I THINK it was the Fourth of July when they took the chair from under my ass again.  Not a word of warning.  One of the big muck-a-mucks from the other side of the water had decided to make economies; cutting down on proofreaders and helpless little dactylos enabled him to pay the expenses of his trips back and forth and the palatial quarters he occupied at the Ritz.  After paying what little debts I had accumulated among the linotype operators and a goodwill token at the bistro across the way, in order to preserve my credit, there was scarcely anything left out of my final pay.  I had to notify the patron of the hotel that I would be leaving; I didn't tell him why because he'd have worried about his measly two hundred francs.

      "What'll you do if you lose your job?"  That was the phrase that rang in my ears continually.  Ca y est maintenant!  Ausgespielt!  Nothing to do but to get down into the street again, walk, hang around, sit on benches, kill time.  By now, of course, my face was familiar in Montparnasse; for a while I could pretend that I was still working on the paper.  That would make it a little easier to bum a breakfast or a dinner.  It was summertime and the tourists were pouring in.  I have schemes up my sleeve for mulcting them.  "What'll you do....?"  Well, I wouldn't starve, that's one thing.  If I should do nothing else but concentrate on food that would prevent me from falling to pieces.  For a week or two I could still go to Monsieur Paul's and have a square meal every evening; he wouldn't know whether I was working or not.  The main thing is to eat.  Trust to Providence for the rest!

      Naturally, I kept my ears open for anything that sounded like a little dough.  And I cultivated a whole new set of acquaintances - bores whom I had sedulously avoided heretofore, drunks whom I loathed, artists who had a little money, Guggenheim-prize men, etc.  It's not hard to make friends when you squat on a terrasse twelve hours a day.  You get to know every sot in Montparnasse.  They cling to you like lice, even if you have nothing to offer them but your ears.

      Now that I had lost my job Carl and Van Norden had a new phrase for me: "What if your wife should arrive now?"  Well, what of it?  Two mouths to feed, instead of one.  I'd have a companion in misery.  And, if she hadn't lost her good looks, I'd probably do better in double harness than alone: the world never permits a good-looking woman to starve.  Tania I couldn't depend on to do much for me; she was sending money to Sylvester.  I had thought at first that she might let me share her room, but she was afraid of compromising herself; besides, she had to be nice to her boss.

      The first people to turn to when you're down and out are the Jews.  I had three of them on my hands almost at once.  Sympathetic souls.  One of them was a retired fur merchant who had an itch to see his name in the papers; he proposed that I write a series of articles under his name for a Jewish daily in New York.  I had to scout around the Dôme and the Coupole searching for prominent Jews.  The first man I picked on was a celebrated mathematician; he couldn't speak a word of English.  I had to write about the theory of shock from the diagrams he left on the paper napkins; I had to describe the movements of the astral bodies and demolish the Einsteinian conception at the same time.  All for twenty-five francs.  When I saw my articles in the newspaper I couldn't read them; but they looked impressive, just the same, especially with the pseudonym of the fur merchant attached.

      I did a lot of pseudonymous writing during this period.  When the big new whorehouse opened up on the Boulevard Edgar- Quinet, I get a little rake-off, for writing the pamphlets.  That is to say, a bottle of champagne and a free fuck in one of the Egyptian rooms.  If I succeeded in bringing a client I was to get my commission, just like Kepi got his in the old days.  One night I brought Van Norden; he was going to let me earn a little money by enjoying himself upstairs.  But when the madame learned that he was a newspaperman she wouldn't hear of taking money from him; it was a bottle of champagne again and a free fuck.  I got nothing out of it.  As a matter of fact, I had to write the story for him because he couldn't think how to get round the subject without mentioning the kind of place it was.  One thing after another like that.  I was getting fucked good and proper.

      The worst job of all was a thesis I undertook to write for a deaf and dumb psychologist.  A treatise on the care of crippled children.  My head was full of diseases and braces and workbenches and fresh air theories; it took about six weeks off and on, and then, to rub it in, I had to proofread the goddamned thing.  It was in French, such a French as I've never in my life seen or heard.  But it brought me in a good breakfast every day, an American breakfast, with orange juice, oatmeal, cream, coffee, now and then ham and eggs for a change.  It was the only period of my Paris days that I ever indulged in a decent breakfast, thanks to the crippled children of Rockaway Beach, the East Side, and all the coves and inlets bordering on these sore points.

