“Oh yes you do,” she answered quietly. “All your life you’ve been protected. Just think a moment. . . . Haven’t you been near death several times . . . haven’t you always found someone to help you, some stranger usually, just when you thought all was lost? Haven’t you committed several crimes already, crimes which nobody would suspect you of? Aren’t you right now in the midst of a very dangerous passion, an affair which, if you weren’t born under a lucky star, might lead you to ruin? I know that you’re in love. I know that you’re ready to do anything in order to satisfy this passion. . . . You look at me strangely . . . you wonder how I know. I have no special gifts—except the ability to read human beings at a glance. Look, a few moments ago you were waiting eagerly for me to come to you. You knew that I would throw myself in your arms, as soon as he left. I did. But you were paralyzed—a little frightened of me, shall I say? Why? What could I do to you? You have no money, no power, no influence. What could you expect me to ask of you?” She paused, then added: “Shall I tell you the truth?”
I nodded helplessly.
“You were afraid that if I did ask you to do something for me you would not be able to refuse. You were perplexed because, being in love with one woman, you already felt yourself the potential victim of another. It isn’t a woman you need—it is an instrument to liberate yourself. You crave a more adventurous life, you want to break your chains. Whoever the woman is you love I pity her. To you she will appear to be the stronger, but that is only because you doubt yourself. You are the stronger. You will always be stronger—because you can think only of yourself, of your destiny. If you were just a little stronger I would fear for you. You might make a dangerous fanatic. But that is not your fate. You’re too sane, too healthy. You love life even more than your own self. You are confused, because whomsoever or whatever you give yourself to is never enough for you—isn’t that true? Nobody can hold you for long: you are always looking beyond the object of your love, looking for something you will never find. You will have to look inside yourself if you ever hope to free yourself of torment. You make friends easily, I’m sure. And yet there is no one whom you can really call your friend. You are alone. You will always be alone. You want too much, more than life can offer . . .”
“Wait a moment, please,” I interrupted. “Why have you chosen to tell me all this?”
She paused a moment, as if hesitating to answer this directly. “I suppose I am merely answering a question in my own mind,” she said. “Tonight I must make a grave decision; I leave in the morning on a long journey. When I saw you I said to myself—this may be the man who can help me. But I was wrong. I have nothing to ask of you. . . . You may put your arms around me, if you like . . . if you are not afraid of me.”
I walked over to her, clasped her tightly and kissed her. I drew my lips away and looked into her eyes, my arms still about her waist.
“What is it you see?” she said, gently disengaging herself.
I moved away from her and looked at her steadily, for several moments, before answering. “What do I see? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. To look into your eyes is like looking into a dark mirror.”
“You’re disturbed. What is it?”
“What you said about me—it frightens me. . . . So I’m no help to you, is that it?”
“You have helped, in a way,” she replied. “You always help, indirectly. You can’t help radiating energy, and that is something. People lean on you, but you don’t know why. You even hate them for it, though you act as though you were kind and truly sympathetic. When I came here tonight I was a bit shaken inwardly; I had lost that confidence I usually have. I looked at you and I saw . . . what do you think?”
“A man flushed with his own ego, I suppose.”
“I saw an animal! I felt that you would devour me, if I were to let myself go. And for a moment or two I felt that I wanted to let myself go. You wanted to take me, throw me down on the carpet. To have me that way wouldn’t have satisfied you, would it? You saw in me something you had never observed in another woman. You saw the mask which is your own.” She paused for just a second. “You don’t dare to reveal your real self, nor do I. That much we have in common. I live dangerously, not because I am strong, but because I know how to make use of others’ strength. I am afraid not to do the things I do because if I were to stop I would collapse. You read nothing in my eyes because there is nothing to read. I have nothing to give you, as I told you a moment ago. You look only for your prey, your victims on whom you fatten. Yes, to be a writer is probably the best thing for you. If you were to act out your thoughts you would probably become a criminal. You have always the choice of going two ways. It is not the moral sense which deters you from going the wrong way—it is your instinct to do only that which will serve you best in the long run. You don’t know why it is you abandon your brilliant projects; you think it is weakness, fear, dubiety, but it isn’t. You have the instincts of the animal; you make everything subservient to the desire to live. You would not hesitate to take me against my will, even if you knew you were in a trap. The man trap you are not afraid of, but the other trap, the trap which would set your feet in the wrong direction, that you are wary of. And you are right.” Again she paused. “Yes, you did me a great service. If I had not met you tonight I would have given in to my doubts.”
