The Eleventh Virgin · Part II · Chapter 2 2 (2/3)

Sometimes June lunched with them and sometimes Ivan and Chester called her on the telephone and she met them at what was their breakfast and her lunch.

Poets came in and sat on the desk swinging their feet and declaiming, or, if they had their poems with them, reading aloud.

But these were only the accredited members of the staff and their friends. Other poets, and other artists came diffidently and asked her advice as to markets and the kind of work the Flame wanted. And June was both condescending and pitiful.

After the first few days when Brace did show up, he looked pale and puffy eyed. “I always loaf a bit after getting the magazine out every month,” he told her.

“You don’t look as though you have been loafing,” June told him.

“Not exactly. Loafing on the job, I meant. I’ve been writing for the last couple of nights and couldn’t sleep in the day.”

He fidgeted around desultorily for a while, approved of the letters that June had written, glanced over the contributions that she had laid to one side for him, and then threw his pen down in disgust.

“I’ve got to do something. This infernal restlessness. Worked myself out and you can’t get drunk in the springtime. It goes against the grain somehow. What’ll we do?” and he turned to June appealingly.

“Goldman and Ulan were in a little while ago and they were starting out for a tramp up the Hudson. You might walk off your feelings.”

He chuckled as he jumped out of his chair and went out into the business office. When he returned he had the business manager and the advertising manager with him. It was an unusual occurrence but all three were in the office at the same time.

“All decided. We’ve dismissed the office force, in other words the stenographer and bookkeeper, and we four will go on a picnic over in New Jersey. I’ve got a little old shack there which I retire to in moments of stress.” Brace was radiant.

“I think I should like to forget free verse for a while,” June sighed, stretching tremendously. “It makes me so angry after I’ve read a hundred samples, that I get all tense from holding myself in. Back here,” and June located the tenseness in the back of her neck, “and ’specially here,” and she rubbed her jaw.

“Chuck the work in the drawer,” Hugh told her briskly. “That tense feeling is just what I’ve been recovering from. After a number as full of ‘suppressed sex’ verse and ‘obscene art’ as this one has been, I feel like going home and writing healthy romances in the style of Marion Crawford. And when I get there I find myself putting down on paper the same ideas the Flame is full of. It’s a good thing for the novel I’m writing that I don’t realize it until I’ve been at it for three days. Then I have to get out for fear I’ll tear it up. After a picnic,” he ended cheerfully, “I’ll go back thinking I’m the equal of Anatole France. And so continue the great work.”

The obscene pictures which Hugh referred to was called to the paper’s attention that morning by the post office department, the American censor of the arts, for whom a sample copy of the magazine had to be made up from page proofs before the edition was allowed to go to press. It was an ordinary picture of a nude woman, ordinary to the Flame, at least, which appreciated nudity, and the fact that the artist was an upright middle-aged American who was more appreciated abroad than he was in America, mattered little to the censor.

“We’ve got to do something about that picture,” observed the business manager now that his attention had been called to it. “What’ll it be? Have the printer block it out?”

“That’s entirely too simple to be clever,” Brace reproved. “I’ve got a much better idea. I thought of it after you had telephoned to me this morning.” He took out one of those fashion books which are stacked in the doors of department stores as he spoke. “I stopped in Wanamaker’s as I passed,” he explained. And he picked up a pair of scissors and turning to a page of fashionable dresses he began to cut one out very carefully.

“Lovely idea,” June observed. “It reminds me of the time that I cut out paper dolls. Mother used to bring us home some of those every time she went downtown.”

The other two watched him fascinated. Not having played with paper dolls in their youth they did not know what Hugh was about to do.

“There! It is just the right size, you see.” And he took the original drawing of the nude figure and pasted it from neck to shin. “I’m sure the artist won’t mind my defacing his original. Anything to put something over on the post office.⁠ ⁠… Now if you’ll just send this down to the engraver’s and have him make a plate of it and give him word to send it to the printer’s they can substitute this for the original.” Brace surveyed the ridiculous result of his work with a great deal of satisfaction.

All they had to do to prepare the picnic was to stop in a butcher and grocery shop and buy supplies. “We’ll put it down on general expenses,” the business manager observed as he paid for the purchases. “We’re short on household expenses.”