      Then one day I fell in with a photographer; he was making a collection of the slimy joints of Paris for some degenerate in Munich.  He wanted to know if I would pose for him with my pants down, and in other ways.  I thought of those skinny little runts, who look like bell-hops and messenger boys, that one sees on pornographic postcards in little bookshop windows occasionally, the mysterious phantoms who inhabit the Rue de la Lune and other malodorous quarters of the city.  I didn't like very much the idea of advertising my physiog in company of this elite.  But, since I was assured that the photographs were for a strictly private collection, and since it was destined for Munich, I gave my consent.  When you're not in your home town you can permit yourself little liberties, particularly for such a worthy motive as earning your daily bread.  After all, I hadn't been so squeamish, come to think of it, even in New York.  There were nights when I was so damned desperate, back there, that I had to go out right in my own neighbourhood and panhandle.

      We didn't go to the show places familiar to the tourists, but to the little joints where the atmosphere was more congenial, where we could play a game of cards in the afternoon before getting down to work.  He was a good companion, the photographer.  He knew the city inside out, the walls particularly; he talked to me about Goethe often, and the days of the Hohenstaufen, and the massacre of the Jews during the reign of the Black Death.  Interesting subjects, and always related in some obscure way to the things he was doing.  He had ideas for scenarios too, astounding ideas, but nobody had the courage to execute them.  The sight of a horse, split open like a saloon door, would inspire him to talk of Dante or Leonardo da Vinci or Rembrandt; from the slaughterhouse at Villette he would jump into a cab and rush me to the Trocadero Museum, in order to point out a skull or a mummy that had fascinated him.  We explored the 5th, the 13th, the 19th and the 20th arrondissements thoroughly.  Our favourite resting places were lugubrious little spots such as the Place Nationale, Place des Peupliers, Place de la Contrescarpe, Place Paul-Verlaine.  Many of these places were already familiar to me, but all of them I now saw in a different light owing to the rare flavour of his conversation.  If today I should happen to stroll down the Rue du Chateau-des-Rentiers, for example, inhaling the fetid stench of the hospital beds with which the 13th arrondissement reeks, my nostrils would undoubtedly expand with pleasure, because compounded with that odour of stale piss and formaldehyde, there would be the odours of our imaginative voyages through the charnel house of Europe which the Black Death had created.

      Through him I got to know a spiritual-minded individual named Kruger, who was a sculptor and painter.  Kruger took a shine to me for some reason or other; it was impossible to get away from him once he discovered that I was willing to listen to his "esoteric" ideas.  There are people in this world for whom the word "esoteric" seems to act as a divine ichor.  Like "settled" for Herr Peeperkorn of the Magic Mountain.  Kruger was one of those saints who have gone wrong, a masochist, an anal type whose law is scrupulousness, rectitude and conscientiousness, who on an off day would knock a man's teeth down his throat without a qualm.  He seemed to think I was ripe to move on to another plane, "a higher plane", as he put it.  I was ready to move on to any plane he designated, provided that one didn't eat less or drink less.  He chewed my head off about the "threadsoul", the "causal body", "ablation", the Upanishads, Plotinus, Krishnamurti, "the Karmic vestiture of the soul", "the nirvanic consciousness", all that flapdoodle which blows out of the East like a breath from the plague.  Sometimes he would go into a trance and talk about his previous incarnations, how he imagined them to be, at least.  Or he would relate his dreams which, so far as I could see, were thoroughly insipid, prosaic, hardly worth even the attention of a Freudian, but, for him, there were vast esoteric marvels hidden in their depths which I had to aid him to decipher.  He had turned himself inside out, like a coat whose nap is worn off.

      Little by little, as I gained his confidence, I wormed my way into his heart.  I had him at such a point that he would come running after me, in the street, to inquire if he could lend me a few francs.  He wanted to hold me together in order to survive the transition to a higher plane.  I acted like a pear that is ripening on the tree.  Now and then I had relapses and I would confess my need for more earthly nourishment - a visit to the Sphinx or the Rue St. Apolline where I knew he repaired in weak moments when the demands of the flesh had become too vehement.

