SAVE ME THE WALTZ

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald

We saw of old blue skies and summer seas 

When Thebes in the storm and rain 

Reeled, like to die. 

O, if thou can’st again, 

Blue sky—blue sky! 

OEDIPUS, King of Thebes

I

1

“Those girls,” people said, “think they can do anything and get away with it.”

That was because of the sense of security they felt in their father. He was a living fortress. Most people hew the battlements of life from compromise, erecting their impregnable keeps from judicious submissions, fabricating their philosophical drawbridges from emotional retractions and scalding marauders in the boiling oil of sour grapes. Judge Beggs entrenched himself in his integrity when he was still a young man; his towers and chapels were builded of intellectual conceptions. So far as any of his intimates knew he left no sloping path near his castle open either to the friendly goatherd or the menacing baron. That inapproachability was the flaw in his brilliance which kept him from having become, perhaps, a figure in national politics. The fact that the state looked indulgently upon his superiority absolved his children from the early social efforts necessary in life to construct strongholds for themselves. One lord of the living cycle of generations to lift their experiences above calamity and disease is enough for a survival of his progeny.

One strong man may bear for many, selecting for his breed such expedient subscriptions to natural philosophy as to lend his family the semblance of a purpose. By the time the Beggs children had learned to meet the changing exigencies of their times, the devil was already upon their necks. Crippled, they clung long to the feudal donjons of their fathers, hoarding their spiritual inheritances—which might have been more had they prepared a fitting repository.

One of Millie Beggs’ school friends said that she had never seen a more troublesome brood in her life than those children when they were little. If they cried for something, it was supplied by Millie within her powers or the doctor was called to subjugate the inexorabilities of a world which made, surely, but poor provision for such exceptional babies. Inadequately equipped by his own father, Austin Beggs worked night and day in his cerebral laboratory to better provide for those who were his. Millie, perforce and unreluctantly, took her children out of bed at three o’clock in the morning and shook their rattles and quietly sang to them to keep the origins of the Napoleonic Code from being howled out of her husband’s head. He used to say, without humor, “I will build me some ramparts surrounded by wild beasts and barbed wire on the top of a crag and escape this hoodlum.”

Austin loved Millie’s children with that detached tenderness and introspection peculiar to important men when confronting some relic of their youth, some memory of the days before they elected to be the instruments of their experience and not its result. You will feel what is meant in hearing the kindness of Beethoven’s “Springtime” Sonata. Austin might have borne a closer relation to his family had he not lost his only boy in infancy. The Judge turned savagely to worry fleeing from his disappointment. The financial worry being the only one which men and women can equally share, this was the trouble he took to Millie. Flinging the bill for the boy’s funeral into her lap, he cried heartbreakingly, “How in God’s name do you expect me to pay for that?”

Millie, who had never had a very strong sense of reality, was unable to reconcile that cruelty of the man with what she knew was a just and noble character. She was never again able to form a judgment of people, shifting her actualities to conform to their inconsistencies till by a fixation of loyalty she achieved in her life a saintlike harmony.

“If my children are bad,” she answered her friend, “I have never seen it.”

The sum of her excursions into the irreconcilabilities of the human temperament taught her also a trick of transference that tided her over the birth of the last child. When Austin, roused to a fury by the stagnations of civilization, scattered his disillusions and waning hope for mankind together with his money difficulties about her patient head, she switched her instinctive resentment to the fever in Joan or Dixie’s twisted ankle, moving through the sorrows of life with the beatific mournfulness of a Greek chorus. Confronted with the realism of poverty, she steeped her personality in a stoic and unalterable optimism and made herself impervious to the special sorrows pursuing her to the end.

Incubated in the mystic pungence of Negro mammies, the family hatched into girls. From the personification of an extra penny, a streetcar ride to whitewashed picnic grounds, a pocketful of peppermints, the Judge became, with their matured perceptions, a retributory organ, an inexorable fate, the force of law, order, and established discipline. Youth and age: a hydraulic funicular, and age, having less of the waters of conviction in its carriage, insistent on equalizing the ballast of youth. The girls, then, grew into the attributes of femininity, seeking respite in their mother from the exposition of their young-lady years as they would have haunted a shady protective grove to escape a blinding glare.

The swing creaks on Austin’s porch, a luminous beetle swings ferociously over the clematis, insects swarm to the golden holocaust of the hall light. Shadows brush the Southern night like heavy, impregnated mops soaking its oblivion back to the black heat whence it evolved. Melancholic moonvines trail dark, absorbent pads over the string trellises.

“Tell me about myself when I was little,” the youngest girl insists. She presses against her mother in an effort to realize some proper relationship.

“You were a good baby.”

The girl had been filled with no interpretation of herself, having been born so late in the life of her parents that humanity had already disassociated itself from their intimate consciousness and childhood become more of a concept than the child. She wants to be told what she is like, being too young to know that she is like nothing at all and will fill out her skeleton with what she gives off, as a general might reconstruct a battle following the advances and recessions of his forces with bright-colored pins. She does not know that what effort she makes will become herself. It was much later that the child, Alabama, came to realize that the bones of her father could indicate only her limitations.

“And did I cry at night and raise hell so you and Daddy wished I was dead?”

“What an idea! All my children were sweet children.”

“And Grandma’s, too?”

“I suppose so.”

“Then why did she run Uncle Cal away when he came home from the Civil War?”

“Your grandmother was a queer old lady.”

“Cal, too?”

“Yes. When Cal came home, Grandma sent word to Florence Feather that if she was waiting for her to die to marry Cal, she wanted the Feathers to know that the Beggs were a long-lived race.”

“Was she so rich?”

“No. It wasn’t money. Florence said nobody but the devil could live with Cal’s mother.”

“So Cal didn’t marry, after all?”

“No—grandmothers always have their way.”

The mother laughs—the laugh of a profiteer recounting incidents of business prowess, apologetic of its grasping security, the laugh of the family triumphant, worsting another triumphant family in the eternal business of superimposition.

“If I’d been Uncle Cal I wouldn’t have stood it,” the child proclaims rebelliously. “I’d have done what I wanted to do with Miss Feather.”

The deep balance of the father’s voice subjugates the darkness to the final diminuendo of the Beggs’ bedtime.

“Why do you want to rehash all that?” he says judiciously.

Closing the shutters, he boxes the special qualities of his house: an affinity with light, curtain frills penetrated by sunshine till the pleats wave like shaggy garden borders about the flowered chintz. Dusk leaves no shadows or distortions in his rooms but transfers them to vaguer, grayer worlds, intact. Winter and spring, the house is like some lovely shining place painted on a mirror. When the chairs fall to pieces and the carpets grow full of holes, it does not matter in the brightness of that presentation. The house is a vacuum for the culture of Austin Beggs’ integrity. Like a shining sword it sleeps at night in the sheath of his tired nobility.

The tin roof pops with the heat; the air inside is like a breath from a long unopened trunk. There is no light in the transom above the door at the head of the upstairs hall.

“Where is Dixie?” the father asks.

“She’s out with some friends.”

Sensing the mother’s evasiveness, the little girl draws watchfully close, with an important sense of participation in family affairs.

“Things happen to us,” she thinks. “What an interesting thing to be a family.”

“Millie,” her father says, “if Dixie is out traipsing the town with Randolph McIntosh again, she can leave my house for good.”

Her father’s head shakes with anger; outraged decency loosens the eyeglasses from his nose. The mother walks quietly over the warm matting of her room, and the little girl lies in the dark, swelling virtuously submissive to the way of the clan. Her father goes down in his cambric nightshirt to wait.

From the orchard across the way the smell of ripe pears floats over the child’s bed. A band rehearses waltzes in the distance. White things gleam in the dark—white flowers and paving stones. The moon on the windowpanes careens to the garden and ripples the succulent exhalations of the earth like a silver paddle. The world is younger than it is, and she to herself appears so old and wise, grasping her problems and wrestling with them as affairs peculiar to herself and not as racial heritages. There is a brightness and bloom over things; she inspects life proudly, as if she walked in a garden forced by herself to grow in the least hospitable of soils. She is already contemptuous of ordered planting, believing in the possibility of a wizard cultivator to bring forth sweet-smelling blossoms from the hardest of rocks, and night-blooming vines from barren wastes, to plant the breath of twilight and to shop with marigolds. She wants life to be easy and full of pleasant reminiscences.

Thinking, she thinks romantically on her sister’s beau. Randolph’s hair is like nacre cornucopias pouring forth those globes of light that make his face. She thinks that she is like that inside, thinking in this nocturnal confusion of her emotions with her response to beauty. She thinks of Dixie with excited identity as being some adult part of herself divorced from her by transfiguring years, like a very sunburned arm which might not appear familiar if you had been unconscious of its alterations. To herself, she appropriates her sister’s love affair. Her alertness makes her drowsy. She has achieved a suspension of herself with the strain of her attenuated dreams. She falls asleep. The moon cradles her tanned face benevolently. She grows older sleeping. Someday she will awake to observe the plants of Alpine gardens to be largely fungus things, needing little sustenance, and the white discs that perfume midnight hardly flowers at all but embryonic growths; and, older, walk in bitterness the geometrical paths of philosophical Le Nôtres rather than those nebulous byways of the pears and marigolds of her childhood.

Alabama never could place what woke her mornings as she lay staring about, conscious of the absence of expression smothering her face like a wet bath mat. She mobilized herself. Live eyes of a soft wild animal in a trap peered out in skeptic invitation from the taut net of her features; lemon-yellow hair melted down her back. She dressed herself for school with liberal gestures, bending forward to watch the movements of her body. The schoolbell on the still exudings of the South fell flat as the sound of a buoy on the vast mufflings of the sea. She tiptoed into Dixie’s room and plastered her face with her sister’s rouge.

When people said, “Alabama, you’ve got rouge on your face,” she simply said, “I’ve been scrubbing my face with the nailbrush.”

Dixie was a very satisfactory person to her young sister; her room was full of possessions; silk things lay about. A statuette of the Three Monkeys on the mantel held matches for smoking. The Dark Flower, The House of Pomegranates, The Light that Failed, Cyrano de Bergerac, and an illustrated edition of The Rubáiyát stretched between two plaster “Thinkers.” Alabama knew the Decameron was hid in the top bureau drawer—she had read the rough passages. Over the books, a Gibson girl with a hatpin poked at a man through a magnifying glass; a pair of teddy bears luxuriated over a small white rocker. Dixie possessed a pink picture hat and an amethyst bar pin and a pair of electric curling irons. Dixie was twenty-five. Alabama would be fourteen at two o’clock in the morning on the fourteenth of July. The other Beggs sister, Joan, was twenty-three. Joan was away; she was so orderly that she made little difference in the house, anyway.

Alabama slid down the banisters expectantly. Sometimes she dreamed that she fell down the well of the staircase and was saved at the bottom by landing astride the broad railing—sliding, she rehearsed the emotions of her dream.

Already Dixie sat at table, withdrawn from the world in furtive defiance. Her chin was red and red welts stood out on her forehead from crying. Her face rose and fell in first one place and then another beneath the skin, like water boiling in a pot.

“I didn’t ask to be born,” she said.

“Remember, Austin, she is a grown woman.”

“The man is a worthless cuss and an unmitigated loafer. He is not even divorced.”

“I make my own living and I’ll do as I please.”

“Millie, that man is not to enter my house again.”

Alabama sat very still, anticipating some spectacular protest against her father’s interruption of the course of romance. Nothing transpired but the child’s stillness.

The sun on the silvery fern fronds, and the silver water pitcher, and Judge Beggs’ steps on the blue and white pavings as he left for his office measured out so much of time, so much of space—nothing more. She heard the trolley stop under the catalpa trees at the corner and the Judge was gone. The light flicked the ferns with a less organized rhythm without his presence; his home hung pendant on his will.

Alabama watched the trumpet vine trailing the back fence like chip coral necklaces wreathing a stick. The morning shade under the chinaberry tree held the same quality as the light—brittle and arrogant.

“Mamma, I don’t want to go to school any more,” she said, reflectively.

“Why not?”

“I seem to know everything.”

Her mother stared at her in faintly hostile surprise; the child, thinking better of her intended expositions, reverted to her sister to save her face.

“What do you think Daddy will do to Dixie?”

“Oh, pshaw! Don’t worry your pretty head about things like that till you have to, if that’s what’s bothering you.”

“If I was Dixie, I wouldn’t let him stop me. I like ’Dolph.”

“It is not easy to get everything we want in this world. Run on, now—you will be late to school.”

Flushed with the heat of palpitant cheeks, the schoolroom swung from the big square windows and anchored itself to a dismal lithograph of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Slow days of June added themselves in a lump of sunlight on the far blackboard. White particles from the worn erasers sprayed the air. Hair and winter serge and the crust in the inkwells stifled the soft early summer burrowing white tunnels under the trees in the street and poulticing the windows with sweet sickly heat. Humming Negroid intonations circulated plaintively through the lull.

“H’ye ho’ tomatoes, nice ripe tomatoes. Greens, colla’d greens.”

The boys wore long black winter stockings, green in the sun.

Alabama wrote “Randolph McIntosh” under “A debate in the Athenian Assembly.” Drawing a ring around “All the men were at once put to death and the women and children sold into slavery,” she painted the lips of Alcibiades and drew him a fashionable bob, closing her Myer’s Ancient History on the transformation. Her mind rambled on irrelevantly. How did Dixie make herself so fluffy, so ready always for anything? Alabama thought that she herself would never have every single thing about her just right at once—would never be able to attain a state of abstract preparedness. Dixie appeared to her sister to be the perfect instrument for life.

Dixie was the society editor of the town paper. There was telephoning from the time she came home from the office in the evening till supper. Dixie’s voice droned on, cooing and affected, listening to its own vibrations.

“I can’t tell you now——” Then a long slow gurgle like the water running out of a bathtub.

“Oh, I’ll tell you when I see you. No, I can’t tell you now.”

Judge Beggs lay on his stern iron bed sorting the sheafs of the yellowing afternoons. Calfskin volumes of the Annals of British Law and Annotated Cases lay over his body like leaves. The telephone jarred his concentration.

The Judge knew when it was Randolph. After half an hour, he’d stormed into the hall, his voice quaking with restraint.

“Well, if you can’t talk, why do you carry on this conversation?”

Judge Beggs brusquely grabbed the receiver. His voice proceeded with the cruel concision of a taxidermist’s hands at work.

“I will thank you never to attempt to see or to telephone to my daughter again.”

Dixie shut herself in her room and wouldn’t come out or eat for two days. Alabama reveled in her part of the commotion.

“I want Alabama to dance at the Beauty Ball with me,” Randolph had said over the wire.

Her children’s tears infallibly evoked their mother.

“Why do you bother your father? You could make your arrangements outside,” she said placatingly. The wide and lawless generosity of their mother was nourished from many years of living faced with the irrefutable logic of the Judge’s fine mind. An existence where feminine tolerance plays no role being insupportable to her motherly temperament, Millie Beggs, by the time she was forty-five, had become an emotional anarchist. It was her way of proving to herself her individual necessity of survival. Her inconsistencies seemed to assert her dominance over the scheme had she so desired. Austin couldn’t have died or got sick with three children and no money and an election next fall and his insurance and his living according to law; but Millie, by being a less closely knit thread in the pattern, felt that she could have.

Alabama mailed the letter that Dixie wrote on her mother’s suggestion and they met Randolph at the “Tip-Top” Café.

Alabama, swimming through her teens in a whirlpool of vigorous decision, innately distrusted the “meaning” communicated between her sister and Randolph.

Randolph was a reporter for Dixie’s paper. His mother kept his little girl in a paintless house downstate near the canebrakes. The curves of his face and the shape of his eyes had never been mastered by Randolph’s expression, as if his corporeal existence was the most amazing experience he had ever achieved. He conducted night dancing classes for which Dixie got most of his pupils—his neckties, too, for that matter, and whatever about him that needed to be rightly chosen.

“Honey, you must put your knife on your plate when you’re not using it,” Dixie said, pouring his personality into the mold of her society.

You’d never have known he had heard her, though he seemed to be always listening for something—perhaps some elfin serenade he expected, or some fantastic supernatural hint about his social position in the solar system.

“And I want a stuffed tomato and potatoes au gratin and corn on the cob and muffins and chocolate ice cream,” Alabama interrupted impatiently.

“My God!—So we’re going to do the Ballet of the Hours, Alabama, and I will wear harlequin tights and you will have a tarlatan skirt and a three-cornered hat. Can you make up a dance in three weeks?”

“Sure. I know some steps from last year’s carnival. It will go like this, see?” Alabama walked her fingers one over the other inextricably. Keeping one finger firmly pressed on the table to mark the place she unwound her hands and began again. “——And the next part is this way——And it ends with a br—rr—rr—oop!” she explained.

Dubiously Randolph and Dixie watched the child.

“It’s very nice,” commented Dixie hesitantly, swayed by her sister’s enthusiasm.

“You can make the costumes,” Alabama finished, glowing with the glamour of proprietorship. Marauder of vagrant enthusiasm, she piled the loot on whatever was at hand, her sisters and their sweethearts, performances and panoplies. Everything assumed the qualities of improvisation with the constant change in the girl.

Every afternoon Alabama and Randolph rehearsed in the old auditorium till the place grew dim with dusk and the trees outside seemed bright and wet and Véronèse as if it had been raining. It was from there that the first Alabama regiment had left for the Civil War. The narrow balcony sagged on spindle iron pillars and there were holes in the floor. The sloping stairs led down through the city markets: Plymouth Rocks in cages, fish, and icy sawdust from the butcher shop, garlands of Negro shoes and a doorway full of army overcoats. Flushed with excitement, the child lived for the moment in a world of fictitious professional reserves.

“Alabama has inherited her mother’s wonderful coloring,” commented the authorities, watching the gyrating figure.

“I scrubbed my cheeks with a nailbrush,” she yelled back from the stage. That was Alabama’s answer about her complexion; it was not always accurate or adequate, but that was what she said about her skin.

“The child has talent,” they said, “it should be cultivated.”

“I made it up myself,” she answered, not in complete honesty.

When the curtains fell at last on the tableau at the end of the ballet she heard the applause from the stage as a mighty roar of traffic. Two bands played for the ball; the Governor led the grand march. After the dance she stood in the dark passage that led to the dressing room.

“I forgot once,” she whispered expectantly. The still fever of the show went on outside.

“You were perfect,” Randolph laughed.

The girl hung there on his words like a vestment waiting to be put on. Indulgently, Randolph caught the long arms and swept her lips with his as a sailor might search the horizons of the sea for other masts. She wore this outward sign that she was growing up like a decoration for valor—it stayed on her face for days, and recurred whenever she was excited.

“You’re almost grown, aren’t you?” he asked.

Alabama did not concede herself the right to examine those arbitrary points of view, meeting places of the facets of herself envisaged as a woman, conjured up behind his shoulders by the kiss. To project herself therein would have been to violate her confessional of herself. She was afraid; she thought her heart was a person walking. It was. It was everybody walking at once. The show was over.

“Alabama, why won’t you go out on the floor?”

“I’ve never danced. I’m scared.”

“I’ll give you a dollar if you’ll dance with a young man who’s waiting.”

“All right, but s’pose I fall down or trip him up?”

Randolph introduced her. They got along quite nicely, except when the man went sideways.

“You are so cute,” her partner said. “I thought you must be from some other place.”

She told him he could come to see her sometime, and a dozen others, and promised to go to the country club with a redhead man who slid over the dance floor as if he were skimming milk. Alabama had never imagined what it would be like to have a date before.

She was sorry when the makeup came off of her face with washing next day. There was only Dixie’s rouge pot to help her masquerading through the engagements she had made.

Sloshing his coffee with the folded Journal, the Judge read the account of the Beauty Ball in the morning’s paper. “The gifted Miss Dixie Beggs, oldest daughter of Judge and Mrs. Austin Beggs of this city,” the paper said, “contributed much to the success of the occasion, acting as impresario to her talented sister, Miss Alabama Beggs, assisted by Mr. Randolph McIntosh. The dance was one of startling beauty and the execution was excellent.”

“If Dixie thinks that she can introduce the manners of a prostitute into my family, she is no daughter of mine. Identified in print with a moral scapegoat! My children have got to respect my name. It is all they will have in the world,” the Judge exploded.

It was the most Alabama had ever heard her father say about what he exacted of them. Isolated by his unique mind from the hope of any communication with his peers, the Judge lived apart, seeking only a vague and gentle amusement from his associates, asking only a fair respect for his reserve.

So Randolph came in the afternoon to say good-bye.

The swing creaked, the Dorothy Perkins browned in the dust and sun. Alabama sat on the steps watering the lawn with a hot rubber hose. The nozzle leaked lugubriously over her dress. She was sad about Randolph; she had hoped some occasion would present itself for kissing him again. Anyway, she told herself, she would try to remember that other time for years.

Her sister’s eyes followed the man’s hands as if she expected the path of his fingers to lead her to the ends of the earth.

“Maybe you’ll come back when you’ve got your divorce,” Alabama heard Dixie say in a truncated voice. The shape of Randolph’s eyes was heavy with finality against the roses. His distinct voice carried clear and detached to Alabama.

“Dixie,” he said, “you taught me how to use my knife and fork and how to dance and choose my suits, and I wouldn’t come back to your father’s house if I’d left my Jesus. Nothing is good enough for him.”

Sure enough, he never did. Alabama had learned from the past that something unpleasant was bound to happen whenever the Saviour made his appearance in the dialogue. The savor of her first kiss was gone with the hope of its repetition.

The bright polish on Dixie’s nails turned yellow and deposits of neglect shone through the red. She gave up her job on the paper and went to work at the bank. Alabama inherited the pink hat and somebody stepped on the bar pin. When Joan got home the room was so untidy that she moved her clothes in with Alabama. Dixie hoarded her money; the only things she bought in a year were the central figures from the “Primavera” and a German lithograph of “September Morn.”

Dixie covered her transom with a block of pasteboard to prevent her father’s knowing that she was sitting up after midnight. Girls came and went. When Laura spent the night the family was afraid of catching tuberculosis; Paula, gold and effulgent, had a father who had stood a murder trial; Marshall was beautiful and malicious with many enemies and a bad reputation; when Jessie came all the way from New York to visit she sent her stockings to the dry cleaner. There was something immoral about that to Austin Beggs.

“I don’t see why,” he said, “my daughter has to choose her companions from the scum of the earth.”

“Depending on which way you look at it,” protested Millie. “The scum might be a valuable deposit.”

Dixie’s friends read aloud to each other. Alabama sat in the little white rocker and listened, imitating their elegance and cataloguing the polite, bibelotic laughs which they collected from one another.

“She won’t understand,” they reiterated, staring at the girl with liquidated Anglo-Saxon eyes.

“Understand what?” said Alabama.

The winter choked itself in a ruching of girls. Dixie cried whenever a man talked her into giving him a date. In the spring, word came about Randolph’s death.

“I hate being alive,” she screamed in hysterics. “I hate it, I hate it, I hate it! I could have married him and this wouldn’t have happened.”

“Millie, will you call the doctor?”

“Nothing serious, just nervous strain, Judge Beggs. Nothing to worry about,” the doctor said.

“I cannot put up with this emotional nonsense any longer,” Austin said.

When Dixie was better she went to New York to work. She cried when she kissed them all good-bye and went off with a bunch of kiss-me-at-the-gate in her hand. She shared a room with Jessie on Madison Avenue, and looked up everybody from home who had drifted up there. Jessie got her a job with the same insurance company as herself.

“I want to go to New York, Mamma,” said Alabama as they read Dixie’s letters.

“What on earth for?”

“To be my own boss.”

Millie laughed. “Well, never mind,” she said. “Being boss isn’t a question of places. Why can’t you be boss at home?”

Within three months Dixie married up there—a man from Alabama, downstate. They came home on a trip and she cried a lot as if she was sorry for all the rest of the family who had to go on living at home. She changed the furniture about in the old house and bought a buffet for the dining room. She bought Alabama a Kodak and they took pictures together on the steps of the State Capitol, and under the pecan trees and holding hands on the front steps. She said she wanted Millie to make her a patchwork quilt and to have a rose garden planted around the old house, and for Alabama not to paint her face so much, that she was too young, that in New York the girls didn’t.

“But I am not in New York,” said Alabama. “When I go there, I will, anyway.”

Then Dixie and her husband went away again, out of the Southern doldrums. The day her sister left, Alabama sat on the back porch watching her mother slice the tomatoes for lunch.

“I slice the onions an hour beforehand,” Millie said, “and then I take them out so just the right flavor stays in the salad.”

“Yes’m. Can I have those ends?”

“Don’t you want a whole one?”

“No’m. I love the greenish part.”

Her mother attended her work like a chatelaine ministering to a needy peasant. There was some fine, aristocratic, personal relationship between herself and the tomatoes, dependent on Miss Millie to turn them into a salad. The lids of her mother’s blue eyes rose in weary circumflex as her sweet hands moved in charity through the necessities of her circumstance. Her daughter was gone. Still there was something of Dixie in Alabama—the tempestuousness. She searched the child’s face for family resemblances. And Joan would be coming home.

“Mamma, did you love Dixie very much?”

“Of course. I still do.”

“But she was troublesome.”

“No. She was always in love.”

“Did you love her better than me, for instance?”

“I love you all the same.”

“I will be troublesome, too, if I can’t do as I please.”

“Well, Alabama, all people are, about one thing or another. We must not let it influence us.”

“Yes’m.”

Pomegranates in the leathery lacing of their foliage ripened outside the lattice to an exotic décor. The bronze balls of a mournful crape myrtle at the end of the lot split into lavender tarlatan gurgles. Japanese plums splashed heavy sacks of summer on the roof of the chicken yard.

Cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck!

“That old hen must be laying again.”

“Maybe she’s caught a June bug.”

“The figs aren’t ripe yet.”

A mother called her children from a house across the way. Pigeons cooed in the oak next door. The rhythmic flap of a pounding beefsteak began in a neighbor’s kitchen.

“Mamma, I don’t see why Dixie had to go all the way to New York to marry a man from so near home.”

“He’s a very nice man.”

“But I wouldn’t have married him if I was Dixie. I would have married a New Yorker.”

“Why?” said Millie curiously.

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“More conquering,” Millie mocked.

“Yes’m, that’s it.”

A distant trolley ground to a stop on the rusty rails.

“Isn’t that the streetcar stopping? I’ll bet it’s your father.”

2

“And I tell you I will not wear it if you fix it that way,” Alabama screeched, pounding her fist on the sewing machine.

“But, dear, it’s the very thing.”

“If it has to be blue serge, it doesn’t have to be long as well.”

“When you’re going out with boys, you can’t go back to short dresses.”

“I’m not going out with boys in the daytime—ever,” she said. “I am going to play in the day and go out at night.”

Alabama tilted the mirror and inspected the long gored skirt. She began to cry with impotent rage.

“I won’t have it! I really won’t—how can I run or anything?”

“It’s lovely, isn’t it, Joan?”

“If she were my child, I’d slap her jaw,” said Joan succinctly.

“You would, would you! Well, I’d slap your own jaw.”

“When I was your age I was glad to get anything. My dresses were all made out of Dixie’s old ones. You’re a vixen to be so spoiled,” pursued her sister.

“Joan! Alabama just wants her dress fixed differently.”

“Mamma’s little angel! It’s exactly like she said she wanted it.”

“How could I tell it would look like that?”

“I know what I would do if you were mine,” Joan threatened.

Alabama stood in the special Saturday sun and straightened the sailor collar. She ran her fingers tentatively inside the breast pocket, staring pessimistically at her reflection.

“The feet look as if they were somebody else’s,” she said. “But maybe it’ll be all right.”

“I’ve never heard so much fuss made about a dress,” said Joan. “If I were Mamma I’d make you buy them ready-made.”

“There’s none in the stores that I like. Besides, you have lace on all your things.”

“I pay for it myself.”

Austin’s door slammed.

“Alabama, will you stop that dispute? I am trying to take a nap.”

“Children, your father!” said Millie in dismay.

“Yes, sir, it’s Joan,” shrieked Alabama.

“My Lord! She always has to blame somebody else. If it isn’t me, it’s Mamma or whoever’s near—never herself.”

Alabama thought resentfully of the injustice of a life which had created Joan before herself. Not only that, but had given her sister an unattainable hue of beauty, dark as a black opal. Nothing Alabama ever did could turn her eyes gold and brown or hollow out those dark mysterious sockets from her cheekbones. When you saw Joan directly under a light, she seemed like a ghost of her finest points awaiting inhabitation. Transparent blue halos shone around the edge of her teeth; her hair was smooth to a colorless reflection.

People said Joey was a sweet girl—compared to the others. Being over twenty, Joan had attained her right to the family spotlight. When she heard them planning vaguely for Joan, Alabama hung on her parents’ rare delvings into what she felt was the substance of herself. Hearing little bits of things about the family characteristics that she too must have in her, was like finding she had all five toes when up to the present she had been able to count only four. It was nice to have indications about yourself to go on.

“Millie,” Austin asked anxiously one night, “is Joey going to marry that Acton boy?”

“I don’t know, dear.”

“Well, I don’t think she ought to have gone galavanting about the country visiting his parents if she doesn’t mean business, and she is seeing too much of the Harlan man if she does.”

“I visited Acton’s people from my father’s house. Why did you let her go?”

“I didn’t know about Harlan. There are obligations——”

“Mamma, do you remember your father well?” interrupted Alabama.

“Certainly. He was thrown from a race cart when he was eighty-three years old, in Kentucky.” That her mother’s father had a graphic life of his own to dramatize was promising to Alabama. There was a show to join. Time would take care of that, and she would have a place, inevitably—somewhere to enact the story of her life.

“What about this Harlan?” pursued Austin.

“O, pshaw!” Millie said noncommittally.

“I don’t know. Joey seems very fond of him. He can’t make a living. Acton is well established. I will not have my daughter become a public charge.”

Harlan called every night and sang with Joan the songs she brought with her from Kentucky: “The Time, The Place and The Girl,” “The Girl from the Saskatchewan,” “The Chocolate Soldier,” songs with two-tone lithograph covers of men smoking pipes and princes on a balustrade and worlds of clouds about the moon. He had a serious voice like an organ. He stayed too much to supper. His legs were so long that the rest of him seemed merely a decorative appendage.

Alabama invented dances to show off for Harlan, tapping about the outside edges of the carpet.

“Doesn’t he ever go home?” Austin fretted to Millie on each succeeding visit. “I don’t know what Acton would think. Joan must not be irresponsible.”

Harlan knew how to ingratiate himself personally; it was his status that was unsatisfactory. Marrying him would have meant, for Joan, starting over where the Judge and Millie had started, and Austin didn’t have racehorses to pull her background for her like Millie’s father had had.

“Hello, Alabama, what a pretty bib you’ve got on.” Alabama blushed. She strove to sustain the pleasurable emotion. It was the first time she could remember blushing; another proof of something or other, or that all the old responses were her proper heritage—embarrassment and pride and responsibility for them.

“It’s an apron. I’ve got on a new dress and I was helping fix supper.” She exposed the new blue serge for Harlan’s admiration.

He drew the lanky child across his knee.

Alabama, unwilling to relinquish the discussion of herself, went on hurriedly, “But I have a beautiful dress to wear to the dance, more beautiful than Joan’s even.”

“You are too young to go to a dance. You look such a baby, I’d be ashamed to kiss you.” Alabama was disappointed at sensing Harlan’s paternal air.

Harlan pulled the pale hair away from her face. There were many geometrical formations and shining knolls and an element of odalisque retrocession about its stillness. Her bones were stern like her father’s, an integrity of muscle structure bound her still to extreme youth.

Austin came in for his paper.

“Alabama, you are too big to sprawl on young men’s laps.”

