At 2 o'clock we left our room and headed for the house of Queen Bess.

* * * * *

A huge and ornamental chamber known as the ballroom, or the parlor, had been converted into a dining-room. Ned and I were early. Six or seven men had arrived. They stood around ill at ease, looking at the flamboyant paintings on the wall as if they were inspecting the Titian room of some museum. Ned, who knew the town, pointed out two of the six as men of means. One was manager of a store. One was a billiard champion in a Michigan Avenue club.

Gradually the room filled up. A dozen more men arrived. Each was admitted by invitation as we had been. Sally, the colored mammy of the house, took charge and bade us be seated. Some twenty men took their places about the long rectangular table. And then a pianist entered. I think it was Prof. Schultz. He played the piano in the ballrooms of the district. He came in in a brand-new frock coat and patent leather shoes and sat down at the ivories. There was a pause and then the professor struck up, doloroso pianissimo, the tune of "Home, Sweet Home."

As the first notes carrying the almost audible words, "Mid pleasures and palaces" arose from the piano the folding doors at the end of the ballroom parted and there appeared Queen Bess, followed by fifteen of the girls who sold drinks for her. Queen Bess was dressed in black, her white hair coiffured like a hospital superintendent's. Her girls were dressed in simple afternoon frocks. Neither rouge nor beads were to be seen on them. And as the professor played "Home, Sweet Home" Queen Bess marched her companions solemnly down the length of the ballroom and seated them at the table.

I remember that before the numerous servitors started functioning Queen Bess made a speech. She stood up at the head of the table, her red face beaming under her white hair and her black eyes commanding the attention of the men and women before her.

"All of you know who I am, blankety blank," said Queen Bess, "and, blankety blank, what a reputation I got. All of you know. But I've invited you to this blankety blank dinner, hoping you will humor me for the afternoon and pretend you forget. I would like to see you enjoy yourselves at the banquet board, eat and drink what wine there is and laugh and be thankful, but without pulling any blankety blank rough stuff. I would like to see you enjoy yourselves as if you were in—in your own homes. Which I take it none of you gentlemen have got, seeing you are sitting here at the board of Queen Bess.

"Now, gentlemen," she concluded, "if it's asking too much of you to forget, the fault is mine and not yours. And nobody will be penalized or bawled out, blankety blank him, for being unable to forget. But if you can forget, and if you can let us enjoy ourselves for an afternoon in a blankety blank decent and God-fearing way—God love you."

And Queen Bess sat down. We ate and drank and laughed till seven o'clock that evening. And I remember that not one of the twenty men present used a profane word during this time; not one of them did or said anything that wouldn't have passed muster in his own home, if he had one. And that no one got drunk except Queen Bess. Yes, Queen Bess in her black dress got very drunk and swore like a trooper and laughed like a crazy child. And when the party was over Queen Bess stood at the door and we passed out, shaking hands with her and giving her our thanks. She stood, steadying herself against the door beam, and saying to each of us as she shook our hands:

"God love you. God love you for bringing happiness to a blankety blank blank like old Queen Bess."

THE DAGGER VENUS

The great Gabriel Salvini, whose genius has electrified the populace of a thousand vaudeville centers, sat in his suite at the Astor Hotel and listened glumly to the strains from a phonograph.

"What is the use?" growled the great Salvini. "It is no use. You listen to her."

"New music for your act, signor?"

"No, no, no. My wife. You hear her? She lie on the floor. The phonograph music play. The man call from the phonograph, 'one, two; one, two; one, higher; one, two.' And my wife, she lie on the floor and she kick up. She kick down. She roll over. She bend back. She bend forward. But it is no use."

"Madam is reducing, then, signor?"

"Bah! She kick. She roll. She jump. I say 'Lucia, what good for you to kick and jump when tonight you sit down and you eat; name of God, how you eat! Potatoes and more potatoes. Bread with butter on it. Meat, pie, cream, candy—ten thousand devils! She eat and eat until the eyes stick out. There is no more place to put. And I say, 'Lucia, you eat enough for six weeks every time you set down to the table.' I say, 'Lucia, look how the MacSwiney of Ireland go for thirty weeks without eating one bite.' Bah!"

"It is difficult to make a woman stop eating, signor."

"Difficult! Aha, but she must stop, or what become of me, the great Salvini, who have 200 medals? Look! I will show you from my book what they say of me. They say, 'Salvini is the greatest in his line.' They say, 'Here is genius; here is a man whose skill transcends the imagination.' So what I do if madam keep on growing fatter? Ah, you hear that music? It drive me crazy. I sit every day and listen. You hear her kick. Bang, bang! That's how she kick up she lie on the back. Ah, it is tragedy, tragedy!"

I nodded in silence as the great Salvini arose and moved across the room, a dapper figure in a scarlet dressing gown and green silk slippers. He returned with a fresh load of cigarettes. I noticed his hands—thin, gentle-looking fingers, like a woman's. They quivered perceptibly as he lighted his smoke, and I marveled at this—that the wizard fingers of the great Gabriel Salvini should shake!

"I tell you my story," he resumed. "I tell no one else. But you shall hear it. It is a story of—of this." And he clapped his hand despairingly over his heart. "I suffer. Name of God, I suffer every day, every night. And why? because! You listen to her. She still kick and kick and kick. And I sit here and think 'Where will it all end?' Another five pounds and I am ruined.

"It is ten years ago I meet her. Ah, so beautiful, so sweet, so light—like this." And the great Salvini traced the wavering elfin proportions of the Lucia of his youth in the air with his hands.

"And I say to her, 'My beloved, my queen, you and I will be married and we will work together and grow famous and rich.' And she say, 'Yes.' So we marry and begin work at once. I am in Milan, in Italy. And all through the honeymoon I study my Lucia. For my work is hard. All through the honeymoon I use only little stickers I throw at her. I begin that way. Five, six, seven hours a day we practice. Ah, so sweet and beautiful she is as she stand against the board and I throw the little stickers at her. She smile at me, 'Have courage, Salvini.' And I see the love in her eyes and am happy and my arm and wrist are sure.

"Then I buy the knives to throw at her. I buy the best. Beautiful knives. I have them made for her special. For not a hair of my beloved's head must be touched. And we practice with the knives. I am then already famous. Everybody in Italy knows Salvini, the great knife thrower. They say, 'Never has there been a young man of such genius with the knives.' But I am only begin.

* * * * *

"Our debut is a success. What do I say, 'Success!' Bah! It is like wildfire. They stand up and cheer. 'Salvini, Salvini!' they cry. And she, my beloved, stand against the board framed by the beautiful knives that fit exactly around her—to an inch, to a quarter inch, to a hair from her ears and neck. And she stand, and as they cheer for Salvini, the great Salvini, I see her smile at me. Ah, how sweet she is! How happy I am!

"And so we go on. I train all the time. Soon I know the outline of my Lucia so well I can close my eyes and throw knives at her, and always they come with the point only a hair away from her body. I pin her dress against the board. Her arms she stretch out and I give her two sleeves of knives. And for five years, no for eight years, everything go well. Never once I touch her. Always I watch her eyes when I throw and her eyes give me courage.

"But then what happen? Ah, ten thousand devils, she begin. She grow fat. One night I send a knife through the skin of her arm. I cannot go on with the act. I must stop. I break down and weep. For I love her so much the blood that comes from her arm drive me crazy. But I say, 'How did the great Salvini make such a mistake? It is incredible.' Then I look at her and I see something. She is getting fat. Name of God, I shudder. I say, 'Lucia, we are ruined. You get fat. I can only throw knives at you like you were, like we have studied together. You get fat. I must change my throw. I cannot!"

* * * * *

The great Salvini raised his shoulders in a despairing shrug.

"Two years ago that was," he whispered. "She weigh one hundred fifty pounds when we marry. So pretty, so light she is. But now she weigh already two hundred pounds, and she is going up. She will not listen to me.

"It is the eat, the eat, the terrible eat which do this. And every night when we perform I shiver, I grow cold. I stand looking at her as she take her place on the board. And I see she have grow bigger. Perhaps it is nothing to you, a woman grown bigger. But to Salvini it is ruin.

"I throw the knife. Zip it goes and I close my eyes each time. I no longer dare give her the beautiful frame as before. But I must throw away. Because for eight years I have thrown at a target of 150 pounds. And my art cannot change.

"Some day she will be sorry. Yes, some day she will understand what she is doing to me. She will eat, eat until she grow so fat that it is all my target that I mastered on the honeymoon. And I will throw the knife over. She will no longer be Lucia, and it will hit. Name of God, it will hit her and sink in."

"Well, she will have learned a lesson then, signor."