      As a painter he was nil; as a sculptor less than nil.  He was a good housekeeper, that I'll say for him.  And an economical one to boot.  Nothing went to waste, nor even the paper that the meat was wrapped in.  Friday nights he threw open his studio to his fellow artists; there was always plenty to drink and good sandwiches, and if by chance there was anything left over I would come round the next day to polish it off.

      Back of the Bal Bullier was another studio I into the habit of frequenting - the studio of Mark Swift.  If he was not a genius he was certainly an eccentric, this caustic Irishman.  He had for a model a Jewess whom he had been living with for years; he was now tired of her and was searching for a pretext to get rid of her.  But as he had eaten up the dowry which she had originally brought with her, he was puzzled as to how to disembarrass himself of her without making restitution.  The simplest thing was to so antagonize her that she would choose starvation rather than support his cruelties.

      She was rather a fine person, his mistress; the worst that one could say against her was that she had lost her shape, 'and' her ability to support him any longer.  She was a painter herself and, among those who professed to know, it was said that she had far more talent than he.  But no matter how miserable he made life for her she was just; she would never allow anyone to say that he was not a great painter.  It was because he really has genius, she said, that he was such a rotten individual.  One never saw her canvases on the wall - only his.  Her things were stuck away in the kitchen.  Once it happened, in my presence, that someone insisted on seeing her work.  The result was painful.  "You see this figure," said Swift, pointing to one of her canvases with his big foot.  "The man standing in the doorway there is just about to go out for a leak.  He won't be able to find his way back because his head is on wrong.... Now take that nude over there.... It was all right until she started to paint the cunt.  I don't know what she was thinking about, but she made it so big that her brush slipped and she couldn't get it out again."

      By way of showing us what a nude ought to be like he hauls out a huge canvas which he had recently completed.  It was a picture of her, a splendid piece of vengeance inspired by a guilty conscience.  The work of a madman - vicious, petty, malign, brilliant.  You had the feeling that he had spied on her through the keyhole, that he had caught her in an off moment, when she was picking her nose absentmindedly, or scratching her ass.  She sat there on the horsehair sofa, in a room without ventilation, an enormous room without a window; it might as well have been the anterior lobe of the pineal gland.  Back of her ran the zigzag stairs leading to the balcony; they were covered with a bilious-green carpet, such a green as could only emanate from a universe that had been pooped out.  The most prominent thing was her buttocks, which were lopsided and full of scabs; she seemed to have slightly raised her ass from the sofa, as if to let out a loud fart.  Her face he had idealized: it looked sweet and virginal, pure as a cough drop.  But her bosom was distended, swollen with sewer gas; she seemed to be swimming in a menstrual sea, an enlarged fetus with the dull, syrupy look of an angel.

      Nevertheless one couldn't help but like him.  He was an indefatigable worker, a man who hadn't a single thought in his head but paint.  And cunning as a lynx withal.  It was he who put it into my head to cultivate the friendship of Fillmore, a young man in the diplomatic service who had found his way into the little group that surrounded Kruger and Swift.  "Let him help you," he said.  "He doesn't know what to do with his money."

      When one spends what he has on himself, when one has a thoroughly good time with his own money, people are apt to say "he doesn't know what to do with his money."  For my part, I don't see any better use to which one can put money.  About such individuals one can't say that they're generous or stingy.  They put money into circulation - that's the principal thing.  Fillmore knew that his days in France were limited; he was determined to enjoy them.  And as one always enjoys himself better in the company of a friend it was only natural that he should turn to one like myself, who had plenty of time on his hands, for that companionship which he needed.  People said he was a bore, and so he was, I suppose, but when you're in need of food you can put up with worse things than being bored.  After all, despite the fact that he talked incessantly, and usually about himself or the authors whom he admired slavishly - such birds as Anatole France and Joseph Conrad - he nevertheless made my nights interesting in other ways.  He liked to dance, he liked good wines, and he liked women.  That he liked Byron also, and Victor Hugo, one could forgive; he was only a few years out of college and he had plenty of time ahead of him to be cured of such tastes.  What he had that I liked was a sense of adventure.

