X

  Mr In and Mr Out are not listed by the census-taker. You will search for them in vain through the social register or the births, marriages, and deaths, or the grocer’s credit list. Oblivion has swallowed them and the testimony that they ever existed at all is vague and shadowy, and inadmissible in a court of law. Yet I have it upon the best authority that for a brief space Mr In and Mr Out lived, breathed, answered to their names and radiated vivid personalities of their own.

  During the brief span of their lives they walked in their native garments down the great highway of a great nation; were laughed at, sworn at, chased, and fled from. Then they passed and were heard of no more.

  They were already taking form dimly, when a taxicab with the top open breezed down Broadway in the faintest glimmer of May dawn. In this car sat the souls of Mr In and Mr Out discussing with amazement the blue light that had so precipitately colored the sky behind the statue of Christopher Columbus, discussing with bewilderment the old, gray faces of the early risers which skimmed palely along the street like blown bits of paper on a gray lake. They were agreed on all things, from the absurdity of the bouncer in Childs’ to the absurdity of the business of life. They were dizzy with the extreme maudlin happiness that the morning had awakened in their glowing souls. Indeed, so fresh and vigorous was their pleasure in living that they felt it should be expressed by loud cries.

  ‘Ye-ow-ow!’ hooted Peter, making a megaphone with his hands – and Dean joined in with a call that, though equally significant and symbolic, derived its resonance from its very inarticulateness.

  ‘Yo-ho! Yea! Yoho! Yo-buba!’

  Fifty-third Street was a bus with a dark, bobbed-hair beauty atop; Fifty-second was a street cleaner who dodged, escaped, and sent up a yell of, ‘Look where you’re aimin’!’ in a pained and grieved voice. At Fiftieth Street a group of men on a very white sidewalk in front of a very white building turned to stare after them, and shouted:

  ‘Some party, boys!’

  At Forty-ninth Street Peter turned to Dean. ‘Beautiful morning,’ he said gravely, squinting up his owlish eyes.

  ‘Probably is.’

  ‘Go get some breakfast, hey?’

  Dean agreed – with additions.

  ‘Breakfast and liquor.’

  ‘Breakfast and liquor,’ repeated Peter, and they looked at each other, nodding. ‘That’s logical.’

  Then they both burst into loud laughter.

  ‘Breakfast and liquor! Oh, gosh!’

  ‘No such thing,’ announced Peter.

  ‘Don’t serve it? Ne’mind. We force ’em serve it. Bring pressure bear.’

  ‘Bring logic bear.’

  The taxi cut suddenly off Broadway, sailed along a cross street, and stopped in front of a heavy tomb-like building in Fifth Avenue.

  ‘What’s idea?’

  The taxi-driver informed them that this was Delmonico’s.

  This was somewhat puzzling. They were forced to devote several minutes to intense concentration, for if such an order had been given there must have been a reason for it.

  ‘Somep’m ’bouta coat,’ suggested the taxi-man.

  That was it. Peter’s overcoat and hat. He had left them at Delmonico’s. Having decided this, they disembarked from the taxi and strolled toward the entrance arm in arm.

  ‘Hey!’ said the taxi-driver.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘You better pay me.’

  They shook their heads in shocked negation.

  ‘Later, not now – we give orders, you wait.’

  The taxi-driver objected; he wanted his money now. With the scornful condescension of men exercising tremendous self-control they paid him.

  Inside Peter groped in vain through a dim, deserted check-room in search of his coat and derby.

  ‘Gone, I guess. Somebody stole it.’

  ‘Some Sheff student.’

  ‘All probability.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Dean, nobly. ‘I’ll leave mine here too – then we’ll both be dressed the same.’

  He removed his overcoat and hat and was hanging them up when his roving glance was caught and held magnetically by two large squares of cardboard tacked to the two coat-room doors. The one on the left-hand door bore the word ‘In’ in big black letters, and the one on the right-hand door flaunted the equally emphatic word ‘Out.’

  ‘Look!’ he exclaimed happily—

  Peter’s eyes followed his pointing finger.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look at the signs. Let’s take ’em.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘Probably pair very rare an’ valuable signs. Probably come in handy.’

