Clarkton Read Free

table and slap one of Simpson’s plump cheeks, an impulse which he conquered, grinning feebly at Simpson instead, regretting the whisky sour he was going to have but had instead forgotten. He mumbled something about reds and the OWI and what he supposed had happened to Simpson, and Simpson grinned and said to Bernstien:
    â€œI told you. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary—always was.”
    â€œFrancis isn’t a red,” Bernstien said. “By no means. He’s a good liberal and he feels strongly about a lot of things.”
    Lowell waited only long enough, and then signed his check and left. When he reached the street, he was trembling with fury, something that had not happened to him in a long, long time.

5. B y train time, by the time he had settled himself in the chair car with a book, the papers, an extra pack of cigarettes and a present for Lois—all of it and himself as well blending into the perspective of the long, somewhat tedious ride ahead of him, his anger had passed, and he was ready to tell himself that unpleasant people existed everywhere and could be easily met; but afterward, when he came to think about it—as he surely would—he would realize that these two were no more unpleasant than those he knew generally, and he would ask himself, as he had done before, whether or not he was developing a distaste for all people in his circle of acquaintance. That point came while the train was still clattering over the elevated structure that took it through Harlem. He watched the buildings with the empty curiosity of the thousands who ride past them daily, and he asked himself the question, answering it with the more or less objective realization that Berństien seemed a pleasant enough, harmless enough man, and Simpson was the kind the years obviously leave in bereavement, obtaining nothing from nothing and always surrounded by people like George Clark Lowell, surrounded by them but coming no closer to them than envy. So if it had not been these two, but two others instead, he still would have reacted in much the same way; and he fell into the fleeting consolation that if the boy had lived, he would have felt different about this sort of thing.
    But he didn’t want to think of the boy; ever since Elliott Abbott had remarked that thinking about that could become worse than a drug, in reference to Lois more than to himself, he attempted to control his thoughts carefully. Lois would be pleased, he thought, with his present, which was a snakelike choker of flexible gold, very simple and not too expensive. He would give it to her in the car, and she would wear it at dinner that night and probably not again for at least six months; but still she would be pleased with it.
    The chair car was almost empty, half a dozen besides himself—circumstances of railway travel had changed so rapidly since the war ended! After he had looked around once or twice and met the peculiarly empty stare that Americans reserve for railway cars and public elevators, he lost interest, just as he had lost interest in the tenement houses alongside the track. He opened the book he had bought, the Modern Library edition of the short stories of Ernest Hèmingway, and ruffled through it, trying to recall the name of a story he had read once, a long time back, of a couple who went to hunt lions in Africa, and how the wife, a thoroughgoing bitch, had murdered her own husband in a peculiarly horrible way; just what way, he couldn’t recall, but he did recall a line to the effect of American men remaining adolescent until suddenly they were plunged into middle age. He didn’t find the story he was looking for, but that line remained in his head, and when he started to read a story his thoughts were elsewhere, and three pages of words marched by without any meaning whatsoever.
    Instead, he remembered the last time he had seen his son, and how completely pleasant things were between them. After the