“Well I’m off so long.”
Jimmy gathered up his book and went into his bedroom and undressed. His watch said fifteen past twelve. The night was sultry. When he had turned out the light he sat a long while on the edge of the bed. The faraway sounds of sirens from the river gave him gooseflesh. From the street he heard footsteps, the sound of men and women’s voices, low youthful laughs of people going home two by two. A phonograph was playing “Secondhand Rose.” He lay on his back on top of the sheet. There came on the air through the window a sourness of garbage, a smell of burnt gasoline and traffic and dusty pavements, a huddled stuffiness of pigeonhole rooms where men and women’s bodies writhed alone tortured by the night and the young summer. He lay with seared eyeballs staring at the ceiling, his body glowed in a brittle shivering agony like redhot metal.
A woman’s voice whispering eagerly woke him; someone was pushing open the door. “I wont see him. I wont see him. Jimmy for Heaven’s sake you go talk to him. I wont see him.” Elaine Oglethorpe draped in a sheet walked into the room.
Jimmy tumbled out of bed. “What on earth?”
“Isn’t there a closet or something in here. … I will not talk to Jojo when he’s in that condition.”
Jimmy straightened his pyjamas. “There’s a closet at the head of the bed.”
“Of course. … Now Jimmy do be an angel, talk to him and make him go away.”
Jimmy walked dazedly into the outside room. “Slut, slut,” was yelling a voice from the window. The lights were on. Stan, draped like an Indian in a gray and pink-striped blanket was squatting in the middle of the two couches made up together into a vast bed. He was staring impassively at John Oglethorpe who leaned in through the upper part of the window screaming and waving his arms and scolding like a Punch and Judy show. His hair was in a tangle over his eyes, in one hand he waved a stick, in the other a creamandcoffeecolored felt hat. “Slut come here. … Flagrante delictu that’s what it is. … Flagrante delictu. It was not for nothing that inspiration led me up Lester Jones’s fire escape.” He stopped and stared a minute at Jimmy with wide drunken eyes. “So here’s the cub reporter, the yellow journalist is it, looking as if butter wouldnt melt in his mouth is it? Do you know what my opinion of you is, would you like to know what my opinion of you is? Oh I’ve heard about you from Ruth and all that. I know you think you’re one of the dynamiters and aloof from all that. … How do you like being a paid prostitute of the public press? How d’you like your yellow ticket? The brass check, that’s the kind of thing. … You think that as an actor, an artiste, I dont know about those things. I’ve heard from Ruth your opinion of actors and all that.”
“Why Mr. Oglethorpe I am sure you are mistaken.”
“I read and keep silent. I am one of the silent watchers. I know that every sentence, every word, every picayune punctuation that appears in the public press is perused and revised and deleted in the interests of advertisers and bondholders. The fountain of national life is poisoned at the source.”
“Yea, you tell em,” suddenly shouted Stan from the bed. He got to his feet clapping his hands. “I should prefer to be the meanest stagehand. I should prefer to be the old and feeble charwoman who scrubs off the stage … than to sit on velvet in the office of the editor of the greatest daily in the city. Acting is a profession honorable, decent, humble, gentlemanly.” The oration ended abruptly.
“Well I dont see what you expect me to do about it,” said Jimmy crossing his arms.
“And now it’s starting to rain,” went on Oglethorpe in a squeaky whining voice.
“You’d better go home,” said Jimmy.
“I shall go I shall go where there are no sluts … no male and female sluts. … I shall go into the great night.”
“Do you think he can get home all right Stan?”
Stan had sat down on the edge of the bed shaking with laughter. He shrugged his shoulders.
“My blood will be on your head Elaine forever. … Forever, do you hear me? … into the night where people dont sit laughing and sneering. Dont you think I dont see you. … If the worst happens it will not be my fault.”
“Go‑od night,” shouted Stan. In a last spasm of laughing he fell off the edge of the bed and rolled on the floor. Jimmy went to the window and looked down the fire escape into the alley. Oglethorpe had gone. It was raining hard. A smell of wet bricks rose from the housewalls.
“Well if this isnt the darnedest fool business?” He walked back into his room without looking at Stan. In the door Ellen brushed silkily past him.
“I’m terribly sorry Jimmy …” she began.
He closed the door sharply in her face and locked it. “The goddam fools they act like crazy people,” he said through his teeth. “What the hell do they think this is?”
His hands were cold and trembling. He pulled a blanket up over him. He lay listening to the steady beat of the rain and the hissing spatter of a gutter. Now and then a puff of wind blew a faint cool spray in his face. There still lingered in the room a frail cedarwood gruff smell of her heavycoiled hair, a silkiness of her body where she had crouched wrapped in the sheet hiding.
Ed Thatcher sat in his bay window among the Sunday papers. His hair was grizzled and there were deep folds in his cheeks. The upper buttons of his pongee trousers were undone to ease his sudden little potbelly. He sat in the open window looking out over the blistering asphalt at the endless stream of automobiles that
