Valentine Mitchel was, however, a young man of some sensitivity. If he winced at Charlotte's "Pleased to meetcher," he did not show it. Later, after an excellent and hilarious meal, he must have guessed the situation. He went home reluctantly and Hugo was delighted with him. He had been urbane and filled with anecdotes of Greenwich Village and art-school life, of Paris, whither his struggling footsteps had taken him for a hallowed year. And with his acceptance of Hugo came an equally warm pleasure in Charlotte's company.
"He's a good little kid," Charlotte said.
"Yes. I'm glad I picked him up."
The gala opening of Hogarth's Studio of Strength took place a few nights afterwards. It proved even more successful than Smoots had hoped. The flamboyant advertising posters attracted crowds to see the man who could set a bear trap with his teeth, who could pull an angry boa constrictor into a straight line. Before ranks of gaping faces that were supplanted by new ranks every hour, Hugo performed. Charlotte, resplendent in a black dress that left her knees bare, and a red sash that all but obliterated the dress, helped Hugo with his ponderous props, setting off his strength by contrast, and sold the pamphlets Hugo had written at Smoots's suggestion—pamphlets that purported to give away the secret of Hogarth's phenomenal muscle power. Valentine Mitchel watched the entire performance.
When it was over, he said to Hugo: "Now you better beat it back and get a hot bath. You're probably all in."
"Yes," Charlotte said. "Come. I myself will bathe you."
Hugo grinned. "Hell, no. Now we're all going on a bender to celebrate. We'll eat at Villapigue's and we'll take a moonlight sail."
They went together, marvelling at his vitality, gay, young, and living in a world that they managed to forget did not exist. The night was warm. The days that followed were warmer. The crowds came and the brassy music hooted and coughed over them night and day.
There are, in the lives of almost every man and woman, certain brief episodes that, enduring for a long or a short time, leave in the memory a sense of completeness. To those moments humanity returns for refuge, for courage, and for solace. It was of such material that Hugo's next two months were composed. The items of it were nearly all sensuous: the sound of the sea when he sat in the sand late at night with Charlotte; the whoop and bellow of the merry-go-round that spun and glittered across the street from his tent; the inarticulate breathing and the white-knuckled clenchings of the crowd as it lifted its face to his efforts, for each of which he assumed a slow, painful motion that exaggerated its difficulty; the smell of the sea, intermingled with a thousand man-made odors; the faint, pervasive scent of Charlotte that clung to him, his clothes, his house; the pageant of the people, always in a huge parade, going nowhere, celebrating nothing but the functions of living, loud, garish, cheap, splendid; breakfasts at his table with his woman's voluptuousness abated in the bright sunlight to little more than a reminiscence and a promise; the taste of beer and pop-corn and frankfurters and lobster and steak; the affable, talkative company of Valentine Mitchel.
Only once that he could recall afterwards did he allow his intellect to act in any critical direction, and that was in a conversation with the young artist. They were sitting together in the sand, and Charlotte, browned by weeks of bathing, lay near by. "Here I am," Mitchel said with an unusual thoughtfulness, "with a talent that should be recognized, wanting to be an illustrator, able to be one, and yet forced to dawdle with this horrible business to make my living."