“The Meditation—Thais,” Francis whispered. Young Frank looked up at him. The lamplight lay on Francis’ small and wizened face, and it lay on stark anguish, on frozen misery. And then, as young Frank still stared incredulous, he saw tears on his father’s cheeks.
No, no one would be interested in such mean and little agony. Who would believe that a soul lived in the scurrying small body of an insignificant chemist, and that that soul could know torment, and strain after the voice of an angel? Now, if he, Frank, only knew a great musician, a composer! What a tale he could write of such a one, and with what pleasure and flattery—and money—would a writer of that tale be rewarded!
Who would pause to buy a book that told the story of Mr. Timothy Farley, his father’s employer? Who would care that Mr. Farley was more interested in the state of his soul than in the state of his bank accounts? Mr. Farley had once been betrothed to a sweet girl in Ireland, and she had been drowned the day before their marriage. Mr. Farley had once told Frank that he could never look into water without seeing her white face floating in its greenness, and so he avoided river and lake forever.
Then there was Mr. Brislow, whose wife and four children had died in a railway accident. He had one daughter left, a girl of fourteen. Mr. Brislow had been another Francis Clair, careful, fearful, penurious and full of caution. But on receiving fifteen thousand dollars for the loss of his family, he had suddenly gone completely mad. He had quit his job in a tailoring establishment, and had taken his daughter upon a world cruise, outfitting the girl in the most lavish and stupendous wardrobe, and himself in every kind of tweed and broadcloth and sports clothing. Francis had asked him how long he expected the fifteen thousand dollars to last. “What do I care!” Mr. Brislow had cried in demented excitation. “I’ll have lived, won’t I? I shall have seen what I have always wanted to see! I’ll know what it is to drink and sleep and eat when I wish, and do what I want to do, if only for a couple of years. What will it matter after that? This is blood money, see? My wife, that was Ethel, told me: ‘Matt, if you’d only live, just once!’ This is what she’d want me to do—live. Just once.”
Who would care for Mr. Brislow, whose life had been like a small, tight little vegetable garden, which had now sprouted wild jungle foliage? Who would want to know what had released that worm-like soul, and what had sent those neat polished boots into strange and exotic places?
Then there was old Mr. Tom Sheridan, who had been crippled all his life, and who never left the meagre back yard behind the tiny shack in which he had lived. But old Tom was full of astounding stories of what he observed all about him. He found wonder in the industry of ants, delight in the garnering of the honey-bees, joy in the sight of a hummingbird, ecstasy in the flight of wild geese over his yard in the autumn, amazement in the heart of a dandelion. He found God in a blade of grass, the mystery of the flow of life in a leaf. He “talked” to the robins that hopped all about him. He knew Mrs. Robin and her mate, and declared that every bird had its own distinctive character. He quarreled with the blackbirds, who swore at him, and he had a dear friend, a crow, who sat on his knee and cursed at the other birds. Stupid old fool. What discerning reader in New York would want to know anything about Tom Sheridan and his imaginative follies in his shaggy back yard, which was a tangle of morning-glories and climbing roses?
Frank could see the readers for whom he wished to write and who would reward him. Languid, luxurious, elegant folk, who wanted tales of Machiavelli and the Borgias, of great musicians or singers or adventurers, of mighty historical figures and lost tropic isles, of France and its bordellos and bistros, of Germany with its castles and its gloomy forests and plains, of Russia with its endless steppes and dark rivers.
They wanted stories of the stage and Spanish grandees, of people of their own kind who lived in New York amid the pale blue and lavender and yellow canyons of stone, who haunted the fine and exclusive restaurants and the rich exclusive homes of the “Four Hundred.” What did he know of all this? Nothing. He knew that no amateur such as himself dared write the tales they demanded. They would laugh him to scorn. And he had nothing as yet to offer them but the Francis Clairs, the Mr. Brislows, the Tom Sheridans. What did they care for Bison, on its steep and rushing Niagara River, and what interest could they feel for the Lakes? People such as they ignored the very existence of the small townsfolk, who had nothing to offer the world but their ungrammatical philosophies, their ant-like lives, their petty and sorry hopes, their ignoble deaths.
