Madame, does all this writing of the bullfights bore you?

Old lady: No, sir, I cannot say it does, but I can only read so much of it at one time.

I understand. A technical explanation is hard reading. It is like the simple directions which accompany any mechanical toy and which are incomprehensible.

Old lady: I would not say your book is that bad, sir.

Thank you. You encourage me, but is there nothing I can do to keep your interest from flagging?

Old lady: It does not flag. It is only that I get tired sometimes.

To give you pleasure then.

Old lady: You give me pleasure.

Thank you, Madame, but I mean in the way of writing or conversation.

Old lady: Well, sir, since we have stopped early to-day why do you not tell me a story?

About what, Madame?

Old lady: Anything you like, sir, except I would not like another one about the dead. I am a little tired of the dead.

Ah, Madame, the dead are tired too.

Old lady: No tireder than I am of hearing of them and I can speak my wishes. Do you know any of the kind of stories Mr. Faulkner writes?

A few, Madame, but told baldly they might not please you.

Old lady: Then do not tell them too baldly.

Madame, I will tell you a couple and see how short and how far from bald I can make them. What sort of story would you like first?

Old lady: Do you know any true stories about those unfortunate people?

A few, but in general they lack drama as do all tales of abnormality since no one can predict what will happen in the normal while all tales of the abnormal end much the same.

Old lady: Just the same I would like to hear one. I have been reading of these unfortunate people lately and they are very interesting to me.

All right, this is a very short one, but well written it could be tragic enough, but I will not try to write it but only to tell it quickly. I was eating at the Anglo-American Press Association lunch in Paris and sat next to the man who told this story. He was a poor newspaperman, a fool, a friend of mine, and a garrulous and dull companion and he lived at a hotel too expensive for his salary. He still held his job because the circumstances which were later to demonstrate how poor a newspaperman he was had not yet arisen. He told me at lunch that he had slept very badly the night before because there had been a row going on the whole night in the room next to his at the hotel. About two o'clock some one had knocked on his door and begged to be let in. The newspaperman had opened the door and a dark-haired young man about twenty in pyjamas and a new-looking dressing gown came into the room crying. At first he was too hysterical to make much sense except to give the newspaperman the impression that something horrible had been narrowly averted. It seemed this young man had arrived with his friend in Paris on that day's boat train. The friend, who was a little older, he had met only recently, but they had become great friends and he had accepted his friend's invitation to come abroad as his guest. His friend had plenty of money and he had none and their friendship had been a fine and beautiful one until tonight. Now everything in the world was ruined for him. He was without money, he would not see Europe, at this point he sobbed again, but nothing on earth would induce him to go back into that room. He was firm on this point. He would kill himself first. He really would. Just then there was another knock on the door and the friend who was also a fine, clean-cut-looking American youth wearing an equally new and expensive looking dressing gown came into the room. On the newspaperman asking him what this was all about he said it was nothing; his friend was overwrought from the trip. At this the first friend commenced crying again and said nothing on earth would make him go back in that room. He would kill himself, he said. He would absolutely kill himself. He went back, however, finally, after some very sensible reassuring pleading by the older friend and after the newspaperman had given them each a brandy and soda and advised them to cut it all out and get some sleep. The newspaperman did not know what it was all about, he said, but thought it was something funny all right, and anyway he went to sleep himself and was next awakened by what sounded like fighting in the next room and some one saying, "I didn't know it was that. Oh, I didn't know it was that! I won't! I won't!" followed by what the newspaperman described as a despairing scream. He hammered on the wall and the noise ceased, but he could hear one of the friends sobbing. He took it to be the same one who had sobbed earlier.

"Do you want any help?" the newspaperman asked. "Do you want me to get some one? What's the matter in there?"

There was no answer except the sobbing by the one friend. Then the other friend said, very clearly and distinctly, "Please mind your own business."

The newspaperman was angry at this and thought he would call the desk and have them both thrown out of the hotel, and he would have too if they had said anything more. As it was he told them to cut it out and went back to bed. He could not sleep very well because the one friend sobbed for quite a long while but finally ceased sobbing. The next morning he saw them at breakfast outside the Café de la Paix, chatting together happily, and reading copies of the Paris New York Herald. He pointed them out to me a day or two later riding together in an open taxi and I frequently saw them, after that, sitting on the terrace of the Café des Deux Magots.

Old lady: And is that all of the story? Is there not to be what we called in my youth a wow at the end?

Ah, Madame, it is years since I added the wow to the end of a story. Are you sure you are unhappy if the wow is omitted?

Old lady: Frankly, sir, I prefer the wow.

Then, Madame, I will not withhold it. The last time I saw the two they were sitting on the terrace of the Café des Deux Magots, wearing well-tailored clothes, looking clean cut as ever, except that the younger of the two, the one who had said he would kill himself rather than go back in that room, had had his hair hennaed.

Old lady: This seems to me a very feeble wow.

Madame, the whole subject is feeble and too hearty a wow would overbalance it. Would you like me to relate another story?

Old lady: Thank you, sir. But this will be enough for to-day.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

You read of bulls in the old days accepting thirty, forty, fifty and even seventy pics from the picadors while to-day a bull that can take seven pics is an amazing animal, and it seems as though things were very different in those days and the bullfighters must have been such men as were the football players on the high-school team when we were still in grammar school. Things change very much and instead of great athletes only children play on the high-school teams now and if you sit with the older men at the café you know there are no good bullfighters now either; they are all children without honor, skill or virtue, much the same as those children who now play football, a feeble game it has become, on the high-school team and nothing like the great, mature, sophisticated athletes in canvas-elbowed jerseys, smelling vinegary from sweated shoulder pads, carrying leather headguards, their moleskins clotted with mud, that walked on leather-cleated shoes that printed in the earth along beside the sidewalk in the dusk, a long time ago.

There were always giants in those days and the bulls really did accept that many pics, the contemporary accounts prove, but the pics were different. In the oldest old days the pic had a very small steel triangular tip so wrapped and protected that only that small tip could go into the bull. The picadors received the bull with their horse straight toward him, drove the pic at him and as they held him off pivoted the horse to the left freeing him from the charge and letting the bull go by. A bull, even a modern bull, could accept a large number of those pics since the steel did not cut into him deeply and it was a move of address on the part of the picador rather than a deliberately sought shock and punishment.