LENINE REPORTED ALIVE 1 страница

AUDIENCE AT HIPPODROME TESTIMONIALS MOVED TO
CHEERS AND TEARS

several different stories have come to me well authenti-
cated concerning the depth of Hindenburg's brutality; the de-
tails are too horrible for print. They relate to outraged
womanhood and girlhood, suicide and blood of the innocent
that wet the feet of Hindenburg

WAR DECREASES MARRIAGES AND BIRTHS

Oh ashes to ashes
And dust to dust
If the shrapnel dont get you
Then the eightyeights must

THE CAMERA EYE (29)

the raindrops fall one by one out of the horsechestnut
tree over the arbor onto the table in the abandoned beer-
garden and the puddly gravel and my clipped skull where
my fingers move gently forward and back over the fuzzy
knobs and hollows
spring and we've just been swimming in the Marne
way off somewhere beyond the fat clouds on the horizon
they are hammering on a tin roof in the rain in the
spring after a swim in the Marne with that hammering to
the north pounding the thought of death into our ears

the winey thought of death stings in the spring blood
that throbs in the sunburned neck up and down the belly

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under the tight belt hurries like cognac into the tips
of my toes and the lobes of my ears and my fingers stroking
the fuzzy closecropped skull

shyly tingling fingers feel out the limits of the hard
immortal skull under the flesh a deathshead and
skeleton sits wearing glasses in the arbor under the lucid
occasional raindrops inside the new khaki uniform inside
my twentyoneyearord body that's been swimming in the
Marne in red and whitestriped trunks in Chalons in the
spring

RICHARD ELLSWORTH SAVAGE

The years Dick was little he never heard anything
about his Dad, but when he was doing his homework eve-
nings up in his little room in the attic he'd start thinking
about him sometimes; he'd throw himself on the bed and
lie on his back trying to remember what he had been like
and Oak Park and everything before Mother had been so
unhappy and they had had to come east to live with Aunt
Beatrice. There was the smell of bay rum and cigarsmoke
and he was sitting on the back of an upholstered sofa be-
side a big man in a panama hat who shook the sofa when
he laughed; he held on to Dad's back and punched his
arm and the muscle was hard like a chair or a table and
when Dad laughed he could feel it rumble in his back,
"Dicky, keep your dirty feet off my palm beach suit," and
he was on his hands and knees in the sunlight that poured
through the lace curtains of the window trying to pick
the big purple roses off the carpet; they were all standing
in front of a red automobile and Dad's face was red and he

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smelt of armpits and white steam was coming out around,
and people were saying Safetyvalve. Downstairs Dad and
Mummy were at dinner and there was company and wine
and a new butler and it must be awful funny because they
laughed so much and the knives and forks went click click
all the time; Dad found him in his nightgown peeking
through the portières and came out awful funny and ex-
cited smelling like wine and whaled him and mother came
out and said, " Henry, don't strike the child," and they
stood hissing at one another in low voices behind the por-
tières on account of company and Mummy had picked
Dick up and carried him upstairs crying in her evening
dress all lacy and frizzly and with big puffy silk sleeves;
touching silk put his teeth on edge, made him shudder
all down his spine. He and Henry had had tan over-
coats with pockets in them like grownup overcoats and
tan caps and he'd lost the button off the top of his. Way
back there it was sunny and windy; Dick got tired and
sickyfeeling when he tried to remember back like that
and it got him so he couldn't keep his mind on tomorrow's
lessons and would pull out "Twenty Thousand Leagues
Under the Sea" that he had under the mattress because
Mother took books away when they weren't just about
the lessons and would read just a little and then he'd for-
get everything reading and wouldn't know his lessons the
next day.

All the same he got along very well at school and the
teachers liked him, particularly Miss Teazle, the English
teacher, because he had nice manners and said little things
that weren't fresh but that made them laugh. Miss Teazle
said he showed real feeling for English composition. One
Christmas he sent her a little rhyme he made up about
the Christ Child and the Three Kings and she declared
he had a gift.

The better he liked it in school the worse it was at home.
Aunt Beatrice was always nag nag nag from morning till

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night. As if he didn't know that he and mother were eating
her bread and sleeping under her roof; they paid board,
didn't they? even if they didn't pay as much as Major
and Mrs. Glen or Dr. Kern did, and they certainly did
enough work to pay for their keep anyway. He'd heard
Mrs. Glen saying when Dr. Atwood was calling and Aunt
Beatrice was out of the room how it was a shame that poor
Mrs. Savage such a sweet woman, and a good church-
woman too, and the daughter of a general in the army,
had to work her fingers to the bone for her sister who
was only a fussy old maid and overcharged so, though
of course she did keep a very charming house and set an
excellent table, not like a boarding house at all, more like
a lovely refined private home, such a relief to find in
Trenton, that was such a commercial city so full of work-
ing people and foreigners; too bad that the daughters of
General Ellsworth should be reduced to taking paying
guests. Dick felt Mrs. Glen might have said something
about his carrying out the ashes and shovelling snow and
all that. Anyway he didn't think a highschool student
ought to have to take time from his studies to do the
chores.

