He had been stronger than all of them in his contempt and his derision of “damned foreigners.” Now he knew Romano, a young Italian, a clerk by occupation, but a painter by profession. Now he brought him home, and Romano cooked spaghetti. He met other ones as well—Mr. Chung, a Chinese merchant on Pell Street, and a scholar of the ancient poetry; a Spaniard working as a bus boy in a restaurant; a young Jew from the East Side. Alsop was strong in the profession of his nativeness, but the new and strange—the dark, the foreign, and the mixed—appealed to him.
And yet he loved the South—no doubt of that. He went back every Christmas. First he stayed two weeks, and then ten days, and then a week, and presently he was back in three days’ time. But he loved the South—and he never failed to come back with a fund of bright new stories, of warmth and sentiment and homely laughter; with the latest news of Miss Willsie, of Merriman, his cousin, and of Ed Wetherby, and of his aunt. Miss Caroline; and of all the other simple, sweet, and lovable people “down there” that he had found.
And yet, in his all-mothering nature. Alsop’s soul had room for many things. He chuckled and agreed with all the others, he was himself sharp-tongued and scornful of the city ways, but suddenly he would heave and wheeze with a Pickwickian toleration, he would be filled with warm admissions for this alien place. “Still, you’ve got to hand it to them!” he would say. “It’s the damnedest place on earth…the most glorious, crazy, perfectly wonderful, magnificent, god-damned town that ever was!” And he would rummage around among a pile of junk, a mountain of old magazines and clippings, until he found and read to them a poem by Don Marquis.
CHAPTER 15
G?tterd?mmerung
It was not a bad life that they had that year. It was, in many ways, a good one. It was, at all events, a constantly exciting one. Jim Randolph was their leader, their benevolent but stern dictator.
Jim was thirty now, and he had begun to realize what had happened to him. He could not accept it. He could not face it. He was living in the past, but the past could not come back again. Monk and the others didn’t think about it at that time, but later they knew why he needed them, and why all the people that he needed were so young. They represented the lost past to him. They represented his lost fame. They represented the lost glory of his almost forgotten legend. They brought it back to him with their devotion, their idolatrous worship. They restored a little of it to him. And when they began to sense what had happened, all of them were a little sad.
Jim was a newspaper man now. He had a job working for one of the great agencies of international information, the Federal Press. He liked the work, too. He had, like almost all Southerners, an instinctive and romantic flair for news, but even in his work the nature of his thought was apparent. He had, as was natural, a desire for travel, an ambition to be sent to foreign countries as correspondent. But the others never heard him say that he would like to go to Russia, where the most important political experiment of modern times was taking place, or to England, Germany, or the Scandinavian countries. He wanted to go to places which had for him associations of romance and glamorous adventure. He wanted to be sent to South America, to Spain, to Italy, to France, or to the Balkans. He always wanted to go to a place where life was soft and warm and gallant, where romance was in the air, and where, as he thought, he could have the easy love of easy women. (And there, in fact, to one of these countries, he did go finally. There he went and lived a while, and there he died.)
Jim’s feeling for news, although keen and brilliantly colorful, was, like his whole vision of life, more or less determined by the philosophy of the playing field. In spite of his experience in the World War, he was still fascinated by war, which he regarded as the embodiment of personal gallantry. A war to him was a kind of gigantic sporting contest, an international football game, which gave the star performers on both sides an opportunity to break loose around the flanks on a touchdown dash. Like a Richard Harding Davis character, he not only wanted to see a war and report a war, he wanted also to play a part in war, a central and heroic part. In his highly personal and subjective view of the news, Jim saw each event as somehow shaped for the projection of his own personality.