HIS kindly1 neighbors, who lived in the big room at the back next to his own, were Roger Sully and Don Carew, so he learned from the inscription2 on their mail-box in the entrance. He went in that evening after dinner to thank them.
He was surprised to find, in this dingy3 building, so charming a room—strikingly in contrast to his own bare and cheerless one. Across one wall a blazing splash of colour—some kind of foreign-looking dyed-stuff—and a few brilliant cushions on the couch, warmed the place and made him forget what seemed the bleak4 chill of all the rest of the world.
Roger, it appeared, was the fat little man with the air of distinction, who was making coffee in a glass bulb over an alcohol lamp. Don, a long and bony youth, was stretched at ease in a big chair.
“Have some coffee with us,” said Roger. “It will be good coffee, I promise you. And good coffee,” he went on in his gently modulated5 voice, “is one of the few really important things in life.”
“And a cigarette,” said Don, rising to offer him a box of queer-looking Russian things with long pasteboard mouthpieces. As he offered the cigarettes with one hand, he raised the other and ran his long fingers through his fair tousled hair, reducing it to a state of more picturesque6 disorder7. He made this gesture continually, not in mere8 nervousness but as if he were caressing9 something he liked.
The coffee was very good, and Felix drank it gratefully. The two hosts drank it as though it were a rite10, Felix observed, a veritable and solemn ceremonial. They smoked 76cigarettes the same way—slowly, as if tasting each inhalation with a devout11 palate. And aside from these rather solemn sensory12 enthusiasms, they maintained a slightly bored air.
They referred to the incident of the night before as if it had happened a thousand years ago. It did not appear to interest them in the least, and Felix found it difficult to identify them with the delightedly chattering13 companions who had escorted him home—until something that was said seemed to break the spell, and Roger leaned forward eagerly and demanded:
“Yes—now why did you call him McFish? Have you any idea?”
“Yes—why?” echoed Don, also alert.
Felix did not know, and could not imagine why anybody should care to probe the secret of a mere drunken mistake in nomenclature.... The McFish incident reminded them of some equally esoteric mistake made upon some similar occasion, and they spent an hour in a quite excited discussion of psychic14 revelations which seemed to Felix both immaterial and irrelevant15. He went away feeling as though he had stepped by inadvertence into a chapter by Henry James, and he decided16 not to come again.
But he did drop in a few evenings later, in sheer boredom17, and drank their coffee, and found that upon occasion they could tell a really amusing story—or was it rather that he had begun to understand the point of view from which they found things amusing?
One phrase in their talk, solemnly uttered, caught his fancy. He had seen it in books, but as used by them it seemed to have a special significance.
“The detached attitude?” he repeated inquiringly.
They smiled a little pityingly at him, and explained. The detached attitude was the proper state of mind for an artist. It was an attitude toward life which painters had learned, but which writers generally had forgotten and must re-learn if they were ever to make writing a true art again. The Greeks had the detached attitude. Flaubert had it.... And obviously Don and Roger also had it.
77Felix suspected that it might be simply another name for boredom, but he did not venture to say so.
The artist, they went on—one taking up the argument languidly where the other left off—should strictly18 avoid personal experience. He should hold himself austerely19 aloof20 from participation21 in human affairs....
“But I thought,” said Felix, “that what the artist was supposed to need was experience!”
“A vulgar error,” said Roger scornfully.
“What an artist needs,” said Don, “is background.”
And background, Felix gathered from their further explanations, was something one got by being in many different places without ever settling down and belonging to any one place—by merely being there and, as Roger put it, “looking on disinterestedly22 while other people passionately23 and ridiculously did things.”
The idea rather appealed to Felix.... He secretly wished he had stood by and looked on while the others got drunk that night. He regretted his participation in that scene—regretted it in spite of the absence of any of the traditional unpleasant after-effects. He wished he had remained austerely aloof from the human activities of that occasion. What, after all, was the use of passionately hitting somebody in the face if you couldn’t remember afterward24 what it was all about?... He was inclined to think that Roger and Don were right; it was not the meaningless raw material of experience that one needed, but some calm, fixed25 point of view from which to look on and understand it.
