794
PARTISAN REVIEW
begun with large expert gestures from which occasionally a glass would
fall, break unnoticed at his feet, to mix drinks: Alexanders, Mint
Juleps, an improvisation we called the Little Joe ("It kills you!")–
we broke into speech.
"Gin is vulgar," Hal said. "There is
nothing
more vulgar than
gin !"
"You read it in a book," I told him, "a book you'd be afraid
to be caught reading. Snobbism!"
But there were suddenly tears in Carrie's eyes, more guessed at
then really seen behind the concealing discs of brightness on their
wire frames. "The sons-of bitches," she crooned softly, "the sons-of–
bitches! How those old women, pitiable old women, are talking about
me. Whispering!" She could not have been drunk really, for she had
matched us only one drink for four or five, sadness glinting off her
amusement like the light off those opaque lenses, our absurdity and
her love anomalous in their common dilemma.
"Sons-of-bitches is masculine," Hal said reproachfully.
"True, but at least it's the correct plural. For that we must be
grateful. There are some vulgar louts who say 'son-of-a-bitches.'
That
we frown on." It seemed very important to me.
"That we frown on," Hal echoed, clasping me about the should–
ers and we frowned on it together, friends forever, gallantly in the
fading light-
"Life in that school is getting impossible for me." The improb–
able cigarette, snuffed, dropped from her hand. "I swear I shall-"
she searched for the apt word in our dull eyes, rigid in their pretty
pink orbits.
"Revolt!" we told her, "Rebel! Throw the bosses off your backs!"
We taught her the words of the "Internationale" and marched
for her, rather decorously we thought, though the furniture insidiously
attacked us, fluid and unfaithful, across the genteel room, the hump
of the world, singing it. "'Tis the final conflict. . . . "
The barricades were up and our warm blood gleamed at us from
the rug's softness, from the bottles' secret ambush of color. Oh,
they were all proud of us!
And we were proud of each other; we loved each other so;
trapped in our singular integrity, we faced without tears the con–
spiracy of the unjustifiable world.
