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diff --git a/old/60427-0.txt b/old/60427-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 0433e11..0000000 --- a/old/60427-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,3512 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg EBook of Introducing Irony, by Maxwell Bodenheim - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere 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/license - - -Title: Introducing Irony - A Book of Poetic Short Stories and Poems - -Author: Maxwell Bodenheim - -Release Date: October 5, 2019 [EBook #60427] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INTRODUCING IRONY *** - - - - -Produced by Tim Lindell, David E. Brown, and the Online -Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This -file was produced from images generously made available -by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) - - - - - - - - - - INTRODUCING - IRONY - - - - - INTRODUCING - IRONY - - A BOOK OF POETIC SHORT - STORIES AND POEMS - - - BY - - MAXWELL BODENHEIM - - - [Illustration] - - - NEW YORK - - BONI AND LIVERIGHT - - 1922 - - - - - COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY - BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC. - - _Printed in the United States of America_ - - - - - _To_ - - FEDYA RAMSAY - - WHOSE HAND NEVER LEAVES MY SHOULDER - - - - -Some of the poems and stories in this book have appeared in _The -Dial_, _Harper’s Bazaar_, _The Little Review_, _The Nation_, _Cartoons -Magazine_, _Poetry_, _A Magazine of Verse_, _The New York Globe_, _The -Bookman_, _Vanity Fair_, _The Measure_ and _The Double Dealer_ - - - - -CONTENTS - - - PAGE - - JACK ROSE 11 - - SEAWEED FROM MARS 13 - - TURMOIL IN A MORGUE 18 - - CONDENSED NOVEL 21 - - MANNERS 23 - - AN ACROBAT, A VIOLINIST, AND A CHAMBERMAID CELEBRATE 25 - - NOVEL CONVERSATION 28 - - THE SCRUB-WOMAN 30 - - MEDITATIONS IN A CEMETERY 32 - - SIMPLE ACCOUNT OF A POET’S LIFE 34 - - CANDID NARRATIVE 37 - - UNLITERARY AND SHAMELESS 39 - - TWO SONNETS TO MY WIFE 40 - - FINALITIES, I-VIII 41 - - IMAGINARY PEOPLE, I-IV 47 - - UNEASY REFLECTIONS 50 - - SUMMER EVENING: NEW YORK SUBWAY STATION 50 - - GARBAGE HEAP 52 - - IMPULSIVE DIALOGUE 53 - - EMOTIONAL MONOLOGUE 56 - - PRONOUNCED FANTASY 59 - - WHEN SPIRITS SPEAK OF LIFE 61 - - - INSANITY 64 - - POETRY 68 - - RELIGION 72 - - SCIENTIFIC PHILOSOPHY 75 - - ART 78 - - MUSIC 82 - - ETHICS 86 - - HISTORY 90 - - PSYCHIC PHENOMENA 94 - - LOVE 98 - - - - -INTRODUCING -IRONY - - - - -JACK ROSE - - - With crafty brooding life turned to Jack Rose - And made him heroin-peddler, and his pose - Was sullenly reflective since he feared - That life, regarding him, had merely jeered. - His vanity was small and could not call - His egoism to the dubious hall - Of fame, where average artists spend their hour. - Doubting his powers he was forced to cower - Within the shrill, damp alleys of his time, - Immersed in that brisk midnight known as crime. - He shunned the fiercely shrewd stuff that he sold - To other people, and derived a cold - Enjoyment from the writhing of their hearts. - A speechless artist, he admired the arts - Of blundering destruction, like a monk - Viewing a play that made him mildly drunk. - And so malicious and ascetic Jack - Bent to his trade with a relentless back - Until he tapped an unexpected smile-- - A woman’s smile as smooth and hard as tile. - May Bulger pawned her flesh to him and gave - His heroin to her brother, with a grave - Reluctance fumbling at her painted lips. - Though angry at herself, she took the whips - Of undesired love, to quiet a boy - Who wept inanely for his favorite toy. - She hated Jack because he failed to gloss - And soften the rough surface of her loss, - His matter-of-fact frown biting at her heart. - He hated her because her smiling guess - Had robbed him of ascetic loneliness, - And when her brother died, Jack sat beside - Her grief and played a mouth-harp while she cried. - But when she raised her head and smiled at him-- - A smile intensely stripped and subtly grim-- - His hate felt overawed and in a trap, - And suddenly his head fell to her lap. - For some time she sat stiffly in the chair, - Then slowly raised her hand and stroked his hair. - - - - -SEAWEED FROM MARS - - - I - - “Have you ever played on a violin - Larger than ten thousand stars - And warmer than what you call sin?” - Torban, a young man from Mars, - Gave me the stretch of his voice, - And my “no” fell down like a pin - On the echoed din of his words. - He said: “Then I have no choice. - I must use the barrenly involved - Words with which you have not solved - The wistful riddles of your days. - Leave the pale and ruddy herds - Of men, with their surrendering ways, - And come with me to Mars.” - - - II - - Drums of Autumn beat on Mars, - Calling our minds to reunion. - The avenues of seaweed spars - Have attained a paleness - Equal to that of earthly philosophies, - And the trees have lost - The diamond violence of Spring. - Their purple leaves have turned to grey - Just as a human religion - Gradually changes to pretence. - In Mars we have only two seasons, - Spring and Autumn--their reasons - Rest in a treacherous sun - That suddenly runs away, - Creating a twilight-suspense. - When the sun reappears - Mars is once more amazed - By the blazing flatteries of Spring. - Again the heavy leaves ring - With odor and light deftly pressed - Into a stormy chorus. - Then we abandon the screaming violins - Of our minds, and each man wins - An understanding rest. - Once more we roam and jest - Upon the avenues, with voices - One shade louder than the leaves, - Or sail upon the choral seas - And trade our words with molten ease. - Throughout the Autumn we stand - Still and deserted, while our minds - Leap into sweeping tensions - Blending sound and form - Into one search across the universe. - - - III - - What do we find in this search? - All of your earthly words lurch - Feebly upon the outskirts of my mind, - And when they pass beyond them, they are blind. - Outward forms are but the graves - Of sound, and all the different waves - Of light and odor, they are sound - That floats unshaped and loosely gowned. - When sound is broken into parts - Your ears receive the smaller arts, - But when it drifts in broad release - You cannot hear its louder peace. - Your houses, hills, and flesh of red - Are shapes of sound, asleep or dead. - In Mars a stronger Spring of sound - Revives our forms and makes Profound - Music, softer than the dins - That rose from Autumn violins. - Our minds, whose tense excursions spread - In chase of noisy walls that fled, - Relent and drop within our heads, - Enjoying the timid sound of their beds. - Filled with a gracious weariness, - We place it, like a lighter dress, - Upon the sounds from other stars - Brought back to celebrate on Mars. - - - IV - - A girl of Mars is burning - Notes of thought within her throat. - Her pale white lips are turning - The fire to storied chords. - The song is old but often made - By girls who sit in Spring and braid - The lanterned language of their hair. - Its spacious gaiety cannot be sold - To your narrow glow of words. - The hint that I shall give is cold - And like the sound of snowy air. - - _I shall journey with the men - When my curling thoughts are ten. - O the sternness of that number! - Colored sounds from breath to umber - Promising a first release. - I have dwelt too long in peace - Placing smallness on my breast. - The prisoned whisper of my skin - Longs to vanish in the din - Of Autumn when great sounds are caught. - Let the tall wildness of my thought - Stride beside the thundering grace - Of the man whose spring-time face - Brought me tiny notes of rest._ - - She sits within a house of stone - That lends a wise and balanced tone: - A roofless house whose walls are low - And level with her head’s grey glow. - The bright sounds of her parents fly - Around the house--we do not die - In Mars, but change to gleams of sounds - And stay within our gayer rounds - Until when tired Spring has gone - We lead the Autumn searchers on. - Before we change, our bodies curve - Like yours save that our skins are gray: - Light shades of gray that almost swerve - To white, like earthly men who pray. - - - V - - We do not love and hate in Mars. - These earthly cries are flashing bars - Of sound from which our minds are free. - They stand in our mythology: - Legends elusive and weird, - Acrid Gods that once were feared. - They vanished imperceptibly - And none among us can agree - Upon the tangled way in which they fled. - Starlit symbols of dread, - They slowly exhausted themselves and died - In striding heralds of a wilder bride. - We have no emotions in Mars. - They are like long-healed wounds - Whose scars are softened by the gleam of our minds. - We approach them with clearer kinds - Of sound from deeply resting thought. - Our youths and maidens have not caught - The treacherous and tightly bound - Confusion of your loving sound, - For sex to us is but the ring - Of different shades of thought in Spring - When men recline upon the breast - Of women, dissolving into thoughtful rest. - In Autumn sex is left behind. - Men and women no longer lined - By different bodies raise their dins - Above the screaming violins. - - - - -TURMOIL IN A MORGUE - - - Negro, - Chinaman, - White servant-girl, - Russian woman, - Are learning how to be dead, - Aided by the impersonal boredom - Of a morgue at evening. - The morgue divides its whole - Of dead mens’ contacts into four - Parts, and places one in each - Of these four bodies waiting for the carts. - The frankness of their decay - Breaks into contradictory symbols - And sits erect upon the wooden tables, - Thus cancelling the validity of time. - In a voice as passive as slime - The negro speaks. - “Killed a woman: ripped her skin. - Saw her heart floating in a tumbler of gin. - Had to drink her heart because it wouldn’t leave the gin. - Because I wanted to reach all of her - They ripped my flesh. - They wanted to reach all of me - And their excuse was better than mine.” - Cowed baby painted black, - The negro sits upon fundamentals - And troubles them a little with his hands. - The beautiful insanity - Of his eyes rebukes - The common void of his face. - Then the Chinaman speaks - In a voice whose tones are brass - From which emotion has been extracted. - “Loved a woman: she was white. - Her man blew my brains out into the night. - Hatred is afraid of color. - Color is the holiday - Given to moods of understanding: - Hatred does not understand. - When stillness ends the fever of ideas - Hatred will be a scarcely remembered spark.” - Manikin at peace - With the matchless deceit of a planet, - The Chinaman fashions his placid immensity. - The Chinaman chides his insignificance - With a more impressive rapture - Than that of western midgets. - His rapture provides an excellent light - For the silhouette of the negro’s curse. - Then the white servant-girl - Speaks in a voice whose syllables - Fall like dripping flower-juice and offal, - Both producing a similar sound. - “I made a neat rug for a man. - He cleaned his feet on me and I liked - The tired, scheming way in which he did it. - When he finished he decided - That he needed a smoother texture, - And found another lady. - I killed myself because I couldn’t rub out - The cunning marks that he left behind.” - Impulsive doll made of rubbish - On which a spark descended and ended, - The white servant-girl, without question or answer, - Accepts the jest of a universe. - Then the Russian woman - Speaks in a voice that is heat - Ill-at-ease upon its couch of sound. - “I married a man because - His lips tormented my melancholy - And made it long to be meek, - And because, when he walked to his office each morning, - He thought himself a kindled devil - Enduring the smaller figures around him. - He abandoned me for German intrigue - And I chased him in other men, - Never quite designing him. - Death, a better megalomaniac, - Relieved me of the pursuit.” - Symbol of earth delighted - With the vibration of its nerves, - The Russian woman sunders life - Into amusing deities of emotion - And bestows a hurried worship. - Then the morgue, attended by a whim, - Slays the intonations of their trance - And slips these people back to life. - The air is cut by transformation. - The white servant-girl retreats to a corner - With a shriek, while the negro advances, - And the Russian woman - Nervously objects to the Chinaman’s question. - The morgue, weary housewife for speechless decay, - Spends its helplessness in gay revenge: - Revenge of earth upon four manikins - Who straightened up on wooden tables - And betrayed her. - - - - -CONDENSED NOVEL - - - Shun the abundant paragraphs - With which a novelist interviews shades - Of physical appearance in one man, - And regard the body of Alvin Spar - Curtained by more aristocratic words. - “Alvin Spar in adolescence - Was neither slim nor rotund, - But slightly aware of future corpulence. - The face that Aristotle may have had - Was interfering, bit by bit, - With an outer face of pouting curves. - Alvin Spar in youth - Held half of the face that Aristotle - May have had, and the pungent directness - Of a stable-boy. - Alvin Spar in middle age - Had the face that Aristotle - May have had--a large austerity - Disputing the bloom of well-selected emotions. - Straight nose, thick lips, low forehead - Were apprentices to the austerity - That often stepped beyond them. - Alvin Spar in old age - Had drawn the wrinkled bed-quilts - Over the face that Aristotle - May have had, but his eyes peered out, - Fighting with sleep.” - Shuffle the cards on which I have written - Alvin Spar’s changes in physical appearance, - And deal them out to the various players. - Accident first, then the qualities of the players-- - These two will struggle to dominate - The movements of the plot. - The plot of this novel will ascend - In twenty lines and escape - The honoured adulteration so dear to men. - “Alvin Spar loved a woman - Who poured acid on his slumber - By showing him the different fools within him. - Sincerely longing for wisdom - He married her, while she desired - A pupil whom she could lazily beat. - She convinced him that emotions - Were simply periods of indecision - Within the mind, and with emphasis - He walked to another