“Then you are about to do something dangerous,” I said.
She shrugged her shoulders. “Who knows what is dangerous? To doubt, that is dangerous. You will have a much more dangerous time of it than I. And you will cause a lot of harm to others in defending yourself from your own fears and doubts. You are not even sure at this moment that you will go back to the woman you love. I have poisoned your mind. You would drop her like that if you were sure that you could do what you wanted without her aid. But you will need her and you will call it love. You will always fall back on that excuse when you are sucking the life out of a woman.”
“That is where you are wrong,” I interrupted with some heat. “It’s me who gets sucked dry, not the woman.”
“That is your way of deceiving yourself. Because the woman can never give you what you want you make yourself out to be a martyr. A woman wants love and you’re incapable of giving love. If you were a lower type of man you would be a monster; but you will convert your frustration into something useful. Yes, by all means go on writing. Art can transform the hideous into the beautiful. Better a monstrous book than a monstrous life. Art is painful, tedious, softening. If you don’t die in the attempt, your work may transform you into a sociable, charitable human being. You are big enough not to be satisfied with mere fame, I can see that. Probably, when you have lived enough, you will discover that there is something beyond what you now call life. You may yet live to live for others. That depends on what use you make of your intelligence.” (We looked at one another keenly.) “For you are not as intelligent as you think you are. That is your weakness, your overweening intellectual pride. If you rely exclusively on that you defeat yourself. You have all the feminine virtues, but you are ashamed to acknowledge them to yourself. You think because you are strong sexually that you are a virile man, but you are more of a woman than a man. Your sexual virility is the only sign of a greater power which you haven’t begun to use. Don’t try to prove yourself a man by exploiting your powers of seduction. Women are not fooled by that sort of strength and charm. Women, even when they are subjugated mentally, are always masters of the situation. A woman may be enslaved, sexually, and yet dominate the man. You will have a harder time than other men because to dominate another doesn’t interest you. You will always be trying to dominate yourself; the woman you love will only be an instrument for you to practice on . . .”
Here she broke off. I saw that she expected me to go.
“Oh, by the way,” she said, as I was making my adieu, “the gentleman asked me to give you this”—and she handed me a sealed envelope. “He’s probably explained why he couldn’t make a better excuse for leaving so mysteriously.”
I took the envelope and shook hands with her. If she had suddenly said: “Run! run for your life!” I would have done so without question. I was completely mystified, knowing neither why I had come nor why I was leaving. I had been whisked into it on the crest of a strange elation the origin of which now seemed remote and of little concern to me. From noon to midnight I had gone full circle.
I opened the envelope in the street. It contained a twenty-dollar bill enclosed in a sheet of paper on which was written “Good Luck to you!” I was not altogether surprised. I had expected something of the sort when first I laid eyes on him. . . .
A few days after this episode I wrote a story called “Free Fantasia” which I brought to Ulric and read aloud to him. It was written blindly, without thought of beginning or end. I had just one fixed image in mind throughout, and that was of swinging Japanese lanterns. The piéce de résistance was a kick in the slats which I gave the heroine in the act of submission. This gesture, which was aimed at Mara, was more of a surprise to me than it could possibly be to the reader. Ulric thought the writing quite remarkable but confessed he couldn’t make head nor tail of it. He wanted me to show it to Irene, whom he was expecting later. She had a perverted streak in her, he said. She had returned to the studio with him late that night, after the others had gone, and she had almost bled him to death. Three times ought to be enough to satisfy any woman, he thought, but this one could keep it up all night. “The bitch can’t stop coming,” he said. “No wonder her husband’s a paralytic—she must have twisted the cock off him.”
