Part 33

Ellen goes out to the street. The fireengines are arriving. Policemen are beating back the crowds. She wants to go away but she cant, she’s waiting for something. At last she hears it tinkling down the street. As the fireengines go clanging away, the ambulance drives up. Attendants carry in the folded stretcher. Ellen can hardly breathe. She stands beside the ambulance behind a broad blue policeman. She tries to puzzle out why she is so moved; it is as if some part of her were going to be wrapped in bandages, carried away on a stretcher. Too soon it comes out, between the routine faces, the dark uniforms of the attendants.

“Was she terribly burned?” somehow she manages to ask under the policeman’s arm.

“She wont die ... but it’s tough on a girl.” Ellen elbows her way through the crowd and hurries towards Fifth Avenue. It’s almost dark. Lights swim brightly in night clear blue like the deep sea.

Why should I be so excited? she keeps asking herself. Just somebody’s bad luck, the sort of thing that happens every day. The moaning turmoil and the clanging of the fireengines wont seem to fade away inside her. She stands irresolutely on a corner while cars, faces, flicker clatteringly past her. A young man in a new straw hat is looking at her out of the corners of his eyes, trying to pick her up. She stares him blankly in the face. He has on a red, green, and blue striped necktie. She walks past him fast, crosses to the other side of the avenue, and turns uptown. Seven thirty. She’s got to meet some one somewhere, she cant think where. There’s a horrible tired blankness inside her. O dear what shall I do? she whimpers to herself. At the next corner she hails a taxi. “Go to the Algonquin please.”

She remembers it all now, at eight o’clock she’s going to have dinner with Judge Shammeyer and his wife. Ought to have gone home to dress. George’ll be mad when he sees me come breezing in like this. Likes to show me off all dressed up like a Christmas tree, like an Effenbee walking talking doll, damn him.

She sits back in the corner of the taxi with her eyes closed. Relax, she must let herself relax more. Ridiculous to go round always keyed up so that everything is like chalk shrieking on a blackboard. Suppose I’d been horribly burned, like that girl, disfigured for life. Probably she can get a lot of money out of old Soubrine, the beginning of a career. Suppose I’d gone with that young man with the ugly necktie who tried to pick me up.... Kidding over a banana split in a soda fountain, riding uptown and then down again on the bus, with his knee pressing my knee and his arm round my waist, a little heavy petting in a doorway.... There are lives to be lived if only you didn’t care. Care for what, for what; the opinion of mankind, money, success, hotel lobbies, health, umbrellas, Uneeda biscuits...? It’s like a busted mechanical toy the way my mind goes brrr all the time. I hope they havent ordered dinner. I’ll make them go somewhere else if they havent. She opens her vanity case and begins to powder her nose.

When the taxi stops and the tall doorman opens the door, she steps out with dancing pointed girlish steps, pays, and turns, her cheeks a little flushed, her eyes sparkling with the glinting seablue night of deep streets, into the revolving doors.

As she goes through the shining soundless revolving doors, that spin before her gloved hand touches the glass, there shoots through her a sudden pang of something forgotten. Gloves, purse, vanity case, handkerchief, I have them all. Didn’t have an umbrella. What did I forget in the taxicab? But already she is advancing smiling towards two gray men in black with white shirtfronts getting to their feet, smiling, holding out their hands.

* * * * *

Bob Hildebrand in dressing gown and pyjamas walked up and down in front of the long windows smoking a pipe. Through the sliding doors into the front came a sound of glasses tinkling and shuffling feet and laughing and _Running Wild_ grating hazily out of a blunt needle on the phonograph.

“Why dont you park here for the night?” Hildebrand was saying in his deep serious voice. “Those people’ll fade out gradually.... We can put you up on the couch.”

“No thanks,” said Jimmy. “They’ll start talking psychoanalysis in a minute and they’ll be here till dawn.”

“But you’d much better take a morning train.”

“I’m not going to take any kind of a train.”

“Say Herf did you read about the man in Philadelphia who was killed because he wore his straw hat on the fourteenth of May?”

“By God if I was starting a new religion he’d be made a saint.”

“Didnt you read about it? It was funny as a crutch.... This man had the temerity to defend his straw hat. Somebody had busted it and he started to fight, and in the middle of it one of these streetcorner heroes came up behind him and brained him with a piece of lead pipe. They picked him up with a cracked skull and he died in the hospital.”

“Bob what was his name?”

“I didnt notice.”

“Talk about the Unknown Soldier.... That’s a real hero for you; the golden legend of the man who would wear a straw hat out of season.”

A head was stuck between the double doors. A flushfaced man with his hair over his eyes looked in. “Cant I bring you fellers a shot of gin.... Whose funeral is being celebrated anyway?”

“I’m going to bed, no gin for me,” said Hildebrand grouchily.

“It’s the funeral of Saint Aloysius of Philadelphia, virgin and martyr, the man who would wear a straw hat out of season,” said Herf. “I might sniff a little gin. I’ve got to run in a minute.... So long Bob.”

