"Yes." Newboy nodded. "I've never been on the front page of a newspaper before. I've had just enough of that till now to be rather protective of my anonymity. Well, Mr Calkins thought he was doing something nice; his motives were the best."

"Bellona's a very hard place to get lost in." What Kidd took for slight nervousness, he reacted to with warmth. "I'm glad I read you were here."

Newboy raised his peppered brows.

"I've read some of your poem now, see?"

"And you wouldn't have if you hadn't read about me?"

"I didn't buy the book. A lady had it."

"Which book?"

"Pilgrimage."

Now Newboy lowered them. "You haven't read it carefully, several times, all the way through?"

He shook his head, felt his lips shake, so closed his mouth.

"Good." Newboy smiled. "Then you don't know me any better than I know you. For a moment I thought you had an advantage."

"I only browsed in it." He added: "In the bathroom."

Newboy laughed out loud, and drank. "Tell me about yourself. Are you a student? Or do you write?"

"Yes. I mean I write. I'm… a poet. Too." That was an interesting thing to say, he decided. It felt quite good. He wondered what Newboy's reaction would be.

"Very good." Whatever Newboy's reaction, surprise was not part of it. "Do you find Bellona stimulating, making you produce lots of work?"

He nodded. "But I've never published anything."

"Did I ask if you had?"

Kidd looked for severity; what he saw was a gentle smile.

"Or are you interested in getting published?"

"Yeah." He turned half around on his stool. "How do you get poems published?"

"If I could really answer that, I would probably write a lot more poems than I do."

"But you don't have any problems now, about getting things in magazines and things?"

"Just about everything I write now—" Newboy folded his glass in both hands—"I can be sure will be published. It makes me very careful of what I actually put down. How careful are you?"

The first beer bottle was empty. "I don't know." He drank from the second. "I haven't been a poet very long," he confessed, smiling. "Only a couple of days. Why'd you come here?"

"Pardon?" There was a little surprise there; but not much.

"I bet you know lots of writers, famous ones. And people in the government too. Why did you come here?"

"Oh, Bellona has developed… an underground reputation, you call it? One never reads about it, but one hears. There are some cities one must be just dying to visit." In a theatrical whisper: "I hope this isn't one of them." While he laughed, his eyes asked forgiveness.

Kidd forgave and laughed.

"I really don't know. It was a spur of the moment thing," Newboy went on. "I don't quite know how I did it. I certainly wasn't expecting to meet anyone like Roger. That headline was a bit of a surprise. But Bellona is full of surprises."

"You're going to write about it here?"

Newboy turned his drink. "No. I don't think so." He smiled again. "You're all safe."

"You do know a lot of famous people though, I bet. Even when you read introductions and flyleaves and book reviews, you begin to figure out that everybody knows everybody. You get this picture of all these people sitting around together and getting mad, or friendly, probably screwing each other—"

"Literary intrigues? Oh, you're right: It's quite complicated, harrowing, insidious, vicious; and thoroughly fascinating. The only pastime I prefer to writing is gossip."

He frowned. "Somebody else was talking to me about gossip. Everybody around here sort of goes for it." Lanya was still not in the bar. He looked again at Newboy. "She knows your friend Mr Calkins."

"It is a small city. I wish Paul Fenster had felt a little less — up tight?" He gestured toward the notebook. "I'd enjoy seeing some of your poems."

"Huh?"

"I enjoy reading poems, especially by people I've met. Let me tell you right away, I won't even presume to say anything about whether I think they're good or bad. But you're pleasant, in an angular way. I'd like to see what you wrote."

"Oh. I don't have very many. I've just been writing them down for… well, like I say, not long."

"Then it won't take me very long to read them — if you wouldn't mind showing them to me, sometime when you felt like it?"

"Oh. Sure. But you would have to tell me if they're good."

"I doubt if I could."

"Sure you could. I mean I'd listen to what you said. That would be good for me."

"May I tell you a story?"

Kidd cocked his head, and found his own eager distrust interesting.

Newboy waved a finger at the bartender for refills. "Some years ago in London, when I was much younger than the time between then and now would indicate, my Hampstead host winked at me through his sherry glass and asked if I would like to meet an American writer staying in the city. That afternoon I had to see an editor of an Arts Council subsidized magazine to which my host, the writer in question, and myself all contributed. I enjoy writers: their personalities intrigue me. I can talk about it in this detached way because I'm afraid I do so little of it myself now, that, though I presumptuously feel myself an artist at all times, I only consider myself a writer a month or so out of the year. On good years. At any rate, I agreed. The American writer was phoned to come over that evening. While I was waiting to go out, I picked up a magazine in which he had an article — a description of his travels through Mexico — and began the afternoon's preparation for the evening's encounter. The world is small: I had been hearing of this young man for two years. I had read his name in conjunction with my own in several places. But I had actually read no single piece by him before. I poured more sherry and turned to the article. It was unpenetrable! I read on through the limpest recountings of passage through pointless scenery and unfocused meetings with vapid people. The judgments on the land were inane. The insights into the populace, had they been expressed with more energy, would have been a bit horrifying for their prejudice. Fortunately the prose was too dense for me to get through more than ten of the sixteen pages. I have always prided myself on my ability to read anything; I feel I must, as my own output is so small. But I put that article by! The strange machinery by which a reputation precedes its source we all know is faulty. Yet how much faith we put in it! I assumed I had received that necessary betrayal and took my shopping bag full of Christmas presents into London's whiter mud. The editor in his last letter had invited me, jokingly, to Christmas dinner, and I had written an equally joking acceptance and then come, two thousand miles I believe, for a London holiday. Such schemes, delightful in the anticipation and the later retelling, have their drawbacks in present practice. I'd arrived three days in advance, and thought it best to deliver gifts in tune for Christmas morning and allow my host to rejudge the size of his goose and add a plum or so to his pudding. At the door, back of an English green hall, I rang the bell. It was answered by this very large, very golden young man, who, when he spoke, was obviously American. Let me see how nearly I can remember the conversation. It contributes to the point.