I told him what had occurred the other night when I left the party abruptly. He shook his head from side to side, saying—“By God, those things never happen to me. If anybody but you were to tell me a story like that I wouldn’t believe it. Your whole life seems to be made up of just such incidents. Now why is that, can you tell me? Don’t laugh at me, I know it sounds foolish to ask such a question. I know too that I’m a rather cagey bird. You seem to lay yourself wide open—I suppose that’s the secret of it. And you’re more curious about people than I will ever be. I get bored too easily—it’s a fault, I admit. So often you tell me of the wonderful time you’ve had—after I’ve left. But I’m sure nothing like you related would happen to me even if I were to sit up all night. . . . Another thing about you that gets me is that you always find a character interesting whom most of us would ignore. You have a way of opening them up, of making them reveal themselves. I haven’t got the patience for it. . . But tell me honestly now, aren’t you just a bit sorry that you didn’t get your end in with what’s her name?”
“Sylvia, you mean?”
“Yes. You say she was a loulou. Don’t you think you could have stayed another five minutes and had what was coming to you?”
“Yes, I suppose so . . .”
“You’re a funny fellow. I suppose you mean to say that you got something more by not staying, is that it?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps I did, perhaps not. To tell you the truth, I forgot all about fucking her by the time I was ready to leave. You can’t fuck every woman you run into, can you? If you ask me, I was fucked good and proper. What more could I hope to get out of her if I had gone through with it? Maybe she’d have given me a dose of clap. Maybe I would have disappointed her. Listen, I don’t worry too much if I lose a piece of tail now and then. You seem to be keeping some kind of fuck-ledger. That’s why you don’t loosen up with me, you bugger, you. I have to work on you like a dentist to extract a measly buck from you; I go round the corner and a stranger whom I speak to just a few minutes leaves a twenty-dollar bill for me on the mantelpiece. How do you explain that?”
“You don’t explain it,” said Ulric, making a wry grin. “That’s why things never happen to me, I guess. . . . But I do want to say this,” he continued, getting up from his seat and frowning over his own cussedness. “Whenever you find yourself in a real pinch you can always rely on me. You see, I don’t worry much about your privations usually because I know you well enough to realize that you’ll always find a way out, even if I happen to let you down.”
“You sure have a lot of confidence in my ability, I must say.”
“I don’t mean to be callous when I say a thing like that. You see, if I were in your boots I’d be so depressed that I wouldn’t be able to ask a friend for help—I’d be ashamed of myself. But you come running up here with a grin, saying—‘I must have this . . . I must have that.’ You don’t act as if you needed help desperately.”
“What the hell,” I said. “Do you want me to get down on my knees and beg for it?”
“No, not that, of course. I’m talking like a damned fool again. But you make people envious of you, even when you say you’re desperate. You make people refuse you sometimes because you take it for granted that they should help you, don’t you see?”
“No, Ulric, I don’t see. But it’s all right. Tonight I’m taking you to dinner.”
“And tomorrow you’ll be asking me for carfare.”
“Well, is there any harm in that?”
“No, it’s just cockeyed,” and he laughed. “Ever since I’ve known you, and I’ve known you a long while, you’ve been hitting me up—for nickels, dimes, quarters, dollar bills . . . why once you tried to bludgeon me for fifty dollars, do you remember? And I always keep saying no to you, isn’t that so? But it doesn’t make any difference to you apparently. And we’re still good friends. But sometimes I wonder what the hell you really think of me. It can’t be very flattering.”
“Why, I can answer that right now, Ulric,” I said blithely: “You’re . . .”
“No, don’t tell me now. Save it! I don’t want to hear the truth just yet.”