"She will have learned. But me, I will be ruined. They will laugh. They will say, 'Salvini, the great Salvini, is done. He cannot throw the knives any more. Look, last night he hit his wife. Twice, three, times he threw the knives into her.' Sapristi! It is the stubbornness of womankind.

"I will tell you. Why does she eat, eat, eat? Why does she grow fat? Because she no longer loves me. No, she do it on purpose to ruin me."

And the great Salvini covered his ears with his hands as the phonograph continued relentlessly, "one, two, one, two, higher, two."



LETTERS

One of the drawers in my desk is full of letters that people have sent in. Some of them are knocks or boosts, but most of them are tips. There are several hundred tips on stories in the drawer.

Today, while looking them over I thought that these tips were a story in themselves. To begin with, the different kinds of stationery and the different kinds of handwriting. You would think that stationery and handwriting so varied would contain varied suggestions and varied points of view.

But from the top of the pile to the bottom—through 360 letters written on 360 different kinds of paper—there runs only one tip. And in the 360 different kinds of handwriting there runs only one story.

* * * * *

"There is a man I see almost every day on my way home from work," writes one, "and I think he would make a good story. There is something queer about him. He keeps mumbling to himself all the time." This tip is on plain stationery.

"—and I see the old woman frequently," writes another. "Nobody knows who she is or what she does. She is sure a woman of mystery. You ought to be able to get a good story out of her." This tip is on pink stationery.

"I think you can find him around midnight walking through the city hall. He walks through the hall every midnight and whistles queer tunes. Nobody has ever talked to him and they don't know what he does there. There is certainly a queer story in that man." This tip is written on a business letterhead.

"She lives in a back room and so far as anybody knows has no occupation. There's something awfully queer about her and I've often wondered what the mystery about her really was. Won't you look her up and write it out? Her address is—" This tip is on monogrammed paper.

"I've been waiting for you to write about the queer old man who hangs out on the Dearborn Street bridge. I've passed him frequently and he's always at the same place. I've wondered time and again what his history was and why he always stood in the same place." This tip is on a broker's stationery.

"He sells hot beans in the loop and he's an old-timer. He's always laughing and whenever I see him I think, 'There's a story in that old man. There's sure something odd about him.'" This tip is on scratch paper.

"I saw her first several years ago. She was dressed all in black and was running. As it was past midnight I thought it strange. But I've seen her since and always late at night and she's always running. She must be about forty years old and from what I could see of her face a very curious kind of woman. In fact, we call her the woman of mystery in our neighborhood. Come out to Oakley Avenue some night and see for yourself. There's a wonderful story in that running woman, I'm certain." This tip is signed "A Stenographer."

They continue—tips on strange, weird, curious, odd, old, chuckling, mysterious men and women. Solitaries. Enigmatic figures moving silently through the streets. Nameless ones; exiles from the free and easy conformity of the town.

If you should read these letters all through at one sitting you would get a very strange impression of the city. You would see a procession of mysterious figures flitting through the streets, an unending swarm of dim ones, queer ones. And then as you kept on reading this procession would gradually focus into a single figure. This is because all the letters are so nearly alike and because the mysterious ones offered as tips are described in almost identical terms.

So the dim ones, the queer ones, would become a composite, and you would have in your thought the image of a single one. A huge, nebulous caricature—hooded, its head lowered, its eyes peering furtively from under shaggy brows, its thin fingers fumbling under a great black cloak, its feet moving in a soundless shuffle over the pavement.

Sometimes I have gone out and found the "woman of mystery" given in a letter. Usually an embittered creature living in the memory of wrongs that life has done her. Or a psychopathic case suffering from hallucinations or at war with its own impulses. And each of them has said, "I hate people. I don't like this neighborhood. And I keep to myself."

The letters all ask, "Who is this one?"

But that doesn't begin to answer the question the letters ask, "Who is it?"

* * * * *

The story of the odd ones is perhaps no more interesting than the story that might be written of the letters that "tip them off." A story here, of the harried, buried little figures that make up the swarm of the city and of the way they glimpse mystery out of the corners of their eyes. Of the way they pause for a moment on their treadmill to wonder about the silent, shuffling caricature with its hooded face and its thin fingers groping under its heavy black cloak.

In another drawer I have stored away letters of another kind. Letters that the caricature sends me. Queer, marvelous scrawls that remind one of spiders and bats swinging against white backgrounds. These letters are seldom signed. They are written almost invariably on cheap blue lined pad paper.

There are at least two hundred of them. And if you should read them all through at one sitting you would get a strange sense that this caricature of the hooded face was talking to you. That the Queer One who shuffles through the streets was sitting beside you and whispering marvelous things into your ear.

He writes of the stars, of inventions that will revolutionize man, of discoveries he has made, of new continents to be visited, of trips to the moon and of buried races that live beneath the rivers and mountains. He writes of amazing crimes he has committed, of weird longings that will not let him sleep. And, too, he writes of strange gods which man should worship. He pours out his soul in a fantastic scrawl. He says: "One is all. God looked down and saw ants. The wheel of life turns seven times and you can see between. You will sometime understand this. But now you have curtains on your eyes."

Now that you have read all the letters the city becomes a picture. An office in which sits a well-dressed business man dictating to a pretty stenographer. They are hard at work, but as they work their eyes glance furtively out of a tall, thin window. Some one is passing outside the window. A strange figure, hooded, head down, with his hands moving queerly under his great black cloak.



THE MOTHER

She sat on one of the benches in the Morals Court. The years had made a coarse mask of her face. There was nothing to see in her eyes. Her hands were red and leathery, like a man's. They had done a man's work.

A year-old child slept in her arms. It was bundled up, although the courtroom itself was suffocating. She was waiting for Blanche's case to come up. Blanche had been arrested by a policeman for—well, for what? Something about a man. So she would lose $2.00 by not being at work at the store today. Why did they arrest Blanche? She was in that room with the door closed. But the lawyer said not to worry. Yes, maybe it was a mistake. Blanche never did nothing. Blanche worked at the store all day.

At night Blanche went out. But she was a young girl. And she had lots of friends. Fine men. Sometimes they brought Blanche home late at night. Blanche was her daughter.

* * * * *

The woman with the sleeping child in her arms looked around. The room was nice. A big room with a good ceiling. But the people looked bad. Maybe they had done something and had been arrested. There was one man with a bad face. She watched him. He came quickly to where she was sitting. What was he saying? A lawyer.

"No, I don't want no lawyer," the woman with the child mumbled. "No, no."

The man went back. He kept pretty busy, talking to lots of people in the room. So he was a lawyer. Blanche had a lawyer. She had paid him $10. A lot of money.

"Shh, Paula!" the woman whispered. Paula was the name of the sleeping child. It had stirred in the bundle.

"Shh! Mus'n't. Da-ah-ah-ah—"

She rocked sideways with the bundle and crooned over it. Her heavy coarsened face seemed to grow surprised as she stared into the bundle. The child grew quiet.

The judge took his place. Business started. From where she sat the woman with the child couldn't hear anything. She watched little groups of men and women form in front of the judge. Then they went away and other groups came.

The lawyer had said not to worry. Just wait for Blanche's name and then come right up. Not to worry.

"Shh, Paula, shh! Da-ah-ah-ah—"

There was Blanche coming out of the door. She looked bad. Her face. Oh, yes, poor girl, she worked too hard. But what could she do? Only work. And now they arrested her. They arrested Blanche when the streets were full of bums and loafers, they arrested Blanche who worked hard.

Go up in front like the lawyer said. Sure. There was Blanche going now. And the lawyer, too. He had a better face than the other one who came and asked.

"And is this the woman?"

The lawyer laughed because the judge asked this.

"Oh, no," he said; "no, your honor, that's her mother. Step up, Blanche."

What did the policeman say?

"Shh! Paula, shh! Da-ah—" She couldn't hear on account of Paula moving so much and crying. Paula was hungry. She'd have to stay hungry a little while. What man? That one!

But the policeman was talking about the man, not about Blanche.

"He said, your honor, that she'd been following him down Madison Street for a block, talking to him and finally he stopped and she asked him—"

"Shh! Paula, don't! Bad girl! Shh!"

That man with the black mustache. Who was he?

"Yes, your honor, I never saw her before. I walk in the street and she come up and talk to me and say, 'You wanna come home with me?'"

"Blanche, how long has this been going on?"

Look, Blanche was crying. Shh, Paula, shh! The judge was speaking. But Blanche didn't listen. The woman with the child was going to say, "Blanche, the judge," but her tongue grew frightened.

"Speak up, Blanche." The judge said this.

* * * * *

She could hardly hear Blanche. It was funny to see her cry. Long ago she used to cry when she was a baby like Paula. But since she went to work she never cried. Never cried.

"Oh, judge! Oh, judge! Please—"

"Shh, Paula! Da-ah-ah-ah—" Why was this? What would the judge do?

