HE had decided to write—what, he did not know yet: and it did not matter: something, anything, a play, a poem, a story—whatever came into his head, good or bad. It would occupy his time.
He spent a happy evening buying the materials of writing at a stationery store. He bought a dozen penholders, a quantity of his favourite stub pens, two bottles of a thick black indelible ink, half a ream of good thin bond paper, a great blotting-pad and a whole stack of small blotters. That afternoon he had bought a copy of Roget’s “Thesaurus,” without which the literary life is mere vexation; and a good, fat, reliable little dictionary with “derivations.” Going to his room, he lighted the gas, arranged these materials on his little table, gazed at them with pleasure—and realized that he had forgotten to buy an eyeshade. He went back to the stationery store, and returned with a half-dozen eyeshades of the best pattern, the kind that do not saw the ears or get tangled in the hair. It appeared to him also that the gas-light really would not do; he must get a kerosene student’s lamp; it would be a nuisance to keep it filled and trimmed, and the chimney clean—but the literary life has its inevitable penalties.... He would get a student’s lamp and a gallon can of kerosene tomorrow.
He sat down again at the little table, fitted a stub pen into his penholder, lighted a match, and held the steel point in the blaze, to burn off the oil and take out the temper, making it soft and flexible and easy to write with. He uncorked the ink, wiped out the neck of the bottle with a blotter, and dipped his pen in. Yes, the pen held a full 90sentence’s-worth of ink, as it should. There was nothing the matter with the pen. He took a sheaf of paper from the great pile on the back of the desk, laid it at the proper angle, adjusted his chair, dipped the pen again, poised it above the virgin paper—and remembered that he had only two cigarettes left in the box. One cannot do a good night’s writing without plenty of cigarettes. He went down to the cigar store and returned with five boxes.
Once more he dipped his pen, lifted it ...
An hour later he roused himself from the vague waking dream in which his mind had been immersed. The sheet of paper was covered with lines and circles, stars, geometrical figures, childish pictures of houses with smoke coming out of the chimneys, illegible words, his own initials, and crude attempts to draw the outline of a girl’s arm; and amidst all this, carefully obliterated, so that he could hardly recognize it himself, the name—Rose-Ann, Rose-Ann, Rose-Ann....
He tore the sheet into tiny fragments, brushed them to the floor, and then got down on his hands and knees and carefully picked them up. He must remember to buy a wastebasket for his room tomorrow. He looked at his watch. It was twelve o’clock. He would go in and see Roger and Don; if they were staying up late, they might offer him some coffee.
Roger was lying on the couch reading Flaubert’s “La Tentation de la Saint Antoine,” and Don was sitting in an easy chair reading Flaubert’s “Bouvard et Pecuchet.” They looked up, bade him come in, and went on calmly with their reading. Felix took down a book from the shelf—one of the later works of Henry James—and yawned over it.... Perhaps he had better go to bed after all.
At that moment there was a stumbling up the stairs, and a loud banging at the door.
“That’s Eddie Silver,” said Roger, in a resigned tone.
Felix jumped up and opened the door, and Eddie Silver entered, shouting, “Hello!”—at the same time playfully thrusting against Felix’s stomach an automatic revolver made of tin. But Felix did not know that it was a toy.
91He stepped back hastily, with a queer feeling in the pit of his stomach.
“The fool’s got a revolver!” said Roger.
“Here, give me that,” said Don, going over and trying to snatch it.
“Let him alone——he’s drunk,” said Roger.
“No——not drunk!” protested Eddie Silver. “Don’t say I’m drunk!” He tearfully extended his hands in pleading, with the revolver dangling from a finger. “But—” and he beamed at them suddenly——“going to get drunk! Going——” He noticed the revolver, put it carefully in one overcoat pocket, and took out of the other a quart bottle. “Get some glasses, Rojjie!” And taking off his overcoat, with the revolver still in its pocket, he bundled it up and tossed it over into the corner of the room.
There was a moment in which everybody—except Eddie—held himself tense in expectation of a bullet. Then Don started across the room toward the overcoat.