“But he’s not my beau, Daddy!”

“Good evening, Judge.”

The Judge spat contemplatively into the hearth, disciplining his disapproval.

“It makes no difference, you are too old.”

“Will I always be too old?”

Harlan rose to his feet spilling her to the floor. Joan stood in the door.

“Miss Joey Beggs,” he said, “the prettiest girl in town!”

Joan giggled the way people do when, entrenched in an enviable position, they are forced to deprecate their superiority to spare others—as if she had always known she was the prettiest.

Alabama watched them enviously as Harlan held Joey’s coat and took her off possessively. Speculatively she watched her sister change into a more fluctuating, more ingratiating person, as she confided herself to the man. She wished it were herself. There would be her father at the supper table. It was nearly the same; the necessity of being something that you really weren’t was the same. Her father didn’t know what she really was like, she thought.

Supper was fun; there was toast with a taste of charcoal and sometimes chicken, warm, like a breath of the air from beneath a quilt, and Millie and the Judge talking ceremoniously of their household and their children. Family life became a ritual passed through the sieve of Austin’s strong conviction.

“I want some more strawberry jam.”

“It’ll make you sick.”

“Millie, in my opinion, a respectable girl does not engage herself to one man and permit herself to be interested in another.”

“There’s no harm in it. Joan’s a good girl. She is not engaged to Acton.”

Her mother knew that Joan was engaged to Acton because one summer night when it poured with rain and the vines swished and dripped like ladies folding silken skirts about them, and the drains growled and choked like mournful doves and the gutters ran with foamy mud, Millie had sent Alabama with an umbrella and Alabama had found the two of them clinging together like moist stamps in a pocketbook. Acton said to Millie afterwards that they were going to be married. But Harlan sent roses on Sundays. Lord knows where he got the money to buy so many flowers. He couldn’t ask Joan to marry him, he was so poor.

When the town gardens began to bloom so prettily, Harlan and Joan took Alabama with them on their walks. Alabama, and the big japonicas with leaves like rusting tin, viburnum and verbena and Japanese magnolia petals lying about the lawns like scraps from party dresses, absorbed the quiet communion between them. The presence of the child held them to trivialities. By her person, they held at bay the issue.

“I want one of those bushes when I have a house,” Joan pointed out.

“Joey! I can’t afford it! I’ll grow a beard instead,” expostulated Harlan.

“I love little trees, arborvitae and juniper, and I’m going to have a long walk winding between like featherstitching and a terrace of Clotilde Soupert at the end.” Alabama decided that it didn’t much matter whether her sister was thinking of Acton or Harlan—certainly the garden was to be very nice, for either or neither or both, she amended confusedly.

“O, Lord! Why can’t I make money?” protested Harlan.

Yellow flags like anatomical sketches and pools of lotus flowers, the brown and white batik of snowball bushes, the sudden emotional gush of burning brush and the dead cream of Joey’s eggshell face under her leghorn hat made up that spring. Alabama understood vaguely why Harlan rattled the keys in his pockets where there was no money and walked the streets like a dizzy man traversing a log. Other people had money; he had only enough for roses. If he did without the roses he would have nothing for ages and ages while he saved until Joan was gone or different or lost forever.

When the weather was hot they hired a buggy and drove through the dust to daisy fields like nursery rhymes where dreamy cows saddled with shade nibbled the summer off the white slopes. Alabama stood up behind and brought back the flowers. What she said in this foreign world of restraint and emotion seemed to her especially significant, as a person will imagine himself wittier than usual in an unfamiliar tongue. Joan complained to Millie that Alabama talked too much for her age.

Creaking and swaying like a sail in a swelling gale, the love story breasted July. At last the letter from Acton came. Alabama saw it on the Judge’s mantelpiece.

“And being able to support your daughter in comfort and, I believe, in happiness, I ask your sanction to our marriage.”

Alabama asked to keep it. “To make a family document,” she said.

“No,” said the Judge. He and Millie never kept things.

Alabama’s expectations for her sister envisaged everything except that love might roll on using the bodies of its dead to fill up the craters in the path to its line of action. It took her a long time to learn to think of life unromantically as a long, continuous exposition of isolated events, to think of one emotional experience as preparation to another.

When Joey said “Yes” Alabama felt cheated out of a drama to which she had bought her ticket with her interest. “No show today; the leading lady has cold feet,” she thought.

She couldn’t tell whether Joan was crying or not. Alabama sat polishing white slippers in the upstairs hall. She could see her sister lying on the bed, as if she had laid herself down there and gone off and forgotten to come back, but she didn’t seem to be making a noise.

“Why don’t you want to marry Acton?” she heard the Judge say kindly.

“Oh—I haven’t got any trunk, and it means leaving home, and my clothes are all worn out,” answered Joan evasively.

“I’ll get you a trunk, Joey, and he is well able to give you clothes and a good home and all you will be needing in life.”

The Judge was gentle with Joan. She was less like him than the others; her shyness had made her appear more composed, more disposed to bear with her lot than Alabama or Dixie.

The heat pressed down about the earth inflating the shadows, expanding the door and window ledges till the summer split in a terrific clap of thunder. You could see the trees by the lightning flashes gyrating maniacally and waving their arms about like furies. Alabama knew Joan was afraid of a storm. She crept into her sister’s bed and slipped her brown arm over Joan like a strong bolt over a sagging door. Alabama supposed that Joan had to do the right thing and have the right things; she could see how that might be necessary if a person was like Joan. Everything about Joan had a definite order. Alabama was like that herself sometimes on a Sunday afternoon when there was nobody in the house besides herself and the classic stillness.

She wanted to reassure her sister. She wanted to say, “And, Joey, if you ever want to know about the japonicas and the daisy fields it will be all right that you have forgotten because I will be able to tell you about how it felt to be feeling that way that you cannot quite remember—that will be for the time when something happens years from now that reminds you of now.”

“Get out of my bed,” said Joan abruptly.

Alabama wandered sadly about, in and out through the pale acetylene flashes.

“Mamma, Joey’s scared.”

“Well, do you want to lie here by me, dear?”

“I’m not scared; I just can’t sleep. But I’ll lie there, please, if I may.”

The Judge often sat reading Fielding. He closed his book over his thumb to mark the end of the evening.

“What are they doing at the Catholic Church?” the Judge said. “Is Harlan a Catholic?”

“No, I believe not.”

“I’m glad she’s going to marry Acton,” he said inscrutably.

Alabama’s father was a wise man. Alone his preference in women had created Millie and the girls. He knew everything, she said to herself. Well, maybe he did—if knowing is paring your perceptions to fit into the visible portion of life’s mosaic, he did. If knowledge is having an attitude toward the things we have never experienced and preserving an agnosticism toward those we have, he did.

“I’m not glad,” Alabama said decisively. “Harlan’s hair goes up like a Spanish king. I’d rather Joey married him.”

“People can’t live off the hair of Spanish kings,” her father answered.

Acton telegraphed that he would arrive at the end of the week and how happy he was.

Harlan and Joan rocked in the swing, jerking and creaking the chain and scraping their feet over the worn gray paint and snipping the trailers off the morning glories.

“This porch is always the coolest, sweetest place,” said Harlan.

“That’s the honeysuckle and star jasmine you smell,” said Joan.

“No,” said Millie, “it’s the cut hay across the way, and my aromatic geraniums.”

“Oh, Miss Millie, I hate to leave.”

“You’ll be back.”

“No, not any more.”

“I’m very sorry, Harlan——” Millie kissed him on the cheek. “You’re just a baby,” she said, “to care. There’ll be others.”

“Mamma, that smell is the pear trees,” Joan said softly.

“It’s my perfume,” said Alabama impatiently, “and it cost six dollars an ounce.”

***

From Mobile, Harlan sent Joan a bucket of crabs for Acton’s supper. They crawled about the kitchen and scurried under the stove and Millie dropped their live green backs into a pot of boiling water one by one.

Everybody ate them except Joan.

“They’re too clumsy,” she said.

“They must have arrived in the animal kingdom just about where we have in mechanical development. They don’t work any better than tanks,” said the Judge.

“They eat dead men,” said Joan.

“Joey, is that necessary at table?”

“They do, though,” Millie corroborated distastefully.

“I believe I could make one,” said Alabama, “if I had the material.”

“Well, Mr. Acton, did you have a nice trip?”

Joan’s trousseau filled the house—blue taffeta dresses and a black and white check, and a shell-pink satin, a waist of turquoise blue and black suede shoes.

Brown and yellow silk and lace and black and white and a self-important suit and sachet pads of rose filled the new trunk.

“I don’t want it that way,” she sobbed. “My bust is too big.”

“It’s very becoming and will be so useful in a city.”

“You must come to visit me,” Joan said to her friends. “I want you all to come to see me when you come to Kentucky. Someday we’ll move to New York.”

Joan held excitedly to some intangible protestation against her life’s purpose like a puppy worrying a shoestring. She was irritable and exacting of Acton, as if she had expected him to furnish her store of gladness with the wedding ring.

They put them on the train at midnight. Joan didn’t cry, but she seemed ashamed that she might. Walking back across the railroad tracks, Alabama felt the strength and finality in Austin more than ever. Joan was produced and nourished and disposed of; her father, in parting with his daughter, seemed to have grown the span of Joan’s life older; there was only Alabama’s future now standing between him and his complete possession of his past. She was the only unresolved element that remained of his youth.

Alabama thought of Joan. Being in love, she concluded, is simply a presentation of our pasts to another individual, mostly packages so unwieldy that we can no longer manage the loosened strings alone. Looking for love is like asking for a new point of departure, she thought, another chance in life. Precociously for her age, she made an addendum: that one person never seeks to share the future with another, so greedy are secret human expectations. Alabama thought a few fine and many skeptical thoughts, but they did not essentially affect her conduct. She was at seventeen a philosophical gourmand of possibilities, having sucked on the bones of frustration thrown off from her family’s repasts without repletion. But there was much of her father in her that spoke for itself and judged.

From him, she wondered why that brisk important sense of being a contributory factor in static moments could not last. Everything else seemed to. With him, she enjoyed the concision and completion of her sister’s transference from one family to another.

It was lonesome at home without Joan. She could almost have been reconstructed by the scraps she’d left behind.

“I always work when I’m sad,” her mother said.

“I don’t see how you learned to sew so well.”

“By sewing for you children.”

“Anyway, won’t you please let me have this dress without sleeves at all, and the roses up here on my shoulder?”

“All right, if you want. My hands are so rough nowadays, they stick in the silk and I don’t sew so well as I did.”

“It’s perfectly beautiful, though. It’s better on me than it ever was on Joan.”

Alabama pulled out the full, flowing silk to see how it would blow in a breeze, how it would have looked in a museum on the “Venus de Milo.”

“If I could just stay this way till I got to the dance,” she thought, “it would be pretty enough. But I will all come to pieces long before then.”

“Alabama, what are you thinking about?”

“About fun.”

“That’s a good subject matter.”

“And about how wonderful she is,” teased Austin. Privy to the small vanities of his family, these things so absent in himself amused him in his children. “She’s always looking in the glass at herself.”

“Daddy! I am not!” She knew, though, that she looked more frequently than her satisfaction in her appearance justified in the hope of finding something more than she expected.

Her eyes trailed in embarrassment over the vacant lot next door that lay like a primrose dump through the windows. The vermilion hibiscus curved five brazen shields against the sun; the altheas drooped in faded purple canopies against the barn, the South phrased itself in engraved invitation—to a party without an address.

“Millie, you oughtn’t to let her get so sunburned if she’s going to wear that kind of clothes.”

“She’s only a child yet, Austin.”

Joan’s old pink was finished for the dance. Miss Millie hooked up the back. It was too hot to stay inside. One side of her hair was flattened by the sweat on her neck before she had finished the other. Millie brought her a cold lemonade. The powder dried in rings around her nose. They went down to the porch. Alabama seated herself in the swing. It had become almost a musical instrument to her; by jiggling the chains she could make it play a lively tune or somnolently protest the passage of a boring date. She’d been ready so long that she wouldn’t be any more by the time they got here. Why didn’t they come for her, or telephone? Why didn’t something happen? Ten o’clock sounded on a neighbor’s clock.

“If they don’t come on, it’ll be too late to go,” she said carelessly, pretending she didn’t care whether she missed the dance or not.

Spasmodic unobtrusive cries broke the stillness of the summer night. From far off down the street the cry of a paperboy floated nearer on the heat.

“Wuxtry! Wuxtry! Yad—y—add—vo—tize.”

The cries swelled from one direction to another, rose and fell like answering chants in a cathedral.

“What’s happened, boy?”

“I don’t know, Ma’am.”

“Here, boy! Gimme a paper!”

“Isn’t it awful, Daddy! What does it mean?”

“It may mean a war for us.”

“But they were warned not to sail on the Lusitania,” Millie said.

Austin threw back his head impatiently.

“They can’t do that,” he said, “they can’t warn neutral nations.”

The automobile loaded with boys drew up at the curb. A long, shrill whistle sounded from the dark; none of the boys got out of the car.

“You will not leave this house until they come inside for you,” the Judge said severely.

He seemed very fine and serious under the hall light—as serious as the war they might have. Alabama was ashamed for her friends as she compared them with her father. One of the boys got out and opened the door; she and her father could call it a compromise.

“War! There’s going to be a war!” she thought.

Excitement stretched her heart and lifted her feet so high that she floated over the steps to the waiting automobile.

“There’s gonna be a war,” she said.

“Then the dance ought to be good tonight,” her escort answered.

All night long Alabama thought about the war. Things would disintegrate to new excitements. With adolescent Nietzscheanism, she already planned to escape on the world’s reversals from the sense of suffocation that seemed to her to be eclipsing her family, her sisters, and mother. She, she told herself, would move brightly along high places and stop to trespass and admire, and if the fine was a heavy one—well, there was no good in saving up beforehand to pay it. Full of these presumptuous resolves, she promised herself that if, in the future, her soul should come starving and crying for bread it should eat the stone she might have to offer without complaint or remorse. Relentlessly she convinced herself that the only thing of any significance was to take what she wanted when she could. She did her best.

3

“She’s the wildest one of the Beggs, but she’s a thoroughbred,” people said.

Alabama knew everything they said about her—there were so many boys who wanted to “protect” her that she couldn’t escape knowing. She leaned back in the swing visualizing herself in her present position.

“Thoroughbred!” she thought, “meaning that I never let them down on the dramatic possibilities of a scene—I give a damned good show.”

“He’s just like a very majestic dog,” she thought of the tall officer beside her, “a hound, a noble hound! I wonder if his ears would meet over his nose.” The man vanished in metaphor.

His face was long, culminating in a point of lugubrious sentimentality at the self-conscious end of his nose. He pulled himself intermittently to pieces, showered himself in fragments above her head. He was obviously at an emotional tension.

“Little lady, do you think you could live on five thousand a year?” he asked benevolently. “To start with,” he added, on second thought.

“I could, but I don’t want to.”

“Then why did you kiss me?”

“I had never kissed a man with a mustache before.”

“That’s hardly a reason——”

“No. But it’s as good a reason as many people have to offer for going into convents.”

“There’s no use in my staying any longer, then,” he said sadly.

“I s’pose not. It’s half past eleven.”

“Alabama, you’re positively indecent. You know what an awful reputation you’ve got and I offer to marry you anyway and——”

“And you’re angry because I won’t make you an honest man.”

The man hid dubiously beneath the impersonality of his uniform.

“You’ll be sorry,” he said unpleasantly.

“I hope so,” Alabama answered. “I like paying for things I do—it makes me feel square with the world.”

“You’re a wild Comanche. Why do you try to pretend you’re so bad and hard?”

“Maybe so—anyway, the day that I’m sorry I’ll write it in the corner of the wedding invitations.”

“I’ll send you a picture, so you won’t forget me.”

“All right—if you want to.”

Alabama slipped on the night latch and turned off the light. She waited in the absolute darkness until her eyes could distinguish the mass of the staircase. “Maybe I ought to have married him, I’ll soon be eighteen,” she tabulated, “and he could have taken good care of me. You’ve got to have some sort of background.” She reached the head of the stairs.

“Alabama,” her mother’s voice called softly, almost indistinguishable from the currents of the darkness, “your father wants to see you in the morning. You’ll have to get up to breakfast.”

Judge Austin Beggs sat over the silver things about the table, finely controlled, coordinated, poised in his cerebral life like a wonderful athlete in the motionless moments between the launchings of his resources.

Addressing Alabama, he overpowered his child.

“I tell you that I will not have my daughter’s name bandied about the street corners.”

“Austin! She’s hardly out of school,” Millie protested.

“All the more reason. What do you know of these officers?”

“P—l—e—a—s—e——”

“Joe Ingham told me his daughter was brought home scandalously intoxicated and she admitted that you had given her the liquor.”

“She didn’t have to drink it—it was a freshman leadout and I filled my nursing bottle with gin.”

“And you forced it on the Ingham girl?”

“I did not! When she saw people laughing, she tried to edge in on the joke, having none of her own to amuse them with,” Alabama retorted arrogantly.

“You will have to find a way of conducting yourself more circumspectly.”

“Yes, sir. Oh, Daddy! I’m so tired of just sitting on the porch and having dates and watching things rot.”

“It seems to me you have plenty to do without corrupting others.”

“Nothing to do but drink and make love,” she commented privately.

She had a strong sense of her own insignificance; of her life’s slipping by while June bugs covered the moist fruit in the fig trees with the motionless activity of clustering flies upon an open sore. The bareness of the dry Bermuda grass about the pecan trees crawled imperceptibly with tawny caterpillars. The matlike vines dried in the autumn heat and hung like empty locust shells from the burned thickets about the pillars of the house. The sun sagged yellow over the grass plots and bruised itself on the clotted cotton fields. The fertile countryside that grew things in other seasons spread flat from the roads and lay prone in ribbed fans of broken discouragement. Birds sang dissonantly. Not a mule in the fields nor a human being on the sandy roads could have borne the heat between the concave clay banks and the mediant cypress swamps that divided the camp from the town—privates died of sunstroke.

The evening sun buttoned the pink folds of the sky and followed a busload of officers into town, young lieutenants, old lieutenants, free from camp for the evening to seek what explanation of the world war this little Alabama town had to offer. Alabama knew them all with varying degrees of sentimentality.

“Is your wife in town, Captain Farreleigh?” asked a voice in the joggling vehicle. “You seem very high tonight.”

“She’s here—but I’m on my way to see my girl. That’s why I’m happy,” the captain said shortly, whistling to himself.

“Oh.” The especially young lieutenant didn’t know what to say to the captain. It would be about like offering congratulations for a stillborn child he supposed to say to the man, “Isn’t that splendid” or “How nice!” He might say, “Well, Captain, that’ll be very scandalous indeed!”—if he wanted to be court-martialed.

“Well, good luck, I’m going to see mine tomorrow,” he said finally, and further to show that he bore no moral prejudice, he added “good luck.”

“Are you still panhandling in Beggs Street?” asked Farreleigh abruptly.

“Yes,” the lieutenant laughed uncertainly.

The car deposited them in the breathless square, the center of the town. In the vast space enclosed by the low buildings the vehicle seemed as minuscular as a coach in the palace yard of an old print. The arrival of the bus made no impression on the city’s primal sleep. The old rattletrap disgorged its cargo of clicking masculinity and vibrant official restraint into the lap of this invertebrate world.

Captain Farreleigh crossed to the taxi stand.

“Number five Beggs Street,” he said with loud insistence, making sure his words reached the lieutenant, “as fast as you can make it.”

As the car swung off, Farreleigh listened contentedly to the officer’s forced laugh stabbing the night behind him.

“Hello, Alabama!”

“Ho, there, Felix!”

“My name is not Felix.”

“It suits you, though. What is your name?”

“Captain Franklin McPherson Farreleigh.”

“The war’s on my mind, I couldn’t remember.”

“I’ve written a poem about you.”

Alabama took the paper he gave her and held it to the light falling through the slats of the shutters like a staff of music.

“It’s about West Point,” she said disappointed.

“That’s the same thing,” said Farreleigh. “I feel the same way about you.”

“Then the United States Military Academy appreciates the fact that you like its gray eyes. Did you leave the last verse in the taxi or were you keeping the car in case I should shoot?”

“It’s waiting because I thought we could ride. We ought not to go to the club,” he said seriously.

“Felix!” reproved Alabama, “you know I don’t mind people’s jabbering about us. Nobody will notice that we are together—it takes so many soldiers to make a good war.”

She felt sorry for Felix; she was touched that he did not want to compromise her. In a wave of friendship and tenderness. “You mustn’t mind,” she said.

“This time it’s my wife—she’s here,” Farreleigh said crisply, “and she might be there.”

He offered no apology.

Alabama hesitated.

“Well, come on, let’s ride,” she said, at last. “We can dance another Saturday.”

He was a tavern sort of man buckled into his uniform, strapped with the swagger of beef-eating England, buffeted by his incorruptible, insensitive, roistering gallantry. He sang “The Ladies” over and over again as they rode along the horizons of youth and a moonlit war. A southern moon is a sodden moon, and sultry. When it swamps the fields and the rustling sandy roads and the sticky honeysuckle hedges in its sweet stagnation, your fight to hold on to reality is like a protestation against a first waft of ether. He closed his arms about the dry slender body. She smelled of Cherokee roses and harbors at twilight.

“I’m going to get myself transferred,” said Felix impatiently.

“Why?”

“To avoid falling out of aeroplanes and cluttering up roadsides like your other beaux.”

“Who fell out of an aeroplane?”

“Your friend with the Dachshund face and the mustache, on his way to Atlanta. The mechanic was killed and they’ve got the lieutenant up for court-martial.”

“Fear,” said Alabama as she felt her muscles tighten with a sense of disaster, “is nerves—maybe all emotions are. Anyway, we must hold on to ourselves and not care.

“Oh—how did it happen?” she inquired casually.

Felix shook his head.

“Well, Alabama, I hope it was an accident.”

“There isn’t any use worrying about the dog-one,” Alabama extricated herself. “Those people, Felix, who spread their sensibilities for the passage of events live like emotional prostitutes; they pay with a lack of responsibility on the part of others—no Walter Raleighing of the inevitable for me,” she justified.

“You didn’t have the right to lead him on, you know.”

“Well, it’s over now.”

“Over in a hospital ward,” commented Felix, “for the poor mechanic.”

Her high cheekbones carved the moonlight like a scythe in a ripe wheat field. It was hard for a man in the army to censure Alabama.

“And the blond lieutenant who rode with me to town?” Farreleigh went on.

“I’m afraid I can’t explain him away,” she said.

Captain Farreleigh went through the convulsive movements of a drowning man. He grabbed his nose and sank to the floor of the car.

“Heartless,” he said. “Well, I suppose I shall survive.”

“Honor, Duty, Country, and West Point,” Alabama answered dreamily. She laughed. They both laughed. It was very sad.

“Number five Beggs Street,” Captain Farreleigh directed the taximan, “immediately. The house is on fire.”

The war brought men to the town like swarms of benevolent locusts eating away the blight of unmarried women that had overrun the South since its economic decline. There was the little major who stormed about like a Japanese warrior flashing his gold teeth, and an Irish captain with eyes like the Blarney stone and hair like burning peat, and aviation officers, white around their eyes from where their goggles had been with swollen noses from the wind and sun; and men who were better dressed in their uniforms than ever before in their lives communicating their consequent sense of a special occasion; men who smelled of Fitch’s hair tonic from the camp barber and men from Princeton and Yale who smelled of Russian Leather and seemed very used to being alive, and trademark snobs naming things and men who waltzed in spurs and resented the cut-in system. Girls swung from one to another of the many men in the intimate flush of a modern Virginia reel.

Through the summer Alabama collected soldiers’ insignia. By autumn she had a glove box full. No other girl had more and even then she’d lost some. So many dances and rides and so many golden bars and silver bars and bombs and castles and flags and even a serpent to represent them all in her cushioned box. Every night she wore a new one.

Alabama quarreled with Judge Beggs about her collection of bric-a-brac and Millie laughed and told her daughter to keep all those pins; that they were pretty.

It turned as cold as it ever gets in that country. That is to say, the holiness of creation misted the lonesome green things outside; the moon glowed and sputtered nebulous as pearls in the making; the night picked itself a white rose. In spite of the haze and the clouds in the air, Alabama waited for her date outside, pendulously tilting the old swing from the past to the future, from dreams to surmises and back again.

A blond lieutenant with one missing insignia mounted the Beggs’ steps. He had not bought himself a substitute because he liked imagining the one he had lost in the battle of Alabama to be irreplaceable. There seemed to be some heavenly support beneath his shoulder blades that lifted his feet from the ground in ecstatic suspension, as if he secretly enjoyed the ability to fly but was walking as a compromise to convention. Green gold under the moon, his hair lay in Cellinian frescoes and fashionable porticoes over his dented brow. Two hollows over his eyes like the ends of mysterious bolts of fantasy held those expanses of electric blue to the inspiration of his face. The pressure of masculine beauty equilibrated for twenty-two years had made his movements conscious and economized as the steps of a savage transporting a heavy load of rocks on his head. He was thinking to himself that he would never be able to say to a taxi driver “Number five Beggs Street” again without making the ride with the ghost of Captain Farreleigh.

“You’re ready already! Why outdoors?” he called. It was chilly in the mist to be swinging outside.

“Daddy has the blight and I have retired from the field of action.”

“What particular iniquity have you committed?”

“Oh, he seems to feel for one thing, that the army has a right to its epaulettes.”

“Isn’t it nice that parental authority’s going to pieces with everything else?”

“Perfect—I love conventional situations.”

They stood on the frosted porch in the sea of mist quite far away from each other, yet Alabama could have sworn she was touching him, so magnetic were their two pairs of eyes.

“And——?”

“Songs about summer love. I hate this cold weather.”

“And——?”

“Blond men on their way to the country club.”

The clubhouse sprouted inquisitively under the oaks like a squat clump of bulbs piercing the leaves in spring. The car drew up the gravel drive, poking its nose in a round bed of cannas. The ground around the place was as worn and used as the plot before a children’s playhouse. The sagging wire about the tennis court, the peeling drab-green paint of the summerhouse on the first tee, the trickling hydrant, the veranda thick in dust all flavored of the pleasant atmosphere of a natural growth. It is too bad that a bottle of corn liquor exploded in one of the lockers just after the war and burned the place to the ground. So much of the theoretical youth—not just transitory early years, but of the projections and escapes of inadequate people in dramatic times—had wedged itself beneath the low-hung rafters, that the fire destroying this shrine of wartime nostalgias may have been a case of combustion from emotional saturation. No officer could have visited it three times without falling in love, engaging himself to marry and to populate the countryside with little country clubs exactly like it.

Alabama and the lieutenant lingered beside the door.

“I’m going to lay a tablet to the scene of our first meeting,” he said.

Taking out his knife he carved in the doorpost:

“David,” the legend read, “David, David, Knight, Knight, Knight, and Miss Alabama Nobody.”

“Egotist,” she protested.

“I love this place,” he said. “Let’s sit outside awhile.”

“Why? The dance only lasts until twelve.”

“Can’t you trust me for three minutes or so?”

“I do trust you. That’s why I want to go inside.” She was a little angry about the names. David had told her about how famous he was going to be many times before.

Dancing with David, he smelled like new goods. Being close to him with her face in the space between his ear and his stiff army collar was like being initiated into the subterranean reserves of a fine fabric store exuding the delicacy of cambrics and linen and luxury bound in bales. She was jealous of his pale aloofness. When she saw him leave the dance floor with other girls, the resentment she felt was not against any blending of his personality with theirs, but against his leading others than herself into those cooler detached regions which he inhabited alone.

He took her home and they sat together before the grate fire in a still suspension of externals. The flames glittered in his teeth and lit his face with transcendental qualities. His features danced before her eyes with the steady elusiveness of a celluloid target on a shooting-gallery spray. She searched her relations with her father for advice about being clever; there, she found nothing relative to human charm. Being in love, none of her personal aphorisms were of the slightest help.

Alabama had grown tall and thin in the last few years; her head was blonder for its extra distance from the earth. Her legs stretched long and thin as prehistoric drawings before her; her hands felt poignant and heavy as if David’s eyes lay a weight over her wrists. She knew her face glowed in the firelight like a confectioner’s brewing, an advertisement of a pretty girl drinking a strawberry sundae in June. She wondered if David knew how conceited she was.

“And so you love blond men?”

“Yes.” Alabama had a way of talking under pressure as if the words she said were some unexpected encumbrance she found in her mouth and must rid herself of before she could communicate.

He verified himself in the mirror—pale hair like eighteenth-century moonlight and eyes like grottoes, the blue grotto, the green grotto, stalactites and malachites hanging about the dark pupil—as if he had taken an inventory of himself before leaving and was pleased to find himself complete.

The back of his head was firm and mossy and the curve of his cheek a sunny spreading meadow. His hands across her shoulders fit like the warm hollows in a pillow.

“Say ‘dear,’ ” he said.

“No.”

“You love me. Why won’t you?”

“I never say anything to anybody. Don’t talk.”

“Why won’t you talk to me?”

“It spoils things. Tell me you love me.”

“Oh—I love you. Do you love me?”

So much she loved the man, so close and closer she felt herself that he became distorted in her vision, like pressing her nose upon a mirror and gazing into her own eyes. She felt the lines of his neck and his chipped profile like segments of the wind blowing about her consciousness. She felt the essence of herself pulled finer and smaller like those streams of spun glass that pull and stretch till there remains but a glimmering illusion. Neither falling nor breaking, the stream spins finer. She felt herself very small and ecstatic. Alabama was in love.

She crawled into the friendly cave of his ear. The area inside was gray and ghostly classic as she stared about the deep trenches of the cerebellum. There was not a growth nor a flowery substance to break those smooth convolutions, just the puffy rise of sleek gray matter. “I’ve got to see the front lines,” Alabama said to herself. The lumpy mounds rose wet above her head and she set out following the creases. Before long she was lost. Like a mystic maze, the folds and ridges rose in desolation; there was nothing to indicate one way from another. She stumbled on and finally reached the medulla oblongata. Vast tortuous indentations led her round and round. Hysterically, she began to run. David, distracted by a tickling sensation at the head of his spine, lifted his lips from hers.

“I’ll see your father,” he said, “about when we can be married.”

Judge Beggs rocked himself back and forth from his toes to his heels, sifting values.

“Um—m—m—well, I suppose so, if you think you can take care of her.”

“I’m sure of it, sir. There’s a little money in the family—and my earning capacity. It will be enough.”

David thought doubtfully to himself that there wasn’t much money —perhaps a hundred and fifty thousand between his mother and his grandmother, and he wanted to live in New York and be an artist. Perhaps his family wouldn’t help. Well, anyway, they were engaged. He had to have Alabama, anyway, and money—well once he had dreamed of a troop of Confederate soldiers who wrapped their bleeding feet in Rebel banknotes to keep them off the snow. David, in his dream, had been there when they found that they did not feel sorry about using up the worthless money after they had lost the war.

Spring came and shattered its opalescent orioles in wreaths of daffodils. Kiss-me-at-the-gate clung to its angular branches and the old yards were covered with a child’s version of flowers: snowdrops and Primula veris, pussywillow and calendula. David and Alabama kicked over the oak leaves from the stumpy roots in the woods and picked white violets. They went on Sundays to the vaudeville and sat in the back of the theater so they could hold hands unobserved. They learned to sing “My Sweetie” and “Baby” and sat in a box at Hitchy-Koo and gazed at each other soberly through the chorus of “How Can You Tell?” The spring rains soaked the heavens till the clouds slid open and summer flooded the South with sweat and heat waves. Alabama dressed in pink and pale linen and she and David sat together under the paddles of ceiling fans whipping the summer to consequence. Outside the wide doors of the country club they pressed their bodies against the cosmos, the gibberish of jazz, the black heat from the greens in the hollow like people making an imprint for a cast of humanity. They swam in the moonlight that varnished the land like a honey-coating and David swore and cursed the collars of his uniforms and rode all night to the rifle range rather than give up his hours after supper with Alabama. They broke the beat of the universe to measures of their own conception and mesmerized themselves with its precious thumping.