For the three men clubbed together as the advertising manager put it, in order that they might live in the style to which they were accustomed without exceeding their meager salaries.

That day was a long day of talk⁠—mostly about themselves.

Daniel Sloane, the advertising manager, was a tall, phlegmatic Hollander who had lived most of his youth in Texas. He was a graduate of Harvard and when he was consciously conversing, you could detect a trace of what is known as the “Harvard accent” in his enunciation. There was more than a hint of the Southwestern in his speech for he had worked in a small town in the west before he had earned enough money to go to Harvard, and you could tell that he spoke Dutch with his family by a slight foreign note in his voice.

At the time when June was in the university town Daniel had been driving an ambulance car in France. Six months of service at the front resulted in shell shock. At this time, the shattering of his nerves was still noticeable, but he was making continual efforts to get back. He had no sympathy with the Flame but being something of a Jesuit in his principles, he worked to live. Now that war was declared by America he never let up in his endeavor to enlist in any form of active service.

Before the war he had had the same dogged enthusiasm for writing plays with the same dogged determination to have them produced. Although he no longer wrote⁠—war did not admit of voluntarily pursuing one’s personal ambition⁠—he never lost faith in what he had written and the greatest mark of friendship that he could have possibly shown, he showed to June. He gave her two of his plays to read. They were good plays to read, she knew that, but she knew too little about the production of them to criticize from more than a literary standpoint. She criticized them diffidently, for although she could imagine writing a book or a short story, she could not imagine herself writing a play. And when someone else did what was impossible to her, she respected them accordingly.

Daniel had two complexes, as Hugh in his enthusiasm for psychoanalysis often pointed out to him. One was a persecution complex. That was in regard to his writing. The other was a chastity complex.

For Daniel, as Tolstoy put it, had “whored a great deal in his youth.” That was the general idea which he managed to convey to June in the course of their friendship. From the way in which he talked of that revered institution which he had attended, June drew the conclusion that looseness was no part of it. Texas was connected with Daniel’s early life, and the only deduction you could draw from Daniel’s talk was that Texas was as iniquitous a place as the legended California in the days of the gold strike.

Hugh was an ardent feminist. June was much more in sympathy with what he had to say than she was with the haphazard talk of the “little group” in the university in their discussions of free love and single standards. When he talked of the necessity of a love life for woman, irrespective of marriage, she found him much more intelligible than she had found women writers on the subject. There were long arguments as to why a young woman should not remain in a virginal state after she had felt the first tingling of desire.

“If I had followed your line of reasoning,” June told Hugh indignantly, “I should have lost my virtue at the age of twelve. I was far more conscious of sex at that time (and once again a few years later) than I ever have been since. And that was because I knew nothing about it. It was a thing that wasn’t mentioned in polite society. Radicals are so free in their discussions and I’ve heard so much about sex that it loses in importance the more I learn. It’s no longer a temptation to indulge desire. It isn’t forbidden. You speak of it as a supremely right thing to do⁠—to take a lover or as many lovers as you want. It is, but it isn’t heroic. I shouldn’t feel brave and untrammeled and all that if I went in for lovers. Just because it isn’t forbidden. We can’t think about society and the condemnation of society because we don’t live in it. Look at the people I know, the people I came in contact with on the Clarion and the people I meet around the Flame. Anything short of absolute promiscuity is disregarded as long as you can speak of sexual relationships as love affairs.

“When they gossip you hear them say, ‘Have you heard the latest? Beatrice has left Charlie, or do you think he left her? And now she’s living with Bertram. I wonder how long it will last.⁠—Oh, wasn’t she the one who lived with Jim Albright for three years?’

“Or if you mention the name of some woman, somebody immediately speaks up⁠—‘Who is she living with now?’

“Oh, I wish I could meet someone who would tempt me very insidiously to give up my virtue, persuading me to wickedness that was lovely just because it was wickedness!”

Hugh was a subtle antagonist and usually June could find nothing to say to his arguments. She could not even take the attitude of Daniel who held up purity as an ideal with almost Biblical fervor. He talked as she had heard Ellen talk many times. Even if she had wished to combat Daniel’s arguments, she could not have done so, for logic was not one of her gifts. From her knowledge of it (confined to Jevon’s handbook) she was inclined to think that reason predominated on the side of Hugh. It was hard to find where instinct came in.

