"You're forgetting to be reasonable."
"Reasonable! Go on, you make me sick. The sight of you makes me sick. You make me queasy at the stomach with your suave little, false little looks."
"Joseph, look here v, "Oh, get out. Get out of here. You're two-faced. You're not to be trusted, you damned diplomat, you cheat!"
Furious, I flung a handful of orange peel at him, and he fled the room.
February 4
Tnv. landlady, Mrs. Kiefer, had another stroke yesterday that paralyzed her legs. According to Mrs.
Bartlett, whom
Mrs. Briggs has engaged as a nurse, she can't live more than a few weeks. The windows are kept darkened; the halls and stairways smell of disinfectant, so that, going up to the landing with its stained-glass window, one imagines oneself in the hospital of a religious order. Except when Vanaker comes or goes, the house is quiet.
He still is noisy; he has not learned to close the door when he goes down the hall. To stop him, I have to come out and march threateningly toward the bathroom.
Thereupon he slams it shut. I have several times made general but loud and menacing remarks about decency and politeness. But he is either too drunk or too witless to change. When I do these things, I make myself ill. When I step out of the door to reprimand and stop him I am merely a nervous or irascible young man and I feel the force on me of a bad, harsh mood which I despise in others-the nastiness of a customer to a waiter or of a parent to a child. Iva is the same way. She gasps, "Oh, the fool!" when I go into the hall with a cross pull at the door. I suppose she means Vanaker; but may she not also mean me @?
February 5
Mr rRms. rer ill temper first manifested itself last winter. Before we moved out of our flat I had a disgraceful fist fight with the landlord, Mr.
Gesell.
That fight had been on the horizon a long time.
Throughout the summer we had been on good terms. We exerted ourselves to be courteous to Gesell and to Mrs.
Gesell, who made a daily racket in her shop downstairs with a machine-powered chisel. She was an amateur sculptress. Often the house trembled. Then she borrowed our books, and brought them back with stone dust on the pages. We did not complain.
But, when the frosts began, the house was underheated.
We could not bathe at night; in Iggecember we had to go to bed at nine, when the radiators turned cold. Then, during one week in lanuary, the furnace broke down. Mr. Gesell was an electrician himself; to save money, he undertook the repairs. But he had his job to attend to, so he worked at the furnace evenings and Sundays. The fireplace stifled us when we tried to use it, it was blocked with bricks. Below, Mrs. Gesell, surrounded by heat lamps, worked away at the figure of a sand hog she was designing for the new subwaynshe was going to enter a competition. When we went down to complain, she did not answer the bell. We ate supper with our sweaters on.
The gas stove in the kitchen, which was now our only source of heat, began to give us headaches. We lived with Myron for a week, the three of us in one bed. I caught Mr. Gesell at last, when he was airing the dog. He joked about the cold, and said I was so strapping I could bear it. He pounded my arms playfully, exciting the dog, from whom I shrank. Gesell said. "You'll do. You're pretty husky for a guy that leads such a soft life. Even though you couldn't stand up a day in my line." He was a strongly built man, about forty years old. He dressed in old trousers and flannel shirts. His wife wore the same costumc jeans, shirt, and neckcloth. He began to relate how near the two of them had come to freezing, during the depression, in a bare studio on Lake Park Avenue. They burned orange crates while waiting for the Relief to deliver coal. They took down the curtains and stuffed them in cracks against the wind. "The depression's over," I said.
He laughed so hard he had to take hold of my arm to keep himself up. "
"Say, you're all fight, you are." The dog, with rueful red eyes, watched the snow wreathing back and forth over the street. "We'll see what we can do about you," said Gesell.
A little heat began to seep up, but the house was not really warm. Iva hit upon the plan of holding up the rent. On the fifth of the month, Gesell made belligerent representations. Ira retorted angrily. She didn't expect an artist to make a good landlord. "But you, Mr. Gesell!"
"An artist!" I snorted, thinking of that poor sand hog with his nose and thick legs. Gesell probably carried this back to Beth Gesell, for she stopped speaking to me. There were hard feelings.
But in February things took a turn for the better. In our encounters, as we went in and out of the house, we began to greet one another once more. The rent was paid, the heat rose, the hot water returned. I entered one day, with a check, to find the Gesells having breakfast at a table you might expect to find in a log cabin. The Dalmatian came and rubbed himself against me embarrassingly-poor animal, he was an adjunct and had no life of his own. Gesell took the check with thanks and began to write. ou a receipt. Beth, resting her chin on the back of her hand, was looking out of the window, watching the snow. She was a fat woman, with red hair cut in square, boxlike, masculine fashion. I began to think she was still angry and did not want to speak to me, but she was watching the fall of soft, heavy flakes, and all at once she said: "When we were kids in Montana, we used to say they were plucking geese in heaven. I wonder if they still say that."
"I never heard it before," I said, entirely willing to make peace.
"Maybe the saying's gone out. It was long ago."
"Couldn't be so long," I said generously, and won a saddened smile.
"Oh, yes, long enough."
Gesell wroteon, also smiling, thinking, perhaps, of his wife's girlhood or of similar myths of his own early days.
The yawning dog closed his jaws with a snap.
"Then there was rain," said Beth. "I know," said Gesell. "Angels?"
"Oh, get along, Peter." She laughed, and the color from her hair seemed to spread along her cheeks. "Placer mining."
"I never heard of that, either," I said.
"And here you are," said Gesell, ttuttering the receipt. We were smiling broadly, all three.
Not long afterward, however, on a Sunday afternoon, the house began to go cold, and at two o'clock the electricity was shut off. It was a mild day; we might easily have borne the chill. But we had been listening to a Brahms concerto. I hurried downstairs and rang at Gesell's door. The Dalmatian threw himself in a rage against it, clawing the glass. I ran around to the basement entrance and, without knocking, went in. Gesell stood at his workbench, a length of pipe in his hand.
A pistol would not have deterred me. I strode toward him, kicking rods, board-ends, pieces of wire, out of my way.
"Why did you turn off the current?" I said.
"I had to work on this stoker, that's why."
"Why the devil do you wait until Sunday?
And why couldn't you tall us beforehand?"
"I don't have to get your permission to work on this stoker," he said.
"How long are you going to keep it off?"
Ignoring this question, he turned sullenly back to his bench.
"Well, how long?" I repeated. And, when I saw that he was not going to reply, I took him by the shoulder and, forcing him round, pushed aside the pipe and struck him. He fell, the pipe clattering under him on the cement. But instantly he was up again, brandishing his fists, shouting, "If that's what you want!" He could not reach me. I carried him to the wall, hitting repeatedly into his chest and belly and cutting my knuckles on his open, panting mouth. After the first few blows, my anger vanished. In weariness and self-disgust I pinned him against the bricks. Hearing his thick, rasping shouts, I said pacifyingly, "Don't get excitedMR. Gesell. I'm sorry about this. Don't get excited!"