The air turned opaque over the singed grass slopes, and the sand in the bunkers flew up dry as gunpowder under a niblick. Tangles of goldenrod shredded the sun; the splendid summer lay ground into powder over the hard clay roads. Moving day came and the first day of school spiced the mornings—and one summer ended with another fall.

When David left for the port of embarkation, he wrote Alabama letters about New York. Maybe, after all, she would go to New York and marry.

“City of glittering hypotheses,” wrote David ecstatically, “chaff from a fairy mill, suspended in penetrating blue! Humanity clings to the streets like flies upon a treacle stream. The tops of the buildings shine like crowns of gold-leaf kings in conference—and oh, my dear, you are my princess and I’d like to keep you shut forever in an ivory tower for my private delectation.”

The third time he wrote that about the princess, Alabama asked him not to mention the tower again.

She thought of David Knight at night and went to the vaudeville with the dog-faced aviation officer till the war was over. It ended one night with the flash of a message across the vaudeville curtain. There had been a war, but now there were two more acts of the show.

David was sent back to Alabama for demobilization. He told Alabama about the girl in the Hotel Astor the night he had been so drunk.

“Oh, God!” she said to herself. “Well, I can’t help it.” She thought of the dead mechanic, of Felix, of the faithful dog-lieutenant. She hadn’t been too good herself.

She said to David that it didn’t matter: that she believed that one person should only be faithful to another when they felt it. She said it was probably her fault for not making him care more.

As soon as David could make the arrangements, he sent for her. The Judge gave her the trip north for a wedding present; she quarreled with her mother about her wedding clothes.

“I don’t want it that way. I want it to drop off the shoulders.”

“Alabama, it’s as near as I can get it. How can it stay up with nothing to hold it?”

“Aw, Mamma, you can fix it.”

Millie laughed, a pleased sad laugh, and indulgent.

“My children think I can accomplish the impossible,” she said, complacently.

Alabama left her mother a note in her bureau drawer the day she went away:

My dearest Mamma:

I have not been as you would have wanted me but I love you with all my heart and I will think of you every day. I hate leaving you alone with all your children gone. Don’t forget me.

Alabama

The Judge put her on the train.

“Good-bye, daughter.”

He seemed very handsome and abstract to Alabama. She was afraid to cry; her father was so proud. Joan had been afraid, too, to cry.

“Good-bye, Daddy.”

“Good-bye, Baby.”

The train pulled Alabama out of the shadow-drenched land of her youth.

The Judge and Millie sat on the familiar porch alone. Millie picked nervously at a palmetto fan; the Judge spat occasionally through the vines.

“Don’t you think we’d better get a smaller house?”

“Millie, I’ve lived here eighteen years and I’m not going to change my habits of life at my age.”

“There are no screens in this house and the pipes freeze every winter. It’s so far from your office, Austin.”

“It suits me, and I’m going to stay.”

The old empty swing creaked faintly in the breeze that springs up from the gulf every night. Children’s voices floated past from the street corner where they played some vindictive trick on time under the arc light. The Judge and Millie silently rocked the paintless porch chairs. Uncrossing his feet from the banisters, Austin rose to close the shutters for the night. It was his house at last.

“Well,” he said, “this night next year you’ll probably be a widow.”

“Pshaw!” said Millie. “You’ve been saying that for thirty years.”

The sweet pastels of Millie’s face faded in distress. The lines between her nose and mouth drooped like the cords of a flag at half-mast.

“Your mother was just the same,” she said, reproachfully, “always saying she was going to die and she lived to be ninety-two.”

“Well, she did die, didn’t she, at last?” the Judge chuckled.

He turned out the lights in his pleasant house and they went upstairs, two old people alone. The moon waddled about the tin roof and bounced awkwardly over Millie’s windowsill. The Judge lay reading Hegel for half an hour or so and fell asleep. His deeply balanced snoring through the long night reassured Millie that this was not the end of life although Alabama’s room was dark and Joan was gone and the board for Dixie’s transom was long thrown away with the trash and her only boy lay in the cemetery in a little grave beside the common grave of Ethelinda and Mason Cuthbert Beggs. Millie didn’t think anything much about personal things. She just lived from day to day; and Austin didn’t think anything at all about them because he lived from one century to another.

It was awful, though, for the family to lose Alabama, because she was the last to go and that meant their lives would be different with her away. . . .

Alabama lay thinking in room number twenty-one-o-nine of the Biltmore Hotel that her life would be different with her parents so far away. David David Knight Knight Knight, for instance, couldn’t possibly make her put out her light till she got good and ready. No power on earth could make her do anything, she thought frightened, any more, except herself.

David was thinking that he didn’t mind the light, that Alabama was his bride and that he had just bought her that detective story with the last actual cash they had in the world, though she didn’t know it. It was a good detective story about money and Monte Carlo and love. Alabama looked very lovely herself as she lay there reading, he thought.

II

1

It was the biggest bed that both of them together could imagine. It was broader than it was long, and included all the exaggerated qualities of their combined disrespect for tradition in beds. There were shining black knobs and white enamel swoops like cradle rockers, and specially made covers trailing in disarray off one side onto the floor. David rolled over on his side; Alabama slid downhill into the warm spot over the mass of the Sunday paper.

“Can’t you make a little more room?”

“Jesus Chr—Oh Jesus,” groaned David.

“What’s the matter?”

“It says in the paper we’re famous,” he blinked owlishly.

Alabama straightened up.

“How nice—let’s see——”

David impatiently rustled the Brooklyn real estate and Wall Street quotations.

“Nice!” he said—he was almost crying—“nice! But it says we’re in a sanitarium for wickedness. What’ll our parents think when they see that, I’d like to know?”

Alabama ran her fingers through her permanent wave.

“Well,” she began tentatively. “They’ve thought we ought to be there for months.”

“——But we haven’t been.”

“We aren’t now.” Turning in alarm she flung her arms about David. “Are we?”

“I don’t know—are we?”

They laughed.

“Look in the paper and see.”

“Aren’t we silly?” they said.

“Awfully silly. Isn’t it fun—well, I’m glad we’re famous anyway.”

With three running steps along the bed Alabama bounced to the floor. Outside the window gray roads pulled the Connecticut horizons from before and behind to a momentous crossing. A stone minuteman kept the peace of the indolent fields. A driveway crawled from under the feathery chestnuts. Ironweed wilted in the heat; a film of purple asters matted over their stalks. Tar melted in the sun along the loping roads. The house had been there forever, chuckling to itself in the goldenrod stubble.

New England summer is an Episcopal service. The land basks virtuously in a green and homespun stretch; summer hurls its thesis and bursts against our dignity explosively as the back of a Japanese kimono.

Dancing happily about, she put on her clothes, feeling very graceful and thinking of ways to spend money.

“What else does it say?”

“It says we’re wonderful.”

“So you see——” she began.

“No, I don’t see, but I suppose everything will be all right.”

“Neither do I—David, it must be your frescoes.”

“Naturally, it couldn’t be us, megalomaniac.”

Playing about the room in the Lalique ten o’clock sun, they were like two uncombed Sealyhams.

“Oh,” wailed Alabama from the depths of the closet. “David, just look at that suitcase, and it’s the one you gave me for Easter.”

Exhibiting the gray pigskin she exposed the broad watery yellow ring disfiguring the satin lining. Alabama stared at her husband lugubriously.

“A lady in our position can’t go to town with a thing like that,” she said.

“You’ve got to see the doctor—what happened to it?”

“I lent it to Joan the day she came to bawl me out to carry the baby’s diapers in.”

David laughed conservatively.

“Was she very unpleasant?”

“She said we ought to save our money.”

“Why didn’t you tell her we’d spent it?”

“I did. She seemed to feel that that was wrong so I told her we were going to get some more almost immediately.”

“What’d she say to that?” asked David confidently.

“She was suspicious; she said we were against the rules.”

“Families always think the idea is for nothing to happen to people.”

“We won’t call her up again—I’ll see you at five, David, in the Plaza lobby—I’m gonna miss my train.”

“All right. Good-bye, darling.”

David held her seriously in his arms. “If anybody tries to steal you on the train tell them you belong to me.”

“If you’ll promise me you won’t get run over——”

“Good—by—e!”

“Don’t we adore each other?”

Vincent Youmans wrote the music for those twilights just after the war. They were wonderful. They hung above the city like an indigo wash, forming themselves from asphalt dust and sooty shadows under the cornices and limp gusts of air exhaled from closing windows. They lay above the streets like a white fog off a swamp. Through the gloom, the whole world went to tea. Girls in short amorphous capes and long flowing skirts and hats like straw bathtubs waited for taxis in front of the Plaza Grill; girls in long satin coats and colored shoes and hats like straw manhole covers tapped the tune of a cataract on the dance floors of the Lorraine and the St. Regis. Under the somber ironic parrots of the Biltmore a halo of golden bobs disintegrated into black lace and shoulder bouquets between the pale hours of tea and dinner that sealed the princely windows; the clank of lank contemporaneous silhouettes drowned the clatter of teacups at the Ritz.

People waiting for other people twisted the tips of the palms into brown mustache ends and ripped short slits about their lower leaves. It was just a lot of youngness: Lillian Lorraine would be drunk as the cosmos on top of the New Amsterdam by midnight, and football teams breaking training would scare the waiters with drunkenness in the fall. The world was full of parents taking care of people. Debutantes said to each other, “Isn’t that the Knights?” and “I met him at a prom. My dear, please introduce me.”

“What’s the use? They’re c—r—a—z—y about each other,” smelted into the fashionable monotone of New York.

“Of course it’s the Knights,” said a lot of girls. “Have you seen his pictures?”

“I’d rather look at him any day,” answered other girls.

Serious people took them seriously; David made speeches about visual rhythm and the effect of nebular physics on the relation of the primary colors. Outside the windows, fervently impassive to its own significance, the city huddled in a gold-crowned conference. The top of New York twinkled like a golden canopy behind a throne. David and Alabama faced each other incompetently—you couldn’t argue about having a baby.

“So what did the doctor say?” he insisted.

“I told you—he said ‘Hello!’ ”

“Don’t be an ass—what else did he say?—We’ve got to know what he said.”

“So then we’ll have the baby,” announced Alabama, proprietarily.

David fumbled about his pockets. “I’m sorry—I must have left them at home.” He was thinking that then they’d be three.

“What?”

“The bromides.”

“I said ‘Baby.’ ”

“Oh.”

“We should ask somebody.”

“Who’ll we ask?”

Almost everybody had theories: that the Longacre Pharmacies carried the best gin in town; that anchovies sobered you up; that you could tell wood alcohol by the smell. Everybody knew where to find the blank verse in Cabell and how to get seats for the Yale game, that Mr. Fish inhabited the aquarium, and that there were others besides the sergeant ensconced in the Central Park Police Station—but nobody knew how to have a baby.

“I think you’d better ask your mother,” said David.

“Oh, David—don’t! She’d think I wouldn’t know how.”

“Well,” he said tentatively, “I could ask my dealer—he knows where the subways go.”

The city fluctuated in muffled roars like the dim applause rising to an actor on the stage of a vast theater. Two Little Girls in Blue and Sally from the New Amsterdam pumped in their eardrums and unwieldy quickened rhythms invited them to be Negroes and saxophone players, to come back to Maryland and Louisiana, addressed them as mammies and millionaires. The shopgirls were looking like Marilyn Miller. College boys said Marilyn Miller where they had said Rosie Quinn. Moving-picture actresses were famous. Paul Whiteman played the significance of amusement on his violin. They were having the breadline at the Ritz that year. Everybody was there. People met people they knew in hotel lobbies smelling of orchids and plush and detective stories, and asked each other where they’d been since last time. Charlie Chaplin wore a yellow polo coat. People were tired of the proletariat—everybody was famous. All the other people who weren’t well known had been killed in the war; there wasn’t much interest in private lives.

“There they are, the Knights, dancing together,” they said, “isn’t it nice? There they go.”

“Listen, Alabama, you’re not keeping time,” David was saying.

“David, for God’s sake will you try to keep off of my feet?”

“I never could waltz anyway.”

There were a hundred thousand things to be blue about exposed in all the choruses.

“I’ll have to do lots of work,” said David. “Won’t it seem queer to be the center of the world for somebody else?”

“Very. I’m glad my parents are coming before I begin to get sick.”

“How do you know you’ll get sick?”

“I should.”

“That’s no reason.”

“No.”

“Let’s go someplace else.”

Paul Whiteman played “Two Little Girls in Blue” at the Palais Royal; it was a big expensive number. Girls with piquant profiles were mistaken for Gloria Swanson. New York was more full of reflections than of itself—the only concrete things in town were the abstractions. Everybody wanted to pay the cabaret checks.

“We’re having some people,” everybody said to everybody else, “and we want you to join us,” and they said, “We’ll telephone.”

All over New York people telephoned. They telephoned from one hotel to another to people on other parties that they couldn’t get there—that they were engaged. It was always teatime or late at night.

David and Alabama invited their friends to throw oranges into the drum at the Plantation and themselves into the fountain at Union Square. Up they went, humming the New Testament and Our Country’s Constitution, riding the tide like triumphant islanders on a surfboard. Nobody knew the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

In the city, old women with faces as soft and ill lit as the side streets of Central Europe offered their pansies; hats floated off the Fifth Avenue bus; the clouds sent out a prospectus over Central Park. The streets of New York smelled acrid and sweet like drippings from the mechanics of a metallic night-blooming garden. The intermittent odors, the people and the excitement, suctioned spasmodically up the side streets from the thoroughfares, rose in gusts on the beat of their personal tempo.

Possessing a rapacious, engulfing ego their particular genius swallowed their world in its swift undertow and washed its cadavers out to sea. New York is a good place to be on the upgrade.

The clerk in the Manhattan thought they weren’t married but he gave them the room anyway.

“What’s the matter?” David said from the twin bed under the cathedral print. “Can’t you make it?”

“Sure. What time is the train?”

“Now. I’ve got just two dollars to meet your family,” said David searching his clothes.

“I wanted to buy them some flowers.”

“Alabama,” said David sententiously, “that’s impractical. You’ve become nothing but an aesthetic theory—a chemistry formula for the decorative.”

“There’s nothing we can do with two dollars anyway,” she protested in a logical tone.

“I s’pose not——”

Attenuated odors from the hotel florist tapped the shell of the velvet vacuum like silver hammers.

“Of course, if we have to pay the taxi——”

“Daddy’ll have some money.”

Puffs of white smoke aspired against the station skylight. Lights like unripe citrus fruits hung in the gray day from the steel rafters. Swarms and swarms of people passed each other coming up the stairway. The train clicked up with the noise of many keys turning in many rusty locks.

“If I’d only known it would be like that at Atlantic City,” they said—or, “Could you believe it, we’re half hour late?”—or, “The town hasn’t changed much without us,” they said, rustling their packages and realizing their hats were all wrong for wear in the city.

“There’s Mamma!” cried Alabama.

“Well, how do ye do——”

“Isn’t it a great city, Judge?”

“I haven’t been here since 1882. There’s been considerable change since then,” said the Judge.

“Did you have a nice trip?”

“Where is your sister, Alabama?”

“She couldn’t come down.”

“She couldn’t come down,” corroborated David lamely.

“You see,” went on Alabama at her mother’s look of surprise, “the last time Joan came she borrowed my best suitcase to carry away wet diapers and since then we’ve—well, we haven’t seen her so much.”

“Why shouldn’t she?” the Judge demanded sternly.

“It was my best suitcase,” explained Alabama patiently.

“But the poor little baby,” sighed Miss Millie. “I suppose we can telephone them.”

“You will feel differently about things like that after you have children of your own,” said the Judge.

Alabama wondered suspiciously if her figure showed.

“But I can see how she felt about the suitcase,” continued Millie magnanimously. “Even as a baby, Alabama was particular like that about her own things—never wanted to share them, even then.”

The taxi steamed up the vaporous chute of the station runway.

Alabama didn’t know how to go about asking the Judge to pay the taxi—she hadn’t been absolutely sure of how to go about anything since her marriage had precluded the Judge’s resented direction. She didn’t know what to say when girls postured in front of David hoping to have him sketch them on his shirtfront, or what to do when David raved and ranted and swore that it ruined his talent to have his buttons torn off in the laundry.

“If you children will get these suitcases into the train, I’ll pay the taxi,” said the Judge.

The green hills of Connecticut preached a sedative sermon after the rocking of the gritty train. The gaunt, disciplined smells of New England lawn, the scent of invisible truck gardens bound the air in tight bouquets. Apologetic trees swept the porch, insects creaked in the baking meadows widowed of their crops. There didn’t seem room in the cultivated landscape for the unexpected. If you wanted to hang anybody, reflected Alabama, you’d have to do it in your own backyard. Butterflies opened and shut along the roads like the flash of white in a camera lens. “You couldn’t be a butterfly,” they said. They were silly butterflies, flying about that way and arguing with people about their potentialities.

“We meant to get the grass cut,” began Alabama—“but——”

“It’s much better this way,” finished David. “It’s more picturesque.”

“Well, I like the weeds,” the Judge said amiably.

“They make it smell so sweet in the country,” Miss Millie added. “But aren’t you lonely out here at night?”

“Oh, David’s friends from college come out occasionally and sometimes we go into town.”

Alabama didn’t add how often they went in to New York to waste the extra afternoons sloshing orange juice through bachelor sanctuaries, droning the words to summer behind insoluble locks. They went there ahead, awaiting the passage of that progressive celebration that a few years later followed the boom about New York like the Salvation Army follows Christmas, to absolve themselves in the waters of each other’s unrest.

“Mister,” Tanka greeted them from the steps, “and Missy.”

Tanka was the Japanese butler. They couldn’t have afforded him without borrowing from David’s dealer. He cost money; that was because he constructed botanical gardens out of cucumbers and floral displays with the butter and made up the money for his flute lessons from the grocery bills. They had tried to do without him till Alabama cut her hand on a can of baked beans and David sprained his painting wrist on the lawn mower.

The Oriental swept the floor in an inclusive rotation of his body, indicating himself as the axis of the earth. Bursting suddenly into a roar of disquieting laughter, he turned to Alabama.

“Missy, kin see you jessy minute—jessy minute, this way, please.”

“He’s going to ask for change,” thought Alabama, uneasily following him to the side porch.

“Look!” said Tanka. With a gesture of negation, he indicated the hammock swung between the columns of the house where two young men lay uproariously asleep with a bottle of gin by their sides.

“Well,” she said hesitantly, “you’d better tell Mister—but not in front of the family, Tanka.”

“Velly careful,” nodded the Jap, making a shushing sound and barring his lips with his fingers.

“Listen, Mamma, I think you’d better come upstairs and rest before dinner,” suggested Alabama. “You must be tired after your trip.”

From the sense that she had nothing whatever to do with herself which radiated from the girl as she descended from her parents’ room, David knew that something was wrong.

“What’s the matter?”

“Matter! There are drunks in the hammock. If Daddy sees that there’ll be hell to pay!”

“Send them away.”

“They can’t move.”

“My God! Tanka’ll just have to see that they stay outside until after dinner.”

“Do you think the Judge would understand?”

“I’m afraid so——”

Alabama stared about disconsolately.

“Well—I suppose there comes a moment when people must choose between their contemporaries and their families.”

“Are they in very bad shape?”

“Pretty hopeless. If we send for the ambulance, it would just make a scene,” she said tentatively.

The moiré sheen of the afternoon polished the sterility of the rooms’ colonial picturesqueness and scratched itself on the yellow flowers that trailed the mantel like featherstitching. It was a priestly light curving in the dips and hollows of a melancholic waltz.

“I don’t see what we can do about it,” they agreed.

Alabama and David stood there anxiously in the quiet till the clang of a spoon on a tin waiter summoned them to dinner.

“I’m glad to see,” said Austin over the beets like roses, “that you have succeeded in taming Alabama a little. She seems to have become a very good housekeeper since her marriage.” The Judge was impressed with the beets.

David thought of his buttons upstairs. They were all off.

“Yes,” he said vaguely.

“David has been working very well out here,” Alabama broke in nervously.

She was about to paint a picture of their domestic perfections when a loud groan from the hammock warned her. Staggering through the dining room door with a visionary air, the young man eyed the gathering. On the whole he was all there; just a little awry—his shirttail was out.

“Good evening,” he said formally.

“I think your friend had better have some dinner,” suggested the baffled Austin.

The friend exploded in foolish laughter.

Miss Millie confusedly inspected Tanka’s flowery architecture. Of course, she wanted Alabama to have friends. She had always brought up her children with that in mind, but circumstances were, at times, dubious.

A second disheveled phantom groped through the door; the silence was broken only by squeaky grunts of suppressed hysteria.

“He does that way because he’s been operated on,” said David hastily. The Judge bristled.

“They took out his larynx,” David added in alarm. His eyes wildly sought the protoplasmic face. Luckily, the fellows seemed to be listening to what he was saying.

“One’s mute,” Alabama explained with inspiration.

“Well, I’m glad of that,” answered the Judge enigmatically. His tone was not without hostility. He seemed chiefly relieved that any further conversation was precluded.

“I can’t speak a word,” burst from the ghost unexpectedly. “I’m mute.”

“Well,” thought Alabama, “this is the end. Now what can we say?”

Miss Millie was saying that salt air spoiled the table silver. The Judge faced his daughter implacable and reproving. The necessity for saying anything was dispelled by a weird and self-explanatory carmagnole about the table. It was not exactly a dance; it was an interpretive protest against the vertebrate state punctuated by glorious ecstatic paeans of rhythmic backslappings and loud invitations to the Knights to join the party. The Judge and Miss Millie were generously included in the invitation.

“It’s like a frieze, a Greek frieze,” commented Miss Millie distractedly.

“It’s not very edifying,” supplemented the Judge.

Exhausted, the two men wobbled unsteadily to the floor.

“If David could lend us twenty dollars,” gasped the mass, “we were just going on to the roadhouse. Of course, if he can’t we’ll stay a little longer, maybe.”

“Oh,” said David, spellbound.

“Mamma,” said Alabama, “can’t you let us have twenty dollars till we can get to the bank tomorrow?”

“Certainly, my dear—upstairs in my bureau drawer. It’s a pity your friends have to leave; they seem to be having such a good time,” she continued vaguely.

The house settled. The cool chirp of the crickets like the crunching of fresh lettuce purged the living room of dissonance. Frogs wheezed in the meadow where the goldenrod would bloom. The family group yielded itself to the straining of the night lullaby through the boughs of the oak.

“Escaped,” sighed Alabama as they snuggled together in the exotic bed.

“Yes,” said David, “it’s all right.”

There were people in automobiles all along the Boston Post Road thinking everything was going to be all right while they got drunk and ran into fireplugs and trucks and old stone walls. Policemen were too busy thinking everything was going to be all right to arrest them.

It was three o’clock in the morning when the Knights were awakened by a stentorian whispering on the lawn.

An hour passed after David dressed and went down. The noise rose in increasingly uproarious muffles.

“Well, then, I’ll take a drink with you if you’ll try to make a little less noise,” Alabama heard David say as she meticulously put on her clothes. Something was sure to happen; it was better to be looking your best when the authorities arrived. They must be in the kitchen. She stuck her head truculently through the swinging door.

“Now, Alabama,” David greeted her, “I would advise you to keep your nose out of this.” In a husky melodramatic aside he continued confidentially, “This is the most expedient way I could think of——”

Alabama stared, infuriated over the carnage of the kitchen.

“Oh, shut up!” she yelled.

“Now listen, Alabama,” began David.

“It was you who said all the time that we should be so respectable and now look at you!” she accused.

“He’s all right. David’s perfectly all right,” the prostrate men muttered feebly.

“And what if my father comes down now? What’ll he have to say about this being all right?” Alabama indicated the wreckage. “What are all those old cans?” she demanded contemptuously.

“Tomato juice. It sobers you up. I’ve just been giving some to the guests,” explained David. “First I give them tomato juice and then I give them gin.”

Alabama snatched at the bottle in David’s hand. “Give me that bottle.” As he fended her off, she slid against the door. To save the noise of a crash in the hall, she precipitated her body heavily into the jamb. The swinging door caught her full in the face. Her nose bled jubilantly as a newly discovered oil well down the front of her dress.

“I’ll see if there’s a beefsteak in the icebox,” proffered David. “Stick it under the sink, Alabama. How long can you hold your breath?”

By the time the kitchen was in some kind of order, the Connecticut dawn drenched the countryside like a firehose. The two men staggered off to sleep at the inn. Alabama and David surveyed her black eyes disconsolately.

“They’ll think I did it,” he said.

“Of course—it won’t make any difference what I say.”

“When they see us together you’d think they’d believe.”

“People always believe the best story.”

The Judge and Miss Millie were down early to breakfast. They waited amidst the soggy mountains of damp bloated cigarette butts while Tanka burnt the bacon in his expectation of trouble. There was hardly a place to sit without sticking to dried rings of gin and orange juice.

Alabama’s head felt as if somebody had been making popcorn in her cranium. She tried to conceal her bruised eyes with heavy coatings of face powder. Her face felt peeled under the mask.

“Good morning,” she said brightly.

The Judge blinked ferociously.

“Alabama,” he said, “about that telephone call to Joan—your mother and I felt that we’d better make it today. She will be needing help with the baby.”

“Yes, sir.”

Alabama had known this would be their attitude, but she couldn’t prevent a cataclysmic chute of her insides. She had known that no individual can force other people forever to sustain their own versions of that individual’s character—that sooner or later they will stumble across the person’s own conception of themselves.

“Well!” she said defiantly to herself, “families have no right to hold you accountable for what they inculcate before you attain the age of protestation!”

“And since,” the Judge continued, “you and your sister do not seem to be on the best of terms, we thought we would join her alone tomorrow morning.”

Alabama sat silently inspecting the debris of the night.

“I suppose Joan will stuff them with moralities and tales about how hard it is to get along,” she said to herself bitterly, “and neatly polish us off in contrast to herself. We’re sure to come out of this picture black demons, any way you look at it.”

“Understand,” the Judge was saying, “that I am not passing a moral judgment on your personal conduct. You are a grown woman and that is your own affair.”

“I understand,” she said. “You just disapprove, so you’re not going to stand it. If I don’t accept your way of thinking, you’ll leave me to myself. Well, I suppose I have no right to ask you to stay.”

“People who do not subscribe,” answered the Judge, “have no rights.”

The train that carried the Judge and Miss Millie to the city was lumbered with milk cans and the pleasant paraphernalia of summer in transit. Their attitude was one of reluctant disavowal as they said good-bye. They were going south in a few days. They couldn’t come back to the country again. David would be away seeing to his frescoes, and they thought Alabama would be better off at home during his absence. They were glad of David’s success and popularity.

“Don’t be so desolate,” said David. “We’ll see them again.”

“But it will never be the same,” wailed Alabama. “Our rôle will always be discounting the character they think we are from now on.”

“Hasn’t it always been?”

“Yes—but David, it’s very difficult to be two simple people at once, one who wants to have a law to itself and the other who wants to keep all the nice old things and be loved and safe and protected.”

“So,” he said, “I believe many people have found out before. I suppose all we can really share with people is a taste for the same kinds of weather.”

Vincent Youmans wrote a new tune. The old tunes floated through the hospital windows from the hurdy-gurdies while the baby was being born and the new tunes went the luxurious rounds of lobbies and grills, palm gardens and roofs.

Miss Millie sent Alabama a box of baby things and a list of what must be done for bathing infants to pin on the bathroom door. When her mother got the telegram about Bonnie’s birth, she wired Alabama, “My blue-eyed baby has grown up. We are so proud.” It came through Western Union “glue-eyed.” Her mother’s letters asked her simply to behave; they implied that Alabama and David were wanton to a certain extent. As Alabama read them over she could hear the slow springs creaking in on the rusty croaking of the frogs in the cypress swamps at home.

The New York rivers dangled lights along the banks like lanterns on a wire; the Long Island marshes stretched the twilight to a blue Campagna. Glimmering buildings hazed the sky in a luminous patchwork quilt. Bits of philosophy, odds and ends of acumen, the ragged ends of vision suicided in the sentimental dusk. The marshes lay black and flat and red and full of crime about their borders. Yes, Vincent Youmans wrote the music. Through the labyrinthine sentimentalities of jazz, they shook their heads from side to side and nodded across town at each other, streamlined bodies riding the prow of the country like metal figures on a fast-moving radiator cap.

Alabama and David were proud of themselves and the baby, consciously affecting a vague bouffant casualness about the fifty thousand dollars they spent on two years’ worth of polish for life’s baroque façade. In reality, there is no materialist like the artist, asking back from life the double and the wastage and the cost on what he puts out in emotional usury.

People were banking in gods those years.

“Good morning,” the bank clerks said in the marble foyers, “did you want to draw on your Pallas Athene?” and “Shall I credit the Diana to your wife’s account?”

It costs more to ride on the tops of taxis than on the inside; Joseph Urban skies are expensive when they’re real. Sunshine comes high to darn the thoroughfares with silver needles—a thread of glamour, a Rolls-Royce thread, a thread of O. Henry. Tired moons ask higher wages. Lustily splashing their dreams in the dark pool of gratification, their fifty thousand dollars bought a cardboard baby nurse for Bonnie, a secondhand Marmon, a Picasso etching, a white satin dress to house a beaded parrot, a yellow chiffon dress to snare a field of ragged robins, a dress as green as fresh wet paint, two white knickerbocker suits exactly alike, a broker’s suit, an English suit like the burnt fields of August, and two first-class tickets for Europe.

In the packing case a collection of plush teddy bears, David’s army overcoat, their wedding silver, and four bulging scrapbooks full of all the things people envied them for were ready to be left behind.

“Good-bye,” they had said on steel station stairways. “Someday you must try our home brew,” or “The same band will play at Baden-Baden for the summer, perhaps we’ll see you there,” they said, or “Don’t forget what I told you and you’ll find the key in the same old place.”

“Oh,” groaned David from the depths of the bed’s sagacious enamel billows, “I’m glad we’re leaving.”

Alabama inspected herself in the hand mirror.

“One more party,” she answered, “and I’d have to see Viollet-le-Duc about my face.”

David inspected her minutely.

“What’s the matter with your face?”

“Nothing, only I’ve been picking at it so much I can’t go to the tea.”

“Well,” said David blankly, “we’ve got to go to the tea—it’s because of your face that they’re having it.”

“If there’d been anything else to do, I wouldn’t have done the damage.”

“Anyway, you’re coming, Alabama. How would it look for people to say, ‘And how is your charming wife, Mr. Knight?’ ‘My wife, oh, she’s at home picking at her face.’ How do you think I’d feel about that?”

“I could say it was the gin or the climate or something.”

Alabama stared woefully at her reflection. The Knights hadn’t changed much externally—the girl still looked all day long as if she’d just got up; the man’s face was still as full of unexpected lilts and jolts as riding the amusements on the Million-Dollar Pier.

“I want to go,” said David, “look at this weather! I can’t possibly paint.”

The rain spun and twisted the light of their third wedding anniversary to thin prismatic streams; alto rain, soprano rain, rain for Englishmen and farmers, rubber rain, metal rain, crystal rain. The distant philippics of spring thunder hurtled the fields in thick convolutions like heavy smoke.

“There’ll be people,” she demurred.

“There’ll always be people,” agreed David. “Don’t you want to say good-bye to your beaux?” he teased.

