Men Without Women (16 page)

3rd Soldier
—Hey, what you put in that, camel chips?

Wine-seller
—
You
drink that right down, Lootenant. That’ll fix you up right.

3rd Soldier
—Well, I couldn’t feel any worse.

1st Soldier
—Take a chance on it. George fixed me up fine the other day.

Wine-seller
—
You
were in bad shape, Lootenant. I know what fixes up a bad stomach.

[
The third Roman soldier drinks the cup down
.]

3rd Soldier
—Jesus Christ.
[
He makes a face
.]

2nd Soldier
—
That
false alarm!

1st Soldier
—Oh, I don’t know. He was pretty good in there to-day.

2nd Soldier
—
Why
didn’t he come down off the cross?

1st Soldier
—He didn’t want to come down off the cross. That’s not his play.

2nd Soldier
—Show me a guy that doesn’t want to come down off the cross.

1st Soldier
—
Aw
, hell, you don’t know anything about it. Ask George there. Did he want to come down off the cross, George?”

Wine-seller
—I’ll tell you, gentlemen, I wasn’t out there. It’s a thing I haven’t taken any interest in.

2nd Soldier
—Listen, I seen a lot of them—here and plenty of other places. Any time you show me one that doesn’t want to get down off the cross when the time comes—when the time comes, I mean—I’ll climb right up with him.

1st Soldier
—I thought he was pretty good in there to-day.

3rd Soldier
—He was all right.

2nd Soldier
—
You
guys don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m not saying whether he was good or not. What I mean is, when the time comes. When they first start nailing him, there isn’t none of them wouldn’t stop it if they could.

1st Soldier
—
Didn’t
you follow it, George?

Wine-seller
—No, I didn’t take any interest in it, Lootenant.

1st Soldier
—I was surprised how he acted.

3rd Soldier
—
The
part I don’t like is the nailing them on. You know, that must get you pretty bad.

2nd Soldier
—
It
isn’t that that’s so bad, as when they first lift ’em [
He makes a lifting gesture with his two palms together
.]
When the weight starts to pull on ’em.
That’s when it gets ’em.

3rd Soldier
—
It
takes some of them pretty bad.

1st Soldier
—Ain’t I seen ’em?
I seen
plenty of them. I tell you, he was pretty good in there today.

[
The second Roman soldier smiles at the Hebrew wine-seller
.]

2nd Soldier
—
You’re
a regular
Christer
, big boy.

1st Soldier
—
Sure
, go on and kid him. But listen while I tell you something. He was pretty good in there today.

2nd Soldier
—
What
about some more wine?”

[
The wine-seller looks up expectantly. The third Roman soldier is sitting with his head down. He does not look well
.]

3rd Soldier
—I don’t want any more.

2nd Soldier
—Just for two, George.

[
The wine-seller puts out a pitcher of wine, a size smaller than the last one. He leans forward on the wooden counter
.]

1st Soldier
—
You
see his girl?”

2nd Soldier
—Wasn’t I standing right by her?

1st Soldier
—
She’s
a nice looker.

2nd Soldier
—I knew her before he did. [
He winks at the wine-seller
.]

1st Soldier—
I used to see her around the town.

2nd Soldier
—
She
used to have a lot of stuff. He never brought her
no
good luck.

1st Soldier
—
Oh
, he ain’t lucky. But he looked pretty good to me in there today.

2nd Soldier
—
What
became of his gang?”

1st Soldier
—
Oh
, they faded out.
Just the women stuck by him.

2nd Soldier
—
They
were a pretty yellow crowd. When they seen him go up there they didn’t want any of it.

1st Soldier
—
The
women stuck all right.

2nd Soldier
—
Sure
, they stuck all right.

1st Soldier
—
You
see me slip the old spear into him?

2nd Soldier
—
You’ll
get into trouble doing that some day.

1st Soldier
—
It
was the least I could do for him. I’ll tell you he looked pretty good to me in there today.

