The Bum

It Rained. It Rained.

Waves of rain flooded the afternoon. I walked in West Madison Street like a deep-sea diver. An autumn wind slanted the rain and fired it against the town like pistol caps. I moved through this sea bottom of a day soaked, chilled and deeply pleased.

I had a use for the rain, a double use. It would help turn me into a bum, an objective advised by my city editor, Mr. Mahoney. "You'll never get this story unless you disguise yourself as a broken-down, witless bit of flotsam," said Mr. Mahoney, "which should not be too difficult." And I would be able to describe the rain to Betha Ingalls next Sunday evening, as evidence of my poetic side. It was the only side of me she cared for.

It made an uneven relationship, since I loved all of Betha, including her tightlipped, black-brocaded widow of a mother who looked like the bar of judgment, with a patrician nose to boot. Mrs. Zelda Ingalls was as ominous a parent as ever put a hex on young love. I became shifty-eyed in her presence, like a pickpocket waiting to be sent up for 30 days.

Betha? Nineteen – a year my senior. Large eyes so bright they seemed to consume her face as well as mine. I think they were blue and that she had tan hair. What a turncoat memory is, hanging onto trivia and dropping vital statistics into the well of years.

Betha's body is easier to remember, for it was an impression rather than a fact. It had no existence. Betha was a face, a voice, deep eyes and a pair of almost transparent hands. The rest was fabric, usually white, that revealed only good taste. The body it covered remained remote and inconceivable. It takes more than a dress to do this, even though dresses in that day were ankle length and pillory collared. Betha was clothed also in a purity of mood and thought – a white candle with a little flame of a face.

How did a spotty-souled young newspaper reporter meet so seraphic a girl? As he met nearly everyone else in that time – pursuing a story for Mr. Mahoney.

I'll let the embryo bum slosh along West Madison Street, and put down some background details; for there is no Mr. Mahoney hurrying me now to invade the town's flophouses in quest of a seven-column scoop. "If, by any chance, you dig up the heir to the Willard Chatfield millions, please remember to telephone in the news. The Journal does not mind the extra expense."

Mr. Mahoney was referring to an incident some months before. While tracking down some minor piece of South Side news, I had turned a corner and seen a man running and leaping and tossing greenbacks into the air as if they were confetti. A score of yelling men were chasing him. Leading the posse was a white-aproned butcher. I saw the butcher swing his cleaver and watched the man's head leave his neck and land on the pavement. The man stopped running but stayed erect, spurting blood into the air like fireworks.

I got the story from the triumphant posse leaders. The headless man, now fallen, had walked through the plateglass window of Jesse Binga's Negro bank, terrorized its employees with drug-crazed whoops, scooped up $10,000 and gone zigzagging and yodeling down the street.

With the facts in hand, I hurried to get the scoop to the city desk. But I hurried on foot, the existence of the telephone totally forgotten. I ran the three miles to the Journal in good time. Mr. Mahoney listened coldly to my panted information about the headless bank robber. The City Press had bulletined the story to all the afternoon papers minutes before and ruined my scoop.

"We ought to fire you on the grounds of stark idiocy," said Mr. Mahoney, "but Mr. Hutchens may want to enter you in the Olympics. I'll ask him."

Now to Betha, my blessed damsel.

A month before, Mr. Mahoney had brought Betha into my life in the oblique fashion to which I was used. In youth, fate (continued on page 110)THE BUM(Continued from page 105) leaps at you from unexpected corners. Or maybe the eyes of 18 look into such corners.

Mr. Mahoney had said to me, "We have been secretly tipped off that our former police chief, Timothy O'Shea, is being taken to the Elgin State Hospital for the Insane this morning, to become one of its most distinguished inmates. Members of his family are loyally escorting him to the booby hatch. Hoping to elude the watchdog press, they are leaving from the Englewood station instead of from LaSalle Street. See what you can get from the grieving relatives. Also, I would like a statement from the lunatic himself."

There were five O'Sheas in the Englewood station shed, all tall and brawny fellows. I stood casually near them, listening in on the family chitchat, when one of them suddenly bellowed, "A newspaper fink! Get him!" I fled the station with four fierce O'Sheas after me. A rage against publicity in their dark hour had seemingly driven all the O'Sheas loco. With a half-block lead I turned and noted that an automobile had joined the chase. The lunatic exchief was at the wheel.