"Have you ever been arrested before, Blanche?"

No, no, no! She must tell the judge that. The woman with the child raised her face.

"Please, judge," she said, "No! No! She never arrested before. She's a good girl."

"I see," said the judge. "Does she bring her money home?"

"Yes, yes, judge! Please, she brings all her money home. She's a good girl."

"Ever seen her before, officer?"

"Well, your honor, I don't know. I've seen her in the street once or twice, and from the way she was behavin', your honor, I thought she needed watchin'."

"Never caught her, though, officer?"

No, your honor, this is the first time."

"Hm," said his honor.

Now the lawyer was talking. What was he saying? What was the matter? Blanche was a good girl. Why they arrest her?

"Shh, Paula, shh! Mus'n't." She held the child closer to her heavy bosom. Hungry. But it must wait. Pretty soon.

He was a nice judge. "All right," he said, "you can go, Blanche. But if they bring you in again it'll be the House of the Good Shepherd. Remember that. I'll let you go on account of her."

A nice judge. "Thank you, thank you, judge. Shh, Paula! Goo-by."

Now she would find out. She would ask Blanche. They could talk aloud in the hallway.

"Blanche, come here." A note of authority came into the woman's voice. A girl of eighteen walking at her side turned a rouged, tear-stained face.

"Aw, don't bother me, ma. I got enough trouble."

"What was the matter with the policeman?"

"Aw, he's a boob. That's all."

"But what they arrest you for, Blanche? I knew it was a mistake. But what they arrest you for, Blanche? I gave him $10."

"Aw, shut up! Don't bother me."

The woman shrugged her shoulders and turned to the child in her arms.

"Da-ah-ah, Paula. Mamma feed you right away. Soon we find place to sit down. Shh, Paula! Mus'n't. Da-ah-ah—"

When she looked up Blanche had vanished. She stood still for a while and then, holding the year-old child closer to her, walked toward the elevator. There was nothing to see in her eyes.



CLOCKS AND OWL CARS

As they say in the melodramas, the city sleeps. Windows have said good-night to one another. Rooftops have tucked themselves away. The pavements are still. People have vanished. The darkness sweeping like a great broom through the streets has emptied them.

The clock in the window of a real estate office says "Two." A few windows down another clock says "Ten minutes after two."

The newspaper man waiting for a Sheffield Avenue owl car walks along to the next corner, listening for the sound of car wheels and looking at the clocks. The clocks all disagree. They all hang ticking with seemingly identical and indisputable precision. Their white faces and their black numbers speak in the dark of the empty stores. "Tick-tock, Time never sleeps. Time keeps moving the hands of the city's clocks around and around."

Alas, when clocks disagree what hope is there for less methodical mechanisms, particularly such humpty-dumpty mechanisms as tick away inside the owners of clocks? The newspaper man must sigh. These clocks in the windows of the empty stores along Sheffield Avenue seem to be arguing. They present their arguments calmly, like meticulous professors. They say: "Eight minutes of two. Three minutes of two. Two. Four minutes after two. Ten minutes after two."

Thus the confusions of the day persist even after the darkness has swept the streets clean of people. There being nobody else to dispute, the clocks take it up and dispute the hour among themselves.

The newspaper man pauses in front of one half-hidden clock. It says "Six." Obviously here is a clock not running. Its hands have stopped and it no longer ticks. But, thinks the newspaper man, it is not to be despised for that. At least it is the only clock in the neighborhood that achieves perfect accuracy. Twice a day while all the other clocks in the street are disputing and arguing, this particular clock says "Six" and of all the clocks it alone is precisely accurate.

In the distance a yellow light swings like an idle lantern over the car tracks. So the newspaper man stops at the corner and waits. This is the owl car. It may not stop. Sometimes cars have a habit of roaring by with an insulting indifference to the people waiting for them to stop at the corner. At such moments one feels a fine rage, as if life itself had insulted one. There have been instances of men throwing bricks through the windows of cars that wouldn't stop and cheerfully going to jail for the crime.

But this car stops. It comes to a squealing halt that must contribute grotesquely to the dreams of the sleepers in Sheffield Avenue. The night is cool. As the car stands silent for a moment it becomes, with its lighted windows and its gay paint, like some modernized version of the barque in which Jason journeyed on his quest.

* * * * *

The seats are half filled. The newspaper man stands on the platform with the conductor and stares at the passengers. The conductor is an elderly man with an unusually mild face.

The people in the car try to sleep. Their heads try to make use of the window panes for pillows. Or they prop their chins up in their palms or they are content to nod. There are several young men whose eyes are reddened. A young woman in a cheap but fancy dress. And several middle-aged men. All of them look bored and tired. And all of them present a bit of mystery.

Who are these passengers through the night? And what has kept them up? And where are they going or coming from? The newspaper man has half a mind to inquire. Instead he picks on the conductor, and as the car bounces gayly through the dark, cavernous streets the mild-faced conductor lends himself to a conversation.

"I been on this line for six years. Always on the owl car," he says. "I like it better than the day shift. I was married, but my wife died and I don't find much to do with my evenings, anyway.

"No, I don't know any of these people, except there's a couple of workingmen who I take home on the next trip. Mostly they're always strangers. They've been out having a good time, I suppose. It's funny about them. I always feel sorry for 'em. Yes, sir, you can't help it.

"There's some that's been out drinking or hanging around with women and when they get on the car they sort of slide down in their seats and you feel like there was nothing much to what they'd been doing. Pessimistic? No, I ain't pessimistic. If you was ridin' this car like I you'd see what I mean.

"It's like watchin' people afterwards. I mean after they've done things. They always seem worse off then. I suppose it's because they're all sleepy. But standin' here of nights I feel that it's more than that. They're tired sure enough but they're also feeling that things ain't what they're cracked up to be.

"I seldom put anybody off. The drunks are pretty sad and I feel sorry for them. They just flop over and I wake them up when it comes their time. Sometimes there's girls and they look pretty sad. And sometimes something really interestin' comes off. Once there was a lady who was cryin' and holdin' a baby. On the third run it was. I could see she'd up and left her house all of a sudden on account of a quarrel with her husband, because she was only half buttoned together.

"And once there was a man whose pictures I see in the papers the next day as having committed suicide. I remembered him in a minute. Well, no, he didn't look like he was going to commit suicide. He looked just about like all the other passengers—tired and sleepy and sort of down."

The mild-faced conductor helped one of his passengers off.

"Don't you ever wonder what keeps these people out or where they're going at this time of night?" the newspaper man pursued as the car started up again.

"Well," said the conductor, "not exactly. I've got it figured out there's nothing much to that and that they're all kind of alike. They've been to parties or callin' on their girls or just got restless or somethin'. What's the difference? All I can say about 'em is that you get so after years you feel sorry for 'em all. And they're all alike—people as ride on the night run cars are just more tired than the people I remember used to ride on the day run cars I was on before my wife died."

The clock in a candy store window says "Three-twelve." A few windows down, another clock says "Three-five." The newspaper man walks to his home studying the clocks. They all disagree as before. And yet their faces are all identical—as identical as the faces of the owl car passengers seem to the conductor. And here is a clock that has stopped. It says "Twenty after four." And the newspaper man thinks of the picture the conductor identified in the papers the next morning. The picture said something like "Twenty after four" at the wrong time. It's all a bit mixed up.



CONFESSIONS

The rain mutters in the night and the pavements like dark mirrors are alive with impressionistic cartoons of the city. The little, silent street with its darkened store windows and rain-veiled arc lamps is as lonely as a far-away train whistle.

Over the darkened stores are stone and wooden flat buildings. Here, too, the lights have gone out. People sleep. The rain falls. The gleaming pavements amuse themselves with reflections.

I have an hour to wait. From the musty smelling hallway where I stand the scene is like an old print—an old London print—that I have always meant to buy and put in a frame but have never found.

* * * * *

Writing about people when one is alone under an electric lamp, and thinking about people when one stands watching the rain in the dark streets, are two different diversions. When one writes under an electric lamp one pompously marshals ideas; one remembers the things people say and do and believe in, and slowly these things replace people in one's mind. One thinks (in the calm of one's study): "So-and-so is a Puritan ... he is viciously afraid of anything which will disturb the idealized version of himself in which he believes—and wants other people to believe...." Yes, one thinks So-and-so is this and So-and-so is that. And it all seems very simple. People focus into clearly outlined ideas—definitions. And one can sit back and belabor them, hamstring them, pull their noses, expose their absurdities and derive a deal of satisfaction from the process. Iconoclasm is easy and warming under an electric light in one's study.

But in the rain at night, in the dark street staring at darkened windows, watching the curious reflections in the pavements—it is different in the rain. The night mutters and whispers.

"People," one thinks, "tired, silent people sleeping in the dark."

