproved they swarm about his still recumbent shape, exploring his clothing in an obscene silence, dragging their hot bellies over his lean and agechilled body, sniffing his intimate parts. I love three things.
(He drew Fairchild onward, babbling in an ecstasy.) A voice, a touch, a sound: life going on about you unseen in the close dark, beyond these walls, these bricks—(Fairchild stopped, laying his hand against the heatdrunken wall beside him, staring at his friend in the starlight. Gordon strode on ahead)—in this dark room or that dark room. You want to go into all the streets of all the cities men live in. To look into all the darkened rooms in the world. Not with curiosity, not with dread nor doubt nor disapproval. But humbly, gently, as you would steal in to look at a sleeping child, not to disturb it.
Then as one rat they flash away, and, secure again and still, they become as a row of cigarettes unwinking at a single level. The beggar, whose hand yet shapes his stolen crust, sleeps beneath the stone gate.
(Fairchild babbled on. Gordon striding on ahead turned and passed through a door. The door swung open, letting a sheet of light fall outward across the pavement, then.the door swung to, snatching the sheet of light again. The Semitic man grasped Fairchild’s arm, and he halted. About him the city swooned in a voluption of dark and heat, a sleep which was not sleep; and dark and heat lapped his burly short body about with the hidden eternal pulse of the world. Above him, above the shallow serrated canyon of the street, huge hot stars burned at the heart of things.)
Three more priests, barefoot, in robes the color of silence, appear from nowhere. They are speeding after the first three, when they spy the beggar beneath the stone gate. They pause above him: the walls hush away their gray and sibilant footsteps. The rats are motionless as a row of cigarettes. (Gordon reappeared, looming above the other two in the hushed starlight. He held in his hand a bottle.) The priests draw nearer, touching one another, leaning diffidentty above the beggar in the empty street while silence comes slow as a procession of nuns with breathing blent, Above the hushing walls, a thing wild and passionate, remote and sad; shrill as pipes, and yet unheard. Beneath it, soundless shapes amid which, vaguely, a maiden in an ungirdled robe and with a thin bright chain between her ankles, and a sound of far lamenting.
(They went on around a corner and into a darker street. Gordon stopped again, brooding and remote. He raised the bottle against the sky.) Yes, bitter and new as fire. Fueled close now with sleep. Hushed her strange and ardent fire. A chrysalis of fire whitely. Splendid and new as fire. (He drank, listening to the measured beat of his wild, bitter heart. Then he passed the bottle to his companions, brooding his hawk’s face above them against the sky. The others drank. They went on through the dark city.)
The beggar yet sleeps, shaping his stolen crust, and one of the priests says, Do you require aught of man, Brother? Just above the silence, amid the shapes, a young naked boy daubed with vermillion, carrying casually a crown. He moves erratic with senseless laughter; and the headless naked body of a woman carved of ebony, surrounded by women wearing skins of slain beasts and chained one to another, lamenting. The beggar makes no reply, he does not stir; and the second priest leans nearer his pale half-shadowed face. Beneath his high white brow he is not asleep, for his eyes stare quietly past the three priests without remarking them. The third priest leans down, raising his voice. Brother.
(They stopped and drank again. Then they went on, the Semitic man carrying the bottle, nursing it against his breast.) I love three things. (Fairchild walked erratically beside him. Above him, among the mad stars, Gordon’s bearded head. The night was full and rich, smelling of streets and people, of secret beings and things.)
The beggar does not move and the priest’s voice is a dark bird seeking its way from out a cage. Above the silence, between it and the antic sky, there grows a sound like that of the sea heard afar off. The three priests gaze at one another. The beggar lies motionless beneath the stone gate. The rats stare their waiting cigarettes upon the scene.
I love three things: gold, marble, and purple. The sound grows. Amid shadows and echoes it becomes a wind thunderous from hills with the clashing hooves of centaurs. The headless black woman is a carven agony beyond the fading placidity of the ungirdled maiden, and as the shadows and echoes blend the chained women raise their voices anew, lamenting thinly e , (They were accosted. Whispers from every doorway, hands un-chaste and importunate and rife in the tense wild darkness. Fairchild wavered beside him, and Gordon stopped again. “I’m going in here,” he said. “Give me some money.” The Semitic man gave him a nameless bill.) The wind rushes on, becoming filled with leaping figures antic as flames, and a sound of pipes fiery cold carves the world darkly out of space. The centaurs’ hooves clash, storming; shrill voices ride the storm like gusty birds, wild and passionate and sad. (A door opened in the wall. Gordon entered and before the door closed again they saw him in a narrow passageway lift a woman from the shadow and raise her against the mad stars, smothering her squeal against his tall kiss.) Then voices and sounds, shadows and echoes change form swirling, becoming the headless, armless, legless torso of a girl, motionless and virginal and passionately eternal before the shadows and echoes whirl away.
