At first Rudolph was popular in this hell of the underworld. He spent
money easily, he danced well, he had audacity and a sort of sardonic
humor. They asked no questions, those poor wretches who had themselves
slid over the edge of life. They took what came, grateful for little
pleasures, glad even to talk their own tongue.
And then, one broiling August day, late in the afternoon, when the
compound was usually seething with the first fetid life of the day,
Rudolph found it suddenly silent when he entered it, and hostile,
contemptuous eyes on him.
A girl with Anna Klein's eyes, a girl he had begun to fancy, suddenly
said, "Draft-dodger!"
There was a ripple of laughter around the compound. They commenced to
bait him, those women he would not have wiped his feet on at home. They
literally laughed him out of the compound.
He went home to his stifling, windowless adobe room, with its sagging
narrow bed, its candle, its broken crockery, and he stood in the center
of the room and chewed his nails with fury. After a time he sat down and
considered what to do next. He would have to move on some time. As well
now as ever. He was sick of the place.
He began preparations to move on, gathering up the accumulation of
months of careless living for destruction. He picked up some newspapers
preparatory to throwing them away, and a name caught his attention.
Standing there, inside his doorway in the Mexican dusk, he read of
Graham's recent wounding, his mending, and the fact that he had won the
Croix de Guerre. Supreme bitterness was Rudolph's then.
"Stage stuff!" he muttered. But in the depths of his warped soul there
was bitter envy. He knew well with what frightened yet adoring eyes Anna
Klein had devoured that news of Graham Spencer. While for him there
was the girl in the compound back of the "Owl," with Anna Klein's eyes,
filled when she looked at him with that bitterest scorn of all, the
contempt of the wholly contemptible.
That night he went to the Owl. He had shaved and had his hair cut and
he wore his only remaining decent suit of clothes. He passed through the
swinging gate in the railing which separated the dancing-floor from the
tables and went up to the line of girls, sitting in that saddest waiting
of all the world, along the wall. There was an ominous silence at his
approach. He planted himself in front of the girl with eyes like Anna
Klein.
"Are you going to dance?"