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Skateboard Video
Archiving the City from
Below

Duncan McDuie-Ra
 Skateboard Video

“In crisp, engaging prose, McDuie-Ra recognizes the rich resource that skate-
boarding video provides for tracing urban transformation at a variety of scales.
In framing such media as an unparalleled window on how our city spaces—
from the quotidian to the spectacular—are experienced, McDuie-Ra’s analysis
does what only the best urban research can achieve, offering a profound and
previously ignored vantage point for understanding the intimacies that evolve
between humans and their shared built environments. And it does so in the
context of media and performances of urban skateboarding that are in turn
masterful, subversive, obnoxious, artful, problematic, beautiful, and startling.”
—John Carr, UNSW, Australia

“In this engaging and provocative work McDuie-Ra’s metaphor is powerful; here
is a culture that documents itself ‘from below’. By adopting the video camera
as a ritual item, skateboarders have created an informal archive of urban life and
social change. In studying these videos, the author invites us to become inti-
mately familiar with the overlooked corners of cities across the globe, presenting
an informal index of development and austerity, and an extraordinary resource
for academic study. This clear and accessible voice questions the central tenets
of skateboard culture, showing that through video, skateboarders can be respon-
sible delinquents, and inclusive elitists who cherish and honour their history. A
remarkable text that urges the reader to reconsider the ways we archive urbanism,
occupy space, and think of race.”
—Paul O’Connor, author of Skateboarding and Religion

“In an era when footage speaks louder than words, McDuie-Ra convinces us that
we can perceive and understand cities from an alternative, yet novel perspective.
This is a highly readable and intriguing work for urban sub-cultural scholars
interested in conducting media-based archival research or content analysis, as well
as for those seeking an in-depth depiction of skaters’ embodied and socio-cultural
experience.”
—Chihsin Chiu, National Taiwan University
 Duncan McDuie-Ra

Skateboard Video
Archiving the City from Below
Duncan McDuie-Ra
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
University of Newcastle Australia
Callaghan, NSW, Australia

ISBN 978-981-16-5698-9 ISBN 978-981-16-5699-6 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5699-6

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Singapore Pte Ltd.
The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore
189721, Singapore
 Acknowledgements

Thank you to everyone who gave permission for screenshots: Aaron

Meza, Elias Markkula at DUMBØ, Guillaume Perimony, Izrayl Brinsdon,
Jason Hernandez, Joe Pease, Josh Stewart, Justin Albert, Kirill Korobkov,
Laura and Olga from Visit Tampere, Mackenzie Eisenhower, Michael
Furukawa at Powell Peralta, Pontus Alv, Shari White. I really appreciate
your generosity, care, and for sitting in gutters for hours to archive urban
history.
Thanks to Mackenzie Eisenhower, James Turvey, Sean Musset, John
Carr, Mikko Kyrönviita, Chris Butters, Adam and Laura at LAATE,
Luke O’Donnell, Izrayl Brinsdon, Andrew Nash and Paul O’Connor for
discussing video memories with me while I was working on this book.
Thanks as always to the Ship Inn for giving lots of us a place to have
these discussions and also to ensure our vital organs get a good workout.
Thanks to Ian Michna and Alexis Castro at JENKEM for your interest and
support in academic work about skateboarding. Thanks to Death Breath
Skateboards for keeping custom wood under my feet during this process.
Thanks to Julie McIntyre, Hedda Askland and Kate Senior for talking
about memory and archiving with me over the last couple of years. And
for going on walks to look at weird stuff in the middle of the day.
Thank you to all the people who pirated and shared skate videos with
me in the late 1980s to the late 1990s. I learned a lot about cities without
even knowing it.

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to Vick and Pops for indulging my desire for skate videos
growing up—thank goodness for Video Ezy!
Thank you to Joshua Pitt at Palgrave and the anonymous reviewers of
the manuscript for invaluable input. Thank you to my human and non-
human family, as always.
 Contents

1 Introduction: Archiving the Urban Backstage 1

Animating and Archiving 7
Structure of the Book 13
Approaching This Book 17
2 Archiving Without Archives 21
Memories on Video 22
The Memory Ecology of Skate Video 26
Premieres to Platforms 30
Fragility 44
3 Archiving Urban Space 49
The Secret Lives of Spots 50
On/Off the Map 54
Mutants of the Sprawl 62
4 Archiving Delinquency 79
Skater Versus Citizen 80
Self-Destructive Delinquency 86
Authentic Delinquency 90
Reformed Delinquency 92
5 Archiving Diversity 99
The Myth of Radical Inclusion 100
Gender 101
Race 107

vii
viii CONTENTS

6 Conclusion 123
Lenin Plaza 124
Open Archive or Closed Loop? 128

Bibliography 133
Index 151
 List of Images

Image 1.1 Pioneering street skater Tommy Guerrero pushing

through San Francisco in Future Primitive capturing
the backstage in a definitive slice of space–time
(Directed by Stacey Peralta, 1985. Screenshot. Used
with permission) 4
Image 1.2 Breana Geering impossible into the famous China Banks
in San Francisco in Credits (Directed by Shari White,
2020. Screenshot. Used with permission) 6
Image 1.3 Ishod Wair making a California pavement famous in SB
Chronicles 2 (Directed by Jason Hernandez, 2013.
Screenshot. Used with permission) 9
Image 1.4 Soy Panday skating Paris in Static III (Directed by Josh
Stewart, 2007. Screenshot. Used with permission) 12
Image 2.1 Jaakko Ojanen evoking Wallenberg in Tampere Skatecity
(Directed by DUMBØ, 2019. Screenshot. Used
with permission) 25
Image 2.2 Mark Suciu at New York’s famous black Hubba
(a.k.a Blubba) in the instant classic Verso (Directed
by Justin Albert, 2019. Screenshot. Used
with permission) 37
Image 2.3 Japanese pro-skater Shin Sanbongi skating the backstage
of New York in We Blew it at Some Point, by Polar Skate
Co. (which started in Sweden) (Directed by Pontus Alv,
2018. Screenshot. Used with permission) 38