Did they have such a point of view? He began to respect and envy them.
2
It was strange—he said to himself—that he should continue to be so upset by Rose-Ann’s absence! He realized grudgingly26 and unwillingly27 how much the centre of his Chicago she had been. Without her companionship, his life seemed to have lost its significance.
His class at Community House had come to seem a nuisance, 78his newspaper work mere empty trickery. And there was nothing in the outside world to turn to, no cause that seemed worth serving. Socialism—it was too Utopian. Social reform—perhaps that was not Utopian enough. The art of writing—no, he must not think of that.... He found in his life nothing to give it meaning.
Rose-Ann’s letters increased his sense of futility28. They were friendly letters, telling of her mother’s illness, which it seemed was sufficiently29 real this time, and of her encounters with a family of aggressively brotherly brothers; and to these letters he had responded in equally friendly terms.
That was the trouble. He did not want to write friendly letters.... He wanted to write angry letters. He wanted to tell her to stop writing to him—to let him alone, and let him forget her, as she would soon forget him. He wanted to say: “You know, and I know, that your moment of freedom, and all it promised, is over for good now. Springfield has got you, you belong to your family again, you will never come back except as the wife of some fat Springfield manufacturer, to see the sights, or go to the theater with him and show off your new gowns, and—yes, you will come to Community House, and visit your old class, and as you go away you will say to your husband, ‘I used to know such a quaint30 and interesting boy here—I wonder what has become of him!’ And your fat husband will put his fat cigar into the other corner of his fat mouth, and say, ‘Yes, I suppose it’s a good thing your folks got you back to Springfield when they did!’ But he will be wrong, at that; Springfield is your natural habitat, you would have gone back there anyway....”
He wanted to write absurd things like that to her. Instead, he wrote friendly letters, “frank” and comradely and cool, in the tone in which their whole relationship had been couched from the first, up to that insane moment on the station platform....
He was ashamed of himself for thinking so much about her. Of course he was not in love with her! He was merely lonely.
79Clive was still preoccupied31 with that troublesome girl to whom he had darkly and allusively32 referred in their infrequent luncheons33 together.
He needed other friends. He called on Roger and Don one Sunday afternoon, and they were primping to go out to a tea, and urged him to come along. “It’s at Doris’s—you know Doris, don’t you? Doris Pelman. You’ll like her.”
Doris Pelman’s apartment, somewhere on the north side, was like Don’s and Roger’s in having a certain impressive charm which consisted precisely34 in its being un-homelike. It was meant, somehow, to be looked at, rather than lived in. The chairs were thin-legged and rickety, but doubtless genuine antiques; the rugs were hung on the walls instead of on the floor; and on the walls, too, were dim Chinese paintings to whose beauty Felix was dense35; yet altogether the place had an effect of being somewhere quite out of the world, and Felix liked it for that.
He was introduced at once to half-a-dozen young men and women, and in the course of the afternoon to half-a-dozen more. The young men greeted Don and Roger with a languid enthusiasm, and the young women with a sort of boisterous36 camaraderie37. Felix was struck by something at once delicate and artificial about these young men, something which he had at first noted38 and then became oblivious39 to in Roger and Don. Among them, he felt somehow coarse and brutal40.... He had an impulse to swear, or spit on the floor.
Don and Roger and two other young men were talking about travel. A nostalgia41 for foreign parts seemed to afflict42 them all. They had, it seemed, been everywhere in Europe; and most of them knew, with an especial and fond intimacy43, the geography of France, Italy, and Spain. They had all been somewhere, if not East of Suez, at least somewhere exotically remote, last year; and they were going somewhere even more strange and distant, next year. With Don and Roger the question was, Tunis or Tahiti?—they could not decide which.