Hugh’s premise was that virginity was a state of dishonesty and it was only by living in a state of unreality that virginity continued.

June could only say that she was sure she was an honest person and that she had always faced reality.

“What you mean by facing reality,” Hugh told her, “is facing the more intellectual discussion of sex. As a matter of fact you are an utter coward when it comes to acknowledging your own feelings and the recognition of their importance in your life.”

June could only repeat what she had said before, that she had had no “feelings” since she was fifteen.

Whereupon Hugh regarded her lithe young body for several seconds and then gave a supercilious snort.

“You make me furious with your pose of cool indifference; I know you’re an exotic person. Don’t you suppose my feelings tell me something? It isn’t that I want you⁠—”

“Now you’re lying,” she caught him up quickly. “Even if I’m not seething with feelings of suppressed sex, I can recognize different forms of approach. The poetical, the primitive, the psychic, the intellectual and your combination of them which I can only call logical. But I must say that I like the simpler forms better. They at least allow of some illusion.”

That summer, similar conversations took place just as often in public with Daniel and Kenneth Graves (the business manager) as listeners, as in private. And June was delighted at the opportunity to point out to him, with her newfound knowledge of Freudian theories that he was something of an exhibitionist in his lovemaking. Or as one jealous rival put it in a moment of irritation, Hugh’s love encounters should really take place on the stage of the Hippodrome before a packed house.

During these discussions, Kenneth would sit curled up on a sofa, drawing consolation from the stem of a wet briar, making noises which were at first irritating to June, and which afterwards she associated with a singing teakettle or a purring cat. Although he was inarticulate, he managed to convey his appreciation of what was being said by a few rumbled words which nobody understood or paid any attention to. Somehow, in his person he reflected New England and was a thoroughly good young man. Without in any way modifying his own ideas or his life to conform to the ideas of those around him, he was tolerant and appreciative of his friends.

June’s intimacy with those three grew from a suggestion made by Hugh at the close of that picnic day, a suggestion prompted by a view to economy.

“You cannot possibly live and clothe yourself on ten dollars a week,” Hugh told her thoughtfully. “Besides a salary of such dimensions savours of capitalistic exploitation. Daniel and Kenneth and I, as you probably know, have rented a furnished apartment from a friend of ours for the summer at practically nothing so as to keep down our own expenses. And we’ve decided that the only thing lacking around there is a woman. Kenneth sleeps on a couch in the dining-room and Daniel and I have separate couches in the living-room. Besides a kitchen, there is a big hall bedroom which is quite unnecessary, so why don’t you come down and live there? Your only responsibilities, my dear, will be to be silent in the morning and fairly agreeable in the evening. We’ll all take turns at cooking and bed-making, Yes, even the dish-washing.”

This was the beginning of the “ménage au quatre” which miraculously worked from inception and was their boast to friends and even acquaintances. Hugh’s theoretical lovemaking, Kenneth’s vicious pipe, Daniel’s lectures on chastity and June’s almost irrepressible desire to sing before breakfast did not seriously disturb the friendship of the four. And the arrangement continued till the Flame with many other radical publications was abolished by the government in the fall of that year.

Breakfasts were at eight every morning and June for courtesy’s sake was conceded the first bath. She always felt so fresh after her cold plunge that it usually fell to her to run around the corner to buy the papers and go to the little French bakery for brioche. By the time she had returned, the others had jumped in the tub and out, had set the table and made the coffee. Immediately scrambled eggs and tomatoes had been established as the staple breakfast food and these Daniel prepared. Hugh made the coffee and it was Kenneth that set the table. He acknowledged that he was worthless as a cook but June comforted him by saying he was the only man she ever saw who could set a table properly without forgetting anything that was necessary.

They ate with newspapers propped before them and cigarettes near at hand to add the finishing touch to the meal. It was an attractive breakfast room. The table had been painted bright orange and the chairs were black. There was matting on the floor and a wide low couch was the only other furniture of the room. Japanese prints and old brass candlesticks and lamps were the only ornaments.