ix
x LIST OF IMAGES

Image 3.1 Multimedia by Mackenzie Eisenhower (Used

with permission. Original caption reads: ‘Maps 308:
Out front of San Pasqual High there is also the sealed
off rail that Duffy notoriously front 50d twice
in a row for Questionable [92] and also famously
carries on to slappy the curb and tre flip right
after. Spot photo still from @blairlylegal. Thanks B!
Escondido, CA. #questionablestarmaps #schoolqmaps
#skatenerdstarmaps’) 51
Image 3.2 Multimedia by Mackenzie Eisenhower (Used
with permission. Original caption reads: ‘Maps
390: another Video Days spot in the March
towards documenting every spot in that video;
@blair.alley and @clintscorner skated past the old Pioneer
Chicken curbs recently and shot this pic. Sequence
of course is @rudyjohnson’s kickflip back lip [Video
Days/1991]. Rudy also cab back tails the curb against
the wall. Clint, let me know if you can shoot a pic
of that one too. Cheers dudes and big ups to Rudy. Spot
is now a Little Caesar’s, 1321 Echo Park Ave. LA, CA
90026. #videodaysstarmaps #skatenerdstarmaps #1991
#justlikeadream’) 53
Image 3.3 Ray Barbee performs a nose-pick on part of the Wilshire
ledges adjacent to J. Kwon in Ban This! (Directed
by Stacey Peralta, 1989. Screenshot. Used
with Permission. This area has been part of street
skateboarding for over 30 years and, along with the LA
River, the spots have persevered through crackdowns
by authorities, changing tenants and demographic shifts
in different parts of the city) 61
Image 3.4 Rowan Davis enrolling Newcastle’s backstage in Meadow
(Directed by Izrayl Brinsdon, 2019. Screenshot. Used
with Permission) 72
Image 4.1 Ray Barbee, Steve Saiz, Eric Sanderson, Chet
Thomas, and Jim Thiebaud skate the ‘cultural detritus
of an abandoned manufacturing facility’ in Public
Domain (Directed by Stacey Peralta and Craig Stecyk,
1988. Screenshot. Used with Permission) 83
Image 4.2 Jarne Verbruggen is hit with a flower pot thrown
from above in Jarne Verbruggen’s “Professional Life”
(Directed by Guillaume Perimony, 2020. Screenshot.
Used with Permission) 88
 LIST OF IMAGES xi

Image 5.1 Fabiana Delfino under the eye of law enforcement

in Credits (Directed by Shari White, 2020. Screenshot.
Used with Permission) 104
Image 5.2 Daewon Song exercising memory skating through
his old Gardena neighbourhood in Daewon (Directed
by Joe Pease, 2019. Screenshot. Used with permission) 113
Image 5.3 Pat Washington at the famous Pier 7 in San Francisco
in Penal Code 100A (Directed by Aaron Meza, 1996.
Screenshot. Used with permission) 119
Image 5.4 Laurence Keefe in the Evisen Video (Directed by Katsumi
Minami, 2017. Screenshot. Used with Permission) 121
Image 6.1 Alexey Krasniy in Lenin Plaza (Directed by Dima
Kononov and Kirill Korobkov, 2020. Screenshot. Used
with Permission) 126
Image 6.2 Taylor Nawrocki in Admit One (Directed by Josh
Stewart, 2021. Screenshot. Used with permission) 130
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Archiving the Urban Backstage

Abstract This chapter offers a brief history of skate video before making
a case for its value as an archive of the city from below. ‘Below’ has
a dual meaning here. One, below as an unofficial or ‘rebel’ archive, a
subaltern history of urban space. Two, below as the angle from which
skateboarders and filmers gaze upon the city, capture it on video, and
the angle from which it is viewed. I discuss the surprising underappreci-
ation of skate video and skateboarding more generally in scholarship on
cities; odd given the boon in attention to infrastructure, urban landscapes
and their cultural imaginaries, debates about urban theory in the Global
South and Global North, low-end globalisation, urban performance, and
urban media among other themes. In response to this unappreciation, I
consider the alignment of skate video with existing scholarship that exper-
iments with the city as an archive. I argue that skate video is a record of
ethnographic practice and an object of ethnographic inquiry, making it a
durable media object to analyse an otherwise fleeting act of urban spec-
tacle. The chapter closes with a breakdown of the book’s chapters and a
short section on approaching the text.

Keywords Skateboarding · Skate video · Archive · Living archive ·

Urban backstage

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021
D. McDuie-Ra, Skateboard Video,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5699-6_1
2 D. MCDUIE-RA

This is short book about skateboard video. By putting skate video at

the centre of analysis I advocate for taking skate video seriously to
explore the urban backstage,1 recent urban history, creative urban prac-
tice, urban encounters (people-to-people and people-to-object/s), and
the globalisation of a subculture at once delinquent and magnificent.
From the early 1980s, skateboarding has been captured on film, video
tape, and digital memory cards, edited into consumable forms and circu-
lated around the world, circulating slowly at first before accelerating
rapidly with changes to digital communications technology and video
hosting platforms. Commonly referred to simply as ‘skate video’ regard-
less of method of capture or form,2 every skateboarder has seen a skate
video. Most have seen hundreds, maybe thousands; especially as the
format has shifted from full-length videos running for 60–90 minutes
purchased or pirated onto VHS cassettes and DVDs to shorter videos
(20–30 minutes) and stand-alone video parts (3–10 minutes) circulated
online.
In any one moment skaters are in city streets performing physical
and creative feats, making mischief, encountering and reinterpreting the

