U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [214]
The sky was grey and the birds were chirping outside before he got to sleep. Al next day, as he sat hol oweyed behind the desk, passing on the guests' demands for ice--82-water and towels, answering inquiries about rooms and traintimes, he was turning a poem over in his mind about the scarlet of my sin and the scarlet of thy sin and dark birds above the surging seawaves crying and damned souls passionately sighing. When it was finished he showed the poem to the Thurlows, Edwin wanted to know where
he got such morbid ideas, but was glad that faith and the church triumphed in the end. Hilda laughed hysterical y and said he was a funny boy but that maybe he'd be a writer someday.
When Skinny came down for a two weeks' vacation to
take the place of one of the new bel hops that was sick, Dick talked very big to him about women and sin and about how he was in love with a married woman. Skinny said that wasn't right because there were plenty of easy women around who'd give a fel er al the loving he
wanted. But when Dick found out that he'd never been with a girl although he was two years older, he put on so many airs about experience and sin, that one night when they'd gone down to the drugstore for a soda, Skinny picked up a couple of girls and they walked down the beach with them. The girls were thirtyfive if they were a day and Dick didn't do anything but tel his girl about his unhappy love affair and how he had to be faithful to his love even though she was being unfaithful to him at the very moment. She said he was too young to take things serious like that and that a girl ought to be ashamed of her-self who made a nice boy like him unhappy. "Jez, I'd make a fel er happy if I had the chanct," she said and burst out crying.
Walking back to the Bayview, Skinny was worried for fear he might have caught something, but Dick said physi-cal things didn't matter and that repentance was the key of redemption. It turned out that Skinny did get sick be-cause later in the summer he wrote Dick that he was paying a doctor five dol ars a week to cure him up and that he felt
-83-terrible about it. Dick and Hilds went on sinning Sunday evening when Edwin was conducting services in Elberon and when Dick went back to school that fal he felt very much the man of the world.
In the Christmas vacation he went to stay with the
Thurlows in East Orange where Edwin was the assistant to the rector of the church of St. John, Apostle. There, at tea at the rector's he met Hiram Halsey Cooper, a Jersey City lawyer and politician who was interested in High Church and first editions of Huysmans and who
asked Dick to come to see him. When Dick cal ed Mr. Cooper gave him a glass of sherry, showed him first edi-tions of Beardsley and Huysmans and Austin Dobson, sighed about his lost youth and offered him a job in his office as soon as school was over. It turned out that Mr. Cooper's wife, who was dead, had been an El sworth and a cousin of Dick's mother's. Dick promised to send him copies of al his poems, and the articles he published in the school paper.
Al the week he was with the Thurlows he was trying to get to see Hilda alone, but she managed to avoid him. He'd heard about French letters and wanted to tel her about them, but it wasn't until the last day that Edwin had to go out and make parochial cal s. This time it was Dick who was the lover and Hilda who tried to hold him off, but he made her take off her clothes and they laughed and giggled together while they were making love.