“Where?”
“Oh I dunno, I guess everywhere.... Well so long Joe, I guess I’ll go along an buy that ticket.... Jez it’s goin to be a swell fight.”
Joe Harland watched the young man’s short jerky stride as he went off down the path with his straw hat on the side of his head. Then he got to his feet and walked east along Twentythird Street. The pavements and housewalls still gave off heat although the sun had set. He stopped outside a corner saloon and examined carefully a group of stuffed ermines, gray with dust, that occupied the center of the window. Through the swinging doors a sound of quiet voices and a malty coolness seeped into the street. He suddenly flushed and bit his upper lip and after a furtive glance up and down the street went in through the swinging doors and shambled up to the brassy bottleglittering bar.
After the rain outdoors the plastery backstage smell was pungent in their nostrils. Ellen hung the wet raincoat on the back of the door and put her umbrella in a corner of the dressing room where a little puddle began to spread from it. “And all I could think of,” she was saying in a low voice to Stan who followed her staggering, “was a funny song somebody’d told me when I was a little girl about: And the only
man who survived the flood was longlegged Jack of the Isthmus.”
“God I dont see why people have children. It’s an admission of defeat. Procreation is the admission of an incomplete organism. Procreation is an admission of defeat.”
“Stan for Heaven’s sake dont shout, you’ll shock the stagehands.... I oughtnt to have let you come. You know the way people gossip round a theater.”
“I’ll be quiet just like a lil mouse.... Just let me wait till Milly comes to dress you. Seeing you dress is my only remaining pleasure ... I admit that as an organism I’m incomplete.”
“You wont be an organism of any kind if you dont sober up.”