      We got even better acquainted, more intimate, I might say, due to a peculiar incident that occurred during my brief sojourn with Kruger.  It happened just after the arrival of Collins, a sailor whom Fillmore had got to know on the way over from America.  The three of us used to meet regularly on the terrasse of the Rotonde before going to dinner.  It was always Pernod, a drink which put Collins in good humour and provided a base, as it were, for the wine and beer and fines, etc., which had to be guzzled afterwards.  All during Collins's stay in Paris I lived like a duke; nothing but fowl and good vintages and desserts that I hadn't even heard of before.  A month of this regimen and I should have been obliged to go to Baden- Baden or Vichy or Aix-les-Bains.  Meanwhile Kruger was putting me up at his studio.  I was getting to be a nuisance because I never showed up before three a.m. and it was difficult to rout me out of bed before noon.  Overtly Kruger never uttered a word of reproach but his manner indicated plainly enough that I was becoming a bum.

      One day I was taken ill.  The rich diet was taking effect upon me.  I don't know what ailed me, but I couldn't get out of bed.  I had lost all my stamina, and with it whatever courage I possessed.  Kruger had to look after me, had to make broths for me, and so on.  It was a trying period for him, more particularly because he was just on the verge of giving an important exhibition at his studio, a private showing to some wealthy connoisseurs from whom he was expecting aid.  The cot on which I lay was in the studio; there was no other room to put me in.

      The morning of the day he was to give his exhibition, Kruger awoke thoroughly disgruntled.  If I had been able to stand on my feet I know he would have given me a clout in the jaw and kicked me out.  But I was prostrate, and weak as a cat.  He tried to coax me out of bed, with the idea of locking me up in the kitchen upon the arrival of his visitors.  I realized that I was making a mess of it for him.  People can't look at pictures and statues with enthusiasm when a man is dying before their eyes.  Kruger honestly thought I was dying.  So did I.  That's why, despite my feelings of guilt, I couldn't muster any enthusiasm when he proposed calling for the ambulance and having me shipped to the American Hospital.  I wanted to die there, comfortably, right in the studio; I didn't want to be urged to get up and find a better place to die in.  I didn't care where I died, really, so long as it wasn't necessary to get up.

      When he heard me talk this was Kruger became alarmed.  Worse than having a sick man in his studio should the visitors arrive, was to have a dead man.  That would completely ruin his prospects, slim as they were.  He didn't put it that way to me, of course, but I could see from his agitation that that was what worried him.  And that made me stubborn.  I refused to let him call the hospital.  I refused to left him call a doctor.  I refused everything.

      He got so angry with me finally that, despite my protestations, he began to dress me.  I was too weak to resist.  All I could do was to murmur weakly - "you bastard you!"  Though it was warm outdoors I was shivering like a dog.  After he had completely dressed me he flung an overcoat over me and slipped outside to telephone.  "I won't go!  I won't go!" I kept saying, but he simply slammed the door on me.  He came back in a few minutes and, without addressing a word to me, busied himself about the studio.  Last minute preparations.  In a little while there was a knock on the door.  It was Fillmore.  Collins was waiting downstairs, he informed me.

      The two of them, Fillmore and Kruger, slipped their arms under me and hoisted me to my feet.  As they dragged me to the elevator Kruger softened up.  "It's for your own good," he said.  "And besides, it wouldn't be fair to me.  You know what a struggle I've had all these years.  You ought to think about me too."  He was actually on the point of tears.

      Wretched and miserable as I felt, his words almost made me smile.  He was considerably older than I, and even though he was a rotten painter, a rotten artist all the way through, he deserved a break - at least once in a lifetime.

      "I don't hold it against you," I muttered.  "I understand how it is."

      "You know I always liked you," he responded. "When you get better you can come back here again ... you can stay as long as you like."

      "Sure, I know.... I'm not going to croak yet," I managed to get out.

      Somehow, when I saw Collins down below my spirits revived.  If ever anyone seemed to be thoroughly alive, healthy, joyous, magnanimous, it was he.  He picked me up as if I were a doll and laid me out on the seat of the cab - gently too, which I appreciated after the way Kruger had manhandled me.

      When we drove up to the hotel - the hotel that Collins was stopping at - there was a bit of a discussion with the proprietor, during which I lay stretched out on the sofa in the bureau.  I could hear Collins saying to the patron that it was nothing ... just a little breakdown ... be all right in a few days.  I saw him put a crisp bill in the man's hands and then, turning swiftly and lithely, he came back to where I was and said: "Come on, buck up!  Don't let him think you're croaking."  And with that, he yanked me to my feet and, bracing me with one arm, escorted me to the elevator.