woman. - The second woman loved him, - But she was merely to him - Clay for mental sculpture. - She killed herself, believing - That he might become to her in death - A figure less remote and careful. - He forgot her in an hour - And used the rest of his life - In finding women over whom he could tower.... - He died while madly straying over his heights.” - The incidental people, chatter, and background? - You will find them between - Pages one and four-hundred - Of the latest bulk in prose. - - - - -MANNERS - - - Gingerly, the poets sit. - Gingerly, they spend - The adjectives of dribbling flatteries, - With here and there a laceration - Feeding on the poison of a smile. - In the home of the poet-host - That bears the slants of a commonplace, - Eagerly distributed-- - The accepted lyrical note-- - The poets sit. - The poets drink much wine - And tug a little at their garments, - Weighing the advantages of disrobing. - (It is necessary to call them “poets” - Since, according to custom, - Titles are generously given to the attempt.) - Sirona, cousin of the poet-host, - Munches at the feast of words. - She endeavors to convince herself - That her hunger has become an illusion. - The poets, capitulating to wine, - Leave their birds and twilights, - Their trees and cattle at evening, - And study Sirona’s body-- - Their manacled hands still joined - By the last half-broken link. - Beneath her ill-fitting worship - Young Sirona fears - That the poets are wordy animals - Circled by brocaded corsets.... - Sirona, if you stood on your head - Now, and waved the brave plan of your legs, - Undisturbed by cloth, - The poets would be convinced - That you were either insane or angling. - But an exceptional poet, - Never present at these parties, - Would compliment your vigour - And scoff at the vain deceptions of privacy. - Vulgarity, Sirona, is often a word - Invented by certain men to defend - Their disdain for other men, who chuckle - At the skulking tyrannies of fashion. - Few men, Sirona, dare to become - Completely vulgar, but many - Nibble at the fringes. - - - - -AN ACROBAT, A VIOLINIST, AND A CHAMBERMAID CELEBRATE - - - Geometry of souls. - Dispute the roundness of gesturing flesh; - Angles, and oblongs, and squares - Slip with astounding precision - Into the throes of lifted elbows; - Into the searching perpendicular - Of fingers rising to more than ten; - Into the salient straightness of lips; - Into the rock-like protest of knees. - The flesh of human beings - Is a beginner’s-lesson in mathematics. - The pliant stupidity of flesh - Mentions the bungling effort - Of a novice to understand - The concealed mathematics of the soul. - Men will tell you that an arm - Rising to the sky - Indicates strident emotion; - Reveals a scream of authority; - Expresses the longing of a red engine - Known as the heart; - Rises like a flag-pole - From which the mind signals. - Men will fail to tell you - That an arm rising to the sky - Takes a straight line of the soul - And strives to comprehend it; - That the arm is a solid tunnel - For a significance that shoots beyond it. - The squares, and angles, and oblongs of the soul, - The commencing lines of the soul - Are pestered by a debris of words. - Men shovel away the words: - Falteringly in youth; - Tamely and pompously in middle age; - Vigorously in old age. - Death takes the last shovel-full away: - Death is accommodating. - Nothing is wise except outline. - The content held by outline - Is a slave in the mass. - Men with few outlines in their minds - Try to give the outlines dignity - By moulding them into towers two inches high, - In which they sit in lonely, talkative importance. - Men with many outlines - Break them into more, and thus - Playing, come with quickened breath - To hints of spiritual contours. - Seek only the decoration; - Avoid the embryonic yelping - Of argument, and scan your patterns - For angles, oblongs, and squares of the soul. - I overheard this concentrated prelude - While listening to an acrobat, a violinist, and a chamber-maid - Celebrate the removal of their flesh. - While playing, the violinist’s upper arm - Bisected the middle of the acrobat’s head - As the latter knelt to hear, - And the chamber-maid - Stretched straight on the floor, with her forehead - Touching the tips of the violinist’s feet. - Motion knelt to receive - The counselling touch of sound, - And vigour, in a searching line, - Reclined at the feet of sound, - Buying a liquid release. - Angles of arms and straight line of bodies - Made a decoration. - The violinist’s music - Fell upon this decoration; - Erased the vague embellishment of flesh; - And came to angles, squares, and oblongs - Of the soul. - - - - -NOVEL CONVERSATION - - -Certain favorite words of men have gathered in a vale made of -sound-waves. These words, far removed from human tongues and -impositions, enjoy an hour of freedom. - - - _Emotion_ - - Men believe that I can speak - Without the aid of thought. - True, I have murdered many kings, - Leaned upon many cheeks, - And sought the release of music, - But when I ride upon words - I am forced to steal them from the mind. - Forgive me, now, if a trace of thought - Invades my liquid purity! - - - _Truth_ - - You need not defend your argument - With meek verbosity, - As though you dreaded its possible subtleties. - We are not men, but words! - Men have made me a lofty acrobat - Entertaining each of their desires - With some old twist on the bars. - But let us leave the frantic tasks - Forced upon us by men. - This is our grove of rest. - - - _Intellect_ - - Emotion, we have often crept - From our separate palaces, - Asking each other for secret favors. - - - _Emotion_ - - We laughed because the men who made us - Could not see our desperate trading. - We will end our laugh - Upon the dust of the last man on earth - And taste a peaceful strangeness. - - - _Art_ - - And I, the tortured child of your love, - Will slip from the fringe of your grayness - Into the void from which I came. - - - _Poetry_ - - And I, the moment when your arms - Touched each other in the night, - Will no longer strive - To tell the happening to men. - - - _Fantasy_ - - And I, the glistening whim - Of your secret love, - Will change to a question lurking within your dust. - - - _Suggestion_ - - And I, the beckoning second - When you curved a world in the twist of your fingers-- - I shall vanish into your completeness. - - - _Intellect_ - - The hope of this magic ending - Is our only consolation. - Emotion, a new philosopher - Is forging blades for your torture, - And a braggart poet - Invites me to his disdain. - Let us return to our burdens. - - - - -THE SCRUB-WOMAN - -(_A Sentimental Poem_) - - - Time has placed his careful insult - Upon your body. - In other ages Time gave rags - To hags without riches, but now he brings - Cotton, calico, and muslin-- - Tokens of his admiration - For broken backs. - Neat nonsense, stamped with checks and stripes, - Fondles the deeply marked sneer - That Time has dropped upon you. - While Time, in one of his well-debated moods - That men call an age, is attending to his manners, - I shall scan the invisible banners - Of meaning that unfurl when you move. - - - II - - When you open your mouths - I see a well, and strangled chastity - At the bottom--not chastity - Of the flesh, but lucid purity - Of the mind choked by a design - Of filth that has slowly turned cold, - Like a sewer intruding - Upon a small, dead face. - This is not repulsive. - Only things alive, with gaudy hollows, - Can repulse, but your death holds - A haggard candour that gently thrusts its way - Into the unimportance of facts. - You are not old: you were never young. - Life caressed your senses - With a heavy sterility, - And you thanked him with the remnant - Of thought that he left behind-- - His usual moment of absentminded kindness. - When the muscles of your arm - Punish the brush that rubs upon wood - I see a rollicking mockery-- - Rhythm in starved pursuit - Of petrified desire. - When the palms of your hands - Stay flat in dirty water - I can observe your emotions - Welcome refuse as perfume, - Intent upon a last ghastly deception. - When you grunt and touch your hair - I perceive your exhaustion - Reaching for a bit of pity - And carefully rearranging it. - - Lift up your pails and go home; - Take the false tenderness of rest; - Drop your clothes, disordered, on the floor. - Vindictive simplicity. - - - - -MEDITATIONS IN A CEMETERY - - You can write nothing new about death - - GEROID LATOUR - - - Death, - Grandiosely hackneyed subject, - I live in a house one hundred years old - Placed in the middle of a cemetery. - The cemetery is bothered by mausoleums - Where fragments of Greek and Gothic - Lie in orderly shame. - Slabs and crosses of stone - Remain unacquainted with the bones - That they must strive to introduce. - The trees retain their guiltless sibilants. - The trees tell me upon my morning walk: - “In other cemeteries, - Shakespeare, Maeterlinck and Shaw - Fail to produce the slightest awe - In trees that do not create for an audience.” - Being finalities, the grass and trees - Find no need for rules of etiquette. - Delicacy must be effortless - Or else it changes to a patched-up dress. - But delicate and coarse are words - For quickness that tries to linger, - And slowness that strives to be fast! - Emotions and thoughts are merely - The improvisations of motion, - And lack a permanent content. - An aging tree is wiser - Than an aging poet, - And death is wiser than both. - The scale ascends out of sight - And I recall that the morning is light - And smaller notes await me. - The tomb-stones around my path - Have been crisply visited by names - To which they bear no relation. - Imagine the perturbation - Of a stone removed - From the comprehension of a mountain - And branded with the name of A. Rozinsky! - Recollecting journeys of my own, - I close my eyes and leave the stone. - The names of other men entreat-- - Slight variations in line - Ponderously refusing to resign. - Men who will be forgotten - Try to hinder the process with stone. - Because they dread the affirmation - Of ashes undiscovered in wind, - I am walking through this cemetery. - - The old grave-diggers will soon - Astonish the earth below this oak. - From their faces adjectives have fled, - Leaving the essential noun: - Leaving also the unwilling frown - With which they parley with the earth ... - Death, I must tell you of these things - Since you are unaware that they exist. - You send an efficient servant - To the almost unseen fluctuations - Of tomb-stones, skulls, and lilies, - Reserving your eyes for larger games. - - - - -SIMPLE ACCOUNT OF A POET’S LIFE - - - In 1892 - When literature and art in America - Presented a mildewed but decorous mien, - He was born. - During the first months of his life - His senses had not yet learned to endure - The majestic babble of old sterilities. - The vacuum of his brain - Felt a noisy thinness outside, - Which it could not hear or see, - And gave it the heavier substance - Of yells that were really creation - Fighting its way to form. - (When babies shriek they seek - Power in thought and action. - Life objects to their intent - And forces their voices to repent.) - At the age of four he lived inwardly, - With enormous shapeless emotions - Taking his limbs, like waves. - His mind was vapour censured - By an occasional protest - That mumbled and could not be heard. - People to him were headless figures-- - Bodies surmounted by voices - That tickled like feathers, or struck like rocks. - Missiles thrown from moving mountain-tops - And leaving only resentment at their touch. - At ten the voices receded - To invisible meanings - That toyed with flesh-protected secrets of faces. - The voices made promises - Which the faces continually evaded, - And often the voices in vengeance - Changed a lip or an eye-brow - To repeat their neglected demands. - When swung to him the voices - Were insolent enigmas, - Tripping him as he stood - Midway between fright and indifference. - He sometimes tittered tranquilly - At the obvious absurdity of this. - His rages were false and sprang - From aloof thoughts chanting over their chains. - The immediate cause of each rage - Merely opened a door - Upon this changeless inner condition. - That species of intoxicated thought - Which men describe as emotion - Used its merriment to blind his eye-sight. - But anger, whose real roots are in the mind, - Tendered him times of hot perception. - He noticed that children held flexible flesh - That wisely sought a variety of patterns-- - Flesh intent upon correcting - Its closeted effect-- - While older people enticed their flesh - Into erect and formal lies - Repeated until their patience died - And they tried an unpracticed rebellion. - This was a formless revelation, - Unattended by words - But throwing its indistinct contrast - Over his broad one-colored thought. - At sixteen he employed words - To flay the contrast into shapes. - At seventeen he decided - To emulate the gay wisdom of children’s flesh. - He deliberately borrowed whiskey - To wipe away the lessons of older people - Lest they intrude their sterility - Upon his plotting exuberance. - He placed his hands on women, - Gently, boldly, as one - Experimenting with a piano. - He stole money, begged on street-corners, - And answered people with an actual knife - Merely to give his thoughts and emotions - A changing reason for existence. - Moderation seemed to him - A figure half asleep and half awake - And mutilating the truth of each condition. - At twenty-four his flesh became tired, - And to amuse the weariness - His hands wrote poetry. - He had done this before, - But only as a gleeful reprimand - To the speed of his limbs. - Now he wrote with the motives of one - Whose flesh is passing into less visible manners. - At times he returned to more concrete motions, - To befriend the handmaiden of his flesh, - But gradually he longed - For the complete secrecy of written creation, - Enjoying the novelty of a hiding-place. - In 1962 - He died with a grin at the fact - That literature and art in America - Were still presenting a mildewed, decorous mien. - - - - -CANDID NARRATIVE - - - I - - _A chorus-girl falls asleep and, in a dream, speaks to a former - lover. In her dream she holds the intelligence of a poet but still - clings to