I ran through the opened door of an undertaker's parlor, darted into the rear salesroom where a half-dozen shiny coffins were on display, threw open the rear door and headed back for one of the coffins. Its lid was down. I hoped it was empty. It was. I climbed into it, pulled the lid over me and propped it up for air with a silver dollar.

Lying there in one of my future homes, I heard the ugly roar of the O'Shea posse as it galumphed through the display room and out the opened back door in pursuit of the newspaper fink. I doubt whether anyone ever enjoyed a coffin more. Its inky dark gave me a sense of safety, of trouble outwitted.

A half hour later, I pushed up the lid and left my earth box. The display room was empty. I walked into the front parlor. Two women and a man were discussing a prospective burial with the undertaker. The women were Mrs. Zelda Ingalls and her daughter, Betha.

I stood staring at the spiritual-looking girl in the white dress. She seemed exactly the sort of girl one should meet after coming out of a coffin. As the songwriters might put it, I fell in love with an angel at first sight.

? ? ?

Walking in West Madison Street in the melodious roar of the rain, I thought tenderly of Betha. It was Tuesday. No Betha till Sunday – a schedule invented by her omnipotent mother. I walked on, dreaming of Sunday. A good thing Betha's mother couldn't see me now. I was sockless, tieless, hatless, unshaven – a match for any bum in any flophouse. I was also a little drunk from sipping at the flask in my pocket, a touch of disguise suggested by Mr. Mahoney.

What fine phrases I would have for the poetic Betha on Sunday. I frowned experimentally at her judgment bar of a mother. I would look her in the eye on Sunday and say, "Not guilty, your Honor. I bring your daughter only descriptions of the rain."

I busied myself preparing them as I sloshed along, soaked through and half drunk. The hypotenuse of the rain. The rain turning into a swarm of Vs as it hit the pavement. The rain, a pliant wall of water, fuming and opalescent. The tenacious lash of the rain, with the wind for its handle.

West Madison Street had darkened. Through the leaping rain, lighted store signs burned like golden-lettered banners flung stiffly into the storm. In their yellow mists the rain looked like flurries of moths.

I tucked away my Sunday bouquet of similes and thought of my assignment. Pride warmed my drenched body. Mr. Mahoney had sent me forth to find a man for whom scores of city police and private detectives had been searching vainly for a week. His name was Daniel Chatfield, aged 40, with a record of 20 arrests in the last eight years. He had been arrested usually for lying in a coma on the pavement. He was known to the cops as Sleepy Dan, a vagrant and a morphine addict.

A week ago a noted Chicago financier, Willard Chatfield, had died and left his millions to his only son, Daniel, alias Sleepy Dan, the flophouse bum.

"That the cops can't find him signifies nothing," Mr. Mahoney had said to me. "But that Daniel himself has ignored our headlines and failed to come scrambling out of his sewer for his papa's millions gives us a clue of sorts. Sleepy Dan is either dying or dead. Or possibly he is a philosopher who prefers the freedom of poverty to the nasty burden of riches. Come what may, we expect some descriptive passages superior to Tolstoy."

Mr. Mahoney joked, but I knew his secret attitude. Mr. Martin Hutchens, our pink-faced, hung-over, silver-haired managing editor shared it. They were hatching me out. Clucking, deriding and giving me their city as an incubator. God love their journalistic shades.

? ? ?

I had written of bums often in news items: bums in front of a municipal judge; nose-running, dirt-glazed head-hung derelicts mumbling their "Not guilties," and listening without protest to the verdict – "30 days in the Bridewell. Call the next case." But I had never seen them in the flophouse.

The Victoria Hotel was one of the addresses in the police files for Sleepy Dan. It was a three-story building, but its two upper floors had been blitzed by time. Their windows were boarded up. Rats held carnival in the darkened rooms. A carpet of bugs covered the littered floors and maggots glowed around rodent carcasses.

The street floor, only, was available to guests. I returned to it after a peek at the disabled upper stories. The street floor was divided into two large rooms – the lobby in which the guests could stand, the other in which they slept.

