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-The Project Gutenberg eBook of Blackguard, by Maxwell Bodenheim
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
-most other parts of the world 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. If you are not located in the United States, you
-will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
-using this eBook.
-
-Title: Blackguard
-
-Author: Maxwell Bodenheim
-
-Illustrator: Wallace Smith
-
-Release Date: September 5, 2021 [eBook #66224]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-Produced by: Tim Lindell, sf2001, and the Online Distributed Proofreading
-             Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from
-             images generously made available by The Internet
-             Archive/American Libraries.)
-
-*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BLACKGUARD ***
-
-
-
-
-[Illustration]
-
-
-
-
- BLACKGUARD
-
-
- by Maxwell Bodenheim
-
- [Illustration]
-
- drawing by Wallace Smith
-
-
- CHICAGO
- COVICI-McGEE · PUBLISHERS ·
- 1923
-
-
-
-
- Copyright 1923
- Covici-McGee
- Chicago
-
-
-_First Printing, March, 1923_
-
-
-
-
-CONTENTS
-
-
- PART ONE
- The Struggle Page 1
- CHAPTER I.
- CHAPTER II.
- CHAPTER III.
- CHAPTER IV.
- CHAPTER V.
- CHAPTER VI.
- CHAPTER VII.
- CHAPTER VIII.
- CHAPTER IX.
-
- PART TWO
- The Knife Page 121
- CHAPTER X.
- CHAPTER XI.
- CHAPTER XII.
- CHAPTER XIII.
- CHAPTER XIV.
- CHAPTER XV.
-
- PART THREE
- Instigation Page 181
- CHAPTER XVI.
- CHAPTER XVII.
- CHAPTER XVIII.
-
-
-
-
-PART I
-
-THE STRUGGLE
-
-
-
-
-The Struggle
-
-CHAPTER I.
-
-
-Carl Felman stepped from a train at the Union Station of a midwestern
-American city. His young face, partly obscured by a blonde stubble of
-beard, was a passive concealment, and his thin lips and long nose did
-not hold that stalwart sleekness which one associates with earth. If
-some joker had taken a Gothic effigy of Christ, trimmed its beard,
-dressed it in grey and dirty clothes, and forced upon it an unwilling
-animation, he would have produced an exact duplicate of Carl’s aspect
-and gestures.
-
-In the emotional confusion of the railroad-station, with its reluctant
-farewells and gushing greetings, Carl walked alone and abstracted, and
-he treated the scene as though it were a feverishly unreal mixture
-of drama and travesty. He strode with the careful haste of one who
-seeks to escape from an irritating dream but knows at the same time
-that his efforts are futile. He was without baggage, and his face
-held the strain that comes from battling with open spaces and strange
-faces--the hunted question of the hobo. His face showed two masks, one
-transparent and passive and the other tense and protesting. He had
-ridden for thirty-six hours in the chair of a day-coach, without food
-or sleep, and he was walking to the home of his parents because he
-lacked the necessary car-fare, but these circumstances were only partly
-responsible for his air of spectral weariness. He knew the stunned
-exhaustion of a man whose mind and heart had broken their questions
-against unfriendly walls, and at intervals he became immersed in vain
-efforts to understand the meaning of his wounds.
-
-During the twenty-one years of his life he had resembled an amateur
-actor, forced to play the part of a troubled scullion in a first
-act that bewildered and enraged him. At high-school he had been
-known as “the poet-laureate of room sixteen,” a title invented by
-snickering pupils, and his timidly mystic lyrics about sandpipers,
-violets, and the embracing glee of the sun, had gained an unrestrained
-admiration from his English teachers. Teachers of English in American
-high-schools are not apt to insist upon originality and mental
-alertness in expression, since their own lives are usually automatic
-acceptances of a minor role, and Carl became convinced that writing
-poetry was only a question of selecting some applauded poet of the past
-and imitating his verse. “You must say the inspiring things that they
-have said, but see that your words are a little different from theirs,”
-he said to himself, and his words--“a little different”--became
-slightly incongruous upon the thoughts and emotions of Tennyson and
-Longfellow, the latter two having been selected because they seemed
-easier to flatter than other poets such as Browning and Swinburne.
-Another Carl Felman watched this proceeding from an inner dungeon but
-lacked the courage to interrupt it, for to a boy the opinions of his
-teachers, delivered with an air of weary authority, seem as inexorable
-as the laws of the Talmud or the blazing sincerity of sunlight. Carl
-was nearing seventeen at this time--a lonely, vaguely rebellious,
-anaemic, dumbly sullen boy, who tried in his feeble way to caress the
-life-chains which he did not dare to break. His parents, middle-aged
-Jews with starved imaginations and an anger at the respectable poverty
-of their lives, looked upon his poetic desires with mingled feelings of
-elation and uneasiness.
-
-The phenomenon of an adolescent poet in the family is always liked
-and distrusted by simple people--liked because it pleasantly teases
-the monotone of their existence, and distrusted because they fear,
-without quite knowing why, that it will develop into a being at
-variance with the fundamental designs of their lives. Carl’s parents
-clucked their tongues in puzzled admiration when he read them one of
-his poems, and then, with a note of loquacious fear in their voices,
-told him that he must look upon writing as a “side-line”--a pretty,
-lightly smirking distraction that could snuggle into the hollows of a
-business-man’s life. Carl, who liked the importance of carrying secret
-plots within him, did not answer this suggestion, or gave it a sulky
-monosyllable, and his reticence frightened his parents. The simple
-person is reassured by garrulity, even when it attacks but can derive
-nothing from silence save the feeling of an unseen dagger. The Felmans
-wanted their son to attain the money that had seduced and eluded their
-longings, but deeper than that, they yearned for him to place a colored
-wreath over the brows of their tired imaginations--one that could
-convince them that their lives had not been mere sterile and oppressed
-bickerings. The father, a traveling-salesman for a whiskey-firm,
-wanted Carl to be prosperous and yet daring over his cups while the
-mother felt that he might become a celestial notary-public, placing his
-seal upon the unnoticed documents of her virtues.
-
-Carl experienced the uncertain dreads of a dwarf futilely attempting
-to squirm from a ring of perspiring golden giants known to the world,
-and not even sure of whether he ought to escape, but knowing only
-that a vicious and unformed ache within him found little taste for
-the flat-footed routines of clerk or salesman. Upon another planet
-this initial writhing is doubtless offered the consolation of better
-compromises, but the treadmill uproars of this earth merely increased
-Carl’s feelings of shrinking anger.
-
-“Oh, well, I’ll work in a store or sell something, and make money.
-Life won’t let you do anything else,” he said to himself. “But inside
-of me, m-m, there I’ll do as I please. I’ll make a country where poets
-and other begging men live in little huts on the obscure hills and rear
-their families of thoughts and emotions, with a haughty peacefulness.”
-
-He shunned the people around him as much as possible, studying his
-lessons in a precisely weary manner and squatting on the grass of a
-public park near his home where he wrote his dimly placid lyrics to
-the sun and moon. He had no companions at school, for the children
-around him were quick to jibe at any remark of his that contained a
-searching wraith of thought, and he did not join in the school’s minor
-activities because of his angry pride at the giggling accusations
-of queerness which he received from the other boys and girls. They
-regarded him for moments as an enticing target, reviling his exact
-grammar and mild manners, but for the most part they paid little heed
-to this grotesque atom lost in the swirl of their games and plans.
-In a smaller school the strident inquisitiveness of average children
-thrown upon each other might have overwhelmed him, but in the immense
-city high-school he managed effortlessly to isolate himself, and the
-children, once having dubbed him poet-laureate--sarcastically mimicking
-the phraseology of their elders--proceeded to forget about him.
-
-When at length he was graduated, he begged his parents to send him
-to college, desperately fighting for another long period in which he
-could brush aside dry information and rhyme “earth” with “birth,” since
-he preferred the frolic of misty promises to a world of prearranged
-shouts and sweating dreads. But his parents felt that their period of
-uneasy indulgence had inevitably ended, and words trooped from them in
-righteously redundant regiments.
-
-“You’re a big boy now, yes, a big boy, and you know that we’ve
-sacrificed everything to give you a good education,” said Mrs.
-Felman. “Not that we regret it, no indeed, we only hope that it helps
-you to get along in life, but this college stuff, now, is a lot of
-foolishness. That’s only for people with rich parents, or them that
-can afford to go a long time without working; and not only that, but
-it fills your head, you know, with a lot of nonsense. It’s time now
-that you go out and make money to help your parents. You know that
-we’re just barely able to get along on what your father makes. Not that
-we’re begging you for your help, you understand, but you should be only
-too proud to give comfort to your parents. Uncle Emil can use a smart
-boy like you in his clothing business and he told us only the other
-night that he’d give you a good job the minute you come down. You’ve
-got to give up those writing notions of yours! They don’t bring you in
-anything, and a man must go out into the world and make his own living.
-Writing is no business for a strong, sensible boy!”
-
-Carl listened with a feeling of impotent anger. Yes, they were probably
-right in their commands and he would be a scoundrel if he refused to
-obey them and rescue them from their poverty; but--well, he preferred
-to be a scoundrel. “Beyond a doubt I’m a lazy, ungrateful wretch, and
-all that I care for is to put words together--that seems to relieve me
-somehow--but say, how about sticking to what I am?” he asked himself.
-“I know perfectly well that I’ll never change, and if I make a liar
-out of the rest of my life that won’t make me any the less guilty.
-Besides, it’s funny, but I don’t know whether I want to change.
-There’s something satisfactory about being a scoundrel--it lets you
-do the things that you want to do; while being good, as far as I can
-see, is just pretending that you like to do the things that you don’t
-want to do. Well, I’m not going to stand for that! I’ve got to choose
-between hurting my parents and hurting myself and they are going to be
-the victims. This will be mighty selfish, I know, but I guess I’m a
-naturally selfish person. Anyway, I don’t feel much love for them and
-I don’t see that it will help them if I try to hide my feelings. They
-would find out sooner or later what an inhuman person I am and they
-might as well find out now.”
