Three men and a woman at a table effusively greeted Margaret, and after she had introduced Blanche, the two girls sat down with the others. The third girl, Dora Ruvinsky, was an unsymmetrically fat Jewess, with a thin-lipped but salacious face and a shorn disorder of black hair. Her sex had yielded to a cunning nightmare of masculinity, and she wore a stiff white collar, a red cravat, and a man’s vest and coat. She spoke in a husky drawl and perpetually slapped the shoulders of the men beside her. They regarded her with tolerance contending against a slight aversion.
One of them, Max Oppendorf, a blond-haired man of thirty, plied her with whisky from a hip-bottle and strove to trap her into feminine reactions and remarks, as though he were coldly and listlessly playing with a desperately hypocritical insect. His narrow, pale, blue-eyed face glanced around the tables with pity and repugnance somehow fused into its expression. A recognized poet and novelist, he was nevertheless known as a distinguished outcast, ostracized, attacked, and hated by literary and dilettantish groups of every variety because of his skillful-tongued independence, his careless violations of etiquettes and conventions, and the ravages of his unorthodox intellect. His clothes were shabby but not quite untidy, and as he frequently closed his eyes while speaking, he displayed the contradictory guise of an aristocratic vagabond.
Men almost invariably detested him, while the reactions of the women who met him were evenly divided into a distrustful resentment in one camp and a loyal adoration in the other. His armor was invulnerable, save when he became hopelessly drunk, in which condition he either savagely denounced and affronted the people around him or became unwontedly indulgent and gave them simulations of sentimentality and affectionate attention. These abdications sprang from his innate indifference to life and most of its people. Sincerely believing that most men and women were beclouded, unsearching, and cruelly gauche children, alcohol made his indifference to them more indulgently intent upon distracting itself, and, when drunk, he stooped to them with loud, mock-arguments, and exuberant caresses. He felt a moderate degree of tenderness toward Margaret Wheeler, who appealed to him as an honest grappler, more unreserved and mentally edged than most other girls of her age and occupation. She was violently in love with him, and they spoke together in tones that were almost whispers, and stroked each other’s hands.
The second man, Bob Trussel—a gorgeously effeminate youth who was known in Village circles for his not-quite-Beardsleyesque black and whites—conversed with Dora, while the third, Ben Helgin, talked to Blanche.
Ben was a robustly tall man in his early thirties, with a huge, half-bald head, and dark-brown hair inclined to be frizzly. His long, pointed nose, severely arched eyebrows, and widely thin lips gave him the look of a complacent, pettily cruel Devil—a street urchin who had donned the mask of Mephistopheles but could not quite conceal the leer of a boy intent upon practical jokes and small tormentings. He was a master in the arts of dramatic exaggeration and belittling, never quite telling the truth and never quite lying, and his immeasurable vanity made him always determined to dominate any conversation. He had an Oriental volubility, and people would often sit beside him for an hour or more and vainly seek to insert a beginning remark or express an uninterrupted opinion.
One of his favorite devices was to tell anecdotes about men of his acquaintance, in which the men were invariably depicted in a childish, ridiculous, or inferior posture, while he gloated over and embellished the details of their fancied discomfiture, with a great assumption of sympathy for the victims. Living in a dream-world entirely of his own making, he loved to flirt with visions, conquests, world-shaking concepts, and child-like boasts. On one morning he would appear among his friends, describing some plan or idea with a cyclonic enthusiasm, and on the very next afternoon no trace of it would remain within his mind. Again, he would loll in an armchair and announce that a famous actress of forty had implored him to reside with her and to become the leading man in her next play, but he would neglect to mention that the lady in question was renowned for her generous impulses and included truck-drivers and cigar-clerks in her overtures. These impositions caused most people to regard him as an eel-like poseur, when they were removed from the persuasive sorceries of his words, and they failed to see that his gigantic egotism had sincerely hoaxed itself into the rôle of a flitting and quickly ennuied conqueror.
For years he had followed the luring dream of amassing a large fortune through the creation of dexterously dishonest stories, plays, and press-agent campaigns, and while he had accumulated thousands of dollars in these ways, the dream of wealth persistently refused to be captured. He lacked the grimly plodding, blind instinct necessary for such a goal, and his financial harvests were always quickly gathered and dissipated. This babbling immersion in the garnering of money, however, gave him the paradoxical air of an esthetic Babbitt.
His serious literary creations were original and sardonic at their best, but frequently marred by a journalistic glibness which led him into shallow and redundant acrobatics, or facetious saunterings.
He had known Max Oppendorf for nine years, and they had passed through a comical fanfare of recriminations, friendly invitations, sneers, and respects. Oppendorf secretly disliked him but was at times fascinated by his charming pretenses of camaraderie, and the quickness of his mind. At one time, the poet had broken off with Helgin for three years—a withdrawal caused by his discovery of the other man’s peculiar and somewhat incredible sense of humor. Penniless, and afflicted with incipient tuberculosis, Oppendorf had written to his friend and asked for the loan of two hundred dollars. A special-delivery letter had flown back to him, containing an unctuously sympathetic note and announcing the enclosure of a two-hundred-dollar check. The rest of the envelope had been empty, however, and believing that the absence of the check was merely an absent-minded error, he dispatched another letter which apprised his friend of the oversight. In response, Helgin had sent him the following telegram: “It was a nice joke—hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.”
Helgin had a sincere admiration for the other man’s work and a veiled, malicious aversion to the poet’s personal side. To him, Oppendorf’s life held a supreme taunt which had to be demolished with falsehoods and ridicule. The poet’s unbroken flaunting of moralities, conventions, and compromises, reminded Helgin that his own life had not been equally courageous and defiant, in spite of his endless written shots at average people and their fears, and that, in his personal existence, he had frequently prostrated himself before the very observances which he pilloried, or laughed at, in his books and conversation. This specter could only be slain by the effort to jeer at the opposite man’s episodes with men and women, and to hold them forth as clownish and unrewarded capers.