I’ve got to learn. I’ve got to travel. I’ve got to know! he cried to himself, with angry but determined desperation. I don’t have a minute to lose!
He heard the far chiming of church bells. He looked at his nickel watch and was conscious of hunger. His mother would wonder what had become of him, and she would nag endlessly when he returned. He was not as yet able to endure her nagging without nausea. Now he was chilly. He shivered. He heard the somber voice of the river below him, but the river itself was lost in the night.
He did not hear the soft footfall on the grass near him, but he felt the bench vibrate as someone sat down. He turned his head irritably, half rising as he did so. A girl was sitting near him, a girl in cheap flamboyant clothing, wearing a large black velvet hat with rose velvet facing. Her yellowish hair, he could see in the lamplight, was crimped and frizzed and bunched about a highly painted and impudent young face, and her thick lips were purple. She had pale blue eyes, wary, hard and knowing. She smiled at him, and the purple parted to show discolored teeth. The smile was coquettish. She could not have been more than a year or two older than himself.
“How ya, honey?” she asked, in a hoarse voice. “Nice evenin’, huh? Lonesome?”
Her suit was a sickly pale gray, and she wore a red blouse with it, and a long string of pearls. Her stockings were of cheap, artificial silk, which gleamed, and her patent-leather pumps were cracked. She saw Frank’s glance, and coyly lifted her skirt to show the rise of her calf. It was thin and scrawny. She smirked and blinked her pale eyelashes.
“Kinda by yerself, ain’t you, hon?” she murmured. “Want company?”
A prostitute, thought Frank, with disgust. He suddenly remembered the sour and awkward warnings his father had given him. “Bad” diseases lying in wait for young fellows like himself. Rotten women who preyed on half-witted youths, and who gave themselves for two dollars. He wanted to get up and leave the girl, but something held him on the bench. He did not know what it was, but he remained and looked at her steadily and curiously.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“Why, nothin’,” she answered. She studied him with her old eyes, and then smiled. “You ain’t used to girls, are you? Never had a girl yet, did you?”
Frank felt heat in his cheeks, and anger. He was eighteen years old, but, as far as he could remember, his sex urges had been faint and muffled, held in abeyance by his father’s disgusting tales. His life had been too circumscribed, too full, too busy, too desperate, for idle speculations, and in some way the smirking stories of his fellow-workers had slipped by his ears.
He was silent, still staring at the girl. With the writer’s intuitive eye he saw all her cheapness. He saw her life. He saw her hunger and misery. But he saw them all objectively. That faint pain in himself, that faint stir: that could not be compassion, could it? He had got over compassion a long time ago. But some depression had taken hold of him, and held him on that bench.
Then he said: “Are you hungry? I thought I’d find a restaurant.”
She had a stupid face, for all its cunning, but that face lighted up briefly, if cautiously. “Say, that’s a swell idea! I’m kinda faint, myself. Where’d you want to go? By the way, my name’s Myrtle.”
Myrtle! Why did he see his father sharpening the carving knife just then, and see red roast beef on a platter before him? An ugly name. A grating, sharp, meanly smirking name! “Call me Myrt, honey,” suggested the girl. “All my friends call me Myrt.”
He winc
ed. “My name’s Frank,” he said. The faint pain, the faint stir, became more imminent, clearer, and he clenched his teeth on it and tried to force it down. Then, all at once, he felt his loneliness, his tiredness. Any company was better than none. He refused to remember Paul Hodge. But what was he to do with this horrible girl? She exuded a nauseating cheap scent, reminiscent of vanilla. It had a smell of corruption. He stood up. “Let’s eat,” he said.
She stood up. The wobbling velvet hat came barely to his chin. He took her arm with instinctive courtesy. He felt its lean boniness under the sleazy gray wool. Again the stir, the pain, the depression. She smiled up at him archly. She tripped by his side as they walked towards Niagara Street. She laughed, and her laugh was the harsh, grating voice of a crow. She was too young to have such a voice. “How old are you—Myrt?” he asked.