-
-Carl answered the verbose commands and advice of his parents with a
-mechanical “yes” now and then--a small shield to protect the inner
-unfolding of his thoughts--and walked into his bedroom, where he rested
-his dull broodings upon a pillow. The lives of some men represent a
-scale of gradually increasing compromises with, or victories against,
-the forces surrounding them, while other men crowd their decision into
-one early moment and walk swiftly down an unchanging road. The boy with
-Carl died upon the bed in his room and the fumbling, stiffly vindictive
-beginning of a man rose and walked into the street, with an evil
-smile petrifying the softness of his face. In this emotional birth he
-became to himself a huge black criminal staggering beneath the weight
-of unreleased plots, and he derived an angry joy from this condition,
-reveling in the first guilty importance that had invaded his meekly
-repressed life.
-
-With the inquisitive grin of one who is quite convinced that he is an
-embryonic monster, he arose at five o’clock on the next morning, stole
-into the bedroom of his sleeping parents, pilfered fifteen dollars from
-the trousers of his father, and took the train to a distant city, where
-he enlisted in the United States Army. He had first intended to do this
-at the nearest recruiting station, but with the triumphant shrewdness
-of a budding knave he decided that if he joined the army in another
-city he could more easily escape being arrested for his theft. He had
-robbed his parents with an actually quivering delight, feeling that
-it was the first gesture of his attack upon an unresponsive world.
-In joining the army he had not been lured by the recruiting poster’s
-gaudy lies concerning “adventure, travel, and recreation,” but his
-reasons were more practical and involved. He longed for the stimulus
-of a physical motion that would not be concerned with the capture of
-pennies and he believed that he could be more alone with himself in a
-new whirlpool than in the drably protected alcove from which he had
-fled. He felt also that if he were going to prey upon the world he must
-make haste to learn the tricks and signals of a rogue and pay for this
-knowledge with physical pain and weariness.
-
-The details of his army life need not interfere with this quickly
-sculptured hint of his birth. He emerged from the lustreless workshop
-of the army with the patient bitterness of one whose dreams have become
-the blundering slaves of a colorless reality. For some time he wandered
-about the country, in a stumbling dance with various kinds of manual
-labor--cotton picking, wood chopping, factory work. At intervals he
-engaged in little thefts, such as the money from a drunken man’s
-pockets, the purses of rooming-house landladies, and articles from the
-counters of shops, and used them for a week or two of leisure in which
-he wrote of nightingales inebriated with the fragrance of lilac bushes,
-or dawn robbing the hills of their favorite shawl.
-
-His role of desultory sneak-thief failed to cause within him the
-slightest shame or self-reproach and he felt that his longings were
-using trivial weapons in a furtive manner merely to protect a secretly
-delicate bravery within him.
-
-“I don’t care whether the world is filled with poets or not,” he
-sometimes said to himself. “If it were, I might want to be a carpenter
-or a clerk then and make that my form of rebellion. I don’t know. But
-the world wants to be filled with carpenters and clerks, and it’s not
-as fair as I am. The unfairness makes me angry and I strike against
-it.... You must guard your only reason for living. All that I want to
-do is to keep on writing, and since no one cares to pay me for this
-kind of work I’ll have to arrange for the payment myself. When I do
-hard work during the day I’m too tired to write at night, and the only
-way in which I can get leisure time for writing is to steal. If this
-is evil, it’s been forced upon me. Of course, I’d much rather steal
-out in the open; but that would instantly bring me to jail. No, this
-complicated game known as a world is unaware of my existence and I must
-be equally absent-minded in my own attitude.”
-
-His youthful gesture of contorted cynicism, qualified a bit by the
-remaining ghosts of a naively wounded idealism, made him resolve to
-become a crafty underdog--a man who had become obsessed with the task
-of finding his voice and was using every possible subterfuge and device
-to protect this obsession, leering at the forces that were attempting
-to intrude upon his religious concentration. Right and wrong to him
-were unfair scarecrows that slipped from the huge indifference of his
-surroundings and demanded an attention which they were unwilling to
-give in return. Perhaps he was a minor knave, seeking to rationalize
-his instincts for crime, and perhaps he merely held a naked
-determination like that of a certain immoral slayer and plunderer known
-as Nature. The question is a frayed one and derives little benefit from
-the tensions of exhausted arguments. Carl was constantly harassed by a
-feeling of inarticulate insignificance, and the poems which he twisted
-from his heart, on park benches and in the long weeds of ditches
-beside railroad tracks, were like bunches of forget-me-nots plucked by
-a dirty, bewildered child and thrown as offerings against the stone
-breast of an unheeding giant. He still believed that poetry was a
-cloak of blurred embroidery that should be cast over the shoulders of
-sentiments such as love, faith, charity, mercy, chivalry, courage and
-honor, and he felt both consoled and amused at the thought that he was
-using a rogue to guard within himself the better man that life had not
-allowed him to become. His love for the sentiments which he tipped with
-rhymes was partly caused, however, by the fear that without them he
-might become too utterly inhuman for earthly survival.
-
-For a year he wrestled with different manual labors, and stole when
-their perspiring monotones weakened and angered his desire to write
-lyrics that were half trite and half thinly wistful, but he finally
-decided to return to the midwestern city and brave the reactions of his
-parents, whose wrathful letters had sometimes visited his journeys.
-He determined to rest awhile amid the moderate comforts of his former
-home and felt that he could disarm the anger of his parents with a
-masterful, jesting attitude that would muzzle them. And so, penniless
-and in dirty clothes, he was now walking through the heavily tawdry
-business district of a midwestern city.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER II.
-
-
-On the streets martyred by crowds, electric lights pencilled the night
-with their trivial appeals, and an ineffectual approach to daylight
-spread its desperately dotted jest over the scene. Since Carl almost
-never voiced his actual thoughts and emotions to people, he grasped, as
-usual, the luxury of speaking to himself.
-
-“Electric light is only the molten fear of men,” he said, as he strode
-through the unreal haste of the crowds. “Men are afraid to look at the
-night and they have given it eyes as stiffly frightened as their own.
-Underneath the comforting glare of this second blindness they protect
-themselves. In a dim light men and women could not easily escape from
-each other, for the darkness would tend to press them together, but
-in this violent stare of light they are divided by a self-assured
-indifference. Watch them as they stride along with an air of gigantic,
-amusing importance. The crowd is really a single symbol of many
-isolations joined to a huge one. It sees only those people who are
-unpleasantly conscious of the electric glare, and who hurry through it
-with gestures of alert dislike, or with a slow and morbid desire for
-pain.”
-
-This fancy made him feel conspicuously disrobed, and the glances of
-passing people became to him flitting symbols of derision directed at
-his beard and dirty clothes. As he looked up at the tall, unlit office
-buildings, grey and narrowly vertical, they reminded him of coffins
-standing on end and patiently waiting for a civilization to crumble,
-so that they might inter it and fall to the ground with their task
-completed. He reached the apartment-house section in which his parents
-lived--rows of three and four-story buildings almost exactly like each
-other, and standing like factory boxes awaiting shipment, but never
-called for. In front of each building was a little, square lawn hemmed
-in between the sidewalk and the curbstone--tiny squares of dusty green
-lost in a solved and colorless problem in material geometry. Carl
-greeted them with a gesture of ironical brotherhood as he hurried along
-the walk, while people, observing his downcast gaze and saluting hands,
-sometimes paused to doubt his sanity.
-
-The glib suavity of a midsummer night sprinkled its sounds down the
-street and the doorsteps and walks were heavy with men, women and
-children, parading the uncomfortable drabness of their clothes and
-unwinding their idle talk. In pairs and squads, youths and girls
-strolled past Carl, laughing and playing to that exact degree of
-animal abandon tolerated by the street lights of a civilization, and
-sometimes crossing the forbidden boundary line, with little bursts of
-guilty spontaneity. Amid the openness of the street they were forced
-to become jauntily evasive of the old sensual madness brought by a
-summer evening, and they sought the refuges of crudely taunting words,
-snickering withdrawals, and tentative invitations. They were sauntering
-toward the kittenish excitements of ice-cream sundaes, moving pictures,
-and kisses traded upon the shaded benches in a nearby public park.
-Thought had subsided in their heads to a kindly mist that clung to
-the rhythm of their emotions, though in the main, their minds were
-merely emotions that vainly strove to become discreet. Most people are
-incapable of actual thought, and thinking to them is merely emotion
-that calmly plots for more concrete rewards and visions.
-
-Carl looked upon the people on the sidewalks with the attitude of an
-unscrupulous stranger, and in his fancy he measured them for material
-gains and attacks, without a trace of warm emotion in his regard. To
-him they were merely alien figures busily engaged in deifying the
-five senses, and they mattered no more than shadowy animals blind
-to his aims and presence. He had long since frozen his emotions
-in self-defense and nothing could unloosen them save the timidly
-mystical lyrics which he wrenched from the baffled surfaces of his
-heart. During the four years of his life as a soldier and hobo he
-had often looked upon some of the darker and more rawly naked shades
-of sexual desire in the people around him, but after a first period
-of mechanical curiosity he had drawn aloof from what he considered a
-blind, shrieking, fantastic parade. “This wearisome game of advancing
-and retreating flesh, always trying to lend importance to an essential
-monotone, can go to hell,” he had muttered to himself. “I’ll yield to
-my sexual desires at rare intervals, but I’ll do it in the brief and
-matter-of-fact manner in which a man spits into a convenient cuspidor.”
-Women to him were simply moulds of dull intrigue, irritating him with
-their pretenses of animation and with the oneness of their appeal.
-
-As he walked between the incongruities of hard street surfaces and
-soft noises, everything around him seemed to be vainly trying to
-conceal a hollow monotone. Middle-aged and old people sat around the
-doorsteps of the box-like apartment-houses, and the circumscribed and
-hair’s-breadth shades of intelligence and defeat on their faces were
-transparent over one color and shape. Each of these people strove
-to convince himself that his relaxation on this summer evening was
-a glittering honor conferred by hours of virtuous toil, though at
-times discontent suddenly raised their voices high in the air. It was
-as though they lifted musical instruments, gave them one helpless
-blow, and retired to apathy, scarcely aware of what they had done.
-Carl looked at them with a weary indifference that almost verged upon
-hatred, and hurried down the cement walk.
-
-As he neared the apartment-house where his parents lived it suddenly
-occurred to him that the entrance might be decorated by people who
-would recognize him and comment upon his appearance and his abrupt
-return. The thought of their amused and veiled contempt, or their
-assumption of superior compassion, made him cringe a little and he
-turned to a side-street that led to an alley which extended behind the
-block in which his parents lived. He passed through the dismal rear
-yard of beaten earth and ascended the wooden stairway. A negro janitor,
-who had been working in this place for several years, gazed at him, at
-first with suspicion and then with a slowly pitying grin of recognition.