      Don't let him think you're croaking!  Obviously it was bad taste to die on people's hands.  One should die in the bosom of his family, in private, as it were.  His words were encouraging.  I began to see it all as a bad joke.  Upstairs, with the door closed, they undressed me and put me between the sheets.  "You can die now, goddamn it!" said Collins warmly.  "You'll put me in a hole.... Besides, what the hell's the matter with you?  Can't stand good living?  Keep your chin up!  You'll be eating a porterhouse steak in a day or two.  You think you're ill!  Wait, by Jesus until you get a dose of syphilis!  That's something to make you worry...." And he began to relate, in a humorous way, his trip down the Yangtze Kiang, with hair falling out and teeth rotting away.  In the feeble state that I was in, the yarn that he spun had an extraordinary soothing effect upon me.  It took me completely out of myself.  He had guts, this guy.  Perhaps he put it on a bit thick, for my benefit, but I wasn't listening to him critically at the moment.  I was all ears and eyes.  I saw the dirty yellow mouth of the river, the lights going up at Hankow, the sea of yellow faces, the sampans shooting down through the gorges and the rapids flaming with the sulphurous breath of the dragon.  What a story!  The coolies swarming around the boat each day, dredging for the garbage that was flung overboard, Tom Slattery rising up on his deathbed to take a last look at the lights of Hankow, the beautiful Eurasian who lay in a dark room and filled his veins with poison, the monotony of blue jackets and yellow faces, millions and millions of them hollowed out by famine, ravaged by disease, subsisting on rats and dogs and roots, chewing the grass off the earth, devouring their own children.  It was hard to imagine that this man's body had once been a mass of sores, that he had been shunned like a leper; his voice was so quiet and gentle, it was as though his spirit had been cleansed by all the suffering he had endured.  As he reached for his drink his face grew more and more soft and his words actually seemed to caress me.  And all the while China hanging over us like Fate itself.  A China rotting away, crumbling to dust like a huge dinosaur, yet preserving to the very end the glamour, the enchantment, the mystery, the cruelty of her hoary legends.

      I could no longer follow his story; my mind had slipped back to a Fourth of July when I bought my first package of firecrackers and with it the long pieces of punk which break so easily, the punk that you blow on to get a good red glow, the punk whose smell sticks to your fingers for days and makes you dream of strange things.  The Fourth of July the streets are littered with bright red paper stamped with black and gold figures and everywhere there are tiny firecrackers which have the most curious intestines; packages and packages of them, all strung together by their thin, flat, little gutstrings, the colour of human brains.  All day long there is the smell of powder and punk and the gold dust from the bright red wrappers sticks to your fingers.  One never thinks of China, but it is there all the time on the tips of your fingers and it makes your nose itchy; and long afterwards, when you have forgotten almost what a firecracker smells like, you wake up one day with gold leaf choking you and the broken pieces of punk waft back their pungent odour and the bright red wrappers give you a nostalgia for a people and a soil you have never known, but which is in your blood, mysteriously there in your blood, like the sense of time or space, a fugitive, constant value to which you turn more and more as you get old, which you try to seize with your mind, but ineffectually, because in everything Chinese there is wisdom and mystery and you can never grasp it with two hands or with your mind but you must let it rub off, let it stick to your fingers, let it slowly infiltrate your veins.

 

      A few weeks later, upon receipt of a pressing invitation from Collins who had returned to Le Havre, Fillmore and I boarded the train one morning, prepared to spend the weekend with him.  It was the first time I had been outside of Paris since my arrival here.  We were in fine fettle, drinking Anjou all the way to the coast.  Collins had given us the address of a bar where we were to meet; it was a place called Jimmie's Bar, which everyone in Le Havre was supposed to know.

      We got into an open barouche at the station and started on a brisk trot for the rendezvous; there was still a half bottle of Anjou left which we polished off as we rode along.  Le Havre looked gay, sunny; the air was bracing, with that strong salty tang which almost made me homesick for New York.  There were masts and hulls cropping up everywhere, bright bits of bunting, big open squares and high-ceilinged cafés such as one only sees in the provinces.  A fine impression immediately; the city was welcoming us with open arms.

