We didn't exchange three words, not even two, he said, but I took her in and she took me in. We like each other, I'm sure, and some day we'll meet again. Look, he added, sweeping his arm around, see what her glamour has given me, a new life!
But why did you leave so early?
I met a girl....
The next few weeks have left a rather confused impression in my mind, perhaps because Peter himself seemed to be confused. He never spoke of his book. Occasionally we went to the theatre or to a concert. I remember a concert of Negro music at Carnegie Hall, when there were twenty-four pianos and thirty banjos in the band and the Negroes sang G'wine up, Go Down, Moses, Rise and Shine, Run Mary, Run, and Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, with less of the old plantation spirit than either Peter or I could have assumed, but when the band broke into ragtime, the banjos twanged, the pianos banged, the blacks swayed back and forth, the roof was raised, and glory was upon us. Once, coming out of Æolian Hall, after a concert given by Elena Gerhardt, we were confronted by a wagon-load of double basses in their trunks. Two of the monsters, with their fat bellies and their long necks, stood vis-à-vis on the sidewalk and seemed to be conversing, while their brothers on the wagon, a full nine, wore the most ridiculously dégagé air of dignity. We will not sit down, not here at any rate, they plainly said, but they did not complain. Peter laughed a good deal at them and remarked that the aristocrats in the French Revolution must have gone to the guillotine in much the same manner, only the absurd double basses in their trunks had no roses to smell. Never have I seen inanimate objects so animate save once, at a rehearsal in the darkened Belasco Theatre, when the curly gold backs of the ornate chairs, peeping over the rails of the boxes, assumed the exact appearance of Louis XIV wigs on stately gentlemen. We heard Toscanini conduct the Ninth Symphony at the Metropolitan Opera House and we went to see Mrs. Leslie Carter play Paula Tanqueray. Often, in those days, we dined at the Pavillon d'Orient, an Armenian restaurant on Lexington Avenue. Peter particularly enjoyed a pudding called Tavouk Gheoksu, made of shredded chicken-breasts, pounded rice flour, powdered sugar, and cinnamon, and Midia Dolma, which are mussels stuffed with raisins and rice and pignolia nuts. Studying the menu one night, it occurred to him that the names of the dishes would make excellent names for the characters of a play. The heroine, of course, he said, would be Lahana Sarma and the adventuress, Sgara Keofté; Enguinar is a splendid name for a hero, and the villain should be called Ajem Pilaf! There was a negro café in the basement of a building on Thirty-eighth street, which we frequently visited to see a most amazing mulatto girl, apparently boneless, fling herself about while a pitch-black boy with ivory teeth pummelled his drum, at intervals tossing his sticks high in the air and catching them dexterously, and the pianist pounded Will Tyers's Maori out of the piano. Occasionally we patronized more conventional cafés, one especially, where Peter was interested in a dancer, who painted her face with Armenian bole and said she was a descendant of a Hindu Rajah.
It was during this period that Peter nourished a desire to be tattooed and we sought out masters of the art on the Bowery and at Coney Island. For hours at a time he would examine the albums of designs or watch the artist at work decorating sailors and stevedores. One of these young men came nearly every day until his entire body, with the exception of his eye-balls, lips, and nails, had become a living Persian carpet, a subtle tracery of arabesques and fantastic beasts, birds and reptiles. The process of application was interesting. First, the pattern must be pricked out on glazed paper, smeared with lamp-black; this was laid on the surface to be tattooed and the outline left by the lamp-black was worked over with needles. The artist utilized a piece of wood into which were fixed with wires, nine or ten sharp points. The victims seemed to suffer a good deal of pain, but they suffered in silence. It was not, however, fear of pain that caused Peter to hesitate. I think he would have been frescoed from head to foot, could he have once decided upon a design. Day after day, he looked over the sketches, professional symbols, military, patriotic, and religious, symbols of love, metaphorical emblems and emblems fantastic and historical, frogs, tarantulas, serpents, hearts transfixed with arrows, crosses surmounted by spheres, and cannon. He was most tempted, I think, by the design of an Indian holding aloft the flag of the United States.
Late in March, he suggested a trip to Bermuda.
We must go somewhere, he explained, and why not Bermuda? It's not too far away.
I had been working hard and welcomed the idea of a vacation. To the question of a destination I was comparatively indifferent. It was, however, not too easy to arrange for even a brief leave of absence from the Times during the busy Winter months. By pleading incipient nervous prostration, however, I managed to accomplish my purpose.
On the day marked for our departure, I set out, bags in hands, for the office of the steamship company on lower Broadway, where Peter had commissioned me to stop for the tickets. There, a clerk behind the counter gave me a note. It was from Peter.
Dear Carl, it ran, I've cancelled our bookings. I can't go. Come in to see me today and we'll arrange another trip.