We went to dinner down in Chinatown and on the way home Ulric slipped me a ten-dollar bill, just to prove to me that his heart was in the right place. In the park we sat down and had a long talk about the future. Finally he said to me what so many of my friends had already told me—that he had no hopes for himself but that he was confident I would break loose and do something startling. He added very truthfully that he didn’t think I had even begun to express myself, as a writer. “You don’t write like you talk,” he said. “You seem to be afraid of revealing yourself. If you ever open up and tell the truth it will be like Niagara Falls. Let me tell you honestly—I don’t know any writer in America who has greater gifts than you. I’ve always believed in you—and I will even if you prove to be a failure. You’re not a failure in life, that I know, though it’s the craziest life I’ve ever known of. I wouldn’t have time to paint a stroke if I did all the things you do in a day.”
I left him, feeling as I often did, that I had probably underestimated his friendship. I don’t know what I expected of my friends. The truth is I was so dissatisfied with myself, with my abortive efforts, that nothing or nobody seemed right to me. If I were in a jam I would be sure to pick the most unresponsive individual, just to have the satisfaction of wiping him off my list. I knew full well that in sacrificing one old friend I would have three new ones by the morrow. It was touching, too, to run across one of these discarded friends later on and find that he bore me no hatred, that he was eager and willing to resume the old ties, usually by way of a lavish meal and an offer to lend me a few dollars. In the back of my head there was always the intention of surprising my friends one day by paying off all debts. Nights I would often lull myself to sleep by adding up the score. Even at this date it was already a huge sum, one that could only be settled by the advent of some unexpected stroke of fortune. Perhaps one day some unheard-of relative would die and leave me a legacy, five or ten thousand dollars, whereupon I would immediately go to the nearest telegraph office and dispatch a string of money orders to all and sundry. It would have to be done by telegraph because if I were to keep the money in my pocket more than a few hours it would vanish in some foolish, unexpected way.
I went to bed that night dreaming of a legacy. In the morning the first thing I heard was that the bonus had been declared—we mi
ght have the dough before the day was over. Everybody was in a state of agitation. The burning question was—how much? Towards four in the afternoon it arrived. I was handed something like three hundred and fifty dollars. The first man I took care of was McGovern, the old flunky who guarded the door. (Fifty dollars on account.) I looked over the list. There were eight or ten I could take care of immediately—brothers of the cosmococcic world who had been kind to me. The rest would have to wait until another day—including the wife whom I had decided to lie to about the bonus.
Ten minutes after I had received the money I was arranging to throw a little spread at the Crow’s Nest, where I had decided to make the pay-off. I checked up the list again to make sure I had not overlooked any of the essential ones. They were a curious lot, my benefactors. There was Zabrowskie, the crack telegrapher, Costigan, the knuckleduster, Hymie Laubscher, the switchboard operator, O’Mara, my old crony whom I had made my assistant, Steve Romero from the main office, little Curley, my stooge, Maxie Schnadig, an old stand-by, Kronski, the intern, and Ulric of course . . . oh yes, and MacGregor, whom I was paying back merely as a good investment.
All told I would have to shell out about three hundred dollars—two hundred and fifty dollars in debts and a possible fifty for the banquet. That would leave me flat broke, which was normal. If there were a five-spot left over I’d probably go to the dance hall and see Mara.
As I say, it was an incongruous group I had gathered together, and the only way to unite them in fellowship was to make merry. First of course I paid them off. That was better than the best hors d’œuvre. Cocktails followed promptly and then we fell to. It was a staggering meal I had ordered and there was plenty to wash it down with. Kronski, who was not used to liquor, got tipsy almost immediately. Had to go out and stick a finger down his throat long before we came to the roast duckling. When he rejoined us he was pale as a ghost: his face had the hue of a frog’s belly, a dead frog floating on the scum of a stinking swamp. Ulric thought he was a rum bird—had never met a type like that before. Kronski, on the other hand, took a violent dislike to Ulric, asking me on the side why I had invited a polite fart like that. MacGregor positively detested little Curley—couldn’t understand how I could be friendly with such a venomous little crook. O’Mara and Costigan seemed to be getting along best of all; they fell into a lengthy discussion about the relative merits of Joe Gans and Jack Johnson. Hymie Laubscher was trying to get a hot tip from Zabrowskie, who made it a point never to give tips because of his position.