Page:Peter Whiffle (1922).djvu/146

 want simple, homely facts regarding their trades and he gives them these facts. He is—

What are all these God damn bourgeois doing here? demanded a high, shrill voice from the next room.

My companion smiled. That is Hippolyte Havel. He always asks that question, even at anarchist meetings, but it isn't a cliché with him; it's part of his charm.

Hippolyte, sweet, blinking, amblyoptic Hippolyte, his hair as snarly as the Medusa's, strode into the room.

Hush, some one adjured us, Hush! Yorska is going to recite.

After a few seconds, there was silence. All the chairs were filled; many were sitting on the floor or standing against the wall or in the doorways; ladies in black velvet, wearing diamonds, ladies in batik and Greenwich village sacks, ladies with bobbed hair and mannish-cut garments, men in evening dress, men in workmen's clothes. No one present, I noted, looked quite so untidy as Peter. Yorska, her tragic face emerging from three yards of black tulle and satin, recited, in French, Baudelaire's Le Balcon, fingering a red rose at her waist. As she uttered the last lines with passionate intensity,

there was a scattered clapping of hands, a few exclamations of delight. Now the Tuscan butler, as