“You are right, darling Dickie,” said Bernice, “but sometimes I would love to be waited on in a beautiful room. Sometimes I think it would be nice to be a bourgeois.” (She said the word “bourgeois,” Miss Goering noticed, as though she had just learned it.) Bernice continued: “I am such a human person. Even though I am poor I will miss the same things that they do, because sometimes at night the fact that they are sleeping in their houses with security, instead of making me angry, fills me with peace like a child who is scared at night likes to hear grown people talking down in the street. Don’t you think there is some sense in what I say, Dickie?”
“None whatsoever!” said the boy. “We know perfectly well that it is this security of theirs that makes us cry out at night.”
Miss Goering by now was very anxious to get into the conversation.
“You,” she said to Dick, “are interested in winning a very correct and intelligent fight. I am far more interested in what is making this fight so hard to win.”
“They have the power in their hands; they have the press and the means of production.”
Miss Goering put her hand over the boy’s mouth. He jumped. “This is very true,” she said, “but isn’t it very obvious that there is something else too that you are fighting? You are fighting their present position on this earth, to which they are all grimly attached. Our race, as you know, is not torpid. They are grim because they still believe the earth is flat and that they are likely to fall off it at any minute. That is why they hold on so hard to the middle. That is, to all the ideals by which they have always lived. You cannot confront men who are still fighting the dark and all the dragons, with a new future.”
“Well, well,” said Dick, “what should I do then?”
“Just remember,” said Miss Goering, “that a revolution won is an adult who must kill his childhood once and for all.”
“I’ll remember,” said Dick, sneering a bit at Miss Goering.
The man who had been rolling the balls was now standing at the bar.
“I better go see what Andy wants,” said Frank. He had been whistling softly all through Miss Goering’s conversation with Dick, but he seemed to have been listening nevertheless, because as he was leaving the table he turned to Miss Goering.
“I think that the earth is a very nice place to be living on,” he said to her, “and I never felt that by going one step too far I was going to fall off it either. You can always do things two or three times on the earth and everybody’s plenty patient till you get something right. First time wrong doesn’t mean you’re sunk.”
“Well, I wasn’t talking about anything like that,” said Miss Goering.
“That’s what you’re talking about all right. Don’t try to pussyfoot it out now. But I tell you it’s perfectly all right as far as I’m concerned.” He was looking with feeling into Miss Goering’s eyes. “My life,” he said, “is my own, whether it’s a mongrel or a prince.”
“What on earth is he talking about?” Miss Goering asked Bernice and Dick. “He seems to think I’ve insulted him.”
“God knows!” said Dick. “At any rate I am sleepy. Bernice, let’s go home.”
While Dick was paying Frank at the bar, Bernice leaned over Miss Goering and whispered in her ear.
“You know, darling,” she said, “he’s not really like this when we are home together alone. He makes me really happy. He is a sweet boy and you should see the simple things that delight him when he is in his own room and not with strangers. Well”—she straightened up and seemed to be a little embarassed at her own burst of confidence—“well, I am very glad indeed that I met you and I hope we did not give you too much of a rough time. I promise you that it has never happened before, because underneath, Dick is really like you and me, but he is in a very nervous state of mind. So you must forgive him.”
“Certainly,” said Miss Goering, “but I do not see what for.”
“Well, good-by,” said Bernice.
Miss Goering was far too embarrassed and shocked by what Bernice had said behind Dick’s back to notice at first that she was now the only person in the barroom besides the man who had been rolling the wooden balls and the old man, who had by now fallen asleep with his head on the bar. When she did notice, however, she felt for one desolate moment that the whole thing had been prearranged and that although she had forced herself to take this little trip to the mainland, she had somehow at the same time been tricked into taking it by the powers above. She felt that she could not leave and that even if she tried, something would happen to interfere with her departure.
She noticed with a faint heart that the man had lifted his drink from the bar and was coming towards her. He stopped about a foot away from her table and stood holding his glass in mid-air.
“You will have a drink with me, won’t you?” he asked her without looking particularly cordial.
“I’m sorry,” said Frank from behind the bar, “but we’re going to close up now. No more drinks served, I’m afraid.”
Andy said nothing, but he went out the door and slammed it behind him. They could hear him walking up and down outside of the saloon.
“He’s going to have his own way again,” said Frank, “damn it all.”
“Oh, dear,” said Miss Goering, “are you afraid of him?”
“Sure I’m not,” said Frank, “but he’s disagreeable — that’s the only word I can think up for him — disagreeable; and after it’s all said and done, life is too short.”
“Well,” said Miss Goering, “is he dangerous?”
Frank shrugged his shoulders. Soon Andy came back.
“The moon and the stars are out now,” he said, “and I could almost see clear to the edge of the town. There are no policemen in sight, so I think we can have our drink.”
He slid in, onto the bench opposite Miss Goering.
“It’s cold and lifeless without a living thing on the street,” he began, “but that’s the way I like it nowadays; you’ll forgive me if I sound morose to a gay woman like yourself, but I have a habit of never paying attention to whoever I am talking to. I think people would say, about me: ‘Lacking in respect for other human beings.’ You have great respect for your friends, I’m sure, but that is only because you respect yourself, which is always the starting-off point for everything: yourself.”
Miss Goering did not feel very much more at ease now that he was talking to her than she had before he had sat down. He seemed to grow more intense and almost angry as he talked, and his way of attributing qualities to her which were not in any way true to her nature gave his conversation an eerie quality and at the same time made Miss Goering feel inconsequential.
“Do you live in this town” Miss Goering asked him.
“I do, indeed,” said Andy. “I have three furnished rooms in a new apartment house. It is the only apartment house in this town. I pay rent every month and I live there all alone. In the afternoon the sun shines into my apartment, which is one of the finest ironies, in my opinion, because of all the apartments in the building, mine is the sunniest and I sleep there all day with my shades drawn down. I didn’t always live there. I lived before in the city with my mother. But this is the nearest thing I could find to a penal island, so it suits me; it suits me fine.” He fumbled with some cigarettes for a few minutes and kept his eyes purposely averted from Miss Goering’s face. He reminded her of certain comedians who are at last given a secondary tragic role and execute it rather well. She also had a very definite impression that one thing was cleaving his simple mind in two, causing him to twist between his sheets instead of sleeping, and to lead an altogether wretched existence. She had no doubt that she would soon find out what it was.