1 The urban backstage is a metaphor for the mundane, unspectacular backblocks of

an urban landscape, and across different urban landscapes. These may be planned or
unplanned, dense of sprawling, working class or gentrifying. Regardless, the backstage are
the patches of the city rarely noticed and rarely captured on video and/or image and
consumed by a globally dispersed audience. The term is most effectively deployed by
Robina Mohammad and James Sidaway in their work on Abu-Dhabi. They differentiate
between the urban ‘frontstage’, the landscape of spectacle for display and consumption,
and ‘the city’s mundane backstage’, ‘inhabited by those whose labour enables the spectacle
and supports the lifestyles of the elite’. See Robina Mohammad and James D. Sidaway.
“Spectacular Urbanization Amidst Variegated Geographies of Globalization: Learning from
Abu Dhabi’s Trajectory Through the Lives of South Asian Men.” International Journal
of Urban and Regional Research 36, no. 3 (2012): 610.
2 Skate video has been filmed on Hi-8 and VHS tape through its early years, though
some companies spliced this with footage captured on film and Betacam. The Sony
VX1000 was launched in 1995 and became wildly popular with skate filmers following the
release of the MK1 fisheye lens in 1998. While various HD cameras have become stan-
dard in capturing skate video—along with mobile phones and other portable devices—the
VX1000 remains popular as it retains a look and feel of videos shot in the ‘golden age’
of skate video from 1999–2007. For a history of the VX1000 see Nic Doobija-Nootens,
“Tracing the History of Skateboarding’s Most Famous Camera.” Jenkem, 13 July 2018.
Available at: http://www.jenkemmag.com/home/2018/07/13/tracing-history-skateboar
dings-most-famous-camera/. Accessed 4 January 2019.
 1 INTRODUCTION: ARCHIVING THE URBAN BACKSTAGE 3

built environment,3 encountering other bodies (authorities, bystanders,

and spectators), shedding skin, leaking blood, and making connections
with other skaters across racial, class, and cultural boundaries. There
is something like 20–60 million skateboarders around the world.4 The
industry is estimated to be worth almost $2 billion US Dollars.5 Despite
this popularity, in its core form skateboarding involves illegal or semi-
illegal acts; friction between delinquency and profitability. Skateboarding
requires loitering, trespassing, vandalising, and liberating urban objects
(see Image 1.1). Skateboarding subculture has its own internal mores
while simultaneously coveted by grander agents of capitalism from ‘action

3 Iain Borden puts this beautifully in his landmark 2001 book on skateboarding, archi-
tecture, and space. He writes that these interrelationships are ‘not so much a specific
place (for skateboarding occurs in cities across the world), specific moment (for skate-
boarding changes over the course of a 40-year history) or specific person or persons
(skateboarding is practised predominantly by nameless millions), but is a practice, a
particular patterning of space–time produced from a specific body-centred origin’. Iain
Borden. Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body (London/New
York: Bloomsbury, 2001/2013), 12.
4 Estimates vary wildly because it is very hard to track. Skateboarding does not require
registration nor association. Skateboarders don’t ‘show up’ in the ways formalised activities
might. Sales of product may be indicative but are very difficult to capture in multiple
markets (who tracks skateboards manufactured and sold in Indonesia?). The same goes
for production. It is also difficult to align sales of product with number of skateboarders.
A skateboard deck (the wooden part you stand on) may last one skater a year and
another skater a week. The second skater might go through 40 or 50 skate decks in a
year but is just a single body in a demographic count. Skaters who self-identify could be
someone who skates occasionally, or someone who skates every day. Some skaters may
not pick up their board for years, but still identify as a skater and still consume skate
videos and buy apparel and shoes. Some skaters start and give up within a few months.
Some keep going for decades. Where does this leave the estimate of the number of
skaters globally? Hazy. Literature quotes various figures ranging from 20 to 60 million
skaters worldwide and these figures are probably as good as any. For a discussion see Paul
O’Connor. “Skateboarding, Helmets, and Control: Observations from Skateboard Media
and a Hong Kong Skatepark.” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 40, no. 6 (2016): 478.
In a sense it doesn’t really matter for the purposes of this book. The point is that this
is far from a marginal activity. And therefore, skate video is far from a marginal cultural
artefact.
5 Figures are thrown around all the time with little detail at how they are calcu-
lated. I am never sure if this figure includes the industry outside the US or not. In
a 2020 magazine article, Mackenzie Eisenhower, a long running editor and journalist
in skateboard media puts the value of the industry at 1.9 billion USD. See Mackenzie
Eisenhower. “Skateboarding Culture in Dogtown, Los Angeles.” WestJet Magazine, 16
June 2020. Available at: https://www.westjetmagazine.com/story/article/dogtown-los-
angeles. Accessed 10 July 2020. Of all people, Eisenhower would know!
4 D. MCDUIE-RA

Image 1.1 Pioneering street skater Tommy Guerrero pushing through San
Francisco in Future Primitive capturing the backstage in a definitive slice of
space–time (Directed by Stacey Peralta, 1985. Screenshot. Used with permission)

sports’ broadcasters to upscale fashion brands. City and town planners

covet skateboarding too, especially as an element in the so-called ‘creative
city,’6 while also cracking down on skateboarding or at least trying to
contain it in designated skate parks.
Significant too is the globalisation of skateboarding, which has intensi-
fied in the last two decades. Thriving communities of skaters can be found
from Ethiopia to Palestine, from Brazil to Russia, along with the ‘discov-
ery’ of iconic skate cities like Barcelona, Shenzhen, Milan, and Seoul. This
has de-centred Californian cities from the centre of the skateboarding
universe, though much of the industry remains based here.

6 See Ocean Howell. “The ‘Creative Class’ and the Gentrifying City: Skateboarding
in Philadelphia’s Love Park.” Journal of Architectural Education 59, no. 2 (2005): 32–
42; Kara-Jane Lombard. “Skate and Create/Skate and Destroy: The Commercial and
Governmental Incorporation of Skateboarding.” Continuum 24, no. 4 (2010): 475–488;
Oli Mould. Urban Subversion and the Creative City (London: Routledge, 2015); Gregory
J. Snyder. “The City and the Subculture Career: Professional Street Skateboarding in LA.”
Ethnography 13, no. 3 (2012): 306–329.
 1 INTRODUCTION: ARCHIVING THE URBAN BACKSTAGE 5

These dynamics—cultural, social, political, economic—warrant schol-

arly inquiry in several fields and disciplines interested in cities and the
people and things who make them: from anthropology to sociology,
history to cultural studies, architecture to media studies. And yet, skate-
boarding remains underappreciated in academia. I suspect this is in part
because of its liminality. Skateboarding is not quite a sport, not quite a
discreet culture, not quite political, not quite radical, not quite (or no
longer) rebellious, not quite capitalism, not quite adult—yet is also all
these things in small ways. There are several landmark studies on skate-
boarding transcending different disciplines7 ; blazing a trail that make this
book on skate video possible. However, the level of scholarly attention is
incommensurate with skateboarding’s presence out there in the world.
This underappreciation is weird. Skate scholarship tends to be put in a
novelty box, even when research is published in high-end discipline and
area-specific journals. It never seems to ‘cut through’ to scholars with
parallel interests despite speaking to themes of concern across different
fields. Skateboarding, as practice and as subculture, is entangled with
elements of modernity that preoccupy scholars of cities: infrastructure and
its intended and unintended publics, ‘socio-technical systems’ and their
glitches,8 laws governing space and their transgression,9 comparability of
cities between and within the Global North and Global South,10 low-end