certain of the qualities and mannerisms of her wakeful - self._ - - Say, kid, I’m in a candid mood; - The kind of mood that silences - The babbling dampness of my character. - I’m feeling as improbable - As an overworked Grecian myth - Fainting amid the smells of a Ghetto. - Now, Hypocrisy - Always slinks along - Winking an opaque eye at reality. - But when he spies a fantasy - He feels disgraced and leaves in haste. - What’s the use of telling a lie to a lie? - So, since I’m only a dream, - Listen to my candid scream. - You like to press a rouged cheek - Against your obscurity, - Like a third-rate poet - Pasting a sunset upon his emptiness. - Bashful mountebanks like you - Can seduce the eloquent delusion - Of time and give it a speechless limp. - The insincere trickle of your words - Was neither silence nor sound - But falteringly tempted both, - Like a tiny fountain unnoticed - At the feet of two large coquettes - The intricate laziness - Of your dimpled face - Received a petulantly naked - Ghost of thought, and seized it without desire. - Again it held the furbished effigies - Of sensuality - And tried to give them life - From the weariness of my face. - Yet I could have endured you - But for the fact that your moustache - Scraped across my lips - Like a clumsy imitation of passion. - Trivial insults have tumbled down - The pillared complacency of empires - Just as the thrust of your lips - Tripped my mercenary balance. - My lover now has the face of a dog, - With each corner of his lips - Pointing to a different Heaven, - Yet his greed and melancholy - Sometimes fondle each other - Upon the pressures of his mouth, - And the monotony of his kiss - Does not dissolve my stoicism. - Women who measure their gifts for lovers - Never hope for more than this. - - - - - II - -UNLITERARY AND SHAMELESS - - _A young woman who has been renounced by her lover, because of her - lack of culture, answers his derision._ - - Your cloistered naughtiness - Makes me as boisterous - As a savage attending - A minstrel-show of regrets. - The pampered carefulness - With which you distil a series - Of standardized perfumes from life - Takes its promenade - Between the realms of sanity and madness. - You are too precise to be quite sane - And too evasive to be insane, - And all that you have left me - Is a mood of windy sadness-- - Emotions becoming verbose - In a last thin effort - To persuade themselves that they loved - A jewel that slipped from your fingers. - Your mind is a limpid warehouse - Filled with other mens’ creations, - And you pilfer a bit from each, - Disguising the scheme of your culture. - I would rather be a naked fool - Than a full-gowned erudite - Imitation of other mens’ hands. - I shall marry a desperado - And give him strength with which to paint - Black angels and muscular contortions - On panels of taffeta. - - - - -TWO SONNETS TO MY WIFE - - - I - - Because her voice is Schönberg in a dream - In which his harshness plays with softer keys - This does not mean that it is void of ease - And cannot gather to a strolling gleam. - Her voice is full of manners and they seem - To place a masquerade on thought and tease - Its strength until it finds that it has knees, - And whimsically leaves its heavy scheme. - - Discords can be the search of harmony - For worlds that lie beyond the reach of poise - And must be captured with abandoned hands. - The music of my wife strives to be free - And often takes a light, unbalanced voice - While madly walking over thoughtful lands. - - - II - - My wife relents to life and does not speak - Each moment with a deft and rapid note. - Sometimes a clumsy weirdness finds in her throat - And ushers in a music that is weak - And bargains with the groping of her heart. - But even then she plays with graver tones - That do not sell themselves to laughs and moans - But seek the counsel of a deeper art. - - She drapes her loud emotions in a shroud - Of glistening thought that waves above their dance - And sometimes parts to show their startled eyes. - The depths of mind within her have not bowed - To sleek emotion with its amorous glance. - She slaps its face and laughs at its surprise! - - - - -FINALITIES - - - I - - Pretend that night is grandiose, - That stars win graves in every ditch; - Pretend that moonlight is verbose - And affable, like some grande-mère, - And men will say that your despair - Seduces luminous conceits, - Or call you an anaemic fool - Who stuffs himself with curdled sweets. - Thus sentenced to obscurity, - You can find more turbulent lips - And spaciously retreat from men - Immersed in pedestals and whips. - Amusedly, you can say that stars - Are wizened jests on every ditch; - That moonlight is a trick that jars - Your mind intent on other minds. - Having agreed upon your station, - Men will no longer heed your words, - And with a galloping elation - You can contradict yourself in peace. - - - II - - The wary perturbations of convinced - And secretly disdainful men are mild - And deftly tepid to the ears of one - Who entertains a careless, ungloved child. - Above the sprightly idleness of plates - Men sit and feign industrious respect, - With eye-brows often slightly ill at ease-- - Cats in an argument are more erect. - At last the tactful lustres of farewells - Are traded: each man strolls off and forgets - The other--not a frill is disarranged. - The tension dexterously avoids regrets. - Two men have unveiled carved finalities - And made apologies for the event, - With voices well-acquainted with a task - Devoid of nakedness and ornament. - And each man might have murmured, “Yes, I know - What you will say and what I shall reply,” - And each man might have watched the other man - Smile helplessly into his mutton-pie. - - - III - - This farcical clock is copying - A wood-chopper with nimble poise, - While Time, with still and fluid strides, - Perplexedly listens to the noise. - The room that holds this joke is filled - With the relaxed complacencies - Of poets hiding from themselves - With measured trivialities. - But one among them walks about - And watches with embarrassed eyes. - The others do not speak to him: - His nudeness is a tight disguise. - This fool is anxious to display - Interrogations of his mind - To poets who at work and play - Are isolated from their kind. - Reluctantly he finds his room, - Sits on the floor, with legs tucked in, - And grins up at another clock - Aloofly measuring its din. - - - IV - - When you are tired of ogling moltenly, - Your undertones explosively confess. - A shop-girl coughing over her cigarette - Expresses the burlesque of your distress. - Take your cocaine. It leaves a blistering stain, - But phantom diamonds are immune from greed. - You pluck them from the buttons of your vest, - Wildly apologising for your need. - Take more. Redress the thinness of your neck - With diamonds; entertain them with your breast; - Cajole them on the floor with fingertips - That cannot pause, dipped in a demon’s zest. - If you had not relented to a man - Who meddled with your face and stole your clothes, - Your shrill creative pleasures might be still - Incarcerated in the usual pose. - Hysteria shot its fist against your face - One day, and left the blood-spot of your mouth, - But when the morning strikes you there will be - More than hysteria in your answering shout. - - - V - - Laughter is a skeleton’s applause: - Grief sells increase to sterility: - Happiness protects its subtle flaws. - These three significances make - The part of you that men can see, - As you recline upon this bed, - Your hand defending one bare knee, - Your shoulders trapped upon the quilt. - But under the warm sophistry - That turns your flesh, another form - Abstractly bellicose and free - Attacks the answer of your blood. - Freedom is the lowest note - Of slavery, and slavery - The lowest freedom--you can feel - The charm of your servility. - True, you were once a chamber-maid - Who won a thief and spoke to grief, - And now your limbs have numbly strayed. - Are these not harmless travesties? - - - VI - - Snobs have pockets into which - They crowd too many trinkets. - You feel this, talking to the rich - And lightly bulging mountebank. - Untie the knots that close your bag - And tempt him with a creed or need. - Be as loquacious as a hag - Who loves the details of her wares. - There is a relish when you speak - To one who cannot understand: - You celebrate upon a peak - And prod his helpless effigy. - This is an unimportant game - To men evading holidays, - But introspection becomes tame - Unless it compliments itself. - The lightly bulging mountebank - Is but an interval in which - You take your garments off and thank - The privacy that he bestows. - - - VII - - Like other men you fly from adjectives. - The plain terseness that lives in verbs and nouns - Creates a panorama where you know - That men are not a cloud of romping clowns. - You greet the wideness of eternal curves - Where beauty, death and silence give their height - To those rare men who do not play with thought. - But this fruit-peddler decorates his fright - And polishes his peaches and his grapes - Insanely. If his mercenary hopes - Were bolder he would be a nimble poet. - Slight in her bridal gown, his mind elopes - With adjectives that find her incomplete: - Your mind is hard and massively parades - Across the earth with Homer and Villon. - Since each of you with common sense evades - Monotony, I join you and refuse - To call you dwarf or giant. Let the fools - Who criticise you bind you with these names - And separate your dead bones with their rules! - - - VIII - - Dead men sit down beside the telephones - Within your brain and carefully relate - Decisions and discretions of the past, - Convinced that they will not deteriorate. - But you have not their certainty: you try - A question now and then that cautiously - Assaults their whispered indolence until - Their sharp words once more force you to agree. - Then you insist that certain living men - Whose tones are half-discreet may be allowed - To greet their masters through the telephones, - Provided that their words are not too loud. - The new men imperceptibly entice - Their elders, and a compromise is made, - Both sides discovering that two or three - Excluded men must be correctly flayed. - And so the matter ends; conservative - And radical revise their family-tree, - While you report this happening with relief - To liberals and victorious cups of tea. - - - - -IMAGINARY PEOPLE - - -I - -POET - - You have escaped the comedy - Of swift, pretentious praise and blame, - And smashed a tavern where they sell - The harlots’ wine that men call fame. - Heralds of reckless solitude - Have offered you another voice, - But men are still a tempting jest. - You roam and cannot make a choice. - When you have played distractedly - With a humility, you tire - And change the pastime to a pride. - These are but moods of one desire. - You throw an imitating gleam - Upon the dwarfs that line your road, - Then with a worn hostility - You tramp along beneath your load. - - -II - -WOMAN - - To hide your isolation, you become - Tame and loquacious, bowing to the men - Who bring you ornaments and poverties. - Your cryptic melancholy dwindles then, - Solved by the distant contrast of your words. - Your loneliness, with an amused relief, - Sits listening to your volubility - And idling with an enervated grief. - The play does not begin until you say - Your last “good-night,” for you have only made - A swindled fantasy regain its parts. - Throughout the night you held an unseen blade - Upon your lap and trifled with its hilt, - And now you lift it with submissive dread. - Should you attack your loneliness and grief - Now that they are asleep? You shake your head. - - -III - -CHILD - - Like puffs of smoke inquisitively blown - Across the slight transparency of dawn, - The births of thought disperse upon your face. - A tenuous arrogance, when they have gone, - Clings to its tiny wisdom and denies - The feeble challenge. Warm emotions swarm - Upon the flushed impatience of your face - And merge to lordly, evanescent form. - New sights bring light oppression to your mind. - You struggle with a hunger that transcends - The glistening indecisions of your eyes - And wins a flitting certainty. Your trends - Lead to a fabled turmoil that escapes - The stunted messengers of trembling thought. - Yet, when your hand for moments closes tight - You feel a dagger that your fears have caught. - - -IV - -OLD MAN - - Below your skull a social gathering glows. - Weak animosities exchange a last - Chat with emotional ambassadors - Who honor the importance of your past. - You turn your hammock and surrender limbs - To sunlight, and increase the hammock’s swing - As though you suavely bargained with a friend. - Its answers are impersonal and bring - A tolerance that wounds your lack of strength. - A final insurrection cleaves your rest. - You raise your back, then lower it convinced - That motion now would be a needless test.... - And with your falling back, the gathering - Within your head melts through a door, chagrined, - And everything within you dies except - A blue and golden hammock in the wind. - - - - -UNEASY REFLECTIONS - - - Determinedly peppered with signs, - The omnibus ambles without curiosity. - Southampton Row, Malborne Road, Charing Cross-- - These names have no relation - To the buildings they partition - If one mutters, “I shall go to Euston Road,” - Imagination is relieved of all errands - And, decently ticketed, enters the omnibus. - If one muttered, “I shall go to protesting angles, - Surreptitiously middle-aged, - And find a reticent line to play with,” - One would violate - The hasty convenience of labels - And seriously examine one’s destination. - If poplar-trees, brief violets and green glades - On any country road had each received - An incongruous name--Smith’s Tree, - C. Jackson’s Clump, or Ferguson’s Depression-- - And city streets had never known a label, - Most poets would have turned their fluid obsession - On lamp-posts and the grandeur of ash-cans. - It would be grimly realistic now - To write about a violet or a cow. - - - - -SUMMER EVENING: NEW YORK SUBWAY-STATION - - - Perspiring violence derides - The pathetic collapse of dirt. - An effervescence of noises - Depends upon cement for its madness. - Electric light is taut and dull, - Like