-
-“’Lo, Mistah Felman. What brings you-all back here?”
-
-Carl affected an irritated aloofness.
-
-“I came back to enjoy a little shame,” he said.
-
-“What dat last word you said?”
-
-“Shame, shame,” repeated Carl, frowning at the man.
-
-“Guess you-all’s crazy,” said the negro, throwing up his hands and
-stumping away.
-
-This was one of Carl’s favorite tricks. Whenever he desired to avoid
-a forced exchange of commonplaces, or the threat of a humiliation, he
-would speak in a cryptic fashion that aroused bewilderment or annoyance
-in the person before him and helped him to end the conversation. He
-found that the rear door of the apartment was locked and knew that
-his parents were visiting an adjacent moving-picture theater or
-sitting outside on the tiny lawn. Happily, he eyed the open window and
-remembered how often in the past his mother had scolded his father
-for that enormous crime. Ah, the windows in their minds were well
-nailed and shaded. He felt relieved at the knowledge that he could
-probably sit for an hour or two and rest before they returned. He
-climbed through the window with the jocose satisfaction of a criminal
-whose mock-hanging has been postponed, and sat on a weak-jointed
-rocking-chair in the small dining-room.
-
-Not a fraction of change had come to the cluttered dullness of
-the room. He saw the same rickety table of round oak, where an
-inferior circle was displaying with mild pride an embroidered square
-of white linen; the modest and orderly showing of cut-glass and
-silverware--tinsel of an old defeat--; the plaster-of-paris bust of
-an Indian, violently colored and bearing an artificial scowl; the
-mantlepiece that held a little squatting Chinaman made of colored
-lead and the bric-a-brac effigy of a doll-like courtier in washed
-out pinks and blues. On the wall opposite him a brass clock, moulded
-into crude cherubs intertwined with stiff blossoms, busily spoke of
-itself, forgetful of the time that it was supposed to measure, and
-little prints of uncertain landscapes hung in golden frames upon
-the wall-paper that was stamped with heavy purple grapes against a
-tan background. Carl shuddered as though he were in the midst of a
-weak and disorganized nightmare, in which reality was indulging in a
-hackneyed burlesque at its own expense, and he crashed his fist upon
-the oak table.
-
-“Damn it, I’ll get out of this some day,” he shouted, craving the sharp
-relief of sound, and then he grinned at the clumsy futility of his
-explosion.
-
-“If you ever do manage to escape from this conspiracy of barren peace
-and flat lies it won’t be with angry noise,” he said to himself. “A
-vicious calmness will help you more.”
-
-He extracted a soiled roll of pencilled, smudged papers from an inside
-pocket of his coat and stroked them as though they were a gathering
-of living presences. The paper became smooth skin to him and he
-questioned it with his fingers. This reaction was not a sensual one
-but sprang from his longing for a reality that had so far eluded his
-consciousness. His poems, peeping with eyes of fanciful promises above
-the veils that redeemed their faces, were more concrete to him than
-actual flesh and breath.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER III.
-
-
-He sat in the rocking-chair, tired and vaguely oppressed, clutching the
-paper in the manner of one who clings to a tangible encouragement in
-the midst of fantastic lies and fists. His parents came into the room
-at last and turned on an electric light without at first noticing him
-in the semi-gloom. Turning, his mother saw him in the chair. Her hands
-flew to her breast, in two tight slants, as she impulsively pictured
-the presence of a bearded burglar, and then she recognized him and
-insulted her emotions with a cross between a gasp and a squawk.
-
-“It’s Carl! Carl! For God’s sake, when did you come in?”
-
-“About an hour ago, through the window that father always leaves open,”
-said Carl, waiting with a poised and resigned smile for the inevitable
-cannonade.
-
-His father came in from the kitchen, where he had gone for a drink of
-water. Seeing Carl, he slowly challenged him with sleepily prominent
-eyes.
-
-“S-o-o, s-o! You’re back here again,” he said. “I always said that you
-would come back. I knew you would get tired of bumming around. I knew
-it. Well, you loafer, what do you want from us now? Some more money out
-of my pants-pockets, maybe? You’re a son that I should be proud of; oh,
-yes!”
-
-“Yes, and a fine condition he comes back in,” said Mrs. Felman, who was
-beginning to be angry at herself because she was not quite as wrathful
-at Carl as she felt that she should have been. A louder voice might
-supply this missing intensity. “A fine condition! Look, will you, at
-his shoes, and his clothes, and the beard on his face. A nice specimen
-to be trotting back to his parents after four years! When he needs us
-he comes back, oh, sure, but we wasn’t good enough for him when he ran
-away and stole our money. We should tell him to go right back where he
-came from. Right back!”
-
-She sat down with an air of stifled indignation that strained in its
-effort to capture an actual condition, and with many gasping words
-she tried to piece together the image of an inexplicable reptile.
-She was a woman whose emotions, garrulously bitter because of the
-material strait-jackets in which they had writhed for years, were ever
-determined to exalt their bondage, if only to win relief from pain.
-Carl had always been an evil enigma to her, one that was at times half
-guessed--the accusing finger of her youth, sometimes barely discerned
-through the mist of lost desires. To escape these momentary exposures
-she had often swung the blindness of an anger that was directed as much
-at herself as at Carl. The father, however, had obliterated his past
-self with a more jovial carelessness and had stolen the consoling fumes
-of many taverns, so that he felt little need for the shrouds of loud
-noise.
-
-“Well, at least you showed good sense in coming through the back way,”
-he said, looking at his son with a mixture of wonder and humorous
-contempt. “You would have made a fine sight for the neighbors on the
-front steps! We would never have heard the last of it. Noo, noo, what
-did you come back for? If it’s just to play your old tricks again, you
-can walk right out of here, I tell you. I’ll stand for no more nonsense
-from you. Turn over a new leaf and you’re welcome here, but no more of
-your writing, and fancy talk, and high notions!”
-
-“Look at him,” said Mrs. Felman. “Sits there like a piece of wood!
-Have you nothing to say for yourself? Why, you haven’t told us
-how-do-you-do. Inhuman! I don’t see how I ever gave birth to such a
-creature as you.”
-
-Carl had been sitting like a stone figure, dressed by the playful
-passerby known as Life and yet absolutely void of life. His mute
-indifference had seduced all suggestions of flesh from him and even his
-blonde beard and hair seemed pasted upon an effigy. Finally the clever
-semblance of emotion returned to his body and sent an experimental
-tremble to see whether the flesh was prepared to receive another
-animated disguise. His hands twitched as though they were striving to
-overcome their paralysis in an effort to obey some powerful signal. As
-he listened to the jerky tirades of his parents--sterility seeking to
-regain a fertility by the use of a staccato voice--part of him wanted
-to cringe and win the convulsive shield of tears, while another part
-longed to bound from the insipid, brittle room and glide aimlessly into
-the night. The cringing mountebank, unfairly aided by physical fatigue,
-won this inner skirmish, and Carl decided to silence the anger of his
-parents by speaking to them in a way that would make them bewildered,
-since bewilderment is but a shade removed from frightened respect. It
-was the only pitiful little stunt that could offer him a small respite
-from the poverties of noise that were assailing him--the favorite
-purchase of Indian medicine-men, Druid priests, circus barkers and
-other childlike charlatans.
-
-“You see, the situation has been complicated,” he answered slowly,
-with the voice of a loftily enervated teacher. “Complicated. I have
-tried to save a possible poet from death--always a noble but redundant
-proceeding--but it seems that his skin must burn. I’ve come back now to
-make his coffin and stud it with gold. Gold would seem to be a favorite
-metal of yours, my dear parents. Surely you will be satisfied now. And
-it is also possible that you may help me with the funeral arrangements,
-since this burial, unlike plebeian ones, may extend over several years.
-And what else do you want me to say? I have so many acrobatic words and
-they would love to perform for you, but I am tired to-night. True, I am
-a rascal. Can you forget that embarrassing challenge for one evening?”
-
-He broke his stonelike repose into one forward motion as he leaned
-toward his parents, turning upon them the prominently somnolent eyes
-that had been the sole gift from his father’s face, and smiling like
-an exhausted but lightly poised angel. His parents were stunned, for
-their indignant assurance had suddenly recoiled from an unexpected,
-blank wall. They could not quite understand his words and yet they felt
-that he was mocking them. The gracious glibness of his voice dwarfed
-them with the mystery of its meanings. This monster was not ashamed of
-himself--what could it signify? But, after all, it was rather difficult
-to be angry at a man when you were not quite sure whether his words
-were flattering or sneers. Carl rose abruptly from the chair. Now he
-controlled the situation for a time. He kissed his mother’s forehead
-lightly and smiled at his father.
-
-“I’m tired and hungry,” he said. “A little food and sleep will fix me
-up, though, and to-morrow I’ll look for work of some kind.”
-
-“Crazy, crazy, just like he always was,” said his father, turning away
-with a partly appeased and patient manner. After all, one must give the
-proper blend of pity and tolerance to one who is truly insane.
-
-The face of his mother held a virtuous impatience that made her large
-nose go up and down like a see-saw, and on the see-saw a dash of
-reluctant tenderness rode.
-
-“I’ll get you something from the ice-box,” she said. “You’re still so
-young--twenty-two you’ll be next week--and we may yet live to be proud
-of you. If you’ll only get rid of your funny writing notions and your
-stealing ideas. My God, what a combination!”
-
-Afterwards, as Carl ate, they sat at the kitchen table with him. Mrs.
-Felman was tall and strong, with a body on which plumpness and angles
-met in a transfigured prizefight of lines. The long narrowness of her
-face was captured by a steep nose slightly hooked at the top and her
-thin lips were not unlike the relics of a triumphant sneer. Even when
-they tried to be satisfied they never quite lost their expression
-of tight gloating. Above her high cheek-bones her eyes were bitter
-tensions of light, and a remnant of greyish-brown hair receded from
-the moderate and indented rise of her forehead. Her skin, once pink,
-was now roughly florid, like a petal on which many boots have been
-scraped and cleaned. Mr. Felman was her violent refutation. Short
-and hampered by plumpness, the large roundness of his face held the
-smirking emphasis of a greyish-red moustache, huge and clipped at the
-ends. His thick lips blossomed uncompromisingly over his fair double
-chin, and his low forehead, madly scratched by a plowman, stood between
-the abrupt curve of his small nose and a ruff of dark red hair pestered
-by grey. An expression of carelessly earthly humor, banqueting on
-shallowness, fitted snugly upon his face and only his eyes, bulging
-with sleep, brought a metaphysical contradiction. He watched his son
-with a lazy, half-curious pity.