Two broken windows in the lobby looked on the street. Rain poured through them. Pools of water rippled around the feet of the standing guests. There were some 50 of them. An unshaded electric bulb hung from the ceiling. Faces glinted in its light.

I stood, wet and shivering, and saw around me an assembly of truthtellers, of humans unmasked and visible only as what they were. Vacuity, hunger, despair, fear, defeat, desolation were stamped plainly on their faces, without the veil of boast or lie. The things you guessed at in other people were vividly seeable in these ragged ones, as if they were actors offering brilliant characterizations. Their dirtiness was half hidden in the dim light, but their stink betrayed their rotted clothes, clotted bodies and weak bladders. Yet I saw grins all around me. Nitwit and goon-born, but still grins. A flock of grinning scarecrows stood silently watching the rain as if it were a parade.

A hand pulled my sleeve. An old man, small as a boy, smiled up at me with watery, colorless eyes. His toothless mouth whispered, "I ain't got a dime for sleepin' here tonight."

I handed him a coin, unaware that it was a half dollar till it left my fingers. The little old man gulped, shivered and started to weep. He whispered, "Jesus love you." His hand squeezed my arm and the weeper whispered again, "Come on. I'll fix you up, sweet man. I know a place that's private. Nobody'll see. Come on, honey boy, I'll fix you up."

I moved away from the decrepit homosexual and his unwholesome burst of gratitude.

The 50 stood for hours in the pools of lobby water. I was one of them, silent, shivering, nipping at my whiskey flask and hungry as a wolf in whelping time. I wrote the scene in my head for Mr. Mahoney. My copy would begin, "Outside, the pizzicato of the rain ..."

The rain ended. A lonely wind remained in the wet street. Talk started around me. A man near me asked a riddle. Voices offered guesses. The riddle asker laughed and finally revealed (continued on page 147) The Bum (continued from page 110) the right answer. Everyone was happy to hear it.

Another man told a dirty joke. His hearers laughed at its finish. There was no beggar profit in the empty, windy streets. The bums, on layoff, entertained one another.

I heard strange curses, rasping coughs, sudden crazy outcries. But there was sociability in the flooded lobby – the jauntiness of a journey ended, a destination arrived at. And in the gloomy, odorous room, there was a mood of hurrah. These discards approved of one another. They were without criticism.

I saw flasks being passed. I gave mine to two men. They took swigs and returned it, politely.

Near me, a skeletonized man with sickly eyes started telling an anecdote about himself. I wrote it years later as a one-act play and performed it over the radio with movie director Alfred Hitchcock playing one of the parts. I played the sickly-eyed bum who told the story. He said a strange thing happened to him on a winter night a year before. He was standing in front of a saloon at midnight in a hell of a snowstorm. The saloon was closed. He was unable to walk because he was too sick and hungry. So he stood still in the snowstorm in the empty street. Then he happened to look into the darkened saloon window and he saw the figure of Jesus Christ standing inside it, plain as day. Jesus was wearing a white robe. He was barefooted and a crown of thorns was on his head. Seeing him, the bum cried out: "Jesus Christ! I'm a sonofabitch if it ain't! Walkin' around barefoot in the snow. Bleedin' all over."

The bum said he started talking to this Jesus in the saloon window, because he felt sorry for him, barefoot in the icy night and bleeding from his wounds. He said he told Jesus he'd be able to find a bed for him in a couple of hours. He knew a whore who finished her night's work around three A.M. He had heard Jesus wasn't the kind who turned up his nose at a whore.

Then the figure of Jesus had started fading out of the saloon window. The bum began to cry. He held out his arms to the fading Jesus and said, "Don't go 'way. I thought you was goin' to pal with me."

But Jesus disappeared. The bum stood looking into the empty saloon window and, all of a sudden, he began to laugh. There was a looking glass in the window and the bum saw himself in it, all white with snow.

"And I seen I'd been talkin' to myself," said the storyteller near me, "talk-in' to myself in a lookin' glass. And I thought it was him. I thought it was Jesus Christ. And it was only me in a lookin' glass, talkin' to myself."

A door opened at the rear of the lobby. A stocky man in a sailor's reefer stood in the doorway and called out in a Swedish accent, "All right, fellas, the bunks are ready. A dime a head. No stowaways. Get your money out, fellas."

