He had never met any of Joel Pierce’s family, but one night towards seven o’clock when he had just returned to his room from the university, Joel telephoned him, and, saying that his father was in town, asked him if he would go to dinner and to the theatre with them. He found Joel and his father waiting for him in the lobby. Mr. Pierce was a man of fifty years, comfortably dressed for the hot weather in a black mohair suit, and with a kind of stately yet spacious dignity of linen that was agreeably old-fashioned and that evoked a picture of an older and more leisurely generation. He was quite deaf — so deaf, in fact, that he made use of a small ear-phone — but his speech and manners, like his dress, were easy, friendly, and yet touched with an air of distinguished authority.
He took the two boys to the Lafayette for dinner, and ordered generously and with the easy and comforting assurance of a man of the world who gives everyone around him a happy feeling of security and well-being. For Eugene, it was a memorable experience.
The fine restaurant — it was perhaps the finest he had yet seen — the French waiters, the delicious food, the beautiful women, the well-dressed, prosperous and worldly-looking men and the pleasant weary languor of fading day, the huge nameless thrill and prophecy of oncoming night touched him with a feeling of joy and nameless anticipation. He felt, as he had never felt before, that strange, seductive promise which the city has at evening, at the end of a day of terrible summer’s heat, and which is so strangely mixed of sorrow and delight, of desolation and the promise of a wild and nameless joy.
And suddenly, all the horror, heat and desolation of the day were forgotten. He forgot the blind horror of the man-swarm thrusting through the mazes of the furious streets. He forgot the drowning flood of humid flesh, the pale, wet, suffering faces that thrust from nowhere out of sweltering heat, that were engulfed again into the heat-hazed distances of swarming streets in which man’s life seemed more uncountable than the sands of the sea, and more blind, lost and horribly forsaken than the lives of those eyeless crawls and gropes that scuttle blindly and for ever through murky ooze upon the sea’s vast floor.
The old red light of evening filled his heart again with its wild prophecy, its huge and secret joy, and the great stride of oncoming night revived again, in all their magic, his childhood dreams of the enchanted city, the city of great men and glorious women, the city of unceasing joy, of power, triumph and success, and of the fortunate, good, and happy life.
As Mr. Pierce sat there with his air of quiet and urbane authority, studying the menu with a little frowning smile through the lenses of a pince-nez that dangled fashionably and casually from a black silk cord when he was not using it, the boy felt an indescribable sense of wealth and power and prosperous ease. It seemed to him that everything in the world was his for the asking, and the suave service of the waiter, hovering over Mr. Pierce with poised pencil and an attitude of devoted respect, the rich designs of snowy linen, the heavy silver, the thick carpets, the handsome women and distinguished-looking men, all added to this feeling of wealth and happiness.
Mr. Pierce kept studying the menu with an air of good-natured seriousness, quizzing his son from time to time with gruff but genial banter:
“Joel,” he would say, “what do you want? Have you any preference of your own or will you leave it to me to decide?”
“Gosh!” Joel answered in his soft, eager tone. “I don’t care, Pups. Whatever you say goes with me! You know, it’s all the same to me, anyway. I can eat anything you order. Only,” he added laughing, “I’d prefer it if there’s no meat. I’d like it much better if you ordered vegetables.”
Mr. Pierce knocked the pince-nez from his nose, and turning to Eugene with an air of agreeable confidence, said:
“What’s wrong with a boy who takes no more interest in his food than that? Can you make it out? It strikes me as the most astonishing thing,” he went on in a gruff, distinguished way, “to see a healthy young man who has no interest in his belly. Really Joel,” he went on, turning to his son and regarding him with a kind of quizzical but good-humoured sarcasm, “I’d feel so much better about you if you only liked food more. It’s really tragic to see a boy of your age deliberately throwing away one of the greatest pleasures in life. Don’t you think so?” he demanded, turning to the other boy again with his air of friendly confidence. “Or have you turned vegetarian, too?”