-
-“Noo, what have you been doing all this time?” he asked.
-
-“I left the army a year ago. You know, I wrote to you then and found
-out that you still lived here. That was very kind of me, I’m sure.
-Since then I’ve knocked about in different towns. Sleep and work, work
-and sleep--the twin brothers of man’s inadequacy.”
-
-“Ye-es, still using long words, the twin brothers of something or
-other,” said Mrs. Felman, with a light disapproval. “Learn to talk
-and act like other people and you’ll be better off. I used to think a
-little different when I was young, but believe me, you can’t get along
-by just dreaming and talking to yourself. The trouble with you is that
-you got a lot of fancy words and no get-up.”
-
-“Philosophical discourse number sixty-two,” answered Carl, in the
-drowsily chanting voice of a train announcer. “Or have I lost count of
-them? Your life hasn’t made you very happy, mother, and perhaps that’s
-why your arguments are lacking in the swagger of conviction. Or perhaps
-you think that it’s best to be unhappy, and in that case I agree with
-you.”
-
-“Well, I wouldn’t lower myself by trying to argue with you,” said Mrs.
-Felman. “I’m perfectly right in everything I say, but I simply don’t
-know how to fiddle with words like you do.”
-
-“Have you still got those poetry ideas in your head?” asked Mr. Felman.
-“Poetry is no business for a strong, grownup man. It’s a lot of
-foolishness good for women and children!”
-
-“If you could write things that make money now,” said Mrs. Felman.
-“Why, only the other day Mrs. Benjamin was telling me she has a cousin
-who writes love stories for the Daily Gazette. Nice stories that make
-you laugh and cry. And this girl gets twenty dollars apiece for them,
-too.”
-
-“Now, now, don’t be trying to encourage him again,” said Mr. Felman.
-“Ain’t we had enough trouble over this writing of his? Let him go out
-and get a regular job, like other men!”
-
-Carl laughed, and his laugh was like an emotion interviewed by carbolic
-acid, and his parents eyed him with an offended surprise.
-
-“Still squabbling over the bones,” he said, with a sarcastic apathy.
-“If you were more delicate you might realize that it is inappropriate
-to argue at a funeral. I’m only a tongue-tied fool, but I seem very
-elusively inarticulate to you because you’re even more tongue-tied. And
-now, as usual, you haven’t understood a word of what I’ve said.”
-
-“Well, you don’t have to laugh at your parents,” said Mrs. Felman, with
-an air of pin-pricked dignity. “You never did show any respect for us,
-in spite of all that we’ve done for you. Never.”
-
-“Say, Carrie, you’ll have to get a suit for him. Something cheap, you
-know, at Pearlman’s,” said the father. “He’ll never get a job in those
-rags of his.”
-
-“Money, money,” said Mrs. Felman in a mechanically mournful voice. “All
-I do is spend money. It’s terrible.”
-
-The sound of an opening door invaded the flat tom-tom of their talk.
-
-“It’s Al Levy,” said Mrs. Felman, with fear in her voice. “It would be
-a shame now if he saw Carl in this condition. Hurry, hurry, Carl, to
-the bathroom before he comes in here. Your father’s razor is on the
-shelf and I’ll get you a clean shirt from the ones you left behind.
-Maybe they still fit you, as I was always careful to buy them a size
-too large.”
-
-Carl felt like an ignoble marionette who was being hastily mended
-behind the curtain for fear that he might cast ridicule upon the
-sleekly vacant play, and his emotions were evenly divided between
-amusement and contempt. Driving his heart and mind into a fitting
-blankness, he closed the bathroom door. Levy had a room in the Felman
-apartment and they treated him with an unctuous respect that almost
-verged upon an Oriental self-abasement. He was a man of twenty-six who
-worked for a wealthy uncle, received a large salary, and polished and
-scrubbed the limited essentials of a semi-professional man-about-town,
-with minor chorus girls and gamblers helping him to flatter
-microscopically the fatigue donated by his daily labors.
-
-“Be very friendly to Al, please,” said Mrs. Felman, as they all sat
-around the dining-room table. “He’s a very smart man--works in the
-mail-order business, selling cheap jewelry to country people, and makes
-a pile of money. His seven dollars a week come in mighty handy to us, I
-can tell you.”
-
-“Dammit, all business is going good except whiskey,” said Mr. Felman,
-as though he were inviting an elusive conspiracy to share the firmness
-of his tones. “These prohibition fanatics are ruining everything. The
-saloon-keepers are all afraid they’re gonna be closed up, and they
-won’t buy. I haven’t sold a barrel in two days. I don’t know what the
-world’s coming to with all these here prohibitions. People are entirely
-too busy telling each other what to do, and nobody minds his own
-business any more.... Well, anyway, Carl, there’s still sample bottles
-for you to swipe from my overcoat pockets.”
-
-He said the last words with a bearish joviality, and had the expression
-of a bear who has paddled to within a mile of irony and is sniffing at
-the singular realm.
-
-“Sol, don’t remind me of his old wildness,” said Mrs. Felman, with a
-peevish dread. “I still remember the time when he staggered along the
-sidewalk in front of all the neighbors. Is there anything bad that he
-hasn’t done, I want to know?”
-
-One evening, just before running away from home, Carl had taken some
-tiny bottles of whiskey from his father’s overcoat, without curiosity,
-but longing for the feeling of sly self-assurance that had balanced his
-blood from former sneaking sips. He had repaired with the bottles to
-a neighboring public park and emptied them in swiftly nervous gulps,
-enjoying the vastly kinglike sneer at the world which had brushed aside
-his melancholy uncertainties.
-
-“I am a poet!” he had cried out to the murmuring patience of the
-trees around him, “and fools will some day gape along my road, and the
-open circles of their mouths will be like the rims of beggars’ cups.
-My voice will rise above the dreamless clink of their coins and they
-will stop and look at me, as though I were a pilgrim-problem. An angry
-amazement will lend its little catastrophe to their faces. Yes, I will
-drop beauty to them, in clearly abundant handfuls, and they will sit
-quarreling over its value and tossing me an occasional penny. But I
-will never stop to join their discourses. My feet will be lighter than
-breezes and more direct. I am a poet, and the world is stagnation that
-I must ever torment!”
-
-He had lurched back to the Felman apartment, “dropping beauty” with
-an incisive exuberance to the astonished neighbors seated around the
-doorstep, and commanding them to examine his gifts. As he sat at the
-dining-room table now, he remembered this episode, and similar ones,
-with a gust of half-rebellious shame.
-
-“This has been my only triumph so far--a whiskey bottle raised beneath
-the stars, on a summer evening, and reigning over an idle riot of
-words,” he said to himself with an exhausted self-hatred. “Am I going
-to be contented with this thwarted joke? And yet----”
-
-Levy stepped into the room and provided a slightly unwelcome ending to
-this secret sentence. Short and slender, his blue serge suit clinging
-to him like an emblem of shrewd victory, he made an excellent period
-to the labors of thought. Upon his small, light tan face a twirled-up
-black moustache curved to a diminutive swagger and his bending nose
-seemed to be vainly attempting to caress the moustache--an unnecessary
-affirmation. His black eyes incessantly drove little bargains beneath
-the shine of his black hair.
-
-“H’llo, folks,” he chirruped, smiling with an automatic ease at the
-Felmans. Then he noticed Carl and looked at him with polite surprise.
-
-The father and mother regarded each other with a despondent indecision,
-dreading the thought of introducing their drolly disreputable son to
-this shining symbol of an outside world and hating the undeserved
-appearance of inferiority which had been thrown upon them. This queer
-son had cast his shadow upon their assured and humbly conservative
-position in life--in a world of decently balanced regularities.
-Their ability at loquacious pretense took up the burden with a weary
-precision.
-
-“This is my son Carl,” said Mr. Felman, with a prodigiously uneasy
-grin tickling the roundness of his face. “Carl, this is Al Levy.
-You’ve heard us talking of him, Al. He’s just come back from the
-army--surprised his old parents, you know.”
-
-“Glad to meet you, I’m sure,” said Levy, with an expert affability
-beneath which he exercised his disdain for Carl’s patched-up appearance
-and his inkling of the actual situation.
-
-He complimented a chair at the table briskly; or, in other words, he
-sat down, employing a great condescension of limbs. He and Felman began
-an uncouth debate concerning the respective selling merits of whiskey
-and cheap jewelry, while Carl listened, bored and a little sick at the
-stomach. Words to these men were crudely unveiled mistresses, selling
-their favors for whatever hasty coin might be thrown on the table. Levy
-turned to Carl.
-
-“How did you like the army?” he asked, with a lightly superior
-kindliness.
-
-Carl nervously wondered what he should answer and bickered with
-his desire to return a curt indifference to this vaguely garnished
-mannikin. He decided to annoy the limited mind of the man in front
-of him and take a comforting wraith of revenge from this result--his
-customary device for such situations, always used to evade a language
-which he did not care to simulate. The physical nearness of people
-made him snarl, for then his imagination found it more difficult to
-trifle with their outlines, and he would strive to drive them away with
-insult.
-
-“The army is a colorless workshop, where men can forget their past and
-avoid gambling with their future,” he said, in an aloofly professorial
-voice. “All of the hurried and obedient movements of a day in the army,
-like a little drove of dazed foxes, prevent a man from fully realizing
-his own insignificance, and at night there is always a nearby city in
-which the sorrowful illusion can be captured again. Oh, yes, the army
-is an excellent prison for men to whom life holds a fixed horizon--men
-whose hearts and minds have reduced curiosity to an ashen foothold.”
-
-Levy’s brows bent to an unfamiliar process and perplexity slowly
-loosened his lips, but a feeling of irritated pride made him determined
-not to show his confusion to one whom he looked upon as a demented and
-windy subordinate. He knew that this “fancy fool” was attempting to
-parade a superior knowledge of English, thus creating a counterfeit of
-wisdom.
-
-“Oh, I don’t think that the army is as bad as all that,” he said,
-in a glibly hurried voice, trying to assume an attitude of careless
-disagreement. “I was a sergeant-major once in the National Guard,
-down in Tennessee, and we had a pretty good time of it, I’ll tell you.