Ideas do not come so easily or so clearly. The ennobling angers which are the emotion of superiority in the iconoclast do not rise so spontaneously. And one does not say "People are this and people are that...." No, one pauses and stares at the dark chatter of the rain and a curious silence saddens one's mind.

Life is apart from ideas. And the things that people say and believe in and for which they die and in behalf of which they invent laws and codes—these have nothing to do with the insides of people. Puritan, hypocrite, criminal, dolt—these are paper-thin masks. It is diverting to rip them in the calm of one's study.

Life that warms the trees into green in the summer, that sends birds circling through the air, that spreads a tender, passionate glow over even the most barren wastes—people are but one of its almost too many children. The dark, the rain, the lights, people asleep in bed, the wind, the snow that will fall tomorrow, the ice, flowers, sunlight, country roads, pavements and stars—all these are the same. Through all of them life sends its intimate and sacred breath.

One becomes aware of such curious facts in the rain at night and one's iconoclasm, like a broken umbrella, hangs useless from one's hand. Tomorrow these people who are now asleep will be stirring, giving vent to outrageous ideas, championing incredulous banalities, prostrating themselves before imbecile superstitions. Tomorrow they will rise and begin forthwith to lie, quibble, cheat, steal, fourflush and kill, each and all inspired by the solacing monomania that every one of their words and gestures is a credible variant of perfection. Yes, tomorrow they will be as they were yesterday.

But in this rain at night they rest from their perfections, they lay aside for a few hours their paper masks. And one can contemplate them with a curious absence of indignation or criticism. There is something warm and intimate about the vision of many people sleeping in the beds above the darkened store fronts of this little street. Their bodies have been in the world so long—almost as long as the stones out of which their houses are made. So many things have happened to them, so many debacles and monsters and horrors have swept them off their feet ... and always they have kept on—persisting through floods, volcanic eruptions, plagues and wars.

Heroic and incredible people. Endlessly belaboring themselves with ideas, gods, taboos, and philosophies. Yet here they are, still in this silent little street. The world has grown old. Trees have decayed and races died out. But here above the darkened store fronts lies the perpetual miracle.... People in whom life streams as naive and intimate as ever.

* * * * *

Yes, it is to life and not people one makes one's obeisance. Toward life no iconoclasm is possible, for even that which is in opposition to its beauty and horror must of necessity be a part of them.

It rains. The arc lamps gleam through the monotonous downpour. One can only stand and dream ... how charming people are since they are alive ... how charming the rain is and the night.... And how foolish arguments are ... how banal are these cerebral monsters who pose as iconoclasts and devote themselves grandiloquently and inanely to disturbing the paper masks....

* * * * *

I walk away from the musty smelling hallway. A dog steps tranquilly out of the shadows nearby. He surveys the street and the rain with a proprietary calm.

It would be amusing to walk in the rain with a strange dog. I whistle softly and reassuringly to him. He pauses and turns his head toward me, surveying me with an air of vague discomfort. What do I want of him? ... he thinks ... who am I? ... have I any authority? ... what will happen to him if he doesn't obey the whistle?

Thus he stands hestitating. Perhaps, too, I will give him shelter, a kindness never to be despised. A moment ago, before I whistled, this dog was tranquil and happy in the rain. Now he has changed. He turns fully around and approaches me, a slight cringe in his walk. The tranquillity has left him. At the sound of my whistle he has grown suddenly tired and lonely and the night and rain no longer lure him. He has found another companionship.

And so together we walk for a distance, this dog and I, wondering about each other....



AN IOWA HUMORESQUE

In a room at the Auditorium Hotel a group of men and women connected with the opera were having tea. As they drank out of the fragile cups and nibbled at the little cakes they boasted to each other of their love affairs.

"And I had the devil of a time getting rid of her," was the motif of the men's conversation. The women said, "And I just couldn't shake him. It was awful."

There was one—an American prima donna—who grew pensive as the amorous boasting increased. An opulent woman past 35, dark-haired, great-eyed; a robust enchantress with a sweep to her manner. Her beauty was an exaggeration. Exaggerated contours, colors, features that needed perspective to set them off. Diluted by distance and bathed by the footlights she focused prettily into a Manon, a Thais, an Isolde. But in the room drinking tea she had the effect of a too startling close-up—a rococo siren cramped for space.

The barytone leaned unctuously across the small table and said to her with a preposterous archness of manner:

"And how does it happen, my dear, that you have nothing to tell us?"

"Because she has too much," said one of the orchestra men, laughingly.

The prima donna smiled.

"Oh, I can tell a story as well as anybody," she said. "In fact, I was just thinking of one. You know I was in Iowa last month. And I visited the town where I was born and lived as a girl—until I was nineteen. It's funny."

Again the pensive stare out of the window at the chill-looking autumn sky and the sharp outlines of the city roofs.

"Go on," her hostess cried. To her guests she added, in the social curtain-raiser manner peculiar to rambunctious hostesses, "if Mugs tells anything about herself you can be sure it'll be something immense. Go on, Mugs." Mugs is one of the nicknames the prima donna is known by among her friends.

"We went to school together," the prima donna smiled, "John and I. And I don't think I've ever loved anybody as I loved him. He used to frighten me to death. You see, I was ambitious. I wanted to be somebody. And John wanted me to marry him. Somehow marriage wasn't what I wanted then. There were other things. I had started singing and at night I used to lie awake, not wanting to sleep. I was so taken up with my dreams and plans that I hated to lose consciousness. That's a fact.

"Well, John grew more and more insistent. And one evening he came to call on me. I was alone on the porch. John was about twenty-three then. That was about twenty years ago. He was a tall, good-looking, sharp-faced young man with lively eyes. I thought him marvelous at the time. And he stood on the steps of the porch and talked to me. I never forgot a word he said. I have never heard anything so wonderful since."

The barytone shrugged his shoulders politely and said "Hm!"

"Oh, I know," smiled the prima donna, "you're the Great Lover and all that. But you never could talk as John did that evening on the porch—in Iowa. He stood there and said, 'Mugs, you're going to regret this moment for the rest of your life. There'll be nights when you'll wake up shivering and crying and you'll want to kill yourself. Why? Because you didn't marry me. Because you had your chance to marry me and turned it down. Remember. Remember how I'm standing here talking to you—unknown—a country boy. Remember that when you hear of me again.'

"'What are you going to do?' I asked.

"I'm going to be president of the United States,' he said. And he said it so that there was truth in it. As I looked at him standing on the steps I felt frightened to death. There he was, going to be president of the United States, and there was I, throwing the greatest chance in the world away. He knew I believed him and that made it worse. He went on talking in a sort of oracular singsong that drove me mad.

"'I'm not asking you again. You've had your chance, Mugs. And you've thrown it away. All right. It'll not be said afterward that John Marcey made a fool of himself. Good-bye.'"

* * * * *

The prima donna sighed. "Yes," she went on, looking into her empty teacup; "it was good-bye. He walked away, erect, his shoulders high, his body swinging. And I sat there shivering. I had turned down a president of the United States! Me, a gawky little Iowa girl. And, what was worse, I was in love with him, too. Well, I remember sitting on the porch till the folks came home from prayer meeting and I remember going to bed and lying awake all night, crying and shivering.

"I didn't see John Marcey again. I stayed only a week longer and then I came to Chicago to study music. My folks were able to finance me for a time. But I never forgot him. It was John who had started me for Chicago. And it was John who kept me practicing eight hours a day, studying and practicing until I thought I'd drop.

"I was going to make good. When he became president I was going to be somebody. I wasn't going to do what he said I would, wake up cursing myself and remembering my lost chance. So I went right on working my head off and finally it was Paris and finally it was a job in London. And I never stopped working.

"But the funny part was that I gradually forgot about John Marcey. When I had arrived as an opera singer he was entirely dead for me. But last month I visited my home town. I was passing through and couldn't resist getting off and looking up people I knew as a girl. My folks are dead, you know.

"And when I walked down the street—the same old funny little Main Street—I remembered John Marcey. And, would you believe it, that same feeling of fear came back to me as I'd had that night on the porch when he made his 'remember' speech. I got curious as the devil about John and felt afraid to inquire. But finally I was talking to an old, old man who runs the drug-store on the corner of Main and Sixth streets there. I'd recognized him through the window and gone inside and shaken hands; and I asked him:

"'Do you remember John Marcey?'

"'Marcey—Marcey?' he repeated. 'Oh, yes. Old Marse. Why, yes. Sure.' And he kept nodding his head. Then I asked with my heart in my mouth, 'What's become of him?' And the old druggist who was looking out of his store window adjusted his glasses and pointed with his finger. 'There he is. There he is. Wait a minute. I'll call him.'