a nauseated suspense. - This kind of heat is the recollection - Of an orgy in a swamp. - Soiled caskets joined together - Slide to rasping stand-stills. - People savagely tamper - With each other’s bodies, - Scampering in and out of doorways. - Weighted with apathetic bales of people - The soiled caskets rattle on. - The scene consists of mosaics - Jerkily pieced together and blown apart. - A symbol of billowing torment, - This sturdy girl leans against an iron girder. - Weariness has loosened her face - With its shining cruelty. - Round and poverty-stricken - Her face renounces life. - Her white cotton waist is a wet skin on her breast: - Her black hat, crisp and delicate, - Does not understand her head. - An old man stoops beside her, - Sweat and wrinkles erupting - Upon the blunt remnants of his face. - A little black pot of a hat - Corrupts his grey-haired head. - - Two figures on a subway-platform, - Pieced together by an old complaint. - - - - -GARBAGE-HEAP - - - The wind was shrill and mercenary, - Like a housewife pacing down the sky. - Green weeds and tin-cans in the yard - Made a debris of ludicrous dissipations. - The ochre of cold elations - Had settled on the cans. - Their brilliant labels peeped from the weeds, - Like the remains of a charlatan. - A bone reclined against a fence-post - And mouldily congratulated life. - A woman’s garter wasted its faded frills - Upon a newspaper argument. - The shipwrecked rancor of bottles and boxes - Was pressed to disfigured complexities. - A smell of torrential asperity - Knew the spirit of the yard. - - Contented or incensed, - The wreckage stood in the yard, - One shade below the sardonic. - - - - -IMPULSIVE DIALOGUE - - - _Poet_ - - Will you, like other men, - Offer me indigo indignities? - - - _Undertaker_ - - Indigo indignities! - The words are like a mermaid and a saint - Doubting each other’s existence with a kiss. - - - _Poet_ - - The words of most men kiss - With satiated familiarity. - Indigo is dark and vehement, - But one word in place of two - Angers barmaids and critics. - - - _Undertaker_ - - Straining after originality - You argue with its ghost! - A simple beauty, like morning - Harnessed by a wide sparkle - And plodding into the hearts of men, - Cannot reach your frantic juggling. - - - _Poet_ - - I can appreciate - The spontaneous redundancy of nature - Without the aid of an echo - From men who lack her impersonal size. - - - _Undertaker_ - - The sweeping purchase of an evening - By an army of stars; - The bold incoherence of love; - The peaceful mountain-roads of friendship-- - These things evade your dexterous epigrams! - - - _Poet_ - - A statue, polished and large, - Dominates when it stands alone. - Placed in a huge profusion of statues - Its outlines become humiliated. - Simplicity demands one gesture - And men give it endless thousands. - Complexity wanders through a forest, - Glimpsing details in the gloom. - - - _Undertaker_ - - I do not crave the dainty pleasure - Of chasing ghosts in a forest! - Nor do I care to pluck - Exaggerated mushrooms in the gloom. - I have lost myself on roads - Crossed by tossing hosts of men. - Pain and anger have scorched our slow feet: - Peace has washed our foreheads. - - - _Poet_ - - Futility, massive and endless, - Captures a stumbling grandeur - Embalmed in history. - In my forest you could see this - From a distance and lose - Your limited intolerance. - Simplicity and subtlety - At different times are backgrounds for each other, - Changing with the position of our eyes. - Death will burn your eyes - With his taciturn complexity. - - - _Undertaker_ - - Death will strike your eyes - With his wild simplicity! - - - _Poet_ - - Words are soldiers of fortune - Hired by different ideas - To provide an importance for life - But within the glens of silence - They meet in secret peace.... - Undertaker, do you make of death - A puffing wretch forever pursued - By duplicates of vanquished forms? - Or do you make him a sneering King - Brushing flies from his bloodless cheeks? - Do you see him as an unappeased brooding - Walking over the dust of men? - Do you make him an eager giant - Discovering and blending into his consciousness - The tiny parts of his limitless mind? - - - _Undertaker_ - - Death and I do not know each other. - I am the stolid janitor - Who cleans the litter he has left - And claims a fancied payment. - - - _Poet_ - - Come to my fantastic forest - And you will not need to rise - From simple labours, asking death - For final wages. - - - - -EMOTIONAL MONOLOGUE - - - _A man is sitting within the enigmatic turmoil of a railroad station. - His face is narrow and young, and his nose, lips, and eyes carved to - a Semitic sharpness, have been sundered by a bloodless catastrophe. - A traveling-bag stands at his feet. Around him people are clutching - farewells and shouting greetings. Within him a monologue addresses an - empty theatre._ - - I am strangling emotions - And casting them into the seats - Of an empty theatre. - When my lifeless audience is complete, - The ghosts of former emotions - Will entertain their dead masters. - After each short act - A humorous ghost will fly through the audience, - Striking the limp hands into applause, - And between the acts - Sepulchral indifference will mingle - With the dust upon the backs of seats. - Upon the stage a melodrama - And a travesty will romp - Against a back-drop of fugitive resignation. - Climax and anti-climax - Will jilt each other and drift - Into a cheated insincerity. - Sometimes the lights will retire - While a shriek and laugh - Make a martyr of the darkness. - When the lights reappear - An actor-ghost will assure the audience - That nothing has happened save - The efforts of a fellow ghost - To capture life again. - In his role of usher - Another ghost will arrange - The lifeless limbs of the audience - Into postures of relief. - Sometimes a comedy will trip - The feet of an assassin, - Declaring that if ghosts were forced - To undergo a second death - Their thinness might become unbearable. - At other times indignant tragedy - Will banish an intruding farce, - Claiming that life should not retain - The luxury of another laugh. - The first act of the play will show - The owner of the theatre - Conversing with the ghost of a woman. - As unresponsive as stone - Solidly repelling a spectral world, - His words will keenly betray - The bloodless control of his features. - He will say: “With slightly lowered shoulders, - Because of a knife sticking in my back, - I shall trifle with crowded highways, - Buying decorations - For an interrupted bridal-party. - This process will be unimportant - To the workshop of my mind - Where love and death are only - Colourless problems upon a chart.” - The ghost of the woman will say: - “Your mind is but the rebellious servant - Of sensitive emotions - And brings them clearer dominance.” - And what shall I mournfully answer? - I am strangling emotions - And casting them into the seats - Of an empty theatre. - - - - -PRONOUNCED FANTASY - - - A negro girl with skin - As black as a psychic threat, - And plentiful swells of blonde hair, - Sat at a badly tuned piano - And vanquished her fingers upon the keys. - A midnight exultation - Fastened itself on her face, - Quivering over the shrouded prominence - Of her lips and nose. - Her dress was pink and short, - And hung upon her tall, thin body, - Like a lesson in buffoonery. - She lectured her heart on the piano - With violence of minor chords. - Her voice was a prisoner - Whose strong hands turned the bars of his cell - Into musical strings. - _Wen’ tuh Houston, tuh get mah trunk, - Did’n get mah trunk, but ah got dam’ drunk. - Well, ahm satisfi-i-ied - Cause ah gotta be-e-e-ee._ - The negro girl turned and cursed - With religious incision - At a parrot in a white spittoon. - He pampered his derision - While she played another tune. - Then he saw her long blonde hair - And paused in the midst of his squawk. - - - II - - I found the negro girl - Walking down a railroad track. - The unconscious humour of sunlight - Disputed the gloom of her skin. - Her gray and dirty clothes - Disgraced the haste of her body. - Her feet and arms were bare - And thin as sensual disappointments. - An egg stood straight upon - The blonde attention of her hair. - The upturned remonstrance of her head - Revealed her balancing effort. - Lacking a more intense food - She dined upon the air - And sang with loosened despair. - - _Gonna lay mah head right down upon dat-- - Down upon dat railroad track! - Gonna rest mah head right down upon dat railroad track. - An’ wen the train goes by--’m boy-- - Ahm gonna snatch it back._ - - The negro girl received my gaze - And broke it on her poignant face. - “Why do you carry the egg?” I said. - “If I could only hate it less - I might break it, and undress,” - She answered with motionless lips. - - - - -WHEN SPIRITS SPEAK OF LIFE - - -_Three spirits sit upon a low stone wall placed on the top of a hill. -Their figures are gray, with human outlines, and their faces are those -of a boy, a woman, and an old man. Light is greeting intimations of -evening. The wall, the hill, and the figures exist only to the spirits -who have created them._ - - - _First Spirit_ - - We have made a wall - And take it gravely. - - - _Second Spirit_ - - The pensive vagary - That led us to return to earth - Welcomes these pretty illusions. - Stone wall, hill, and evening - Become the touch of spice - Precious to our weariness. - - - _Third Spirit_ - - The animated brevity - Of this world is captivating! - We have journeyed inward - To the ever-distant center of life, - Where language is a universe - Seething with variations, - And form becomes the changing warmth - Of wrestling influences; - Where motion is the plunging light of thoughts - Dying upon each other. - - - _First Spirit_ - - We find an incredulous pleasure - In changing from violent influences - To breath that is mutilated with outlines. - With a subtle suspicion, we greet - The tiny fables of our hands and feet. - We take the little blindness of eyes - To reassure ourselves - That the fables will not vanish. - Humorously we trade - Languages, like one who gives a plateau - For a drop of old liquor! - - - _Second Spirit_ - - Once we were germs of thought - Squirming under elastic disguises-- - The bank-clerk inscribing tombstones; - The poet playing surgeon to his heart; - The cardinal starving his flesh. - Our bodies were images made by thought - And symbolizing the pain of its birth. - Murder, love, and theft - Were only struggling experiments - Made by germs of thought emerging to form. - - - _Third Spirit_ - - What men call mysticism - Is the lull in which their germ - Of thought compensates itself - By dreaming of a future form. - But when the struggle is resumed, - It often derides its inactivity, - Scorning the brilliant trance of its exhaustion! - - - _First Spirit_ - - And now, three tired spirits, - Seeking a weird trinket of the past, - Have slipped into a replica of birth. - - - _Second Spirit_ - - Because the gliding search of our life - Is lacking in one quality, amusement, - We shall often return - To evenings, men, and walls of stone. - - - - -INSANITY - - -Geroid Latour was a lean, grandiose Frenchman whose curly beard -resembled a cluster of ripe raspberries. His lips were maroon-colored -and slightly distended, as though forever slyly inviting some -stubbornly inarticulate thought--as though slyly inviting Geroid -Latour. A man’s lips and beard are two-thirds of his being, unless he -is an anchorite, and even in that case they can become impressively -stunted. Geroid Latour was an angel rolling in red mud. From much -rolling he had acquired the pert, raspberry beard, struggling lips, and -the surreptitious grandeur of a nose, but the plastic grin of a singed -angel sometimes listened to his face. - -His wife, having futilely tried to wrench his beard off, sought to -reach his eyes with a hat-pin. - -“This is unnecessary,” he expostulated. “Another woman once did it much -better with a word.” - -A plum-colored parrot in the room shrieked: “I am dumb! I am dumb!” -Geroid Latour had painted it once, in a sober moment. Geroid and his -wife wept over the parrot; slapped each other regretfully; and sat down -to eat a pear. A little girl ran into the room. Her face was like a -candied moon. - -“My mother has died and my father wants a coffin,” she said. - -Geroid Latour rubbed his hands into a perpendicular lustre--he was a -facetiously candid undertaker. He took the hand of the little girl -whose face was like a candied moon and they ambled down the street. - -“I have lost my friendship with gutters,” mused Geroid, looking down as -he walked. “They quarrel with bits of orange peel and pins. Patiently -they wait for the red rain that men give them every two hundred years. -Brown and red always sweep toward each other. Men are often unknowingly -killed by these two huge colours treading the insects upon a path and -walking to an ultimate trysting-place.” - -The little girl whose face was like a molasses crescent cut off one of -her yellow curls and hung it from her closed mouth. - -“Why are you acting in this way?” asked Geroid. - -“It’s something I’ve never done before,” she answered placidly. - -Geroid stroked his raspberry beard with menacing longing but could not -quite induce himself to pull it off. It would have been like cutting -the throat of his mistress. - -They passed an insincerely littered courtyard, tame beneath its gray -tatters, and saw a black cat chasing a yellow cat. - -“A cat never eats a cat--goldfish and dead lions are more to his -taste,” said Geroid. “Indulgently he flees from other cats or pursues -them in turn.” - -“I see that you dislike melodrama,” observed a bulbous woman in -penitent lavender, who was beating a carpet in the courtyard. - -“You’re mistaken. Melodrama is a weirdly drunken plausibility and can -not sincerely be disliked,” said Geroid. “But I must not leave without -complimenting your lavender wrapper. Few people have mastered the art -of being profoundly ridiculous.” - -“I can see that you’re trying to be ridiculously profound,” said the -woman as she threw a bucket of stale water at Geroid. He fled down the -street, dragging the child with him. They left the cumbersome sterility -of the city behind them and passed into the suburbs. - -“Here