“So long you mysterious traveler.... Let us have your address, do you hear?”

The long front room was full of ginbottles, gingerale bottles, ashtrays crowded with half smoked cigarettes, couples dancing, people sprawled on sofas. Endlessly the phonograph played _Lady ... lady be good_. A glass of gin was pushed into Herf’s hand. A girl came up to him.

“We’ve been talking about you.... Did you know you were a man of mystery?”

“Jimmy,” came a shrill drunken voice, “you’re suspected of being the bobhaired bandit.”

“Why dont you take up a career of crime, Jimmy?” said the girl putting her arm round his waist. “I’ll come to your trial, honest I will.”

“How do you know I’m not?”

“You see,” said Frances Hildebrand, who was bringing a bowl of cracked ice in from the kitchenette, “there is something mysterious going on.”

Herf took the hand of the girl beside him and made her dance with him. She kept stumbling over his feet. He danced her round until he was opposite to the halldoor; he opened the door and foxtrotted her out into the hall. Mechanically she put up her mouth to be kissed. He kissed her quickly and reached for his hat. “Good night,” he said. The girl started to cry.

Out in the street he took a deep breath. He felt happy, much more happy than Greenwich Village kisses. He was reaching for his watch when he remembered he had pawned it.

The golden legend of the man who would wear a straw hat out of season. Jimmy Herf is walking west along Twentythird Street, laughing to himself. Give me liberty, said Patrick Henry, putting on his straw hat on the first of May, or give me death. And he got it. There are no trollycars, occasionally a milkwagon clatters by, the heartbroken brick houses of Chelsea are dark.... A taxi passes trailing a confused noise of singing. At the corner of Ninth Avenue he notices two eyes like holes in a trianglewhite of paper, a woman in a raincoat beckons to him from a doorway. Further on two English sailors are arguing in drunken cockney. The air becomes milky with fog as he nears the river. He can hear the great soft distant lowing of steamboats.

He sits a long time waiting for a ferry in the seedy ruddy-lighted waiting room. He sits smoking happily. He cant seem to remember anything, there is no future but the foggy river and the ferry looming big with its lights in a row like a darky’s smile. He stands with his hat off at the rail and feels the riverwind in his hair. Perhaps he’s gone crazy, perhaps this is amnesia, some disease with a long Greek name, perhaps they’ll find him picking dewberries in the Hoboken Tube. He laughs aloud so that the old man who came to open the gates gave him a sudden sidelong look. Cookoo, bats in the belfry, that’s what he’s saying to himself. Maybe he’s right. By gum if I were a painter, maybe they’ll let me paint in the nuthouse, I’d do Saint Aloysius of Philadelphia with a straw hat on his head instead of a halo and in his hand the lead pipe, instrument of his martyrdom, and a little me praying at his feet. The only passenger on the ferry, he roams round as if he owned it. My temporary yacht. By Jove these are the doldrums of the night all right, he mutters. He keeps trying to explain his gayety to himself. It’s not that I’m drunk. I may be crazy, but I dont think so....

Before the ferry leaves a horse and wagon comes aboard, a brokendown springwagon loaded with flowers, driven by a little brown man with high cheekbones. Jimmy Herf walks round it; behind the drooping horse with haunches like a hatrack the little warped wagon is unexpectedly merry, stacked with pots of scarlet and pink geraniums, carnations, alyssum, forced roses, blue lobelia. A rich smell of maytime earth comes from it, of wet flowerpots and greenhouses. The driver sits hunched with his hat over his eyes. Jimmy has an impulse to ask him where he is going with all those flowers, but he stifles it and walks to the front of the ferry.

Out of the empty dark fog of the river, the ferryslip yawns all of a sudden, a black mouth with a throat of light. Herf hurries through cavernous gloom and out to a fog-blurred street. Then he is walking up an incline. There are tracks below him and the slow clatter of a freight, the hiss of an engine. At the top of a hill he stops to look back. He can see nothing but fog spaced with a file of blurred arclights. Then he walks on, taking pleasure in breathing, in the beat of his blood, in the tread of his feet on the pavement, between rows of otherworldly frame houses. Gradually the fog thins, a morning pearliness is seeping in from somewhere.

Sunrise finds him walking along a cement road between dumping grounds full of smoking rubbishpiles. The sun shines redly through the mist on rusty donkeyengines, skeleton trucks, wishbones of Fords, shapeless masses of corroding metal. Jimmy walks fast to get out of the smell. He is hungry; his shoes are beginning to raise blisters on his big toes. At a cross-road where the warning light still winks and winks, is a gasoline station, opposite it the Lightning Bug lunchwagon. Carefully he spends his last quarter on breakfast. That leaves him three cents for good luck, or bad for that matter. A huge furniture truck, shiny and yellow, has drawn up outside.

“Say will you give me a lift?” he asks the redhaired man at the wheel.

“How fur ye goin?”

“I dunno.... Pretty far.”

THE END