(They went on. The Semitic man nursed the bottle against his breast.) I love three things. . . . Dante invented Beatrice, creating himself a maid that life had not had time to create, and laid upon her frail and unbowed shoulders the whole burden of man’s history of his impossible heart’s desire. . . . At last one priest, becoming bolder, leans yet nearer and slips his hand beneath the beggar’s sorry robe, against his heart. It is cold. (Suddenly Fairchild stumbled heavily beside him and would have fallen. He held Fairchild up and supported him to the wall, and Fairchild leaned against the wall, his head tilted back, hatless, staring into the sky, listening to the dark and measured beating of the heart of things. “That’s what it is. Genius.” He spoke slowly, distinctly, staring into the sky. “People confuse it so, you see. They have got it now to where it signifies only an active state of the mind in which a picture is painted or a poem is written. When it is not that at all. It is that Passion Week of the heart, that instant of timeless beatitude which some never know, which some, I suppose, gain at will, which others gain through an outside agency like alcohol, like tonight—that passive state of the heart with which the mind, the brain, has nothing to do at all, in which the hackneyed accidents which make up this world—love and life and death and sex and sorrow—brought together by chance in perfect proportions, take on a kind of splendid and timeless beauty. Like Yseult of the White Hands and her Tristan with that clean, highhearted dullness of his; like that young Lady Something that some government executed, asking permission and touching with a kind of sober wonder the edge df the knife that was to cut her head off; like a red-haired girl, an idiot, turning in a white dress beneath a wistaria-covered trellis on a late sunny afternoon in May. . . .” He leaned against the wall, staring into the hushed mad sky, hearing the dark and simple heart of things. From beyond a cornice there came at last a cold and bloodless rumor of the dying moon.)
(The Semitic man nursed the bottle against his breast. “I love three things: gold, marble, and purple—”) The priests cross themselves while the nuns of silence blend anew their breath, and pass on: soon the high windowless walls have hushed away their thin celibate despair. The rats are arrogant as cigarettes. After a while they steal forth again climbing over the begg
ar, dragging ,their hot bellies over him, exploring unreproved his private parts. Somewhere above the dark street, above the windcarved hills, beyond the silence; thin pipes unheard, wild and passionate and sad. ( “—form solidity color,” he said to his own dark and passionate heart and to Fairchild beside him, leaning against a dark wall, vomiting.)
10
The rectangle of light yet fell outward across the alleyway; beyond the halflength lattice blind the typewriter yet leaped and thundered.
“Fairchild.”
The manipulator of the machine felt a vague annoyance, like knowing that someone is trying to waken you from a pleasant dream, knowing that if you resist the dream will be broken.
“Oh, Fairchild.”
He concentrated again, trying to exorcise the ravisher of his heart’s beatitude by banging louder on the keyboard. But at last there came a timid knock at the blind.
“Damn!” He surrendered. “Come in,” he bellowed, raising his head. “My God, where did you come from? I just let you in about ten minutes ago, didn’t I?” Then he saw his caller’s face. “What’s the matter, friend?” he asked quickly, “sick?”
Mr. Talliaferro stood blinking in the light. Then he entered slowly and drooped upon a chair. “Worse than that,” he answered with utter despondence. The large man wheeled heavily to face him.
“Need a doctor or anything?”
The caller buried his face in his hands. “No, no, a doctor can’t help me.”
“Well, what do you want, then? I’m busy. What is it?”
“I believe I want a drink of whisky,” Mr. Talliaferro said at last. “If it’s no trouble,” he added with his customary polite diffidence. He raised a stricken face for a moment. “A terrible thing happened to me tonight.” He lowered his face to his hands again, and the other rose and returned presently with a tumbler half full of liquor. Mr. Talliaferro accepted it gratefully. He took a swallow, then lowered the glass shakily. “I simply must talk to someone. A terrible thing happened to me . . .” He brooded for a moment. “It was my last opportunity, you see,” he burst out suddenly. “For Fairchild now, or you, it would be different. But for me—” Mr. Talliaferro hid his face in his free hand. “A terrible thing happened to me,” he repeated.
“Well, spit it out, then. But be quick about it.”
Mr. Talliaferro fumbled his handkerchief and weakly mopped his face. The other sat watching him impatiently. “Well, just as I’d planned, I pretended indifference; said that I didn’t care to dance tonight. But she said, ‘Ah, come along: do you think I came out just to sit in the park or something?’ Like that. And when I put my arm around her—”
“Around who?”
“Around her. And when I tried to kiss her, she just put—”
“But where was this?”
“In the cab. I haven’t a car, you see. Though I am planning to buy one next year. And she just put her elbow under my chin and choked me until I had to move back to my side of the seat, and she said, ‘I never dance in private or without music, mister man.’ And then—”
“In God’s name, friend, what are you raving about?”
“About J—about that girl I was with this evening. And so we went to dance, and I was petting her a bit, just as I had done on the boat: no more, I assure you; and she told me immediately to stop. She said something about not having lumbago. And yet, all the time we were on the yacht she never objected once.” Mr. Talliaferro looked at his host with polite uncomprehending astonishment. Then he sighed and finished the whisky and set the glass near his feet.