we have a tragedy in shades of naked inertness,” said Geroid to -the little girl. - -“I don’t quite understand you,” answered the little girl. “I see -nothing but scowls and brownness.” - -A tree stood out like the black veins on an unseen fist. A square -house raised its toothless snarl and all the other houses were jealous -imitators. Wooden fences crossed each other with dejected, mathematical -precision. A rat underneath a veranda scuffled with an empty candy box. -The green of dried grasses spread out like poisonous impotence. - -“Here is the house where my mother lies dead,” said the little girl. - -Her father--peace germinating into greasy overalls--came down the -steps. His blue eyes were parodies on the sky--discs of sinisterly -humourous blue; his face reminded one of a pear that had been stepped -on--resiliently flattened. - -“I have come to measure your wife for her coffin,” said Geroid Latour. - -“You’ll find her at the bottom of the well in the back-yard,” answered -the man. - -“Trying to cheat a poor old undertaker out of his business!” said -Latour, waggishly. - -“No, I’ll leave that to death,” said the man. “Come inside and warm -your candour.” - -“No, thank you, shrieks travel faster through the open air,” said -Geroid, squinting at the man’s sportively cerulean eyes. - -“Come out to the well and we’ll haul her up,” said the man. - -The little girl darted into the house, like a disappointed hobgoblin, -and Geroid Latour followed the man to the well at the rear of the -house. Suddenly he saw a mountainous washerwoman dancing on her toes -over the black loam. Her sparse grayish black hair flapped behind her -like a dishrag and her naked body had the color of trampled snow. An -empty beer-bottle was balanced on her head. She had the face of an old -Columbine who still thought herself beautiful. - -“A neighbour of mine,” said the man in an awed voice. “She was a -ballet-dancer in her youth and every midnight she makes my back-yard a -theater. In the morning she scrubs my floors. Here, in my back-yard, -she chases the phantoms of her former triumphs. Moonlight turns her -knee joints into miracles!” - -“Ah, from enormous wildness and pretence, squeezed together, comes the -little drop of happiness,” said Geroid Latour, sentimentally. - -“My wife objected to my joining this woman’s midnight dance,” said the -man. “To prevent her from informing the police, I killed her. I could -not see a miracle ruined.” - -“Only the insane are entertaining,” answered Geroid. “The egoism of -sane people is gruesome--a modulated scale of complacent gaieties--but -insane people often display an artificial ego which is divine. The -artist, gracefully gesticulating about himself, on his divan, is -hideous, but if he danced on a boulder and waved a lilac bough in one -hand and a broom in the other, one could respect him.” - -As Geroid finished talking the mountainous washerwoman drew nearer and -stopped in front of the man. Blossoming glints of water dropped from -her grayish white skin. - -“You haven’t killed me yet, my dear husband,” she shouted to the man. -Then, snatching the beer-bottle balanced on her head she struck at him. -Geroid fled to the front gate and sped down the road. Looking back, -from a safe distance, he saw the mountainous woman, the man, and the -little child earnestly gesticulating in the moonlight. - - - - -POETRY - - -Morning light anxiously pinched the cheeks of these poplar trees. The -silver blood rushed to their faces and they blushed. The garden walls -forgot their stolidity for a moment and seemed inclined to leap away, -but became sober again, resisting the twinkling trickery of morning -light. Airily suspended tales in light and colour, of no importance to -philosophers, hung over the scene. Only a snail underneath the trees, -steeped in a creeping evening, lived apart from the crisp medley of -morning lights. Laboriously, the snail moved through his explanation of -the universe. But, to blades of grass, their lives tersely centered in -green, the morning was a mysterious pressure. - -The morning glowed over the garden like an incoherent rhapsody. It -lacked order and thought, and the serious eyes of teachers and jesters -would have spurned it. But Halfert Bolin, walking between rows of cold -peonies, regarded the morning with harsh approval and spoke. - -“You have the brightness and flatness of a distracted virgin but your -eyes are mildly opaque. The tinseled swiftness of a courtesan’s memoirs -is yours but your heart is as shy as the clink of glass. You glow like -an incoherent rhapsody over the peonies in this garden!” - -A woman whose painted face was a lurid snarl tapped Bolin on the -shoulder. Her red hair was brushed upward into a pinnacle of burnished -frenzy; her blue serge dress cast its plaintive monotone over the body -of a sagging amazon; a pink straw hat dangled from her hand. Bolin -allowed his admiration to bow. - -“A babyish lisp slipping from you would make your grewsomeness perfect, -madame,” he said. - -“I don’t getcha, friend,” she responded. “I’m a sporting lady from the -roadhouse down the way an’ I’m out for a morning walk. Who planted you -here, old duck?” - -“I’m a cow browsing amidst the peonies,” said Bolin seriously. “Without -a thought, I feed on light and colour.” - -“You don’t look like a cow,” said the woman, dubiously. “Maybe you’re -spoofing me, you funny old turnip!” - -“No, I only jest with the morning,” Bolin answered, unperturbed. -“It ignores me with soaring colours and I prefer this to the minute -antagonisms of human beings. You don’t understand a word I say--you -bend beneath tepid apprehension, so I find a pleasure in speaking to -you--it’s like humming a love-song to a mud-turtle.” - -“Don’t get insultin’,” said the woman with disgruntled amazement. “I -think you’re crazy.” - -Bolin turned, with a smile like a distant spark, and walked away -between the peonies. The woman regarded him a moment, while a -fascinated frown battled with her painted face. Then she strode after -him and gripped his arm. - -“Hey, watcha leavin’ me for?” she said in a piteously strident voice. - -“For the peonies in this garden,” answered Bolin, mildly. - -“Listen, don’t get mad at me,” she said. “I don’t care whether you’re -crazy or not. I like your face.” - -Bolin gazed at her while sorrow loosened his face and made it glisten -spaciously. - -“Can you become as spontaneously tranquil as these peonies?” he asked. - -The woman tendered him her dazed frown, like an anxious servant. - -“Walk with me and be quiet unless I ask you to speak,” said Bolin with -sudden harshness. - -Obediently she laid a hand on his arm and they strolled down the path -between the peonies. She sidled along like an inspired puppet--she -seemed a doll touched to life by some Christ. Upon her painted face a -nun and a violinist grappled tentatively and her lips made a red scarf -fallen from the struggle. Bolin left the peonies and wandered down the -road. They came upon a boulder clad in an outline of smashed spears. -Queen Anne’s Lace grew close to its base, like the remnants of some -revel. - -“This is the head of a philosopher,” said Bolin. - -The woman jerkily turned her body, while pallid perplexity ate into her -paint and made her face narrow. - -“You can speak,” said Bolin. - -“It looks like a rock,” she answered in the voice of a child clinking -his fetters. - -“We have both spoken words,” said Bolin mildly. - -The shy blindness on her face glided to and fro, like a prisoner. As -she strolled with Bolin she still seemed a puppet dragged along the -dust of a road by some Christ. Bolin’s middle-aged face whistled, with -limpid chagrin, to his youth. His high cheek-bones were like hidden -fists straining against his sallow skin. - -They came upon a dead rabbit stiffening by the roadside. - -“Bury him,” said Bolin, gravely. - -The woman clutched at her habitual self. - -“S-a-a-y, what’s the idea?” she asked in a shrilly lengthened voice. - -“Bury him,” repeated Bolin gravely. - -With a dazed giggle she picked a dead branch from the ground and jabbed -at the loose black loam. Then she gingerly prodded the dead rabbit with -the branch, shoving it into the depression she had made. She scooped -earth over it with her foot. - -“Now we’re both crazy,” she said uncertainly, and her nervous smile was -the juggled wreck of a silver helmet. - -“You have buried your meekness,” said Bolin, calmly amused. “Now walk -beside me and do not speak unless, being brave, you desire to leave me.” - -The woman stood gaping at him, like a vision poignantly doubting -the magician who has created it. Sullenness made her lips straight -for a moment, then faded into twitching awe. She slid her arm into -his and once more seemed a doll dragged along the dust of a road by -some distracted giant. Bolin retraced his steps; he and the woman -passed by the garden of cold peonies and came to a bend in the road. -Late afternoon blundered sedately through shades of green foliage -beneath them. Below the hilltop on which they stood, a barn-like house -crouched, its tan cerements repelling the afternoon light. - -The woman tapped her chin with two fingers in a drum-beat of reality. - -“Gotta get back to work, old dear,” she said, amiably squinting at -Bolin. - -Bolin’s sallow face shook once and became chiseled apathy. - -“So do I,” he answered, his voice like the accidental ring of light -metals. “I’m the new waiter Foley hired last week. You’ve been too busy -to notice me much.” - -For a full minute the woman stood staring at him, her hands upon her -hips, her slightly bulging gray eyes like water-drops threatening to -roll down her shattered face. - -“You’re the guy they call Nutty Louie,” she said at last, as though -confiding a ludicrously startling message to herself. - -Then for another full minute she stood staring at him. - -“We’re bughouse,” she said in a mesmerised whisper. “Bughouse.” - -Bolin walked forward without a word. The woman gaped at him for a -moment and then ran after him as she had in the garden of peonies. - - - - -RELIGION - - -Alvin Tor sat in his floating row-boat and read the Bible. Green waves -died upon each other, like a cohesive fantasy. Each small wave rose as -high as the other and ended in a swan’s neck of white interrogation. -Sunlight blinded the water as style dazes the contents of a poem and -the blue sky lifted itself to symmetrical stupor. The air fell against -one like a soothing religion. The bristling melancholia of pine trees -lined the wide river. But Alvin Tor sat in his floating row-boat, -reading the Bible. He read the Songs of Solomon, and a sensual -pantomime made a taut stage of his face. When not reading the Songs -of Solomon he was as staidly poised as a monk’s folded arms. He had -borrowed the colours of his life from that spectrum of desire which he -called God. Different shades of green leaves were, to him, the playful -jealousies of a presence; the tossed colours of birds became the -ineffably light gestures of a lost poet. - -His Swedish peasant’s face had singed its dimples in a bit of -sophistication but his eyes were undeceived. His heart was a secluded -soliloquy transforming the shouts of the world into tinkling surmises. -His broad nose and long lips were always at ease and his ruddy skin -held the texture of fresh bunting. His eyes knew the unkindled -reticence of a rustic boy. - -This man of one mood sat in his floating row-boat, reading the Bible. -He reached the mouth of the river and drifted out to sea. The sea was -a menacing lethargy of rhythm: green swells sensed his row-boat with -dramatic leisure. A sea gull skimmed over the water, like a haphazard -adventure. Looking up from his Bible Alvin Tor saw the body of a -woman floating beside his boat. With one jerk his face swerved into -blankness. The tip of his tongue met his upper lip as though it were -a fading rim of reality. The fingers of one hand distressed his flaxen -hair. - -The woman floated on her back with infinite abandon. Little ripples of -green water died fondling her body. The green swells barely lifting her -were great rhythms disturbed by an inert discord. Sunlight, fumbling at -her body, relinquished its promiscuous desires and became abashed. _Her -wet brown hair had a drugged gentility: its short dark curls hugged -her head with despondent understanding. Her face had been washed to -an imperturbable transparency: it had the whiteness of reclining foam -overcast with a twinge of green--the sea had lent her its skin._ Her -eyes were limply unworried and violated to gray disintegration. In -separated bits of outlines the remains of thinly impudent features were -slipping from her face. The bloated pity of black and white garments -hid her lean body. - -As Alvin Tor watched her, tendrils of peace gradually interfered with -the blankness on his face. His lips sustained an unpremeditated repose. -A sensitive compassion dropped the sparks of its coming into his eyes. -His clothes became a jest upon an inhuman body; the earth of him -effortlessly transcended itself in the gesture of his arm flung out to -the woman. - -“Impalpable relic of a soul, the spirit you held must have severed -its shadow to preserve you forever from the waves,” he said, his face -blindfolded with ecstasy, “for you grasp the water with immortal -relaxation. You are not a body--you are beauty receding into a -resistless seclusion.” - -“Kind fool, musically stifling himself in a row-boat--made kind by the -desperate tenderness of a lie--you are serenading the chopped bodies of -your emotions,” said the woman. - -Alvin Tor’s face cracked apart and the incredulously hurrying ghost of -a child nodded a moment and was snuffed out. - -“Mermaid of haunting despondency, what are you?” he asked. - -“I am the symbol of your emotions,” the woman answered. - -“I made them roses stepped upon by God,” said Alvin Tor. - -“I am the symbol of your emotions,” said the woman. - -Alvin Tor heavily dropped his raised arm, like a man smashing a -trumpet. Restless white hands compressed the ruddy broadness of his -face. The woman slid into the green swells like exhausted magic. Alvin -Tor rowed back to the river. - - -II - -A woman lifted the green window-shades in her room and resentfully -blinked at the sun-plastered clamours of a street. She turned to the -bed upon which another woman reclined. - -“Say, wasn’t that a nutty