  Peter removed the left-hand sign from the door and endeavored to conceal it about his person. The sign being of considerable proportions, this was a matter of some difficulty. An idea flung itself at him, and with an air of dignified mystery he turned his back. After an instant he wheeled dramatically around, and stretching out his arms displayed himself to the admiring Dean. He had inserted the sign in his vest, completely covering his shirt front. In effect, the word ‘In’ had been painted upon his shirt in large black letters.

  ‘Yoho!’ cheered Dean. ‘Mister In.’

  He inserted his own sign in like manner.

  ‘Mister Out!’ he announced triumphantly. ‘Mr In meet Mr Out.’

  They advanced and shook hands. Again laughter overcame them and they rocked in a shaken spasm of mirth.

  ‘Yoho!’

  ‘We probably get a flock of breakfast.’

  ‘We’ll go – go to the Commodore.’

  Arm in arm they sallied out the door, and turning east in Forty-fourth Street set out for the Commodore.

  As they came out a short dark soldier, very pale and tired, who had been wandering listlessly along the sidewalk, turned to look at them.

  He started over as though to address them, but as they immediately bent on him glances of withering unrecognition, he waited until they had started unsteadily down the street, and then followed at about forty paces, chuckling to himself and saying ‘Oh, boy!’ over and over under his breath, in delighted, anticipatory tones.

  Mr In and Mr Out were meanwhile exchanging pleasantries concerning their future plans.

  ‘We want liquor; we want breakfast. Neither without the other. One and indivisible.’

  ‘We want both ’em!’

  ‘Both ’em!’

  It was quite light now, and passers-by began to bend curious eyes on the pair. Obviously they were engaged in a discussion, which afforded each of them intense amusement, for occasionally a fit of laughter would seize upon them so violently that, still with their arms interlocked, they would bend nearly double.

  Reaching the Commodore, they exchanged a few spicy epigrams with the sleepy-eyed doorman, navigated the revolving door with some difficulty, and then made their way through a thinly populated but startled lobby to the dining-room, where a puzzled waiter showed them an obscure table in a corner. They studied the bill of fare helplessly, telling over the items to each other in puzzled mumbles.

  ‘Don’t see any liquor here,’ said Peter reproachfully.

  The waiter became audible but unintelligible.

  ‘Repeat,’ continued Peter, with patient tolerance, ‘that there seems to be unexplained and quite distasteful lack of liquor upon bill of fare.’

  ‘Here!’ said Dean confidently, ‘let me handle him.’ He turned to the waiter – ‘Bring us – bring us—’ He scanned the bill of fare anxiously. ‘Bring us a quart of champagne and a – a – probably ham sandwich.’

  The waiter looked doubtful.

  ‘Bring it!’ roared Mr In and Mr Out in chorus.

  The waiter coughed and disappeared. There was a short wait during which they were subjected without their knowledge to a careful scrutiny by the head-waiter. Then the champagne arrived, and at the sight of it Mr In and Mr Out became jubilant.

  ‘Imagine their objecting to us having champagne for breakfast – jus’ imagine.’

  They both concentrated upon the vision of such an awesome possibility, but the feat was too much for them. It was impossible for their joint imaginations to conjure up a world where any one might object to any one else having champagne for breakfast. The waiter drew the cork with an enormous pop – and their glasses immediately foamed with pale yellow froth.

  ‘Here’s health, Mr In.’

  ‘Here’s same to you, Mr Out.’

  The waiter withdrew; the minutes passed; the champagne became low in the bottle.

  ‘It’s – it’s mortifying,’ said Dean suddenly.

  ‘Wha’s mortifying?’

  ‘The idea their objecting us having champagne breakfast.’

  ‘Mortifying?’ Peter considered. ‘Yes, tha’s word – mortifying.’

  Again they collapsed into laughter, howled, swayed, rocked back and forth in their chairs, repeating the word ‘mortifying’ over and over to each other – each repetition seeming to make it only more brilliantly absurd.

