There was Mark Twain, who wrote a book called “The Innocents Abroad,” that Aline’s father had loved. When she was a child he was always reading it and laughing with delight over it, and it had really been nothing but a kind of small boy’s rather nasty disdain of things he couldn’t understand. Pap for vulgar minds. Could Aline honestly think her father or Mark Twain were vulgar men? Well, she could not. To Aline her father had always been sweet, kind and tender — too tender perhaps.
One morning she sat on a bench in the Tuileries and near her on another bench two young men were talking. They were French and had not seen her take a seat on the near-by bench, and they talked. It was good to hear such talk. A kind of intense fervor about the art of painting. What was the right road? One of them declared for the Moderns, for Cezanne and Matisse, and burst forth suddenly into warm hero-worship. The men of whom he was speaking had kept, all their lives, to the good road. Matisse was doing it yet. Such men had in them devotion, bigness, the grand manner. It had been pretty much lost to the world until they came, and now — after their coming and because of their fine devotion — it had a chance of really being born again into the world.
Aline on her bench had leaned forward to listen. The words of the young Frenchman, flowing rapidly forth, were a little hard to catch. Her own French was rather slipshod. She waited for each word, leaning forward. If such a man — if someone having such fervor for what he thought fine in life — if he could only be brought near herself —— —
And then, at that moment, the young man, seeing her, seeing the look on her face, got to his feet and started toward her. Something warned her. She would have to flee, get a taxicab. The man was after all a Continental. There was the touch of Europe, of the Old World, of a world in which men knew too much about women and not enough — perhaps. Were they right or wrong? There was an inability to think or feel women as anything but flesh, that was both terrible and in an odd way also true enough — to an American woman, to an English woman perhaps, too startling though. When Aline met such a man, in the company of Joe and Esther — as she sometimes did — when her position was well-defined, safe, he seemed, beside most American men she had ever known, altogether grown up, graceful in his approach to life, much more worth while, much more interesting, with infinitely greater capacity for accomplishment — real accomplishment.
As she walked with Esther and Joe, Esther kept pulling nervously at Aline. Her mind was filled with little hooks that wanted to grapple about in Aline’s mind. “Have you been stirred or moved by life over here? Are you just a stupid, self-satisfied American woman looking for a man — thinking that settles anything? You go along — a prim, neat little figure of a woman, with good ankles, a small sharp interesting face, a good neck — the body graceful and fascinating too. What are you up to — really? Very soon now — within three or four years — your body will begin to settle into heaviness. Someone is going to tarnish your loveliness. I would rather like to do it. There would be satisfaction in that, a kind of joy. Do you think you can escape? Is that what you’re up to — you little American fool?”
Esther walking through Parisian streets thinking. Joe, her husband, missing it all — not caring. He smoked cigarettes, twirled his cane. Rose Frank, to whose apartment they were going, was a correspondent for several American newspapers that wanted a weekly-letter, gossip about Americans in Paris, and Esther thought it just as well to keep in with her. If Rose was onto Esther and Joe what did it matter? They were of the sort American newspapers want to gossip about.
It was the night after the Quat’z Arts Ball, and as soon as they had got to the apartment Aline knew something was wrong, although Esther — not at the moment so keen — did not sense it. She was perhaps occupied with Aline, thinking of her. Already several people had gathered, Americans all, and at once Aline, who from the first was very sensitive to Rose and her moods, concluded that, had she not already invited the people to come to her on that particular evening, Rose would have been glad to be alone or almost alone.
There was a studio apartment with a large room in which the people had gathered, and Rose, the hostess, was wandering about among them, smoking cigarettes and with a queer vacant look in her eyes. When she saw Esther and Joe she made a gesture with the hand that held the cigarette. “Oh, Lord, you too, did I invite you?” the gesture seemed to say. At Aline she did not at first look at all; but later, when several other men and women had come in, she sat on a couch in a corner still smoking the cigarettes and staring at Aline.
“Well, well, and so you are what you are? You also are here? I do not remember ever to have met you. You are with the Walker crew and so I fancy you are newspaper stuff. Miss So-and-So of Indianapolis. Something of that sort. The Walkers take no chances. When they tote anyone around it means money for them.”
Rose Frank’s thoughts. She smiled as she looked at Aline. “I’ve been up against something. I’ve been banged. I’m going to talk. I’ve got to. It doesn’t much matter to me who is here. People have to take their chances. Now and then something happens to a human being — it might happen even to a rich young American woman like you — something that lies too heavy on the mind. When it happens you’ve got to talk. You’ve got to explode. Look out, you! Something is going to happen to you, young lady, but I’m not to blame. You’re to blame for being here.”
It was obvious something was wrong with the American newspaper woman. Everyone in the room felt it. There was a hurried, rather nervous outbreak of talk, all taking part in it except only Rose Frank, Aline and a man who sat at the side of the room and who had not noticed Aline, Joe, Esther or any of the others as they came in. He spoke once, to a young woman who sat near him. “Yes,” he said, “I was there, lived there for a year. I worked as a painter of bicycle wheels in a factory there. It’s about eighty miles from Louisville, isn’t it?”