“David! I’m much too much on their side to be very romantic to men. They’ve always just floated through my life in taxis full of cold smoke and metaphysics.”

“We won’t discuss it,” said David peremptorily.

“Discuss what?” Alabama asked idly.

“The somewhat violent compromises of certain American women with convention.”

“Horrors! Please let’s not. Do you mean to say that you’re jealous of me?” she asked incredulously.

“Of course. Aren’t you?”

“Terribly. But I thought we weren’t supposed to be.”

“Then we’re even.”

They looked at each other compassionately. It was funny, compassion under their untidy heads.

The muddy afternoon sky disgorged a white moon for teatime. It lay wedged in a split in the clouds like the wheel of a gun carriage in a rutted, deserted field of battle, slender, and tender and new after the storm. The brownstone apartment was swarming with people; the odor of cinnamon toast embalmed the entry.

“The master,” the valet pronounced as they rang, “left word, sir, to the guests that he was escaping, that they were to make themselves at home.”

“He did!” commented David. “People are always running all over the place to escape each other, having been sure to make a date for cocktails in the first bar outside the limits of convenience.”

“Why did he leave so suddenly?” asked Alabama disappointed.

The valet considered gravely, Alabama and David were old clients.

“The master,” he decided to trust them, “has taken one hundred and thirty hand-woven handkerchiefs, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, two dozen tubes of Frances Fox ointment and sailed. Don’t you find, sir, the luggage a bit extraordinary?”

“He might have said good-bye,” pursued Alabama petulantly. “Since he knew we were going and he wouldn’t see us for ages.”

“Oh, but he did leave word, Madam. ‘Good-bye,’ he said.”

Everybody said that they wished they could get away themselves. They all said they would be perfectly happy if they didn’t have to live the way they lived. Philosophers and expelled college boys, movie directors and prophets predicting the end said people were restless because the war was over.

The tea party told them that nobody stayed on the Riviera in summer—that the baby would take cholera if they carried her into the heat. Their friends expected they’d be bitten to death by French mosquitoes and find nothing to eat but goat. They told them they’d find no sewage on the Mediterranean in summer and remembered the impossibility of ice in the highballs; there was some suggestion of packing a trunk with canned goods.

The moon slid mercurially along the bright mathematical lines of the ultra-modern furniture. Alabama sat in a twilit corner, reassuring herself of the things that made up her life. She had forgotten to give the Castoria to a neighbor. And Tanka could just as well have had the half-bottle of gin. If the nurse was letting Bonnie sleep at this hour at the hotel, she wouldn’t sleep on the boat—first-class passengers, midnight sailing, C deck, 35 and 37; she could have telephoned her mother to say good-bye but it would only have frightened her from so far away. It was too bad about her mother.

Her eyes strayed over the rose-beige living room full of people. Alabama said to herself they were happy—she had inherited that from her mother. “We are very happy,” she said to herself, as her mother would have said, “but we don’t seem to care very much whether we are or not. I suppose we expected something more dramatic.”

The spring moonlight chipped the pavement like an ice pick; its shy luminosity iced the corners of the buildings with glittering crescents.

It would be fun on the boat; there’d be a ball and the orchestra would play that thing that goes “um—ah—um”—you know—the one Vincent Youmans wrote with the chorus explaining why we were blue.

The air was sticky and stuffy in the ship’s bar. Alabama and David sat in their evening clothes, sleek as two borzois on the high stools. The steward read the ship’s news.

“There’s Lady Sylvia Priestly-Parsnips. Shall I ask her to have a drink?”

Alabama stared dubiously about. There was nobody else in the bar. “All right—but they say she sleeps with her husband.”

“But not in the bar. How do you do, Madam?”

Lady Sylvia flapped across the room like an opaque protoplasm propelling itself over a sandbank.

“I have been chasing you two over the entire boat,” she said. “We have word that the ship is about to sink, so they are giving the ball tonight. I want you for my dinner party.”

“You do not owe us a party, Lady Parsnips, and we are not the sort of people who pay steerage rates and ride in the honeymoon suite. So what is it?”

“I am quite altruistic,” she expostulated. “I’ve got to have somebody for the party, though I hear you two are quite mad about each other. Here’s my husband.”

Her husband thought of himself as an intellectual; his real talent was piano playing.

“I’ve been wanting to meet you. Sylvia here—that’s my wife—tells me you are an old-fashioned couple.”

“A Typhoid Mary of time-worn ideals,” supplied Alabama, “but I consider it only fair to tell you we are not paying any wine checks.”

“Oh, we didn’t expect you to. None of my friends pay for us any more—I can’t trust them at all since the war.”

“It seems there’s going to be a storm,” said David.

Lady Sylvia belched. “The trouble with emergencies is,” she said, “that I always put on my finest underwear and then nothing happens.”

“I find the easiest way to provoke the unexpected is by deciding to sleep in pore cream.” Alabama crossed her legs to above the tabletop in a triangular checkmark.

“My place in the sun of incalculability could be had with five Octagon soap wrappers,” said David emphatically.

“There are my friends,” interrupted Lady Sylvia. “These Englishmen were sent to New York to save them from decadence and the American gentleman is seeking refinements in England.”

“So we pool our resources and think we’ll be able to live out the trip.” They were a handsome quartet intent on portraying the romantic ends they anticipated.

“And Mrs. Gayle’s joining us, aren’t you, dear?”

Mrs. Gayle blinked her round eyes with conviction.

“I’d just love to, but parties nauseate my husband, Lady Sylvia. He really can’t stand them.”

“That’s all right, my dear, so do they me,” said Lady Sylvia.

“No more than the rest of us.”

“But more actively,” her ladyship insisted. “I’ve given parties in one room after another of my house till finally I had to leave because of the broken fixtures, there being no place left to read.”

“Why didn’t you have them mended?”

“I needed the money for more parties. Of course, I didn’t want to read—that was my husband. I spoil him so.”

“Boxing with the guests broke Sylvia’s lights,” added milord, “and she was very unpleasant about it, bringing me to America and back this way.”

“You loved the rusticity once you became accustomed to it,” said his wife decisively.

The dinner was one of those ship’s meals with everything tasting of salty mops.

“We must all have an air of living up to something,” Lady Sylvia directed, “to please the waiters.”

“But I do,” sang Mrs. Gayle. “I really have to. There’s been so much suspicion of us about, that I’ve been afraid to have children for fear they’d be born with almond-shaped eyeballs or blue fingernails.”

“It’s one’s friends,” said Lady Sylvia’s husband. “They rope you into dull dinners, cut you on the Riviera, devour you in Biarritz, and spread devastating rumors about your upper bicuspids over the whole of Europe.”

“When I marry a woman she will have to avoid social criticism by dispensing with all natural functions,” said the American.

“You must be sure you dislike her to escape her condemnation,” David said.

“It’s approval you need to avoid,” said Alabama emphatically.

“Yes,” commented Lady Sylvia, “tolerance has reached such a point that there’s no such thing as privacy in relations any more.”

“By privacy,” said her husband, “Sylvia means something disreputable.”

“Oh, it’s all the same, my dear.”

“Yes, I suppose it actually is.”

“One is so sure to be outside the law these days.”

“There’s such a crowd behind the barn,” Lady Sylvia sighed, “one can’t find a place to show off one’s defense mechanism.”

“I suppose marriage is the only concept we can never fully work out of our system,” said David.

“But there are reports about that you two have made a success of your marriage.”

“We are going to present it to the Louvre,” Alabama corroborated. “It’s been accepted already by the French government.”

“I thought for a long time that Lady Sylvia and I were the only ones who’d stuck together—of course, it’s more difficult when you’re not in the arts.”

“Most people feel nowadays that marriage and life do not go together,” said the American gentleman.

“But nothing does go with life,” echoed the Englishman.

“If you feel,” interrupted Lady Parsnips, “that we are now well enough established in the eyes of our public, we might have some more champagne.”

“Oh, yes, it’s better to be well started on our dissolution before the storm begins.”

“I’ve never seen a storm at sea. I suppose it will be a fiasco after all they’ve led us to expect.”

“The theory is not to drown, I believe.”

“But, my dear, my husband says you’re safer on a boat than anywhere at all if you’re at sea when there’s a storm.”

“Oh, much better off.”

“Decidedly.”

It began very suddenly. A billiard table crashed a pillar in the salon. The sound of splintering subdued the ship like a presage of death. A quiet, desperate organization pervaded the boat. Stewards sped through the corridors, hastily lashing the trunks to the washbasins. By midnight the ropes were broken and fixtures loosened from the walls. Water flooded the ventilators and sogged the passage and word went round that the ship had lost her radio.

The stewards and stewardesses stood in formation at the foot of the stairway. The strained faces and roving, self-conscious eyes of people whose routed confidence would lead you to believe that they are contemptuous of the forces which dissipate their superficial disciplinary strength to a more direct egotism, surprised Alabama. She’d never thought of training as being superimposed on temperaments, but as temperaments being fit to carry the burden of selfless routines.

“Everybody can share the worst things,” she thought as she dashed along the soggy corridors to her cabin, “but there’s almost nobody at the top. I s’pose that’s why my father was always so alone.” A heave threw her across from one berth to another. Her back felt as if it must be broken. “Oh, God, can’t it stop rocking for a minute, before it goes down?”

Bonnie peered at her mother dubiously. “Don’t be ’fraid,” said the child.

Alabama was scared half to death.

“I’m not frightened, dear,” she said. “Bonnie, if you move from the berth you will be killed, so lie there and hold on to the sides while I look for Daddy.”

Rocking and whipping with the ship, she clung to the rails. The faces of the personnel stared at her blankly as she passed, as if she had lost her mind.

“Why don’t they signal for the lifeboats?” Alabama shrieked hysterically in the calm face of the radio officer.

“Go back to your cabin,” he said. “No boat could be launched in a sea like this.”

She found David in the bar with Lord Priestly-Parsnips. The tables were massed one on top of the other; heavy chairs were bolted to the floor and bound with ropes. They were drinking champagne, sloshing it over the place like tilted slop pails.

“It’s the worst I’ve seen since I came back from Algiers. Then I literally walked on my cabin walls,” milord was saying placidly, “and then, too, the transport during the war was pretty bad. I thought we should certainly lose her for ages.”

Alabama crawled across the bar, lunging from one post to another. “David, you’ve got to come down to the cabin.”

“But, dearest,” he protested—he was fairly sober, more so than the Englishman, anyway—“what on earth can I do?”

“I thought we’d better all go down together——”

“Rot!”

Launching herself along the room, she heard the Britisher’s voice trailing after her, “Isn’t it funny how danger makes people passionate? During the war——”

Frightened, she felt very second rate. The cabin seemed to grow smaller and smaller as if the reiterant shocks were mashing in the sides. After a while she grew accustomed to the suffocation and the intestinal ripping. Bonnie slept quietly by her side.

There was nothing but water outside the porthole, no sky at all. The motion made her whole body itch. She thought all night that they would be dead by morning.

By morning Alabama was too sick and nervous to bear the stateroom any longer. David helped her along the rail to the bar. Lord Parsnips slept in a corner. A low conversation issued from the backs of two deep leather chairs. She ordered a baked potato and listened, wishing something would prevent the two men from talking. “I’m very antisocial,” she tabulated. David said all women were. “I guess so,” she thought resignedly.

One of the voices resounded with the conviction of learning. It had the tone with which doctors of mediocre intelligence expound the medical theories of more brilliant colleagues to their patients. The other spoke with the querulous ponderousness of a voice which is dominant only in the subconscious.

“It’s the first time I ever started thinking about things like that—about the people in Africa and all over the world. It made me think that men don’t know as much as they think they do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, hundreds of years ago those fellows knew nearly as much about saving life as we do. Nature certainly looks after itself. You can’t kill anything that’s going to live.”

“Yes, you can’t exterminate anything that’s got a will to live. You can’t kill ’em!”

The voice grew alarmingly accusative. The other voice changed the subject defensively.

“Did you go to many shows in New York?”

“Three or four, and of all the trivial indecent things! You never get a thing to take away with you. There’s nothing to it,” the second voice welled in accusation.

“They’ve got to give the public what it wants.”

“I was talking to a newspaperman the other day and he said just that, and I told him just look at The Cincinnati Enquirer. They never carry a word of all this scandal and stuff, and it’s one of the biggest papers in the country.”

“It’s not the public—they have to take what they get.”

“Of course, I just go myself to see what’s doing.”

“I don’t go much myself—not more than three or four times a month.”

Alabama staggered to her feet. “I can’t stand it!” she said. The bar smelled of olive brine and dead ashes. “Tell the man I want the potato outdoors.”

Clinging to the rail, she reached the back sun parlor. A gigantic swish and suction burst over the deck. She heard the chairs go overboard. The waves closed like marble tombstones over her vision and opened again and no water showed. The boat floated precariously in the sky.

“Everything in America is like its storms,” drawled the Englishman, “or would you say we were in Europe?”

“Englishmen are never frightened,” she remarked.

“Don’t worry about Bonnie, Alabama,” said David. “She’s, after all, a child. She doesn’t feel things very much, yet.”

“Then it would be more horrible if anything should happen to her!”

“No. If I had to choose between the saving of you two theoretically, I’d take the proven material.”

“I wouldn’t. I’d save her first. She may be some wonderful person.”

“Maybe, but none of us are, and we know we’re not absolutely terrible.”

“Seriously, David, do you think we’ll get through?”

“The purser says it’s a Florida tidal wave with a ninety-mile wind—seventy’s a hurricane. The ship’s listing thirty-seven degrees. It won’t go over till we hit forty. They think the wind may drop. Anyway, we can’t do anything about it.”

“No. What do you think about?”

“Nothing. I’m ashamed to confess, I’ve been having too many fines. It’s made me sort of sick.”

“I don’t think, either. The elements are splendid—I don’t really care if we sink. I’ve grown very savage.”

“Yes, when we find we have to dispense with so much of ourselves to function, we do—to save the rest.”

“Anyway, there’s nobody in this boat or in any other gathering I have examined at first hand that it would matter a damn if they were lost.”

“You mean geniuses?”

“No. Links in that intangible thread of evolution which we call first science, then civilization—instruments of purpose.”

“As denominators to sense the past?”

“More to imagine the future.”

“Like your father?”

“In a way. He’s done his job.”

“So have the others.”

“But they don’t know it. Consciousness is the goal, I feel.”

“Then the direction of education should be to teach us to dramatize ourselves, to realize to the fullest extent the human equipment?”

“That’s what I think.”

“Well, it’s hooey!”

After three days the salon opened its doors again. Bonnie clamored to see the ship’s movie.

“Do you think she ought to? I believe it’s full of sex appeal,” Alabama said.

“Most certainly,” replied Lady Sylvia. “If I had a daughter, I’d send her to every performance so she should learn something useful for when she grew up. After all, it’s the parents who pay.”

“I don’t know what I think about things.”

“Nor I—but sex appeal is in a class by itself, my dear.”

“Which would you rather have, Bonnie, sex appeal or a walk in the sun on the deck?”

Bonnie was two, priestess of obscure wisdoms and reverenced of her parents as if she were two hundred. The Knight household having exhausted the baby interest during the long months of weaning, her standing was that of a voting member.

“Bonnie walks afterwards,” the child responded promptly.

The air felt already very un-American. The sky was less energetic. The luxuriance of Europe had blown up with the storm.

Clamp—clamp—clamp—clamp, their feet fell on the resounding deck. She and Bonnie stopped against the rail.

“A ship must be very pretty passing in the night,” said Alabama.

“See the dipper?” pointed Bonnie.

“I see Time and Space wedded in painted static. I have seen it in a little glass case in a planetarium, the way it was years ago.”

“Did it change?”

“No, people just saw it differently. It was something different from what they were thinking all along.”

The air was salty, such beautiful air, from the ship’s rail.

“It’s the quantity makes it so beautiful,” thought Alabama. “Immensity is the most beautiful of all things.”

A shooting star, ectoplasmic arrow, sped through the nebular hypothesis like a wanton hummingbird. From Venus to Mars to Neptune it trailed the ghost of comprehension, illuminating far horizons over the pale battlefields of reality.

“It’s pretty,” said Bonnie.

“This will be in a case for your grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren.”

“Child’en’s child’en in a case,” commented Bonnie profoundly.

“No, dear, the stars! Perhaps they will use the same case—externals seem to be all that survive.”

Clamp—clamp! Clamp—clamp! round the deck they went. The night air felt so good.

“You must go to bed, my baby.”

“There won’t be any stars when I wake up.”

“There will be others.”

David and Alabama climbed together to the prow of the boat. Phosphorescent, their faces gleamed in the moonlight. They sat on a coil of rope and looked back on the netted silhouette.

“Your picture of a boat was wrong; those funnels are ladies doing a very courteous minuet,” she commented.

“Maybe. The moon makes things different. I don’t like it.”

“Why not?”

“It spoils the darkness.”

“Oh, but it’s so unhallowed!” Alabama rose to her feet. Contracting her neck, she pulled herself high on her toes.

“David, I’ll fly for you, if you’ll love me!”

“Fly, then.”

“I can’t fly, but love me anyway.”

“Poor wingless child!”

“Is it so hard to love me?”

“Do you think you are easy, my illusive possession?”

“I did so want to be paid, somehow, for my soul.”

“Collect from the moon—you’ll find the address under Brooklyn and Queens.”

“David! I love you even when you are attractive.”

“Which isn’t very often.”

“Yes, often and most impersonal.”

Alabama lay in his arms feeling him older than herself. She did not move. The boat’s engine chugged out a deep lullaby.

“It’s been a long time since we’ve had a passage like this.”

“Ages. Let’s have one every night.”

“I’ve composed a poem for you.”

“Go on.”

Why am I this way, why am I that? 

Why do myself and I constantly spat? 

Which is the reasonable, logical me? 

Which is the one who must will it to be?

David laughed. “Am I expected to answer that?”

“No.”

“We’ve reached the age of caution when everything, even our most personal reactions, must pass the test of our intellects.”

“It’s very fatiguing.”

“Bernard Shaw says all people over forty are scoundrels.”

“And if we do not achieve that desirable state by then?”

“Arrested development.”

“We’re spoiling our evening.”

“Let’s go in.”

“Let’s stay—maybe the magic will come back.”

“It will. Another time.”

On the way down they passed Lady Sylvia rapturously kissing a shadow behind a lifeboat.

“Was that her husband? It must have been true—that about their being in love.”

“A sailor—sometimes I’d like to go to a Marseilles dance hall,” said Alabama vaguely.

“What for?”

“I don’t know—like eating rump steak, I suppose.”

“I would be furious.”

“You would be kissing Lady Sylvia behind the lifeboat.”

“Never.”

The orchestra blared out the flower duet from Madame Butterfly in the ship’s salon.

There’s David for Mignonette

And somebody else for the violette,

hummed Alabama.

“Are you artistic?” asked the Englishman.

“No.”

“But you were singing.”

“Because I am happy to find that I am a very self-sufficient person.”

“Oh, but are you? How narcissistic!”

“Very. I am very pleased with the way I walk and talk and do almost everything. Shall I show you how nicely I can?”

“Please.”

“Then treat me to a drink.”

“Come along to the bar.”

Alabama swung off in imitation of some walk she had once admired. “But I warn you,” she said, “I am only really myself when I’m somebody else whom I have endowed with these wonderful qualities from my imagination.”

“But I shan’t mind that,” said the Englishman, feeling vaguely that he should be expectant. Anything incomprehensible has a sexual significance to many people under thirty-five.

“And I warn you that I am a monogamist at heart if not in theory,” said Alabama, sensing his difficulty.

“Why?”

“A theory that the only emotion which cannot be repeated is the thrill of variety.”

“Are you wisecracking?”

“Of course. None of my theories work.”

“You’re as good as a book.”

“I am a book. Pure fiction.”

“Then who invented you?”

“The teller of the First National Bank, to pay for some mistakes he made in mathematics. You see, they would have fired him if he hadn’t got the money some way,” she invented.

“Poor man.”

“If it hadn’t been for him I should have had to go on being myself forever. And then I shouldn’t have had all these powers to please you.”

“You would have pleased me anyway.”

“What makes you think so?”

“You are a solid person at heart,” he said seriously.

Afraid of having compromised himself, he added hastily, “I thought your husband promised to join us.”

“My husband is up enjoying the stars behind the third lifeboat on the left-hand side.”

“You’re kidding! You couldn’t know; how could you?”

“Occult gifts.”

“You are an outrageous faker.”

“Obviously. And I’m very fed up with myself. Let’s talk about you.”

“I meant to make money in America.”

“Everybody intends to.”

“I had letters.”

“You can put them in your book when you write it.”

“I am not a writer.”

“All people who have liked America write books. You will get neurosis when you have recovered from your trip, then you will have something that had so much better be left unsaid that you will try to get it published.”

“I should like to write about my travels. I liked New York.”

“Yes, New York is like a Bible illustration, isn’t it?”

“Do you read the Bible?”

“The Book of Genesis. I love the part about God’s being so pleased with everything. I like to think that God is happy.”

“I don’t see how he could be.”

“I don’t either, but I suppose somebody has to feel every possible way about everything that happens. Nobody else claiming that particular attribute, we have accredited it to God—at least, Genesis has.”

The coast of Europe defied the Atlantic expanse; the tender slid into the friendliness of Cherbourg amidst the green and faraway bells and the clump of wooden shoes over the cobbles.

New York lay behind them. The forces that produced them lay behind them. That Alabama and David would never sense the beat of any other pulse half so exactly, since we can only recognize in other environments what we have grown familiar with in our own, played no part in their expectations.

“I could cry!” said David, “I want to get the band to play on the deck. It’s the most thrilling goddamned thing in the world—all the experiences of man lie there to choose from!”

“Selection,” said Alabama, “is the privilege for which we suffer in life.”

“It’s so magnificent! It’s glorious! We can have wine with our lunch!”

“Oh, Continent!” she apostrophized, “send me a dream!”

“You have one now,” said David.

“But where? It will only be the place where we were younger in the end.”

“That’s all any place is.”

“Crab!”

“Soapbox orator! I could bowl a bomb through the Bois de Boulogne!”

Passing Lady Sylvia at the douane, she called to them from a heap of fine underwear, a blue hot-water bag, a complicated electrical appliance, and twenty-four pairs of American shoes.

“You will come out with me tonight? I will show you the beautiful city of Paris to portray in your pictures.”

“No,” said David.

“Bonnie,” counselled Alabama, “if you walk into the trucks, they’ll almost certainly mash your feet, which would be neither ‘chic’ nor ‘élégante’—France, I am told, is full of such fine distinctions.”

The train bore them down through the pink carnival of Normandy, past the delicate tracery of Paris and the high terraces of Lyons, the belfries of Dijon and the white romance of Avignon into the scent of lemon, the rustle of black foilage, clouds of moths whipping the heliotrope dusk—into Provence, where people do not need to see unless they are looking for the nightingale.

2

The deep Greek of the Mediterranean licked its chops over the edges of our febrile civilization. Keeps crumbled on the gray hillsides and sowed the dust of their battlements beneath the olives and the cactus. Ancient moats slept bound in tangled honeysuckle; fragile poppies bled the causeways; vineyards caught on the jagged rocks like bits of worn carpet. The baritone of tired medieval bells proclaimed disinterestedly a holiday from time. Lavender bloomed silently over the rocks. It was hard to see in the vibrancy of the sun.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” said David. “It’s so utterly blue, except when you examine it. Then it’s gray and mauve and if you look closely, it’s harsh and nearly black. Of course, on close inspection, it’s literally an amethyst with opal qualities. What is it, Alabama?”

“I can’t see for the view. Wait a minute.” Alabama pressed her nose against the mossy cracks of the castle wall. “It’s really Chanel, Five,” she said positively, “and it feels like the back of your neck.”

“Not Chanel!” David protested. “I think it’s more robe de style. Get over there, I want to take your picture.”

“Bonnie, too?”

“Yes. I guess we’ll have to let her in.”

“Look at Daddy, privileged infant.”

The child wooed its mother with wide incredulous eyes.

“Alabama, can’t you tilt her a little bit? Her cheeks are wider than her forehead and if you could lean her a little bit forward, she wouldn’t look so much like the entrance to the Acropolis.”

“Boo, Bonnie,” Alabama essayed.

They both toppled over in a clump of heliotrope.

“My God! I’ve scratched its face. You haven’t got any Mercurochrome with you, have you?”

She inspected the sooty whirlpools that formed the baby’s knuckles.

“It doesn’t seem to be serious, but we ought to go home and disinfect, I suppose.”

“Baby home,” Bonnie pronounced ponderously, pushing the words between her teeth like a cook straining a puree.

“Home, home, home,” she chanted tolerantly, bobbing down the hill on David’s arm.

“There it is, my dear. ‘The Grand Hotel of Petronius and the Golden Isles.’ See?”

“I think, David, that maybe we should have gone to the Palace and the Universe. They have more palms in their garden.”

“And pass up a name like ours? Your lack of a historical sense is the biggest flaw in your intelligence, Alabama.”

“I don’t see why I should have to have a chronological mind to appreciate these white-powdered roads. We remind me of a troupe of troubadours, your carrying the baby like that.”

“Exactly. Please don’t pull Daddy’s ear. Have you ever seen such heat?”

“And the flies! I don’t know how people stand it.”

“Maybe we’d better move further up the coast.”

“These cobbles make you feel as if you had a peg leg. I’m going to get some sandals.”

They followed the pavings of the French Republic past the bamboo curtains of Hyères, past strings of felt slippers and booths of women’s underwear, past gutters flush with the lush wastage of the south, past the antics of exotic dummies inspiring brown Provençal faces to dream of the freedom of the Foreign Legion, past scurvy-eaten beggars and bloated clots of bougainvillea, dust and palms, a row of horse cabs, the toothpaste display of the village coiffeur exuding the smell of Chypre, and past the caserne which drew the town together like a family portrait will a vast disordered living room.

“There.”

David deposited Bonnie in the damp cool of the hotel lobby on a pile of last year’s Illustrated London News.

“Where’s Nanny?”

Alabama poked her head into the bilious plush of the lace parlor.

“Madame Tussaud’s is deserted. I s’pose she’s out gathering material for her British comparison table so when she gets back to Paris she can say, ‘Yes, but the clouds in Hyères were a touch more battleship gray when I was there with the David Knights.’ ”

“She’ll give Bonnie a sense of tradition. I like her.”

“So do I.”

“Where’s Nanny?” Bonnie rolled her eyes in alarm.

“Darling! She’ll be back. She’s out collecting you some nice opinions.”

Bonnie looked incredulous.

“Buttons,” she said, pointing to her dress. “I want some orange jluice.”

“Oh, all right—but you’ll find opinions will be much more useful when you grow up.”

David rang the bell.

“Can we have a glass of orange juice?”

“Ah, Monsieur, we are completely desolated. There aren’t any oranges in summer. It’s the heat; we had thought of closing the hotel since one can have no oranges because of the weather. Wait a minute, I’ll see.”

The proprietor looked like a Rembrandt physician. He rang the bell. A valet de chambre, who also looked like a Rembrandt physician, responded.

“Are there any oranges?” the proprietor asked.

“Not even one,” the man responded with gloomy emphasis.

“You see, Monsieur,” the proprietor announced in a tone of relief, “there is not even one orange.”

He rubbed his hands contentedly—the presence of oranges in his hotel would certainly have caused him much trouble.

“Orange jluice, orange jluice,” bawled the baby.

“Where in the hell is that woman?” shrieked David.

“Mademoiselle?” the proprietor asked. “But she is in the garden, under an olive that is over one hundred years old. What a splendid tree! I must show you.”

He followed them out of the door.

“Such a pretty little boy,” he said. “He will speak French. I have spoke very good English before.”

Bonnie’s femininity was the most insistent thing about her.

“I’m sure you have,” said David.

Nanny had constructed a boudoir out of the springy iron chairs. Sewing was scattered about, a book, several pairs of glasses, Bonnie’s toys. A spirit lamp burned on the table. The garden was completely inhabited. On the whole, it might have been an English nursery.

“I looked on the menu, Madam, and there was goat again, so I just stopped in at the butcher’s. I’m making Bonnie a little stew. This is the filthiest place, if you’ll pardon me, Madam. I don’t believe we shall be able to stand it.”

“We think it is too hot,” Alabama said apologetically. “Mr. Knight’s going to look for a villa further up the coast if we don’t find a house this afternoon.”

“I’m sure we could be better pleased. I have spent some time in Cannes with the Horterer-Collins, and we found it very comfortable. Of course, in summer, they go to Deauville.”

Alabama felt, somehow, that they, perhaps, should have gone to Deauville—some obligation on their parts to Nanny.

“I might try Cannes,” David said, impressed.

The deserted dining room buzzed with the turbulent glare of midday in the tropics. A decrepit English couple teetered over the rubbery cheese and soggy fruit. The old woman leaned across and distantly rubbed one finger over Bonnie’s flushed cheeks.

“So like my little granddaughter,” she said patronizingly.

Nanny bristled. “Madam, you will please not to stroke the baby.”

“I wasn’t stroking the baby. I was only touching her.”

“This heat has upset her stomach,” concluded Nanny, peremptorily.

“No dinner. I won’t have my dinner,” Bonnie broke the long silence of the English encounter.

“I don’t want mine either. It smells of starch. Let’s get the real estate man now, David.”

Alabama and David stumbled through the seething sun to the main square. An enchantment of lethargy overwhelmed the enclosure. The cabbies slept under whatever shade they could find, the shops were closed, no shadows broke the tenacious, vindictive glare. They found a sprawling carriage and managed to wake the driver by jumping on the step.

“Two o’clock,” the man said irritably. “I am closed till two o’clock!”

“Well, go to this address anyway,” David insisted. “We’ll wait.”

The cabby shrugged his shoulders reluctantly.

“To wait is ten francs an hour,” he argued disgruntled.

“All right. We are American millionaires.”

“Let’s sit on the robe,” said Alabama, “the cab looks full of fleas.”

They folded the brown army-issue blanket under their soaking thighs.

“Tiens! There is the Monsieur!” The cabby pointed indolently at a handsome meridional with a patch over one eye who was engrossed in removing the handle from his shop door directly across the way.

“We want to see a villa, the ‘Blue Lotus,’ which I understand is for rent,” David began politely.

“Impossible. For nothing in the world is it barely possible. I have not had my lunch.”

“Of course, Monsieur will allow me to pay for his free time——”

“That is different,” the agent beamed expansively. “Monsieur understands that since the war things are different and one must eat.”

“Of course.”

The rickety cab rolled along past fields of artichoke blue as spots of the hour’s intensity, through long stretches of vegetation shimmering in the heat like submarine growths. A parasol pine rose here and there in the flat landscape, the road wound hot and blinding ahead to the sea. The water, chipped by the sun, spread like a floor of luminous shavings in a workshop of light.

“There she is!” the man cackled proudly.

The “Blue Lotus” parched in a treeless expanse of red clay. They opened the door and stepped into the coolness of the shuttered hall.

“This is the master’s bedroom.”

On the huge bed lay a pair of batik pajamas and a chartreuse pleated nightgown.

“The casualness of life in this country amazes me,” Alabama said. “They obviously just spent the night and went off.”

“I wish we could live like that, without premeditation.”

“Let’s see the plumbing.”

“But, Madame, the plumbing is a perfection. You see?”

A massive carved door swung open on a Copenhagen toilet bowl with blue chrysanthemums climbing over the edge in a wild Chinese delirium. The walls were tiled with many-colored fishing scenes of Normandy. Alabama tentatively tested the brass rod designed to operate these pictorial fantasies.

“It doesn’t work,” she said.

The man raised his eyebrows Buddhistically.

“But! It must be because we have had no rain! Sometimes when it doesn’t rain, there is no water.”

