Part 35 (1/2)
”----to dare to eat bread and milk out of blue bowls.”
”Yes, I think I shall have to admit you to the Blue Bowl League, Mr.
Ericson. Speaking of which----Tell me, who did introduce us, you and me? I feel so apologetic for not remembering.”
”Mayn't I be a mystery, Miss Winslow? At least as long as I have this new s.h.i.+rt, which you observed with some approval while I was drooling on about authors? It makes me look like a count, you must admit. Or maybe like a Knight of the Order of the Bunny Rabbit. Please let me be a mystery still.”
”Yes, you may. Life has no mysteries left except Olive's coiffure and your beautiful s.h.i.+rt.... Does one talk about s.h.i.+rts at a second meeting?”
”Apparently one does.”
”Yes.... To-night, I _must_ have a mystery.... Do you swear, as a man of honor, that you are at this party dishonorably, uninvited?”
”I do, princess.”
”Well, so am I! Olive was invited to come, with a man, but he was called away and she dragged me here, promising me I should see----”
”Anarchists?”
”Yes! And the only nice lovable crank I've found--except you, with your vulgar prejudice against the whole race of authors--is a dark-eyed female who sits on a couch out in the big room, like a Mrs.
St. Simeon Stylites in a tight skirt, and drags you in by her glittering eye, looking as though she was going to speak about theosophy, and then asks you if you think a highball would help her cold.”
”I think I know the one you mean. When I saw her she was talking to a man whose beating whiskers dashed high on a stern and rock-bound face.... Thank you, I like that fairly well, too, but unfortunately I stole it from a chap named Haviland. My own idea of witty conversation: is 'Some car you got. What's your magneto?'”
”Look. Olive Dunleavy seems distressed. The number of questions I shall have to answer about you!... Well, Olive and I felt very low in our minds to-day. We decided that we were tired of select a.s.sociations, and that we would seek the Primitive, and maybe even Life in the Raw. Olive knows a woman mountain-climber who always says she longs to go back to the wilds, so we went down to her flat. We expected to have raw-meat sandwiches, at the very least, but the Savage Woman gave us Suchong and deviled-chicken sandwiches and pink cakes and Nabiscos, and told us how well her son was doing in his Old French course at Columbia. So we got lower and lower in our minds, and we decided we had to go down to Chinatown for dinner. We went, too!
I've done a little settlement work----Dear me, I'm telling you too much about myself, O Man of Mystery! It isn't quite done, I'm afraid.”
”Please, Miss Winslow! In the name of the--what was it--Order of the Blue Bowl?” He was making a mental note that Olive's last name was Dunleavy.
”Well, I've done some settlement work----Did you ever do any, by any chance?”
”I once converted a Chinaman to Lutheranism; I think that was my nearest approach,” said Carl.
”My work was the kind where you go in and look at three dirty children and teach them that they'll be happy if they're good, when you know perfectly well that their only chance to be happy is to be bad as anything and sneak off to go swimming in the East River. But it kept me from being very much afraid of the Bowery (we went down on the surface cars), but Olive was scared beautifully. There was the dearest, most inoffensive old man in the most perfect state of intoxication sitting next to us in the car, and when Olive moved away from him he winked over at me and said, 'Honor your shruples, ma'am, ver' good form.' I think Olive thought he was going to murder us--she was sure he was the wild, dying remnant of a n.o.ble race or something.
But even she was disappointed in Chinatown.
”We had expected opium-fiends, like the melodramas they used to have on Fourteenth Street, before the movies came. But we had a disgustingly clean table, with a mad, reckless picture worked in silk, showing two doves and a boiled lotos flower, hanging near us, to intimidate us. The waiter was a Harvard graduate, I know--perhaps Oxford--and he said, 'May I sugges' ladies velly nize China dinner?'
He suggested chow-main--we thought it would be either birds' nests or rats' tails, and it was simply crisp noodles with the most innocuous sauce.... And the people! They were all stupid tourists like ourselves, except for a j.a.p, with his cunnin' Sunday tie, and his little trousers all so politely pressed, and his clean pocket-hanky.
And he was reading _The Presbyterian_!... Then we came up here, and it doesn't seem so very primitive here, either. It's most aggravating....
It seems to me I've been telling you an incredible lot about our silly adventures--you're probably the man who won the Indianapolis motor-race or discovered electricity or something.”
Through her narrative, her eyes had held his, but now she glanced about, noted Olive, and seemed uneasy.
”I'm afraid I'm nothing so interesting,” he said; ”but I have wanted to see new places and new things--and I've more or less seen 'em. When I've got tired of one town, I've simply up and beat it, and when I got there--wherever there was--I've looked for a job. And----Well, I haven't lost anything by it.”
”Have you really? That's the most wonderful thing to do in the world.