Felix had accepted this travel-mania as part of Don’s and 80Roger’s interesting scheme of life. Sometimes he had even envied them, for they boasted that they did all this travelling “on their wits”; they insisted that one could go anywhere and live well, without money—and Felix had felt rather ashamed of his own singular lack of nomadic44 enterprise. But today he felt annoyed with them. He remarked to himself that though he had not ostensibly travelled, he had actually spent his life in changing his place of habitation, from house to house and from town to town; and even if these places were only the same middle-western town all over again each time, yet he felt that he had never stayed long enough to get really acquainted with it! He observed aloud, challengingly, that he thought one might stay in a city like Chicago the whole of one’s life without quite exhausting its interest.
The four young men raised their eyebrows45, and uttered impressively the names of the great capitals of Europe; and even more unctuously46 the names of little out-of-the-way foreign towns of which he had never heard.
“The trouble with writers,” Don remarked—he and Roger paid Felix the compliment of regarding him as a fellow-writer—“is that they try to write before they have sufficient background.”
Evidently, Felix reflected, Don and Roger had not made that mistake! They had been acquiring background for years, according to their own testimony—Roger for some ten years, and Don for perhaps five. And neither of them had, so far as he could discover, written anything yet!... And when would they begin, with so much background still left to be acquired? Tunis and Tahiti!
He turned impatiently to the young women.... They seemed at first much more congenial spirits. And yet there was something odd about them, too—something odd in their very friendliness47. His hostess, Doris Pelman, a strikingly handsome girl, tall and fair, was the one with whom he had what most nearly resembled a conversation—a thing difficult enough to achieve at a tea. What immediately impressed him was that she did not seem at all conscious of her looks—she might, from her behaviour, not have been possessed48 of 81any; or rather, the mysterious barrier across which two strangers, man and woman, must communicate, seemed not to be there for her; she was apparently49 unaware50 of herself and him, in a way that even old Mrs. Perk51, a grandmother, never could be. There was in her manner an utter absence of shyness, an apparent perfect ease in this contact of personalities52. But in her easy unembarrassed friendliness there was something steely and aloof—a fundamental untouchableness. She talked fluently, about his work and hers—she was an interior decorator, it appeared,—about the new books and plays, and, with an especial zest53, about people.... A peculiar54 zest, too: she had a way, which at first gave him an uncanny feeling, of talking about human beings as though they were insects. The only things of which she spoke55 with visible affection were the fabrics56 and materials of her profession—and art in general.
But they were all, he felt, rather like this. The tea had become a kind of family gathering57, in which only Felix felt out of place. Dusk fell, tall candles were lighted, and everyone became anecdotal. It would seem that they had spent their lives in collecting these anecdotes58, and they related them and heard them with an inexhaustible relish—each one being rehearsed at full length with a loving care for the minutest psychological details. Some of these stories were apparently precious gems59 in their collection, worthy60 of being taken out and enjoyed over and over again. Other stories they laughed over uproariously, chokingly, helplessly—though to Felix the point of these seemed frequently rather obscure, and seldom very funny.
He went away feeling surprised, and not knowing quite whether he was disappointed or grateful at the absence of any challenge in these new feminine acquaintanceships. He had never consciously realized, except now in its absence, that undercurrent of vague questioning, at once delightful61 and disconcerting, as to just what there might be in a new “friendship”—what rich and beautiful possibilities it might hold in store: all the familiar and foolish day-dreaming that follows the most casual meeting of masculine with feminine 82youth. But here there was no question whatever; imagination took no hold on this extraordinarily62 self-possessed, this imperturbable63 young womanhood.... Here was, indeed, the “detached attitude”!