-It gave us all a splendid muscle and fine appetite, and it taught us
-to obey the commands of our superior officers without hesitating. You
-know, in life you’ve got to follow the orders of someone who knows more
-than you do, or you’ll never get anywhere. Besides, we had a lot of
-intelligent men in our outfit. Why, my company commander was one of the
-best lawyers in Nashville.”
-
-“My planet is somewhat distant from yours. I was barely able to hear
-you,” said Carl, amusedly. “Still, that doesn’t mean that either of us
-is better or worse than the other. Your eyes are contented with what
-they see and mine are not. But it would not be very important to tell
-you of things that you have never missed.”
-
-Levy became involved in his cigarette smoking while he futilely asked
-his mind for an adequate and unconcerned retort. Mrs. Felman sensed his
-annoyance and felt hugely angry at her son for “not getting in right”
-with this splendid young business-man and for speaking in a manner that
-was mysteriously and trivially vexing.
-
-“Ach, Carl always talks just like a hero in a story,” she said, in an
-agitated effort at humorous masquerade and hoping to smooth over the
-errors made by her freakish son. “Don’t pay no attention to him. I can
-never understand him myself.”
-
-Levy, once more completely the successful man to his own vision, forgot
-the bite of the beetle, and turned to the elder Felman.
-
-“How about a little game of rummy?”
-
-“Carrie, get the cards,” Felman answered, in quick tones of bright
-relief. “Carl will play--he always was a rummy shark and he never
-changes in anything. Such a stubborn boy! I bet you that forty years
-from now he’ll be just as foolish as he ever was.”
-
-“Your optimism concerning the length of my life intrigues me,” said
-Carl.
-
-Ten-cent pieces were placed on the table and the cards were shuffled.
-To the other two men the card game would have lacked interest without
-the money to be battled for, not because of the tiny gain involved, but
-because their desires for relaxation were lacking in spontaneity and
-needed the pettily deliberate strokes of a familiar whip to encourage
-their birth. Whenever, on rare occasions, they romped upon some lawn,
-tossing a ball to a child, or read the lurid clumsinesses of some
-magazine, they showed a sheepish hesitation and hazily felt that they
-were wasting time that belonged to the shrewd importance of barter
-and exchange. The presence of a coin upon a table, however, held a
-glint of the missing coquette. They swore elaborately and interminably
-at lost hands--“that queen would have given it to me”--flung down the
-paper oblongs with a tense elation when they were winning, and enjoyed
-the presence of a milder but still keen market-place. The gambling
-instinct is never anything more than the desire to seduce an artificial
-uncertainty from a life that has grown mildewed and prearranged--the
-monotone must be circumvented with little, straining devices. It
-pleased Carl to imitate the motions of the other two men, outwitting
-them at their own small game while still remaining a repulsed
-bystander, and sneaking a morsel of enjoyment from their genuine dismay
-at some defeat. After several games had been played the father yawned
-mightily, creating a noise that sounded like a Mississippi River
-steamboat whistle heard at a distance, poignant and full-throated.
-Perhaps with this yawn his soul signaled a complaint against the
-disgrace which this day had cast upon it--a nightly remonstrance
-unheard by his mind and heart. Levy, subdued and impressed by Carl’s
-card-playing abilities, pelted him with commonplaces which he tried
-to make as genial as possible, and Carl, too sleepy to be belligerent
-or aloof, gave him softly vague responses. Mrs. Felman, for the first
-time, looked out with heavy peace from behind the crinkling newspaper
-where she had been placidly nibbling at the perfumed logics of a latest
-divorce scandal. Her son had finally redeemed the evening by exhibiting
-a small but ordinary proficiency which drew him a little nearer to the
-dully efficient level of mankind, and her reflections upon his material
-future became a shade less hopeless.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER IV.
-
-
-At an early hour on the following morning she hurried Carl to the
-business section of the city so that the neighboring women, who slept
-late after getting breakfast for their men, would not see him from
-their windows, and at a department store she purchased a cheap suit of
-clothes for him. He dressed behind a small screen in the store, feeling
-like a small, eccentric lamb who was being glossed for the market. She
-left him at an elevated railroad station, extracting a dollar from her
-pocketbook with an air of intensely solemn and reflective importance.
-
-“Don’t waste it now; I know your tricks,” she said. “Be sure and get
-the afternoon paper and look through the want ads. Take anything at the
-start--don’t be high-toned.”
-
-Carl gave her the necessary monosyllables of assent and walked down the
-street, his mind busy with many insinuations.
-
-“Perhaps I’d better stop stealing for a while,” he said to himself.
-“If I keep it up without an intermission it’s going to land me in jail
-again and I’m not anxious for that circumscribed travesty to happen.
-That term of three months in Texas gave me a great deal of time in
-which to write, but the little animals in that place intruded with a
-bite that was both wistful and inadequate. It’s a little difficult to
-write about beauty and scratch your skin simultaneously--the proud
-stare of the former does not like to sit in the prison of a small
-irritation. It is an intricately adjusted equilibrium and the lunge of
-a finger nail can desecrate this subtly balanced aloofness. There is
-little difference between the bars of mind and actual iron rods, but
-when you are still partly inarticulate, physical motion can become a
-necessary recompense. No, for the time being I had better strain my
-hands in prayer against the tiny implements with which men felicitate
-their stupidity. Back and forth--but what else can I do?”
-
-It was his habit to think only in metaphors and similes, and in this
-way he evaded the realities that would otherwise have crushed him. He
-walked down the street, practicing an emotion of stolid submission, and
-this surface humility played pranks with his blonde-topped head and
-made his thin lips loosely unrelated to the rest of his face. As he
-strode through the business district of the city, with its sun-steeped
-frenzies of men and vehicles, the scene pressed upon him and yet was
-remote at the same time. It was as though he were studying a feverishly
-capering unreality and vainly striving to persuade himself that he
-formed a significant part of it.
-
-The unrelenting roar of automobiles, wagons and cars became the
-laughable and inarticulate attempt of a dream to convince him that it
-held a power over his mind and body. Men and women darted past him
-with a rapidity that made them appear to be the mere figments of a
-magic trick. Here he caught the thick tension of lips, and there the
-abstracted flash of eyes, but they were gone before he could believe
-that they had interfered with his vision. He paused beside a dark
-green news-stand squeezed under the iron slant of an elevated-railroad
-stairway and strove to pin the scene to his mind and fix his relation
-to the people who were jesting with his eyes. Young and old, dressed
-in complications of timidly colored cloth, each seemed to be running
-an exquisitely senseless race in the effort to gain a nonsensical foot
-on the other person. The masked rush of their bodies deprived them of
-a divided sexual appearance and lure--men and women, touching elbows
-without emotion, were swept into one lustreless sex which darted in
-pursuit of a treacherously invisible reward. The entire structure
-around them--buildings, signs, and iron slabs--stood like a house of
-cards carefully supported by an essence that rose from the rushing
-people, and Carl felt that if these men and women were to become silent
-and motionless, in unison, the house of cards would instantly lose its
-meaning and tumble down.
-
-“What are they gliding and stumbling toward?” he asked himself--the
-old, poignantly futile first question of youth. “Each man, with an
-ingenious treason, is trying to forget his inability at self-expression
-and soiling the void with an increasing burden that will prevent
-him from complaining too much. At some time in their lives all of
-these people felt, dimly or strongly, for a moment or for years, the
-ludicrous ache of a desire to stand out clearly against their scene,
-but the loaded momentum of past lives--the choked influence of past
-futilities--pushed them along with a force which they could not
-withstand. It is really a stream of adroitly dead men and women that
-is fleeing down this street--surreptitiously dead people living in the
-bodies of a present reality and perpetuating the defeated essence of
-their past lives.”
-
-As he stood and watched the crowd he found it necessary to ask himself
-the words: “What gave its slyly amused signal for this plaintive race
-through the centuries?”
-
-He also found it necessary to answer: “A languid idiot, much in need of
-consolation, refuses to abandon his dream.”
-
-Here and there, apart from the main lunge of the crowd, were men and
-women, standing still, as though motion had betrayed them, or loitering
-in a carelessly placid fashion. Vacancy and indecision tampered with
-most of their faces.
-
-“How many minor poets have stood upon these street corners, making
-arrangements for a gradual and unnoticed death?” he asked himself, with
-the sentimental self-importance of youth.
-
-But the stage hands clamored that he was neglecting the play--a habit
-falsely known as laziness--and that, with appropriate cunning, they had
-erected this city scene so that he and hordes of others should find it
-difficult to forget their tamely borrowed lines. With an uncomplaining
-wrench he returned to his surface role of a youth sent out in weakly
-gruesome clothes to look for some task that would begin to answer the
-flatly strident requests of an average life. The humble stupor fell
-back upon his shoulders and he walked to a bench in a public square,
-seated himself, and read the “want-ad” section of a newspaper. He
-spied, with a prostrate frown, the barren jest of: “Wanted--Young man
-for clerical work; must be neat, industrious, wide-awake, sober, well
-educated, reliable, good at details, ambitious, honest, painstaking;
-salary twelve dollars a week.” He muttered certain useless words
-to himself. “The illusion of a reluctant penny for fresh vigor. If
-the applicant is morbidly patient and reasonably deft at following
-orders he may after many years attain the virtue of writing the same
-trivially unfair appeal to other men. And even that exquisite victory
-is uncertain.”
-
-He saw that as usual his only choice rested between an office-boy’s
-task, dignified by the title of junior clerk to make it more enticing,
-and unskilled manual labor.
-
-“Now, how will you become tired--mentally or physically?” he asked
-himself with great formality.
-
-Abruptly, and in that conscious and secret plot which men insist
-upon calling subconscious, he peered at the picture of a black man
-and a white man throwing a wilted rose back and forth to each other
-and catching it without a trace of emotion. The little, ridiculous
-rose lost a petal after each catch, but in spite of its smallness
-the number of petals seemed to be inexhaustible. At a distance the
-black and white man exactly resembled each other, but on approaching
-closer it could be seen that the black man held the face of an
-incredibly stolid ruffian, while the white man’s face was engraved
-with the patience of a cowed child. Not being acquainted with
-psychoanalysis--that blind exaggeration of sexual routines--Carl did
-not believe, after he returned to the touch of the park bench, that
-this picture had slyly veiled the direction of his physical desires. He
-knew that a fantastic whim had slipped from his mind and induced him to
-probe his choice between two equally drab kinds of labor, striving to
-make this choice endurable for a moment.