Hebrew wine-seller
—Gentlemen, you know I got to close.

1st Soldier
—
We’ll
have one more round.

2nd Soldier
—
What’s
the use? This stuff
don’t
get you anywhere. Come on, let’s go.

1st Soldier
—Just another round.

3rd Soldier
—[
Getting up from the barrel
.]
No, come on. Let’s go. I feel like hell tonight.

1st Soldier
—Just one more.

2nd Soldier
—No, come on. We’re going to go. Good night, George. Put it on the bill.

Wine-seller
—Good night gentlemen.
[
He looks a little worried
.] You couldn’t let me have a little something on account, Lootenant?”

2nd Soldier
—
What
the hell, George!
Wednesday’s payday.

Wine-seller
—
It’s
all right, Lootenant. Good night, gentlemen.

[
The three Roman soldiers go out the door into the street
.]

[
Outside in the street
.]

2nd Soldier
—George is a kike just like all the rest of them.

1st Soldier
—Oh, George is a nice fella.

2nd Soldier
—
Everybody’s
a nice fella to you tonight.

3rd Soldier
—Come
on,
let’s go up to the barracks. I feel like hell tonight.

2nd Soldier
—
You
been out here too long.

3rd Soldier
—No, it ain’t that. I feel like hell.

2nd Soldier
—
You
been out here too long. That’s all.

CURTAIN

SO he ate an orange, slowly spitting out the seeds. Outside, the snow was turning to rain. Inside, the electric stove seemed to give no heat and rising from his writing-table, he sat down upon the stove. How good it felt! Here, at last, was life.

He reached for another orange. Far away in Paris, Mascart had knocked Danny Frush cuckoo in the second round. Far off in Mesopotamia, twenty-one feet of snow had fallen. Across the world in distant Australia, the English cricketers were sharpening up their wickets.
There
was Romance.

Patrons of the arts and letters have discovered The Forum, he read. It is the guide, philosopher, and friend of the thinking minority. Prize short-stories—will their authors write our best-sellers of tomorrow?”

You will enjoy these warm, homespun, American tales, bits of real life on the open ranch, in crowded tenement or comfortable home, and all with a healthy undercurrent of humor.

I must read them, he thought.

He read on. Our children’s children—what of them? Who of them? New means must be discovered to find room for us under the sun. Shall this be done by war or can it be done by peaceful methods?”

Or will we all have to move to Canada?”

Our deepest convictions—will Science upset them? Our civilization—is it inferior to older orders of things—

And meanwhile, in the far-off dripping jungles of Yucatan, sounded the chopping of the axes of the gum-choppers. Do we want big men—or do we want them cultured? Take Joyce. Take President Coolidge. What star must our college students aim at? There is Jack Britton. There is Dr Henry Van Dyke. Can we reconcile the two? Take the case of Young Stribling.

And what of our daughters who must take their own Soundings? Nancy Hawthorne is obliged to make her own Soundings in the sea of life. Bravely and sensibly she faces the problems which come to every girl of eighteen.

It was a splendid booklet.

Are you a girl of eighteen? Take the case of a Joan of Arc. Take the case of Bernard Shaw. Take the case of Betsy Ross.

Think of these things in 1925—
Was
there a frisqué page in Puritan history? Were there two sides to Pocahontas? Did she have a fourth dimension?”

Are modern paintings—and poetry—Art? Yes and No. Take Picasso.

Have tramps codes of conduct? Send your mind adventuring.

There is Romance everywhere.
Forum
writers talk to the point, are possessed of humor and wit. But they do not try to be smart and are never long-winded.

Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the romance of the unusual. He laid down the booklet.