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1
kindly
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| adj.和蔼的，温和的，爽快的；adv.温和地，亲切地 | |
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inscription
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| n.（尤指石块上的）刻印文字，铭文，碑文 | |
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dingy
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| adj.昏暗的，肮脏的 | |
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bleak
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| adj.(天气)阴冷的；凄凉的；暗淡的 | |
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modulated
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| 已调整[制]的，被调的 | |
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picturesque
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| adj.美丽如画的，（语言）生动的，绘声绘色的 | |
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7
disorder
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| n.紊乱，混乱；骚动，骚乱；疾病，失调 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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caressing
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| 爱抚的，表现爱情的，亲切的 | |
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rite
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| n.典礼，惯例，习俗 | |
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devout
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| adj.虔诚的，虔敬的，衷心的 (n.devoutness) | |
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sensory
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| adj.知觉的，感觉的，知觉器官的 | |
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chattering
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| n. （机器振动发出的）咔嗒声，(鸟等)鸣，啁啾 adj. 喋喋不休的，啾啾声的 动词chatter的现在分词形式 | |
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14
psychic
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| n.对超自然力敏感的人；adj.有超自然力的 | |
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irrelevant
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| adj.不恰当的，无关系的，不相干的 | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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boredom
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| n.厌烦，厌倦，乏味，无聊 | |
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strictly
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| adv.严厉地，严格地；严密地 | |
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austerely
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| adv.严格地，朴质地 | |
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aloof
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| adj.远离的；冷淡的，漠不关心的 | |
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participation
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| n.参与，参加，分享 | |
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disinterestedly
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passionately
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| ad.热烈地，激烈地 | |
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afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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grudgingly
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unwillingly
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| adv.不情愿地 | |
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futility
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| n.无用 | |
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sufficiently
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| adv.足够地，充分地 | |
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quaint
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| adj.古雅的，离奇有趣的，奇怪的 | |
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preoccupied
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| adj.全神贯注的，入神的；被抢先占有的；心事重重的v.占据（某人）思想，使对…全神贯注，使专心于( preoccupy的过去式) | |
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32
allusively
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| adj.暗指的，影射，间接提到 | |
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33
luncheons
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| n.午餐，午宴( luncheon的名词复数 ) | |
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precisely
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| adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地 | |
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dense
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| a.密集的，稠密的，浓密的；密度大的 | |
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boisterous
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| adj.喧闹的，欢闹的 | |
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camaraderie
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| n.同志之爱，友情 | |
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noted
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| adj.著名的，知名的 | |
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oblivious
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| adj.易忘的，遗忘的，忘却的，健忘的 | |
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40
brutal
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| adj.残忍的，野蛮的，不讲理的 | |
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41
nostalgia
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| n.怀乡病，留恋过去，怀旧 | |
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42
afflict
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| vt.使身体或精神受痛苦，折磨 | |
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43
intimacy
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| n.熟悉，亲密，密切关系，亲昵的言行 | |
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44
nomadic
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| adj.流浪的；游牧的 | |
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45
eyebrows
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| 眉毛( eyebrow的名词复数 ) | |
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46
unctuously
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| adv.油腻地，油腔滑调地；假惺惺 | |
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47
friendliness
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| n.友谊，亲切，亲密 | |
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48
possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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49
apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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50
unaware
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| a.不知道的，未意识到的 | |
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51
perk
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| n.额外津贴；赏钱；小费； | |
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52
personalities
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| n. 诽谤，（对某人容貌、性格等所进行的）人身攻击； 人身攻击；人格, 个性, 名人( personality的名词复数 ) | |
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53
zest
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| n.乐趣；滋味，风味；兴趣 | |
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54
peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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55
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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56
fabrics
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| 织物( fabric的名词复数 )； 布； 构造； （建筑物的）结构（如墙、地面、屋顶）：质地 | |
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57
gathering
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| n.集会，聚会，聚集 | |
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58
anecdotes
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| n.掌故，趣闻，轶事( anecdote的名词复数 ) | |
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59
gems
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| growth； economy； management； and customer satisfaction 增长 | |
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60
worthy
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| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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61
delightful
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| adj.令人高兴的，使人快乐的 | |
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62
extraordinarily
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| adv.格外地；极端地 | |
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63
imperturbable
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| adj.镇静的 | |
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