“Gosh, no!” Joel said, laughing his hushed eager, immensely agreeable laugh. “He’ll agree with every word you say, Pups. He likes food even more than you do.”
“Then I’m glad to hear it!” said Mr. Pierce approvingly. “I had begun to fear that this younger generation had gone utterly to hell. But if the symptoms are only local —” he frowned humorously at his son for a moment —“perhaps it’s not as bad as I thought.”
“You and Pups should get along together beautifully,” said Joel to Eugene. “He loves to eat — he’s a wonderful cook — you should come up to Rhinekill sometime and let him cook one of his meals for you.”
The ordering of the meal proceeded in this agreeable fashion. Mr. Pierce ordered liberally: small pink-fleshed clams, cold, pungent and exciting in their perfect shells, a thick pea soup with little squares of toast-crust floating in it, young chicken, plump and tender, grilled so succulently that it seemed to melt away the moment that one put it in his mouth, asparagus and potatoes, and a salad of crisp lettuce, beautifully mixed, “fatigued,” in a big salad bowl, iced coffee, and a dessert of ripe Camembert and salted crackers. Mr. Pierce and Eugene ate heartily and with obvious relish, but Joel, in spite of all their protests and his father’s bantering ridicule, which he took with the beautiful laughing good-nature which was one of the finest traits of his character, stuck to his vegetable diet with the gentle doggedness that was also characteristic of him.
Later, when they had finished dinner, they drove uptown in a taxi-cab and went to one of the summer musical shows near Broadway, where an English revue was appearing. The comic actress, Beatrice Lillie, was the star of the performance. Eugene had never heard of her before, but it was evident from the fashionable and “smart” look of the audience, and the way in which Joel and other people greeted every word and gesture, that the actress was “all the rage,” one of those persons who, in addition to their native talent, have some special quality that for a time makes them the darling of the cult-adepts of the world of fashion.
The revue was a clever and amusing one, but it also had a stylish quality of fashionable smartness that was more and more beginning to mark the productions of the theatre and the responses of the audience. Thus, in later years, when one had almost completely forgotten the scenes of the revue and its songs and jokes, one could still remember it for the brilliant picture of the life it evoked. And the image of that life was implied rather than portrayed. The revue was one of those productions which people were beginning to “wear” as they “wore” books or plays or a dress: people went to the revue more because it was “the thing to do,” the thing that everyone was talking about, than because they had a genuine desire to go, more because they had been told that it was “amusing” than from any deep conviction that they would find it so.
Thus, not only in the jokes and songs and scenes of the revue, but in the laughter and applause with which the fashionable audience greeted them, there was a quality that was somewhat strained and metallic — a new and disagreeable mirth that was coming into man’s life, which seemed to have its sources not in the warm human earth and blood of humour, but to proceed from something sterile, sour and acrid in his soul. In this hard and essentially lifeless merriment there was evident the desire to wound and mock and injure. And this desire came more from fear, a need to divert attention from one’s own nakedness and insecurity by an attack upon a common target, than from any real cruelty or scornful hardihood of the soul.
This fear and insecurity were evident even in the fashionable and sophisticated audience which had come to this theatre to see the smart revue. In the interval between the acts, the people streamed up the gangways and out into the lobby, and everywhere one looked, the hostile fear and insecurity of the people were apparent. For the most part the audience was fashionably dressed, the men in evening dress, the women in expensive evening gowns, that revealed their long white arms, the velvet perfection of their breasts and long backs. It would have been difficult to find a more assured, sophisticated and wealthy-looking group of people, but in spite of this air of complete worldly assurance, their unhappiness and fear were painfully evident. Their bodies seemed to throw off and to fill the air with a feverish electric tension, the texture of their thousand voices rising all together in a braided clamour was almost hysterically high, and remembering suddenly the quiet murmurous drone of voices in a theatre twenty years before, the glamorous spell of enchantment and happiness that surrounded even the performances of some travelling company in its one-night appearance in a little town, one felt poignantly again that something old and pleasant had gone out of life, that something dissonant, painful and unwholesome had changed man’s rhythm, spread a poisonous infection through the human chemistries.