      Before we ever reached the bar we saw Collins coming down the street on a trot, heading for the station, no doubt, and a little late as usual.  Fillmore immediately suggested a Pernod; we were all slapping each other on the back, laughing and spitting, drunk already from the sunshine and the salt sea air.  Collins seemed undecided about the Pernod at first.  He had a little dose of clap, he informed us.  Nothing very serious - "a strain" most likely.  He showed us a bottle he had in his pocket - "Venetienne" it was called, if I remember rightly.  The sailors' remedy for clap.

      We stopped off at a restaurant to have a little snack before repairing to Jimmie's place.  It was a huge tavern with big, smoky rafters and tables creaking with food.  We drank copiously of the wines that Collins recommended.  Then we sat down on a terrasse and had coffee and liqueurs.  Collins was talking about the Baron de Charlus, a man after his own heart, he said.  For almost a year now he had been staying at Le Havre, going through the money that he had accumulated during his bootlegging days.  His tastes were simple - food, drink, women and books.  And a private bath!  That he insisted on.

      We were still talking about the Baron de Charlus when we arrived at Jimmie's Bar.  It was late in the afternoon and the place was just beginning to fill up.  Jimmie was there, his face red as a beet, and beside him was his spouse, a fine buxom Frenchwoman with glittering eyes.  We were given a marvellous reception all around.  There were Pernods in front of us again, the gramophone was shrieking, people were jabbering away in English and French and Dutch and Norwegian and Spanish, and Jimmie and his wife, both of them looking very brisk and dapper, were slapping and kissing each other heartily and raising their glasses and clinking them - altogether such a bubble and blabber of merriment that you felt like pulling off your clothes and doing a war dance.  The women at the bar had gathered around like flies.  If we were friends of Collins that meant we were rich.  It didn't matter that we had come in our old clothes; all Anglais dressed like that.  I hadn't a sou in my pocket, which didn't matter, of course, since I was the guest of honour.  Nevertheless I felt somewhat embarrassed with two stunning-looking whores hanging on my arms waiting for me to order something.  I decided to take the bull by the horns.  You couldn't tell anymore which drinks were on the house and which were to be paid for.  I had to be a gentleman, even if I didn't have a sou in my pocket.

      Yvette - that was Jimmie's wife - was extraordinarily gracious and friendly with us.  She was preparing a little spread in our honour.  It would take a little while yet.  We were not to get too drunk - she wanted us to enjoy the meal.  The gramophone was going like wild and Fillmore had begun to dance with a beautiful mulatto who had on a tight velvet dress that revealed all her charms.  Collins slipped over to my side and whispered a few words about the girl at me side.  "The madame will invite her to dinner," he said, "if you'd like to have her."  She was an ex-whore who owned a beautiful home on the outskirts of the city.  The mistress of a sea captain now.  He was away and there was nothing to fear.  "If she likes you she'll invite you to stay with her," he added.

      That was enough for me.  I turned at once to Marcelle and began to flatter the ass off her.  We stood at the corner of the bar, pretending to dance, and mauled each other ferociously.  Jimmie gave me a big horse-wink and nodded his head approvingly.  She was a lascivious bitch, this Marcelle, and pleasant at the same time.  She soon got rid of the other girl, I noticed, and then we settled down for a long and intimate conversation which was interrupted unfortunately by the announcement that dinner was ready.

      There were about twenty of us at the table, and Marcelle and I were placed at one end opposite Jimmie and his wife.  It began with the popping of champagne corks and was quickly followed by drunken speeches, during the course of which Marcelle and I played with each other under the table.  When it came my turn to stand up and deliver a few words I had to hold the napkin in front of me.  It was painful and exhilarating at the same time.  I had to cut my speech very short because Marcelle was tickling me in the crotch all the while.

      The dinner lasted until almost midnight.  I was looking forward to spending the night with Marcelle in that beautiful home up on the cliff.  But it was not to be.  Collins had planned to show us about and I couldn't very well refuse.  "Don't worry about her," he said.  "You'll have a bellyful of it before you leave.  Tell her to wait here for you until we get back."

      She was a bit peeved at this, Marcelle, but when we informed her that we had several days ahead of us she brightened up.  When we got outdoors Fillmore very solemnly took us by the arm and said he had a little confession to make.  He looked pale and worried.

