John Passos - Manhattan transfer

‘I just found there was nothing in it for me,’ he found himself saying a little later.

‘Oh we none of us know what we want,’ burst out Martin. ‘That’s why we’re such a peewee generation.’

‘I’m beginning to learn a few of the things I dont want,’ said Herf quietly. ‘At least I’m beginning to have the nerve to admit to myself how much I dislike all the things I dont want.’

‘But it’s wonderful,’ cried Alice, ‘throwing away a career for an ideal.’

‘Excuse me,’ said Herf pushing back his chair. In the toilet he looked himself in the eye in the wavy lookingglass.

‘Dont talk,’ he whispered. ‘What you talk about you never do…’ His face had a drunken look. He filled the hollow of his two hands with water and washed it. At the table they cheered when he sat down.

‘Yea for the wanderer,’ said Roy.

Alice was eating cheese on long slices of pear. ‘I think it’s thrilling,’ she said.

‘Roy is bored,’ shouted Martin Schiff after a silence. His face with its big eyes and bone glasses swam through the smoke of the restaurant like a fish in a murky aquarium.

‘I was just thinking of all the places I had to go to look for a job tomorrow.’

‘You want a job?’ Martin went on melodramatically. ‘You want to sell your soul to the highest bidder?’

‘Jez if that’s all you had to sell…’ moaned Roy.

‘It’s my morning sleep that worries me… Still it is lousy putting over your personality and all that stuff. It’s not your ability to do the work it’s your personality.’

‘Prostitutes are the only honest…’

‘But good Lord a prostitute sells her personality.’

‘She only rents it.’

‘But Roy is bored… You are all bored… I’m boring you all.’

‘We’re having the time of our lives,’ insisted Alice. ‘Now Martin we wouldn’t be sitting here if we were bored, would we?… I wish Jimmy would tell us where he expected to go on his mysterious travels.’

‘No, you are saying to yourselves what a bore he is, what use is he to society? He has no money, he has no pretty wife, no good conversation, no tips on the stockmarket. He’s a useless fardel on society… The artist is a fardel.’

‘That’s not so Martin… You’re talking through your hat.’

Martin waved an arm across the table. Two wineglasses upset. A scaredlooking waiter laid a napkin over the red streams. Without noticing, Martin went on, ‘It’s all pretense… When you talk you talk with the little lying tips of your tongues. You dont dare lay bare your real souls… But now you must listen to me for the last time… For the last time I say… Come here waiter you too, lean over and look into the black pit of the soul of man. And Herf is bored. You are all bored, bored flies buzzing on the windowpane. You think the windowpane is the room. You dont know what there is deep black inside… I am very drunk. Waiter another bottle.’

‘Say hold your horses Martin… I dont know if we can pay the bill as it is… We dont need any more.’

‘Waiter another bottle of wine and four grappas.’

‘Well it looks as if we were in for a rough night,’ groaned Roy.

‘If there is need my body can pay… Alice take off your mask… You are a beautiful little child behind your mask… Come with me to the edge of the pit… O I am too drunk to tell you what I feel.’ He brushed off his tortoiseshell glasses and crumpled them in his hand, the lenses shot glittering across the floor. The gaping waiter ducked among the tables after them.

For a moment Martin sat blinking. The rest of them looked at each other. Then he shot to his feet. ‘I see your little smirking supercil-superciliosity. No wonder we can no longer have decent dinners, decent conversations… I must prove my atavistic sincerity, prove…’ He started pulling at his necktie.

‘Say Martin old man, pipe down,’ Roy was reiterating.

‘Nobody shall stop me… I must run into the sincerity of black… I must run to the end of the black wharf on the East River and throw myself off.’

Herf ran after him through the restaurant to the street. At the door he threw off his coat, at the corner his vest.

‘Gosh he runs like a deer,’ panted Roy staggering against Herf’s shoulder. Herf picked up the coat and vest, folded them under his arm and went back to the restaurant. They were pale when they sat down on either side of Alice.

‘Will he really do it? Will he really do it?’ she kept asking.

‘No of course not,’ said Roy. ‘He’ll go home; he was making fools of us because we played up to him.’

‘Suppose he really did it?’

‘I’d hate to see him… I like him very much. We named our kid after him,’ said Jimmy gloomily. ‘But if he really feels so terribly unhappy what right have we to stop him?’

‘Oh Jimmy,’ sighed Alice, ‘do order some coffee.’

Outside a fire engine moaned throbbed roared down the street. Their hands were cold. They sipped the coffee without speaking.

Francie came out of the side door of the Five and Ten into the six o’clock goinghome end of the day crowd. Dutch Robertson was waiting for her. He was smiling; there was color in his face.

‘Why Dutch what’s…’ The words stuck in her throat.

‘Dont you like it…?’ They walked on down Fourteenth, a blur of faces streamed by on either side of them. ‘Everything’s jake Francie,’ he was saying quietly. He wore a light gray spring overcoat and a light felt hat to match. New red pointed Oxfords glowed on his feet. ‘How do you like the outfit? I said to myself it wasnt no use tryin to do anythin without a tony outside.’

‘But Dutch how did you get it?’

‘Stuck up a guy in a cigar store. Jez it was a cinch.’

‘Ssh dont talk so loud; somebody might hear ye.’

‘They wouldnt know what I was talkin about.’

Mr Densch sat in the corner of Mrs Densch’s Louis XIV boudoir. He sat all hunched up on a little gilt pinkbacked chair with his potbelly resting on his knees. In his green sagging face the pudgy nose and the folds that led from the flanges of the nostrils to the corners of the wide mouth made two triangles. He had a pile of telegrams in his hand, on top a decoded message on a blue slip that read: Deficit Hamburg branch approximately $500,000; signed Heintz. Everywhere he looked about the little room crowded with fluffy glittery objects he saw the purple letters of approximately jiggling in the air. Then he noticed that the maid, a pale mulatto in a ruffled cap, had come into the room and was staring at him. His eye lit on a large flat cardboard box she held in her hand.

‘What’s that?’

‘Somethin for the misses sir.’

‘Bring it here… Hickson’s… and what does she want to be buying more dresses for will you tell me that… Hickson’s… Open it up. If it looks expensive I’ll send it back.’

The maid gingerly pulled off a layer of tissuepaper, uncovering a peach and peagreen evening dress.

Mr Densch got to his feet spluttering, ‘She must think the war’s still on… Tell em we will not receive it. Tell em there’s no such party livin here.’

The maid picked up the box with a toss of the head and went out with her nose in the air. Mr Densch sat down in the little chair and began looking over the telegrams again.

‘Ann-ee, Ann-ee,’ came a shrill voice from the inner room; this was followed by a head in a lace cap shaped like a libertycap and a big body in a shapeless ruffled negligée. ‘Why J. D. what are you doing here at this time of the morning? I’m waiting for my hair-dresser.’

‘It’s very important… I just had a cable from Heintz. Serena my dear, Blackhead and Densch is in a very bad way on both sides of the water.’