"And there was John, my president of the United States, hunched over on the seat of a garbage wagon driving a woebegone nag down the street. I grabbed hold of the druggist and said, 'Don't, I'll see him later.'

"Well, I couldn't stay in that town another minute. I hurried to the station and waited for the next train and kept thinking of John driving his garbage wagon, and his battered felt hat and his hangdog face until I thought I'd go mad.

"That's all," laughed the prima donna, "That's my love story." And she stared pensively into the empty teacup as the barytone moved a bit closer and began:

"I'll tell you about a Spanish girl I met in Prague that'll interest you—"



THE EXILE

The newspaper man told the story apropos of nothing at all. There was a pause in the talk among the well-dressed dinner guests. A very satisfied-looking man said:

"Well, thank God, this radical excitement is over."

Every one agreed it was fortunate and the newspaper man, an insufferably garrulous person, interjected: "That reminds me of Bill Haywood."

"Oh, yes," said the hostess, "he was the leader of all that terrible thing, wasn't he?"

"He was," said the newspaper man. "I knew him fairly well. I covered the I.W.W. trial in Judge Landis' court, where he and a hundred or so others were sent to prison."

"What was the charge against them?" inquired the satisfied one.

"I forget," said the newspaper man, "but I remember Haywood. The trial, of course, had something to do with the war. The war was going on then, you remember."

"Oh, yes, indeed," exclaimed the hostess. "It will take a long time to forget the war." And her eyes brightened.

* * * * *

"You were going to tell us about the I.W.W. trial," pursued the hostess a few minutes later.

"Oh, there's nothing much about that," said the newspaper man. "I was principally interested in Bill Haywood for a moment. You know they sent him to jail for twenty years or so. Anyway, that was his sentence."

"The scoundrel ran away," said the very satisfied one. "Funny they should let a man as unprincipled and dangerous as Haywood slip through their hands after sending him to jail."

"Yes, they let him escape to Russia, of all places," declared the hostess with indignation. "Where he could do the most harm. Oh, the government is so stupid at times it simply drives one furious. Or makes you laugh. Doesn't it?"

"Yes, he skipped his bond or something," said the newspaper man, "and became an exile."

The satisfied one snorted.

"Exile!" he derided. "You don't call a man an exile who runs away from a country he has always despised and fought against?"

"The last time I saw him," went on the newspaper man, as if he were unruffled, "was about four or five days before he disappeared. I was surprised to see him. I thought he was serving his time in jail. I hadn't been following the ins and outs and I wasn't aware he had got appeals and things and was still at large."

"Yes," said the satisfied one, "that's the trouble with this country. Too lenient toward these scoundrels. As if they were entitled to—"

"Justice," murmured the newspaper man. "Quite so. Our enemies are not entitled to justice. It is one of my oldest notions."

"But tell us about what this Haywood said," pursued the hostess. "It must have been funny meeting him."

"It was," said the newspaper man. "It was at the Columbia theater between acts in the evening. I had gone to see a burlesque show there. And between acts I was on the mezzanine floor. I went out to get a glass of water.

"As I was coming back whom do I see leaning against the railing but old Bill Haywood. I hadn't seen him for about two years, I guess. But he hadn't changed an iota. The same crooked-lipped smile. And his one eye staring ahead of him with a mildly amused light in it. A rather striking person was Bill. I suppose it was because he always seemed so calm outside.

"He remembered me and when I said hello to him he called me by name and I walked to his side. I started talking and said: 'Well, what are you doing here? I thought you were serving time in six jails.'

"'Not yet,' said Haywood, 'but in a few days. The sentence starts next week.'

"'Twenty years?'

"'Oh, something like that.'

* * * * *

"Well," said the newspaper man, "I suddenly remembered that he was in a theater and I got kind of curious. I asked what he was doing in the theater and he looked at me and grinned.

"'I'm all in," he said. 'Been going the pace for about a month now. Out every night. Taking in all the glad spots and high spots.'

"This was so curious coming from Big Bill that I looked surprised. And he went on talking. Yes, sir, this Big Bill Haywood, the terror of organized society, was saying goodbye to his native land as if he were a sentimental playboy. He wasn't going to jail because by that time he had all his plans matured for his escape to Russia.

"But he knew he was going to leave the country and perhaps never come back again. So he was making the rounds.

"'I've been to almost every show in town,' he went on talking, 'all the musical comedies, all the dramas, all the west side melodramas. I've been to almost all the cafes, the swell ones with the monkey-suit waiters and the old ones I've known myself for years. I drew up a list of all these places in town about a month ago and I've been following a schedule ever since.'

* * * * *

"I asked him," said the newspaper man, "if he liked the plays he'd seen. Bill grinned at that.

"'It ain't that,' said Bill. 'No, it ain't that. It's only seeing them. You know, there's nothing like these kind of things anywhere else in the world.'

"And then the theater got dark and we said good-bye casually and went to our different seats. I didn't see Haywood again. About a week or so later I read the headline that he had fled the country. Nobody knew where he was, but people suspected. And then two weeks after that there was the story that he had reached Russia and was in Moscow.

"Well, when I read that," said the newspaper man, "I remembered all of a sudden how he had stood leaning against the railing at the Columbia theater saying good-bye to something. Making the rounds for a month saying good-bye in his own way to all the places he would never see again. Kind of odd, I thought, for Bill Haywood to do that. That isn't the way Nietzsche would have written a radical. But Dickens might have written it that way, like Bill.

"That's why whenever I see his name in print now," pursued the newspaper man, "I always think of the burlesque chorus on the stage kicking their legs and yodeling jazzily and Big Bill Haywood staring with his one eye, saying good-bye with his one eye.

"Tell me he's not an exile!" laughed the newspaper man suddenly.



ON A DAY LIKE THIS

On a day like this, he says, on a day like this, when the wind plays cello music across the rooftops.... I think about things. The town is like a fireless, dimly lighted room. Yesterday the windows sparkled with sunlight. To-day they stare like little coffin tops.

On a day like this, he says, on this sort of a day I walk along smoking a pipe and wonder what I was excited about yesterday. Then I remember, he says, that once it rained yesterday and I waited under the awning till it ended. I remember, he says, that once I walked swiftly down this street toward a building on the corner. It was vastly important that I reach this building. I remember, he says, that there were days I hurried down Clark Street and days I ran down Monroe Street. Now it is windy again. There is long silence over the noises of the street. The sky looks empty and old.

* * * * *

There were people gathered around an automobile that had bumped into the curbing. I stopped to watch them, he says. There was a man next to me with a heavy gray face, with loose lips and with intent eyes. There was another man and another—dozens of men—all of them people who had been hurrying in the street to get somewhere. And here they were standing and looking intently at an automobile with a twisted wheel.

I became aware that we were all looking with a strange intensity at this automobile; that we all stood as if waiting for something. Dozens of men hurrying somewhere suddenly stop and stand for ten, twenty, thirty minutes staring at a broken automobile. There was a reason for this. Always where there is a machine at work, digging or hammering piles, where there is a horse fallen, an auto crashed, a flapjack turner, a fountain pen demonstrator; where there is a magic clock that runs, nobody knows how, or a window puzzle that turns in a drug-store window or anything that moves behind plate glass—always where there is any one of these things there are people like us standing riveted, attentive, unwavering.

People on artificial errands, hurrying like obedient automations through the streets; stern-faced people with dignified eyes, important-stepping people with grave decision stamped upon them; careless, innocuous-looking people—all these people look as if they had something in their heads, as if there were things of import driving them through the streets. But this is an error. Nothing in their heads. They are like the fish that swim beneath the water—a piece of shining tin captures their eyes and they pause and stare at it.

The broken automobile holds their eyes, holds them all riveted because—because it is something unordinary to look at, to think about. And there is nothing unordinary to look at or think about in their heads.

* * * * *

And I too, he says, on this day when the wind played cello music across the rooftops, stood in the crowd. We were all children, I noticed, more than that—infants. Open-mouthed infantile wonder staring out of our tired, gray faces. Men, without thought, men making a curious little confession in the busy street that they were not busy, that there is nothing in life at the moment that preoccupies them—that a broken automobile is a godsend, a diversion, a drama, a great happiness.

I smoked my pipe, he says, and began to wonder again. Why did they stare like this? And at what? And who were these staring ones? And what was it in them that stared? I thought of this, he says. Dead dreams, and forgotten defeats stood staring from the curb at the broken automobile. Men who had survived themselves, who had become compliant and automatic little forces in the engine of the city—these were ourselves on the curb.

And this is a weary thing to remember about the city. When I am tired, he says, and the plot of which I am hero, villain and Greek chorus suddenly vanish from my mind, I pause and look at something behind plate glass. A bauble catches my eye. Long minutes, half hours pass. There is a marvelous plentitude of baubles to look at. Machines digging, excavations, scaffoldings, advertisements, never are lacking.