“What do you do if it doesn’t rain again all summer?” David asked, fascinated.

“But then, Monsieur, it is sure to rain,” the agent smiled cheerfully.

“And in the meantime?”

“Monsieur is unnatural.”

“Well, we’ve got to have something more civilized than this.”

“We ought to go to Cannes,” Alabama said.

“I’ll take the first train when we get back.”

David telephoned her from St-Raphaël.

“Just the place,” he said, “for sixty dollars a month—garden, waterworks, kitchen stove, wonderful composition from the cupola—metal roofing of an aviation field, I understand—I’ll be over for you tomorrow morning. We can move right in.”

The day enveloped them in an armor of sunshine. They hired a limousine stuffy with reminiscences of state occasions. Paper nasturtiums fading in the cubism of a cut glass triangle obscured the view along the coast.

“Drive, drive, why can’t I drive?” Bonnie screamed.

“Because the golf sticks have to go there, and, David, you can get your easel back here.”

“Um—um—um,” the baby droned, content with the motion. “Nice, nice, nice.”

The summer ate its way into their hearts and crooned along the shaggy road. Tabulating the past, Alabama could find no real upheavals in spite of the fact that its tempo created the illusion that she lived in madcap abandon. Feeling so wonderful, she wondered why they had ever left home.

Three o’clock in July, and Nanny gently thinking of England from hilltops and rented motorcars and under all unusual circumstances, white roads and pines—life quietly humming a lullaby. Anyway, it was fun being alive.

“Les Rossignols” was back from the sea. The smell of tobacco flowers permeated the faded blue satin of the Louis XV parlor; a wooden cuckoo protested the gloom of the oak dining room; pine needles carpeted the blue and white tiles of the balcony; petunias fawned on the balustrade. The gravel drive wound round the trunk of a giant palm sprouting geraniums in its crevices and lost itself in the perspective of a red-rose arbor. The cream calcimined walls of the villa with its painted windows stretched and yawned in the golden shower of late sun.

“There’s a summerhouse,” said David proprietorily, “built of bamboo. It looks as if Gauguin had put his hand to landscape gardening.”

“It’s heavenly. Do you suppose there really is a rossignol?”

“Undoubtedly—every night on toast for supper.”

“Comme ça, Monsieur, comme ça,” Bonnie sang exultantly.

“Look! She can speak French already.”

“It’s a marvelous, marvelous place, this France. Isn’t it, Nanny?”

“I’ve lived here for twenty years, Mr. Knight, and I’ve never got to understand these people. Of course, I haven’t had much opportunity to learn French, being always with the better class of family.”

“Quite,” said David emphatically. Whatever Nanny said sounded like an elaborate recipe for making fudge.

“The ones in the kitchen,” said Alabama, “are a present from the house agent, I suppose.”

“They are—three magnificent sisters. Perhaps the Three Fates, who knows?”

Bonnie’s babbling rose to an exultant yell through the dense foliage.

“Swim! Now swim!” she cried.

“She’s thrown her doll in the goldfish pool,” observed Nanny excitedly. “Bad Bonnie! To treat little Goldilocks that way.”

“Her name’s Comme Ça,” Bonnie expostulated. “Did you see her swimming?”

The doll was just visible at the bottom of the sleek green water.

“Oh, we are going to be so happy away from all the things that almost got us but couldn’t quite because we were too smart for them!” David grabbed his wife about the waist and shoved her through the wide windows onto the tile floors of their new home. Alabama inspected the painted ceiling. Pastel cupids frolicked amidst the morning glories and roses in garlands swelled like goiters or some malignant disease.

“Do you think it will be as nice at it seems?” she said skeptically.

“We are now in Paradise—as nearly as we’ll ever get—there’s the pictorial evidence of the fact,” he said, following her eyes.

“You know, I can never think of a rossignol without thinking of the Decameron. Dixie used to hide it in her top drawer. It’s funny how associations envelop our lives.”

“Isn’t it? People can’t really jump from one thing to another, I don’t suppose—there’s always something carried over.”

“I hope it’s not our restlessness, this time.”

“We’ll have to have a car to get to the beach.”

“Sure. But tomorrow we’ll go in a taxi.”

Tomorrow was already bright and hot. The sound of a ProvenҪal gardener carrying on his passive resistance to effort woke them. The rake trailed lazily over the gravel; the maid put their breakfast on the balcony.

“Order us a cab, will you, daughter of this flowery republic?”

David was jubilant. It was unnecessary to be anything so dynamic before breakfast, commented Alabama privately with matinal cynicism.

“And so, Alabama, we have never known in our times the touch of so strong and sure a genius as we have before us in the last canvases of one David Knight! He begins work after a swim every day, and he continues until another swim at four o’clock refreshes his self-satisfaction.”

“And I luxuriate in this voluptuous air and grow fat on bananas and Chablis while David Knight grows clever.”

“Sure. A woman’s place is with the wine,” David approved emphatically. “There is art to be undone in the world.”

“But you’re not going to work all the time, are you?”

“I hope so.”

“It’s a man’s world,” Alabama sighed, measuring herself on a sunbeam. “This air has the most lascivious feel——”

The machinery of the Knights’ existence, tended by the three women in the kitchen, moved without protest through the balmy world while the summer puffed itself slowly to pompous exposition. Flowers bloomed sticky and sweet under the salon; the stars at night caught in the net of the pine tops. The garden trees said, “Whip—poor—will,” the warm black shadows said, “Whoo—oo.” From the windows of “Les Rossignols” the Roman arena at Fréjus swam in the light from the moon bulging low over the land like a full wineskin.

David worked on his frescoes; Alabama was much alone.

“What’ll we do, David,” she asked, “with ourselves?”

David said she couldn’t always be a child and have things provided for her to do.

A broken-down carryall transported them every day to the beach. The maid referred to the thing as la voiture and announced its arrival in the mornings with much ceremony during their brioche and honey. There was always a family argument about how soon it was safe to swim after a meal.

The sun played lazily behind the Byzantine silhouette of the town. Bathhouses and a dancing pavilion bleached in the white breeze. The beach stretched for miles along the blue. Nanny habitually established a British Protectorate over a generous portion of the sands.

“It’s bauxite makes the hills so red,” Nanny said. “And, Madam, Bonnie will need another bathing costume.”

“We can get it at the Galeries des Objectives Perdues,” Alabama suggested.

“Or the Occasion des Perspectives Oubliés,” said David.

“Sure. Or off a passing porpoise, or out of that man’s beard.”

Alabama indicated a lean burned figure in duck trousers with shiny ribs like an ivory Christ and faunlike eyes beckoning an obscene fantasy.

“Good morning,” the figure said formidably. “I have often seen you here.”

His voice was deep and metallic and swelled with the confidence of a gentleman.

“I am the proprietor of my little place. We have eating and there is dancing in the evenings. I am glad to welcome you to St-Raphaël. There are not many people in the summer, as you see, but we make ourselves very happy. My establishment would be honored if you would accept an American cocktail after your bath.”

David was surprised. He hadn’t expected a welcoming committee. It was as if they had passed a club election.

“With pleasure,” he said hastily. “Do we just come inside?”

“Yes, inside. Then I am Monsieur Jean to my friends! But you must surely meet the people, so charming people.” He smiled contemplatively and vanished in splinters on the sparkle of the morning.

“There aren’t any people,” Alabama said, staring about.

“Maybe he keeps them in bottles inside. He certainly looks enough like a genie to be capable of it. We’ll soon know.”

Nanny’s voice, ferocious in its disapproval of gin and genies, called Bonnie from over the sands.

“I said no! I said no! I said no!” The child raced to the water’s edge.

“I’ll get her, nurse.”

The David Knights precipitated themselves into the blue dye after the child.

“You ought to come out a sailor, somehow,” Alabama suggested.

“But I’m being Agamemnon,” protested David.

“I’m a little teeny fish,” Bonnie contributed. “A lovely fish, I am!”

“All right. You can play if you want to. Oh, my! Isn’t it wonderful to feel that nothing could disturb us now and life can go on as it should?”

“Perfectly, radiantly, gorgeously wonderful! But I want to be Agamemnon.”

“Please be a fish with me,” Bonnie inveigled. “Fishes are nicer.”

“Very well. I’ll be an Agamemnon fish. I can only swim with my legs, see?”

“But how can you be two things at once?”

“Because, my daughter, I am so outrageously clever that I believe I could be a whole world to myself if I didn’t like living in Daddy’s better.”

“The salt water’s pickled your brain, Alabama.”

“Ha! Then I shall have to be a pickled Agamemnon fish, and that’s much harder. It has to be done without the legs as well,” Alabama gloated.

“Much easier, I should think, after a cocktail. Let’s go in.”

The room was cool and dark after the glare of the beach. A pleasantly masculine smell of dried salt water lurked in the draperies. The rising waves of heat outside gave the bar a sense of motion as if the stillness of the interior were a temporary resting place for very active breezes.

“Combs, yes we have no combs today,” Alabama sang, inspecting herself in the mildewed mirror behind the bar. She felt so fresh and slick and salty! She decided the part was better on the other side of her head. In the dim obliteration of the ancient mirror she caught the outline of a broad back in the stiff white uniform of the French Aviation. Gesticulating Latin gallantries, indicating first her, then David, the glass blurred the pantomime. The head of the gold of a Christmas coin nodded urgently, broad bronze hands clutched the air in the vain hope that its tropical richness held appropriate English words to convey so Latin a meaning. The convex shoulders were slim and strong and rigid and slightly hunched in the man’s effort to communicate. He produced a small red comb from his pocket and nodded pleasantly to Alabama. As her eyes met those of the officer, Alabama experienced the emotion of a burglar unexpectedly presented with the combination of a difficult safe by the master of the house. She felt as if she had been caught red-handed in some outrageous act.

“Permettez?” said the man.

She stared.

“Permettez,” he insisted. “That means, in English, ‘permettez’ you see?”

The officer lapsed into voluble incomprehensible French.

“No understand,” said Alabama.

“Oui understand,” he repeated superiorly. “Permettez?” He bowed and kissed her hand. A smile of tragic seriousness lit the golden face, an apologetic smile—his face had the charm of an adolescent forced to enact unexpectedly in public some situation long rehearsed in private. Their gestures were exaggerated as if they were performing a role for two other people in the distance, dim spectres of themselves.

“I am not a germe,” he said astonishingly.

“Oui can see—I mean, it’s obvious,” she said.

“Regardez!” The man ran the comb effectively through his hair to demonstrate its functions.

“I’d love using it,” Alabama looked dubiously at David.

“This, Madame,” boomed Monsieur Jean, “is the Lieutenant Jacques Chevre-Feuille of the French Aviation. He is quite harmless and these are his friends, the Lieutenant Paulette et Madame, Lieutenant Bellandeau, Lieutenant Montague, who is a Corse, as you will see—and those over there are René and Bobbie of St-Raphaël, who are very nice boys.”

The grilled red lamps, the Algerian rugs precluding the daylight, the smell of brine and incense gave Jean’s Plage the sense of a secret place—an opium den or a pirate’s cave. Scimitars lined the walls; bright brass trays set on African drumheads glowed in the dark corners; small tables encrusted with mother-of-pearl accumulated the artificial twilight like coatings of dust.

Jacques moved his sparse body with the tempestuous spontaneity of a leader. Back of his flamboyant brilliance stretched his cohort; the fat and greasy Bellandeau who shared Jacques’ apartment and had matured in the brawls of Montenegro; the Corse, a gloomy romantic, intent on his own desperation, who flew his plane so low along the beach in the hope of killing himself that the bathers could have touched the wings; the tall, immaculate Paulette followed continually by the eyes of a wife out of Marie Laurencin. René and Bobbie protruded insistently from their white beach clothes and talked in undertones of Arthur Rimbaud. Bobbie pulled his eyebrows and his feet were flat and silent butler’s feet. He was older and had been in the war and his eyes were as gray and desolate as the churned spaces about Verdun—during that summer, René painted their rainwashed shine in all the lights of that varied sea. René was the artistic son of a Provençal avocat. His eyes were brown and consumed by the cold fire of a Tintoretto boy. The wife of an Alsatian chocolate manufacturer furtively brooded over the cheap phonograph and pandered loudly to her daughter Raphaël, burned black to the bone of her unforgotten, southern, sentimental origin. The white tight curls of two half-Americans in the early twenties, torn between Latin curiosity and Anglo-Saxon caution, hovered through the gloom like a cherub detail from a dark corner of a Renaissance frieze.

David’s pictorial sense rose in wild stimulation on the barbaric juxtapositions of the Mediterranean morning.

“So now I will buy the drinks, but they will have to be a Porto because I have no money, you see.” Despite Jacques’ grandiloquent attempts at English he made known his desires with whatever dramatic possibilities he found at hand for expansive gesture.

“Do you think he actually is a god?” Alabama whispered to David. “He looks like you—except that he is full of the sun, whereas you are a moon person.”

The lieutenant stood by her side experimentally handling things that she had touched, making tentative emotional connections between their persons like an electrician installing a complicated fuse. He gesticulated volubly to David and pretended a vast impassivity to Alabama’s presence, to hide the quickness of his interest.

“And so I will come to your home in my aeroplane,” he said generously, “and I will be here each afternoon to swim.”

“Then you must drink with us this afternoon,” said David, amused, “because now we’ve got to get back to lunch and there isn’t time for another.”

The rickety taxi poured them through the splendid funnels of ProvenҪal shade and scrambled them over the parched stretches between the vineyards. It was as if the sun had absorbed the coloring of the countryside to brew its sunset mixtures, boiling and bubbling the tones blindingly in the skies while the land lay white and devitalized awaiting the lavish mixture that would be spread to cool through the vines and stones in the late afternoon.

“Look, Madam, at the baby’s arms. We shall want a sunshade certainly.”

“Oh, Nanny, do let her tan! I love these beautiful brown people. They seem so free of secrets.”

“But not too much, Madam. They say it spoils the skin for afterwards, you know. We must always think of the future, Madam.”

“Well, I personally,” said David, “am going to grill myself to a high mulatto. Alabama, do you think it would be effeminate if I shaved my legs? They’d burn quicker.”

“Can I have a boat?” Bonnie’s eyes roved the horizon.

“The Aquitania, if you like, when I’ve finished my next picture.”

“It’s too démodé,” Alabama joined in, “I want a nice beautiful Italian liner with gallons of the Bay of Naples in the hold.”

“Reversion to type,” David said, “you’ve gone Southern again—but if I catch you making eyes at that young Dionysus, I’ll wring his neck, I warn you.”

“No danger. I can’t even speak intelligibly to him.”

A lone fly beat its brains against the light over the unsteady lunch table; it was a convertible billiard table. The holes in the felt top stuck up in bumps through the cloth. The Graves Monopole Sec was green and tepid and unappetizing colored by blue wineglasses. There were pigeons cooked with olives for lunch. They smelled of a barnyard in the heat.

“Maybe it would be nicer to eat in the garden,” suggested David.

“We should be devoured by insects,” said Nanny.

“It does seem silly to be uncomfortable in this lovely country,” agreed Alabama. “Things were so nice when we first came.”

“Well, they get worse and more expensive all the time. Did you ever find out how much a kilo is?”

“It’s two pounds, I believe.”

“Then,” stormed David, “we can’t have eaten fourteen kilos of butter in a week.”

“Maybe it’s half a pound,” said Alabama apologetically. “I hope you’re not going to spoil things over a kilo——”

“You have to be very careful, Madam, in dealing with the French.”

“I don’t see why,” expostulated David, “when you complain of having nothing to do, you can’t run this house satisfactorily.”

“What do you expect me to do? Every time I try to talk to the cook she scuttles down the cellar stairs and adds a hundred francs to the bill.”

“Well—if there’s pigeon again tomorrow I’m not coming to lunch,” David threatened. “Something has got to be done.”

“Madam,” said Nanny, “have you seen the new bicycles the help have bought since we arrived here?”

“Miss Meadow,” David interrupted abruptly, “would you mind helping Mrs. Knight with the accounts?”

Alabama wished David wouldn’t drag Nanny in. She wanted to think about how brown her legs were going to be and how the wine would have tasted if it had been cold.

“It’s the Socialists, Mr. Knight. They’re ruining the country. We shall have another war if they aren’t careful. Mr. Horterer-Collins used to say——”

Nanny’s clear voice went on and on. It was impossible to miss a word of the clear enunciation.

“That’s sentimental tommyrot,” David retorted irritably. “The Socialists are powerful because the country is in a mess already. Cause and effect.”

“I beg your pardon, sir, the Socialists caused the war, really, and now——” The crisp syllables expounded Nanny’s unlimited political opinions.

In the cool of the bedroom where they were supposed to be resting, Alabama protested.

“We can’t have that every day,” she said. “Do you think she’s gonna talk like that through every meal?”

“We can have them eat upstairs at night. I suppose she’s lonely. She’s been just sitting by herself on the beach every morning.”

“But it’s awful, David!”

“I know—but you needn’t complain. Suppose you had to be thinking of composition while it was going on. She’ll find somebody to unload herself on. Then it will be better. We mustn’t let externals ruin our summer.”

Alabama wandered in idleness from one room to another of the house; usually only the distant noise of a functioning ménage interrupted the solitude. This last noise was the worst of all—a fright. The villa must be falling to pieces.

She rushed to the balcony; David’s head appeared in the window.

The beating, drumming whirr of an aeroplane sounded above the villa. The plane was so low that they could see the gold of Jacques’ hair shining through the brown net about his head. The plane swooped malevolently as a bird of prey and soared off in a tense curve, high into the blue. Banking swiftly back, the wings glittering in the sun, it dropped in a breathless spiral, almost touching the tile roof. As the plane straightened itself, they saw Jacques wave with one hand and drop a small package in the garden.

“That damn fool will kill himself! It gives me heart failure,” protested David.

“He must be terribly brave,” said Alabama dreamily.

“Vain, you mean,” he expostulated.

“Voilà! Madame, Voilà! Voilà! Voilà!”

The excited maid presented the brown dispatch box to Alabama. There was no thought in the French fastnesses of her mind that it might have been for the masculine element of the family that a machine would fly so dangerously low to leave a message.

Alabama opened the box. On a leaf of squared notebook paper was written diagonally in blue pencil “Toutes mes amitiés du haut de mon avion. Jacques Chevre-Feuille.”

“What do you suppose it means?” Alabama asked.

“Just greetings,” David said. “Why don’t you get a French dictionary?”

Alabama stopped that afternoon at the librairie on the way to the beach. From rows of yellow-paper volumes she chose a dictionary and Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel in French to teach herself the language.

Beginning at four by prearrangement, the breeze blew a blue path through sea-drenched shadows at Jean’s. A three-piece version of a jazz band protested the swoop of the rising tide with the melancholia of American popular music. A triumphant rendering of “Yes, We Have No Bananas” brought several couples to their feet. Bellandeau danced in mock coquetry with the lugubrious Corsican; Paulette and Madame hurtled wildly through the intricacies of what they believed to be an American fox-trot.

“Their feet look like a tightrope walker’s gymnastics,” commented David.

“It looks fun. I’m going to learn to do it.”

“You’ll have to give up cigarettes and coffee.”

“I suppose. Will you teach me to do that, Monsieur Jacques?”

“I am a bad dancer. I have only danced with men in Marseilles. It is not for real men, dancing well.”

Alabama didn’t understand his French. It didn’t make any difference. The man’s valvating golden eyes drew her back and forth, back and forth obliviously through the great Republic’s lack of bananas.

“You like France?”

“I love France.”

“You cannot love France,” he said pretentiously. “To love France you must love a Frenchman.”

Jacques’ English was more adequate about love than about anything else. He pronounced the word “lahve” and emphasized it roundly as if he were afraid of its escaping him.

“I have bought a dictionary,” he said. “I will learn English.”

Alabama laughed.

“I’m learning French,” she said, “so I can love France more articulately.”

“You must see Arles. My mother was an Arlésienne,” he confided. “The Arlésienne women are very beautiful.”

The sad romanticism in his voice reduced the world to ineffable inconsequence. Together they skimmed the boom of the blue sea and gazed out over the tip of the blue horizon.

“I’m sure,” she murmured—what about, she had forgotten.

“And your mother?” he asked.

“My mother is old. She is very gentle. She spoiled me and gave me everything I wanted. Crying for things I couldn’t have grew to be quite characteristic of me.”

“Tell me about when you were a little girl,” he said tenderly.

The music stopped. He drew her body against him till she felt the blades of his bones carving her own. He was bronze and smelled of the sand and sun; she felt him naked underneath the starched linen. She didn’t think of David. She hoped he hadn’t seen; she didn’t care. She felt as if she would like to be kissing Jacques Chevre-Feuille on the top of the Arc de Triomphe. Kissing the white-linen stranger was like embracing a lost religious rite.

Nights after dinner David and Alabama drove into St-Raphaël. They bought a little Renault. Only the façade of the town was illuminated like a shallow stage set to cover a change of scene. The moon excavated fragile caverns under the massive plane trees back from the water. The village band played Faust and merry-go-round waltzes in a round pavilion by the sea. An itinerant street fair pitched its panoplies and the young Americans and the young officers swung into the southern heavens on the cable swings of chevaux de bois.

“A breeding place for whooping cough, that square, Madam,” Nanny admonished.

She and Bonnie waited in the car to avoid the germs or took slow walks in the swept place before the station. Bonnie became intractable and howled so lustily for the nightlife of the fair that finally they had to leave the nurse and child at home in the evenings.

Every night they met Jacques and his friends at the Café de la Flotte. The young men were uproarious and drank many beers and Portos and even champagne when David was paying, addressing the waiters boisterously as “Amiraux.” René drove his yellow Citroen up the steps of the Hotel Continental. The fliers were Royalists. Some were painters and some tried to write when they weren’t flying their aeroplanes and all were amateurs of garrison life. For flying at night they got extra pay. The red and green lights of Jacques and Paulette swept over the seafront in aerial fete very often. Jacques hated David to pay for his drinks and Paulette needed the money—he and Madame had a baby in Algiers with his parents.

The Riviera is a seductive place. The blare of the beaten blue and those white palaces shimmering under the heat accentuates things. That was before the days when High Potentates of the Train Bleu, First Muck-a-mucks of the Biarritz-Backs and Dictators-in-Chief to interior decorators employed its blue horizons for binding their artistic enterprises. A small horde of people wasted their time being happy and wasted their happiness being time beside the baked palms and vines brittlely clawing the clay banks.

Alabama read Henry James in the long afternoons. She read Robert Hugh Benson and Edith Wharton and Dickens while David worked. The Riviera afternoons are long and still and full of a consciousness of night long before evening falls. Boatloads of bright backs and the rhythmic chugging of motor launches tow the summer over the water.

“What can I do with myself?” she thought restlessly. She tried to make a dress; it was a failure.

Desultorily, she asserted herself on Nanny. “I think Bonnie is getting too much starch in her food,” she said authoritatively.

“I do not think so, Madam,” Nanny answered curtly. “No child of mine in twenty years has ever got too much starch.”

Nanny took the matter of the starch to David.

“Can’t you at least not interfere, Alabama?” he said. “Peace is absolutely essential to my work at present.”

When she was a child and the days slipped lazily past in the same indolent fashion, she had not thought of life as furnishing up the slow uneventful sequence, but of the Judge as meting it out that way, curtailing the excitement she considered was her due. She began to blame David for the monotony.

“Well, why don’t you give a party?” he suggested.

“Who’ll we ask?”

“I don’t know—the real estate lady and the Alsatian.”

“They’re horrible——”

“They’re all right if you think of them as Matisse.”

The women were too bourgeoise to accept. The rest of the party met in the Knights’ garden and drank Cinzano. Madame Paulette plucked the lilt of “Pas Sur la Bouche” from the tinny teakwood piano. The French talked volubly and incomprehensively to David and Alabama about the works of Fernand Léger and René Crevel. They bent from the waist as they spoke and were strained and formal in acknowledgment of the oddity of their presence there—all but Jacques. He dramatized his unhappy attraction to David’s wife.

“Aren’t you afraid when you do stunts?” Alabama asked.

“I am afraid whenever I go in my aeroplane. That is why I like it,” he answered defiantly.

If the sisters of the kitchen were wanting on weekdays they rose like July fireworks to special occasions. Venomous lobsters writhed in traps of celery, salads fresh as an Easter card sprouted in mayonnaise fields. The table was insistently wreathed in smilax; there was even ice, Alabama confirmed, on the cement floor of the basement.

Madame Paulette and Alabama were the only women. Paulette held himself aloof and watchful of his wife. He seemed to feel that dining with Americans was as risqué a thing to do as attending the Quatre-Arts ball.

“Ah, oui,” smiled Madame, “mais oui, certainement oui, et puis o—u—i.” It was like the chorus of a Mistinguett song.

“But in Monte-Negro—you know Monte-Negro, of course?” said the Corse—“all the men wear corsets.”

Somebody poked Bellandeau about the ribs.

Jacques kept his eyes fastened disconsolately on Alabama.

“In the French Navy,” he declaimed, “the Commandant is glad, proud to sink with his ship.—I am an officer of the French Marine!”

The party soared on the babble of French phrases senseless to Alabama; her mind drifted inconsequently.

“Do let me offer you a taste of the Doge’s dress,” she said, dipping into the currant jelly, “or a nice spoonful of Rembrandt?”

They sat in the breeze on the balcony and talked of America and Indo-Chine and France and listened to the screech and moan of night birds out of the darkness. The unjubilant moon was tarnished with much summer use in the salt air and the shadows black and communicative. A cat clambered over the balcony. It was very hot.

René and Bobbie went for ammonia to keep off the mosquitoes; Bellandeau went to sleep; Paulette went home with his wife, careful of his French proprieties. The ice melted on the pantry floor; they cooked eggs in the blackened iron pans of the kitchen. Alabama and David and Jacques drove in the copper dawn to Agay against the face of the cool golden morning into the patterns of the creamy sun on the pines and the white odors of closing flowers of the night.

“Those are the caves of Neathandral man,” David said, pointing to the purple hollows in the hills.

“No,” said Jacques, “it was at Grenoble that they found the remains.”

Jacques drove the Renault. He drove it like an aeroplane, with much speed and grinding and protesting tensions scattering echoes of the dawn like swarms of migrating birds.

“If this car were my own I’d drive into the ocean,” he said. They sped down the dim obliteration of Provence to the beach, following the languorously stretching road where it crinkled the hills like rumpled bedclothes.

It was going to cost five hundred francs at least to get the car repaired, thought David, as he deposited Jacques and Alabama at the pavilion to swim.

David went home to work till the light changed—he insisted he couldn’t paint anything but exteriors in the noon light of the Midi. He walked to the beach to join Alabama for a quick plunge before lunch. He found her and Jacques sitting in the sand like a couple of—well a couple of something, he said to himself distastefully. They were as wet and smooth as two cats who had been licking themselves. David was hot from the walk. The sun in the perspiration of his neck stung like a nettled collar.

“Will you go in with me again?” He felt he had to say something.

“Oh, David—it’s awfully chilly this morning. There’s going to be a wind.” Alabama employed an expletive tone as if she were brooking a child’s unwelcome interruption.

David swam self-consciously alone, looking back at the two figures glittering in the sun side by side.

“They are the two most presumptuous people I have ever seen,” he said to himself angrily.

The water was already cold from the wind. The slanting rays of the sun cut the Mediterranean to many silver slithers and served it up on the deserted beach. As David left them to dress he saw Jacques lean over and whisper to Alabama through the first gusts of a mistral. He could not hear what they were saying.

“You’ll come?” Jacques whispered.

“Yes—I don’t know. Yes,” she said.

When David came out of the cabin the blowing sand stung his eyes. Tears were pouring over Alabama’s cheeks, strained till the deep tan glowed yellow on her cheekbones. She tried to blame it on the wind.

“You’re sick, Alabama, insane. If you see that man any more, I’ll leave you here and go back to America alone.”

“You can’t do that.”

“You’ll see if I can’t!” he said threateningly.

She lay in the sand in the smarting wind, miserable.

“I’m going—he can take you home in his aeroplane.” David strode off. She heard the Renault leave. The water shone like a metal reflector under the cold white clouds.

Jacques came; he brought a Porto.

“I have been to get you a taxi,” he said. “If you like, I will not come here again.”

“If I do not come to your apartment day after tomorrow when he goes to Nice, you must not come again.”

“Yes——” He waited to serve her. “What will you say to your husband?”

“I’ll have to tell him.”

“It would be unwise,” said Jacques in alarm. “We must hang on to our benefits——”

The afternoon was harsh and blue. The wind swept cold clots of dust about the house. You could hardly hear yourself speaking out of doors.

“We don’t need to go to the beach after lunch, Nanny. It’s too cold to swim.”

“But, Madam, Bonnie gets so restless with this wind. I think we should go, Madam, if you don’t mind. We needn’t bathe—it makes a change, you know. Mr. Knight was willing to take us.”

There was nobody at all on the plage. The crystalline air parched her lips. Alabama lay sunning herself, but the wind blew the sun away before it warmed her body. It was unfriendly.

René and Bobbie strolled out of the bar.

“Hello,” said David shortly.

They sat down as if they shared some secret that might concern the Knight family.

“Have you noticed the flag?” said René.

Alabama turned in the direction of the aviation field.

The flag blew rigidly out at half-mast over the metallic cubistic roofs, brilliant in the thin light.

“Somebody is killed,” René went on. “A soldier say it is Jacques—flying in this mistral.”

Alabama’s world grew very silent as if it had stopped, as if an awful collision of astral bodies were imminent.

She rose vaguely. “I’ve got to go,” she said quietly. She felt cold and sick at her stomach. David followed her to the car.

He slammed the Renault angrily into gear. It wouldn’t go any faster.

“Can we go in?” he said to the sentry.

“Non, Monsieur.”

“There has been an accident—Could you tell me who it is?”

“It is against the rules.”

In the glare of a white sandy stretch before the walls, an avenue of oleanders bent behind the man in the mistral.

“We are interested to know if it was the Lieutenant Chevre-Feuille.”

The man scrutinized Alabama’s miserable face.

“That, Monsieur—I will see,” he said at last.

They waited interminably in the malevolent gusts of the wind.

The sentry returned. Courageous and proprietary, Jacques swung along behind him to the car, part of the sun and part of the French Aviation and part of the blue and the white collar of the beach, part of Provence and the brown people living by the rigid discipline of necessity, part of the pressure of life itself.

“Bonjour,” he said. He took her hand firmly as if he were dressing a wound.

Alabama was crying to herself.

“We had to know,” said David tensely as he started the car——“but my wife’s tears are for me.”

Suddenly David lost his temper.

“God damn it!” he shouted. “Will you fight this out?”

Jacques spoke steadily into Alabama’s face.

“I cannot fight,” he said gently. “I am much stronger than he.”

His hands gripping the side of the Renault were like iron mitts.

Alabama tried to see him. The tears in her eyes smeared his image. His golden face and the white linen standing off from him exhaling the gold glow of his body ran together in a golden blur.

“You couldn’t either,” she cried out savagely. “You couldn’t either beat him!”

Weeping, she flung herself on David’s shoulder.

The Renault shot furiously off into the wind. David drew the car short with a crash before Jean’s picket fence. Alabama reached for the emergency brake.

“Idiot!” David pushed her angrily away. “Keep your hands off those brakes!”

“I’m sorry I didn’t let him beat you to a pulp,” she yelled infuriated.

“I could have killed him if I had wanted,” said David contemptuously.

“Was it anything serious, Madam?”

“Just somebody killed, that’s all. I don’t see how they stand their lives!”

David went straight to the room at “Les Rossignols” that he had arranged as a studio. The soft Latin voices of two children gathering figs from the tree at the end of the garden drifted up on the air in a low hum lulled louder and softer by the rise and fall of the twilit wind.