Dr. Atwood was the rector of St. Gabriel's Episcopal
Church where Dick had to sing in the choir every Sunday
at two services while mother and his brother Henry S.,
who was three years older than he was and worked in a
drafting office in Philadelphia and only came home week-
ends, sat comfortably in a pew. Mother loved St. Gabriel's
because it was so highchurch and they had processions and
even incense. Dick hated it on account of choirpractice and
having to keep his surplice clean and because he never
had any pocketmoney to shoot craps with behind the bench
in the vestry and he was always the one who had to stand
at the door and whisper, "Cheeze it," if anybody was
coming.

One Sunday, right after his thirteenth birthday, he'd

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walked home from church with his mother and Henry
feeling hungry and wondering all the way if they were
going to have fried chicken for dinner. They were all
three stepping up onto the stoop, Mother leaning a little
on Dick's arm and the purple and green poppies on her
wide hat jiggling in the October sunlight, when he saw
Aunt Beatrice's thin face looking worriedly out through
the glass panel of the front door. "Leona," she said in
an excited reproachful voice, "he's here." "Who, Beatrice
dear?" "You know well enough . . . I don't know what
to do . . . he says he wants to see you. I made him wait
in the lower hall on account of . . . er . . . our friends."

"Oh, God, Beatrice, haven't I borne enough from that
man?

Mother let herself drop onto the bench under the stags-
horn coatrack in the hall. Dick and Henry stared at the
white faces of the two women. Aunt Beatrice pursed up
her lips and said in a spiteful tone, "You boys had better
go out and walk round the block. I can't have two big
hulks like you loafing round the house. You be back for
Sunday dinner at one thirty sharp . . . run along now."

"Why, what's the matter with Aunt Beatrice?" asked
Dick as they walked off down the street. "Got the pip I
guess . . . she gives me a pain in the neck," Henry said
in a superior tone.

Dick walked along kicking at the pavement with his toes.

"Say, we might go around and have a soda they
have awful good sodas at Dryer's."

"Got any dough?"

Dick shook his head.

"Well, you needn't think I'm goin' to treat you. . . .
Jimminy criskets, Trenton's a rotten town. . . . In Phila-
delphia I seen a drugstore with a sodafountain half a
block long."

"Aw, you."

"I bet you don't remember when we lived in Oak

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Park, Dick. . . . Now Chicago's a fine town." "Sure I
do . . . and you an' me going to kindergarden and Dad
being there and everything."

"Hell's bells, I wanta smoke."

"Mother'll smell it on you."

"Don't give a damn if she does."

When they got home Aunt Beatrice met them at the
front door looking sore as a crab and told them to go down
to the basement. Mother wanted to see them. The back
stairs smelt of Sunday dinner and sage chickenstuffing.
They hobbled down as slowly as possible, it must be about
Henry's smoking. She was in the dark basement hall. By
the light of the gasjet against the wall Dick couldn't make
out who the man was. Mother came up to them and they
could see that her eyes were red. "Boys, it's your father,"
she said in a weak voice. The tears began running down
her face.

The man had a grey shapeless head and his hair was
cut very short, the lids of his eyes were red and lashless
and his eyes were the same color as his face. Dick was
scared. It was somebody he'd known when he was little;
it couldn't be Dad.

"For God's sake, no more waterworks, Leona," the man
said in a whining voice. As he stood staring into the boys'
faces his body wabbled a little as if he was weak in the
knees. "They're good lookers both of them, Leona . . .
I guess they don't think much of their poor old Dad."

They all stood there without saying anything in the
dark basement hall in the rich close smell of Sunday dinner
from the kitchen. Dick felt he ought to talk but something
had stuck in his throat. He found he was stuttering, "Ha-
ha-hav-have you been sick?"

The man turned to Mother. "You'd better tell them all
about it when I'm gone . . . don't spare me . . . no-
body's ever spared me. . . . Don't look at me as if I was
a ghost, boys, I won't hurt you." A nervous tremor shook

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the lower part of his face. "All my life I've always been
the one has gotten hurt. . . . Well, this is a long
way from Oak Park . . . I just wanted to take a look at
you, good-by. . . . I guess the likes of me had better go
out the basement door . . . I'll meet: you at the bank at
eleven sharp, Leona, and that'll be the last thing you'll
ever have to do for me."