drunk we had last night?” she said. “Huggin’ -a Bible and ravin’ about waves and mermaids and a lot of funny stuff!” - -She dropped the green shade and stood against it a moment in the -smouldering gloom of the room. _Her brown hair had a drugged gentility: -its short dark curls hugged her head with despondent understanding. -Her face had been washed to an imperturbable transparency: it had the -whiteness of reclining foam overcast with a twinge of green--the sea -had lent her its skin._ - - - - -SCIENTIFIC PHILOSOPHY - - -The concentrated vehemence of a mountain halted against the sky in -a thin line of thwarted hostility. A waterfall hurdled its crazed -parabola between gray rocks, flying into a stifled scream of motion far -below. When the pine trees moved a mathematician solved his problems, -and his acrid exultation hypnotized the air. The pungent truculence of -earth that had never been stepped on raised its brown shades. - -Eric Lane stopped in an alcove of pine trees; lifted a pack from his -back; pitched his tent; and broke dead pine branches across his knee. -There were scars on his face where philosophies had broken and died -and the beaming redundancy of one that survived. For Eric believed -that the visible and audible surface of man’s conduct and dreams, -when interpreted and compared, could reveal his frustrated hungers. -Metaphysics, to him, was a beggar rattling his chains into insincere -victories of sound--a beggar painting seraphs upon the strained -finality of his brain. - -Eric looked up from his task of breaking dead pine branches. A first -shade of twilight climbed the mountain, like a dazed negro runner. The -mountain impassively confessed that its vehemence had been a lie. It -met the sky with an immense line of collapsed reticence. The waterfall -became the squirming of a white hermit who finds a black stranger -invading his cell. Twilight was a body gradually returning to the -festooned skeletons of the pine trees. The rocks were enticed into -attitudes--one was a giant fondling the spear that had wounded him; -another curved over like a gray serf who had broken his back. Eric -stared at a huge rock standing on the mountainside and outlined against -the distant base of a second mountain. It held the tensely embalmed -profile of a woman. Her rigidly woebegone features had withdrawn -from some devil’s cliff of desire; they made a line of incomplete -crucifixion. Her hidden eyes germinated into ghouls stealthily -absorbing the gray harvest of her face. Designed by a shattered surmise -her face retreated from the valley. Her forehead was like a sword -cracked in the middle; her nose and lips were the remains of an autopsy -on emotion. Demons and virgins had gained one grave in the grayness -assailing her face. - -Eric regarded her at first with a celebrating scepticism; then -sallowness slowly marked his face into a hanging scroll of terror. -Lightness vanished from his black hair and it became a charred crown. -He tottered three steps in the direction of the rock-face and then, -with unannounced dexterity, a smile revived his face. The diminutive -city of his mind had sent its lord-mayor to restore him. Eric returned -to his task of breaking dead pine branches. The diminutive city of -his mind sent slender pæans into electric threads. Eric kindled the -branches into a fire, and a carnival of flames pirouetted into startled -death. Eric stretched his arms out, like a concubine stroking the walls -of her black tent, and his face became idly immobile. Then he altered -completely, in the leap of a moment, as though slipping from a loose -costume with infinite ease. His face stiffened into the unearthly -equilibrium of thought witnessing the torture of emotion. The fire, to -him, became a gaudy funeral-pyre. When sleep finally interfered with -his face he dropped slowly to the ground, like satiated revenge. - -When he awoke, morning assaulted the gaunt scene with unceremonious -clarity. The mountain became a senseless giant; the waterfall changed -to a commonplace ribbon: and the pine trees blended into the lethargy -of dwarfs. The gray rock on the mountain was still gashed into the -face of a woman but her outlines were those of a transfigured virago. -Eric strapped on his pack; gazed down at the rock, with the smile of -a merchant emerging from drunken memories, and strode toward it. When -he reached it he hammered away a flat fragment, for remembrance, and -returned to the mountain path, with an expressionless face. - - * * * * * - -Eric Lane ended his lecture on scientific philosophy and tapped a -desecrating hand, for a moment, on the profile that had told me a story -during his talk. He had left the mountain pass but he was unaware of -that. He would have laughed at the idea, like a beggar who rattles his -chains into insincere victories of sound. Of that, too, he was unaware. - - - - -ART - - -Mrs. Calvin and Mrs. Kildrick stood on opposite sides of a back-yard -fence. Around them the romping improbabilities of early spring were -dispersed amidst the sour reality of suburban houses. Pale green -surrounded the small, square abodes, like an impish irrelevance. Each -house carried a shade of dull green, brown and red, and these shades -fitted into each other and made a meekly repressed story. Cinder -side-walks stretched in front of the houses--remorsefully dry remains -of fire, sacrificing themselves to occasional feet. The entire scene -was an unconscious reflection of the minds of Mrs. Calvin and Mrs. -Kildrick, standing on opposite sides of a back-yard fence. - -These women held an unblossoming stoutness, like buds that had swollen -enormously but failed to open. Their gray muslin wrappers were too -undistinguished to be shrouds and sepulchrally flirted with red -ruffles. Mrs. Calvin had an implacably round face and it reminded one -of a merchant scolding an infant. Mrs. Kildrick’s face was round, but -softer, like that of a frustrated milk-maid. - -“You ought to see her room,” said Mrs. Kildrick. “It looks like a -drunkard’s confession, as my husband says, the funniest clay figgers -and paintins you ever saw.” - -“I couldn’t believe it when you told me,” said Mrs. Calvin, “the poor -dear looks so-o respectable--what can be ailing her?” - -“She calls it her a-art,” said Mrs. Kildrick. “Well, as my husband does -say, we should pity those whose minds are a little bit cracked!” - -The ladies continued to adulterate the wanness of their doubts and the -sunlight continued its blunt rummaging way among the rubbish-cans and -fences. The afternoon jovially began to change its glowing costume for -a pretended death scene, studying and lingering over gray effects. Just -as its melancholy was heaving toward a climax Helma Solbert strode up -the cinder walk leading to Mrs. Kildrick’s abode. - -She was a woman of thirty with a body whose dying youth amply derided -middle-age. Her ovally impertinent face spoke to the first warnings of -dissolution and told them that their coming had been ill-advised. Weary -but tenaciously merry, her gray eyes were close to those of one who -has made the dagger in his side a cajoling saint. Her little nose was -a straight invitation to her widely ripe lips and they turned upward -as if to reach it. She wore a blue serge suit that was an incongruous -commonplace but did not quite succeed in effacing her. Round and black, -her small hat rested lightly upon her brown and abundant hair, like an -inconspicuous accident. She entered her room, abandoned her hat and -coat, and measured herself in a mirror as though encouraging a stranger -to play with his burden. Then a smile of delighted futility plucked -at her lips and she closed her eyes to avoid robbing the stranger of -his forlornly puzzling charm. With her eyes still closed she walked to -a couch and stretched out upon it, and everything vanished from her -face except its flesh. Framed canvases hung upon the yellow plaster -walls of the room and each frame had a shape that obviously failed -to harmonize with the painting it enclosed. Unconscious of the stiff -challenges holding them, the canvases stood in the fading afternoon -light, like a disconnected fable. One above the couch represented a -small red apple split by an enormous dark green hatchet. The hatchet -had driven one of its points into a wooden table and slanted steeply -upward, its slender handle rising to an upper corner of the painting. -Two little hemispheres of red and white apple cowered on each side -of the hatchet’s blade. The visible, level top of the table was dark -brown and terminated against a feebly violet background. The following -sentimental words were painted in black letters high upon the violet. - -“The hatchet struck at weak beauty, but--” - -The canvas was enclosed by a round frame painted in a shade of apple -red. Each canvas in the room held the first line of a poem that was -completed by the colored forms of the painting or a last line preceded -by visual symbols. With the air of a fanatic whose blood had tightened -into loops of fire that cast their sheen upon his voice, Helma would -say to rare visitors viewing her paintings: - -“By blending into one, art, literature and painting can lose their -deficiencies and gain perfection. I am merely experimenting with the -crude promise of this future union.” - -On a canvas at the opposite side of the room a huge complexly broken -arrow emerged from a pale red sky. The black arrow pieces were dotted -with tiny yellow, indigo and pink birds. Dark red lips, each twisted to -a different expression, stood in the corners of the canvas. Extending -down the left side of the painting the following line was written in -black against a strip of bare canvas. - -“Thus I spoke one afternoon, because--” - -Helma Solbert rose from her couch, lit a candle and stood before the -arrow-framed painting, gazing at it with a pierced and subtly colorless -face. Then she turned on an electric light and its artificial stare, -in an instant, brought her an obliterating self-consciousness. With -the bearing of one who impudently walks to a gruesome sacrifice she -disappeared behind a lavender screen in a corner of the room and fried -her evening meal. When she emerged from the screen her face had once -more perfected its defensive impertinence. Even in her sleep some hours -later her features retained the blurred suspicion of a smile that -stayed like a lurking sentinel. - -The following morning she was too ill to rise and Mrs. Kildrick -summoned a doctor. He was a portly man with a steeply florid face and -a dominating beard that had the color of wet sand. While he was in the -midst of examining his patient she rose to a sitting posture and stared -at him. - -“You’re what I tried to hide from; why have you come to plague me?” she -said, loudly. - - - - -MUSIC - - -Olga Crawford fiercely divorced herself from all expression as she -maltreated her violin at the Symphony Moving Picture Theater. In -its average moments of vivacity her face was a dissembling friar -who brightly listened to her sensual lips, but as she played, her -face became an emptiness profaned by the wail of her instrument. Her -arms desecrated their errands and her head sloped into an unwilling -counterfeit of wakefulness. On the screen above her men and women -frantically guarded their hallucination of life and a decrepit -plot vaguely imitated love and bravery. Rows of faces stolidly -massacred the gloom of the theater and stood like a regiment waiting, -without thought, for some command. But when one looked closer three -expressions broke from the stolidity, as three major harmonies might -charm the mind of a composer. The first was a somnolent elation--the -mien of a hungry person dozing over some crumbs he is almost too -tired to eat. Shop-girls, with pertly robbed faces, became victims -of this expression, although an occasional man with lips like -determined fiascoes also attained it. The second was a tightly laced -impatience--the enmity of one whose feelings have been openly censored. -Fat women with flabbily throttled faces and glistening men with bodies -like bulky scandals received this expression. The third was a seraphic -stupor--the demeanour of one whose formless delights have benignly -exiled thought. - -To Olga these people gathered into a blanched duplicate of life--a -remote comedy that made the monotone of her evening self-conscious. -If they had excoriated her she could have forgotten them, but their -weighty indifference raped her attention. The dryly sinuous smell of -their clothes pelted her like a sandstorm: the little, desperate -perfumes they used scarcely survived. Their eyes were scores of tinily -inviting bulls-eyes never reached by her hurried arrows. - -She finished her playing; the people shuffled out like an apologetic -delusion. Ferenz, the pianist, a cowed Toreador of a man, gave his -browns and blacks a ponderous recreation. - -“Nother grind passed,” he said in a thick voice corrupted by pity. -“Hand over them sheets, Joe.” - -Joe, fat as a gourmand’s revery, handed him the sheets. The features on -Joe’s face were as abject as crumbs on a shallow plate. The Symphony -Theater orchestra flaunted its yawning moroseness a little while longer -and filed through a low exit. - -Olga’s feet tamely saluted the crowded street-pavements. To her the -crowd was an approach to the theater audience--a brisk indifference -that made her eyes neglected spendthrifts. Its motion alone gave it -a flickering mastery: if it had paused, for an hour, it would have -become inane. The choked tirade of rolling street-cars and automobiles -would have ended in a dismal curtain of silence--the chariots would -have changed to mere hardware puzzled by the moonlight. A tall woman, -encouraging the gorgeous tumult of her dresses, would have stood like -a cluttered farce. The little pagan symmetries of her face, gaudily -tantalizing when merely glimpsed, would have met in a kittenish -argument. A tall man, blondly governing his polished discrepancies, -would have changed to a stagnant buffoon. An old man, chiding his -corpulent effulgence with endearments of motion, would have altered to -a maudlin exaggeration. - -Olga reached her room and summoned the meaningless stare of an electric -light. Upon her short body plumpness and slenderness bargained with -each other, and the result was a suave arbitration. Her dark green -skirt