After a long time, Alabama heard him shout out the window: “Will you get the hell out of that tree! Damn this whole race of Wops!”

They hardly spoke to each other at dinner.

“These winds are useful, though,” Nanny was saying. “They blow the mosquitoes inland and the atmosphere is so much clearer when they fall, don’t you find, Madam? But my, how they used to upset Mr. Horterer-Collins! He was like a raging lion from the moment the mistral commenced. You don’t feel it very much, do you, Madam?”

Hardened to a quiet determination to settle the row, David insisted on driving downtown after dinner.

René and Bobbie were alone at the café drinking verveine. The chairs were piled on the tables out of the mistral. David ordered champagne.

“Champagne is not good when there is the wind,” René advised—but he drank it.

“Have you seen Chevre-Feuille?”

“Yes, he tells me he goes to Indo-Chine.”

Alabama was afraid from his tone that David was going to fight if he found Jacques.

“When is he leaving?”

“A week—ten days. When he can get transferred.”

The lush promenade under the trees so rich and full of life and summer seemed swept of all its content. Jacques had passed over that much of their lives like a vacuum cleaner. There was nothing but a cheap café and the leaves in the gutter, a dog prowling about, and a Negro named Sans-Bas with a sabre cut over one cheek who tried to sell them a paper. That was all there was left of July and August.

David didn’t say what he wanted with Jacques.

“Perhaps he is inside,” René suggested.

David crossed the street.

“Listen, René,” Alabama said quickly, “you must see Jacques and tell him I cannot come—just that. You will do this for me?”

Compassion lit his dreamy, passionate face. René took her hand and kissed it.

“I am very sorry for you. Jacques is a good boy.”

“You are a good boy, too, René.”

Jacques was not on the beach next morning.

“Well, Madame,” Monsieur Jean greeted them. “You have had a nice summer?”

“It’s been lovely,” Nanny answered, “but I think Madam and Monsieur will soon have had enough of it here.”

“Well, the season will soon be over,” Monsieur Jean commented philosophically.

There were pigeons for lunch and the rubbery cheese. The maid fluttered about with the account book; Nanny talked too much.

“It has been very pleasant, I must say, here this summer,” she commented.

“I hate it. If you can have our things packed by tomorrow we’re going to Paris,” said David fiercely.

“But there’s a law in France that you must give the servants ten days’ notice, Mr. Knight. It’s an absolute law,” expostulated Nanny.

“I’ll give them money. For two francs, you could buy the President, the lousy Kikes!”

Nanny laughed, flustered by David’s violence. “They are certainly very pecuniary.”

“I’ll pack tonight. I’m going walking,” Alabama said.

“You won’t go into town without me, Alabama?”

Their resistance met and clung with the taut suspense of two people seeking mutual support in a fast dance turn.

“No, I promise you, David. I’ll take Nanny with me.”

She roamed through the pine forests and over the high roads back of the villa. The other villas were boarded up for the summer. The plane trees covered the driveways with leaves. The jade porcelain gods in front of the heathen cemetery seemed very indoor gods and out of place on the bauxite terrace. The roads were smooth and new up there to make walking easier for the British in winter. They followed a sandy path between the vineyards. It was just a wagon track. The sun bled to death in a red and purple hemorrhage—dark arterial blood dyeing the grape leaves. The clouds were black and twisted horizontally and the land spread biblical in the prophetic light.

“No Frenchman ever kisses his wife on the mouth,” said Nanny confidentially. “He has too much respect for her.”

They walked so far that Alabama carried Bonnie astride her back to rest the short legs.

“Git up, horsey, Mummy, why won’t you run?” the baby whined.

“Sh—sh—sh. I’m an old tired horse with hoof-and-mouth disease, darling.”

A peasant in the hot fields gestured lasciviously and beckoned to the women. Nanny was frightened.

“Can you imagine that, Madam, and we with a little child? I shall certainly speak to Mr. Knight. The world is not safe since the war.”

At sundown the tom-toms beat in the Senegalese camp—rites they performed for the dead in their monster-guarded burial ground.

A lone shepherd, brown and handsome, herded a thick drove of sheep along the stubbly tracks leading to the villa. They swept around Alabama and the nurse and child, whirling up the dust with their pattering feet.

“J’ai peur,” she called to the man.

“Oui,” he said gently, “vous avez peur! Gi—o.” He clucked the sheep on down the road.

They couldn’t get away from St-Raphaël until the end of the week. Alabama stayed at the villa and walked with Bonnie and Nanny.

Madame Paulette telephoned. Would Alabama come to see her in the afternoon? David said she could go to say good-bye.

Madame Paulette gave her a picture from Jacques and a long letter.

“I am very sorry for you,” Madame said. “We had not thought that it was so serious an affair—we had thought it was just an affair.”

Alabama could not read the letter. It was in French. She tore it in a hundred little pieces and scattered it over the black water of the harbor beneath the masts of many fishing boats from Shanghai and Madrid, Colombia and Portugal. Though it broke her heart, she tore the picture, too. It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever owned in her life, that photograph. What was the use of keeping it? Jacques Chevre-Feuille had gone to China. There wasn’t a way to hold on to the summer, no French phrase to preserve its rising broken harmonies, no hopes to be salvaged from a cheap French photograph. Whatever it was that she wanted from Jacques, Jacques took it with him to squander on the Chinese. You took what you wanted from life, if you could get it, and you did without the rest.

The sand on the beach was as white as in June, the Mediterranean as blue as ever from the windows of the train that extracted the Knights from the land of lemon trees and sun. They were on their way to Paris. They hadn’t much faith in travel nor a great belief in a change of scene as a panacea for spiritual ills; they were simply glad to be going. And Bonnie was glad. Children are always glad of something new, not realizing that there is everything in anything if the thing is complete in itself. Summer and love and beauty are much the same in Cannes or Connecticut. David was older than Alabama; he hadn’t really felt glad since his first success.

3

Nobody knew whose party it was. It had been going on for weeks. When you felt you couldn’t survive another night, you went home and slept and when you got back, a new set of people had consecrated themselves to keeping it alive. It must have started with the first boatloads of unrest that emptied themselves into France in 1927. Alabama and David joined in May, after a terrible winter in a Paris flat that smelled of a church chancery because it was impossible to ventilate. That apartment, where they had fastened themselves up from the winter rain, was a perfect breeding place for the germs of bitterness they brought with them from the Riviera. From out their windows the gray roofs before shaved the gray roofs behind like lightly grazing fencing foils. The gray sky came down between the chimneys in inverted ethereal Gothic dividing the horizon into spires and points which hung over their unrest like the tubes of a vast incubator. The etching of the balconies of the Champs-Elysées and the rain on the pavements about the Arc de Triomphe was all they could see from their red and gilt salon. David had a studio on the Left Bank in that quarter of the city beyond the Pont de l’Alma, where rococo apartment buildings and long avenues of trees give on colorless openings with no perspective.

There he lost himself in the retrospect of autumn disembodied from its months, from heat and cold and holidays, and produced his lullabies of recapitulation that drew vast crowds of the advance guard to the Salon des Indépendants. The frescoes were finished: this was a new, more personal, David on exhibit. You heard his name in bank lobbies and in the Ritz Bar, which was proof that people were saying it in other places. The steely concision of his work was making itself felt even in the lines of interior decoration. Des Arts Décoratifs carried a dining room after one of his interiors painted because of a gray anemone; the Ballet Russe accepted a décor—phantasmagoria of the light on the plage at St-Raphaël to represent the beginning of the world in a ballet called Evolution.

The rising vogue of the David Knights brought Dickie Axton flying symbolically across their horizons, scribbling over the walls of their prosperity a message from Babylon which they did not bother to read, being at that time engrossed in the odor of twilit lilacs along the Boulevard St-Germain and the veiling of the Place de la Concorde in the expensive mysticism of the Blue Hour.

The telephone rang and rang and rustled their dreams to pale Valhallas, Ermenonville, and the celestial twilight passages of padded hotels. As they slept in their lyric bed dreaming the will of the world to be probate, the bell rained on their consciousness like the roll of distant hoops; David grabbed the receiver.

“Hello. Yes, this is both the Knights.”

Dickie’s voice slid down the telephone wire from high-handed confidence to a low wheedle.

“I hope you’re coming to my dinner.” The voice descended by its teeth like an acrobat from the top of a circus tent. The limits of Dickie’s activities stopped only at the borders of moral, social, and romantic independence, so you can well imagine that her scope was not a small one. Dickie had at her beck and call a catalogue of humanity, an emotional casting agency. Her existence was not surprising in this age of Mussolinis and sermons from the mount by every passing Alpinist. For the sum of three hundred dollars she scraped the centuries’ historic deposits from under the nails of Italian noblemen and passed it off as caviar to Kansas débutantes; for a few hundreds more she opened the doors of Bloomsbury and Parnassus, the gates of Chantilly, or the pages of Debrett’s to America’s postwar prosperity. Her intangible commerce served up the slithered frontiers of Europe in a céleri-rave—Spaniards, Cubans, South Americans, even an occasional black floating through the social mayonnaise like bits of truffle. The Knights had risen to so exalted a point in the hierarchy of the “known” that they had become material for Dickie.

“You needn’t be so high-hat,” Alabama protested to David’s lack of enthusiasm. “All the people will be white—or were once.”

“We’ll come, then,” said David into the receiver.

Alabama twisted her body experimentally. The patrician sun of late afternoon spread itself aloofly over the bed where she and David untidily collected themselves.

“It’s very flattering,” she said, propelling herself to the bathroom, “to be sought after, but more provident, I suppose, to seek.”

David lay listening to the violent flow of the water and the quake of the glasses in their stands.

“Another jag!” he yelled. “I find I can get along very well without my basic principles, but I cannot sacrifice my weaknesses—one being an insatiability about jags.”

“What did you say about the Prince of Wales being sick?” called Alabama.

“I don’t see why you can’t listen when I’m talking to you,” David answered crossly.

“I hate people who begin to talk the minute you pick up a toothbrush,” she snapped.

“I said the sheets of this bed are actually scorching my feet.”

“But there isn’t any potash in the liquor over here,” said Alabama incredulously. “It must be a neurosis—have you a new symptom?” she demanded jealously.

“I haven’t slept in so long I would be having hallucinations if I could distinguish them from reality.”

“Poor David—what will we do?”

“I don’t know. Seriously, Alabama”—David lit a cigarette contemplatively—“my work’s getting stale. I need new emotional stimulus.”

Alabama looked at him coldly.

“I see.” She realized that she had sacrificed forever her right to be hurt on the glory of a Provençal summer. “You might follow the progress of Mr. Berry Wall through the columns of the Paris Herald,” she suggested.

“Or choke myself on a chiaroscuro.”

“If you are serious, David, I believe it has always been understood between us that we would not interfere with each other.”

“Sometimes,” commented David irrelevantly, “your face looks like a soul lost in the mist on a Scotch moor.”

“Of course, no allowance has been made in our calculations for jealousy,” she pursued.

“Listen, Alabama,” interrupted David, “I feel terrible; do you think we can make the grade?”

“I want to show off my new dress,” she said decisively.

“And I’ve got an old suit I’d like to wear out. You know we shouldn’t go. We should think of our obligations to humanity.” Obligations were to Alabama a plan and a trap laid by civilization to ensnare and cripple her happiness and hobble the feet of time.

“Are you moralizing?”

“No. I want to see what her parties are like. The last of Dickie’s soirées netted no profits to charity though hundreds were turned away at the gates. The Duchess of Dacne cost Dickie three months in America by well-placed hints.”

“They’re like all the others. You just sit down and wait for the inevitable, which is the only thing that never happens.”

The post-war extravagance which had sent David and Alabama and some sixty thousand other Americans wandering over the face of Europe in a game of hare without hounds achieved its apex. The sword of Damocles, forged from the high hope of getting something for nothing and the demoralizing expectation of getting nothing for something, was almost hung by the third of May.

There were Americans at night, and day Americans, and we all had Americans in the bank to buy things with. The marble lobbies were full of them.

Lespiaut couldn’t make enough flowers for the trade. They made nasturtiums of leather and rubber and wax gardenias and ragged robins out of threads and wires. They manufactured hardy perennials to grow on the meagre soil of shoulder straps and bouquets with long stems for piercing the loamy shadows under the belt. Modistes pieced hats together from the toy-boat sails in the Tuileries; audacious dressmakers sold the summer in bunches. The ladies went to the foundries and had themselves some hair cast and had themselves half-soled with the deep chrome fantasies of Helena Rubenstein and Dorothy Gray. They read off the descriptive adjectives on the menu-cards to the waiters and said, “Wouldn’t you like” and “Wouldn’t you really” to each other till they drove the men out to lose themselves in the comparative quiet of the Paris streets which hummed like the tuning of an invisible orchestra. Americans from other years bought themselves dressy house with collars and cuffs in Neuilly and Passy, stuffed themselves in the cracks of the rue du Bac like the Dutch boy saving the dikes. Irresponsible Americans suspended themselves on costly eccentricities like Saturday’s servants on a broken Ferris wheel and made so many readjustments that a constant addenda went on about them like the clang of a Potin cash register. Esoteric pelletiers robbed a secret clientele in the rue des Petits-Champs; people spent fortunes in taxis in search of the remote.

“I’m sorry I can’t stay, I just dropped in to say ‘hello,’ ” they said to each other and refused the table d’hôte. They ordered Veronese pastry on lawns like lace curtains at Versailles and chicken and hazelnuts at Fontainebleau where the woods wore powdered wigs. Discs of umbrellas poured over suburban terraces with the smooth round ebullience of a Chopin waltz. They sat in the distance under the lugubrious dripping elms, elms like maps of Europe, elms frayed at the end like bits of chartreuse wool, elms heavy and bunchy as sour grapes. They ordered the weather with a continental appetite, and listened to the centaur complain about the price of hoofs. There were bourgeois blossoms on the bill of fare and tall architectural blossoms on the horse chestnut and crystallized rosebuds to go with the Porto. The Americans gave indications of themselves but always only the beginning like some eternal exposition, a clef before a bar of music to be played on the minors of the imagination. They thought all French schoolboys were orphans because of the black dresses they wore, and those of them who didn’t know the meaning of the word “insensible” thought the French thought that they were crazy. All of them drank. Americans with red ribbons in their buttonholes read papers called the Eclaireur and drank on the sidewalks, Americans with tips on the races drank down a flight of stairs, Americans with a million dollars and a standing engagement with the hotel masseuses drank in suites at the Meurice and the Crillon. Other Americans drank in Montmartre, pour le soif and contre la chaleur and pour la digestion and pour se guérir. They were glad the French thought they were crazy.

Over fifty thousand francs’ worth of flowers had wilted to success on the altars of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires during the year.

“Maybe something will happen,” said David.

Alabama wished nothing ever would again but it was her turn to agree—they had evolved a tacit arrangement about waiting on each other’s emotions, almost mathematical like the trick combination of a safe, which worked by the mutual assumption that it would.

“I mean,” he pursued, “if somebody would come along to remind us about how we felt about things when we felt the way they remind us of, maybe it would refresh us.”

“I see what you mean. Life has begun to appear as tortuous as the sentimental writhings of a rhythmic dance.”

“Exactly. I want to make some protestations since I’m largely too busy to work very well.”

“Mama said ‘Yes’ and Papa said ‘Yes’ ” to the gramophone owners of France. “Ariel” passed from the title of a book to three wires on the housetop. What did it matter? It had already gone from a god to a myth to Shakespeare—nobody seemed to mind. People still recognized the word: “Ariel!” it was. David and Alabama hardly noticed the change.

In a Marne taxicab they clipped all the corners of Paris precipitous enough to claim their attention and descended at the door of the Hotel George-V. An atmosphere of convivial menace hung over the bar. Delirious imitations of Picabia, the black lines and blobs of a commercial attempt at insanity squeezed the shiplike enclosure till it communicated the sense of being corseted in a small space. The bartender inspected the party patronizingly. Miss Axton was an old customer, always bringing somebody new; Miss Dickie Axton, he knew. She’d been drinking in his bar the night she shot her lover in the Gare de l’Est. Alabama and David were the only ones he’d never seen before.

“And has Mademoiselle Axton completely recovered from so stupid a contretemps?”

Miss Axton affirmed in a magnetic, incisive voice that she had, and that she wanted a gin highball damn quick. Miss Axton’s hair grew on her head like the absentminded pencil strokes a person makes while telephoning. Her long legs struck forcefully forward as if she pressed her toes watchfully on the accelerator of the universe. People said she had slept with a Negro. The bartender didn’t believe it. He didn’t see where Miss Axton would have found the time between white gentlemen—pugilists, too, sometimes.

Miss Douglas, now, was a different proposition. She was English. You couldn’t tell whom she had slept with. She had even stayed out of the papers. Of course she had money, which makes sleeping considerably more discreet.

“We will drink the same as usual, Mademoiselle?” He smiled ingratiatingly.

Miss Douglas opened her translucent eyes; she was so much the essence of black chic that she was nothing but a dark aroma. Pale and transparent, she anchored herself to the earth solely by the tenets of her dreamy self-control.

“No, my friend, this time it’s Scotch and soda. I’m getting too much of a stomach for sherry flips.”

“There’s a scheme,” said Miss Axton, “you put six encyclopaedias on your stomach and recite the multiplication table. After a few weeks your stomach is so flat that it comes out at the back, and you begin life again hind part before.”

“Of course,” contributed Miss Douglas, punching herself where a shade of flesh rose above her girdle like fresh rolls from a pan, “the only sure thing is”—leaning across she sputtered something in Miss Axton’s ear. The two women roared.

“Excuse me,” finished Dickie hilariously, “and in England they take it in a highball.”

“I never exercise,” pronounced Mr. Hastings with unenthusiastic embarrassment. “Ever since I got my ulcers I’ve eaten nothing but spinach so I manage to avoid looking well that way.”

“A glum sectarian dish,” concluded Dickie sepulchrally.

“I have it with eggs and then with croutons and sometimes with——”

“Now, dear,” interrupted Dickie, “you mustn’t excite yourself.” Blandly explaining, she elaborated. “I have to mother Mr. Hastings; he’s just come out of an asylum, and when he gets nervous he can’t dress or shave himself without playing his phonograph. The neighbors have him locked up whenever it happens, so I have to keep him quiet.”

“It must be very inconvenient,” muttered David.

“Frightfully so—travelling all the way to Switzerland with all those discs, and ordering spinach in thirty-seven different languages.”

“I’m sure Mr. Knight could tell us some way of staying young,” suggested Miss Douglas. “He looks about five years old.”

“He’s an authority,” said Dickie, “a positive authority.”

“What about?” inquired Hastings skeptically.

“Authorities are all about women this year,” said Dickie.

“Do you care for Russians, Mr. Knight?”

“Oh, very much. We love them,” said Alabama. She had a sense that she hadn’t said anything for hours and that something was expected of her.

“We don’t,” said David. “We don’t know anything about music.”

“Jimmie,” Dickie seized the conversation rapaciously, “was going to be a celebrated composer, but he had to take a drink every sixteen measures of counterpoint to keep the impetus of the thing from falling and his bladder gave out.”

“I couldn’t sacrifice myself for success the way some people do,” protested Hastings querulously implying that David had sold himself, somehow, to something.

“Naturally. Everybody knows you anyway—as the man without any bladder.”

Alabama felt excluded by her lack of accomplishment. Comparing herself with Miss Axton’s elegance, she hated the reticent solidity, the savage sparse competence of her body—her arms reminded her of a Siberian branch railroad. Compared with Miss Douglas’ elimination, her Patou dress felt too big along the seams. Miss Douglas made her feel that there was a cold cream deposit at the neckline. Slipping her fingers into the tray of salted nuts, she addressed the barman dismally, “I should think people in your profession would drink themselves to death.”

“Non, Madame. I did use to like a good sidecar but that was before I became so well-known.”

The party poured out into the Paris night like dice shaken from a cylinder. The pink flare from the streetlights tinted the canopy scalloping of the trees to liquid bronze: those lights are one of the reasons why the hearts of Americans bump spasmodically at the mention of France; they are identical with the circus flares of our youth.

The taxi careened down the boulevard along the Seine. Careening and swerving, they passed the brittle mass of Notre-Dame, the bridges cradling the river, the pungence of the baking parks, the Norman towers of the Department of State, the pungence of the baking parks, the bridges cradling the river, the brittle mass of Notre-Dame, sliding back and forth like a repeated newsreel.

The Ile St-Louis is boxed by many musty courtyards. The entryways are paved with the black and white diamonds of the Sinister Kings and grilles dissect the windows. East Indians and Georgians serve the deep apartments opening on the river.

It was late when they arrived at Dickie’s.

“So, as a painter,” Dickie said as she opened the door, “I wanted your husband to meet Gabrielle Gibbs. You must, sometime; if you’re knowing people.”

“Gabrielle Gibbs,” echoed Alabama, “of course, I’ve heard of her.”

“Gabrielle’s a half-wit,” continued Dickie calmly, “but she’s very attractive if you don’t feel like talking.”

“She has the most beautiful body,” contributed Hastings, “like white marble.”

The apartment was deserted; a plate of scrambled eggs hardened on the centre table; a coral evening cape decorated a chair.

“Qu’est-ce tu fais ici?” said Miss Gibbs feebly from the bathroom floor as Alabama and Dickie penetrated the sanctuary.

“I can’t speak French,” Alabama answered.

The girl’s long blonde hair streamed in chiselled segments about her face, a platinum wisp floated in the bowl of the toilet. The face was as innocent as if she had just been delivered from the taxidermist’s.

“Quelle dommage,” she said laconically. Twenty diamond bracelets clinked against the toilet seat.

“Oh, dear,” said Dickie philosophically, “Gabrielle can’t speak English when she’s drunk. Liquor makes her highbrow.”

Alabama appraised the girl; she seemed to have bought herself in sets.

“Christ,” the inebriate remarked to herself morosely, “etait né en quatre cent Anno Domini. C’etait vraiment très dommage.” She gathered herself together with the careless precision of a scene-shifter, staring skeptically into Alabama’s face from eyes as impenetrable as the background of an allegorical painting.

“I’ve got to get sober.” The face quickened to momentary startled animation.

“You certainly do,” Dickie ordered. “There’s a man outside such as you have never met before especially lured here by the prospect of meeting you.”

“Anything can be arranged in the toilet,” Alabama thought to herself. “It’s the woman’s equivalent for the downtown club since the war.” She’d say that at table, she thought.

“If you’ll leave me I’ll just take a bath,” Miss Gibbs proposed majestically.

Dickie swept Alabama out into the room like a maid gathering dust off the parlor floor.

“We think,” Hastings was saying in a tone of finality, “that there’s no use working over human relations.”

He turned accusingly to Alabama. “Just who is this hypothetical we?”

Alabama had no explanation to offer. She was wondering if this was the time to use the remark about the toilet when Miss Gibbs appeared in the doorway.

“Angels,” cried the girl, peering about the room.

She was as dainty and rounded as a porcelain figure; she sat up and begged; she played dead dog, burlesquing her own ostentation attentively as if each gesture were a configuration in some comic dance she composed as she went along and meant to perfect late. It was obvious that she was a dancer—clothes never become part of their sleek bodies. A person could have stripped Miss Gibbs by pulling a central string.

“Miss Gibbs!” said David quickly. “Do you remember the man who wrote you all those mash notes back in 1920?”

The fluttering eyes ruminated over the scene uncritically. “So,” she said, “it is you whom I am to meet. But I’ve heard you were in love with your wife.”

David laughed. “Slander. Do you disapprove?”

Miss Gibbs withdrew behind the fumes of Elizabeth Arden and the ripples of a pruned international giggle. “It seems rather cannibalistic in these days.” The tone changed to one of exaggerated seriousness; her personality was alive like a restless pile of pink chiffon in a breeze.

“I dance at eleven, and we must dine if you ever had that intention. Paris!” she sighed—“I’ve been in a taxi since last week at half-past four.”

From the long trestle table a hundred silver knives and forks signalled the existence of as many million dollars in curt cubistic semaphore. The grotesquerie of fashionable tousled heads and the women’s scarlet mouths opening and gobbling the candlelight like ventriloquists’ dummies brought the quality of a banquet of a mad, mediæval monarch to the dinner. American voices whipped themselves to a frenzy with occasional lashings of a foreign tongue.

David hung over Gabrielle. “You know,” Alabama heard the girl say, “I think the soup needs a little more eau de cologne.”

She was going to have to overhear Miss Gibbs’ line all during dinner, which fact considerably hampered her own.

“Well,” she began bravely—“the toilet for women——”

“It’s an outrage—a conspiracy to cheat us,” said the voice of Miss Gibbs. “I wish they’d use more aphrodisiac.”

“Gabrielle,” yelled Dickie, “you’ve no idea how expensive such things are since the war.”

The table achieved a shuttlecock balance which gave the illusion of looking out on the world from a fast-flying train window. Immense trays of ornamental foods passed under their skeptical distraught eyes.

“The food,” said Hastings crabbily, “is like something Dickie found in a geologist’s excavation.”

Alabama decided to count on his being cross at the right point; he was always a little bit cross. She had almost thought of something to say when David’s voice floated up like driftwood on a tidal wave.

“A man told me,” he was saying to Gabrielle, “that you have the most beautiful blue veins all over your body.”

“I was thinking, Mr. Hastings,” said Alabama tenaciously, “that I would like somebody to lock me up in a spiritual chastity belt.”

Having been brought up in England, Hastings was intent on his food.

“Blue ice cream!” he snorted contemptuously. “Probably frozen New England blood extracted from the world by the pressure of modern civilization on inherited concepts and acquired traditions.”

Alabama went back to her original premise that Hastings was hopelessly calculating.

“I wish,” said Dickie unpleasantly, “that people would not flagellate themselves with the food when they’re dining with me.”

“I have no historical sense! I am an unbeliever!” shouted Hastings. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“When Father was in Africa,” interrupted Miss Douglas, “they climbed inside the elephant and ate the entrails with their hands—at least, the Pygmies did; Father took pictures.”

“And,” said David’s voice excitedly, “he said that your breasts were like marble dessert—a sort of blancmange, I presume.”

“It would be quite an experience,” yawned Miss Axton idly, “to seek stimulation in the church and asceticism in sex.”

The party lost body with the end of dinner—the people, intent on themselves in the big living room, moved about like officials under masks in an operating room. A visceral femininity suffused the umber glow.

Night lights through the windows glittered miniature and precise as carvings of stars in a sapphire bottle. Quiet sound from the street rose above the party’s quiescence. David passed from one group to another, weaving the room into a lacy pattern, draping its substance over Gabrielle’s shoulders.

Alabama couldn’t keep her eyes off them. Gabrielle was the center of something; there was about her that suspension of direction which could only exist in a centre. She lifted her eyes and blinked at David like a complacent white Persian cat.

“I imagine you wear something startling and boyish underneath your clothes,” David’s voice droned on, “BVD’s or something.”

Resentment flared in Alabama. He’d stolen the idea from her. She’d worn silk BVD’s herself all last summer.

“Your husband’s too handsome,” said Miss Axton, “to be so well known. It’s an unfair advantage.”

Alabama felt sick at her stomach—controllably, but too sick to answer—champagne is a filthy drink.

David opened and closed his personality over Miss Gibbs like the tentacles of a carnivorous maritime plant. Dickie and Miss Douglas leaning against the mantel suggested the weird arctic loneliness of totem poles. Hastings played the piano too loud. The noise isolated them all from each other.

The doorbell rang and rang.

“It must be the taxis come to take us to the ballet,” Dickie sighed with relief.

“Stravinsky is conducting,” supplied Hastings. “He’s a plagiarist,” he added lugubriously.

“Dickie,” said Miss Gibbs peremptorily, “could you just leave me the key? Mr. Knight will see me to the Acacias—that is, if you don’t mind.” She beamed on Alabama.

“Mind? Why should I?” Alabama answered disagreeably. She wouldn’t have minded if Gabrielle had been unattractive.

“I don’t know. I’m in love with your husband. I thought I’d try to make him if you didn’t mind—of course, I’d try anyway—he’s such an angel.” She giggled. It was a sympathetic giggle covering any unexpected failure in its advance apology.

Hastings helped Alabama with her coat. She was angry about Gabrielle—Gabrielle made her feel clumsy. The party burrowed into their wraps.

The lamps swung and swayed soft as the ribbons of a Maypole along the river; the spring sniggered quietly to itself on the street corners.

“But what a ‘lahvely’ night!” Hastings proffered facetiously.

“Weather is for children.”

Somebody mentioned the moon.

“Moons?” said Alabama contemptuously. “They’re two for five at the five-and-ten, full or crescent.”

“But this is an especially nice one, Madam. It has an especially fashionable way of looking at things!”

In her deepest moods of discontent, Alabama, on looking back, found the overlying tempo of that period as broken and strident as trying to hum a bit of La Chatte. Afterwards, the only thing she could place emotionally was her sense of their all being minor characters and her dismay at David’s reiterance that many women were flowers—flowers and desserts, love and excitement, and passion and fame! Since St-Raphaël she had had no uncontested pivot from which to swing her equivocal universe. She shifted her abstractions like a mechanical engineer might surveying the growing necessities of a construction.

The party was late at the Châtelet. Dickie hustled them up the converging marble stairs as if she directed a processional to Moloch.

The décor swarmed in Saturnian rings. Spare, immaculate legs and a consciousness of rib, the vibrant suspension of lean bodies precipitated on the jolt of reiterant rhythmic shock, the violins’ hysteria, evolved themselves to a tortured abstraction of sex. Alabama’s excitement rose with the appeal to the poignancy of a human body subject to its physical will to the point of evangelism. Her hands were wet and shaking with its tremolo. Her heart beat like the fluttering wings of an angry bird.

The theatre settled in a slow nocturne of plush culture. The last strain of the orchestra seemed to lift her off the earth in inverse exhilaration—like David’s laugh, it was, when he was happy.

Down the stairs many girls looked back at important men with silver-fox hair from the marble balustrade and influential men looked from side to side jingling things in their pockets—private lives and keys.

“There is the princess,” said Dickie. “Shall we take her along? She used to be very famous.”

A woman with a shaved head and the big ears of a gargoyle paraded a Mexican hairless through the lobby.

“Madame used to be in the ballet until her husband exhausted her knees so she couldn’t dance,” went on Dickie, introducing the lady.

“It is many years since my knees have grown quite ossified,” the woman said plaintively.

“How did you manage?” said Alabama breathlessly. “How did you get in the ballet? And get to be important?”

The woman regarded her with velvety bootblack’s eyes, begging the world not to forget her, that she herself might exist oblivious.

“But I was born in the ballet.” Alabama accepted the remark as if it were an explanation of life.

There were many dissensions about where to go. As a compliment to the Princess the party chose a Russian boîte. The voice of a fallen aristocracy tethered its wails to the flexible notes of tzigane guitars; the low clang of bottles against champagne buckets jangled the tone of the dungeon of pleasure like the lashing of spectral chains. Cold-storage necks and throats like vipers’ fangs pierced the ectoplasmic light; eddying hair whirled about the shallows of the night.

“Please, Madame,” Alabama persisted intently, “would you give me a letter to whoever trains the ballet? I would do anything in the world to learn to do that.”

The shaved head scanned Alabama enigmatically.

“Whatever for?” she said. “It is a hard life. One suffers. Your husband could surely arrange——”

“But why should anyone want to do that?” Hastings interrupted. “I’ll give you the address of a Black Bottom teacher—of course, he’s colored, but nobody cares any more.”

“I do,” said Miss Douglas. “The last time I went out with Negroes I had to borrow from the headwaiter to pay the check. Since then I’ve drawn the color line at the Chinese.”

“Do you think, Madame, that I am too old?” Alabama persisted.