  After a few more gorgeous minutes they decided on another quart. Their anxious waiter consulted his immediate superior, and this discreet person gave implicit instructions that no more champagne should be served. Their check was brought.

  Five minutes later, arm in arm, they left the Commodore and made their way through a curious, staring crowd along Forty-second Street, and up Vanderbilt Avenue to the Biltmore. There, with sudden cunning, they rose to the occasion and traversed the lobby, walking fast and standing unnaturally erect.

  Once in the dining-room they repeated their performance. They were torn between intermittent convulsive laughter and sudden spasmodic discussions of politics, college, and the sunny state of their dispositions. Their watches told them that it was now nine o’clock, and a dim idea was born in them that they were on a memorable party, something that they would remember always. They lingered over the second bottle. Either of them had only to mention the word ‘mortifying’ to send them both into riotous gasps. The dining-room was whirring and shifting now; a curious lightness permeated and rarefied the heavy air.

  They paid their check and walked out into the lobby.

  It was at this moment that the exterior doors revolved for the thousandth time that morning, and admitted into the lobby a very pale young beauty with dark circles under her eyes, attired in a much-rumpled evening dress. She was accompanied by a plain stout man, obviously not an appropriate escort.

  At the top of the stairs this couple encountered Mr In and Mr Out.

  ‘Edith,’ began Mr In, stepping toward her hilariously and making a sweeping bow, ‘darling, good morning.’

  The stout man glanced questioningly at Edith, as if merely asking her permission to throw this man summarily out of the way.

  ‘’Scuse familiarity,’ added Peter, as an afterthought. ‘Edith, good-morning.’

  He seized Dean’s elbow and impelled him into the foreground.

  ‘Meet Mr In, Edith, my bes’ frien’. Inseparable. Mr In and Mr Out.’

  Mr Out advanced and bowed; in fact, he advanced so far and bowed so low that he tipped slightly forward and only kept his balance by placing a hand lightly on Edith’s shoulder.

  ‘I’m Mr Out, Edith,’ he mumbled pleasantly, ‘S’misterin Misterout.’

  ‘’Smisterinanout,’ said Peter proudly.

  But Edith stared straight by them, her eyes fixed on some infinite speck in the gallery above her. She nodded slightly to the stout man, who advanced bull-like and with a sturdy brisk gesture pushed Mr In and Mr Out to either side. Through this alley he and Edith walked.

  But ten paces farther on Edith stopped again – stopped and pointed to a short, dark soldier who was eying the crowd in general, and the tableau of Mr In and Mr Out in particular, with a sort of puzzled, spell-bound awe.

  ‘There,’ cried Edith. ‘See there!’

  Her voice rose, became somewhat shrill. Her pointing finger shook slightly.

  ‘There’s the soldier who broke my brother’s leg.’

  There were a dozen exclamations; a man in a cutaway coat left his place near the desk and advanced alertly; the stout person made a sort of lightning-like spring toward the short, dark soldier, and then the lobby closed around the little group and blotted them from the sight of Mr In and Mr Out.

  But to Mr In and Mr Out this event was merely a particolored iridescent segment of a whirring, spinning world.

  They heard loud voices; they saw the stout man spring; the picture suddenly blurred.

  Then they were in an elevator bound skyward.

  ‘What floor, please?’ said the elevator man.

  ‘Any floor,’ said Mr In.

  ‘Top floor,’ said Mr Out.

  ‘This is the top floor,’ said the elevator man.

  ‘Have another floor put on,’ said Mr Out.

  ‘Higher,’ said Mr In.

  ‘Heaven,’ said Mr Out.

  XI

  In a bedroom of a small hotel just off Sixth Avenue Gordon Sterrett awoke with a pain in the back of his head and a sick throbbing in all his veins. He looked at the dusky gray shadows in the corners of the room and at a raw place on a large leather chair in the corner where it had long been in use. He saw clothes, dishevelled, rumpled clothes on the floor and he smelt stale cigarette smoke and stale liquor. The windows were tight shut. Outside the bright sunlight had thrown a dust-filled beam across the sill – a beam broken by the head of the wide wooden bed in which he had slept. He lay very quiet – comatose, drugged, his eyes wide, his mind clicking wildly like an unoiled machine.