“Nineteen,” she answered blithely. “Older than you, huh?”
He shook his head. Nineteen. An old, sick, hungry woman. A piece of abandoned trash. Rubbish on a heap of other rubbish along the towpath. An empty tin can, rusting in the rain. A dirty rag floating on canal waters. A horror, a sickness, a deadness. A filthiness, a terror.
The extremely high heels clacked on the sidewalk beside him. The scent of vanilla and corruption came stronger to his nose. He averted his head. She was holding his arm. He could see the gloved hand on his sleeve. A cheap glove. Twenty-five cents. It was mended. Why didn’t she work? The war-plants were crying desperately for help. The restaurants, the shops, were eager for any sort of labor. Yet she crept up upon park benches, and she smiled through purple lips, and she called strangers “hon.”
“Got a job during the day, Myrt?” he said.
The hand slipped from his arm. She shook her head, eyed him warily. “Can’t,” she answered briefly. “Got—obligations. Yep, that’s it, obligations.”
She looked up at the September moon. “Now, ain’t that pretty and romantic?” she asked hoarsely. “Say, I like a moon, don’t you?” She began to hum a song: “By the light of the silvery moon!” The song was as horrid as her voice. Frank held himself taut until she had finished. Then she said, with animation: “There’s a swell restaurant on Niagara Street, right near here. You can get anythin’. And cheap, too.”
“Beer?” asked Frank.
She shook her head, lifted it, gave him a grotesquely prim look. “I don’t drink. Nothin’. But you can have beer, if you want it.”
He had never walked on the street with a girl before. It was a new experience, and an oddly uncomfortable one. He had to shorten his long stride to her short trippings. He felt her weight on his arm. All at once, he forgot that she was a prostitute. She was only a girl; what did one say to girls? In fact, what did one say to anyone? His only friend had been Paul Hodge, and now, even with Paul, he had had nothing to say. He fumbled in his mind.
“Think the war’ll be over soon?” he asked.
She shook her head with exaggerated solemnity. “Nope. Not for three years. That’s what the big guys, Wilson and Pershing, say. They ought to know. Three years more, of all that killin’.” Her voice dropped, became low and curiously stifled. He looked down at her, vaguely surprised, for he had heard the echoes of emotion. Then she lifted her head gallantly and grinned widely. “Hell, you can’t think of it. You hafta go on, don’t you? No matter what happens. All the casualties ain’t just in France.”
He had seen so much of that spurious gallantry, that theatrical fortitude, that heroic facing-the-facts and keeping-the-chin-up of civilians. The war had touched him hardly at all. He neither cared about it nor speculated much upon it. He suspected that almost all civilians, with the exception of those intimately concerned, cared as little. Yet there had been that degrading gallantry, that lofty lifting of head, that setting of lips, among his fellow-workers. Now he had encountered it again in the person of a stinking little prostitute! Again he was angered. He said: “Have you a brother, or someone, in the war?”
The velvet hat was lifted high. “No,” said the girl, loudly and emphatically. “Nobody.”
Frank was silent. They were approaching a street corner. He felt an impulse to tip his hat and leave her abruptly.
“Nobody,” repeated the girl, and now he was conscious again of her voice, hurried and more emphatic than ever. “I don’t know nobody. Me, I’m all alone. I ain’t got nobody.”
“No father or mother, sister or brother?” Hell, what did it matter? In a moment he would walk off. He was not interested in her answer.
She was shaking her head almost vehemently. “Me, I’m an orphant.”
She hastily added: “What about you, honey? Ain’t you old enough for the draft?” She glanced up at him, and he saw the pale hardness of her eyes, and he thought: Why, she looks as if she hates me! This confused him, and he stammered: “No. I’m not old enough. I’m not eighteen yet.”