And meanwhile, stretched flat on a bed in a darkened room in the house in Triana, Manuel Garcia Maera lay with a tube in each lung, drowning with the pneumonia. All the papers in Andalucia devoted special supplements to his death, which had been expected for some days. Men and boys bought full-length colored pictures of him to remember him by, and lost the picture they had of him in their memories by looking at the lithographs. Bullfighters were very relieved he was dead, because he did always in the bullring the things they could only do sometimes. They all marched in the rain behind his coffin and there were one hundred and forty-seven bullfighters followed him out to the cemetery where they buried him in the tomb next to Joselito. After the funeral every one sat in the cafés out of the rain, and many colored pictures of Maera were sold to men who rolled them up and put them away in their pockets.

THAT night we lay on the floor in the room and I listened to the silk-worms eating. The silk-worms fed in racks of mulberry leaves and all night you could hear them eating and a dropping sound in the leaves. I myself did not want to sleep because I had been living for a long time with the knowledge that if I ever shut my eyes in the dark and let myself go, my soul would go out of my body. I had been that way for a long time, ever since I had been blown up at night and felt it go out of me and go off and then come back. I tried never to think about it, but it had started to go since, in the nights, just at the moment of going off to sleep, and I could only stop it by a very great effort. So while now I am fairly sure that it will not really have gone out, yet then, that summer, I was unwilling to make the experiment.

I had different ways of occupying myself while I lay awake. I would think of a trout stream I had fished along when I was a boy; and fish its whole length very carefully in my mind; fishing very carefully under all the logs, all the turns of the bank, the deep holes and the clear shallow stretches, sometimes catching trout and sometimes losing them. I would stop fishing at noon to eat my lunch; sometimes on a log over the stream; sometimes on a high bank under a tree, and I always ate my lunch very slowly and watched the stream below me while I ate. Often I ran out of bait because I would take only ten worms with me in a tobacco tin when I started. When I had used them all I had to find more worms, and sometimes it was very difficult digging in the bank of the stream where the cedar trees kept out the sun and there was no grass but only the bare moist earth and often I could find no worms. Always though I found some kind of bait, but one time in the swamp I could find no bait at all and had to cut up one of the trout I had caught and use him for bait.

Sometimes I found insects in the swamp meadows, in the grass or under ferns, and used them. There were beetles and insects with legs like grass stems, and grubs in old rotten logs; white grubs with brown pinching heads that would not stay on the hook and emptied into nothing in the cold water, and wood ticks under logs where sometimes I found angle-worms that slipped into the ground as soon as the log was raised. Once I used a salamander from under an old log. The salamander was very small and neat and agile and a lovely color. He had tiny feet that tried to hold on to the hook, and after that one time I never used a salamander, although I found them very often. Nor did I use crickets, because of the way they acted about the hook.

Sometimes the stream ran through an open
meadow,
and in the dry grass I would catch grasshoppers and use them for bait and sometimes I would catch grasshoppers and toss them into the stream and watch them float along swimming on the stream and circling on the surface as the current took them and then disappear as a trout rose. Sometimes I would fish four or five different streams in the night; starting as near as I could get to their source and fishing them down stream. When I had finished too quickly and the time did not go, I would fish the stream over again, starting where it emptied into the lake and fishing back up stream, trying for all the trout I had missed coming down. Some nights too I made up streams, and some of them were very exciting, and it was like being awake and dreaming. Some of those streams I still remember and think that I have fished in them, and they are confused with streams I really know. I gave them all names and went to them on the train and sometimes walked for miles to get to them.

But some nights I could not fish, and on those nights I was cold-awake and said my prayers over and over and tried to pray for all the people I had ever known. That took up a great amount of time, for if you try to remember all the people you have ever known, going back to the earliest thing you remember—which was, with me, the attic of the house where I was born and my mother and father’s wedding-cake in a tin box hanging from one of the rafters, and, in the attic, jars of snakes and other specimens that my father had collected as a boy and preserved in alcohol sunken in the jars so the backs of some of the snakes and specimens were exposed and had turned white—if you thought back that far, you remembered a great many people. If you prayed for all of them, saying a Hail Mary and Our Father for each one, it took a long time and finally it would be light, and then you could go to sleep, if you were in a place where you could sleep in the daylight.