And at such times I begin to notice how many of us there are. The hurry of the streets is an illusion. The noises that rise in clouds, and the too-many suits of clothes and hats that sweep by—all these things are part of an illusion. The fact drifts through my tired senses that there is an amazing silence in the street—the silence inside of people's heads. Everywhere I look I find these busy ones, these energetic ones stopped and standing like myself before a bauble in a window, before a broken automobile.

* * * * *

Of people, authors always make great plots. Authors always write of adventures and intrigues, of emotions and troubles and ideas which occupy people. People fall in love, people suffer defeats, people experience tragedies, happinesses, and there is no end to the action of people in books.

But here is a curious plot, he says, on a day like this. Here is a crowd around a broken automobile. The broken automobile has trapped them, betrayed them. They realize the broken automobile as a "practical" excuse to stop walking, to stop moving, to stop going anywhere or being anybody. Their serious concentration on the broken wheel enables them to pretend that they are logically interested in practical matters. Without which pretense it would be impossible for them to exist. Without which pretense they would become consciously dead. They must always seem, to themselves as well as to others, logically interested in something. Yes, always something.

But the plot is—and do not misunderstand this, he cautions—that the pretense here around the broken automobile grows shallow enough to plumb. There is nothing here. Two dozen men standing dead on a curbing, tricked into confessional by a little accident.

So I will begin a book tomorrow, he says, and empties his pipe as he talks, which will have to do with the make-believe of people in streets—the make-believe of being alive and being somebody and going somewhere.

And saying this, this garrulous one walks off with a high whistle on his lips and a grave triumph sitting on his shoulders.

JAZZ BAND IMPRESSIONS

The trombone player has a straight part. He umpah umps with the conventional trombone fatalism. Whatever the tune, whatever the harmonies, trombone umpah umps regardless. Umpah ump is the soul of all things. Cadenzas, glissandos, arpeggios, chromatics, syncopations, blue melodies—these are the embroidery of sound. From year to year these change, these pass. Only the umpah ump remains. And tonight the trombone player plays what he will play a thousand nights from tonight—umpah ump.

The bassoon and the bull fiddle—they umpah ump along. Underneath the quaver and whine of the jazz they beat the time, they make the tuneless rhythm. The feet dancing on the crowded cabaret floor listen cautiously for the trombone, the bassoon and the bull fiddle. They have a liaison with the umpah umps—the feet. Long ago they danced only to the umpah umps. There were no cadenzas, glissandos, arpeggios then. There was only the thumping of cedar wood on cedar wood, on ebony or taut deerskin.

Civilizations have risen, fallen and risen again. Armies, gods, races have been chewed into mist by the years. But the thumping remains. The feet of the dancers on the cabaret floor keep a rendezvous with the ebony on the taut deerskin, with the cedar wood beating on cedar wood.

* * * * *

The clarinet screeches, wails, moans and whistles. The clarinet flings an obbligato high over the heads of the dancers on the cabaret floor. It makes shrill sounds. It raves like a fireless Ophelia. It plays the clown, the tragedian, the acrobat.

A whimsical insanity lurks in the music of the clarinet. It stutters ecstasies. It postures like Tristan and whimpers like a livery-stable nag. It grimaces like Peer Gynt and winks like a lounge lizard, a cake eater.

It is not for the feet of the dancers on the crowded cabaret floor. The feet follow the umpah umps. The thoughts of the dancers follow the clarinet. The thoughts of the boobilariat dance easily to the tangled lyric of the clarinet. The thoughts tie themselves into crazy knots. The music of the clarinet becomes like crazily uncoiling whips. The thoughts of the dancers shake themselves loose from words under the spur of the whips. They begin to dance, not as the feet dance. There is another rhythm here. The rhythm of little ecstasies whimpering. Thus the thoughts of the dancers dance—dead hopes, wearied ambitions, vanishing youth do an inarticulate can-can in the heads of the dancers on the cabaret floor.

* * * * *

The cornet wears a wooden gag in its mouth and a battered black derby hangs over its end. Umpah ump from the trombone, the bull fiddle and the bassoon. Tangled lyrics from the clarinet. And the cornet cakewalks like a hoyden vampire, the cornet whinnies like an odalisque expiring in the arms of the Wizard of Oz.

Lust giggles at a sly jest out of the cornet. Passion thumbs its nose at the stars out of the cornet. The melody of jazz, the tin pan ghosts of Chopin, Tchaikowsky, Old Black Joe, Liszt and Mumbo Magumbo, jungle troubadour of the Congo, come whinnying out from under the pendant derby.

The dancers on the cabaret floor close their eyes and grin to themselves. The cornet kids them along. When they grow sad it burlesques their sorrow. The cornet laughs at them. It leers like a satyr master of ceremonies at them. It is Pan in a clown suit, Silenus on a trick mule, Eros in a Pullman smoker.

* * * * *

Laugh, dance, jerk, wiggle and kid all you want—but the Lady of the Sea Foam whispers a secret. Aphrodite, become a female barytone, still takes herself very seriously. Aphrodite, alas, is always serious. She gurgles a sonorous plaint out of the saxophone. The cornet sneers at her. The clarinet sneaks up on her and tweaks her nose. The trombone, the bull fiddle and the bassoon ignore her altogether. And the dancers on the cabaret floor are too busy to dance to her simple wails.

Yet there is no mistake. Aphrodite, the queen, abandoned by her courtiers and surrounded by this galaxy of mountebanks, is still Aphrodite. Big-bosomed, sleepy-eyed and sad lipped she walks invisible among the dancers on the cabaret floor and they listen to her voice out of the saxophone.

The drums, the piano and the violin give her a fluttering drape. But there are things to be seen. This is not the Aphrodite of the Blue Danube waltz—but a duskier, more mystical lady. There are no roses on her cheeks, no lilies in her skin. She is colored like a panther flower and her limbs are heavy with taboo magic. But she is still imperial. In vain the mountebanks and burlesqueries of her court. Her lips place themselves against the hearts of the dancers on the cabaret floor. And she croons her ancient hymns.

The hearts of the dancers give themselves to the saxophone. Their feet keep a rendezvous with the umpah umps. Their thoughts dance on the slack wire of the clarinet. Their veins beat time to the whinny of the derby wreathed cornet. The fiddles and the drums are partners for their arms and their muscles. But their hearts embrace shyly the Mother Aphrodite. Their hearts listen sadly and proudly and they almost forget to dance.

* * * * *

Midnight approaches. Enameled faces, stenciled smiles, painted eyes and slants of colored hats—these are the women. Careless, polite, suave, grinning—these are the men. The jazz band plays. The cabaret floor, jammed, seems to be moving around like a groaning turnstile.

Bodies are hidden. The spotlight from the balcony begins to throw a series of colors. Melody is lost. The jazz band is hammering like a mad blacksmith. Whang! Bam! Whang! Bam! Nobody hears the music of the band. Bodies together move on the turnstile floor. This is the part of the feast of Belshazzar that the authorities censored in a Griffith movie. This is the description of Tiberius's court that the authorities suppressed. Here are the poems that hide on the forbidden shelves of the public library.

The pulp of figures dissolves. The hammering band has finished. Men and women, grown suddenly polite and social, return to their tables. Citizens of a neighborhood, toilers, clerks, fourflushers, wives, husbands, gropers, nobodies, less-than-nobodies—watch and see where they go. Into the brick holes, into the apartment buildings. They pack themselves away like ants in an anthill.

The nobodies—the gropers, husbands, wage-earners, fourflushers—but they made a violent picture a moment ago. Under the revolving colors of the floodlight and the hammering, whinnying music of the jazz band they became again the mask of Dionysus—the ancient satanical mask which nature slips over her head when in quest of diversion.



NIGHT DIARY

Where is the moon? Gone. This inferior luminary cannot compete with the corset ad signs and the ice cream ad signs that blaze in the night sky. We stand on a bridge that connects State Street and look at the river.

There are night shapes. But first we see the dark water of the river and silver, gold and ruby reflections of the bridge lights. These hang like carnival ribbons in the water. The "L" trains crawl over the Wells Street bridge and the water below them becomes alive with a moving silver image. For a moment the reflection of the "L" trains in the river seems like a ghostly waterfall. Then it changes and becomes something else. What? The light reflections in the dark water are baffling. It is a game to stand on the bridge and make up similes about them. They look like this, like that, like something else. Like golden pillars, like Chinese writing, like monotonous exclamation points.

There are boat shapes. The river docks bulge with shadows. The boat shapes emerge slowly from the shadows. These shapes, unlike the river reflections, do not suggest similes. They bulge in the darkness and their vanished outlines remind one of something. What? Of boats, of ships, of men.

