“Like Erisichthon, by a sad mischance,
Gnawest thou at thine own enfeebled limbs?”
Well, by God, that was pretty good! He would go on with it: the glamour of life was renewed in him by something connected with those lines: twilight, soft music, women’s faces—white under arc-lamps. He felt melancholy. After all, it was wonderful, living in a dirty boarding-house in the great city. He thought of the girl he had seen at Child’s in Madison Square the day before: she wore a lavender-colored soft dress and a wide straw hat. After lunch he had followed her irresolutely as far as Brentano’s. Then he had gone into Brentano’s—to read all the foreign magazines. He looked everywhere for clues to beauty, to some short-cut by which he could learn to write as he wanted to—with power and subtlety and magnificence. But what he wrote was always commonplace.
The six o’clock whistles began to blow. The tom-tom downstairs in the basement, where the dark dining room was, began its soft swelling clamor, ending in a brazen crash. He heard Billington, in the room over his head, push back his chair which screeched on the bare floor, and take several soft steps. Flodden’s bed began creaking agitatedly. The iron gate in the front yard clanged, and looking down he saw Mr. Ezra D. Ramsden, the detective (sour-faced idiot), walking up the path. He was carrying a paper package under his arm, and looking at the red headlines of a newspaper: the creaking of his shoes was audible and the basement door rang automatically as he went in.… Two fingernails ticked the door, and Flodden entered, his white Hapsburg face grinning, his bad teeth showing, and black gums.
“Alas,” he cried, “what boots it with incessant care: to strictly meditate the thankless muse?… Were it not better done, as others booze, to sport with Phyllis at the Palisades?”
“The Palisades tonight? Too damned hot.”
“Out in the vestry, too damned hot,” sang Flodden. He shuffled to the window in his red carpet slippers, and spat neatly to the path below. “It’s too hot for anything but cold baths and naps. That’s what I’ve been doing all afternoon, one after another. When I wasn’t in the bath, Mother Ramsden was; when Mrs. Ramsden wasn’t, I was; and vice versa and et cetera ad infinitum. And when I wasn’t either soaking or sleeping, I read the Lake, as being the coolest book I could think of.… Certainly the coolest of Moore’s! Ha, Ha.”
“Papa Ramsden is back from the Wild West with his disguise under his arm.”
“More likely it’s a touching little gift for the missus. Sister Susie, being in hopes, read the works of Marie Stopes. Now she’s in a sad condition because she read the wrong edition.”
“How delightful! Where do you pick up these engaging trifles, Flod!”
“Solicit not thy thought with matters hid: leave them to Flod. I wonder if the mail’s come. I’m expecting a check for a thousand dollars from the Smart Set. If it’s come I’ll treat you to a dinner at the free lunch over the way.”
“What have you sold to the Smart Set?”
“The usual cynical little triangle story. I turn them out by recipe. Take one sweet, tired, gingham wife in a Long Island village: one successful climbing husband, who wants to build him more stately mansions, O my soul, but finds his wife still feeding the chickens—come, chick, come, chick! add one deep-dyed chorus girl recuperating in the country from housemaid’s knee. Stir till thick. Separate them. Sprinkle with Belasco sauce. And there you are.… I cut all the descriptive passages out of the newspapers. Much easier than trying to grasp the contemporary style myself.”
He knocked out his pipe on the window-sill, humming. While Cooke was fastening his collar, Billington came in.
“I say, where are we going to hog it, tonight?… Shall we go to that new Chinese place in Sixth Avenue?… No, let’s go to Keen’s.… No, Schwartz’s would be better—pig’s knuckles and cold beer. No, I feel like something really subtle. What about Leveroni’s and a lobster?…”
He beamed, leaning on a massive walking-stick almost as long as himself: pirouetted around it, excited.
“One at a time, Steel-trap!”
“I don’t feel like eating at all,” said Cooke, jerking his striped tie.
“Cooky’s romantic,” laughed Flodden. “Waitah! Waitah! Bring me, please, the underdone uvula of a bat—and waitah, one moment, please—I’ll have just a half-portion, please, just a half-portion.”
“Dry up, Flod! You make me sick.”
“Well, if we’re going out in serious quest of food, I’ll have to take off my beautiful slippers.”
“Go barefoot, Flod,” said Billington, his black eyes glittering. “Wrap a sheet around you and carry a lily.”
“Tush,” said Flodden, and disappeared into the hall.
II.
On the way downtown, Cooke said little to his two companions, feeling that they irritated him. They were older than he. They were fairly successful hack-writers, knew the ropes, talked esoterically of the editors they knew. Certainly, they fascinated him. He liked living with them. But why the devil did they chatter so incessantly? How could they keep up, as they did, their clever patter? There seemed to be nothing serious in them—they were always laughing and smirking. Cooke, from the window of the elevated train, stared out, peered into all the house-windows. All those lives, in there! Secret, rich, mysterious. He liked to see the people moving there, inside, folding newspapers, taking pots from stoves, turning back bed covers, reaching up arms to light the gas. He liked the heavy Jewesses leaning out into the evening, apathetic, their massive breasts spread out on the cool stone, their faces like the faces of oxen. The street swarmed with children; children ragged and noisy. The vast multiplicity thrilled him and made him melancholy. There it was, so close to him, so immediate, yet he could do nothing with it! Some poison in his brain turned it all to dullness, to mud—no, worse than that, to a kind of lifeless simulacrum, a mechanical formula—as soon as he tried to touch it. Why was it? Oh, God, if he could only get hold of beauty! It was so simple a thing—this tawny evening light flung slantwise from the west through dirty streets—streets of wholesale warehouses strewn with broken crates and straw—ash cans and blown papers.