“Elaine you wont repeat this to anyone. … I feel the completest confidence in you.”
“That’s very nice of you George. Isn’t it amazing the way girls are getting to look more like Mrs. Castle every day? Just look round this room.”
“She was like a wild rose Elaine, fresh and pink and full of the Irish, and now she’s a rather stumpy businesslike looking little woman.”
“And you’re as fit as you ever were. That’s the way it goes.”
“I wonder. … You dont know how empty and hollow everything was before I met you. All Cecily and I can do is make each other miserable.”
“Where is she now?”
“She’s up at Bar Harbor. … I had luck and all sorts of success when I was still a young man. … I’m not forty yet.”
“But I should think it would be fascinating. You must enjoy the law or you wouldn’t be such a success at it.”
“Oh success … success … what does it mean?”
“I’d like a little of it.”
“But my dear girl you have it.”
“Oh not what I mean.”
“But it isn’t any fun any more. All I do is sit in the office and let the young fellows do the work. My future’s all cut out for me. I suppose I could get solemn and pompous and practice little private vices … but there’s more in me than that.”
“Why dont you go into politics?”
“Why should I go up to Washington into that greasy backwater when I’m right on the spot where they give the orders? The terrible thing about having New York go stale on you is that there’s nowhere else. It’s the top of the world. All we can do is go round and round in a squirrel cage.”
Ellen was watching the people in light summer clothes dancing on the waxed square of floor in the center; she caught sight of Tony Hunter’s oval pink and white face at a table on the far side of the room. Oglethorpe was not with him. Stan’s friend Herf sat with his back to her. She watched him laughing, his long rumpled black head poised a little askew on a scraggly neck. The other two men she didn’t know.
“Who are you looking at?”
“Just some friends of Jojo’s. … I wonder how on earth they got way out here. It’s not exactly on that gang’s beat.”
“Always the way when I try to get away with something,” said Baldwin with a wry smile.
“I should say you’d done exactly what you wanted to all your life.”
“Oh Elaine if you’d only let me do what I want to now. I want you to let me make you happy. You’re such a brave little girl making your way all alone the way you do. By gad you are so full of love and mystery and glitter …” He faltered, took a deep swallow of wine, went on with flushing face. “I feel like a schoolboy … I’m making a fool of myself. Elaine I’d do anything in the world for you.”
“Well all I’m going to ask you to do is to send away this lobster. I dont think it’s terribly good.”
“The devil … maybe it isn’t. … Here waiter! … I was so rattled I didn’t know I was eating it.”
“You can get me some supreme of chicken instead.”
“Surely you poor child you must be starved.”
“… And a little corn on the cob. … I understand now why you make such a good lawyer, George. Any jury would have burst out sobbing long ago at such an impassioned plea.”
“How about you Elaine?”
“George please dont ask me.”
At the table where Jimmy Herf sat they were drinking whiskey and soda. A yellowskinned man with light hair and a thin nose standing out crooked between childish blue eyes was talking in a confidential singsong: “Honest I had em lashed to the mast. The police department is cookoo, absolutely cookoo treating it as a rape and suicide case. That old man and his lovely innocent daughter were murdered, foully murdered. And do you know who by … ?” He pointed a chubby cigarettestained finger at Tony Hunter.
“Dont give me the third degree judge I dont know anything about it,” he said dropping his long lashes over his eyes.
“By the Black Hand.”
“You tell em Bullock,” said Jimmy Herf laughing. Bullock brought his fist down on the table so that the plates and glasses jingled. “Canarsie’s full of the Black Hand, full of anarchists and kidnappers and undesirable citizens. It’s our business to ferret em out and vindicate the honor of this poor old man and his beloved daughter. We are going to vindicate the honor of poor old monkeyface, what’s his name?”
“Mackintosh,” said Jimmy. “And the people round here used to call him Santa Claus. Of course everybody admits he’s been crazy for years.”
“We admit nothing but the majesty of American citizenhood. … But hell’s bells what’s the use when this goddam war takes the whole front page? I was going to have a fullpage spread and they’ve cut me down to half a column. Aint it the life?”
“You might work up something about how he was a lost heir to the Austrian throne and had been murdered for political reasons.”
“Not such a bad idear Jimmy.”
“But it’s such a horrible thing,” said Tony Hunter.
“You think we’re a lot of callous brutes, dont you Tony?”
“No I just dont see the pleasure people get out of reading about it.”
“Oh it’s all in the day’s work,” said Jimmy. “What gives me gooseflesh is the armies mobilizing, Belgrade bombarded, Belgium invaded … all that stuff. I just cant imagine it. … They’ve killed Jaures.” “Who’s he?”
“A French Socialist.”
“Those goddam French are so goddam degenerate all they can do is fight duels and sleep with each other’s wives. I bet the Germans are in Paris in two weeks.”
“It couldn’t last long,” said Framingham, a tall ceremonious man with a whispy blond moustache who sat beside Hunter.
“Well I’d like to get an assignment as warcorrespondent.”
“Say Jimmy do you know this French guy who’s barkeep here?”
“Congo Jake? Sure I know him.”
“Is he a good guy?”
“He’s swell.”
“Let’s go out and talk to him.