“Good Lord,” the other murmured in a hushed tone.
Mr. Talliaferro continued more briskly: “And quite soon I remarked that her attention was engaged by something or someone behind me. She was dodging her head this way and that as we danced and getting out of step and saying, ‘Pardon me,’ but when I tried to see what it was I could discover nothing at all to engage her like that. So I said, ‘What are you thinking of?’ and she said, ‘Huh?’ like that, and I said, ‘I can tell you what you are thinking of,’ and she said, ‘Who? me? What am I thinking of?’ still trying to see something behind me, mind you. Then I saw that she was smiling also, and I said, ‘You are thinking of me,’ and she said, ‘Oh. Was I?’”
“Good God,” the other murmured.
“Yes,” agreed Mr. Talliaferro unhappily. He continued briskly however: “And so I said, as I’d planned, ‘I’m tired of this place. Let’s go.’ She demurred, but I was firm, and so at last she consented and told me to run down and engage a cab and she would join me on the street.
“I should have suspected something then, but I didn’t. I ran down and engaged a cab. I gave the driver ten dollars and he agreed to drive out on some unfrequented road and to stop and pretend that he had lost something back along the road, and to wait there until I blew the horn for him.
“So I waited and waited. She didn’t appear, so at last I ordered the cab to wait and I ran back upstairs. I didn’t see her in the anteroom, so I went back to the dancing floor.” He ceased, and sat for a while in a brooding dejection.
“Well?” the other prompted.
Mr. Talliaferro sighed. “I swear, I think I’ll give it up: never have anything to do with them any more. When I returned to the dancing floor I looked for her at the table where we had been sitting. She was not there, and for a moment I couldn’t find her, but presently I saw her, dancing. With a man I had never seen before. A large man, like you. I didn’t know what to think. I decided finally he was a friend of hers with whom she was dancing until I should return, having misunderstood our arrangement about meeting below. Yet she had told me herself to await her on the street. That’s what confused me.
“I waited at the door until I finally caught her eye, and I signaled to her. She flipped her hand in reply, as though she desired that I wait until the dance was finished. So I stood there. Other people were entering and leaving, but I kept my place near the door, where she could find me without difficulty. But when the music ceased, they went to a table and sat down and called to a waiter. And she didn’t even glance toward me again!
“I began to get angry, then. I walked over to them. I didn’t want everyone to see that I was angry, so I bowed to them, and she looked up at me and said, ‘Why, hello, I thought you’d left me and so this kind gentleman was kind enough to take me home.’ ‘You damn right I will,’ the man said, popping his eyes at me. ‘Who’s he?’ You see,” Mr. Talliaferro interpolated, “I’m trying to talk as he did. I can’t imitate his execrable speech. You see, it wouldn’t have been so—so—I wouldn’t have felt so helpless had he spoken proper English. But the way he said things—there seemed to be no possible rejoinder—You see?”
“Go on, go on,” the other said.
“And she said, ‘Why, he’s a little friend of mine,’ and the man said, ‘Well, it’s time little boys like him was in bed.’ He looked at me, hard, but I ignored him and said firmly, ‘Come, Miss Steinbauer, our taxi is waiting.’ Then he said, ‘Herb, you ain’t trying to take my girl, are you?’ I told him that she had come with me, firmly, you know; and then she said, ‘Run along. You are tired of dancing: I ain’t. So I’m going to stay and dance with this nice man. Good night.’
“She was smiling again: I could see that they were ridiculing me; and then he laughed—like a horse. ‘Beat it, brother,’ he said, ‘she’s gave you the air. Come back tomorrow.’ Well, when I saw his fat red face all full of teeth I wanted to hit him. But I remembered myself in time—my position in the city and my friends,” he explained, “so I just looked at them and turned and walked away. Of course everyone had seen and heard it all: as I went through the door a waiter said to me, ‘Hard luck, fellow, but they will do it.’”
Mr. Talliaferro mused again in a sort of polite incomprehension, more of bewilderment than anger or even dejection. He sighed again. “And on top of a
ll that, the cab driver had gone off with my ten dollars.”
The other man looked at Mr. Talliaferro with utter admiration. “O Thou above the thunder and above the excursions and alarms, regard Your masterpiece! Balzac, chew thy bitter thumbs! And here I am, wasting my damn life trying to invent people by means of the written word!” His face became suddenly suffused: he rose towering. “Get to hell out of here,” he roared. “You have made me sick!”
Mr. Talliaferro rose obediently. His hopeless dejection invested him again. “But what am I to do?”
“Do? Do? Go to a brothel, if you want a girl. Or if you are afraid someone will come in and take her away from you, get out on the street and pick one up: bring her here, if you like. But in Christ’s dear name, don’t ever talk to me again. You have already damaged my ego beyond repair. Do you want another drink?”