      "Well, what is it?" said Collins cheerfully.  "Spit it out!"

      Fillmore couldn't spit it out like that, all at once.  He hemmed and hawed and finally he blurted out - "Well, when I went to the closet just a minute ago I noticed something...."

      "Then you've got it!" said Collins triumphantly, and with that he flourished the bottle of "Venetienne". "Don't go to a doctor," he added venomously.  "They'll bleed you to death, the greedy bastards.  And don't stop drinking either.  That's all hooey.  Take this twice a day ... shake it well before using.  And nothing's worse than worry, do you understand?  Come on now.  I'll give you a syringe and some permanganate when we get back."

      And so we started back out into the night, down towards the waterfront where there was the sound of music and shouts and drunken oaths, Collins talking quietly all the while about this and that, about a boy he had fallen in love with, and the devil's time he had to get out of the scrape when the parents got wise to it.  From that he switched back to the Baron de Charlus and then to Kurtz who had gone up the river and got lost.  His favourite theme.  I liked the way Collins moved against this background of literature continuously; it was like a millionaire who never stepped out of his Rolls Royce.  There was no intermediate realm for him between reality and ideas.  When we entered the whorehouse on the Quai Voltaire, after he had flung himself on the divan and rung for girls and for drinks, he was still paddling up the river with Kurtz, and only when the girls had flopped on the bed beside him and stuffed his mouth with kisses did he cease his divagations.  Then, as if he had suddenly realized where he was, he turned to the old mother who ran the place and gave her an eloquent spiel about his two friends who had come down from Paris expressly to see the joint.  There were about half a dozen girls in the room, all naked and all beautiful to look at, I must say.  They hopped about like birds while the three of us tried to maintain a conversation with the grandmother.  Finally the latter excused herself and told us to make ourselves at home.  I was altogether taken in by her, so sweet and amiable she was, so thoroughly gentle and maternal.  And what manners!  If she had been a little younger I would have made overtures to her.  Certainly you would not have thought that we were in a "den of vice", as it is called.

      Anyway we stayed there an hour or so, and as I was the only one in condition to enjoy the privileges of the house, Collins and Fillmore remained downstairs chattering with the girls.  When I returned I found the two of them stretched out on the bed; the girls had formed a semicircle about the bed and were singing with the most angelic voices the chorus of Roses in Picardy.  We were sentimentally depressed when we left the house - Fillmore particularly.  Collins swiftly steered us to a rough joint which was packed with drunken sailors on shore leave and there we sat awhile enjoying the homosexual rout that was in full swing.  When we sallied out we had to pass through the red-light district where there were more grandmothers with shawls about their necks sitting on the doorsteps fanning themselves and nodding pleasantly to the passers-by.  All such good-looking, kindly souls, as if they were keeping guard over a nursery.  Little groups of sailors came swinging along and pushed their way noisily inside the gaudy joints.  Sex everywhere: it was slopping over, a neap tide that swept the props from under the city.  We piddled along at the edge of the basin where everything was jumbled and tangled; you had the impression that all these ships, these trawlers and yachts and schooners and barges, had been blown ashore by a violent storm.

      In the space of forty-eight hours so many things had happened that it seemed as if we had been in Le Havre a month or more.  We were planning to leave early Monday morning, as Fillmore had to be back on the job.  We spent Sunday drinking and carousing, clap or no clap.  That afternoon Collins confided to us that he was thinking of returning to his ranch in Idaho; he hadn't been home for eight years and he wanted to have a look at the mountains again before making another voyage East.  We were sitting in a whorehouse at the time, waiting for a girl to appear; he had promised to slip her some cocaine.  He was fed up with Le Havre, he told us.  Too many vultures hanging around his neck.  Besides, Jimmie's wife had fallen in love with him and she was making things hot for him with her jealous fits.  There was a scene almost every night.  She had been on her good behaviour since we arrived, but it wouldn't last, he promised us.  She was particularly jealous of a Russian girl who came to the bar now and then when she got tight.  A troublemaker.  On top of it all he was desperately in love with this boy whom he had told us about the first day.  "A boy who can break your heart," he said.  "He's so damned beautiful!  And so cruel!"  We had to laugh at this.  It sounded preposterous.  But Collins was in earnest.