The men started entering the sleeping quarters. I put a dime in the Swede's big hand.

The sleeping room was darker than the lobby. An oil lamp on a wall offered a sample of the room to the eye. Its windows were boarded up. I made out two rows of pads on a cement floor, and lay down on one near the oil lamp. It had a greasy strip of oilcloth for a sheet. I heard the 50 bums stretch out in the dark, grunting, giggling, coughing.

I kept silent. I knew the police had been here and asked questions about Sleepy Dan, and learned nothing. I had planned to ask no questions for a night or two, until I had earned my spurs as a bum. I was already hungry enough to groan, and drunk enough to yell at the things crawling over my face, nipping at me inside my trousers as if I were a Thanksgiving feast. But I stayed silent.

An hour passed. Snores, gurgles, muffled cries began to come out of the smelly darkness. Crazy words sounded suddenly, "I'm gettin' littler. I'm little! I'm little! I'm a bug!" No one answered. "Oh, them big tits! I'm buried in them big tits!" No one laughed. A high-pitched voice announced, "Mogo on the Gogo. I got Mogo on the Gogo!" The snoring increased. Men were sleeping all around me. I could see them in my mind. Battered, gutless faces like closed doors; closed now to the crawl of vermin, the scamper of rats, and to hopelessness. Bums, dreaming. Memories tiptoeing in human refuse. Old nightmares still whimpering.

A figure stood up in the dark, tall and vague like a shadow leaving a grave. It moved down the lane between the rows of pads and vanished. Another figure moved toward me. It lay down on the vacant pad next to mine. A voice whispered, "Sonny boy, I got a pint o' rye." It was my half-dollar friend, the pervert. "Don't be scared," he whispered.

"I ain't scared," I whispered back.

"There's a couple beds in the back where it's darker," the whisper said. I felt a hand on my chest and grabbed it. There was a bottle in the hand.

"Take a snifter," the little old man whispered, "and you'll like me better."

I sat up and drank. A fragile, weightless body leaned against me.

"I'm lookin' for a friend of mine," I whispered, "Sleepy Dan."

"You should of asked Chuck," he answered. "Chuck's his best friend. He just went out o' here."

As I stood up, the little old man started cooing, "Don't go 'way. Don't go 'way."

I dropped the bottle on his pad and stumbled out of the room.

The chilly, rain-washed night was a darling embrace. There are moments when breathing becomes a love affair with God. I stood swallowing the night, tasting its clean wind and unsullied spaces. A man was walking slowly a half block down the empty street. I started after him. I knew what he was from the way he moved – a bum. Ten to one the bum who had left the flophouse, Sleepy Dan's best friend.

The lone walker disappeared into an alley. I ran down the empty street. My quarry was standing in the alley with his back to me. Two large garbage cans shone dully in front of him. Looking furtively at the darkened building near the cans, the man lifted the cover off one of them and put it carefully on the muddy ground. He straightened and thrust an arm into the uncovered can. He remained for several minutes with his arm buried in the garbage can, alert and motionless as a fisherman. His arm came out. His hand held a prize, a bony chicken breast. Over its bits of rotted meat, sparks raced like blue insects. He stood still and ate his find.

When he had finished gnawing and licking his garbage meal, he started toward the street. I hid in the shadows as he appeared. He walked off and I followed him.

It's not easy to talk to a man you've seen driven by hunger to nibble like a rat at decaying refuse. A guilt makes you shy. I followed, clutching the three dollar bills in my pocket. I'd give him one and tell him to go buy a meal with it.

As I decided on this good Samaritan deed, the man walked up the front steps of a house. A red electric light burned over its door. He rang the bell. The door opened. I was up the steps and behind him as he entered.

A fat man with a simpleton face led the way into a parlor. Four girls in colored kimonos were sitting around a large, glass-topped table, drinking beer. One of the girls stood up and said, "Hello, Chuck. Glad to see you. Gets lonely as hell on a rainy night."

She went toward him slowly, swinging her hips and bouncing her breasts in her hands. Her kimono opened. She was naked under it.

"Be right with you, babe," said Chuck.

He sat down and removed a shoe. He fished a dollar bill out of its toe and handed it to the girl. He wiped his smeared mouth with his sleeve and said, "Come on, babe. Upstairs."