Men and ships. Little lanterns hang like elfin watchmen from the sterns of ships. The bulldog noses of tugboats sleep against the docks. High overhead the corset ad and the ice cream ad blaze, wink and go out and turn on so as to attract the preoccupied eyes of people far away. Then the bridges count themselves to the west. First bridge, second bridge, third bridge. Street cars, auto lights and vague noises jerk eerily over the bridges.

The sleeping tugboats, launches and lake craft remind one of nothing at all except that there are engines. But as one stares at them they become secret. There is something mysterious about abandoned engines. It is almost as if one saw the bodies of men lying in shadows. Engines and men are inseparable. And these boats that sleep in the river shadows are parts of men. Amputations.

The night shapes increase. There are buildings. They drift along the river docks. Dark windows and faded brick lines. Their rooftops are like the steps of a giant stairway that has broken down. Where is the moon? Here are windows to mirror its distant silver. Instead, the windows sleep. The nervous electric signs that wink and do tricks throw an intermittent glare over the windows.

Do you know the dark windows of the city, you gentlemen who write continually of temples and art? Come, forget your love for things you never saw, cathedrals and parthenons that exist in the yesterdays you never knew. Come, look at the fire escapes that are stamped like letter Z's against the mysterious rectangles; at the rhythmic flight of windows whose black and silver wings are tipped with the yellow winkings of the corset and ice cream signs. The windows over the dark river are like an alphabet, like the keyboard of a typewriter. They are like anything you want them to be. You have only to wish and the dark windows take new patterns.

Wall shapes arise. Warehouses that have no windows. Huge lines loom in the shadows. A vast panel of brick without windows rises, vanishes. Buildings that stand like playing blocks. The half-hidden shapes, the tracks of windows, the patterns of rooftops suggest things—fortresses, palaces, dungeons, wars, witches and cathedrals.

But after watching them they lose these false significances. They suggest nothing. They are the amputations of men. Things, playthings men have left behind for the corset and the ice cream ads to wink at. And this is the real secret of their beauty. The night devours their meaning and leaves behind lines; angles, geometries, rhythms and lights. And these things that have no meaning, that suggest nothing, that are not the symbols of ideas or events—these become beautiful.

There are several people standing on this bridge—loiterers. Their elbows rest on the railing, their faces are hidden in their hands. They stare into the scene. A hoarse whistle toots at Wells Street. Bells clang far away. There is a scurry of dim noises in the dark. Something huge moves through the air. It is a bridge opening. Its arms make a massive gesture upward. A boat is coming through, a heavy shape drifting among the carnival ribbons that hang down in the black water.

* * * * *

Noises that have different tones. Boat whistles, bridge bells, electric alarm tinglings and the swish of water like the sound of wood tapping wood. Lights that have different colors. The yellow of electric signs. Around one of them that hoists its message in the air runs a green border. The electric lights quiver and run round the glaring frame like a mysterious green water. Red, gold and silver pillars in the water. Gray, blue and black shadows; elfin lanterns, "L" trains like illuminated caterpillars creeping over Wells Street, waterfalls of silver, Chinese writing in ruby; black, lead and silver windows and a thousand shades of darkness from bronze to strange greens. All these are things that the loitering ones leaning on the bridge rail know.

* * * * *

How nicely the hoods of automobiles hide the twisted lines of the gas engines under them. Smooth as chariots, curved and graceful as greyhounds, pigeons, rabbits—the State Street begins after one passes odors. This is South Water Street. A swept, dusted and wonderfully silent street. White wings have scrubbed its worn body. But the odors deepen with the night. Farm odors, food odors—an aroma of decay surrounds them. By their smells one can almost detect the presence of chickens, eggs, oranges, cabbages, potatoes, plums and cantaloupes.

A group of movie theaters holds carnival at the entrance to the loop. People hurry under electric canopies, dig in their pockets for dollar bills and buy tickets. The buildings sleep along the river. The boats wait in the shadows. Movie signs, crossing cops, window tracks and different colored suits of clothes; odors, noises, lights and a mysteriously tender pattern of walls—these lie in the night like a reward.

We walk away with memories. When we are traveling some day, riding over strange places, these will be things we shall remember. Not words, but lines that mean nothing; and the scene from the bridge will bring a sad confusion into our heads. And we shall sit staring at famous monuments, battlefields, antiquities, and whisper to ourselves:

"... wish I was back ... wish I was back...."



THE LAKE

The lake asks an old question as you ride to work or come home from work on the I. C. train. The train shoots along and out of the window the lake turns slowly like a great wheel. There is a curious optical illusion, as if the train were riding frantically on the rim of a great wheel and the wheel were turning in an opposite direction.

Perhaps this illusion makes it seem as if the lake were asking an old question as you ride along its edge—"Where you going?"

* * * * *

People looking out of the train window seem to grow sad as they stare at the lake. But this does not apply to train riders alone. In the summer time there are the revelers on the Municipal Pier and the beach loungers and all others who sit or take walks within sight of the water.

During the summer day the beaches are lively and the vari-colored bathing suits and parasols offer little carnival panels at the ends of the east running streets. As you pass them on the north side bus or on the south side I. C., the sun, the swarm of bathers smeared like bits of brightly colored paint across the yellow sand and the obliterating sweep of water remind you of the modernist artists whose pictures are usually lithographic blurs.

* * * * *

Yet winter and summer, even when the thousands upon thousands of bathers cover the sand like a shower of confetti and when there are shouts and circus excitements along the beach, people who look at the lake seem always to become sad. One wonders why.

Perhaps it is because the inanimate sweep of the water, its hugeness and silence, make one forget the petty things and the greedy trifles which form the routine of one's day. And when one forgets these things one remembers, alas, something they pleasantly obscured by their presence. A dream, perhaps, buried long ago. A hope, an emotion successfully interred under the amiable rubbish the days have piled up.

Then, too, there is the question, "Where you going?" And an answer to it that seems to come out of the long reaches of water—"Come with me—somewhere—nowhere."

These thoughts play in people's minds without words. They are almost more a part of the lake than of their thinking, as if they were, in fact, lake thoughts.

Another reason why people grow sad when they look at the water of the lake is perhaps that the lake offers them an escape from the tawdry, nagging little responsibilities of the day that go with being a citizen and a breadwinner. Not that it invites to suicide. Quite the reverse; it invites to living. To doing something that has a sweep to it; that has a swagger to it. To setting sail for strange ports where strange adventures wait.

So, as the I. C. trains rush their thousands to work and home again the citizens and breadwinners let their imaginations gallop toward a faraway horizon. And these imaginations came galloping back again and the breadwinners are saddened—by a memory. Yes, they were for a moment rovers, egad! swashbucklers, gentlemen and ladies of fortune free of the rigamarole burdens that keep them on the I. C. treadmill. And now they are again passengers. Going to work. Going home to go to work again tomorrow.

It is easy to think that this is the secret of the sad little grimace the lake brings to the eyes of the train riders.

* * * * *

This discourse is becoming a bit dolorous. But the subject rather requires an andante treatment. The city's press agents will tell you quite another story about the lake—about the "city's playground" and how conducive it is to healthful sport and joyous recreation. But, on the other hand, there is this other side, so to speak, of the lake. For the lake belongs to those familiar things that surprise people into uncomfortable silences.

One could as easily write about the sky in this vein, since the lake, like the sky, challenges the monotony of people's lives with another monotony—the monotony of nature that seems to engulf, obliterate, reduce to puny proportions the routine by which people live and which, fortunately, they delude themselves into admiring.

There is also the question of beauty. This is a delicate issue to introduce into one's daily reading and the reader's pardon is solicited with proper humiliation. And yet, there is a question of beauty, of soul states and aesthetic nuances involved in the consideration of the lake.

Beauty by one definition is the sensatory excitement stirred in people by the rhythm of line, the vibration of color, the play of motion and the surprise of idea. It is usually a saddening effect that beauty produces and perhaps this is because beauty is something like an illumination that while admirable in itself throws into pathetic evidence all the ugly and unbeautiful things of one's life.

In this somewhat involved aesthetic principle there is probably another hint at the causes of the sadness people show when they look at the lake.

* * * * *

Today the lake wears its autumn aspect. Out of the train window one sees a wedge of geese flying south or occasionally a lone bird circling like an endless note over the water. The waves look cold and their symmetrical crisscross makes one think of the chill, lonely nights that beckon outside the coziness of one's home windows.

On summer days the lake is sometimes like a huge lavender leaf veined with gold. Sometimes it becomes festive and wears the awning stripes of cloud and sun. Or it grows serene and reminds one of a superb domesticity—as it lies pointed like a grate, arched like a saucer or the back of a sleeping kitten.

But today its autumn is a bit depressing. It no longer lures toward strange adventure. Instead its grayness seems to say to one, "Stay away—stay away. Hide away in warm houses and warm overcoats. Men are little things—puny things."