The gasjet went red when the door opened and flooded
the hall with reflected sunlight. Dick was shaking for fear
the man was going to kiss him, but all he did was give
them each a little trembly pat on the shoulder. His suit
hung loose on him and he seemed to have trouble lifting
his feet in their soft baggy shoes up the five stone steps to
the street.

Mother closed the door sharply.

"He's going to Cuba," she said. "That's the last time
we'll see him. I hope God can forgive him for all this,
your poor mother never can . . . at least he's out of that
horrible place." "Where was he, Mom?" asked Henry in
a business like voice. "Atlanta."

Dick ran away and up to the top floor and into his own
room in the attic and threw himself on the bed sobbing.

They none of them went down to dinner although they
were hungry and the stairs were rich with the smell of
roast chicken. When Pearl was washing up Dick tiptoed
into the kitchen and coaxed a big heaping plate of chicken
and stuffing and sweetpotatoes out of her; she said to run
along and eat it in the back yard because it was her day
out and she had the dishes to do. He sat on a dusty step-
ladder in the laundry eating. He could hardly get the
chicken down on account of the funny stiffness in his throat.
When he'd finished, Pearl made him help her wipe.

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That summer they got him a job as bellboy in a small
hotel at Bay Head that was run by a lady who was a
parishioner of Dr. Atwood's. Before he left Major and
Mrs. Glen, who were Aunt Beatrice's star boarders, gave
him a fivedollar bill for pocket money and a copy of the
"Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come" to read on the train.
Dr. Atwood asked him to stay after the bibleclass his last
Sunday and told him the parable of the talent, that Dick
knew very well already because Dr. Atwood preached on
it as a text four times every year, and showed him a letter
from the headmaster of Kent accepting him for the next
year as a scholarship pupil and told him that he must
work hard because God expected from each of us accord-
ing to our abilities. Then he told him a few things a grow-
ing boy ought to know and said he must avoid temptations
and always serve God with a clean body and a clean mind,
and keep himself pure for the lovely sweet girl he would
some day marry, and that anything else led only to mad-
ness and disease. Dick went away with his cheeks burning.

It wasn't so bad at the Bayview, but the guests and help
were all old people; about his own age there was only
Skinny Murray the other bellhop, a tall sandyhaired boy
who never had anything to say. He was a couple of years
older than Dick. They slept on two cots in a small airless
room right up under the roof that would still be so hot
from the sun by bedtime they could hardly touch it.
Through the thin partition they could hear the waitresses
in the next room rustling about and giggling as they went
to bed. Dick hated that sound and the smell of girls and
cheap facepowder that drifted in through the cracks in
the wall. The hottest nights he and Skinny would take
the screen out of the window and crawl out along the
gutter to a piece of flat roof there was over one of the
upper porches. There the mosquitoes would torment them,
but it was better than trying to sleep on their cots. Once
the girls were looking out of the window and saw them

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crawling along the gutter and made a great racket that
they were peeping and that they'd report them to the
manageress, and they were scared to death and made plans
all night about what they'd do if they were fired, they'd
go to Barnegat and get work on fishing boats; but the next
day the girls didn't say anything about it. Dick was kinda
disappointed because he hated waiting on people and run-
ning up and down stairs answering bells.

It was Skinny who got the idea they might make some
extra money selling fudge, because when Dick got a
package of fudge from his mother he sold it to one of the
waitresses for a quarter. So Mrs. Savage sent a package
of fresh fudge and panocha every week by parcel post that
Dick and Skinny sold to the guests in little boxes. Skinny
bought the boxes and did most of the work but Dick con-
vinced him it wouldn't be fair for him to take more than
ten percent of the profits because he and his mother put
up the original capital.

The next summer they made quite a thing of the fudge-
selling. Skinny did the work more than ever because Dick
had been to a private school and had been hobnobbing
with rich boys all winter whose parents had plenty of
money. Luckily none of them came to Bay Head for the
summer. He told Skinny all about the school and recited
ballads about St. John Hospitaller and Saint Christopher
he'd made up and that had been published in the school
paper; he told him about serving at the altar and the
beauty of the Christian Faith and about how he'd made
the outfield in the junior baseball team. Dick made Skinny
go to church with him every Sunday to the little Episcopal
chapel called St. Mary's-by-the-Sea. Dick used to stay
after the service and discuss points of doctrine and cere-
mony with Mr. Thurlow the young minister and was
finally invited to come home with him to dinner and meet
his wife.

