The Poor Man — Key Ideas to Explore

place. He knew well that he was more than half deaf and in many moods he welcomed the insight that his infirmity gave him into matters that did not exist. His two friends had been telling each other facts that both knew and that Edward did not wish to know. Neither would, of course, dream of mentioning emeralds or hills of violets except when it was really necessary and helpful to do so. Edward did not care. He felt that his mind’s eye had acquired one picture the more without the trouble of acquiring a fact.

Some music that did not interest Edward began and Edward thought, “I wish I were really musical, but if I wear this grave half-shut expression everybody will think I am very musical indeed.” Nobody looked at him, but he persisted in his selected expression.

Miss Rhoda Romero’s pictures hung all round the room. Of these Edward thought, “If I am asked I will look at them in silence with a chin-down, eye-up sort of look, as if the sun were in my eyes and then say ‘A-ha’ once slowly. Then people will think I know how good they are—if they are good.” But he never had had a chance to do this, because nobody had ever formally introduced him to the pictures. Rhoda Romero never asked people what they thought of her pictures. She thought she knew. They were mostly studies of assorted fruits in magenta and mustard-colour running violently down steep slopes into the sea. They were all called still life, curiously enough. Rhoda Romero also, I need hardly say, wrote poetry. It was, of course, unrhymed and so delicately scanned that often there was not room in a line for a word unless it were spelt in the newest American manner; the poems were usually about dirt or disease, and were believed in Chicago to have an international reputation.

Rhoda Romero herself was insolent, handsome, and contented. Almost the only thing that she regretted about herself was that she had a great deal of money. Her grandfather, a Mexican forty-niner, had been so wise as to buy land all round one of those cities of California whose motto—“Watch us Grow”—had not been an idle boast. Many of these cities have so far clamored for an audience under false pretenses, and now try to justify themselves by hanging signboards—“Drive Slowly, Congested Business District”—on every gum-tree in the vicinity of the lonely real-estate office. Rhoda Romero’s city could have paved her studio with gold, and this, she felt, was a blot upon an artist’s reputation. She thought that an artist ought to be “Of the People” and, though she had been to a very ladylike school in Virginia and had later graduated from a still more ladylike college in Pennsylvania, she used what she called “the speech of the people” whenever she remembered to do so. For much the same reason she shared a flat with Mr. Avery Bird, a transformed Russian Jew with high upward hair. They had once married in a moment of inconsistency but had since divorced each other in order that they might live together with a quiet conscience.

Mrs. Melsie Stone Ponting, tired of music, had suddenly started an argument about Art and Sex. You could tell it was an argument because now and then a little hole in the close-knit fabric of her voice occurred which was presumably filled up by some man’s voice. In the United States you become used to hearing only women. Men speak guiltily in small suffocated voices. Yet arguments often seem just as spirited as though the opponent were audible. Before each clause of Mrs. Ponting’s argument she opened her mouth for several seconds very widely, showing the whole of her tongue. Sometimes Mr. Avery Bird rudely took advantage of this necessity to give voice to an epigram of his own which nobody could follow.

The argument provided cover for Miss Romero to say to her friend, Mr. Banner Hope, who was trying to make his empty cocktail glass look as conspicuously wistful as possible:

“Say, listen, Banner, I want to talk to you about You Know Whom. We’ll mention no names....”

Mr. Hope looked doubtfully at Edward Williams, who was about ten feet away.

“He’s good and deaf,” said Miss Romero; “he can’t hear.” And indeed, beyond a preliminary impression that Rhoda had begun a dramatic but elusive conversation about Steel Men in the Flames, Edward Williams did not hear. His protesting ears were filled with the voice of Mrs. Ponting.

“Well, say, listen, Banner, have you heard the latest?” continued Miss Romero.