and white waist made a subdued affirmation: their coloured lines -did not emphasise the lurking essences of her body. Surrounded by black -disturbances of hair the sardonic parts of her face were molested by -sentimental inconsistencies. Her nose was a salient inquisition but her -full mouth had a negroid flash; her chin was coldly bellicose but her -cheeks were softly turned. Beneath her moderate brow her blue and white -eyes were related to glaciers. - -She sat at an upright piano and trifled with the keys, almost -inaudibly. It was midnight and an acrimonious man in the next -room often remonstrated with the wall when her piano conversed -too impulsively. Since she was an unknown composer the moment is -appropriate for an attack upon her obscurity. Her music was the -compact Sunday of her life. There she deserted the trite miserliness -of narrative and definite concepts and designed a spacious holiday. -Her notes loafed and romped into inquisitive patterns and were only -intent upon shifting their positions. Thought and emotion presided -over the experimental revels of their servants but issued no narrow -commands and became broadly festive guidances. In her music the rules -of harmony were neither neglected nor worshipped. When they felt an -immense friendliness for the romping of her notes they made a natural -background: otherwise, they did not intrude. Her music did not strive -to suggest or interpret concepts and pictures nor did it salaam to -emotions. All three were seconds rising and dying as her sounds changed -their places. The first few notes of each composition were repeated -above as the title, not because they dominated the piece, but merely as -a means of identification. - -In her wanly nondescript room which she did not own, from midnight -to dawn, this woman whose face was a bewilderment of contrasts, sat -furnishing the momentum for a reveling deluge of music. But an evening -decided to interrupt this performance. - -Olga stood in the shop of a neighborhood cobbler. He was a frayed -apologia, with a scant distraction of gray hair and a dustily crushed -face. - -“When you play violin in theater I have heard,” he said. “Maybe you -would like to hear my boy. He is only eleven but he play almost so good -as you. Maybe you will tell him how he can play better.” - -Olga followed him to the rear of his shop, with a surface purchase of -pity. He trotted out his son, a comedy in light browns relieved by the -smothered fixity of gray eyes. With whining precision the boy twisted -his way through Massenet’s Elegy, defending each sliding note with -his arms and his head. The syrupy embrace of a world stirred upon his -acceptant face; the whites of his eyes hovered against Olga’s face, -like a writhing request. In the midst of his playing she turned and -fled, terror-stricken, down the street. - - - - -ETHICS - - -Ethel Curn was an acrobat with Hearn’s Twelve Ring Circus, but her -bones were riveted together by a precariously brittle dignity as she -paraded down the field of daisies to a cliff at the edge of the sea. -Perhaps acrobats walk stiffly during their leisure hours because -their bodies become ascetic when released from an unreal, sensual -agility. Ethel Curn sometimes stooped to pick a daisy and her body -received motion in a deliberately ungallant manner, as though greeting -an unwelcome mistress. Her face was an indiscreetly torn screen for -emotions that had been dead for many years; her low forehead broke into -the tinily pointed lustres of her features; her body was as slim as a -symbolised cricket’s lament. She crossed the field of daisies intensely -dissolved into a forethought of afternoon and stood underneath a tree -at the edge of the cliff. As she leaned against the tree it seemed as -if a giant had courteously lent his umbrella to a rudely unresponsive -dwarf. Below her the sea grunted with automatic fury and receded, like -a pleased actor. Winds threw their weird applause against the blue -and gray rocks. The calmer air underneath the tree was not unlike a -distressed mind caught between the noises. - -Ethel Curn seated herself beneath the tree and read a paper-bound -novel entitled, “The Fate of Eleanor Martin,” but the sea and the -rocks interfered too effectively with Eleanor and her pretended life -slid into the reality at the foot of the tree, while Ethel peered -aggressively down at the waves. A whim winked its narcotic eye at -her mind--the waves became fellow-workers and she was an audience -critically examining their turns. “A little higher with that green -somersault! Come on, old chicken, you can do a longer slide if you -try!” her mind cried amiably. Lost in the syncopation of admiration -her body swayed with the waves and her brown hair went adventuring. -Then, like a jilted servant, her mood ran from her, brandishing its -abashed haste over her body. Sorrow struck her face with a crazily gay -second that extinguished her eyes. Her body improvised its lines into a -wilted sexlessness that made her black skirt and pink waist mysterious. -The torture of a lost love had feasted upon her flesh and reduced it -to an abstraction. Hearn, the circus-master, presided over the feast -like a chilly urbane magician. Without a trace of sensual longing she -recalled his little black moustache, standing like a curt intrigue -over his lips, and the way in which it had bitten into her mouth -became the unreal memento of something she had never possessed. Like -all women gazing back at a departed love, she felt a swindled poverty -that could not quite decide whether it had once owned wealth or not. -This feeling translated itself in exclamatory vowels that could not -find the consonants of her past passion. She smiled like a bedraggled, -masquerading tragedy. It takes women years to perfect this masquerade, -but they win a distracted pleasure that guards them from haggling -memories. To generalize about women is to broaden our hope that one -woman may serve for the rest. Philosophers disappointed in love -often do this, though the man on the street is a fairly adept mimic. -Ethel Curn’s bosom lightly scolded her pink waist and her poignantly -devilish smile almost persuaded her that it was real. All the tragedy -on her face spent itself in a distressed question. In unison with this -proceeding a perturbed monologue within her addressed her vanity which -was silkily perched upon an emotional balcony. - -“Hearn treated me white--blue garters with a real diamond in the -center--he never smiled when he kissed me--God, why couldn’t I keep -him?--He stayed with me a year and there’s not a woman in the troupe -who’s had him more than a month--he’s a lying rat, but he never -smiled when he kissed me--I wonder whether he’d smile if I slit his -throat?--what did I ever see in that fat face--he’ll be a joke in a -few years--they all throw you down unless you get in ahead of them--If -I broke a bottle against his mug I’d only make him happy--it had blue -silk tassles and he paid three hundred for it--I drank too much--blue -silk tassles--He’s better than most of them--I knew what he wanted and -I’m bawling him out because he got it--He treated me white--blue silk -garters with real diamonds that would make the Queen of England wink--” - -The devilishly poignant smile and the monologue met each other within -her, while fleeing back to their graves, and their unpremeditated -clash illuminated the renunciation upon her face. She looked into her -upturned, yellow turban as though it held elusive dregs. Brooding -experimented with her head and suddenly threw it to the ground, -dissatisfied. She lay there like the impoverished effigy of a far off -love--her black skirt revealed her slim legs, with gloomy discourtesy, -and her fluffy pink waist gave its babyish sympathy to the sharpness -of her back. Her slender but muscular arms, stretching over the grass, -were senseless branches touching the shoulders of the armless effigy. -The wind trifled with her loose brown hair and incited it to ironically -flitting imitations of life. Dead thoughts and emotions united upon her -hidden face and gripped it with decayed finesse. She rested, perilously -unconcerned, upon the sloping edge of the cliff. Suddenly, in a -sibilant prank, the earth fled beneath her body and she disappeared. - - * * * * * - -They knelt around her prostrate figure hugged by the pale blue -indelicacy of tights and the scant impudence of her yellow bodice. -High above her a little wooden board dangled helplessly from a long -wire, while another wire hung loosely above it. She opened her eyes -and stared, with a lustreless disbelief, at the people who were like a -tension ready to snap. - -“Damn him, he did me dirty!” she cried to the amazed, painted faces -above her. - - - - -HISTORY - - -Sunlight stuck to the gray floor like curdled honey and clung to -the black wall like visible fever on the breast of a savage. This -contradiction gave a fugitive radiance to the room in which King -Ferdinand stood, moulding figures of happiness. On sunless days the -room was a depressed insult to his rejoicing, forcing it into adroit -retorts. He had made this chamber a necessary enemy. - -As he moulded his figures of happiness, his wife stood beside him, -ready with colors. - -“You have almost finished this half-pyramid of eyes emerging from a -flat surface and ending against a vertical wall,” she said, as though -the sound of her words made their obviousness subtle. “What color shall -I use to excite your design?” - -King Ferdinand turned to her, like a blind man peering into -fantastically returning sight. Creative absorption had ruffled his -middle-aged face into an ageless insurrection, but when he spoke a -wrinkled order once more reigned beneath the granite lull of his -forehead. - -“Give each eye a different shade of color and, for the wall, make a -blue of inhuman brightness: a blue that has swallowed a constellation -and defies night,” he said. “This form symbolises my last happiness, -wherein the clashing sequences of my life have been smashed to a -challenging glare. I have become immortal until I voluntarily tender my -immortality to death, if he takes it.” - -The wrinkles on King Ferdinand’s cheeks ascended to a sentence of -belief hacked upon his forehead. His broadly cumbersome face shrunk to -a lighter scope and his red moustache shone like a coal of expectation. -His wife played with her dark green gown as though it were relaxed -gaiety. Her body, like a plump blunder, ended in the deft recklessness -of her head; the high amber of her face raised its slightly turned -lines of brooding abandon. She looked at her husband as though she -considered his flesh an unimportant tragedy calmed by his words. - -The smell of listening earth drifted through a window and bird-cries -violated the air, like expiring emotions. King Ferdinand stood in the -manner of one to whom motion has become a dim travesty, and the blood -in his veins was a prisoned resonance. His folded arms were weighted in -a marble posture beneath his long sleeves. Queen Muriel touched his arm -and gave him life. She led him to a corner of the room and unveiled a -small figure, and her hands were pliant consummations. - -“My first happiness,” she said, in a voice of climbing distinctness. -They carried the figure to the light. Almost as slim as a personified -plant-stem, a conventionalised monk grew straight from the center of -two lean hands cupped into the semblance of a flower-pot. The hands met -each other in an effortless tenderness; the thinly high monk bore the -suggestions of hood and cassock and his face wore a look of indistinct -triumph. - -“And so I like to believe that your happiness has grown uncertainly -from the rarely caught touch of my hands,” she said. - -The door of the room opened and two men strode in. One of them curved -upward into pompous impatience. The tight inquisitiveness of a gaudy -uniform revealed his tall body. His face was like an expansive -fallacy--large rolls of flesh indecisively interrogated the thin slant -of his nose and slid into the refuge of his brown beard. The second man -was waspishly abbreviated and clad in mincing castrations of color. His -tinily sharp face suggested a soulless beetle. - -“Have you come, as usual, to bestow your explosive admiration on -my figures?” said King Ferdinand to the man whose face resembled a -redundant mistake. - -“Three men of your guard will murder you, with restrained admiration, -tomorrow noon,” answered the other man, in whose voice a sneer and -apprehension were partners in a minuet. “You will be killed on the -palace steps and the cheers of a huge audience will make death’s leer -articulate to you. While you have taken the role of a hermit in an -aesthetic petticoat your friends have been arranging a last happiness -for you. You are considered an imbecile who paints pretty figures with -the blood of his country.” - -The flashing hardnesses of a wintry repose assaulted King Ferdinand’s -face. - -“My brothers are quite willing to use this blood as an unsolicited -rouge for the lips of their mistresses,” he answered in a tone of -remotely amused reproach. “I have not assailed my subjects with taxes -or led them to wars and that has been a serious error. They are -probably in the position of a man with his chains removed, who is angry -because he has forgotten how to dance!” - -The acridly shortened man spoke. - -“When you are dead, sire, your brothers will gamble for your throne by -throwing roses at your head. He who first succeeds in striking your -bulging eyes, will win.” - -“Death does not like to be made a cheated jester,” said King Ferdinand. -“He will doubtless devise a better joke for my winning brother.” - -Queen Muriel, whose face had grown old with choked disdain, stepped -forward. - -“Now that your shrewd bantering has made itself sufficiently nude, tell -us why you have come,” she said. - -The tall man, who carried with him the air of an animated mausoleum, -spoke. - -“Today I saw an old libertine tottering down the boulevard. Glancing -to his feet he spied a lily, clipped and fresh. He sidled blithely to -the edge of the walk to avoid stepping on the flower. There is little -pleasure, after all, in flattening a child from another world.... My -carriage will take you to the frontier, tonight.” - -“My caprices have never been able to strut gorgeously because they hold -a