The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride Read Online Free PDF Page B

we both shared—until, at dawn, he at last left me. Art and life, was it? I had taught him the difference.
    Three days later, attired in a new Beehive-with-Double-Guiche, and carrying a spare, I left for Bangkok, telling myself that I had good powers of recuperation, perhaps a hairsbreadth too much humor ever to find my solution in ars amoris— and two more weeks of vacation. And who should know better than we of the Agency that when people lack love affairs, or pressing money ones, they turn to a study of the ethical world?
    Just before I was leaving, the switchboard rang to ask me to take delivery on a package. “Keep it for me!” I snapped, but the doorman said “No, we can’t, Miss. It’s come in an armored car.”
    It was the picture that we had both wanted, from Knoller’s. I saw the tremendous justice of this, that I should have what so suited me—and what I hadn’t paid for, so dearly. But there wasn’t time to open it, so I locked it up with the wigs to keep them company, and didn’t read his card until I was well out, on the plane.
    “Forgive me,” he wrote gracefully, “and forget me. I am a dilettante.”
    Ah he was clever, clever enough even to speak the truth about himself—though I should have phrased it differently. The half-bald often are. Later on, in the hotel, I meant to send him a cable of acknowledgment, then thought better of it and settled for a postcard on which I wrote obscurely, and may never have sent at all. “I have seen them,” it said. “The monks of Bangkok.”
    They walked the streets in the early morning in their orange tunics, going from house to house with their begging bowls, young boys to old men; a man could shave his head to be a monk at any time, could leave his marriage, his children, his aged, and people would understand his reasons; indeed it was expected of every man that for at least once in his lifetime he would live hairless. And agreed, they were beautiful as they walked the dawn-hours with their concept. And their heads (though merely shaven), when met at any angle—the high twin-domes of the forehead brooding toward the welkin, or that sweet rear haunch above the neck muscles, nakedly working—when met at any hour, these were golden unaided, of themselves. But monks though they were, they were men also, and though some women can study up ethically to be anything, I am not one of them. Now and then, I glimpsed the lean-headed, black-garbed widows, but after all, as yet I hadn’t had their successes either. And finally, there were the common people, denuded merely to be sanitary, which I already was. There remained—if I were to insist on a group solution to both philosophical problems and practical ones—one simple course I had never considered myself temperamentally suited for, which however, via an awkward incident in the hotel swimming pool, was brought again to my attention.
    At certain hours the pool, a handsome one surprisingly free-form for the East, was deserted, when it was my pleasure to float on my back there in equally free meditation, reviewing the temple-shaped lamps which bordered it, and other more distant pagodas. Actually, the Thai civilization was in many ways also a heavily hatted one—rooftops, headdressed goddesses, dancers—and I found this mentally very supportive. What at home seemed the inexcusable doubleness of the world here seemed merely inexhaustible, and—oh blessings of travel—not my burden.
    At these times, due to my having only a spare wig with me, I wore bathing cap merely, one of those shaggy rubber flowers, silly thing, but with a chin strap that buttoned securely under each ear. It is also germane that on this day, the bathing suit I wore was black. For, as I floated, quite suddenly I was jounced, splashed, dived under, sent upright and grabbed round the waist by a man who said, “Tell by that cap you’re from the U.S.— hi! ”
    It was my fleeting impression that he was one of those pink-eyed jockey-types