-
-He selected three advertisements, all of them asking for manual
-laborers, walked from the park, and boarded a street car. The first
-place that he visited was a box factory--a slate-colored crate of a
-building, bearing that flatly unexpectant tone that expresses the
-year-long mating of smoke and dirt. As he ascended the gloomy stairway
-an endless drone and clatter battled with his ears. It seemed a
-senseless blasphemy directed at nothing in particular--the complaint
-of a dull-witted, harnessed giant who was being driven on without
-knowing why. Carl entered a huge room disheveled with sawdust and
-shavings and cluttered with black belts and wheels. Men with swarthy,
-motionless faces and feverish arms leaned over the wheels and saws.
-As he stood near the doorway, feeling dwarfed and uncertain, a man
-came toward him. Sturdy and short, the man looked like a magnified and
-absent-minded gnome, too busy to realize that civilization had played
-an obscene trick on him by stealing his fairy disguise and substituting
-the colorless inanities of overalls and a black shirt. The large and
-heavily twisted features on his face were partially hidden by a brown
-stubble of beard, and like all men who work forever in factories, he
-had an ageless air in which youth, middle age and old age were pounded
-into one dull evasion.
-
-“What d’ya want?” he asked, the words jumbled to a bark.
-
-“I’m looking for work. Saw your ad in the paper.”
-
-He examined the region between Carl’s toes and cap, measuring the
-unimportance of flesh.
-
-“We want good strong men to load boxes and carry lumber,” he said. “You
-don’t look like a man for the job, bo. You’re dressed like a travelin’
-salesman an’ we want men who ain’t afraid to get dirt on their clothes.
-Get me?”
-
-“Don’t mind this suit of mine,” said Carl. “I have a much dirtier one
-at home and I’ll be only too glad to wear it here. You see, I always
-feel more peaceful in dirty clothes, but someone played a joke on me
-and made me wear this suit.”
-
-“Well, you ought to come ready for work, if you’re lookin’ for it”--the
-man peered again at Carl.
-
-“Nope. Nope. You ain’t got the build for heavy work. We’re after big,
-husky men. Sorry, Jack, but there’s nothin’ doin’.”
-
-“Say, be reasonable,” said Carl. “I’ve done hard work off and on for
-the last four years and I’m much stronger than I look. Come on, give me
-a chance.”
-
-The man shook his head as his eyes received Carl’s slender arms and
-narrow shoulders, and he did not know that this weak aspect concealed
-an inhuman amount of endurance. After another useless expostulation
-Carl walked out, grinning forlornly as he strode down the street.
-Cheated out of the phantom opiate of a beautiful box-piling job because
-of a deceptive physical appearance and a twenty-dollar suit, reduced
-to nineteen through the expert pleading of his mother! He looked
-down with delicate aversion at the grey, neatly-pressed cloth which
-concealed his material humility with lines of dreamless confidence,
-and felt a sudden impulse to tear it off and go nakedly cavorting down
-the street, taking the cries of onlookers as a suitable reward, but
-that sleek caution born from rough faces and rougher hands chided him
-back to sanity. After calling at another factory and receiving the same
-refusal, he decided to wait until the morrow, when he could don his
-old, dirty clothes and avert suspicion.
-
-The city turmoil was slackening, like a huge, human top beginning to
-spin weakly. The warm hardness of a summer evening between city streets
-tried a little laughter in an unpracticed voice, and revolving streams
-of men and women hid the pavements--a satiated army returning from an
-unsettled conflict. The scene was a mixed metaphor trying to straighten
-itself out. Feeling forlornly alert and useless in the midst of all
-this important exhaustion, Carl made his way home.
-
-A group of neighbors sat with a clean and well-brushed peace around the
-doorstep. In the heat of the summer evening they seemed mere figures
-of slightly animated flesh, with their thoughts and emotions reduced
-to placidly contented wraiths. Three middle-aged Jewish women sat in
-rocking chairs and knitted with an effortless incision, unaware of
-the spiritual prominence that is usually discovered in their race.
-Their bulky bodies censured the lightness of evening air and their
-deeply-marked brown faces were those of self-assured, thoughtless
-queens issuing orders to a tiny domain, with palmetto fans for scepters
-and rhinestone combs for crowns. Incessantly they chatted about the
-personal details of their daily lives, splitting these details into
-even smaller atoms and fondling the minute particles with a lazy
-relish. Children romped at their feet or brought some tiny request to
-their laps--children that seemed to be dreams of cherubic hilarity,
-released from the busy sleep of the middle-aged women and reproving
-it. Behind them, sitting on the stone steps, a middle-aged Jewish man
-glued his depressed weariness to a newspaper. The orderly sleekness of
-his clothes had met with the familiarity of a summer day and the rim
-of his once stiff collar, drenched with perspiration, made a pathetic
-curve around his fat, brown neck. His eyes were like flat discs of
-metal placed on each side of an enormous, confident nose. Noses express
-the spirit of people far better than lips and eyes, for they cannot be
-moved and changed to suit the fears and desires of a person, but stand
-with an outline of uncompromising revealment. Their still silence is
-often the only sincerity upon a human face, and the nose of this man
-showed a strident green that was contradicted a bit by the drooping
-little indentations just above the nostrils, indicating that the man
-had his moments of self-doubt, but refused to yield to them.
-
-It seemed incredible to Carl that these people were housing hearts and
-minds, for he could see them only as so many sterile lumps of flesh
-that were using every desperate trick to minimize the crawling shadow
-of their unimportant graves. Two of the women knew him and greeted him
-with an insincere and inquisitive cordiality.
-
-“Wh-y-y, Mister Felman, when did you get back?” said Mrs. Rosenthal,
-the fattest of the group.
-
-“I returned yesterday,” answered Carl, injecting a great solemnity into
-his voice.
-
-“Yesterday? Well, well. And did you have a nice time in the army? I’ve
-been told that it’s really marvelous for a man--makes him so strong
-and healthy. And then all the traveling about, you know, must be so
-interesting.”
-
-“Oh, ye-e-es, it’s a wonderful place,” said Carl, gravely mimicking
-her drawling voice. “Bands, and uniforms, and parades. It’s really
-quite fascinating.”
-
-“Well, I’m so glad you liked it,” said Mrs. Benjamin, another woman in
-the group, who felt that it was time to advance a well-placed sentence.
-“I want you to meet my husband. Mo, this is Mister Felman, who’s just
-come back from the army.”
-
-“Glad t’ meet yuh,” said the man on the doorstep, blurring the words in
-a swiftly mechanical fashion, but looking very closely at Carl.
-
-Carl returned the salutation in the same fashion, taking a shade of
-amusement from his parrot-like impulse. These hollow creatures--what
-else could one do save to imitate their mannerisms and ideas, for
-self-protection, and rob and defraud them at every opportunity, thus
-giving them a mild apology for existence? After another round of wary
-commonplaces he managed to break away. His mother met him at the door
-and he said “Hello” and was about to pass her when her sharp voice
-halted him.
-
-“You haven’t got an ounce of affection in you! A nice way to greet your
-mother! Hello, and he walks right by like I was some boy he met on the
-street.”
-
-For a moment Carl stood without answering. This woman who had given
-birth to him--an incomprehensible chuckle of an incident--was almost
-non-existent to his emotions--a mere shadow that held an incongruously
-raucous voice and guarded one of the gates of his surface prison. As
-he stood in the hallway, doubting the reality of her shrill voice, he
-asked himself: “Am I an inhuman monster, unfit to touch this woman’s
-dress, or am I a poet standing with candid erectness in an alien
-situation?”
-
-Suddenly the question became unimportant to him and he felt that he had
-merely offered his inevitable self the choice between an imaginary halo
-and an equally fantastic strait-jacket. If his mother actually longed
-for an affection which he did not hold, it would be inexpensive to toss
-her the counterfeit coins of gestures and words. When she finished her
-staccato diatribe, he bowed deeply to her, with the palm of one hand
-lightly interrogating the buttons of his coat, raised her hand to his
-lips, and kissed it at great length.
-
-“Na-a, go away with your silliness,” she said. “I know you don’t mean
-it.”
-
-Her narrow face loosened for a moment and a shimmer of compensation
-found her eyes. This queer son of hers might be faintly realizing,
-after all, the unselfish intensity of her efforts to give him a
-position of honor and respectability in the world. Perhaps he was only
-wild and young, and would finally press his shoulders against the
-admired harness of material success. It could not be possible that one
-who had struggled from her flesh would remain a remote idiot and ignore
-the warm shrewdness within her that life had somehow swindled.
-
-The elder Felman was reading his paper in the dining-room. He greeted
-Carl with a somnolent imitation of interest, but the heat, aided by a
-day spent in pungent saloons, had cheated him of most of his mental
-consciousness. He had become so thoroughly accustomed to drink that an
-artificial buoyancy scarcely ever invaded the dull ending of his days.
-
-“We-e-ell, where did you go to-day?” he asked, feeling some slight
-craving for sound and trying to rouse his material anticipations.
-
-He abandoned his seductive newspaper, with its melodrama that was
-pleasant because it murdered at a distance, and questioned Carl with
-his sleepy eyes.
-
-“Went to a couple of factories, but the foremen were disgusted with the
-cut of my clothes,” said Carl. “They felt that the wearing of a new and
-unwrinkled suit revealed an intelligence which should not be possessed
-by an applicant for manual labor. I tried to convince them that the
-semblance was false in my case, but they refused to be persuaded.”
-
-“Always trying to joke. That won’t get you anything. The main thing
-is--did you get work, or didn’t you?”
-
-“No, I did not. I applied for manual labor, but I forgot to put on
-overalls.”
-
-Mrs. Felman stood in the doorway and lifted a skillet in simple wrath.
-
-“Factories he goes to!” she cried, in a voice that was not unlike the
-previous rattling of the skillet. “I bought him a new suit and shoes
-this morning so he could look for common, dirty work! It’s terrible.
-Here we sent him to high-school for four years and his only ambition is
-to work as a common laborer.”
-
-The father smiled dubiously at her explosion.
-
-“Now, Carrie, don’t let all the neighbors know your business,” he said.