7 Iain Borden. Skateboarding and the City: A Complete History (London: Blooms-
bury Publishing, 2019); Borden. Skateboarding, Space and City; Kara-Jane Lombard
(Ed.). Skateboarding: Subcultures, Sites and Shifts (New York: Routledge, 2015); Paul
O’Connor. Skateboarding and Religion (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); Gregory J.
Snyder, Skateboarding LA: Inside Professional Street Skateboarding (New York: NYU Press,
2017).
8 Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift. Seeing Like a City (Cambridge: Polity, 2017).
9 John Carr. “Legal Geographies—Skating Around the Edges of the Law: Urban Skate-
boarding and the Role of Law in Determining Young Peoples’ Place in the City.” Urban
Geography 31, no. 7 (2010): 988–1003.
10 Jennifer Robinson. “Comparisons: Colonial or Cosmopolitan?” Singapore Journal of
Tropical Geography 32, no. 2 (2011): 125–140.
6 D. MCDUIE-RA

Image 1.2 Breana Geering impossible into the famous China Banks in San
Francisco in Credits (Directed by Shari White, 2020. Screenshot. Used with
permission)

globalisation,11 playful media practices,12 the somaesthetics of unsanc-

tioned urban performance,13 urban subcultures, and the decay, renewal,
and creation of urban landscapes in different polities.
As will be argued in the chapters that follow, skateboarders from
diverse sexual, gendered, racial, and national identities—and the photog-
raphers and filmers that roll alongside them—have an intimate knowledge
of these elements that preoccupy scholars; yet skateboarding’s artefacts
and archives are rarely consulted (Image 1.2). Skaters are generous with
modernity and will follow its material manifestations anywhere provided
there are objects, obstacles, and smooth surfaces to skate; downtown to

11 Gordon Mathews. Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong
Kong (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
12 René Glas, Sybille Lammes, Michiel Lange, Joost Raessens, and Imar Vries. “The
Playful Citizen: An Introduction.” In René Glas, Sybille Lammes, Michiel Lange, Joost
Raessens, and Imar Vries (Eds.). The Playful Citizen (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2019), 9–29.
13 Richard Shusterman. “Bodies in the Streets and the Somaesthetics of City Life.”
In Richard Shusterman (Ed.). Bodies in the Streets: The Somaesthetics of City Life (Leiden:
Brill, 2019), 1–10.
 1 INTRODUCTION: ARCHIVING THE URBAN BACKSTAGE 7

the suburbs, metropolitan to regional, Global North to Global South,

hyper-modern urban landscapes to new frontiers. Skate videos have circu-
lated widely and proliferated rapidly, following skateboarding which itself
follows urbanisation, urban renewal, and urban decay. In the process
skate video archives the city from below. ‘Below’ has a dual meaning in
this book. One, below as an unofficial or ‘radical’ archive14 ; a subaltern
history of urban space. Two, below as the angle from which skateboarders
and filmers capture the city, from ‘below the knees’.15

Animating and Archiving

Imagining the city as archive is not new.16 As Michael Sheringham puts it
in his conversation with Richard Wentworth published in cultural geogra-
phies, ‘to think of a city as an archive is to think in terms of dynamic
process, restless motion, multiple chronologies and levels of meaning’.17
Skateboarding speaks to all these elements. It is dynamic as a craft,
driven by the ‘ethos of progression’18 and responds to the dynamics
of material change in the city itself—skaters are constantly seeking out
new spots as established spots are demolished, surveilled, or rendered

14 David Zeitlyn. “Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contin-
gent Pasts. Archives as Anthropological Surrogates.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41
(2012): 461–480.
15 Francisco Vivoni. “Spots of Spatial Desire: Skateparks, Skateplazas, and Urban
Politics.” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 33, no. 2 (2009): 130–149.
16 There are countless works that use the metaphor of ‘the archive’ and ‘archiving’ to
describe both ways of reading the city (through media and ethnographic practice) and
the ways the city provides readings. Much of this work is inspired one way or another
by Walter Benjamin. See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland
and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). For recent
work on archiving the city from (radically) different perspectives, see Samuel Burgum.
“This City Is An Archive: Squatting History and Urban Authority.” Journal of Urban
History (2020): https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144220955165; Ed Charlton. “Trashing
Johannesburg: Ponte City-as-Archive of Everyday Loss.” Cultural Geographies 27, no.
2 (2020): 277–292; Maura Finkelstein. The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill
Land Mumbai (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019); Kevin Hetherington. “Rhythm
and Noise: The City, Memory and the Archive.” The Sociological Review 61 (2013): 17–
33; Les Roberts. Film, Mobility and Urban Space: A Cinematic Geography of Liverpool
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). There are scores of others. Happy searching!
17 Michael Sheringham and Richard Wentworth. “City as Archive: A Dialogue Between
Theory and Practice.” Cultural Geographies 23, no. 3 (2016): 519.
18 Snyder Skateboarding LA, 70.
8 D. MCDUIE-RA

unskateable. Skateboarding is restlessness embodied. It is motion gener-

ated by the itch, the need, the compulsion to roll through the urban
landscape and repurpose its surfaces, obstacles, shapes, and objects. Skate-
boarding has its own chronologies of the urban backstage; life stories
of a cement ledge or handrail or gap in the pavement are chronicled
on alternative timelines and studied, learned, and circulated as parallel
‘mental furniture’.19 Assemblages created for other purposes entirely have
deep meaning for skateboarders, they have a subcultural significance, their
own histories, and they draw skaters from other cities, other countries, to
what are otherwise unremarkable chunks of material. All these elements
are captured, circulated, and archived in skate video. In her archiving of
loss in de-industrialising Mumbai through creating and then analysing an
ethnographic archive, Maura Finkelstein writes, ‘I am seeking to expand
the form of the archive to access an orientation of knowledge that has
been disappeared or overlooked’.20 While skate video is not overlooked
by skateboarders, it is overlooked by others attempting to come to grips
with the city from below.
Skateboarding differs from more durable texts, objects, and juxtaposi-
tions in the urban landscape in that it is a momentary act of repurposing.
As Iain Borden writes in Skateboarding, Space and the City,

