Ruth Tolhurst Page Sixteen Who Dwell in the Dust (Continued from Page 3) "Oh, Fritzi? She's dressing. We're throwing a little party tonight. Hope you're not too tired. Fritzi can ring up Lila or Belle for you. Your wife won't mind, will she?" He laughed. Bill felt his face grow hot. But only for a moment. Al' ready Milford seemed like some lost valley partitioned off from the rest of the world. Fritzi. That was such a flippant name. Mary was so plain and common. It sounded as durable as broadcloth. He first saw Fritzi through a haze of cigarette smoke. She was small, lithe, exquisitely molded in black velvet. A white rose nestled in her frizz of black hair. He watched her flit about the room. "Not bad, is she?" he heard Rob's voice at his shoulder. He wondered what Mary would look like flitting through the rooms with a white flower nestling in her hair. He met them all that night. They seemed quite an eccentric group. Mike Lester, a trifle bitter and satirical, with his sleek black and impeccable clothes. Rob said that he had been mixed up in some shooting affair. Breen Gordon, a bloated stub of a man whose eyes looked like puddles of gray-green water. Then there were Kate and Belle. He looked at Belle lounging beside him, as listless as a hot summer day. Volup-tuous, streamlined. There was something almost unhealthy about the perfection of her round white face. And Kate? He had seen bold, audacious women like her posing on magazine covers. She had a wide scarlet mouth and a hungry look in her green eyes, lids drooping with mascasa. He felt those eyes sliding over him, looking at the cut of his clothes, the polish of his shoes. She came over by the table and began playing a stacatto tap-tap-tap with her finger nails. "Do you like Chicago?" He nodded. She smiled a wilted smile. "I'm sick of it. It's the same thing day after day." She draped her slender body over one of the chairs and preyed on the crowd with her strange eyes. Soon Bill found that he was fitting into their mad whirl' wind existence. They were night-hawks, all of them. They plunged into a frenzied round of dancing, gambling, enter' taining. There were night clubs, cabarets, house parties, honeyed voices purring in his ears, white shoulders gleaming, jewels flashing, tuxedoes, cigarettes, champagne. Their life was like a wheel spinning faster and faster, letting off a blind' ing scintillation of sparks. "When do you ever work around here?" he asked Rob one day. "We don't work. Only those poor fools in the factories and shops work. Why should we? We have money, investments." He laughed. "Does your conscience bother you?" No, he was too busy enjoying all the luxury of this cushioned existence to have a conscience. The days raced on, and he raced with them. One morning he saw Fritzi without her mask of powder and rouge. Her face was sallow and haggard. Her eyes were a little puffy and bloodshot. She looked like an old woman dragging herself through the apartment. Sometimes Rob looked old and haggard, too. His complexion was often gray and sickly, the color of damp paste. One night Bill lost three hundred dollars on the wheel. "Too bad, old boy," Rob laughed as he hung a cigarette on his lip. "Just a trifle, though." Just a trifle? It would have bought Mary a new fur coat or paid the first installment on a car. She would have liked a new coat. That same night Belle drank too much. They all laughed at her coarse clowning. She looked so ridiculous lolling there with a lugubrious expression on her round white face. They were all too giddy and reckless. Breen, who had drunk most of the night, swayed back and forth across the table. Bill watched them as they chattered, poked and slapped one another on the back. Kate was near him as usual, haunting him with her hungry green eyes. Fritzi was out dancing, whirling her slim tortuous body round and round until she became nothing but a red blur. His head began to spin with her. Now she looked like a red flame wavering up and down. Everything was becoming bizarre and fantastic like a twentieth century painting. He groped his way to the balcony, and looked at the reeling stars, and sank down on a couch. Was this what he wanted, all this confounded hilarity? He was startled by voices a man's, hoarse and breathy, a little drunken; a woman's, shrill and hysterical. "I won't have you toying around with other men, do you hear? I won't have you toying" "You dirty, drunken sop, get out of here." He recognized the woman's voice as Fritzi's and the man's as Rob's. "Get out?" Rob laughed drunkenly. "You cheating vixen. Telling me what to do when you're around spending my money, getting my" "You fool! No one wants your rotten money, you dirty penny-fisted lout!" Her voice crescendoed into a scream. He heard oaths. Then the door slammed. Suddenly he was sick of everything! Sick of toying with other men's wives. Sick of the bare white flesh, of the lacquered fingernails, the carmine lips, the cloying syncopated music. It was like playing a major role in an idiot's dream. There were throngs of people, people everywhere. He stumbled past them, laughing and chattering at their tiny tables. Glasses were tinkling. The orchestra was wailing on and on. The air was heavy with cigarette smoke. Somewhere a man was talking in a loud way, and a woman was laughing boisterously. Then the noise and the laughter faded away. The lights faded away. The great, sprawling city drenched in neon faded away. And he found himself on a train gliding through the darkness, thinking of a girl who was serene and beautiful like a pool of satiny, black water. There was a pagan loveliness about the night in Milford. Tiny white clouds like scraps of white chiffon floated across the sky. Moonlight, pale and fragile, flowed down the trunks of the locust trees and out onto the black earth. Far below he saw the creek winding through the shadowy meadows like a fillet of silver. It was almost as though he were returning from an evening at the club, where he had sat for a while and dreamed. Mary was immaculate in her white collar and cuffs. She was beautiful like a tranquil pool of satiny black water. Page Seventeen