  It must have been thirty seconds after he perceived the sunbeam with the dust on it and the rip on the large leather chair that he had the sense of life close beside him, and it was another thirty seconds after that before he realized that he was irrevocably married to Jewel Hudson.

  He went out half an hour later and bought a revolver at a sporting goods store. Then he took a taxi to the room where he had been living on East Twenty-seventh Street, and, leaning across the table that held his drawing materials, fired a cartridge into his head just behind the temple.

  ‘O Russet Witch!’

  I

  Merlin Grainger was employed by the Moonlight Quill Bookshop, which you may have visited, just around the corner from the Ritz-Carlton on Forty-seventh Street. The Moonlight Quill is, or rather was, a very romantic little store, considered radical and admitted dark. It was spotted interiorly with red and orange posters of breathless exotic intent, and lit no less by the shiny reflecting bindings of special editions than by the great squat lamp of crimson satin that, lighted through all the day, swung overhead. It was truly a mellow bookshop. The words ‘Moonlight Quill’ were worked over the door in a sort of serpentine embroidery. The windows seemed always full of something that had passed the literary censors with little to spare; volumes with covers of deep orange which offered their titles on little white paper squares. And over all there was the smell of the musk, which the clever, inscrutable Mr Moonlight Quill ordered to be sprinkled about – the smell half of a curiosity shop in Dickens’ London and half of a coffee-house on the warm shores of the Bosphorus.

  From nine until five-thirty Merlin Grainger asked bored old ladies in black and young men with dark circles under their eyes if they ‘cared for this fellow’ or were interested in first editions. Did they buy novels with Arabs on the cover, or books which gave Shakespeare’s newest sonnets as dictated psychically to Miss Sutton of South Dakota? he sniffed. As a matter of fact, his own taste ran to these latter, but as an employee at the Moonlight Quill he assumed for the working day the attitude of a disillusioned connoisseur.

  After he had crawled over the window display to pull down the front shade at five-thirty every afternoon, and said good-bye to the mysterious Mr Moonlight Quill and the lady clerk, Miss McCracken, and the lady stenographer, Miss Masters, he went home to the girl, Caroline. He did not eat supper with Caroline. It is unbelievable that Caroline would have considered eating off his bureau with the collar buttons dangerously near the cottage cheese, and the ends of Merlin’s necktie just missing his glass of milk – he had never asked her to eat with him. He ate alone. He went into Braegdort’s delicatessen on Sixth Avenue and bought a box of crackers, a tube of anchovy paste, and some oranges, or else a little jar of sausages and some potato salad and a bottled soft drink, and with these in a brown package he went to his room at Fifty-something West Fifty-eighth Street and ate his supper and saw Caroline.

  Caroline was a very young and gay person who lived with some older lady and was possibly nineteen. She was like a ghost in that she never existed until evening. She sprang into life when the lights went on in her apartment at about six, and she disappeared, at the latest, about midnight. Her apartment was a nice one, in a nice building with a white stone front, opposite the south side of Central Park. The back of her apartment faced the single window of the single room occupied by the single Mr Grainger.

  He called her Caroline because there was a picture that looked like her on the jacket of a book of that name down at the Moonlight Quill.

  Now, Merlin Grainger was a thin young man of twenty-five, with dark hair and no mustache or beard or anything like that, but Caroline was dazzling and light, with a shimmering morass of russet waves to take the place of hair, and the sort of features that remind you of kisses – the sort of features you thought belonged to your first love, but know, when you come across an old picture, didn’t. She dressed in pink or blue usually, but of late she had sometimes put on a slender black gown that was evidently her especial pride, for whenever she wore it she would stand regarding a certain place on the wall, which Merlin thought must be a mirror. She sat usually in the profile chair near the window, but sometimes honored the chaise longue by the lamp, and often she leaned ’way back and smoked a cigarette with posturings of her arms and hands that Merlin considered very graceful.