The two started for a stairway. Another of the girls had left the table. She opened her kimono and put her arms around me. I called out, "Hey, Chuck."

Chuck, sallow-skinned, loosemouthed, turned.

"I can't help you, bud," he said, "I gave her my last dime."

"I don't want any dough," I said, "I'm lookin' for an old friend, Sleepy Dan. You know where he is? I heard he had a girl in here."

"Naw," Chuck said, "Danny's girl is over on Desplaines Street, near Harrison. Ask for Masha. She runs a gypsy joint."

Chuck started up the stairs, a bridegroom arm around his second prize of the night.

I bolted out of the place and went hunting Masha. It was midnight when I found her in an abandoned bakery shop. Its door was open. I walked through a curtain-draped fortunetelling office into a rear room. Three women, two men and two children were sprawled on a floor covered with many rugs. There was a single piece of furniture – a fancy shaded floor lamp. It revealed all the figures but one asleep. A flamboyant woman in her 30s was sitting up, reading a book.

"I'm looking for Masha," I said.

The book reader nodded and went on reading. I sat down beside her. The beat-up book in her hands was Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

"I'm looking for the man who gave you that book," I said.

"I know," she nodded again, but this time looked at me.

A sooty face, black liquid eyes and Oriental cheekbones; a mane of glossy inky hair hanging around her shoulders; large white teeth glistening out of a mouth ready for anger; an unpredictable body under a tumult of dresses, flounces, petticoats, chains of beads, bracelets, silken scarves; a soiled rainbow of a woman – Masha. I was conscious of vitality more than flesh, of strong hands more than full-mooned breasts.

"You look for Danny," she said in a husky voice. "Why? You too young for a cop. You dress dirty, look dirty. But you no bum. You lying."

Her black eyes held my face like a pair of hands.

I told her I was a newspaper reporter. She nodded and said, "Thank you. I look for Danny, too. He's my husband."

She showed me the flyleaf of her book. I read an inscription, "This book and I belong to Masha forever. Danny."

I tried to hide my thrill of delight. Masha laughed and slapped my arm.

"You got a crazy head," she said. "I give you a drink."

She filled a glass from a bottle beside her. I asked questions as I sipped the sweet, tangy wine.

"Were you married in a church, Masha, or was it a civil ceremony?"

I was thinking of the Chatfield millions pouring Arabian Nights fashion into this barren place.

"No church," said Masha. "I marry Danny in my bedroom. I say you my husband. He say I am."

"I see," I said. I looked at the two sleeping children and asked, "Are those Danny's children?"

"Maybe. I don't know," Masha said, "I got two other husbands same time."

She leaned over and slapped the swarthy face of one of the sleeping men. He opened his eyes and grinned slowly.

"You want me, Mashinka?" he asked. He rolled over quickly to her side, placed a hand on her thigh and lifted his face obligingly for a kiss. A second slap from Masha sent him teetering.

"Don't insult me in front company," Masha said. "You tell young man who is my husband."

"Me," the slapped face answered.

"Who else?" Masha asked.

He pointed to a plumper colleague, lying on his back, his thick mustache aflutter with snores.

"Him," he said, "him and me. And Danny. We all Masha's husband."

He grinned at his joint wife and added, "Maybe you got number-four husband now. Yes?"

His face was out of range, but Masha's pointed shoe darted out and caught him in the ribs. Her victim grinned at the exposure of purple-stockinged leg.

"Beautiful," he said.

"Pig! Dog!" Masha said. "You touch me, I skin you alive. Go to sleep."

The man lay down and obediently closed his eyes. Masha introduced me to the two female sleepers. "That one my mother. Old one grandmother. Everybody sleep. Not Masha. Masha look for Danny." Her voice became a husky chant. "I find him. If he is in this life, I find him. Because Masha can see through walls. Nothing hide from Masha. Masha know everything."

Nevertheless, the all-knowing Masha was unaware of the fact that her Danny had inherited his father's millions. I told her it had been in all the papers.

"Me and my people don't read," Masha explained. "In Croatia we read. Not in Chicago."

"But you were reading a book of poems," I said.

