My book, replied Peter, is going to be very unpleasant. It is about life and because you and I enjoy life is little enough reason for us to consider it other than a dirty business. Life for the average person, for Rosie, for instance, simply will not do. It's bloody awful and, if anything, I shall make it worse than it is. Now, if the comrades succeed in starting the REVOLUTION, I am going through with it, straight through, breaking into drawing-rooms with the others. I'm going to pound up a Steinway grand with a hammer. Here Peter, with a suitable gesture, brought his hand down rather heavily on George Moore's head and that one, indignant, immediately rose and jumped down from his lap, subsequently stretched himself on the floor, catching his claws in the carpet, and after yawning once or twice, retreated under the bed. George Sand now left Peter's shoulder to fill the vacant place on his knee. As I told you, I'm going to wear a red handkerchief round my brow and my face will be bloody. Then, all I have to do is to transfer the whole experience, everything I have done and felt, the thrill, the BOOM, to Rosie. Can't you see the picture in my last chapter of the little, lame, hare-lipped hunch-back, with one blue eye and one black one, marching up Fifth Avenue with the comrades, wrapped in the red flag, her face stained with blood, humbling the Guggenheimers and the Morgans, disturbing the sleep of Henry Clay Frick, casting art treasures, bought with the blood of the poor, out to the pavement, breaking windows, shooting, torturing, devastating? Then the triumphant return to the East Side, Rosie on the men's shoulders. Everybody tired and sweaty, satiated and bloody. Now, all the realism of the interiors, gefillte fish and schnaps. But Rosie will sit down to her dinner in a Bendel evening gown, raped from one of the Kahn closets. The men come back for her. Another procession down Canal Street. The police charge the mob. Shots. The Vanderbilts and the Astors and the Schwabs in their Rolls-Royces and their Pierce-Arrows, fitted with machine-guns, charge the mob. Terrible slaughter. Rosie dead, a horrid mess, fully described, lying on the pavement. Everything lost. Everything worse than it was before. Deportation. Exile. Tenements razed. Old women, their sheitels awry, wrapped in half a dozen petticoats and thick shawls, bearing the sacred candlesticks, fleeing in all directions. Cries of Weh is mir! Moans. Groans. Desolation. And, at the end, a lone figure standing just where you and I were standing a little while ago, philosophizing, pointing the dread moral, accenting the horror. The lights go out. Darkness. In the distance, a band is heard playing The Star Spangled Banner. Finis.
Peter's excitement became so great that he almost shrieked; he waved his arms and he half rose out of his chair. George Sand, too, found it expedient to retreat under the bed. The kittens, tumbling mewing out of their baskets, their little tails, like Christmas trees, straight in the air, followed her, and soon were pushing their paws valiantly against her belly and drinking greedily from her dugs.
It's wonderful, I said when Peter, at last, was silent. Then, as it seemed, rather inconsequentially, Do you know Edith Dale?
Who is Edith Dale?
Well, she's a woman, but a new kind of woman, or else the oldest kind; I'm not sure which. I'm going to take you there. Bill Haywood goes there. So does Doris Keane. Everybody goes there. Everything is all mixed up. Everybody talks his own kind of talk and Edith, inscrutable Edith, sits back and listens. You can listen too.
Is she writing a book?
No, she never does anything like that. She spends her energy in living, in watching other people live, in watching them make their silly mistakes, in helping them make their silly mistakes. She is a dynamo. She will give you a good deal. At least, these gatherings will give you a good deal. I think you might carry a chapter or two of your novel through one of Edith Dale's evenings.
Must I change my clothes?
No, you are right just as you are. She will like you the better for them.
That's good. I couldn't change my clothes. My friends, the comrades, wouldn't understand if they saw me. But you must have a drink. I had nearly forgotten that I had promised you one.