"He didn't have to tell me. I could see. from the'bbginning she was dynamite."
During the. holiday he made a killing on a little pony called Spotted Cow; it romped horn two lengths ahead of the field. He. asked the Norwegian out to the Fiorenza for a spaghetti dinner.
"I thought we. were getting along pretty well, and when she excused herself for a few minutes at eleven o'clock I sucked tranquilly at my Perfecto Queen and said to myfea" It's in the bag." She had been drinking Pink Ladies, and she was running over. She went away unevenly. I waited. At eleven-fifteen there was no sign of her, so I thought, "Maybe she's sick in the powder room?"' And I went to get the matron to have a look. But I got as far as the orchestra, and there was the girl sitting in some guy's lap.
Well, I tried not to seem injured, and I suggested that it wa getting late, we ought to start for home. But she wouldn't get up, and I didn't want to make a fool of myself. So I beat it."
He sent her letters for two weeks. She did not answer. When he had almost spent the last of his winnings, he met her in the Loop. It was her birthday, she said. He offered to buy her a drink.
They went to the Blackhawk and had four. By-and-by a few handsome, well-dressed fellows came up to the bar, one in a naval uniform. Alf rose, paid for the drinks, put the rest of his change on the table, and said, "I know when I'm outclassed." Without a cent in his pocket, he walked back to the hotel.
The story wandered to its inevitable conclusion the conquest, with the lorwegian learning at last to distinguish between his superior worth and his appearance, giving in to him jokingly and condescendingly while drunk, and then finding that she had more than she had bargained for, et cetera. It would have shocked All to know that he was boring me, for he considers himself a first-class entertainer. Any night club would be lucky to have him. He can be original'in several dialects.
But I would rather not be entertained. I welcomed him at first, and I still rather like him. But I wish he would not come so often.
February 11
Moation ADI. ERT is back; he called this morning and said he was coming to visit me as soon as he could break away. Robbie Stillman has come in after six months in Officers' School. He has become an engineer. His business will be to construct airfields. Army life, he says, is not hard when you accustom yourself to discipline. You have t learn to submit.
His brother Ben is somewhere in the interior of Brazil. He hasn't been heard from since October.
February 14
No sIcation of Myron or of anyone else.
Even Steidler seems to have deserted me. Two days without visitors, talk, interest. nothing. A pair of perfect blanks punched out of the calendar.
It's enough to make one pray for change, merely change, any change, to make one worship experience-in-itself. If I were a little less obstinate, I would confess failure and say that I do not know what to dwith my freedom.
February 15
Ls.8"Every from Abt, rich in Washington gossip and explanationsof current policy. Why we act as we do in North Africa and toward Spain, De Gaulle, Martinique. It amuses me to catch the subtle pride with which he mentions his familiarity with important figures. (i assume they are important in official circles; I have never heard of them.)
February 16
O. r Ms. KIER'L is, as Mrs. Bartlett puts it, "sinking PDQ. She can drag along for a week or two weeks, but this" rain dumb show she sank a needle into her arm "can't keep her going forever." We walk through the house gingerly. Captain Briggs no longer goes oddut for his evening smoke. It is too cold.
February 17
Ivt ru i have grown closer. Lately she has been remarkably free from the things I once disliked so greatly. She does not protest against this rooming-house life; she seems less taken up with clothes; she does not criticize my appearance or seem disturbed because my underwear is in such a state that in dressing I often put my leg through the wrong hole. And the rest: the cheap restaurant food we eat, our lack of pocket money. Yet she is as far as ever from what I once desired to make her.
I am afraid she has no capacity for that. But now I am struck by the arrogance with which I set people apart into two groups: those with worth-while ideas and those without them.
February 18
YESTERDAY, passing the bush on which I found the stolen socks, I saw a second pair.
Vanaker must have taken several. I pointed them out to Iva as we passed this evening. She, too, recognized them. She says we should find a way of showing that we are aware of the theft.
February 19
Arcoa'rIERT letter from John Pearl" asking for news of Chicago. As if I had any to give him. I know no more about it than he does. He wanted to go to New York but now sounds nostalgic and writes with deep distaste about his "peeling environment."
"Peeling furniture, peeling walls, posters, bridges, everything is peeling and scaling in South Brooklyn. We moved here to save money, but I'm afraid we'd better start saving ourselves and move out again. It's the treelessness, as much as anything, that hurts me. The unnatural, too. human deadness."
I'm sorry for him. I know what he feels, the kind oi terror, and the danger he sees of the lack of the human in the too-human. We find it, as others before us have found it in the last two hundred years, and w bolt for "Nature." It happens in all cities. And cities are "natural," too.
He thinks he would be safer in Chicago, where he grew up. Sentimentality! He doesn't mean Chicago. It is no less inhuman. He means his father's house and the few blocks adjacent. Away from these and a few other islands, he would be just as unsafe.
But even such a letter buoys me up. It gives me a sense of someone else's recognition of the difficult, the sorrowfulIn what to others is merely neutral, the environment.
February 22
IF I HAD To As" Raison..4ussi with me today, I could tell him that the highest "ideal construction" is the one that unlocks the imprisoning self.
We struggle perpetually to free ourselves. Or, to put it somewhat differently, while we seem so intently and ever desperately to be holding on to ourselves, we would far rather give ourselves away. We do not know how. So, at times, we throw ourselves away. When what we really want is to stop living so exclusively and vainly for our own sake, impure and unknowing, turning inward and self-fastened.
The quest, I am beginning to think, whether it be for money, for notoriety, reputation, increase of pride, whether it leads us to thievery, slaughter, sacrifice, the quest is one and the same. All the striving is for one end. I do not entirely understand this impulse. But it seems to me that its final end is the desire for pure freedom. We are all drawn toward the same craters of the spirit-to know what we are and what we are for, to know our purpose, to seek grace. And, if the quest is the same, the differences in our personal histories, which hitherto meant so much to us, become of minor importance.
February 24
HEAVY snowfall last night. I skipped lunch, to avoid wetting my feet three times in one day.
February 27
ONLY twenty-two days until spring. I swear that on the twenty-first I will change from my winter clothes and, no matter what the weather is like, even if there is a blizzard, I will walk through Jackson Park hatless and gloveless.
ADLER showed up, at last. He came in the middle of the afternoon, when I was not expecting him.