"No," said Masha, "I only looking in it for Danny. Many times he speak to me out of book. Tonight he don't speak. I wait."

I watched her as she stared into the book of poems, and a belief in the supernatural grew stronger in me. Not the supernatural of divinity and angels, but of people; of unused human powers.

Many years after that night I thought, how small an invention the release of atomic power will seem when the tinkering psychologists finally uncover the mystic forces of our brains. And put them to work; each human to become a world radio station, an indestructible arsenal of good and evil, and a crony of the Fates. God help us then.

Staring at Masha, my head wobbled with sleepiness.

"Do you mind if I stay here tonight?" I asked.

She patted the rug beside her and I stretched out. Her husky voice began to sing softly. The words were alien, but the tune whispered to me of dark clouds over a forest, of exotic griefs. Despite the front-page copy somersaulting through my head, Masha's gypsy lullaby sent me floating into sleep.

? ? ?

At 7:30 in the morning I stood in a drugstore telephone booth reciting my story to Mr. Mahoney. Masha leaned against me with her ear close to the receiver. I finished my tale of Danny's heartbroken gypsy bride with the information that Masha was gifted with second sight and would soon be able to find Danny for us.

"Her talent won't be needed," said Mr. Mahoney. "The heir to the Chat-field millions was found putrefying in a Wabansia Street alley after midnight. He had been dead for a week. An overdose of morphine. The police have identified him. So have a number of his ill-favored pals. At the present writing, Sleepy Dan is in the expert hands of the Morganside Funeral Parlor staff. His body is being made presentable for a stylish burial Saturday morning." Mr. Mahoney chuckled. "It's a pretty story," he said. "Hang onto your brokenhearted gypsy princess. Keep her bottled up for the Journal. Our photographer will be at her wigwam in a half hour."

I hung up and said to Masha, "I'm sorry you had to hear it that way."

"I hear it last night," she said. "Death speak to me. While you sleep, a shadow came on the wall. The black angel." Her strong fingers gripped my arm. "Life and death are arm in arm. Like this."

We walked out of the drugstore. I told her about the photographer coming to take pictures of her.

"I go home get ready," Masha said. "I put pearls and rubies in my hair. And now you go home. You get clean clothes. You come back to me, not like bum. Like clean young man. I wait for you. I tell you secrets. Many stories you like."

Masha's hands held my cheeks. Her eyes seemed about to fly out of her face.

"You live long time in many places," she whispered. "Goodbye, a little while."

I never saw Masha again. When I came back in an hour, rehabilitated, the Desplaines Street roost was empty. Rugs, floor lamp, drapes and all the gypsies were gone.

Mr. Mahoney chose to believe the whole thing a fraud; that I had invented Masha. His cynicism and Mr. Hutchens' aloofness caused me to lose weight, and to consider returning to one of my original careers. I had been a good fiddle player at 11 and a trapeze acrobat at 14 in the Harry Costello Circus – a one-ring tent show that toured Wisconsin for one enchanted summer of rain, hunger and bankruptcy.

Luckily, Mr. Mahoney's attitude had changed in time. He learned that, after my day's work was done at three P.M., I went flitting about the West Side until dawn, tackling hundreds of people for a clue to Masha's whereabouts.

"I want you to cover Sleepy Dan's funeral tomorrow," Mr. Mahoney grinned at me, "and give us a stirring Horatio Alger story of the bum who made good as a corpse. And for God's sake, stop brooding about Masha. Your gypsy tosspot is bound to turn up with some ambulance-chasing lawyer and make a grab for the Chatfield millions. There never was a gypsy who wouldn't steal a doormat, let alone a pot of gold."

A libel, that, as what ethnic generality isn't? No Masha turned up. No lawyer put in a claim for her. The Chatfield millions were otherwise distributed to deserving institutions as stated in the financier's will, without contest.

The funeral of the "millionaire bum" was an exclusive affair. No bums other than Danny were allowed attendance. I took a look at Sleepy Dan in his ornamented, flower-piled casket. A pink-cheeked, aggressively high-toned corpse lay in the white-satined rectangle.

I noted that a half-dozen distinguished lawyers representing the Chatfield estate were present, and that they rivaled the corpse in tailoring and aloof expressions.