It was the evening after the night of the Quat’z Arts Ball of the year after the war’s end, and Rose
Frank, having been to the ball with a young man — not present at her party on the following evening — wanted to talk of something that had happened to her.
“I’ll have to talk about it, or I’ll explode if I don’t,” she was saying to herself, as she sat in her apartment among her guests, staring at Aline.
She began. Her voice was highly pitched, filled with nervous excitement.
All of the others in the room, all who had been talking, stopped suddenly. There was an embarrassed hush. The people, men and women, had gathered in little groups, disposing of themselves in chairs drawn together and on a large couch in a corner. Several rather younger men and women sat in a circle on the floor. Aline, having, after that first look Rose had given them, instinctively moved away from Joe and Esther, sat alone on a chair near a window that looked down into a street. The window was open and as there was no screen she could see people moving about. Men and women moving down toward the rue Voltaire to cross one of the bridges into the Tuileries or to go sit in a café on the boulevards. Paris! Paris at night! The silent young man who did not speak, except for the one sentence about working in a bicycle factory somewhere in America, obviously in reply to a question, seemed to have some indefinable connection with Rose Frank. Aline kept turning her head to look at him and at Rose. Something was about to happen in the room, and there was a reason, that could not be explained, why it directly concerned the silent man, herself and the young man named Fred Grey who sat beside the silent man. “Perhaps he is like myself, doesn’t know much,” Aline thought, glancing at Fred Grey.
Four people, for the most part strangers to each other, oddly isolated in a roomful of people. Something was about to happen that concerned them as it could not concern any of the others. It was already happening. Did the silent man, sitting alone and looking at the floor, love Rose Frank? Could there be such a thing as love among such a congregation of people, Americans of that sort, gathered in a room in a Paris apartment — newspaper people, young radicals, art students? A queer notion that
Esther and Joe should be there. They didn’t fit in and Esther felt it. She was a little nervous, but her husband Joe — he took what followed as something delicious.
Four people, strangers to each other, isolated in a roomful of people. People were like drops of water in a river, flowing along. Suddenly the river became angry. It became furiously energetic, spreading out over lands, uprooting trees, sweeping houses away. Little whirlpools formed. Certain drops of water were whirled round and round in a circle, constantly touching each other, merging into each other, being absorbed into each other. There came times when human beings ceased being isolated. What one felt others felt. One might say that, at certain times, one left one’s own body and went, quite completely, into the body of another. Love might be something like that. The silent man in the room seemed, as Rose Frank talked, to be a part of her. How odd!
And the young American — Fred Grey — he clung to Aline. “You are someone I can understand. I am out of my depths here.”
A young Irish-American newspaper man, who had been sent by his American newspaper to Ireland to make a report on the Irish revolution and to interview the revolutionary leader, began to talk — insistently interrupting Rose Frank. “They took me in a cab blindfolded. I, of course, had no notion of where I was going. I had to trust the man and I did. The blinds were drawn. I kept thinking of that ride of Madame Bovary’s through the streets of Rouen. The cab rattled over the cobblestones in darkness. Perhaps the Irish love the drama of it.
“And, then, there I was. I was in a room with him — with V — , who is being hunted so hard by the secret agents of the British government, sitting with him in a room, as tight and snug as two bugs in a rug. I got a great story. I’m going to hit for a raise.”
It was an attempt — to stop Rose Frank talking.
Everyone in the room then had felt something wrong with the woman?
Having invited the others to her apartment for that particular evening she did not want them there. She did want Aline. She wanted the silent man sitting by himself and a young American named Fred Grey.
Why she wanted just those four people Aline couldn’t have said. She felt it. The young Irish-American newspaper man had tried to speak of his experiences in Ireland to relieve a kind of tension in the room. “Now wait, you! I’ll talk and then someone else will talk. We’ll get through the evening comfortably and nicely. Something has happened. Perhaps Rose has quarreled with her lover. That man sitting over there alone may be her lover. I never saw him before but I’ll bet he is. Give us a chance, Rose, and we’ll get you through this bad moment.” It was something of that sort the young man, by the telling of his tale, had been trying to say to Rose and the others.
It would not work. Rose Frank laughed, a queer high nervous laugh — dark laughter that. She was a plump strong-looking little American woman of perhaps thirty and was reputed to be very clever and able at her job.
“Well, the devil, I was there. I took part in it all, saw it all, felt it all,” she said in a loud harsh voice and, although she had not said where she had been, everyone in the room, even Aline and Fred Grey knew what she meant.
It had been in the air for days — a promise, a threat — the Quat’z Arts Ball of that year, and had come off on the night before.
Aline had felt its coming in the air and so had Joe and Esther. Joe had secretly wanted to go, had hungered to go.
The Quat’z Arts Ball of Paris is an institution. It is a part of student life in the capital of the arts. Every year it is held, and on that night the young art students, who have come to Paris from all over the Western world — from America, England, South America, Ireland, Canada, Spain — who have come to Paris to study one of the four very delicate arts — on that night they kick the roof off.