-“Your holler is enough to drive anyone crazy. There’s no harm in honest
-work, Carrie, and besides he’ll soon get tired of sweating in factories
-and look for something decent. Don’t worry.”
-
-“I guess anything will be better than that silly scribbling that’s
-ruined his life so far,” said Mrs. Felman, her anger dwindling to a
-guttural sulkiness. Carl, who had been sitting with a suffering grin
-on his face, gave them soothing words and once more held them at arm’s
-length.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER V.
-
-
-In the dirty clothes that he had worn upon his arrival, qualified by
-a clean shirt, he went forth on the next morning and found work as a
-lineman’s helper for a telephone company. He was required to climb up
-the wooden poles; hand tools to the lineman; unwind huge spools of
-wire; make simple repairs under the lineman’s guidance. As he labored
-from pole to pole, down a suburban street, taking the impersonal whip
-of the sun and winning the pricks of insects on his sweat-dappled face,
-he felt dully grateful toward the physical orders that were crudely
-obliterating the confused demands of his heart and mind. As he toiled
-on, this dull feeling gradually rose to a self-lacerating joy. He
-revelled in the cheap vexations brought by his tasks--the unpleasant
-scraping of shins against iron rungs and the sting of dust in his
-eyes--and his self-hatred stood apart, delightedly watching the slavish
-antics of the physical mannikin.
-
-Then, when this emotion paused to catch its breath it was replaced
-by a calmer one, and his insignificance receded a bit, beneath the
-substantial lure of arms and legs that were moving toward a fixed
-purpose. “I am doing something definite now and that is at least a
-shade better than the indefinite uselessness of my thoughts,” he
-mumbled to himself as he lurched from pole to pole. The slowly mounting
-ache of his muscles became a bitter hint of approaching peace and he
-looked forward to the moment when he would quit his labors and enjoy
-the returning independence of his body, as though it were a god’s
-condescension. He worked quickly and breathlessly, as one who hurries
-to a distant lover’s arms. Filled with a doggedly naive hatred for
-his own deficiencies, he welcomed this chance to insult them with
-disagreeable and infinitely humble postures, and he gladly punished
-himself underneath the violence of the sun. It was, indeed, a spiritual
-sadism deigning to make use of the flesh.
-
-“Hey, Jack, take it a little easier,” the lineman called down to him
-once. “Don’t kill yourself at this job. It’s too damned hot to work
-hard.”
-
-Carl gave him a beaten grin and moved his arms even faster while the
-lineman bewilderedly meditated upon this imbecility. The lineman was a
-burly young Swede with a broadly upturned nose and thickly wide lips.
-His face suggested poorly carved wood. The blankness of his mind held
-few skirmishes with thought on this rasping afternoon and his mental
-images were confined to tools, stray glasses of beer, yielding pillows,
-and feminine contours--the flitting promises that held him to his day
-of toil. He possessed no human significance to Carl--he was a drably
-accidental automaton who shouted down the blessed orders that gave Carl
-little time for definite thoughts and emotions: an unconscious helper
-in the flogging of mind and soul.
-
-As they walked down the street after the day’s work Carl looked
-closely at him for the first time. Sweat and dirt were violating the
-youthful outlines of his face, and his small blue eyes were contracted
-and deeply sunk as though still directing the movements of his arms.
-The blunt strength of his body sagged beneath the colorlessness of
-clothes and his head was wearily bent forward--the grey frenzies of a
-civilization had exacted their daily tribute and it is possible that he
-was not aware of the glory and impressiveness which certain poets find
-in his cringing role. For a time Carl looked at him with an exhausted
-friendliness and felt tied to him by the intimate bonds of confessing
-sweat and conquered toil, and this illusion did not vanish until he
-spoke.
-
-“Me for beer and somethin’ to eat,” he said, with heavy anticipation.
-“A day shust like this’ll take the guts outa any man. Come along, Jack,
-I’ll stand treat for the suds.... An’ say, lemme give ya a tip--don’t
-overwork yourself out on this job. It don’t pay. You won’t get a cent
-more at the end of the week. Do whatcha gotta do but take it kinda
-easy. Kinda easy. The boss is too busy most of the time to notice who’s
-doin’ the most work an’ unless you loaf on the job you can get by
-without killin’ yourself.”
-
-The complacent roughness of his voice, divided by the shallow wisdoms
-of the underdog, destroyed the feeling of tired communion which Carl
-had been sheltering, and his exhaustion began to creep apart from the
-man, like a tottering aristocrat. He was once more a proudly baffled
-creator, shuffling along after a day of useless movements, and his
-hatred for human beings awoke from its short sleep and brandished a
-sneer on his loose and dirt-streaked face.
-
-He walked into a corner saloon with Petersen and gulped down a glass
-of beer. Its cool interior kiss aroused a bit of vigor within him
-and he looked around at the men who were amiably fighting to place
-their elbows on the imitation mahogany bar. Their faces were relaxed
-and soiled, heavily betraying the aftermath of a day of toil, and
-an expression of brief elation teased their faces as they swallowed
-the beer and whiskey and licked their lips. After each drink they
-stood with blustering indecision, like generals striving to forget a
-menial dream and regain their command of an army, or quietly tried to
-erase the blunders and supplications of a day, seeking nothing save
-the solace of lazy conversation and weakly clownish arguments. The
-strained, corrupt clamor of voices debating over women, prize-fighters,
-and money swayed back and forth and was timidly disputed by the whir of
-electric-fans and the clink of glasses. A wave of sleepy carelessness
-stormed Carl as he watched these men. Inevitably thrown in with them,
-as a sacrifice to a dubious reality, he felt inclined to copy their
-actions and inanely insult his actual self, since at this moment all
-words and gestures seemed equally futile to him.
-
-“What essential difference is there between a poet, boasting of his
-reputation, and a workman bragging about the women who have allowed him
-to molest their bodies?” he asked himself, forcing the question out of
-the drained limpness of his mind. “The poet has taught better manners
-to his vanity, with many an inquisitive artifice, while the other man
-is more natural and clumsy.”
-
-Petersen’s voice interrupted the soliloquy.
-
-“Come on, have another.”
-
-“Make it whiskey this time,” said Carl to the bartender. “I’ll pay for
-this one, Petersen.”
-
-“Keep your money, keep it,” answered Petersen, warmed by his beers to
-an insistent generosity. “I got plenty of it. But say, I’ll be a little
-shorter in kale tuhnight when Katie gets through with me. There’s no
-way of spendin’ money that that dame don’t know, but I guess all women
-are like that. They make you fly some to get ’em. Gonna meet her at
-eight tonight.”
-
-“Who’s Katie?” asked Carl, drowsily amused after his whiskey.
-
-“She’s a little brunette I’m goin’ with. I’m blonde myself so I like
-’em dark an’ well-built. Fine-lookin’ girl she is. Some curve! She
-ain’t a fast dame by no means but I give her money so’s she can look
-decent. You know the wages they pay at them damn department-stores! I
-don’t wanna be ashamed of her when I take her out so I get her the best
-of everythin’--silk stockings, nice hat, swell shoes.”
-
-“Don’t she feel kinda small about a man paying for her clothes?” asked
-Carl, slipping into Petersen’s language.
-
-“Well, she said no at first but I told her that she didn’t have to give
-me nothin’ except what she wanted to,” said Petersen. “I’m a straight
-guy with women, I am.”
-
-“Do you love her?” asked Carl, wondering how Petersen would take the
-question.
-
-He looked at Carl with a heavy disapproval.
-
-“Say, cut out the kiddin’,” he answered. “D’ya lo-o-ove her”--he
-mimicked the words with astonished derision--“none of that soft stuff
-for me. She’s a good-lookin’, wise girl, and if I don’t see anyone I
-like better I’ll prob’ly marry her, but she ain’t got no ropes tied to
-me. You bet not! There’s plenty of fish in the pond, Jack.”
-
-“Yes, if you’ve got the right kind of bait,” answered Carl,
-deliberately falling into the other man’s verbal stride, “but be sure
-that someone else isn’t fishing for you at the same time. Hooked from
-above, while not watching, you know.”
-
-“You’re a regular kidder, ain’t ya,” said Petersen, who dimly felt that
-Carl was masking the sly wisdom of sexual pursuits and respected him
-for it. “But say, Katie’s got a nice friend--Lucy’s her name. She’s a
-little thin, not much curve to her, but some men like ’em that way.
-An’ she’s kinda quiet too, don’t talk much, but I don’t care for them
-when they’re always laughin’ and cuttin’ up. Then they’re usually
-tryin’ to get on your good side an’ work you for somethin.’ Would ya
-like to meet this dame? I don’t know just how far she’ll go but she
-might come across if you work her right.”
-
-“Sure, lead me to her,” said Carl, inaudibly laughing to himself.
-
-“Alright, I’ll make it for eight tuhmorrow night. The four of us’ll go
-somewhere.... Well, one more an’ we’ll beat it, Jack.”
-
-Glancing swiftly ahead, Carl saw that this engagement would demand a
-certain sum of money and he wondered how he could obtain it since he
-would not be paid for his present work until the end of the week. While
-he stood, grasping this little perplexity, he noticed that a man at his
-left had placed a ten-dollar bill on the bar, in payment for a drink,
-and that the man was immersed in a violent argument with a friend, with
-his back turned to the bar. The bartender was at the other end of the
-counter, and after a glance at Petersen, who stood dully peering into
-his empty glass, Carl whisked the bill into one of his coat pockets.
-Then he quickly prodded Petersen’s shoulder.
-
-“Come on, let’s go,” he said, and the two walked out of the saloon,
-Carl taking care to stroll in a reluctant fashion and steeling himself
-for the angry shout that might come.
-
-As Carl walked down the street he felt a twinge of regret at having
-stolen the money of a stumbling, minor puppet. He told himself that
-this petty gesture had been forced upon him by an innately vicious
-contortion known as life, but his emotions cringed as they arranged an
-appropriate explanation.
-
-“This man whom I have robbed will curse the treacherous unfairness of
-life and his eyes, dilated with bitterness, will see more clearly his
-relation to the things around him. In this way I have really befriended
-him. The railroad-detective, who once struck me on the head with the
-butt of a pistol, when I was offering no resistance, was trying to
-obtain revenge--revenge upon the people who had made him their snarling
-slave--and he blindly reached out for the object nearest to him, which
-happened to be my head. But there was no desire for vengeance in my
-own gesture. I steal from men in order to prevent life from stealing
-an occasional refuge for my thoughts and emotions. A purely practical
-device.”
