Ellen slipped into the side room to get her hat and coat. She stood some time before the mirror powdering her nose. When she went out into the studio again everybody was talking at once. Men and women stood round with sheets and bathrobes draped over their scanty dancingclothes. The detectives had melted away as suddenly as they came. Oglethorpe was talking in loud impassioned tones in the middle of a group of young men.
“The scoundrels to attack women,” he was shouting, red in the face, waving his headdress in one hand. “Fortunately I was able to control myself or I might have committed an act that I should have regretted to my dying day. … It was only with the greatest selfcontrol …”
Ellen managed to slip out, ran down the stairs and out into drizzly streets. She hailed a taxi and went home. When she had got her things off she called up George Baldwin at his house. “Hello George, I’m terribly sorry I had to trouble you and Mr. Winthrop. Well if you hadnt happened to say at lunch you’d be there all the evening they probably would be just piling us out of the black maria at the Jefferson Market Court. … Of course it was funny. I’ll tell you about it sometime, but I’m so sick of all that stuff. … Oh just everything like that aesthetic dancing and literature and radicalism and psychoanalysis. … Just an overdose I guess. … Yes I guess that’s it George. … I guess I’m growing up.”
The night was one great chunk of black grinding cold. The smell of the presses still in his nose, the chirrup of typewriters still in his ears, Jimmy Herf stood in City Hall Square with his hands in his pockets watching ragged men with caps and earsflaps pulled down over faces and necks the color of raw steak shovel snow. Old and young their faces were the same color, their clothes were the same color. A razor wind cut his ears and made his forehead ache between the eyes.
“Hello Herf, think you’ll take the job?” said a milkfaced young man who came up to him breezily and pointed to the pile of snow. “Why not, Dan. I dont know why it wouldnt be better than spending all your life rooting into other people’s affairs until you’re nothing but a goddam traveling dictograph.”
“It’d be a fine job in summer all right. … Taking the West Side?”
“I’m going to walk up. … I’ve got the heebyjeebies tonight.”
“Jez man you’ll freeze to death.”
“I dont care if I do. … You get so you dont have any private life, you’re just an automatic writing machine.”
“Well I wish I could get rid of a little of my private life. … Well goodnight. I hope you find some private life Jimmy.”
Laughing, Jimmy Herf turned his back on the snow-shovelers and started walking up Broadway, leaning into the wind with his chin buried in his coatcollar. At Houston Street he looked at his watch. Five o’clock. Gosh he was late today. Wouldnt be a place in the world where he could get a drink. He whimpered to himself at the thought of the icy blocks he still had to walk before he could get to his room. Now and then he stopped to pat some life into his numb ears. At last he got back to his room, lit the gasstove and hung over it tingling. His room was a small square bleak room on the south side of Washington Square. Its only furnishings were a bed, a chair, a table piled with books, and the gasstove. When he had begun to be a little less cold he reached under the bed for a basketcovered bottle of rum. He put some water to heat in a tin cup on the gasstove and began drinking hot rum and water. Inside him all sorts of unnamed agonies were breaking loose. He felt like the man in the fairy story with an iron band round his heart. The iron band was breaking.
He had finished the rum. Occasionally the room would start going round him solemnly and methodically. Suddenly he said aloud: “I’ve got to talk to her … I’ve got to talk to her.” He shoved his hat down on his head and pulled on his coat. Outside the cold was balmy. Six milkwagons in a row passed jingling.
On West Twelfth two black cats were chasing each other. Everywhere was full of their crazy yowling. He felt that something would snap in his head, that he himself would scuttle off suddenly down the frozen street eerily caterwauling.
He stood shivering in the dark passage, ringing the bell marked Herf again and again. Then he knocked as loud as he could. Ellen came to the door in a green wrapper. “What’s the matter Jimps? Havent you got a key?” Her face was soft with sleep; there was a happy cozy suave smell of sleep about her. He talked through clenched teeth breathlessly.
“Ellie I’ve got to talk to you.”
“Are you lit, Jimps?”
“Well I know what I’m saying.”
“I’m terribly sleepy.”
He followed her into her bedroom. She kicked off her slippers and got back into bed, sat up looking at him with sleepweighted eyes.
“Dont talk too loud on account of Martin.”
“Ellie I dont know why it’s always so difficult for me to speak out about anything. … I always have to get drunk to speak out. … Look here do you like me any more?”
“You know I’m awfully fond of you and always shall be.”
“I mean love, you know what I mean, whatever it is …” he broke in harshly.
“I guess I dont love anybody for long unless they’re dead. … I’m a terrible sort of person. It’s no use talking about it.”
“I knew it. You knew I knew it. O God things are pretty rotten for me Ellie.”
She sat with her knees hunched up and her hands clasped round them looking at him with wide eyes. “Are you