“No, Don—no!——You le’ tha’ o’co’ ’lone. ’S my bes’ o’co’!” And then, very clearly enunciated, “Hurry up with those glasses!”
Felix followed Roger over behind the screen which masked their simple culinary arrangements. “We’ve got to get him drunk enough to get that gun away from him,” whispered Roger.
It took another bottle of whiskey, procured by Don and paid for by Felix, and four hours of time, to kill Eddie Silver’s jealous watchfulness of that overcoat in the corner. Eddie, with a maudlin efficiency, divided his attention between the overcoat and the whiskey. His conversation for the last three of the four hours consisted of a promise to tell them something. “Wo’n’ tell ’nybo’ ’n worl’ ’cep’ you,” he kept saying.
It appeared to have to do with himself and some girl——but whether it was in the nature of a crime or a joke they could not tell, because sometimes he laughed and again he cried about it. But as often as he started to tell what it was, he became diverted, and told instead about somebody else and 92somebody else’s girl. He confessed many follies that night, but not his own.
At three o’clock, just when he seemed to be really on the point of making that long-delayed confession, he suddenly commenced to laugh. “’Minds me Cli’ Bangs!” he said. “Know Cli’ Bangs?” And becoming articulate again he went on, “I’ll tell you a funny story about him. He’s got a—(come on, everybody have another little drink!)—house out in the country. I te’ you ’bou’ tha’ h-house!”
And with vague relapses into the muffled speech of drunkenness, and startling recoveries of clearness, but always with a thread of coherence, he told the story of Clive Bangs’ house. At times Roger, watchfully listening, had to serve as official interpreter; Roger understood the locutions of drunken speech as if they were a foreign language in which he was versed. And Felix, half-ashamed to listen, but curious, heard it to the end.
It seemed that Clive had built—or rebuilt—that house in Woods Point for a girl he was in love with at the time, years ago, five or six or seven years ago. But, said Eddie Silver, he had neglected to tell the girl that he was in love with her. And so, about the time the house was finished, she married somebody else. Or at least, became engaged to some one else, whom she eventually did marry. The point of this story—to Eddie it was an exquisitely funny story—was that Clive Bangs had kept the house a secret from her, because he wanted it to be a surprise. And it was this secrecy of his which had convinced her that he had another sweetheart; so that, in pique, she became engaged to the other man.
“Cli’s li’l’ secret!” said Eddie Silver, infinitely amused. “Do’ pay to have se-secrets. Tha’s why I go’ tell my li’l’ secret.”
But again he wandered from the point, much to Don’s and Roger’s disappointment.
This painful story about his friend stirred Felix deeply. He felt that it was true—true in essence, however fabricated in detail; it seemed to him indecent to have this stolen 93glimpse into the secret of Clive Bangs’ heart—and yet he was glad he had heard the story. Yes, it must be true. Rose-Ann had put it in a phrase: “Some girl has hurt him.” And this—this ridiculous and pathetic incident, too ridiculous ever to confess, a secret that must be buried deep and forgotten—was the reason for Clive’s being what he was.... And suddenly Felix understood why that story had moved him so:—for had he not been as ridiculously, as pathetically hurt, in his own episode of moon-calf-love back in Port Royal? And was that incident, too, to affect his whole life, remaining untold, unconfessed, poisoning his courage and his faith?
He jumped up, went to his room, altogether wide awake, and commenced to write—the story of his folly in Port Royal. He commenced it as a letter to Rose-Ann. He did not consider whether he would ever dare to send it to her. He only knew that it must be written so.
An hour later he paused, tired out—and remembered Eddie Silver’s revolver. After all, that was perhaps a life-and-death matter, and this wasn’t. He went back to Don’s and Roger’s room.... Eddie Silver’s confession was again on the point of becoming definite.
“Tell you all about it,” said Eddie. “Lis’n!”
They leaned forward to hear, but Eddie’s head dropped on his arms, and he was asleep.
“Damn!” whispered Roger.