      Around midnight Sunday Fillmore and I retired; we had been given a room upstairs over the bar.  It was sultry as the devil, not a breath of air stirring.  Through the open windows we could hear them shouting downstairs and the gramophone going continually.  All of a sudden a storm broke - a regular cloudburst.  And between the thunderclaps and the squalls that lashed the windowpanes there came to our ears the sound of another storm raging downstairs at the bar.  It sounded frightfully close and sinister; the women were shrieking at the tops of their lungs, bottles were crashing, tables were upset and there was that familiar, nauseating thud that the human body makes when it crashes to the floor.

      About six o'clock Collins stuck his head in the door.  His face was all plastered and one arm was stuck in a sling.  He had a big grin on his face.

      "Just as I told you," he said.  "She broke loose last night.  Suppose you heard the racket?"

      We got dressed quickly and went downstairs to say goodbye to Jimmie.  The place was completely demolished, not a bottle left standing, not a chair that wasn't broken.  The mirror and the show window were smashed to bits.  Jimmie was making himself an eggnog.

      On the way to the station we pieced the story together.  The Russian girl had dropped in after we toddled off to bed and Yvette had insulted her promptly, without even waiting for an excuse.  They had commenced to pull each other's hair and in the midst of it a big Swede had stepped in and given the Russian girl a sound slap in the jaw - to bring her to her senses.  That started the fireworks.  Collins wanted to know what right this big stiff had to interfere in a private quarrel.  He got a poke in the jaw for an answer, a good one that sent him flying to the other end of the bar.  "Serves you right!" screamed Yvette, taking advantage of the occasion to swing a bottle at the Russian girl's head.  And at that moment the thunderstorm broke loose.  For a while there was a regular pandemonium, the women all hysterical and hungry to seize the opportunity to pay off private grudges.  Nothing like a nice barroom brawl ... so easy to stick a knife in a man's back or club him with a bottle when he's lying under a table.  The poor Swede found himself in a hornet's nest; everyone in the place hated him, particularly his shipmates.  They wanted to see him done in.  And so they locked the door and, pushing the tables aside, they made a little space in front of the bar where the two of them could have it out.  And they had it out!  They had to carry the poor devil to the hospital when it was over.  Collins had come off rather lucky - nothing more than a sprained wrist and a couple of fingers out of joint, a bloody nose and a black eye.  Just a few scratches, as he put it.  But if he ever signed up with that Swede he was going to murder him.  It wasn't finished yet.  He promised us that.

      And that wasn't the end of the fracas either.  After that, Yvette had to go out and get liquored up at another bar.  She had been insulted and she was going to put an end to things.  And so she hires a taxi and orders the driver to ride out to the edge of the cliff overlooking the water.  She was going to kill herself, that's what she was going to do.  But then she was so drunk that when she tumbled out of the cab she began to weep and before anyone could stop her she had begun to peel her clothes off.  The driver brought her home that way, half-naked, and when Jimmie saw the condition she was in he was so furious with her that he took his razor strap and he belted the piss out of her, and she liked it, the bitch that she was.  "Do it some more!" she begged, down on her knees as she was and clutching him around the legs with her two arms.  But Jimmie had enough of it.  "You're a dirty old sow!" he said, and with his foot he gave her a shove in the guts that took the wind out of her - and a bit of her sexy nonsense too.

      It was high time we were leaving.  The city looked different in the early morning light.  The last thing we talked about, as we stood there waiting for the train to pull out, was Idaho.  The three of us were Americans.  We came from different places, each of us, but we had something in common - a whole lot, I might say.  We were getting sentimental, as Americans do when it comes time to part.  We were getting quite foolish about the cows and sheep and the big open spaces where men are men and all that crap.  If a boat had swung along instead of the train we'd have hopped aboard and said goodbye to it all.  But Collins was never to see America again, as I learned later, and Fillmore ... well, Fillmore has to take his punishment too, in a way that none of us could have suspected then.  It's best to keep America just like that, always in the background, a sort of picture postcard which you look at in a weak moment.  Like that, you imagine it's always there waiting for you, unchanged, unspoiled, a big patriotic open space with cows and sheep and tenderhearted men ready to bugger everything in sight, man, woman or beast.  It doesn't exist, America.  It's a name you give to an abstract idea....