CHAPTER XIV
STAMPING-GROUND OF THE MONKEY-PEOPLE
“It was colossal!” Hildegarde Hook panted boisterously, as she burst into my room about four o’clock one morning during the Christmas holidays. “My ideal marriage—eleven o’clock at night, in a dark church with only the minister, the two contracting parties, and her best friend present. And Joe Ellen didn’t even change her dress—didn’t even sew up the slit in the back of her skirt.” Here she stopped panting long enough to laugh loud and long, after the manner of Greenwich Villagers too self-consciously innocent to consider the sleeper in the next room. “Harris had on his old yellow-and-purple Mackinaw, out at both elbows, and I think—yes, I’m sure, the pants he had on were the pair given him by my burglar.” Here she jounced herself down on the side of my bed, and drawing the pins from her hat, cast it on the top of my bureau. The pins she stuck into the mattress. “Now, dear, don’t you agree with me that it was an ideal marriage?—that is, of course, since our atrocious laws force us to go through that silly ceremony. Now don’t you think it an ideal way for two poets to be married?—so characteristic, so filled with color. Two struggling young geniuses!”
“Is Harris a poet?” I questioned, as, having edged as far away from her as the wall would permit, I sat up in bed. “I’ve read several of Joe Ellen’s verses in the magazines. What’s Harris’s other name? What has he written?”
“Casey—Harris Casey. Such a romantic name! Two epics and no end of lyrics. Jack Harland says that Harris’s longer epic is the most colossal thing in the English language since ‘Childe Harold.’ While I’m not sure that Jack will ever accomplish anything worth while in the creative field, you must admit that he is a perfectly colossal critic. You do admit it?” she questioned so earnestly that any one entering the room might have fancied that she pled for the salvation of her immortal soul.
“‘Childe Harold’ is not quite in the form of—” I began, determined not to be led into a controversy so early in the morning, for I still cherished the hope that she would take herself off.
“Form!” Hildegarde cried, as though invoking her patron saint. “Form! the chief difference between poetry and prose. ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘Lucile,’ for instance—both tragedies, in a way, yet each a different form. You don’t mind if I slip my feet under the cover for a bit?—I’ve taken off my slippers.”
Without waiting for my reply she hoisted up her feet and began to tug at the bedclothes. Such looking feet! Her black stockings were without toes and heels and her bare flesh glistened with moisture.
“Your feet are sopping wet!” I involuntarily expostulated.
“I never take cold,” she assured me, in the act of sticking her feet between my sheets.
“Please,” I begged, grabbing the bedclothes from her hands. “Please, get that bath-towel over there and dry them—give them a good rubbing. No use taking risks when you don’t need to.”