The hardness melted away like ice. She stroked his arm. “Why, you’re just a kid,” she murmured tenderly. “I’m a granny compared with you. Yes, I am. I’ll soon be twenty. I feel like a granny, near you.” There was a wetness around her eyelids. “Maybe the war’ll be over soon. Maybe. Maybe you won’t have to go. I’d hate to see you go. Look, I read the papers. I try to find out what’s it about. How’d we ever let the Germans get that way, in the first place? That’s what I ask. We got eyes, ain’t we? We see what they was doing, all the time, before the war, di’n’t we? Whyn’t we do somethin’ about it before they made a war? Why, there was a feller in the newspapers that said the Germans was always trying to cook up wars, years and years back. So we know the Germans, don’t we? We could see what they was doing, all the time. We coulda stopped it, before there was a war. We didn’t, though. That’s what makes me so damn mad I could puke. And now all them boys dyin’.”
I could tell her something about geopolitics, thought Frank, with grim humor. But she wouldn’t understand. And, of course, I don’t know enough about it myself. He patted her hand. He was surprised to feel it trembling in its glove. “Never mind,” he said. “Perhaps we’ll learn after a while, about Germans.”
“Maybe,” she murmured. And now she sighed, deeply and heavily.
They had reached dirty and brawling Niagara Street, where Italian housewives sat on broken stoops and dirty Italian children raced and fought and screamed on the sidewalks, and the new electric street-lamps glared on asphalt and shabby, unpainted houses. A yellow “high-speed” trolley rolled and clattered along. Automobiles clanked and hooted. There was a fetid smell here, as of old fermented dough, and dirt and sweat. Saloons roared on the corners. There was a sudden stench of ham fat burning, and the fumes of beer.
“I know a rest’runt,” Myrtle was saying. “Ain’t much to look at. Ain’t a Wop rest’runt, either. Good ole American food. Not fancy, and no serviettes. But good.”
Frank forgot he had planned to desert her. He was hungry. And he felt an odd kindness for Myrtle, who did not matter, and whose ugly little life was an insult to the alleged dignity of man. She was leading him to the open door of a hideous small restaurant, where pies and cakes and cooked meats, completely encrusted with flies, stood in a window. Frank’s acquaintance with restaurants was very limited. Sometimes, on Christmas, when Maybelle didn’t “feel up to” cooking a holiday dinner, Francis would take his family to the Statler Restaurant in the Shelton Square Building, where a reasonably good and clean dinner could be had for sixty-five cents, including a tasty dessert. He had never been in a restaurant like this, narrow, hot, glaring, small, where gas mantles blazed overhead in an insufferable heat, and dirty tables, covered with dingy white oilcloth, awaited the casual diner. The place swarmed with flies, was permeated with the stench of old rancid grease, with the sweat of the few shirt-sleeved, brutal men who sat about at the tables accompanied by fat shapeless women with pig-like features. There was a brown linoleum on the floor, slippery and stained. A waitress or two drifted about, their white uniforms stained and too short, their frizzled hair clinging to wet red faces, their
hands filthy. They carried platters of greasy hot meats and gray mashed potatoes and coffee, and when the smell hit Frank’s nostrils, he lost his appetite. He had a momentary impulse to back out, to suggest the Statler Restaurant, but Myrtle was leading him blithely to a table, and he had to sit down.
Evidently she was known here. The men winked at her, their women glared, the waitresses smirked. “Hi, Myrt!” one of them called. Then the attention of the entire restaurant was turned upon Frank, who sat there miserably in his neat blue serge suit, his dark red tie, his polished laced boots. They saw his white collar, the white cuffs at his wrists. They saw the combed neatness of the chestnut waves on his head, his clean thin face, well-shaved, the features clear and hard and strong, and his blue, embarrassed eyes. Their interest quickened. This was a new kind of client for Myrtle. Where did she pick up that swell? Out of the University? Was Myrtle goin’ to college now? They snickered, stared at Frank openly. But Myrtle, preening, was settling herself with “serviette” gestures, puffing up her frizzes of pale yellow hair, furtively dabbing her nose with white rice powder from a little bag, rearranging the red ruffles of her blouse. She ostentatiously ignored her former companions. She ceremoniously handed Frank the fly-spotted and greasy “menu,” which was written out in pencil in illiterate English.