[s]kateboarding shows that pre-existing uses of space are not the only
possible ones, that architecture can instead be productive of things, and
consumed by activities which are not explicitly commodified. Buildings,
architecture and urban space, we might propose, should be thought of as
places of use, love, objects and concepts all at once.21

Skateboarders covet and then shred the material objects, surfaces, and
obstacles of urban space. In seeking out particular assemblages, they
uncover forgotten patches of the city, enlivening forgotten histories,
while also making their own history in skate culture (Image 1.3). The
moment of performance, fleeting but with years of preparation and
honing preceding it, is swift, a few seconds perhaps. For the skilled, these
few seconds are captured on skate video, archiving the landscape and the

19 Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton. Cartographies of Time: A History of the

Timeline (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010), 10.
20 Finkelstein. The Archive of Loss, 6.
21 Borden. Skateboarding, Space and the City, 247.
 1 INTRODUCTION: ARCHIVING THE URBAN BACKSTAGE 9

Image 1.3 Ishod Wair making a California pavement famous in SB Chronicles

2 (Directed by Jason Hernandez, 2013. Screenshot. Used with permission)

moment in a form instantly recognised and celebrated by its intended

audience.
Skate video features skateboarders preforming manoeuvres (tricks) or
sequences of manoeuvres (lines) in, on, and through urban and suburban
landscapes around the world. There is footage from skate parks and skate
ramps, competitions, tours, and demos too; however, the ethos of most
skate video (especially since the 1990s) has been footage captured in the
streets (without permission or sanction). As such, skate video presents
intimate symbiosis, fusing bodies, skateboards, and the built environ-
ment.22 It compiles these moments into chunks known as ‘parts’.23 A
standard part of 3–7 minutes in length would usually be compiled over a
year or two from footage captured in multiple cities. Each successful trick
might be on screen for only a few seconds, and therefore a part might

22 Borden. Skateboarding, Space and the City, 105.

23 Parts once referred to sections of a larger whole. A standards skate video might have
between 5 and 15 parts; usually each part features one skater, or perhaps a montage of
skaters. As stand-alone skate videos featuring one skater have become more common since
the 2010s, there are fewer long videos, fewer ‘wholes’ from which to isolate a particular
‘part’. However, the descriptor ‘video part’ has stuck. It is almost akin to an act; allowing
for both a single act and an act as part of a longer play.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of All the Sad
Young Men
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
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you are located before using this eBook.

Title: All the Sad Young Men

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Release date: June 4, 2022 [eBook #68229]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Scribner's sons, 1926

Credits: Laura Natal Rodrigues (Images generously made available

by Hathi Trust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ALL THE

SAD YOUNG MEN ***
ALL THE SAD YOUNG MEN

By
 F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1926

TO
RING AND ELLIS LARDNER

CONTENTS

THE RICH BOY

WINTER DREAMS
THE BABY PARTY
ABSOLUTION
RAGS MARTIN-JONES AND THE PR-NCE OF W-LES
THE ADJUSTER
HOT AND COLD BLOOD
"THE SENSIBLE THING"
GRETCHEN'S FORTY WINKS

THE RICH BOY

Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you
have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have
created—nothing. That is because we are all queer fish, queerer
behind our faces and voices than we want any one to know or than
we know ourselves. When I hear a man proclaiming himself an
"average, honest, open fellow," I feel pretty sure that he has some
definite and perhaps terrible abnormality which he has agreed to
conceal—and his protestation of being average and honest and
open is his way of reminding himself of his misprision.
There are no types, no plurals. There is a rich boy, and this is his
and not his brothers' story. All my life I have lived among his brothers
but this one has been my friend. Besides, if I wrote about his
brothers I should have to begin by attacking all the lies that the poor
have told about the rich and the rich have told about themselves—
such a wild structure they have erected that when we pick up a book
about the rich, some instinct prepares us for unreality. Even the
intelligent and impassioned reporters of life have made the country
of the rich as unreal as fairy-land.
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you
and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to
them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are
trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to
understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than
we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges
of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or
sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They
are different. The only way I can describe young Anson Hunter is to
approach him as if he were a foreigner and cling stubbornly to my
point of view. If I accept his for a moment I am lost—I have nothing
to show but a preposterous movie.