“Yes,” said the Princess briefly.

“They live on cocaine anyway,” said Miss Douglas.

“And pray to Russian devils,” added Hastings.

“But some of them do lead actual lives, I believe,” said Dickie.

“Sex is such a poor substitute,” sighed Miss Douglas.

“For what?”

“For sex, idiot.”

“I think,” said Dickie surprisingly, “that it would be the very thing for Alabama. I’ve always heard she was a little peculiar—I don’t mean actually batty—but a little difficult. An art would explain. I really think you ought, you know,” she said decisively. “It would be almost as exotic as being married to a painter.”

“What do you mean ‘exotic’?”

“Running around caring about things—of course, I hardly know you, but I do think dancing would be an asset if you’re going to care anyhow. If the party got dull you could do a few whirlygigs.” Dickie illustrated her words by gouging a hole in the tablecloth with her fork, “like that!” she finished enthusiastically. “I can see you now!”

Alabama visualized herself suavely swaying to the end of a violin bow, spinning on its silver bobbin, the certain disillusions of the past into uncertain expectancies of the future. She pictured herself as an amorphous cloud in a dressing room mirror which would be framed with cards and papers, telegrams and pictures. She followed herself along a stone corridor full of electric switches and signs about smoking, past a water cooler and a pile of Lily Cups and a man in a tilted chair to a gray door with a stencilled star.

Dickie was a born promoter. “I’m sure you can do it—you certainly have the body!”

Alabama went secretly over her body. It was rigid, like a lighthouse. “It might do,” she mumbled, the words rising through her elation like a swimmer coming up from a deep dive.

“Might?” echoed Dickie with conviction. “You could sell it to Cartier’s for a gold mesh sweatshirt!”

“Who can give me a letter to the necessary people?”

“I will, my dear—I have all the unobtainable entrées in Paris. But it’s only fair to warn you that the gold streets of heaven are hard on the feet. You’d better take along a pair of crepe soles when you’re planning the trip.”

“Yes,” Alabama agreed unhesitantly. “Brown, I suppose, because of the gutters—I’ve always heard stardust shows up on the white.”

“It’s a tomfool arrangement,” said Hastings abruptly. “Her husband says she can’t even carry a tune!”

Something must have happened to make the man so grouchy—or maybe it was that nothing had. They were all grouchy, nearly as much so as herself. It must be nerves and having nothing to do but write home for money. There wasn’t even a decent Turkish bath in Paris.

“What have you been doing with—yourself?” she said.

“Using up my war medals for pistol practice targets,” he answered acidly.

Hastings was as sleek and brown as pulled molasses candy. He was an intangible reprobate, discouraging people and living like a moral pirate. Many generations of beautiful mothers had endowed him with an inexhaustible petulance. He wasn’t half as good company as David.

“I see,” said Alabama. “The arena is closed today, since the matador had to stay home and write his memoirs. The three thousand people can go to the movies instead.”

Hastings was annoyed at the tartness in her tone.

“Don’t blame me,” he said, “about Gabrielle’s borrowing David.” Seeing the earnestness in her face he continued helpfully, “I don’t suppose you’d want me to make love to you?”

“Oh, no, it’s quite all right—I like martyrdom.”

The small room smothered in smoke. A powerful drum beleaguered the drowsy dawn; bouncers from other cabarets drifted in for their morning supper.

Alabama sat quietly humming, “Horses, Horses, Horses,” in a voice like the whistle of boats putting out to sea in a fog.

“This is my party,” she insisted as the check appeared. “I’ve been giving it for years.”

“Why didn’t you invite your husband?” said Hastings maliciously.

“Damn it,” said Alabama hotly. “I did—so long ago that he forgot to come.”

“You need somebody to take care of you,” he said seriously. “You’re a man’s woman and need to be bossed. No, I mean it,” he insisted when Alabama began to laugh.

Nourishing his roots on the disingenuous expectations of ladies whose exploits permitted them a remembrance of the fairy tales, Alabama concluded that he was nevertheless not a prince.

“I was just going to begin doing it myself,” she chuckled. “I made a date with the Princess and Dickie to arrange for a future. In the meantime, it is exceedingly difficult to direct a life which has no direction.”

“You’ve a child, haven’t you?” he suggested.

“Yes,” she said, “there’s the baby—life goes on.”

“This party,” said Dickie, “has been going on forever. They’re saving the signatures on the earliest checks for the war museum.”

“What we need is new blood in the party.”

“What we all need,” said Alabama impatiently, “is a good——”

The dawn swung over the Place Vendôme with the slow silver grace of a moored dirigible. Alabama and Hastings spilled into the Knights’ gray apartment on the morning like a shower of last night’s confetti shaken from the folds of a cloak.

“I thought David would be at home,” she said, searching the bedroom.

“I didn’t,” Hastings mocked. “For I, thy God, am a Jewish God, Baptist God, Catholic God——”

She had wanted to cry for a long time, she realized suddenly. In the weary stuffiness of the salon she collapsed. Sobbing and shaking, she did not lift her face when David finally stumbled into the dry, hot room. She lay sprawled like a damp wrung towel over the windowsill, like the transparent shed carcass of a brilliant insect.

“I suppose you’re awfully angry,” he said.

Alabama didn’t speak.

“I’ve been out all night,” explained David cheerfully, “on a party.”

She wished she could help David to seem more legitimate. She wished she could do something to keep everything from being so undignified. Life seemed so uselessly extravagant.

“Oh, David,” she sobbed. “I’m much too proud to care——pride keeps me from feeling half the things I ought to feel.”

“Care about what? Haven’t you had a good time?” mumbled David placatively.

“Perhaps Alabama’s angry about my not getting sentimental about her,” said Hastings, hastily extricating himself. “Anyway I’ll just run along if you don’t mind. It must be quite late.”

The morning sun shone brightly through the windows.

For a long time she lay sobbing. David took her on his shoulder. Under his arms smelled warm and clean like the smoke of a quiet fire burning in a peasant’s mountain cottage.

“There’s no use explaining,” he said.

“Not the slightest.”

She tried to see him through the early dusk.

“Darling!” she said, “I wish I could live in your pocket.”

“Darling,” answered David sleepily, “there’d be a hole you’d forgotten to darn and you’d slip through and be brought home by the village barber. At least, that’s been my experience with carrying girls about in my pockets.”

Alabama thought she’d better put a pillow under David’s head to keep him from snoring. She thought he looked like a little boy who had just been washed and brushed by a nurse a few minutes before. Men, she thought, never seem to become the things they do, like women, but belong to their own philosophic interpretations of their actions.

“I don’t care,” she repeated convincingly to herself: as neat an incision into the tissue of life as the most dexterous surgeon could hope to produce over a poisoned appendix. Filing away her impressions like a person making a will, she bequeathed each passing sensation to that momentary accumulation of her self, the present, that filled and emptied with the overflow.

It’s too late in the morning for peccadilloes; the sun bathes itself with the night’s cadavers in the typhus-laden waters of the Seine; the market carts have long since rumbled back to Fontainebleau and St-Cloud; the early operations are done in the hospitals; the inhabitants of the Ile de la Cité have had their bowl of café au lait and the night chauffeurs un verre. The Paris cooks have brought down the refuse and brought up the coal, and many people with tuberculosis wait in the damp bowels of the earth for the Metro. Children play in the grassplots about the Tour Eiffel and the white floating veils of English nannies and the blue veils of the French nounous flap out the news that all is well along the Champs-Elysées. Fashionable women powder their noses in their Porto glasses under the trees of the Pavilion Dauphine, just now opening its doors to the creak of Russian leather riding boots. The Knights’ femme de chambre has orders to wake her masters in time for lunch in the Bois de Boulogne.

When Alabama tried to get up she felt nervous, she felt monstrous, she felt bilious.

“I can’t stand this any longer,” she screamed at the dozing David. “I don’t want to sleep with the men or imitate the women, and I can’t stand it!”

“Look out, Alabama, I’ve got a headache,” David protested.

“I won’t look out! I won’t go to lunch! I’m going to sleep till time to go to the studio.”

Her eyes glowed with the precarious light of a fanatic determination. There were white triangles under her jawbone and blue rings around her neck. Her skin smelled of dry dirty powder from the night before.

“Well, you can’t sleep sitting up,” he said.

“I can do exactly as I please,” she said; “anything! I can sleep when I’m awake if I want to!”

David’s delight in simplicity was something very complex that a simple person would never have understood. It kept him out of many arguments.

“All right,” he said, “I’ll help you.”

The macabre who lived through the war have a story they love to tell about the soldiers of the Foreign Legion giving a ball in the expanses around Verdun and dancing with the corpses. Alabama’s continued brewing of the poisoned filter for a semiconscious banquet table, her insistence on the magic and glamour of life when she was already feeling its pulse like the throbbing of an amputated leg, had something of the same sinister quality.

Women sometimes seem to share a quiet, unalterable dogma of persecution that endows even the most sophisticated of them with the inarticulate poignancy of the peasant. Compared to Alabama’s, David’s material wisdom was so profound that it gleamed strong and harmonious through the confusion of these times.

“Poor girl,” he said, “I understand. It must be awful just waiting around eternally.”

“Aw, shut up!” she answered ungratefully. She lay silent for a long time. “David,” she said sharply.

“Yes.”

“I am going to be as famous a dancer as there are blue veins over the white marble of Miss Gibbs.”

“Yes, dear,” agreed David noncommittally.

III

1

The High parabolas of Schumann fell through the narrow brick court and splashed against the red walls in jangling crescendo. Alabama traversed the dingy passage behind the stage of the Olympia Music Hall. In the gray gloom the name of Raquel Meller faded across a door marked with a scaling gold star; the paraphernalia of a troupe of tumblers obstructed the stairway. She mounted seven flights of stairs worn soft and splintery with the insecure passage of many generations of dancers and opened the studio door. The hydrangea blue of the walls and the scrubbed floor hung from the skylight like the basket of a balloon suspended in the ether. Effort and aspiration, excitement, discipline, and an overwhelming seriousness flooded the vast barn of a room. A muscular girl stood in the centre of this atmosphere winding the ends of space about the rigidity of her extended thigh. Round and round she went, and, dropping the thrill of the exciting spiral to the low, precise organization of a lullaby, brought herself to an orgastic pause. She walked awkwardly across to Alabama.

“I have a lesson with Madame at three,” Alabama addressed the girl in French. “It was arranged by a friend.”

“She is coming soon,” the dancer said with an air of mockery. “You will get ready, perhaps?”

Alabama couldn’t decide whether the girl was ridiculing the world in general or Alabama in particular, or, perhaps, herself.

“You have danced a long while?” asked the dancer.

“No. This is my first lesson.”

“Well, we all begin sometime,” said the girl tolerantly.

She twirled blindingly three or four times to end the conversation.

“This way,” she said, indicating her lack of interest in a novice. She showed Alabama into the vestibule.

Along the walls of the dressing room hung the long legs and rigid feet of flesh and black tights molded in sweat to the visual image of the decisive tempos of Prokofiev and Sauguet, of Poulenc and Falla. The bright, explosive carnation of a ballet skirt projected under the edges of a face towel. In a corner the white blouse and pleated skirt of Madame hung behind a faded gray curtain. The room reeked of hard work.

A Polish girl with hair like a copper-wire dishcloth and a purple, gnomish face bent over a straw chest sorting torn sheets of music and arranging a pile of discarded tunics. Odd toe shoes swung from the light. Turning the pages of a ragged Beethoven album, the Pole unearthed a faded photograph.

“I think it is her mother,” she said to the dancer.

The dancer inspected the picture proprietorily; she was the ballerina.

“I think, ma chère Stella, that it is Madame herself when she was young. I shall keep it!” She laughed lawlessly and authoritatively—she was the centre of the studio.

“No, Arienne Jeanneret. It is I who will keep it.”

“May I see the picture?” asked Alabama.

“It is certainly Madame herself.”

Arienne handed the picture to Alabama with a shrug of dismissal. Her motions had no continuity; she was utterly immobile between the spasmodic electric vibrations that propelled her body from one cataclysmic position to another.

The eyes of the picture were round and sad and Russian, a dreamy consciousness of its own white dramatic beauty gave the face weight and purpose as if the features were held together by spiritual will. The forehead was bound by a broad metallic strip after the fashion of a Roman charioteer. The hands posed in experimental organization on the shoulders.

“Is she not beautiful?” asked Stella.

“She’s not un-American,” Alabama answered.

The woman reminded her obscurely of Joan; there was the same transparence about her sister that shone through the face in the picture like the blinding glow of a Russian winter. It was perhaps a kindred intensity of heat that had worn Joan to that thin external radiance.

The girl turned quickly, listening to the tired footsteps of someone hesitantly traversing the studio.

“Where have you found that old picture?” Madame’s voice, broken with sensitivity, would have you believe that it was apologetic. Madame smiled. She was not humorless, but no manifestation of her emotions intruded on the white possessed mysticism of her face.

“In the Beethoven.”

“Before,” Madame said succinctly, “I turned out the lights in my apartment and played Beethoven. My sitting room in Petrograd was yellow and always full of flowers. I said then to myself, ‘I am too happy. This cannot last.’ ” She waved her hand resignedly and raised her eyes challengingly to Alabama.

“So my friend tells me you want to dance? Why? You have friends and money already.” The black eyes moved in frank childish inspection over Alabama’s body, loose and angular as those silver triangles in an orchestra—over her broad shoulder blades and the imperceptible concavity of her long legs, fused together and controlled by the resilient strength of her thick neck. Alabama’s body was like a quill.

“I have been to the Russian ballet,” Alabama tried to explain herself, “and it seemed to me—Oh, I don’t know! As if it held all the things I’ve always tried to find in everything else.”

“What have you seen?”

“La Chatte, Madame, I must do that someday!” Alabama replied impulsively.

A faint flicker of intrigued interest moved the black eyes recessionally. Then the personality withdrew from the face. Looking into her eyes was like walking through a long stone tunnel with a gray light shining at the other end, sloshing blindly through dank dripping earth over a moist curving bottom.

“You are too old. It is a beautiful ballet. Why have you come to me so late?”

“I didn’t know before. I was too busy living.”

“And now you have done all your living?”

“Enough to be fed up,” laughed Alabama.

The woman moved quietly about amongst the appurtenances of the dance.

“We will see,” she said. “Make yourself ready.”

Alabama hastily dressed herself. Stella showed her about tying her toe shoes back of her anklebones so the knot of the ribbon lay hid in a hollow.

“About La Chatte——” said the Russian.

“Yes?”

“You cannot do that. You must not build your hopes so high.” The sign above the woman’s head said, “Do Not Touch the Looking Glass” in French, English, Italian, and Russian. Madame stood with her back to the huge mirror and gazed at the far corners of the room. There was no music as they began.

“You will have the piano when you have learned to control your muscles,” she explained. “The only way, now that it is so late, is to think constantly of placing your feet. You must always stand with them so.” Madame spread her split satin shoes horizontally. “And you must stretch so fifty times in the evenings.”

She pulled and twisted the long legs along the bar. Alabama’s face grew red with effort. The woman was literally stripping the muscles of her thighs. She could have cried out with pain. Looking at Madame’s smoky eyes and the red gash of her mouth, Alabama thought she saw malice in the face. She thought Madame was a cruel woman. She thought Madame was hateful and malicious.

“You must not rest,” Madame said. “Continue.”

Alabama tore at her aching limbs. The Russian left her alone to work at the fiendish exercise. Reappearing, she sprayed herself unconcernedly before the glass with an atomizer.

“Fatiguée?” she called over her shoulder nonchalantly.

“Yes,” said Alabama.

“But you must not stop.”

After a while the Russian approached the bar.

“When I was a little girl in Russia,” she said impassively, “I did four hundred of those every night.”

Rage rose in Alabama like the gurgling of gasoline in a visible tank. She hoped the contemptuous woman knew how much she hated her. “I will do four hundred.”

“Luckily, the Americans are athletic. They have more natural talent than the Russians,” Madame remarked. “But they are spoiled with ease and money and plenty of husbands. That is enough for today. You have some eau de cologne?”

Alabama rubbed herself with the cloudy liquid from Madame’s atomizer. She dressed amongst the confused startled eyes and naked bodies of a class which drifted in. The girls spoke hilariously in Russian. Madame invited her to wait and see the work.

A man sat sketching on a broken iron chair; two heavy bearded personages of the theatre pointed to first one, then another of the girls; a boy in black tights with his head in a bandanna package and the face of a mythical pirate pulverized the air with ankle beats.

Mysteriously the ballet grouped itself. Silently it unfolded its mute clamor in the seductive insolence of back jetés, insouciant pas de chats, the abandon of many pirouettes, launched its fury in the spring and stretch of the Russian schstay,¹ and lulled itself to rest in a sweep of cradling chassés. Nobody spoke. The room was as still as a cyclone center.

“You like it?” said Madame implacably.

Alabama felt her face flush with a hot gush of embarrassment. She was very tired from her lesson. Her body ached and trembled. This first glimpse of the dance as an art opened up a world. “Sacrilege!” she felt like crying out to the posturing abandon of the past as she thought ignominiously of The Ballet of the Hours that she had danced ten years before. She remembered unexpectedly the exaltation of swinging sideways down the pavements as a child and clapping her heels in the air. This was close to that old forgotten feeling that she couldn’t stay on the earth another minute.

“I love it. What is it?”

The woman turned away. “It is a ballet of mine about an amateur who wanted to join a circus,” she said. Alabama wondered how she’d thought those nebulous amber eyes were soft; they seemed to be infernally laughing at her. Madame went on: “You will work again at three tomorrow.”

Alabama rubbed her legs with Elizabeth Arden muscle oil night after night. There were blue bruises inside above the knee where the muscles were torn. Her throat was so dry that at first she thought she had fever and took her temperature and was disappointed to find that she had none. In her bathing suit she tried to stretch on the high back of a Louis Quatorze sofa. She was always stiff, and she clutched the gilt flowers in pain. She fastened her feet through the bars of the iron bed and slept with her toes glued outwards for weeks. Her lessons were agony.

At the end of a month, Alabama could hold herself erect in ballet position, her weight controlled over the balls of her feet, holding the curve of her spine drawn tight together like the reins of a racehorse and mashing down her shoulders till they felt as if they were pressed flat against her hips. The time moved by in spasmodic jumps like a school clock. David was glad of her absorption at the studio. It made them less inclined to use up their leisure on parties. Alabama’s leisure was a creaky muscle-sore affair and better spent at home. David could work more freely when she was occupied and making fewer demands on his time.

At night she sat in the window too tired to move, consumed by a longing to succeed as a dancer. It seemed to Alabama that, reaching her goal, she would drive the devils that had driven her—that, in proving herself, she would achieve that peace which she imagined went only in surety of one’s self—that she would be able, through the medium of the dance, to command her emotions, to summon love or pity or happiness at will, having provided a channel through which they might flow. She drove herself mercilessly, and the summer dragged on.

The heat of July beat on the studio skylight and Madame sprayed the air with disinfectant. The starch in Alabama’s organdy skirts stuck to her hands and sweat rolled into her eyes till she couldn’t see. Choking dust rose off the floor, the intense glare threw a black gauze before her eyes. It was humiliating that Madame should have to touch her pupil’s ankles when they were so hot. The human body was very insistent. Alabama passionately hated her inability to discipline her own. Learning how to manage it was like playing a desperate game with herself. She said to herself, “My body and I,” and took herself for an awful beating: that was how it was done. Some of the dancers worked with a bath towel pinned around their necks. It was so hot under the burning roof that they needed something to absorb the sweat. Sometimes the mirror swam in red heat waves if Alabama’s lesson came at the hours when the direct sun fell on the glass overhead. Alabama was sick of moving her feet in the endless battements without music. She wondered why she came to her lessons at all: David had asked her to swim at Corne-Biche in the afternoon. She felt obscurely angry with Madame that she had not gone off in the cool with her husband. Though she did not believe that the careless happy passages of their first married life could be repeated—or relished if they were, drained as they had been of the experiences they held—still, the highest points of concrete enjoyment that Alabama visualized when she thought of happiness, lay in the memories they held.

“Will you pay attention?” Madame said. “This is for you.” Madame moved across the floor mapping the plan of a simple adagio.

“I can’t do it,” said Alabama. She began negligently, following the path of the Russian. Suddenly she stopped. “Oh, but it is beautiful!” she said rapturously.

The ballet mistress did not turn around. “There are many beautiful things in the dance,” she said laconically, “but you cannot do them—yet.”

After her lesson, Alabama folded her soaking clothes into her valise. Arienne wrung out her tights in pools of sweat on the floor. Alabama held the ends while she squeezed and twisted. It cost a lot of sweat to learn to dance.

“I am going away for a month,” Madame said one Saturday. “You can continue here with Mlle Jeanneret. I hope that when I come back you will be able to have the music.”

“Then I can’t have my lesson on Monday?” She had given so much of her time to the studio that it was like being precipitated into a void to think of life without it.

“With Mademoiselle.”

Alabama felt great hot tears rolling inexplicably down her face as she watched the tired figure of their teacher disappear in the dusty fog. She ought to be glad of the respite; she had expected to be glad.

“You must not cry,” the girl said to her kindly. “Madame must go away for her heart to Royat.” She smiled gently at Alabama. “We will get Stella to play for your lessons at once,” she said with the air of a conspirator.

Through the heat of August they worked. The leaves dried and decayed in the basin of St-Sulpice; the Champs-Elysées simmered in gasoline fumes. There was nobody in Paris; everybody said so. The fountains in the Tuileries threw off a hot vaporous mist; midinettes shed their sleeves. Alabama went twice a day to the studio. Bonnie was in Brittany visiting friends of Nanny. David drank with the crowds of people in the Ritz Bar celebrating the emptiness of the city together.

“Why will you never come out with me?” he said.

“Because I can’t work next day if I do.”

“Are you under the illusion that you’ll ever be any good at that stuff?”

“I suppose not; but there’s only one way to try.”

“We have no life at home any more.”

“You’re never there anyway—I’ve got to have something to do with myself.”

“Another female whine—I have to do my work.”

“I’ll do anything you want.”

“Will you come with me this afternoon?”

They went to Le Bourget and hired an aeroplane. David drank so much brandy before they left that by the time they were over the Porte St-Denis he was trying to get the pilot to take them to Marseilles. When they got back to Paris he urged Alabama to get out with him at the Café Lilas. “We’ll find somebody and have dinner,” he said.

“David, I can’t honestly. I get so sick when I drink. I’ll have to have morphine if I do, like last time.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to the studio.”

“Yet you can’t stay with me! What’s the use of having a wife? If a woman’s only to sleep with there are plenty available for that——”

“What’s the use of having a husband or anything else? You suddenly find you have them all the same, and there you are.”

The taxi whirred through the rue Cambon. Unhappily she climbed the steps. Arienne was waiting.

“What a sad face!” she said.

“Life is a sad business, isn’t it, my poor Alabama?” said Stella.

When the preliminary routines at the bar were over, Alabama and Arienne moved to the centre of the floor.

“Bien, Stella.”

The sad coquetries of a Chopin mazurka fell flat on the parched air. Alabama watched Arienne searching for the mental processes of Madame. She seemed very squat and sordid. She was the premiére danseuse of the Paris Opéra, nearly at the top. Alabama began sobbing inaudibly.

“Lives aren’t as hard as professions,” she gasped.

“Well,” Arienne cackled, exasperated, “this is not a pension de jeunes filles! Will you do the step your own way if you do not like the way I do?” She stood with her hands on her hips, powerful and uninspired, implying that Alabama’s knowledge of the step’s existence imposed on her the obligation to perform it. Somebody had to master the thing; it was there in the air. Arienne had put it there, let Arienne do it.

“It is for you, you know, that we work,” said Arienne harshly.

“My foot hurts,” said Alabama petulantly. “The nail has come off.”

“Then you must grow a harder one. Will you begin? Dva, Stella!”

Miles and miles of pas de bourrée, her toes picking the floor like the beaks of many feeding hens, and after ten thousand miles you got to advance without shaking your breasts. Arienne smelled of wet wool. Over and over she tried. Her ankles turned; her comprehension moved faster than her feet and threw her out of balance. She invented a trick: you must pull with your spirit against the forward motions of the body, and that gave you the tenebrous dignity and economy of effort known as style.

“But you are a bête, an impossible!” screeched Arienne. “You wish to understand it before you can do it.”

Alabama finally taught herself what it felt like to move the upper part of her body along as if it were a bust on wheels. Her pas de bourrée progressed like a flying bird. She could hardly keep from holding her breath when she did it.

When David asked about her dancing she adopted a superior manner. She felt he couldn’t have understood if she had tried to explain about the pas de bourrée. Once she did try. Her exposition had been full of “You-see-what-I-means” and “Can’t-you-understands,” and David was annoyed and called her a mystic.

“Nothing exists that can’t be expressed,” he said angrily.

“You are just dense. For me, it’s quite clear.”

David wondered if Alabama had ever really understood any of his pictures. Wasn’t any art the expression of the inexpressible? And isn’t the inexpressible always the same, though variable—like the X in physics? It may represent anything at all, but at the same time, it’s always actually X.

Madame came back during the September drouth.

“You have made much progress,” she said, “but you must get rid of your American vulgarities. You surely sleep too much. Four hours is enough.”

“Are you better for your treatments?”

“They put me in a cabinet,” she laughed. “I could only stay with somebody holding my hand. Rest is not commode for tired people. It is not good for artists.”

“It has been a cabinet here this summer,” said Alabama savagely.

“And you still want to dance La Chatte, poor?”

Alabama laughed. “You will tell me,” she said, “when I do well enough to buy myself a tutu?”

Madame shrugged her shoulders, “Why not now?” she said.

“I’d like to be a fine dancer first.”

“You must work.”

“I work four hours a day.”

“It is too much.”

“Then how can I be a dancer?”

“I do not know how anybody can be anything,” said the Russian.

“I will burn candles to St. Joseph.”

“Perhaps that will help; a Russian saint would be better.”

During the last days of the hot weather David and Alabama moved to the Left Bank. Their apartment, tapestried in splitting yellow brocade, looked out over the dome of St-Sulpice. Old women hatched in the shadows about the corners of the cathedral; the bells tolled incessantly for funerals. The pigeons that fed in the square ruffled themselves on their window ledge. Alabama sat in the night breezes, holding her face to the succulent heavens, brooding. Her exhaustion slowed up her pulses to the tempo of her childhood. She thought of the time when she was little and had been near her father—by his aloof distance he had presented himself as an infallible source of wisdom, a bed of sureness. She could trust her father. She half hated the unrest of David, hating that of herself that she found in him. Their mutual experiences had formed them mutually into an unhappy compromise. That was the trouble: they hadn’t thought they would have to make any adjustments as their comprehensions broadened their horizons, so they accepted those necessary reluctantly, as compromise instead of as change. They had thought they were perfect and opened their hearts to inflation but not alteration.

The air grew damp with autumn maze. They dined here and there amongst the jeweled women glittering like bright scaled fish in an aquarium. They went for walks and taxi rides. A growing feeling of alarm in Alabama for their relationship had tightened itself to a set determination to get on with her work. Pulling the skeleton of herself over a loom of attitude and arabesque, she tried to weave the strength of her father and the young beauty of her first love with David, the happy oblivion of her teens and her warm protected childhood into a magic cloak. She was much alone.

David was a gregarious person; he went out a great deal. Their life moved along with a hypnotic pound and nothing seemed to matter short of murder. She presumed they wouldn’t kill anybody—that would bring the authorities; all the rest was bunk, like Jacques and Gabrielle had been. She didn’t care—she honestly didn’t care a damn about the loneliness. Years later, she was surprised to remember that a person could have been so tired as she was then.

Bonnie had a French governess who poisoned their meals with “N’est-ce pas, Monsieur?” and “Du moins, J’aurais pensée.” She chewed with her mouth open and the crumbs of sardines about the gold fillings of her teeth nauseated Alabama. She ate staring out on the bare autumnal court. She would have got another governess, but something was sure to happen with things at such a tension and she thought she’d wait.

Bonnie was growing fast and full of anecdotes of Josette and Claudine and the girls at her school. She subscribed to a child’s publication, outgrew the guignol, and began to forget her English. A certain reserve manifested itself in her dealings with her parents. She was very superior with her old English-speaking Nanny, who took her out on the days of Mademoiselle’s sortie: exciting days when the apartment reeked of Coty’s L’Origan and Bonnie incurred eruptions on her face from the scones at Rumpelmayer’s. Alabama could never make Nanny admit that Bonnie had eaten them; Nanny insisted the spots were in the blood and that it was better for them to come out, hinting at a sort of exorcising of hereditary evil spirits.

David bought Alabama a dog. They named him Adage. The femme de chambre addressed him as “Monsieur” and cried when he was spanked so nobody could ever house-train the beast. They kept him in the guest room with the photographic likenesses of the apartment owner’s immediate family peering through the fumes of his saleté.

Alabama felt very sorry for David. He and she appeared to her like people in a winter of adversity picking over old garments left from a time of wealth. They repeated themselves to each other; she dragged out old expressions that she knew he must be tired of; he bore her little show with a patent mechanical appreciation. She felt sorry for herself. She had always been so proud of being a good stage manager.

November filtered the morning light to a golden powder that hung over Paris stabilizing time till the days stayed at morning all day long. She worked in the gray gloom of the studio and felt very professional in the discomfort of the unheated place. The girls dressed by an oil stove that Alabama bought for Madame; the dressing room reeked of glue from the toe shoes warming over the thin blaze, of stale eau de cologne, and of poverty. When Madame was late, the dancers warmed themselves by doing a hundred relevés to the chanted verses of Verlaine. The windows could never be opened because of the Russians, and Nancy and May, who had worked with Pavlova, said the smell made them sick. May lived at the Y.W.C.A. and wanted Alabama to come to tea. One day, as they were going down the steps together, she said to Alabama that she could not dance any more, that she was quite sick.

“Madame’s ears are so filthy, my dear,” she said, “it makes me quite sick.”

Madame had made May dance behind the others. Alabama laughed at the girl’s disingenuousness.

There was Marguerite, who came in white, and Fania in her dirty rubber undergarments, and Anise and Anna who lived with millionaires and dressed in velvet tunics, and Céza in gray and scarlet—they said she was a Jew—and somebody else in blue organdie, and thin girls in apricot draperies like folds of skin, and three Tanyas like all the other Russian Tanyas, and girls in the starkness of white who looked like boys in swimming, and girls in black who looked like women, a superstitious girl in mauve, and one dressed by her mother who wore cerise to blind them all in that pulsating gyroscope, and the thin pathetic femininity of Marte, who danced at the Opéra Comique and swept off belligerently after classes with her husband.

Arienne Jeanneret dominated the vestibule. She dressed with her face to the wall and had many preparations for rubbing herself and bought fifty pairs of toe slippers at a time, which she gave to Stella when she’d worn them a week. She kept the girls quiet when Madame was giving a lesson. The vulgarity of her hips repelled Alabama but they were good friends. It was with Arienne that she sat in the café under the Olympia after their lessons and drank the daily Cap Corse with seltzer. Arienne took her backstage at the Opéra where the dancer was well respected, and Arienne came to lunch with Alabama. David hated her guts because she tried to give him moral lectures about his opinions and his drinking, but she was not bourgeoise: she was gamine, full of strident jokes about firemen and soldiers, and Montmartre songs about priests and peasants and cuckolds. She was almost an elf, but her stockings were always wrinkled and she talked in sermons.

She took Alabama to see Pavlova’s last performance. Two men like Beerbohm cartoons asked to see them home. Arienne refused.

“Who are they?” asked Alabama.

“I do not know—subscribers to the Opéra.”

“Then why do you talk to them if you’ve never met them?”