Felix slipped quietly over to the woolly heap in the corner and reached into one pocket and then the other. He found something strangely light to the touch. He pulled it out and gazed at it angrily. A tin revolver!
“F’lix!”
Eddie suddenly awake, was calling to him.
“Go ge’ ’no’er bo’l’ Swinburne!”
Felix looked at his watch. If he went to sleep now, he would never wake up in the morning in time to go to the office. He might as well keep awake the rest of the night. “Make some coffee,” he said to Roger, “and I’ll get some more whiskey for this crazy loon.”
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That sort of thing—he reflected next evening, when he turned in immediately after dinner—was not the sort of thing he had expected of his Canal street home. He had thought of it as being a quiet backwater, out of reach of the tides of life. And if Eddie Silver was going to come there!... He fell asleep, only to be awakened by the cry,
“F’lix! Oh you F’lix!” and a pounding on his door. “G’ up! We’re having li’l’ Swinburne party!”
Felix lighted a match. It was one o’clock. How had that madman got into the house at this hour? Anyway, there was no sleeping now. Besides, he had had six hours’ sleep.
He rose and dressed, and went into the other room. “Make me a little coffee, Roger,” he pleaded.... And an hour later he managed to slip away, and went back to his room and wrote feverishly on his letter—the letter which he would never send—to Rose-Ann ... falling asleep with his head on the table, and only waking in time to get to the office, without breakfast.
The third evening Eddie Silver came again, and this time Felix felt himself too tired to write, and drank whiskey with the rest. In the morning he was apparently none the worse, except that he had no appetite for anything except a cup of coffee and a cigarette. In the afternoon, for lack of sufficient sleep, he needed more coffee. And of course, the more coffee one drank, the less one seemed to need real food, so that dinner, too, consisted exclusively of coffee. And then he could not sleep, and sat up half the night writing. Fortunately, Eddie Silver did not come again for a while, so there was a lull in the fever of existence. But it took days to get back to normal habits of eating and sleeping again.
And Felix, in the meantime, had commenced, for the sake of companionship and good coffee, to take his dinners with Don and Roger in their room, taking his turn in providing them. These meals were of a delicatessen sort, sometimes chosen because the ingredients reminded Don and Roger of 95Spain or Italy, and sometimes because they made an interesting colour scheme.
For a while their evenings were quiet. Felix would labour upon that endless letter to Rose-Ann—who had by now come to seem to him an unreal figure, an invention of his own fancy; only becoming real again for a moment, a moment only, when he saw on his desk at the office an envelope addressed to him in her large undisciplined handwriting. Within that envelope would be a friendly note, saying nothing; and he would reply in kind.
One day he dropped in at the little Community Theatre to see how things were getting on; Rose-Ann in her latest note had expressed some curiosity about her old class and its new teacher. He found old Mrs. Perk there.
“It’s pretty bad,” Mrs. Perk whispered. “They don’t like the new one at all. And they miss you, too.” Which somehow pleased him very much, even though he suspected it to be only an old woman’s flattery.
“And how do you like your new place? You don’t look very well fed. No, it’s no use; men can’t keep house by themselves. You’ll have to wait till Miss Rosy comes back, and be taken care of right!”
“I’m afraid Miss Rosy will never come back,” said Felix.
“Don’t you bother yourself about that!—Here, thread this needle for me, with your young eyes.... Why, I asked her for a piece of the wedding cake, the very day she went away so sudden. She’ll be back all right!”
So old Mrs. Perk had been joking with Rose-Ann, too—about him. Felix wondered how she had taken it....
“No, your bachelor hall won’t last much longer, I can promise you that.”
He laughed and went away, amused at the quaint pseudo-wisdom of the old. She thought she knew all about him and Rose-Ann. Two young things hopelessly in love, but too shy to tell each other so! And in this situation the inconveniences of bachelor’s hall would operate as a deus ex machina, driving him in despair and her in pity into each other’s arms—and matrimony!
96How simple it all seemed to her! And how complex it all was in reality!