II

Anson was the eldest of six children who would some day divide a
fortune of fifteen million dollars, and he reached the age of reason—
is it seven?—at the beginning of the century when daring young
women were already gliding along Fifth Avenue in electric "mobiles."
In those days he and his brother had an English governess who
spoke the language very clearly and crisply and well, so that the two
boys grew to speak as she did—their words and sentences were all
crisp and clear and not run together as ours are. They didn't talk
exactly like English children but acquired an accent that is peculiar to
fashionable people in the city of New York.
In the summer the six children were moved from the house on
71st Street to a big estate in northern Connecticut. It was not a
fashionable locality—Anson's father wanted to delay as long as
possible his children's knowledge of that side of life. He was a man
somewhat superior to his class, which composed New York society,
and to his period, which was the snobbish and formalized vulgarity of
the Gilded Age, and he wanted his sons to learn habits of
concentration and have sound constitutions and grow up into right-
living and successful men. He and his wife kept an eye on them as
well as they were able until the two older boys went away to school,
but in huge establishments this is difficult—it was much simpler in
the series of small and medium-sized houses in which my own youth
was spent—I was never far out of the reach of my mother's voice, of
the sense of her presence, her approval or disapproval.
Anson's first sense of his superiority came to him when he
realized the half-grudging American deference that was paid to him
in the Connecticut village. The parents of the boys he played with
always inquired after his father and mother, and were vaguely
excited when their own children were asked to the Hunters' house.
He accepted this as the natural state of things, and a sort of
impatience with all groups of which he was not the centre—in
money, in position, in authority—remained with him for the rest of his
life. He disdained to struggle with other boys for precedence—he
expected it to be given him freely, and when it wasn't he withdrew
into his family. His family was sufficient, for in the East money is still
a I somewhat feudal thing, a clan-forming thing. In the snobbish
West, money separates families to form "sets."
At eighteen, when he went to New Haven, Anson was tall and
thick-set, with a clear complexion and a healthy color from the
ordered life he had led in school. His hair was yellow and grew in a
funny way on his head, his nose was beaked—these two things kept
him from being handsome—but he had a confident charm and a
certain brusque style, and the upper-class men who passed him on
the street knew without being told that he was a rich boy and had
gone to one of the best schools. Nevertheless, his very superiority
kept him from being a success in college—the independence was
mistaken for egotism, and the refusal to accept Yale standards with
the proper awe seemed to belittle all those who had. So, long before
he graduated, he began to shift the centre of his life to New York.
He was at home in New York—there was his own house with "the
kind of servants you can't get any more"—and his own family, of
which, because of his good humor and a certain ability to make
things go, he was rapidly becoming the centre, and the débutante
parties, and the correct manly world of the men's clubs, and the
occasional wild spree with the gallant girls whom New Haven only
knew from the fifth row. His aspirations were conventional enough—
they included even the irreproachable shadow he would some day
marry, but they differed from the aspirations of the majority of young
men in that there was no mist over them, none of that quality which
is variously known as "idealism" or "illusion." Anson accepted without
reservation the world of high finance and high extravagance, of
divorce and dissipation, of snobbery and of privilege. Most of our
lives end as a compromise—it was as a compromise that his life
began.
He and I first met in the late summer of 1917 when he was just
out of Yale, and, like the rest of us, was swept up into the
systematized hysteria of the war. In the blue-green uniform of the
naval aviation he came down to Pensacola, where the hotel
orchestras played "I'm sorry, dear," and we young officers danced
with the girls. Every one liked him, and though he ran with the
drinkers and wasn't an especially good pilot, even the instructors
treated him with a certain respect. He was always having long talks
with them in his confident, logical voice—talks which ended by his
getting himself, or, more frequently, another officer, out of some
impending trouble. He was convivial, bawdy, robustly avid for
pleasure, and we were all surprised when he fell in love with a
conservative and rather proper girl.
Her name was Paula Legendre, a dark, serious beauty from
somewhere in California. Her family kept a winter residence just
outside of town, and in spite of her primness she was enormously
popular; there is a large class of men whose egotism can't endure
humor in a woman. But Anson wasn't that sort, and I couldn't
understand the attraction of her "sincerity"—that was the thing to say
about her—for his keen and somewhat sardonic mind.
Nevertheless, they fell in love—and on her terms. He no longer
joined the twilight gathering at the De Sota bar, and whenever they
were seen together they were engaged in a long, serious dialogue,
which must have gone on several weeks. Long afterward he told me
that it was not about anything in particular but was composed on
both sides of immature and even meaningless statements—the
emotional content that gradually came to fill it grew up not out of the
words but out of its enormous seriousness. It was a sort of hypnosis.
Often it was interrupted, giving way to that emasculated humor we
call fun; when they were alone it was resumed again, solemn, low-
keyed, and pitched so as to give each other a sense of unity in
feeling and thought. They came to resent any interruptions of it, to be
unresponsive to facetiousness about life, even to the mild cynicism
of their contemporaries. They were only happy when the dialogue
was going on, and its seriousness bathed them like the amber glow
of an open fire. Toward the end there came an interruption they did
not resent—it began to be interrupted by passion.
Oddly enough, Anson was as engrossed in the dialogue as she
was and as profoundly affected by it, yet at the same time aware that
on his side much was insincere, and on hers much was merely
simple. At first, too, he despised her emotional simplicity as well, but
with his love her nature deepened and blossomed, and he could
despise it no longer. He felt that if he could enter into Paula's warm
safe life he would be happy. The long preparation of the dialogue
removed any constraint—he taught her some of what he had learned
from more adventurous women, and she responded with a rapt holy
intensity. One evening after a dance they agreed to marry, and he
wrote a long letter about her to his mother. The next day Paula told
him that she was rich, that she had a personal fortune of nearly a
million dollars.