“One does not meet the patrons of the first three rows of the National Opéra; the seats are reserved for men,” said Arienne. She herself lived with her brother near the Bois. Sometimes she cried in the dressing room.

“Zambelli still dancing Coppélia!” she’d say. “You don’t know how difficult life is, Alabama, you with your husband and your baby.” When she cried the black came off her eyelashes and dried in lumps like a wet watercolor. There was a spiritual open space between her gray eyes that seemed as pure as an open daisy field.

“Oh, Arienne!” said Madame enthusiastically. “There’s a dancer! When she cries it is not for nothing.” Alabama’s face grew colorless with fatigue and her eyes sank in her head like the fumes of autumnal fires.

Arienne helped her to master the entrechats.

“You must not rest when you come down after the spring,” she said, “but you must depart again immediately, so that the impetus of the first leap carries you through the others like the bouncing of a ball.”

“Da,” said Madame, “da! da!—But it is not enough.” It was never enough to please Madame.

She and David slept late on Sundays, dining at Foyot’s or someplace near their home.

“We promised your mother to come home for Christmas,” he said over many tables.

“Yes, but I don’t see how we can go. It’s so expensive, and you haven’t finished your Paris pictures.”

“I’m glad you are not too disappointed because I had decided to wait until spring.”

“There’s Bonnie’s school, too. It would be a shame to switch just now.”

“We’ll go for Easter, then.”

“Yes.”

Alabama did not want to leave Paris where they were so unhappy. Her family grew very remote with the distention of her soul in schstay and pirouette.

Stella brought a Christmas cake to the studio, and two chickens for Madame that she had received from her uncle in Normandy. Her uncle wrote her that he could send no more money: the franc was down to forty. Stella made her living copying sheet music, which ruined her eyes and left her starving. She lived in a garret and got sinus trouble from the drafts, but she would not give up wasting her days at the studio.

“What can a Pole do in Paris?” she said to Alabama. What can anybody do in Paris? When it comes to fundamentals, nationalities do not count for much.

Madame got Stella a job turning pages for musicians at concerts, and Alabama paid her ten francs a pair for darning her toe shoes on the ends to keep them from slipping.

Madame kissed them all on both cheeks for Christmas, and they ate Stella’s cake. It was as much of a Christmas as she would have at their apartment, thought Alabama without emotion—that was because she hadn’t put any interest into their Christmas at home.

Arienne sent Bonnie an expensive kitchen outfit as a present. Alabama was touched when she thought how her friend probably needed the money it cost. Nobody had any money.

“I shall have to give up my lessons,” said Arienne. “The pigs at the Opéra pay us a thousand francs a month. I cannot live on it.”

Alabama invited Madame to dinner and to see a ballet. Madame was very white and fragile in a pale-green evening dress. Her eyes were fixed on the stage. A pupil of hers was dancing Le Lac des Cygnes. Alabama wondered what passed behind those yellow Confucian eyes as she watched the white sifting stream of the ballet.

“It is much too small nowadays,” the woman said. “When I danced, things were of a different scale.”

Alabama looked incredulous. “Twenty-four fouettés, she did,” she said. “What more can anybody do?” It had physically hurt her to see the ethereal steely body of the dancer snapping and whipping itself in the mad convolutions of those turns.

“I do not know what they can do. I only know that I did something else,” said the artist, “that was better.”

She did not go backstage after the performance to congratulate the girl. She and Alabama and David went to a Russian cabaret. At the table next to theirs sat Hernandara trying to fill a pyramid of champagne glasses by pouring into the top one only. David joined him; the two men sang and shadowboxed on the dance floor. Alabama was ashamed and afraid that Madame would be offended.

But Madame had been a princess in Russia with all the other Russians.

“They are like puppies playing,” she said. “Leave them. It is pretty.”

“Work is the only pretty thing,” said Alabama, “——at least, I have forgotten the rest.”

“It is good to amuse oneself when one can afford it,” Madame spoke reminiscently. “In Spain, after a ballet, I drank red wine. In Russia it was always champagne.”

Through the blue lights of the place and the red lamps in iron grilles, the white skin of Madame glowed like the arctic sun on an ice palace. She did not drink much but ordered caviar and smoked many cigarettes. Her dress was cheap; that saddened Alabama——she had been such a great dancer in her time. After the war she had wanted to quit, but she had no money and kept her son at the Sorbonne. Her husband fed himself on dreams of the Corps des Pages and quenched his thirst with reminiscences till there was nothing left of him but a bitter aristocratic phantom. The Russians! suckled on a gallant generosity and weaned on the bread of revolution, they haunt Paris! Everything haunts Paris. Paris is haunted.

Nanny came to Bonnie’s Christmas tree, and some friends of David’s. Alabama thought dispassionately of Christmas in America. They did not sell little frosted houses to hang on Christmas trees in Alabama. In Paris the florists’ were filled with Christmas lilacs, and it rained. Alabama took flowers to the studio.

Madame was enraptured.

“When I was a girl, I was a miser for flowers,” she said. “I loved the flowers of the fields and gathered them in bouquets and boutonnières for the guests who came to my father’s house.” These little details from the past of so great a dancer seemed glamorous and poignant to Alabama.

By springtime, she was gladly, savagely proud of the strength of her Negroid hips, convex as boats in a wood carving. The complete control of her body freed her from all fetid consciousness of it.

The girls carried away their dirty clothes to wash them. There was heat incubating again in the rue des Capucines and another set of acrobats at the Olympia. The thin sunshine laid pale commemoration tablets on the studio floor, and Alabama was promoted to Beethoven. She and Arienne kidded along the windy streets and roughhoused in the studio, and Alabama drugged herself with work. Her life outside was like trying to remember in the morning a dream from the night before.

2

“Fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three—but I tell you, Monsieur, you must give me the message. I occupy the position of the advisor of Madame—fifty-four, fifty-five——”

Hastings surveyed the panting body coldly. Stella lapsed into a technically seductive attitude. She had often seen Madame behave just so. She stared into his face as if she were in possession of some vital secret, and awaited his application for an introduction to the mystery. Her petits battements had been well done. She was quite réchauffé for so early in the afternoon.

“It was Mrs. David Knight that I wanted to see,” said Hastings.

“Our Alabama! She will surely be here before long. She is a dear, Alabama,” cooed Stella.

“There was nobody at home at the apartment, so they told me to come here.” Hastings’ eyes roved about incredulously as if there must be some mistake.

“Oh, she!” said Stella. “She is always here. You have only to wait. If Monsieur will excuse me——?”

Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine. At three hundred and eighty Hastings rose to leave. Stella sweated and blew like a porpoise making believe she hated the difficulties of the self-imposed bar work. She made believe she was a beautiful galley slave whom Hastings might possibly be wanting to purchase.

“Just tell her I came, will you?” he said.

“Of course, and that you went away. I am sorry that what I can do is not more interesting for Monsieur. There is a class at five if Monsieur would care to——”

“Yes, tell her I went away.” He stared about him distastefully. “I don’t suppose she’d be free for a party, anyway.”

Stella had been so much in the studio that she had absorbed an air of complete confidence in her work like all the pupils of Madame. If people who watched were not fascinated, it must be some lack in themselves of aesthetic appreciation.

Madame allowed Stella to work without paying; many dancers did the same who had no money. When there was money they paid—that was the Russian system.

The crash of a suitcase bumping up the stairs announced the arrival of a student.

“A friend has called,” she said importantly. It was inconceivable to the isolated Stella that a visit could be without consequence. Alabama, too, was forgetting the old casual modulations of life. Against the violent twist and thump of tour jeté nothing stood out but the harshest, most dissonant incident.

“What did they want?”

“How should I know?”

A vague unreasoning dread filled Alabama—she must keep the studio apart from her life—otherwise one would soon become as unsatisfactory as the other, lost in an aimless, impenetrable drift.

“Stella,” she said, “if they should come again—if anyone should come here for me, you will always say you don’t know anything about me—that I am not here.”

“But why? It is for the appreciation of your friends that you will dance.”

“No, no!” Alabama protested. “I cannot do two things at once——I wouldn’t go down the Avenue de 1’Opéra leaping over the traffic cop with pas de chat, and I don’t want my friends rehearsing bridge games in the corner while I dance.”

Stella was glad to share in any personal reactions to life, that side of her own being an empty affair boxed by attics and berated by landladies.

“Very well! Why should life interfere with us artists?” she agreed pompously.

“Last time he was here my husband smoked a cigarette in the studio,” continued Alabama in an attempt to justify the clandestine protestations.

“Oh,” Stella was scandalized. “I see. If I had been here, I would have told him about the awfulness of smells when one is working.”

Stella dressed herself in the worn-out ballet skirts of other dancers and pink gauze shirts from the Galeries Lafayette. She pinned the shirt down over the yoke of the skirt with big safety pins to form a basque. She lived at the studio during the day, clipping the stems of the flowers the pupils brought Madame to keep them fresh, polishing the great mirror, repairing the music with strips of adhesive, and playing for lessons when the pianist was absent. She thought of herself as councillor to Madame. Madame thought of her as a nuisance.

Stella was very conscientious about earning her lessons. If anyone else tried to do the smallest thing for Madame, it precipitated a scene of sulks and weeping. Her dreamy Polish eyes were faded to the yellowish green of scum on a stagnant pool by the glaze of starvation and intensity. The girls bought her croissants and café au lait at midday and called her “ma chère.” Alabama and Arienne gave her money on one pretext or another. Madame gave her old clothes and cakes. In return, she told them each separately that Madame had said they were making more progress than the others and juggled the working hours in Madame’s little book so that her eight-hour day sometimes held nine or ten one-hour periods. Stella lived in an air of general intrigue.

Madame was severe with the girl. “You know you can never dance. Why do you not get work to do?” she scolded. “You will be old, I will be old—then what will become of you?”

“I have a concert next week. I will have twenty francs for turning pages. Oh, Madame, please let me stay!”

No sooner had Stella the twenty francs than she approached Alabama. “If you would give me the rest,” she pleaded persuasively, “we could buy a medicine cabinet for the studio. Only last week someone turned an ankle—we should have means to disinfect our blisters.” Stella talked incessantly about the cabinet until Alabama went with her one morning to get it. They waited in the golden sunshine crystallizing the gilt front of Au Printemps for the store to open. The thing cost a hundred francs and was to be a surprise for Madame.

“You may give it to her, Stella,” said Alabama, “but I am going to pay. You cannot afford such an extravagance.”

“No,” mourned Stella, “I have no husband to pay for me! Hélas!”

“I give up other things,” Alabama replied crossly. She couldn’t feel resentment against the misshapen, melancholy Pole.

Madame was displeased.

“It is ridiculous,” she said. “There is not room for so bulky an affair in the dressing room.” When she saw Stella’s frantic eyes, gluey with disappointment, she added, “But it will be very convenient. Leave it. Only you must not spend your money on me.”

She delegated to Alabama the job of seeing that Stella bought her no more presents.

Madame argued over the dried raisins and licorice bonbons that Stella brought to leave on her table and about the Russian bread she brought in little packages; bread with cheese cooked inside and bread with sugar pellets, caraway bread and glutinous black tragedian breads, breads hot from the oven smelling of innocence, and moldy epicurean breads from Yiddish bakeries. Anything Stella had money to buy, she bought for Madame.

Instead of curbing Stella, Alabama absorbed the aimless extravagance of the girl. She couldn’t wear new shoes; her feet were too sore. It seemed a crime owning new dresses to smell them up with eau de cologne and leave them hanging all day long against the studio walls. She thought she could work better when she felt poor. She had abandoned so many of the occasions of exercising personal choice that she spent the hundred-franc notes in her purse on flowers, endowing them with all the qualities of the things she might have bought under other circumstances, the thrill of a new hat, the assurance of a new dress.

Yellow roses she bought with her money like Empire satin brocade, and white lilacs and pink tulips like molded confectioner’s frosting, and deep-red roses like a Villon poem, black and velvety as an insect wing, cold blue hydrangeas clean as a newly calcimined wall, the crystalline drops of lily of the valley, a bowl of nasturtiums like beaten brass, anemones pieced out of wash material, and malignant parrot tulips scratching the air with their jagged barbs, and the voluptuous scrambled convolutions of Parma violets. She bought lemon-yellow carnations perfumed with the taste of hard candy, and garden roses purple as raspberry puddings, and every kind of white flower the florist knew how to grow. She gave Madame gardenias like white kid gloves and forget-me-nots from the Madeleine stalls, threatening sprays of gladioli, and the soft, even purr of black tulips. She bought flowers like salads and flowers like fruits, jonquils and narcissus, poppies and ragged robins, and flowers with the brilliant carnivorous qualities of Van Gogh. She chose from windows filled with metal balls and cactus gardens of the florists near the rue de la Paix, and from the florists uptown who sold mostly plants and purple iris, and from florists on the Left Bank whose shops were lumbered up with the wire frames of designs, and from outdoor markets where the peasants dyed their roses to a bright apricot, and stuck wires through the heads of the dyed peonies.

Spending money had played a big part in Alabama’s life before she had lost, in her work, the necessity for material possessions.

Nobody was rich at the studio but Nordika. She came to her lessons in a Rolls-Royce, sharing her hours with Alacia, who had the same essence as a Bryn Mawr graduate, she was so practical. It was Alacia who took His Highness away from Nordika, but Nordika hung on to the money and they made a go of it together some way. Nordika was the pretty one like a blonde ejaculation, and Alacia was the one who had moved Milord to pity. Nordika was tremulous with a glassy excitement that she tried to repress—they said in the ballet that Nordika’s excitement ruined all of her costumes. Nordika couldn’t go around vibrating in a void so her friend managed to anchor her feet enough to the ground to keep the car. Both of them threatened to leave Madame’s studio because Stella hid a half-eaten can of shrimp behind their mirror, where it slowly soured. Stella said to the girls that the smell was dirty clothes. When they found what it really was, they were merciless to poor Stella. Stella liked having the chic Nordika and her friend in the class because they were almost the same as an audience.

“Polissonne!” they said to Stella. “It is bad enough to eat shrimp at home without bringing it here like a stink bomb.”

Stella had so little room at home that she had to keep her trunk jammed out the attic window half in the open. A can of shrimp would have asphyxiated her in the small place.

“Don’t mind,” said Alabama. “I will take you to Prunier’s for shrimp.”

Madame said Alabama was a fool to take Stella to Prunier’s for shrimp. Madame could remember the days when she and her husband had eaten caviar together in the butchery fumes of the rue Duphot. Forever, to Madame, a presage of disaster lay in the conjured image of the oyster bar—revolutions would almost certainly follow excursions to Prunier’s, and poverty and hard times. Madame was superstitious; she never borrowed pins and had never danced in purple, and she somehow thought of trouble in connection with the fish she had loved so well when she could afford it. Madame was very afraid of any luxury.

The saffron in the bouillabaisse made Alabama sweat under the eyes and turned the Barsac tasteless. During the lunch Stella fidgeted across the table and folded something into her napkin. The girl was not as impressed as Alabama would have liked with Prunier’s.

“Barsac is a monkish wine,” suggested Alabama absently.

Secretively Stella extracted whatever it was she dredged from the bottomless soup. She was too engrossed to answer. She was as absorbed as a person searching for a dead body.

“What on earth are you doing, ma chère?” It irritated Alabama that Stella was not more enthusiastic. She resolved never to take another poor person to a rich man’s place; it was a waste of money.

“Sh—sh—sh! Ma chère Alabama, it is pearls I have found—big ones, as many as three! If the waiters know they will claim them for the establishment, so I make a cache in my napkin.”

“Really,” asked Alabama, “show me!”

“When we are in the street. I assure you it is so. We will grow rich, and you will have a ballet and I will dance in it.”

The girls finished their lunch breathlessly. Stella was too excited to make her usual senseless protestations about paying the check.

In the pale filtrations of the street they opened the napkin carefully.

“We will buy Madame a present,” she crowed.

Alabama inspected the globular yellow deposits.

“They’re only lobster eyes,” she pronounced decisively.

“How should I know? I have never eaten lobsters before,” said Stella phlegmatically.

Imagine living your life with your only hope of finding pearls and fortunes and the unexpected stewed in the heart of a bouillabaisse! It was like being a child and keeping your eyes forever glued to the ground looking for a lost penny—only children do not have to buy bread and raisins and medicine cabinets with the pennies they find on the pavement!

Alabama’s lessons began the day at the studio.

In the cold barracks the maid scrubbed and coughed. The woman rubbed her fingers unfeelingly through the flame of the oil stove, pinching the wick.

“The poor woman!” said Stella. “She has a husband who beats her at night—she has showed me the places—her husband has no jawbone since the war. We should give her something, perhaps?”

“Don’t tell me about it, Stella! We can’t be sorry for everybody.”

It was too late—Alabama had already noticed the caked black blood under the woman’s fingernails where they were split by the stiff brush in her freezing pail of eau de Javelle. She gave her ten francs and hated the woman for making her sorry. It was bad enough working in the cold asthmatic dust without knowing about the maid.

Stella broke the thorns from the rose stems and gathered the shattered petals off the floor. She and Alabama shivered and worked quickly to get warm.

“Show me again how Madame has shown you in your private lessons,” urged Stella.

Alabama went over and over for her the breathless contraction and muscular abandon necessary to attain elevation. You did the same thing for years, and after three years you might lift yourself an inch higher—of course, there was always the chance that you wouldn’t.

“And you must, after the effort of launching your body is accomplished, let it fall in midair—this way.” She heaved her body with a stupendous inflation off the floor and came to rest limply, like a deflated balloon.

“Oh, but you will be a dancer!” the girl sighed gratefully, “but I do not see why, since you have already a husband.”

“Can’t you understand that I am not trying to get anything—at least, I don’t think I am—but to get rid of some of myself?”

“Then why?”

“To sit this way, expectant of my lesson, and feel that if I had not come the hour that I own would have stood vacant and waiting for me.”

“Is your husband not angry that you are so much away?”

“Yes. He is so angry that I must be away even more to avoid rows about it.”

“He does not like the dance?”

“Nobody does, only dancers and sadists.”

“Incorrigible! Teach me again about the jeté.”

“You cannot do it—you are too fat.”

“Teach me and I shall be able to play it on the piano for your lessons.”

When anything went wrong with the adagio, in silent and controlled rage, Alabama blamed the girl.

“You hear something far away,” said Madame, suggesting.

Alabama could not manage to convey hearing with the lines of her body. She was humiliated to listen with her hips.

“I hear only Stella’s discords,” she whispered fiercely. “She does not keep time.”

Madame withdrew herself when her pupils quarreled.

“A dancer’s supposed to lead the music,” she said succinctly. “There is no melody in ballet.”

One afternoon David came with some old friends.

Alabama was angry with Stella when she saw him there.

“My lessons are not a circus. Why did you let them come in?”

“It was your husband! I cannot stand in front of the door like a dragon.”

“Failli, cabriole, cabriole, failli, soubresaut, failli, coupé, ballonné, ballonné, ballonné, pas de basque, deux tours.”

“Isn’t that ‘Tales from the Vienna Woods’?” asked the tall chic Dickie, smoothing herself over.

“I don’t see why Alabama didn’t take from Ned Weyburn,” said the elegant Miss Douglas with her hair like a porphyry tomb.

The yellow sun of the afternoon poured a warm vanilla sauce in the window. “Failli, cabriole,” Alabama bit her tongue.

Running to the window to spit the quick blood, she was overwhelmingly conscious of the woman beside her. The blood trickled down her chin.

“What is it, chérie?”

“Nothing.”

Miss Douglas said indignantly, “I think it’s ridiculous to work like that. She can’t be getting any fun out of it, foaming at the mouth that way!”

Dickie said, “It’s abominable! She’ll never be able to get up in a drawing room and do that! What’s the good of it?”

Alabama had never felt so close to a purpose as she did at that moment. “Cabriole, failli”——“Why” was something the Russian understood and Alabama almost understood. She felt she would know when she could listen with her arms and see with her feet. It was incomprehensible that her friends should feel only the necessity to hear with their ears. That was “Why.” Fierce loyalty to her work swelled in Alabama. Why did she need to explain?

“We’ll meet you at the corner in the bistro,” said David’s note.

“You will join your friends?” Madame asked disinterestedly as Alabama read.

“No,” answered Alabama abruptly.

The Russian sighed. “Why not?”

“Life is too sad, and I will be too dirty after my lesson.”

“What will you do at home alone?”

“Sixty fouettés.”

“Do not forget the pas de bourrée.”

“Why can I not have the same steps as Arienne,” stormed Alabama, “or at least as Nordika? Stella says that I dance nearly as well.”

So Madame led her through the intricacies of the waltz from Pavillon d’Armide, and Alabama knew that she did the thing like a child jumping rope.

“You see,” said Madame, “not yet! It is difficult to dance for Diaghilev.”

Diaghilev called his rehearsals at eight in the morning. His dancers left the theater around one at night. From the requisite work with their mâitre de ballet they came direct to the studio. Diaghilev insisted that they live at so much nervous tension that movement, which meant dancing to them, became a necessity, like a drug. They worked incessantly.

One day there was a wedding in his troupe. Alabama was surprised to see the girls in street clothes, in furs and shadow lace as they congregated at the studio. They appeared older; there was a distinction about them that came from the consciousness of their beautiful bodies even in their cheap clothes. If they weighed more than fifty kilos, Diaghilev protested in his high screeching voice, “You must get thin. I cannot send my dancers to a gymnasium to fit them for adagio.” He never thought of the women as dancers, except the stars. An allegiance to his genius as strong as a cult determined all their opinions. The quality that set them off from other dancers was his insistence on their obliteration of self to the integral purpose of his ballet. There was no petite marmite in his productions, nor in the people that he produced out of ragged Russian waifs, some of them. They lived for the dance and their master.

“What are you doing with your face?” Madame would say scathingly. “It is not a cinema we are making. You will please to keep it as expressionless as you can.”

“Race, dva, tree, race, dva, tree——”

“Show me, Alabama,” Stella cried in despair.

“How can I show you? I can’t do it myself,” she answered irritably. She was angry when Stella placed her in the same class with herself. She said to herself that she would give Stella no more money to teach her her place. But the girl came to her tearfully smelling of butter and the mechanics of life, offering an apple she had bought for Alabama or a sack of mint tips, and Alabama gave her ten francs anyway, to pay for the apple.

“If you were not here,” Stella said, “how could I live? My uncle can send me no more money.”

“How can you live when I have gone to America?”

“Other people will come—perhaps from America.” Stella smiled improvidently. Though she talked a great deal about the difficulties of the future, it was impossible for her to think further ahead than a day.

Maleena came to give Stella money. She wanted to open a studio of her own, and she offered Stella the job as her pianist if she could get enough pupils away from the classes of Madame. It was Maleena’s mother who wanted to do the dishonest thing—she had herself been a dancer but not a big one.

The mother was as bloated as the delicatessen sausages that kept her alive, and half blinded by the vicissitudes of life. In her pudgy, greasy hands she held a lorgnette and peered at her daughter. “See,” she said to Stella. “Pavlova cannot do sauts sur les pointes like that! There is no dancer like my Maleena. You will get your friends to come to our studio?”

Maleena was chicken-breasted; she performed the dance like a person administering lashes with a scourge.

“Maleena is like a flower,” the old lady said. When Maleena perspired she smelled of onions. Maleena pretended that she loved Madame. She was an old pupil—her mother thought Madame should have got her a job with the Russian ballet.

In watering the floor before class the watering can slipped in Stella’s hands and drenched the parquet over Maleena’s place in line. She did not dare complain, imagining that Madame would suspect her hostility.

“Failli, cabriole, cabriole, failli——”

Maleena slipped in the puddle and split her kneecap.

“I knew our chest would be useful,” said Stella. “You will help me with the bandage, Alabama.”

“——Race, Dva, Tree!”

“The roses are dead,” Stella reminded Alabama reproachfully. She begged for the old organdy skirts which would not meet across her back and gapped scandalously over her dingy tights. Alabama had them made with four ruffles on a broad band that bound her hips—five francs it cost to get them ironed in a French laundry. There was a red and white check for weather like Normandy, a chartreuse for decadent days, pink for her lessons at midday, and sky blue for late afternoon. In the mornings she liked white skirts best to match the colorless reflection on the skylight.

For the waist she bought cotton bicycle shirts and faded them in the sun to pastel shades, burnt orange to wear over the pink, green for the pale chartreuse. It was a game to Alabama discovering new combinations. The habitual flamboyance expressed in her street dress flowered in this less restricted medium. She wore a chosen color for every mood.

David complained that her room smelled of eau de cologne. There was always a pile of dirty clothes from the studio dumped in the corner. The voluminous ruffles of the skirts wouldn’t fit in the closets or drawers. She wore herself to a frazzle, and didn’t notice about the room.

Bonnie came in one day to say good morning. Alabama was late; it was half past seven; the damp of the night air had taken the stiffening out of her skirt. She turned crossly to Bonnie. “You haven’t brushed your teeth this morning,” she said irritably.

“Oh, but I have!” said the little girl defiantly, angry at her mother’s suspicion. “You told me to always before I did anything in the mornings.”

“I told you to, so you just thought you wouldn’t today. I can see the brioche still on the front ones,” Alabama pursued.

“I did so brush them.”

“Don’t lie to me, Bonnie,” said her mother angrily.

“It’s you who’s a lie!” flared Bonnie recklessly.

“Don’t you dare say that to me!” Alabama grabbed the small arms and slapped the child soundly over the thighs. The short explosive sound warned her that she had used more force than she had intended. She and her daughter stared at each other’s red reproachful faces.

“I’m sorry,” said Alabama pathetically. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Then why did you slap me?” protested the child, full of resentment.

“I meant to make it just hard enough to show you that you have to pay for being wrong.” She did not believe what she said, but she had to offer some explanation.

Alabama hastily left the apartment. On her way past Bonnie’s door down the corridor she paused.

“Mademoiselle?”

“Oui, Madame?”

“Did Bonnie brush her teeth this morning?”

“Naturally! Madame has left orders that that is to be tended to first thing on rising, though I personally think it spoils the enamel——”

“Damn it,” said Alabama viciously to herself, “there were nevertheless crumbs. What can I say to make up to Bonnie for the sense of injustice she must have?”

Nanny brought Bonnie to the studio one afternoon when Mademoiselle was out. The dancers spoiled her dreadfully; Stella gave her candy and sweets, and Bonnie choked and sputtered, rubbing her hands through the melted chocolate that plastered her mouth, Alabama had been so severe about her not making a noise that the child tried not to cough. Stella led the little red-faced, gasping girl into the vestibule, patting her over the back.

“You will dance also,” she said, “when you are bigger?”

“No,” said Bonnie emphatically, “it is too ‘sérieuse’ to be the way Mummy is. She was nicer before.”

“Madam,” said Nanny, “I was really astonished at how well you do, really. You do nearly as well as the others. I wonder if I should like it——it must be very good for you.”

“Lord,” Alabama said infuriated.

“We must all have something to do, and Madam never plays bridge,” persisted Nanny.

“We get something to do and as soon as we’ve got it, it gets us.” Alabama wanted to say “Shut up!”

“Isn’t that always the way?”

When David suggested coming again to the studio Alabama protested.

“Why not?” he said. “I should think you would want me to see you practice.”

“You wouldn’t understand,” she answered egotistically. “You will just see that I am given only the things I can’t do and discourage me.”

The dancers worked always beyond their strength.

“Why ‘déboulé’?” Madame expostulated. “You do that already—passably.”

“You’re so thin,” said David patronizingly. “There’s no use killing yourself. I hope that you realize that the biggest difference in the world is between the amateur and the professional in the arts.”

“You might mean yourself and me——” she said thoughtfully.

He exhibited her to his friends as if she were one of his pictures.

“Feel her muscle,” he said. Her body was almost their only point of contact.

The saillants of her sparse frame glowed with the gathering despair of fatigue that lit her interiorly.

David’s success was his own—he had earned his right to be critical—Alabama felt that she had nothing to give to the world and no way to dispose of what she took away.

The hope of entering Diaghilev’s ballet loomed before her like a protecting cathedral.

“You’re not the first person who’s ever tried to dance,” David said. “You don’t need to be so sanctimonious about it.”

Alabama was despondent, nourishing her vanity on the questionable fare of Stella’s liberal flattery.

Stella was the butt of the studio. The girls, angry and jealous of each other, took out their spite and ill temper on the clumsy, massive Pole. She made such an effort to please that she was always in the way of everybody—she flattered them all.

“I can’t find my new tights—four hundred francs they cost,” flared Arienne. “I have not got four hundred francs to throw from the window! There have never been thieves before in the studio.” She glared at the dancers and fixed on Stella.

Madame was called to quell the rising insults. Stella had put the tights in Nordika’s chest. Nordika said angrily that she would have to have her tunics dry-cleaned; it was unnecessary, her saying that; Arienne was immaculate.

It was Stella who placed Kira behind Arienne that she might better learn by imitating the fine technician. Kira was a beautiful girl with long brown hair and high voluptuous curves. She was a protégée—nobody knew of whom, but she was unable to move without supervision.

“Kira!” shrieked Arienne, “will spoil my dancing! She sleeps at the bar and sleeps on the floor. You would think this is a rest cure!”

Kira’s voice was cracked. “Arienne,” she wheedled, “you will help me with my batterie?”

“You have no batterie,” stormed Arienne, “outside of a batterie de cuisine, perhaps, and I would have Stella know that I form my own protégées.”

When Stella had to tell Kira to move farther down the bar, Kira cried and went to Madame.

“What has Stella to do with where I stand?”

“Nothing,” answered Madame, “but since she lives here, you must not notice her more than the walls.”

Madame never said much. She seemed to expect the girls to quarrel. Sometimes she discussed the qualities of yellow or cerise or Mendelssohn. Inevitably the sense of her words was lost for Alabama, drifting off into that dark mournful harvest of the tides of the Sea of Marmara, the Russian language.

Madame’s brown eyes were like the purple bronze footpaths through an autumn beechwood where the mold is drenched with mist, and clear fresh lakes spurt up about your feet from the loam. The classes swayed to the movements of her arms like an anchored buoy to the tides. Saying almost nothing in that ghoulish Eastern tongue, the girls were all musicians and understood that Madame was exhausted with their self-assertion when the pianist began the pathetic lullaby from the entr’acte of Cleopatra; that the lesson was going to be interesting and hard when she played Brahms. Madame seemed to have no life outside her work, to exist only when she was composing.

“Where does Madame live, Stella?” asked Alabama curiously.

“But, ma chère, the studio is her home,” said Stella, “for us anyway.”

Alabama’s lesson was interrupted one day by men with measuring rods. They came and paced the floor and made laborious estimates and calculations. They came again at the end of the week.

“What is it?” said the girls.

“We will have to move, chéries,” Madame answered sadly. “They are making a moving-picture studio of my place here.”

At her last lesson, Alabama searched behind the dismantled segments of the mirror for lost pirouettes, for the ends of a thousand arabesques.

There was nothing but thick dust, and the traces of hairpins rusted to the wall where the huge frame had hung.

“I thought I might find something,” she explained shyly, when she saw Madame looking at her curiously.

“And you see there is nothing!” said the Russian, opening her hands. “But in my new studio you may have a tutu,” she added. “You asked me to tell you. Perhaps in its folds, who knows what you may find.”

The fine woman was sad to leave those faded walls so impregnated with her work.

Alabama had sweated to soften the worn floor, worked with the fever of bronchitis to appease the drafts in winter, candles were burning at St-Sulpice. She hated to leave, too.

She and Stella and Arienne helped Madame to move her piles of old abandoned skirts, worn toe shoes, and discarded trunks. As she and Arienne and Stella sorted and arranged these things redolent of the struggle for plastic beauty, Alabama watched the Russian.

“Well?” said Madame. “Yes, it is very sad,” she said implacably.