Mrs. Perk had the old-fashioned-woman’s na?ve confidence in the importance of woman’s cooking; for that matter, how did she know that Rose-Ann could cook? Most probably she couldn’t! Girls like Rose-Ann didn’t nowadays.... And besides, how could Mrs. Perk be expected to understand the pleasures of a man living alone, free, able to keep what hours he chose—the sheer lazy charm of a masculine establishment, however inefficient!
Yes, Felix really enjoyed this happy-go-lucky kind of existence. As long as there was plenty of good coffee, and cigarettes, nothing else mattered very much—not even Eddie Silver.
He had commenced to come again. At first his visits were welcome as a relief from the monotony of Canal street life. But he was becoming a nuisance.... He would come in at all hours, but preferably when they had just gone to bed—pounding on the doors until they awoke and let him in. If the hall-door downstairs chanced to be locked, he would stand in the street and call to them, and throw pebbles—or dollars—against their front windows.... They would be drifting peacefully into dreams when something would wrench violently and painfully at their attention—they would try to ignore it and go on dreaming, but it would come again, determined, familiar, insistent—and they would reluctantly awake enough to become conscious of a voice in the street calling out their names. “Don! Roger! F’li-i-ix!”
“It’s that damned Eddie Silver!” they would groan, and finally somebody, with a brain aching for sleep, would stumble down the stairs and let him in.
“Wake up there, F’lix—I brought you nice li’l’ bo’l’ Swinburne!” he would call, rattling Felix’s doorknob, until he rose and joined in the festivities.
So strong is the power of association that Felix came to loathe the poetry of Swinburne—it had the smell of whiskey on it....
It was increasingly hard to keep awake in the afternoons, however much he drugged himself with coffee. Getting up in the morning became a tragedy—his whole being cried out 97for the sleep he could not have. Sometimes during the day, in the midst of a story, his mind would suddenly go blank for a minute. His appetite failed, and there were pains in his stomach that nothing but whiskey would relieve. He caught a bad cold, and had a cough that would not go away. And then, one morning in the eighth week of his stay in the Canal street menage, he found himself too ill to go to the office.
3
Roger and Don ministered to him with hot coffee, and called in a doctor who lived in the same building. The doctor had long white locks that fell picturesquely about the collar of his coat. He stuck a thermometer in Felix’s mouth, took out his watch and held Felix’s wrist, then shook his head gravely.
“What do you want to do with him?” he asked.
“We can’t very well take care of him here,” said Don.
“Any folks in town?” asked the doctor.
“No.”
“H’m. How about the County Hospital? They’ll look after him all right.”
“I suppose that is the correct thing to do with a sick person,” said Roger.
“H’m. Yes.... Has to be pretty serious, though, to get him in.”
“Well,” asked Roger, “how serious is it?”
“H’m. Can’t tell just yet. May be very serious—may not be. Better not take any chances.... Well, what do you want to do? County Hospital?”
Roger and Don looked at each other. Felix tried to get the thermometer out of his mouth so as to protest, but commenced to cough instead.
“Yes,” said Roger, “County Hospital.”
“All right,” said the doctor cheerfully, pulling his thermometer out of Felix’s mouth and putting it in his pocket without looking at it, “I’ll diagnose pneumonia. Where’s the telephone? I’ll call up the hospital right away, and stay here till they come.”
98So Felix was taken to the County Hospital—first addressing to Rose-Ann a large envelope in which he put his long, unfinished letter, and giving it to Don to mail.... And at the hospital, after the doctor got round to him, the night nurse told him that there didn’t seem to be anything the matter with him except a bad cold, but the doctor thought he ought to stay in bed a week and rest up.
“He says you need to make up about a month’s sleep, and get some of that booze out of your system.” She grinned at him sympathetically, “You ain’t used to it, are you?”
He rather wished, since he wasn’t going to die after all, that he hadn’t sent Rose-Ann that foolish letter. Still—he didn’t care. He couldn’t care very much about anything. He was weak, and tired, and very sleepy.