III

It was exactly as if they could say "Neither of us has anything: we

shall be poor together"—just as delightful that they should be rich
instead. It gave them the same communion of adventure. Yet when
Anson got leave in April, and Paula and her mother accompanied
him North, she was impressed with the standing of his family in New
York and with the scale on which they lived. Alone with Anson for the
first time in the rooms where he had played as a boy, she was filled
with a comfortable emotion, as though she were pre-eminently safe
and taken care of. The pictures of Anson in a skull cap at his first
school, of Anson on horseback with the sweetheart of a mysterious
forgotten summer, of Anson in a gay group of ushers and bridesmaid
at a wedding, made her jealous of his life apart from her in the past,
and so completely did his authoritative person seem to sum up and
typify these possessions of his that she was inspired with the idea of
being married immediately and returning to Pensacola as his wife.
But an immediate marriage wasn't discussed—even the
engagement was to be secret until after the war. When she realized
that only two days of his leave remained, her dissatisfaction
crystallized in the intention of making him as unwilling to wait as she
was. They were driving to the country for dinner, and she determined
to force the issue that night.
Now a cousin of Paula's was staying with them at the Ritz, a
severe, bitter girl who loved Paula but was somewhat jealous of her
impressive engagement, and as Paula was late in dressing, the
cousin, who wasn't going to the party, received Anson in the parlor of
the suite.
Anson had met friends at five o'clock and drunk freely and
indiscreetly with them for an hour. He left the Yale Club at a proper
time, and his mother's chauffeur drove him to the Ritz, but his usual
capacity was not in evidence, and the impact of the steam-heated
sitting-room made him suddenly dizzy. He knew it, and he was both
amused and sorry.
Paula's cousin was twenty-five, but she was exceptionally naïve;
and at first failed to realize what was up. She had never met Anson
before, and she was surprised when he mumbled strange
information and nearly fell off his chair, but until Paula appeared it
didn't occur to her that what she had taken for the odor of a dry-
cleaned uniform was really whiskey. But Paula understood as soon
as she appeared; her only thought was to get Anson away before
her mother saw him, and at the look in her eyes the cousin
understood too.
When Paula and Anson descended to the limousine they found
two men inside, both asleep; they were the men with whom he had
been drinking at the Yale Club, and they were also going to the party.
He had entirely forgotten their presence in the car. On the way to
Hempstead they awoke and sang. Some of the songs were rough,
and though Paula tried to reconcile herself to the fact that Anson had
few verbal inhibitions, her lips tightened with shame and distaste.
 Back at the hotel the cousin, confused and agitated, considered
the incident, and then walked into Mrs. Legendre's bedroom, saying:
"Isn't he funny?"
"Who is funny?"
"Why—Mr. Hunter. He seemed so funny."
Mrs. Legendre looked at her sharply.
"How is he funny?"
"Why, he said he was French. I didn't know he was French."
"That's absurd. You must have misunderstood." She smiled: "It
was a joke."
The cousin shook her head stubbornly.
"No. He said he was brought up in France. He said he couldn't
speak any English, and that's why he couldn't talk to me. And he
couldn't!"
Mrs. Legendre looked away with impatience just as the cousin
added thoughtfully, "Perhaps it was because he was so drunk," and
walked out of the room.
This curious report was true. Anson, finding his voice thick and
uncontrollable, had taken the unusual refuge of announcing that he
spoke no English. Years afterward he used to tell that part of the
story; and he invariably communicated the uproarious laughter which
the memory aroused in him.
Five times in the next hour Mrs. Legendre tried to get Hempstead
on the phone. When she succeeded, there was a ten-minute delay
before she heard Paula's voice on the wire.
"Cousin Jo told me Anson was intoxicated."
"Oh, no...."
"Oh, yes. Cousin Jo says he was intoxicated. He told her he was
French, and fell off his chair and behaved as if he was very
intoxicated. I don't want you to come home with him."
 "Mother, he's all right! Please don't worry about——"
"But I do worry. I think it's dreadful. I want you to promise me not
to come home with him."
"I'll take care of it, mother...."
"I don't want you to come home with him."
"All right, mother. Good-by."
"Be sure now, Paula. Ask some one to bring you."
Deliberately Paula took the receiver from her ear and hung it up.
Her face was flushed with helpless annoyance. Anson was stretched
asleep out in a bedroom up-stairs, while the dinner-party below was
proceeding lamely toward conclusion.
The hour's drive had sobered him somewhat—his arrival was
merely hilarious—and Paula hoped that the evening was not spoiled,
after all, but two imprudent cocktails before dinner completed the
disaster. He talked boisterously and somewhat offensively to the
party at large for fifteen minutes, and then slid silently under the
table; like a man in an old print—but, unlike an old print, it was rather
horrible without being at all quaint. None of the young girls present
remarked upon the incident—it seemed to merit only silence. His
uncle and two other men carried him up-stairs, and it was just after
this that Paula was called to the phone.
An hour later Anson awoke in a fog of nervous agony, through
which he perceived after a moment the figure of his uncle Robert
standing by the door.
"... I said are you better?"
"What?"
"Do you feel better, old man?"
"Terrible," said Anson.
"I'm going to try you on another bromo-seltzer. If you can hold it
down, it'll do you good to sleep."
With an effort Anson slid his legs from the bed and stood up.
 "I'm all right," he said dully.
"Take it easy."
"I thin' if you gave me a glassbrandy I could go down-stairs."
"Oh, no——"
"Yes, that's the only thin'. I'm all right now.... I suppose I'm in
Dutch dow' there."
"They know you're a little under the weather," said his uncle
deprecatingly. "But don't worry about it. Schuyler didn't even get
here. He passed away in the locker-room over at the Links."
Indifferent to any opinion, except Paula's, Anson was
nevertheless determined to save the débris of the evening, but when
after a cold bath he made his appearance most of the party had
already left. Paula got up immediately to go home.
In the limousine the old serious dialogue began. She had known
that he drank, she admitted, but she had never expected anything
like this—it seemed to her that perhaps they were not suited to each
other, after all. Their ideas about life were too different, and so forth.
When she finished speaking, Anson spoke in turn, very soberly.
Then Paula said she'd have to think it over; she wouldn't decide to-
night; she was not angry but she was terribly sorry. Nor would she let
him come into the hotel with her, but just before she got out of the
car she leaned and kissed him unhappily on the cheek.
The next afternoon Anson had a long talk with Mrs. Legendre
while Paula sat listening in silence. It was agreed that Paula was to
brood over the incident for a proper period and then, if mother and
daughter thought it best, they would follow Anson to Pensacola. On
his part he apologized with sincerity and dignity—that was all; with
every card in her hand Mrs. Legendre was unable to establish any
advantage over him. He made no promises, showed no humility, only
delivered a few serious comments on life which brought him off with
rather a moral superiority at the end. When they came South three
weeks later, neither Anson in his satisfaction nor Paula in her relief at
the reunion realized that the psychological moment had passed
forever.
 IV

