Maybe. And maybe not.
Before he left that night Curley imparted a piece of information which gave us quite a shock. Tony Maurer, he told us, had committed suicide. He had hanged himself in the bathroom during the course of a party he was giving his friends. They had found him with a sardonic smile on his lips and a pipe hanging from his mouth. No one, apparently, knew why he had done it. He was never in lack of money and he was deeply in love with the woman he lived with, a beautiful Javanese girl. Some said he had done it out of sheer boredom. If so, it was in keeping with his character.
The news affected me strangely. I kept thinking what a pity it was that I had not gotten to know Tony Maurer more intimately. He was the sort of man I would have been proud to call a friend. But I was too bashful to make advances, and he was too surfeited to recognize my need. I always felt a little uncomfortable in his presence. Like a school-boy, to be precise. Everything I wanted to do he had done already … Perhaps there was something else which had drawn me to him all unconsciously: his German blood. For once in my life I had had the pleasure of knowing a German who did not remind me of all the other Germans I knew. The truth is, he wasn’t really a German—he was a cosmopolite. The perfect example of that late-city man whom Spengler has so well described. His roots were not in German soil, German blood, German tradition, but in those end periods which distinguished the late-city man of Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, India. He was rootless and at home everywhere—that is, where there was culture and civilization. He might just as well have fought on the Italian, French, Hungarian or Rumanian side as ours. He had a sense of loyalty without being patriotic. No wonder he had spent six months (by accident) in a French prison camp—and enjoyed it. He liked the French even more than the Germans—or the Americans. He liked good conversation, that was it.
All these aspects of the man, plus the fact that he was debonair, adroit, thoroughly sophisticated, utterly tolerant and forgiving, had endeared him to me. Not one of my friends possessed these qualities. They had better and worse traits, traits all too familiar to me. They were too much like myself au fond, my friends. All my life I had wanted, and still crave, as a matter of fact, friends whom I could look upon as being utterly different from myself. Whenever I succeeded in finding one I also discovered that the attraction necessary to maintain a vital relationship was lacking. None of these individuals ever became more than potential friends. Anyway, that night I dreamed. An interminable dream, as I said before, and full of hair-raising escapades. In the dream Butch and Tony Maurer had exchanged personalities. In some mysterious way I was in league with them, or him, for sometimes this mysterious, baffling confederate of mine would split into two distinct personalities, never however being clearly Tony Maurer or clearly Butch, but always a composite of the two, even when split. This sort of double play was sufficient in itself to cause me extreme anguish, to say nothing of the fact that I was never certain whether he or they were with me or against me.
The theme of this disturbing dream centered about a job we were pulling off in some strange city which I had never visited, a remote place like Sioux Falls, Tonopah or Ludlow. I played the role of stooge, a most uncomfortable role, since I was always exposed, always left in the lurch. Over and over again it was impressed on me that one false move, one little mistake, and I would be so much horse meat The instructions were always garbled, always given in a code which it took me hours to decipher. Of course the job was never pulled off. Instead we were on the run continuously, driven from pillar to post, badgered like wild game. When we were obliged to hide away—in caves, cellars, swamps, mineshafts—we played cards or rolled dice. The stakes were always for grand sums. We paid one another off in I.O.U’s, or else in Confederate money which we had seized in rifling a bank. This Butch-Maurer wore a monocle, wore it even in public, despite all my entreaties. His language was a mixture of thieves’ argot and Oxford slang. Even when explaining the devious complexities of a perilous undertaking he had a bad habit of wandering off the track, of telling stories which were long-winded and pointless. It was excruciating to follow him. Eventually the three of us were cornered, or pocketed rather, in a narrow defile (in the Far West, it seemed) by a band of vigilantes. We were all killed outright, shot down like wild boars. I only realized that I was still alive when I came awake. Even then I could scarcely believe it. I was already sprouting wings.
Such was the gist of the dream. I tried to condense this raw material into a tale of pursuit, with a strict plot and a definite locale. The manhunt part of it I captured quite well, I thought, but the choppy, fantastic, episodic dream substance of flight and incident refused to be converted into intelligible narrative. I fell between two stools. Still, it was a brave attempt, and it gave me the courage to tackle more imaginative stories. Perhaps I might have succeeded, in this latter vein, had we not received a telegram from O’Mara urging us to join him in North Carolina, the seat of another big real estate boom. As usual, he intimated that he was holding down a big job: they had need of me on the publicity end.
I wired back immediately to send us the train fare and advise what my salary would be. The answer I received read as follows: Don’t worry everything jake borrow the fare.
Mona immediately suspected the worst. It was just like him, she thought, to be vague, non-committal and utterly unreliable. It was nothing more than loneliness that had made him wire us.
Defending him instinctively, I worked myself up to such a pitch of enthusiasm that, despite the fact that I had a sinking feeling about the whole business, I could no longer back out.
Well, she said, and where will we get the fare?
I was stumped. For a minute only. Suddenly I had a bright thought. The money? Why, from that little Lesbian you met the other day in the department store, remember? The Tansy perfume girl. That’s where.
Preposterous! That was her first reaction.
Come, come, I said, she’ll probably bless you for asking her.
She continued to assert that it was out of the question, but it was obvious that she was revolving the suggestion in her mind. By the morrow I was certain she’d display a different attitude.
I tell you what, said I, as if to dismiss the subject, let’s go to a show tonight, what do you say? Let’s see something funny.
She thought it an excellent idea. We ate out, picked a good show—at the Palace—and came home laughing our heads off. We laughed so much in fact that it took us hours to fall asleep.
The next morning, as I had anticipated, she was off to see her little Lesbian friend. No trouble at all borrowing fifty smackers. Her difficulty had been to shake the girl off.
I suggested that we hitch-hike instead of taking the train. That would leave something over on arriving. You never know about O’Mara. It may be all a smoke dream.
You talked differently yesterday, said Mona.
I know, but now it’s today. I’d rather play safe.
She acquiesced readily enough. Agreed that we would probably see more of the country by hitch-hiking. Besides, with a woman by one’s side it was always easier to get a lift.
The landlady was a bit put out by the suddenness of our decision but when I explained that I had been commissioned to do a book she took it with seeming good nature and wished us well.
What sort of book? she asked, clutching my hand in farewell.
About the Cherokee Indians, I said, quickly closing the door behind us.
We got lifts easily enough but to my amazement Mona registered nothing but disappointment. By the time we reached Harper’s Ferry she was plainly disgusted—with the landscape, the towns, the people we met, the meals and everything.
It was late afternoon when we reached Harper’s Ferry. We sat high up on a rock overlooking three States. Below us the Shenandoah and the Potomac. A hallowed spot, if for no other reason than the fact that here John Brown, the great Liberator, met his fate. Mona, however, wasn’t at all interested in the historic aspects of the place.
As for the splendor of the vista, that she couldn’t repudiate. But it filled her with desolation. To tell the truth, I felt much the same, but for different reasons. It was impossible to pull myself away. Too much had happened here to permit the obtrusion of one’s private worries. I read with moist eyes what Thomas Jefferson had said of this particular spot: the words were carved on a tablet fastened to the rock. There was sublimity in Jefferson’s words. But there was even more sublimity in the actions of John Brown and his faithful followers. No man in America, said Thoreau, has ever stood up so