The Thurlows lived in an unpainted peakedroofed bun-

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galow in the middle of a sandlot near the station. Mrs.
Thurlow was a dark girl with a thin aquiline nose and
bangs, who smoked cigarettes and hated Bay Head. She
talked about how bored she was and how she shocked the
old lady parishioners and Dick thought she was wonderful.
She was a great reader of the Smart Set and The Black
Cat and books that were advanced, and poked fun at Ed-
win's attempts to restore primitive Christianity to the
boardwalk, as she put it. Edwin Thurlow would look at her
from under the colorless lashes of his pale eyes and whis-
per meekly, "Hilda, you oughtn't to talk like that"; then
he'd turn mildly to Dick and say, "Her bark is worse
than her bite, you know." They got to be great friends
and Dick took to running around to their house whenever
he could get away from the hotel. He took Skinny around
a couple of times but Skinny seemed to feel that their
talk was too deep for him and would never stay long but
would shuffle off after explaining that he had to sell some
fudge.

The next summer it was mostly the hope of seeing the
Thurlows that made Dick not mind going to work at the
Bayview where Mrs. Higgins gave him the job of room-
clerk with an increase of pay on account of his gentlemanly
manners. Dick was sixteen and his voice was changing;
he had dreams about things with girls and thought a lot
about sin and had a secret crush on Spike Culbertson, the
yellowhaired captain of his school ballteam. He hated
everything about his life, his aunt and the smell of her
boarding house, the thought of his father, his mother's
flowergarden hats, not having enough money to buy good
clothes or go to fashionable summerresorts like the other
fellows did. All kinds of things got him terribly agitated
so that it was hard not to show it. The wabble of the wait-
resses' hips and breasts while they were serving meals,
girls' underwear in store windows, the smell of the bath-
houses and the salty tingle of a wet bathingsuit and the

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tanned skin of fellows and girls in bathingsuits lying out
in the sun on the beach.

He'd been writing Edwin and Hilda long letters all
winter about anything that came into his head, but when
he actually gaw them he felt funny and constrained. Hilda
was using a new kind of perfume that tickled his nose;
even when he was sitting at the table at lunch with them,
eating cold ham and potato salad from the delicatessen
and talking about the primitive litanies and gregorian
music he couldn't help undressing them in his mind, think-
ing of them in bed naked; he hated the way he felt.

Sunday afternoons Edwin went to Elberon to conduct
services in another little summer chapel. Hilda never went
and often invited Dick to go out for a walk with her or
come to tea. He and Hilda began to have a little world
between them that Edwin had nothing to do with, where
they only talked about him to poke fun at him. Dick began
to see Hilda in his queer horrid dreams. Hilda began to
talk about how she and Dick were really brother and sister,
how passionless people who never really wanted anything
couldn't understand people like them. Those times Dick
didn't get much chance to say anything. He and Hilda
would sit on the back stoop in the shade smoking Egyptian
Deities until they felt a little sick. Hilda'd say she didn't
care whether the damn parishioners saw her or not and
talk and talk about how she wanted something to happen
in her life, and smart clothes and to travel to foreign
countries and to have money to spend and not to have
to fuss with the housekeeping and how she felt sometimes
she could kill Edwin for his mild calfish manner.

Edwin usually got back on a train that got in at 10:53
and, as Dick had Sunday evenings off from the hotel, he
and Hilda would eat supper alone together and then take
a walk along the beach. Hilda would take his arm and
walk close to him; he'd wonder if she felt him tremble
whenever their legs touched.

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All week he'd think about those Sunday evenings. Some-
times he'd tell himself that he wouldn't go another time.
He'd stay up in his room and read Dumas or go out with
fellows he knew; being alone with Hilda like that made
him feel too rotten afterwards. Then one moonless night,
when they'd walked way down the beach beyond the rosy
fires of the picnickers, and were sitting side by side on the
sand talking about India's Love Lyrics that Hilda had
been reading aloud that afternoon, she suddenly jumped
on him and mussed up his hair and stuck her knees into
his stomach and began to run her hands over his body
under his shirt. She was strong for a girl, but he'd just
managed to push her off when he had to grab her by the
shoulders and pull her down on top of him. They neither
of them said anything but lay there in the sand breathing
hard. At last she whispered, "Dick, I mustn't have a
baby. . . . We can't afford it. . . . That's why Edwin
won't sleep with me. Damn it, I want you, Dick. Don't
you see how awful it all is?" While she was talking her
hands were burning him, moving down across his chest,
over his ribs, around the curve of his belly. "Don't, Hilda,
don't." There were mosquitoes around their heads. The
long hissing invisible wash of the surf came almost to their
feet.