One also saw, or rather powerfully felt, among these fashionable and worldly-looking men of the great city, something jaded, puny, sterile, horribly weary; a quality as if their vital energies had been depleted in an unnatural way, as if they were emptied out, dried up, sapped of their juice, and could keep going now only by a kind of lifeless dynamism, a dry electric energy which paced them to the tempo of the city’s furious life, which would not let them go until it had burned them hollow to a dry grey shell.
By contrast, the vivid loveliness of the women was astonishing. The differences that distinguished these women from these men, in colouring, in the velvety texture of the skin, in the sparkling eyes, red mouths, voluptuously seductive bodies and general healthiness and glowing elasticity of figure, were so great that one was reminded of those insect species whose females are wonderfully and fatally superior in strength and beauty to their drab mates, and who finally devour them. And yet, even in the faces and figures of these lovely women, the mutilation of that hard, metallic, blunted-out stamp was also evident: one noticed that the general quality of the tone of all these mixed and intermingled voices was feminine rather than masculine, and that the feminine voice was even more assertive, arrogant and incisive in its naked penetration than the voices of the men.
In fact, even as the two young men stood in one corner of the lobby, surveying the keyed pulsations of this brilliant scene, a woman’s voice could be heard, speaking with an arrogant and dogmatic assertiveness that instantly quenched denial and left no room for disagreement, however mild:
“YES! I think she is VERY charming, and VERY clever, and TERRIBLY, TERRIBLY amusing. The dancing is VERY bad; they simply DON’T KNOW HOW to train a chorus. As for the songs, I thought that one she sings about Queen Mary’s hats was AWFULLY funny; the rest are only fair. Of course, the decor is ABOMINABLE— but what can you expect? That man who sings the song with her is rather good — the other one, the awful little Cockney thing, is SIMPLY HORRIBLE! Where do they ever find these people, anyway? . . . No! No!” she said harshly and arrogantly at this point as one of the men put in a mild, low-voiced, and apologetic interjection of his own, “I do NOT agree with you! I ABSOLUTELY do NOT agree with you: you are ABSOLUTELY wrong! The nursemaid scene is DECIDEDLY the best thing in the show! The restaurant scene is VERY dull, and VERY cheap, and TERRIBLY, TERRIBLY vulgar! And it is VERY stupid of you not to see it!”— And having delivered herself with womanly modesty of these tolerant and generous observations, the lady turned, saw Joel, and instantly addressed him, speaking to him in the same arrogant and assertive tones she had used before, and blurting her words out through lips that she kept perfectly straight and that scarcely seemed to move or open as she spoke.
“JOEL!” she cried. “What on earth are you doing here? . . . I thought you were at Rhinekill or in Maine? . . . And where’s your mother? . . . Did she come down too? . . . No? Too bad!” she said harshly. “I want VERY much to see her. . . . Yes, I shall be in Newport the week-end after next. . . . Yes, yes,” she went on with metallic harshness, “— with Alice Mortimer. . . . Is she going, too? . . . Good; then I shall see her! — My GOD, no! . . . We’re not staying here. . . . We motored in to see the show. . . . No, no. . . . I’ve been staying at Sands Point. . . . Jerry’s at Southampton. . . . But GOD, no! . . . A whole summer in this hell-hole! . . . The man’s MAD! . . . How d’ya do?” she said curtly and harshly, throwing a cold look and a curt nod towards Eugene as Joel whispered at his name, and instantly dismissing him. . . . “But do you seriously mean you’re going to spend the whole summer here? . . . Not REALLY! . . . But, my dear child, what in heaven’s name ever prompted you to do an idiotic thing like that? . . . Oh! I see!” she said coldly. “Painting, eh . . .”
But now the bell for the curtain sounded, and after a few conventional words of parting they returned to their seats.