He dominated and attracted her, and at the same time filled her
with anxiety. Confused by his mixture of solidity and self-indulgence,
of sentiment and cynicism—incongruities which her gentle mind was
unable to resolve—Paula grew to think of him as two alternating
personalities. When she saw him alone, or at a formal party, or with
his casual inferiors, she felt a tremendous pride in his strong,
attractive presence, the paternal, understanding stature of his mind.
In other company she became uneasy when what had been a fine
imperviousness to mere gentility showed its other face. The other
face was gross, humorous, reckless of everything but pleasure. It
startled her mind temporarily away from him, even led her into a
short covert experiment with an old beau, but it was no use—after
four months of Anson's enveloping vitality there was an anæmic
pallor in all other men.
In July he was ordered abroad, and their tenderness and desire
reached a crescendo. Paula considered a last-minute marriage—
decided against it only because there were always cocktails on his
breath now, but the parting itself made her physically ill with grief.
After his departure she wrote him long letters of regret for the days of
love they had missed by waiting. In August Anson's plane slipped
down into the North Sea. He was pulled onto a destroyer after a
night in the water and sent to hospital with pneumonia; the armistice
was signed before he was finally sent home.
Then, with every opportunity given back to them, with no material
obstacle to overcome, the secret weavings of their temperaments
came between them, drying up their kisses and their tears, making
their voices less loud to one another, muffling the intimate chatter of
their hearts until the old communication was only possible by letters,
from far away. One afternoon a society reporter waited for two hours
in the Hunters' house for a confirmation of their engagement. Anson
denied it; nevertheless an early issue carried the report as a leading
paragraph—they were "constantly seen together at Southampton,
Hot Springs, and Tuxedo Park." But the serious dialogue had turned
a corner into a long-sustained quarrel, and the affair was almost
played out. Anson got drunk flagrantly and missed an engagement
with her, whereupon Paula made certain behavioristic demands. His
despair was helpless before his pride and his knowledge of himself:
the engagement was definitely broken.
"Dearest," said their letters now, "Dearest, Dearest, when I wake
up in the middle of the night and realize that after all it was not to be,
I feel that I want to die. I can't go on living any more. Perhaps when
we meet this summer we may talk things over and decide differently
—we were so excited and sad that day, and I don't feel that I can live
all my life without you. You speak of other people. Don't you know
there are no other people for me, but only you...."
But as Paula drifted here and there around the East she would
sometimes mention her gaieties to make him wonder. Anson was too
acute to wonder. When he saw a man's name in her letters he felt
more sure of her and a little disdainful—he was always superior to
such things. But he still hoped that they would some day marry.
Meanwhile he plunged vigorously into all the movement and glitter
of post-bellum New York, entering a brokerage house, joining half a
dozen clubs, dancing late, and moving in three worlds—his own
world, the world of young Yale graduates, and that section of the
half-world which rests one end on Broadway. But there was always a
thorough and infractible eight hours devoted to his work in Wall
Street, where the combination of his influential family connection, his
sharp intelligence, and his abundance of sheer physical energy
brought him almost immediately forward. He had one of those
invaluable minds with partitions in it; sometimes he appeared at his
office refreshed by less than an hour's sleep, but such occurrences
were rare. So early as 1920 his income in salary and commissions
exceeded twelve thousand dollars.
As the Yale tradition slipped into the past he became more and
more of a popular figure among his classmates in New York, more
popular than he had ever been in college. He lived in a great house,
and had the means of introducing young men into other great
houses. Moreover, his life already seemed secure, while theirs, for
the most part, had arrived again at precarious beginnings. They
commenced to turn to him for amusement and escape, and Anson
responded readily, taking pleasure in helping people and arranging
their affairs.
There were no men in Paula's letters now, but a note of
tenderness ran through them that had not been there before. From
several sources he heard that she had "a heavy beau," Lowell
Thayer, a Bostonian of wealth and position, and though he was sure
she still loved him, it made him uneasy to think that he might lose
her, after all. Save for one unsatisfactory day she had not been in
New York for almost five months, and as the rumors multiplied he
became increasingly anxious to see her. In February he took his
vacation and went down to Florida.
Palm Beach sprawled plump and opulent between the sparkling
sapphire of Lake Worth, flawed here and there by house-boats at
anchor, and the great turquoise bar of the Atlantic Ocean. The huge
bulks of the Breakers and the Royal Poinciana rose as twin
paunches from the bright level of the sand, and around them
clustered the Dancing Glade, Bradley's House of Chance, and a
dozen modistes and milliners with goods at triple prices from New
York. Upon the trellissed veranda of the Breakers two hundred
women stepped right, stepped left, wheeled, and slid in that then
celebrated calisthenic known as the double-shuffle, while in half-time
to the music two thousand bracelets clicked up and down on two
hundred arms.
At the Everglades Club after dark Paula and Lowell Thayer and
Anson and a casual fourth played bridge with hot cards. It seemed to
Anson that her kind, serious face was wan and tired—she had been
around now for four, five, years. He had known her for three.
"Two spades."
"Cigarette? ... Oh, I beg your pardon. By me."
 "By."
"I'll double three spades."
There were a dozen tables of bridge in the room, which was filling
up with smoke. Anson's eyes met Paula's, held them persistently
even when Thayer's glance fell between them....
"What was bid?" he asked abstractedly.

"Rose of Washington Square"

sang the young people in the corners:

"I'm withering there

In basement air——"

The smoke banked like fog, and the opening of a door filled the
room with blown swirls of ectoplasm. Little Bright Eyes streaked past
the tables seeking Mr. Conan Doyle among the Englishmen who
were posing as Englishmen about the lobby.
"You could cut it with a knife."
"... cut it with a knife."
"... a knife."
At the end of the rubber Paula suddenly got up and spoke to
Anson in a tense, low voice. With scarcely a glance at Lowell Thayer,
they walked out the door and descended a long flight of stone steps
—in a moment they were walking hand in hand along the moonlit
beach.
"Darling, darling...." They embraced recklessly, passionately, in a
shadow.... Then Paula drew back her face to let his lips say what she
wanted to hear—she could feel the words forming as they kissed
again.... Again she broke away, listening, but as he pulled her close
once more she realized that he had said nothing—only "Darling!
Darling!" in that deep, sad whisper that always made her cry.
Humbly, obediently, her emotions yielded to him and the tears
streamed down her face, but her heart kept on crying: "Ask me—oh,
Anson, dearest, ask me!"
"Paula.... Paula!"
The words wrung her heart like hands, and Anson, feeling her
tremble, knew that emotion was enough. He need say no more,
commit their destinies to no practical enigma. Why should he, when
he might hold her so, biding his own time, for another year—forever?
He was considering them both, her more than himself. For a
moment, when she said suddenly that she must go back to her hotel,
he hesitated, thinking, first, "This is the moment, after all," and then:
"No, let it wait—she is mine...."
He had forgotten that Paula too was worn away inside with the
strain of three years. Her mood passed forever in the night.
He went back to New York next morning filled with a certain
restless dissatisfaction. Late in April, without warning, he received a
telegram from Bar Harbor in which Paula told him that she was
engaged to Lowell Thayer, and that they would be married
immediately in Boston. What he never really believed could happen
had happened at last.
Anson filled himself with whiskey that morning, and going to the
office, carried on his work without a break—rather with a fear of what
would happen if he stopped. In the evening he went out as usual,
saying nothing of what had occurred; he was cordial, humorous,
unabstracted. But one thing he could not help—for three days, in any
place, in any company, he would suddenly bend his head into his
hands and cry like a child.