sincere sympathy for motion,” said King Ferdinand, still mechanically -jesting. His hand rose to one cheek as though signaling for a friendly -trance and his eyes closed unceremoniously. - -“We will take your carriage,” he said in the voice of an abstracted -tight-rope walker. - -The two men tilted their gaudiness into imperceptible bows and -departed. King Ferdinand and his wife stood staring at each other as -though their bodies were teasing curtains. Then, without remembering -what had occurred, they let gay words poke each other and began to -discuss colors for the monk’s figure rising from cupped hands and -blossoming into indistinct triumph. - -That night their carriage stopped upon a hilltop and they were killed -by three men. One of the three had a thin nose and a brown beard--the -tight inquisitiveness of a bright uniform revealed his tall body. Among -historians he was to be noted as the man who killed an imbecile king -and led his country to glory and prosperity. - - - - -PSYCHIC PHENOMENA - - -Carl Dell and Anita Starr were speaking of a dead woman who had -influenced their eyes. She had also refined their heads to a chill -protest. Their faces, involved and disconsolate, had not solved her -absence, and their voices were freighted with a primitive martyrdom. -Carl was fencing with the end of his youth. His body held that -inpenetrable cringing which pretends to ignore the coming of middle age -and is only betrayed by rare gestures. He was tall, with a slenderness -that barely escaped being feminine. The upper part of his face was -scholarly and the lower part roguish, and the two gave him the effect -of a sprite who has become erudite but still retains the memory of -his former identity. His protruding eyes were embarrassed, as though -someone behind them had unexpectedly pushed them from a refuge. With -immense finesse they apologised for intruding upon the world. It is -almost tautology to say that they were gray. His small brown moustache -had a candidly misplaced air as it touched the thin bacchanale of his -lips. It was a mourner at the feast. - -Anita Starr’s form would have seemed stout but for the sweeping -discipline of its lines, but this careful suppression ended in a riot -when it came to her face. Her face was a small, lyrical revel that had -terminated in a fight. Her nose and chin were strident but her cheeks -and mouth were subtlely unassuming. Her blue eyes brilliantly and -impartially aided both sides of the conflict. Glistening spirals of -reddish brown hair courted her head. - -Sitting in the parlor of the Starr home Anita and Carl spoke of a -dead woman who had influenced their eyes. It was two A. M. and the -atmosphere resembled a disillusioned reminiscence: still and heavy. -They had talked about this dead woman throughout the evening, -welcoming any sound that might surprise her profile into life. When -alive she had been the chanting whirlpool of their existences, and when -she died sound ceased for them. Their voices became mere copies of its -past reign. - -“Because I loved her any common pebble became a chance word concerning -her and flowers were enthusiastic anecdotes of her presence,” said Carl. - -For an hour he had been breaking his love into insatiable -variations--one who seduces the fleeting expressions of a past torture. - -“She may have been an august vagabond from another planet--a planet -where loitering is a solemn profession,” said Anita. “Even when she -performed a menial task she awed it with her thoughtful reluctance. -Like a fitful gleaner she crept through bare fields of people, -accepting their bits of laughter and refusal. When she met us she -stepped backward, as from a tempting unreality, and knocked against -death.” - -Carl sat, like a groveling fantasy weary of attempting to capture -a genuine animation, but Anita had forced herself into a tormented -erectness. The clock struck three. Without a word or glance in each -other’s direction they left their chairs, turned out the lights, and -ascended the stairway, Carl slightly in advance. They halted at the -first landing and faced each other with the uncomplaining helplessness -of people suddenly scalded by reality. - -“In the morning we will eat oranges from a silver dish and glibly cheat -our emotions,” said Carl. - -“This deftly impolite proceeding never stops to ask our consent,” said -Anita in a voice whose lethargy barely observed a satirical twinkle. - -Another word would have been a ridiculous impropriety. They parted -and entered their rooms. Flower scents filtered through Carl’s open -window, like softly dismayed sins and the cool repentance of a summer -night glided into his room upon a pathway of moonlight. For a while -he sat absent-mindedly burnishing the knives that had divided his -evening. After he had undressed he fell upon his bed like one hurriedly -obliterating an ordeal. His consciousness played with a black hood; -then a crash mastered the room and the door swung open. His blanched -face paid a spasmodic tribute to the sound and his grey eyes greeted -the darkness as though it were an advancing mob. With a strained -stoicism he waited for a repetition of the sound. The moments were -sledge-hammers fanning his face with their close passage. Then his bed -weirdly meddled with his body and became a light cradle rocked by some -arrogant hand. The darkness tingled lifelessly, like an electrocuted -man. - -Carl’s waiting began to feel sharply disgraced and his senses planned -a revolt. He tried to rise to a sitting posture but his body insulted -his desire. At this point the darkness softened to the disguised -struggle of a woman striving to reach him. The significance of this -cast an impalpable but potent consolation upon the straining of his -chained body. The rocking of his bed measured a powerfully cryptic -welcome and he tried to decipher it with the beat of his heart. Each -of its syllables became the cadenced impact of another person against -a toughly pliant wall. His body demolished its tenseness and pressed a -refrain into the swaying bed. He decorated the darkness with the crisp -flight of his voice. - -“Perish upon the turmoil of each day and make it inaudible, but let the -night be our hermitage,” he cried to a dead woman. As though replying, -the rocking of his bed gradually lessened and the darkness became -an opaque farewell. He turned to the shaft of moonlight which was -tactfully intercepting the floor of his room; it had the unobtrusive -intensity of a melted Chinaman. For hours he gave it his eyes and dimly -contradicted it with his heart. When the dawn made his room aware of -its limitations, he closed his eyes. - -At the breakfast table he and Anita greeted each other with a worn -brevity: their eyes found an empty solace in the white tablecloth -and their minds felt a bright impotence, like beggars idling in the -sun. For a while the tinkle of their spoons amiably pardoned their -constraint, but Anita finally spoke with the staccato of one who snaps -unbearable thongs. - -“She came to me last night. I heard a sound like a huge menace -stumbling over a chair. The door opened and the darkness grew as heavy -as dead flesh. My bed swayed with the precision of a grieving head.” - -Carl’s face broke and gleamed like a soft ground flogged by sudden rain. - -“The same things happened to me,” he said in the voice of a child -wrestling with a minor chord. - -They sat heavily disputing each other with their eyes. - -“Did you lie afterwards, censuring the moonlight?” asked Anita. - -Carl nodded. Anita’s mother majestically blundered into the room. -Exuberantly substantial, with the face of a child skillfully rebuked by -an elderly masquerade, she flattered a chair at the table. - -“Wasn’t that a terrible storm we had last night,” she babbled. “The -rain kept me awake for hours--I’m such a light sleeper, you know. I do -hope you children managed to rest.” - - - - -LOVE - - -The night received the moonlight in the manner of a sophisticated -braggart who slaps the face of an old, impassive man. Mrs. Robert -Calvin Taylor observed this illusion and painted it upon one of the -lanterns lighting a little party within her heart. The guests at the -party, fat sophists and slatterns in gay, patched clothes, gathered -around the lantern and felt relieved at the impersonal novelty of its -decoration. If Mrs. Robert Calvin Taylor had been a philosopher or a -scientist she would have changed the night to an unseen background, or -a chemical diagram; she would have ignored the pleading of her heart -for pictorial distraction. But since she was a society-woman, tired -of sensual toys and a mental twilight, she welcomed the night as her -first effectual lover. Sitting in the garden of her country home she -could see the lighted windows of her crowded ballroom, and hear the -saccharine pandemonium of a jazz orchestra. The noise reminded her of a -middle-aged roué, snickering as he rolled his huge dice while gambling -for a new mistress. She felt glad that her new lover, the night, did -not seek to court her with such a blustering clatter. - -The night was incredibly sophisticated but held the pungently awkward -body of a youth, crashing against trees and bushes. This mixture -pierced Mrs. Robert Calvin Taylor and slid far beneath those sensual -routines which are the delight of psycho-analysts--slid to a depth -where aesthetic passion slays the flesh and blends it into a sexless -potency. She felt a sense of bodiless conflagration striding with wide -steps beside the night. When the limitless glow died within her, she -glanced down and found that she was naked. The complicated shrewdness -of her clothes had disappeared. - -By this time she had ceased to be Mrs. Robert Calvin Taylor--she had -become an expectant novice in a new world, and even the jazz music -and ballroom laughter had changed to the mumbled rumours of a past -existence. Therefore her nakedness failed to disconcert her. She -touched her shoulder, with a gesture of matter-of-fact congratulation, -and loosened her hair to rid herself of a last dab of incongruity. -Then she rose from the stone bench and walked down a pathway leading -to the great lake that bounded one side of her country estate. She -felt the powerful and sober curiosity of one who has decided to become -a recluse and examines the deserted possibilities of his roofless -plateau. She reached a high bluff rising over the placid vanity of -the huge lake, combing its bluish black hair with moonlight. Suddenly -she became aware of a figure standing beside her. She turned with -a gasp of strangled aloofness. The ethereal composure of her small -face, defended by moonlight, sheered into an ebony cast of hermit-like -annoyance. But when the color and outlines of the figure shrunk within -her eyes, her face changed again. An astounded immersion crowned her -head, tugging at her short nose, straightening her thick lips, and -cleaving her gray eyes. The slightly deteriorated slenderness of her -short body lowered a bit toward the earth, not from fear but because -of a weakening incredulity. The figure before her was that of a -sexless human being, small and slim of statute, nude, and hued with -an inhumanly concentrated black. The head held large eyes that shone -like metaphysical diamonds, as though ten thousand stars were carousing -together, in a realm of compressed light. The figure spoke to Mrs. -Robert Calvin Taylor, and its voice seemed thrown forth by the rays -from its eyes. The voice was distinct and subdued. - -“You are not a hermit who has turned a garden into a solitary castle,” -said the figure. - -“What am I?” asked Mrs. Robert Calvin Taylor. - -“Your mind and heart are no longer clad in their heavy mirages of love, -fear, and sleep,” said the figure. “The surface pictures have gone and -the twin bazaars of your heart and mind are exchanging a long-deferred -greeting. Within the now mingled bazaars emotions and thoughts have -become friends and sell each other endless variations in color, light, -and form. I am the being who rules this proceeding.” - -“Have you a name?” asked Mrs. Robert Calvin Taylor, using the unashamed -naïveté of a child. - -“Men call me Aesthetics,” answered the figure. “In my weakest form -I make the eyes of the shop-girl hesitate a bit, as she views an -unusually gaudy sunset. In my strongest manifestations I help poets and -artists to contradict their personal lives. But these are merely my -outward indications. I line the hearts and minds of all human beings, -often remaining within them, unfelt, until they die. In rare cases such -as yours the mirages hiding and dividing me are slain, and I clap my -hands, sending motion to the twin bazaars of heart and mind.” - -“What caused me to uncover you within myself?” said Mrs. Robert Calvin -Taylor. - -“You yielded to a whim and made the night your lover. Dissatisfied with -the loves and fears he found within you, the night threw them aside, -one by one, thus slaying the mirages that hid me. Your other lovers -of the past were content with more material gifts and did not seek to -uncover you.” - -“I am bare now. What will you do with me?” said Mrs. Robert Calvin -Taylor. The figure laid a hand upon her shoulder. His eyes burnt her to -a petal of ashes that fell down between them. - - * * * * * - -Mr. Robert Calvin Taylor stood over the form of his young wife, who -sat slouched down upon a stone bench within their garden. He shook her -shoulder, lightly. She uttered a perturbed mumble and did not raise the -head resting upon one of her arms. The moonlight fell upon the silken -complexities of her dress. - -“Poor Dot, I warned her not to take a third glass,” he muttered to -himself as he raised her in his arms and staggered down the garden -pathway. - - - - -TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES: - - - Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_. - - Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. - - Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized. - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Introducing Irony, by Maxwell Bodenheim - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INTRODUCING IRONY *** - -***** This file should be named 60427-0.txt or 60427-0.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/6/0/4/2/60427/ - -Produced by Tim Lindell, David E. 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