That night Dick couldn't go down to the train to meet
Edwin the way he usually did. He went back to the Bay-
view with his knees trembling, and threw himself on his
bed in his stuffy little room under the roof. He thought
of killing himself but he was afraid of going to hell; he
tried to pray, at least to remember the Lord's Prayer.
He was terribly scared when he found he couldn't even
remember the Lord's Prayer. Maybe that was the sin
against the Holy Ghost they had committed.

The sky was grey and the birds were chirping outside
before he got to sleep. All next day, as he sat holloweyed
behind the desk, passing on the guests' demands for ice-

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water and towels, answering inquiries about rooms and
traintimes, he was turning a poem over in his mind about
the scarlet of my sin and the scarlet of thy sin and dark
birds above the surging seawaves crying and damned souls
passionately sighing. When it was finished he showed the
poem to the Thurlows, Edwin wanted to know where
he got such morbid ideas, but was glad that faith and the
church triumphed in the end. Hilda laughed hysterically
and said he was a funny boy but that maybe he'd be a writer
someday.

When Skinny came down for a two weeks' vacation to
take the place of one of the new bellhops that was sick,
Dick talked very big to him about women and sin and
about how he was in love with a married woman. Skinny
said that wasn't right because there were plenty of easy
women around who'd give a feller all the loving he
wanted. But when Dick found out that he'd never been
with a girl although he was two years older, he put on
so many airs about experience and sin, that one night
when they'd gone down to the drugstore for a soda, Skinny
picked up a couple of girls and they walked down the
beach with them. The girls were thirtyfive if they were a
day and Dick didn't do anything but tell his girl about his
unhappy love affair and how he had to be faithful to his
love even though she was being unfaithful to him at the
very moment. She said he was too young to take things
serious like that and that a girl ought to be ashamed of her-
self who made a nice boy like him unhappy. "Jez, I'd
make a feller happy if I had the chanct," she said and burst
out crying.

Walking back to the Bayview, Skinny was worried for
fear he might have caught something, but Dick said physi-
cal things didn't matter and that repentance was the key
of redemption. It turned out that Skinny did get sick be-
cause later in the summer he wrote Dick that he was paying
a doctor five dollars a week to cure him up and that he felt

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terrible about it. Dick and Hilds went on sinning Sunday
evening when Edwin was conducting services in Elberon
and when Dick went back to school that fall he felt very
much the man of the world.

In the Christmas vacation he went to stay with the
Thurlows in East Orange where Edwin was the assistant
to the rector of the church of St. John, Apostle. There,
at tea at the rector's he met Hiram Halsey Cooper, a
Jersey City lawyer and politician who was interested in
High Church and first editions of Huysmans and who
asked Dick to come to see him. When Dick called Mr.
Cooper gave him a glass of sherry, showed him first edi-
tions of Beardsley and Huysmans and Austin Dobson,
sighed about his lost youth and offered him a job in his
office as soon as school was over. It turned out that Mr.
Cooper's wife, who was dead, had been an Ellsworth and
a cousin of Dick's mother's. Dick promised to send him
copies of all his poems, and the articles he published in
the school paper.

All the week he was with the Thurlows he was trying
to get to see Hilda alone, but she managed to avoid him.
He'd heard about French letters and wanted to tell her
about them, but it wasn't until the last day that Edwin
had to go out and make parochial calls. This time it was
Dick who was the lover and Hilda who tried to hold him
off, but he made her take off her clothes and they laughed
and giggled together while they were making love. This
time they didn't worry so much about sin and when Edwin
came home to supper he asked them what the joke was,
they seemed in such a good humor. Dick started telling a
lot of cock and bull stories about his Aunt Beatrice and
her boarders and they parted at the train in a gale of
laughter.

That summer was the Baltimore convention. Mr. Cooper
had rented a house there and entertained a great deal.
Dick's job was to stay in the outer office and be polite to

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everybody and take down people's names. He wore a
blue serge suit and made a fine impression on everybody
with his wavy black hair that Hilda used to tell him was
like a raven's wing, his candid blue eyes and his pink and
white complexion. What was going on was rather over his
head, but he soon discovered what people Mr. Cooper
really wanted to see and what people were merely to be
kidded along. Then when he and Mr. Cooper found them-
selves alone, Mr. Cooper would get out a bottle of
Amontillado and pour them each a glass and sit in a big
leather chair rubbing his forehead as if to rub the politics
out of his mind and start talking about literature and the
nineties and how he wished he was young again. It was
understood that he was going to advance Dick the money
to go through Harvard with.