It is when one leaves the city and goes to visit or to live in another place where there is no lake that the lake grows y alive in one's mind. One becomes thirsty for it and dreams of it. One remembers it then as something that was almost an essential part of life, like a third dimension. In some way one associates one's day dreams with the lake and falls into thinking that there is something unfinished, sterile about living with no lake at one's elbow.

* * * * *

In a short while, a month or so, the lake will become a stage for melodrama. The people riding on its edge will stare into mists. They will watch the huge mist shapes rolling back and forth over the hidden water. The blue of the sky, the cold sun, the fog and the freezing water will become actors in a great play and the train windows will be little prosceniums inclosing the melodrama of winter.



SERGT. KUZICK'S WATERLOO

"Offhand," said Sergt. Kuzick of the first precinct, "offhand, I can't think of any stories for you. If you give me a little time, maybe I could think of one or two. What you want, I suppose, is some story as I know about from personal experience. Like the time, for instance, that the half-breed Indian busted out of the bridewell, where he was serving a six months' sentence, and snuck home and killed his wife and went back again to the bridewell, and they didn't find out who killed her until he got drunk a year later and told a bartender about it. That's the kind you want, ain't it?"

I said it was.

"Well," said Sergt. Kuzick, "I can't think of any offhand, like I said. There was a building over on West Monroe Street once where we found three bodies in the basement. They was all dead, but that wouldn't make a story hardly, because nobody ever found out who killed them. Let me think awhile."

Sergt. Kuzick thought.

* * * * *

"Do you remember the Leggett mystery?" he inquired doubtfully. "I guess that was before your time. I was only a patrolman then. Old Leggett had a tobacco jar made out of a human skull, and that's how they found out he killed his wife. It was her skull. It come out one evening when he brought his bride home. You know, he got married again after killin' the first one. And they was having a party and the new bride said she didn't want that skull around in her house. Old Leggett got mad and said he wouldn't part with that skull for love or money. So when he was to work one day she threw the skull into the ash can, and when old Leggett come home and saw the skull missing he swore like the devil and come down to the station to swear out a warrant for his wife's arrest, chargin' her with disorderly conduct. He carried on so that one of the boys got suspicious and went out to the house with him and they found the skull in the ash can, and old Leggett began to weep over it. So one of the boys asked him, naturally, whose skull it was. He said it wasn't a skull no more, but a tobacco jar. And they asked him where he'd got it. And he begun to lie so hard that they tripped him up and finally he said it was his first wife's skull, and he was hung shortly afterward. You see, if you give me time I could remember something like that for a story.

* * * * *

"Offhand, though," sighed Sergt. Kuzick, "it's difficult. I ain't got it clear in my head what you want either. Of course I know it's got to be interestin' or the paper won't print it. But interestin' things is pretty hard to run into. I remember one night out to the old morgue. This was 'way back when I started on the force thirty years ago and more. And they was having trouble at the morgue owing to the stiffs vanishing and being mutilated. They thought maybe it was students carryin' them off to practice medicine on. But it wasn't, because they found old Pete—that was the colored janitor they had out there—he wasn't an African, but it turned out a Fiji Islander afterward. They found him dead in the morgue one day and it turned out he was a cannibal. Or, anyway, his folks had been cannibals in Fiji, and the old habit had come up in him so he couldn't help himself, and he was makin' a diet off the bodies in the morgue. But he struck one that was embalmed, and the poison in the body killed him. The papers didn't carry much on it on account of it not bein' very important, but I always thought it was kind of interestin' at that. That's about what you want, I suppose—some story or other like that. Well, let's see.

* * * * *

"It's hard," sighed Sergt. Kuzick, after a pause, "to put your finger on a yarn offhand. I remember a lot of things now, come to think of it, like the case I was on where a fella named Zianow killed his wife by pouring little pieces of hot lead into her ear, and he would have escaped, but he sold the body to the old county hospital for practicin' purposes, and while they was monkeying with the skull they heard something rattle and when they investigated it was several pieces of lead inside rattling around. So they arrested Zianow and got him to confess the whole thing, and he was sent up for life, because it turned out his wife had stabbed him four times the week before he poured the lead into her while she slept, and frightened him so that he did it in self-defense, in a way.

"I understand in a general way what you want," murmured Sergt. Kuzick, "but so help me if I can think of a thing that you might call interestin'. Most of the things we have to deal with is chiefly murders and suicides and highway robberies, like the time old Alderman McGuire, who is dead now, was held up by two bandits while going home from a night session of the council, and he hypnotized one bandit. Yes, sir, you may wonder at that, but you didn't know McGuire. He was a wonderful hypnotist, and he hypnotized the bandit, and just as the other one, who wasn't hypnotized, was searching his pockets McGuire said to the hypnotized bandit, 'You're a policeman, shoot this highwayman.' And the hypnotized one was the bandit who had the gun, and he turned around, as Alderman McGuire said, and shot the other, unhypnotized bandit and killed him. But when he reported the entire incident to the station—I was on duty that night—the captain wouldn't believe it, and tried to argue McGuire into saying it was a accident, and that the gun had gone off accidentally and killed the unhypnotized bandit. But the alderman stuck to his story, and it was true, because the hypnotized bandit told me privately all about it when I took him down to Joliet.

* * * * *

"I will try," said Sergt. Kuzick, "to think of something for you in about a week. I begin to get a pretty definite idea what you want, and I'll talk it over with old Jim, who used to travel beat with me. He's a great one for stories, old Jim is. A man tan hardly think of them offhand like. You give me a week." And the old sergeant sank into his wooden chair and gazed out of the dusty station window with a perplexed and baffled eye.



DEAD WARRIOR

Do you want to see the dead warriors come back, the fallen army come back, crawling out of its million coffins and walking back across the sea and across the prairie; the waxen face of youth come out of its million graves and its uniform hanging from its limp frame? Do you want to see the war dead, the young ones ripped to pieces in the trenches standing like tired beggars at your back door, dead hands and dead eyes and wailing softly: "I was so young. I died so soon. All of us from all the countries who died so soon, we grow lonely on the other side. Ah, my unlived days! My uneaten bread! My uncounted years! They lie in a little corner and nobody comes to them!"

It's a Jewish play called "The Dead Man" and every night in Glickman's Palace Theater on Blue Island Avenue a thousand men and women sit with staring eyes and watch this figure in its grave-clothes come dragging back like a tired beggar, come moaning back with the cry: "My unlived days! My uneaten bread! My uncounted years!"

He stands between Hamlet and Peer Gynt, this strangely motionless one who has thrown the west side into an uproar. There is no drama around him. He is a dead young man in uniform walking slowly, limply through three acts. This is all one remembers—that his eyes were open and unseeing, that his arms hung like a scarecrow's and that the fingers of his hands were curled in and motionless.

* * * * *

They talk to him in the play. The scene is a Jewish village in Poland. The war has ended. Famine, disease and poverty remain. Refugees, dying ones, starving ones, huddle together in the dismantled synagogue. No one knows what has happened. The armies have passed. Flame and blood brightened the sky for a time. Now the little village lies cut off from the world and its people clutch desperately to the hem of life. No news has come. Wanderers stagger down the torn roads with crazy tidings and the old men of the synagogue sit shivering over their prayer books. A world has been blown into fragments and this scene is one of the fragments.

Sholom Ash, who wrote this play, spent a time in villages abroad as a Jewish relief worker and he brought back this scene. A bedlam of despair, a merciless photograph that stares across the footlights for a half-hour. The story begins. There is a village leader in whose veins the will to live still throbs. He exhorts the shivering ones. There will be a wedding. He will give his daughter in marriage. There will be feasting. The dead are dead. The duty of the living ones is to live. Let the old women prepare food and the men will sing. Life will begin over and a new village will be built up.

But the daughter hangs back. She talks of the young man whom she married and who went away to war.

"He is dead, poor child," the father says.

"No, no, he isn't dead. I dreamed he was still alive," she answers.

But the festival starts. The starving ones sing in the broken synagogue. There will be a wedding. Life will begin. But there is something in the ruined doorway. A uniform stands in the doorway. A dark, waxen-faced young man who seems asleep, whose arms hang limp, whose fingers curl in. He comes forward and stands, a terribly idle figure. He is the young man.

* * * * *

They greet him. His bride weeps with joy. His aged mother presses his hands and weeps and murmurs in a whisper: "Oh, how changed he is!" The synagogue shouts and cries its welcome. But the young man's eyes stare and it would seem almost that he is dead. Then he talks. His voice has a lifeless sound, his words are like a child reciting sleepily. There is a gruesome oddity about him. But an old man explains. "They come back like that," he says. "There is one who came back who shrieks all night. And another who cannot remember anything."