As the organ rumbled its finale in the funeral-parlor chapel, I thought happily of Sunday. Tomorrow, Betha. Her name, aided by the organ music, set dreams floating in my head. I would recite my rain similes to her, and read her my story in the Journal – from flophouse to a grave of grandeur. And I would ask her to marry me, if we were ever out of her mother's earshot long enough. Purity, innocence and a genteel ear for my Othello anecdotes – what better wife could I want? Love? Male youth invents love. Or borrows it from a girl. Or, even better, forgets to bother about it. Life is his bride.

? ? ?

The Ingalls' house in Hyde Park Boulevard was a yesterday's mansion, a wooden belle of a house, a bit out of plumb but still elegant. A respectful lawn lay in front of it. An elm tree stood at its side, as if ready in green livery to announce any arrival.

A Negro in a white coat opened the door, smiled expertly at me, pulled my hat out of my hand and led me into a large room. A room full of antique mahogany furniture polished as if it were brand new, of stiff settees, intellectual-looking rugs, oil portraits on the walls and bookcases much too fine for books. I had been in this room a number of times, but it always surprised me. I felt as if I should bow to it as to the head of the house.

The black-brocaded widow Ingalls greeted me with a sort of whimsical tolerance. Betha and I shook hands, and her gentle fingers seemed to expire in my clasp. I met a stranger named Mr. James Smith. He was middle-aged, somewhat paunchy, with a bland circle for a face. He looked at me through rimless glasses. I seemed to amuse him.

"Uncle Jimmy [Mr. Smith] has just come back from Egypt," Betha said. "He was telling us some wonderful things about the Temple of Karnak."

I refrained from saying I had read Breasted and knew about the mighty ruin of Karnak with the inscription over its missing door: This, Too, Shall Pass. I was presented by the colored butler with a cup of tea, a napkin, a small plate holding some odd-looking cookies – all to be balanced adroitly on one knee. Uncle Jimmy was having no trouble with this feat. He cooed away for an incredible time about sphinxes and lost tombs. I had never seen Betha and her mother so elated.

The talk that followed seemed equally fascinating – to them. The superiority of one ocean liner over another; the remarkable change in itinerary of a couple named Eadie and Luddie who had gone to Glasgow instead of London; the inconceivable charm of the new Episcopalian rector, and the new spirit he had injected into the Altar Guild of which Betha was a member; the appearance of a dreadful book named Jennie Gerhardt by a dreadful man named Dreiser. Mrs. Ingalls had returned it to McClurg's with a stiff note after reading its first two chapters. And other glossy matters, all with an overtone of disdain for something – possibly me, or the world beyond this cake-icing of a room.

During the removal of the teacups, Betha smiled at me and asked what I had been doing during the week. Her eyes were eager, but they glanced nervously at her mother for approval. I could see Betha's heart plainly, as if it were a bonbon on a plate. An unhappy bonbon with dreams. Take me away, take me away, Betha's heart spoke to me, as her eyes lowered. Youth is attuned to youth and can hear its secret messages.

"Yes, do tell us," said Mrs. Ingalls, in an advance tone of criticism. Bar-of-judgment mothers also have ears for furtive messages. "I haven't read the newspapers and I haven't the faintest idea of what has happened this week."

"Please," said Betha boldly, "I love to hear you talk about things."

Talk? My rain similes. Sleepy Dan, heir to millions, putrefying in a West Side alley. The world of Mashas, bums, perverts, whores and garbage-can lechers; of rats, men and vermin huddled together at the bottom of the night.

I had not sat in judgment on that world of dirt and human rot. I had until this hour imagined myself a young man in love with all mankind. But here in this sleek room aversion smote me, and I mounted a judgment seat.

These trifle fanciers with their embalmed minds; these ornamental ghosts simpering of their bloodless doings and offering their little froth of opinion as the top of thinking – I wanted no truck with them.

I stood up, apologized for having work to do, bowed to disdainful Mrs. Ingalls and amused Uncle Jimmy.

I felt Betha's gentle fingers in my hand for a last time, fingers that clung secretly for a moment. But a dozen heroines out of Swinburne and Rossetti couldn't have delayed my exit.

I fled the world of the bourgeoisie, full of mysterious judgments and indignations.

And it has been so with me ever since.