Delicacy of line, tenderness of line, color sensitiveness — for to-night — bah!
Women came — usually models from the studios — free women. Everyone goes the limit. That is expected. This once — anyway!
It happens every year, but in the year after the war’s end — Well, it was a year, wasn’t it?
There had been something in the air for a long time.
For too long a time!
Aline had seen something of the blow-off in Chicago on the first Armistice Day and it had moved her strangely as it had all people who saw and felt it. There had been stories of the same sort of thing going on in New York, Cleveland, St. Louis, New Orleans — even in small American towns. Gray-haired women kissing boys, young women kissing young men — factories deserted — the lid off prohibition — offices empty — song — dance a little once again in life — you who haven’t been in the war, in the trenches, you who are just tired of whooping it up for war, for hate — joy — grotesque joy. The lie given the lie.
The end of lies, the end of keeping up the pretense, the end of that sort of cheapness — the end of the War.
Men lying, women lying, children lying, being taught to lie.
Preachers lying, priests lying, bishops, popes and cardinals lying.
Kings lying, governments lying, writers lying, artists drawing lying pictures.
A debauch of lying. Keep it up! The bitter end! Outlast the other liar! Make him eat it! Kill. Kill some more! Keep on killing! Liberty! Love of God! Love of men! Kill! Kill!
The thing in Paris had been carefully thought out — planned. Had not the young artists of the world who came to Paris — to study there the very delicate arts — had they not gone into the trenches instead — for France — dear France? Mother of arts, eh? Young men — artists — the more sensitive men of the Western world —
Show ’em something! Show ’em up! Slap it into ’em!
Give ’em the limit!
They talk so big — make ’em like it!
Well, everything has gone to pot, the fields destroyed, the fruit-trees cut, the vines torn out of the ground, old Mother Earth herself given the riz-raz. Is this damn cheap civilization of ours to go blandly on, never getting a slap in the face? What t’ell?
Dada, eh? The innocents! Babes! Sweet womanhood! Purity! The hearth and home!
Choke the babe in the crib!
Bah, that isn’t the way! Let’s show ’em!
Slap it home to the women! Hit ’em where they live! Slap it home to the gabblers! Give ’em the riz-raz!
In the gardens in the cities, moonlight in the trees. You never were in the trenches, were you — a year, two years, three, four, five, six?
What t’ell moonlight?
Slap it to the women once! They were in it up to the neck. Sentimentality! Gush! That’s what’s back of it all — a lot anyway. They liked it all — the women. Give ’em a party once! Cherches la femme! We were sold out, up to the hilt, and they helped, a lot. A lot of David and Uriah stuff, too. Bathshebas aplenty.
Women talked a lot about tenderness— “our beloved sons” — remember? French women whooping it up, English women, Irish, Italian. How come?
Roll ’em in the stench of it! Life! Western civilization!
Stench of the trenches — in the fingers, the clothes, the hair — staying there — getting into the blood — trench thoughts, trench feelings — trench love, eh?
Is not this dear Paris, the capital of our Western civilization?
What t’ell? Let’s give ’em a look-in, once anyway! Were we not what we were? Did we not dream? Did we not love a little, eh?
Nudity now!
Perversion — well, what of that?
Throw ’em on the floor, dance on ’em.
How good are you? How much you got left in you?
How come your eye out and your nose not skun?
All right. That little brown plump thing over there. Watch me. Keep your eyes on the trench-hound once!
Young artists of the Western world. Let’s show ’em the Western world — this once!
The limit, eh — this once!
Do you like it — eh?
How come?
CHAPTER TWENTY
R
OSE FRANK, THE American newspaper woman, had been to the Quat’z Arts Ball on the evening before Aline saw her. For several years, all through the war, she had made her living by sending smart Parisian gossip to American newspapers, but she also had hungered for — the limit. It was in the air just then, the hunger for the limit.
And on the evening in her apartment she had to talk. It was a mad necessity with her. Having been at the debauch all night she had been awake all day, walking up and down in her room and smoking cigarettes — waiting — to talk perhaps.
She had been through it all. It wasn’t on the cards for newspaper men to get in, but a woman could work it — if she would take the chances.
Rose had gone with a young American art student, whose name she did not mention. When she had insisted the young American had laughed.
“All right. You fool! I’ll do it.”
The young American had said he would try to take care of her.
“I’ll try to manage. We’ll all be drunk of course.”
And after it was over, in the early morning, the two had gone for a ride to the Bois in a fiacre. The birds singing softly. Men, women and children walking along. An old gray-haired man — rather fine-looking — riding a horse in the park. He might have been a public man — member of the chamber of deputies or something of that sort. On the grass in the park a young boy, not over ten, was playing with a small white dog, while a woman stood in a near-by path watching. There was a soft little smile on her lips. The boy had such fine-looking eyes.
Oh, Lord!
Oh, Kalamazoo!
It takes a long, lean brown-skin gal To make a preacher lay his Bible down.
But what an experience it was! It had taught Rose something. What? She did not know.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 112