-
-He left Petersen at the next street-corner and boarded a crowded
-street-car, reflecting on his engagement to meet the “quiet an’ thin
-Lucy” as he stood wearily clinging to the leather strap. Petersen’s
-attitude toward women was a familiar joke. Dressed in its little array
-of fixed and confident variations it had pursued Carl in the past
-without repulsing or flattering him. To him it was an elaborately
-pitiful delusion of dominance made by hosts of men, who felt the
-craving to inject a dramatic variety and assurance into the frightened
-monotones of their lives. In an aching effort to dignify their barren
-days these men adopted the roles of hunters and masters among women.
-They entered, with infinite coarseness and precision, a glamorous
-realm of lies, jealousies, cruelties, and haloes, and in this wildly
-fantastic land they managed to forget the flatly submissive attitudes
-of another world. Carl was telling himself that he had been waiting
-for a woman who could bring him something more than the crudely veiled
-undulation of flesh but he fashioned the starving little romance with
-great deliberateness.
-
-“Women have excited my flesh and it has often yielded to them, but that
-is simply a necessary triviality,” he said to himself. “I, too, must
-seek to evade the monotonies and restrictions of my life, lest I become
-mad, but at least I am quite conscious of the joke. The cheap little
-drug-store does not witness any hoodwinked swaggers on my part! So on
-to quiet Lucy, with her stiff stupidities and elastic curves.”
-
-Once more he had to pass the garrulous sentries at the gate--the
-neighbors around the doorstep. They eyed the dirt upon his clothes
-and face with an amazed contempt--Carrie Felman’s son a common
-laborer!--and lost in their scrutiny they gave him monosyllabic
-greetings.
-
-“Well, judging from the dirt all over you you’ve found a job,” said his
-mother in tones of blunt resignation.
-
-“Yes, I’m working as a lineman’s helper for the telephone company,” he
-answered in an expressionless voice.
-
-After he had washed his parents pelted him with amiable questions--the
-details of his work, wages, and companions--a dash of solicitude
-swinging with their desire to entertain the dull aftermath of a hot
-summer day. He answered their questions patiently and they were glad
-that their son seemed ready to plunge his “wildness” into the soothing
-currents of an average life. Their affection for him was only able
-to dominate their hearts when he failed to challenge the peaceful
-assumptions and bargains of their lives, for otherwise it verged into
-hatred because it was confronted by a stabbing mystery which it could
-not understand.
-
-After the evening meal he sat in an easy chair upholstered with violent
-green plush and usually occupied at such times by his father, but
-donated to him in honor of his first evening of submission. He sprawled
-in the chair, trifling with the headlines of a newspaper and throwing
-them aside. A warm and not unpleasant stupor began to descend upon his
-thoughts and emotions and they fluttered spasmodically, like circles
-of drugged butterflies. He closed his eyes. His legs and arms held a
-heaviness which he enjoyed because he was not forced to raise it.
-
-“Will this be my end--a swinging of arms and legs during the daytime
-and then different shades of sleep or sensual bravado at night?” he
-asked himself drowsily--a well-remembered sentence that needed little
-consciousness.
-
-Suddenly, an emotional revolt within him tore against his physical
-lethargy, like lightnings from some unguessed depth of his soul, and he
-was astonished to find himself sitting upright in the chair. He saluted
-the victory joyously.
-
-“By God, I won’t give in as easily as this,” he whispered to the purple
-grapes on the tan wall-paper, addressing them because their ugliness
-was at least helplessly inert. “You’re concrete symbols, if nothing
-else, and you don’t stumble amidst unconquered clouds. I’ll go to the
-park and try to write a poem.”
-
-Agreeably amazed at the returning vestige of strength in his legs he
-walked to the public-park and sat down upon a bench. Ignoring the
-people who were strolling or romping around him he bent over his
-paper-pad and tugged at the smooth insolence of rhyme and meter, but
-the fight was an uneven one since his mind and emotions were still
-brittle and dazed from their day of hurried subjection. After crumbling
-sheets of paper for two hours he wrote:
-
-
-  TO A SAND-PIPER
-
-    One blast--a mildly frightened little host
-    Of liquid sprites, each holding one high note,
-    Aroused from some repentance in the throat
-    Of this grey-yellow bird who skims the coast--
-    And silence. Far off I can somehow feel
-    The drooping-winged sprites back to covert steal.
-
-
-The poem did not satisfy him, and in a measure he felt like a
-sleepwalker who was imitating gestures that had lost their meaning to
-him, but he dared not substitute his actual thoughts and emotions in
-place of the tenuous or stilted fancies which he believed were all that
-poetry was allowed to achieve. All that he wanted to say, and all that
-he did say in conversation with himself, muttered unhappily within him
-as he sat on the bench and strained to capture the pretty suggestions
-of a mystical rapture, but he was slave to the belief that poetry was a
-thinly aristocratic experience in which thoughts and emotions, serene,
-noble, and ludicrously artificial, disdained the lunges of thought and
-the turmoils of an actual world--pale, washed-out princes contending
-among themselves for trinket-devices known as rhymes and meters.
-
-He rose from the bench, impoverished by the effort that he had made to
-counteract a day of toil, and trudged homeward.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER VI.
-
-
-After stumbling through another day of heaving muscles and bruised
-shins, with his self-hatred gloating over the slavery of his body, he
-met Petersen and the two girls at a down-town street-corner, grinning
-at the thought of what this experience might hold, for he liked the
-idea of pretending to be a sensual beggar while a sneer within him
-played the part of a bystander.
-
-Petersen’s sweetheart, Katie Anderson, was a short, plump girl who
-tried, with the incessant swiftness of her tongue, to apologize for
-the excessive slowness of her thoughts. The coarse roundness of her
-face was determinedly obscured by rouge and powder, and her large brown
-eyes were continually shifting, as though they feared that stillness
-might betray some secret which they held. Her face knew a species of
-sly and mild cunning not unlike that of a rabbit frequently beaten by
-life but clinging to its mask of courage while hopping through the
-forest of sensual experience. Her friend, Lucy Melkin, was more subdued
-and helplessly candid. Her small slender body stooped a little as
-though some unseen hand were pressing too familiarly upon one of her
-shoulders--a hand of exhausted fear--and the pale oval of her face had
-the twist of a loosely pleading infant beneath its idiotic red and
-white. Her blue eyes seemed to be endlessly waiting for something to
-strike them and wondering why the blow failed to arrive on time.
-
-Petersen suggested that they should visit an adjacent vaudeville
-theater and when Carl and the others agreed they walked through the
-crowded streets.
-
-“Baby, but I’ve had some day,” said Katie. “Them shoppers sure get on
-your nerves, I’m telling you. But you’re not gonna let me work all the
-time, are you, Charlie dear?”
-
-“There’s no harm in workin’,” said Petersen, not wanting to be quite
-placed in the position of disdaining an essential fact within his life.
-“No harm. I gotta take a lot of sass myself from the foreman but it’s
-all in the day’s game. You don’t get nothin’ easy in this world, ’less
-you’re a crook, and if y’are you’ll soon wind up in a place where
-ya don’t wanta be. But still, a good-lookin’ girl like you, Katie,
-shouldn’t hafta stand on her feet all day. Don’t be afraid, I’ll make
-it easier for ya pretty soon.”
-
-“Now Charle-e, the way you flatter is somethin’ terrible,” said Katie,
-with a simper of nude delight. “I suppose Mister Felman would like to
-get some nice girl too, wouldn’t you, Mister Felman? Or maybe you’ve
-got two or three already. You men can never be trusted.”
-
-“No, I haven’t been lucky,” said Carl, secretly exploding with a
-laughter that was partly directed at himself.
-
-He had been afraid that these girls would prove to be of the shallowly
-sophisticated, carefully sulky type and he felt relieved at their
-coarsely direct naivetes. An axe, with baby-blue ribbon tied around it,
-was more entertaining than a pocket-knife steeped in cheap perfume.
-
-“No, I haven’t been lucky,” he went on, “but, you know, we’re always
-waiting for the right one.”
-
-“Why, that’s just what Lucy always says,” said Katie, rolling her eyes
-as she looked at the other girl in a ponderously insinuating manner.
-“She’s always been rowmantic, like you, Mister Felman. Why if I was to
-tell you of all the fellas she’s turned down you wouldn’t believe me.”
-
-“No, perhaps I wouldn’t,” answered Carl, keeping his face sober with a
-massive effort.
-
-“Now, Katie, you keep quiet,” said Lucy, and Carl was surprised at
-the actual anger that hardened her voice. “I’m perfectly able to talk
-about my own business without your helpin’ an’ it’s not nice to be
-sayin’ such things to a gen’lman who’s just met me. I’m sure he’s not
-interested in my past an’ even if he is I’m the one to tell him an’ not
-you. You make me tired!”
-
-“Well, of all things,” cried Katie. “I was only tryin’ to be nice an’
-here you go and get real angry about it. I’ve never had a girl frien’
-who was as touchy as you are. I didn’t really tell Mister Felman
-anything about you ’cept that you was rowmantic, an’ that’s nothin’ to
-be ashamed about.”
-
-“See here, stop all this quarrelin’,” said Petersen, to whom the
-speech of women was always an ignorance that assailed the patience of
-masculine wisdom. “You women can talk for ten hours about nothin’! I
-didn’t bring my friend down to have him lissen to your squabblin’. Cut
-it out, I tell ya.”
-
-This storm in an earthen jar was amusing to Carl. He marvelled at the
-ability of these people to whip words into redundantly nondescript
-droves in which thought gasped weakly as it strove to follow the
-uproar of simple emotions. Continually, he felt the reactions of a
-visitor from another planet, witnessing an incredible vaudeville-show.
-All human beings to him were hollow and secretly despairing falsehoods
-separated only by the cleverness or crudeness of their verbal
-disguises, and he heard them with an emotion that was evenly divided
-between amazement and a chuckle.
-
-“I’m sure that Miss Anderson meant no harm,” said Carl, with a whim
-to become the glib peacemaker. “She was just feeling gay and frisky,
-and I took her words in the right spirit. Miss Melkin was a little
-angry because she thought that I didn’t understand Miss Anderson’s
-intentions, but she needn’t be afraid. I never misinterpret. It was
-just a little misunderstanding on both sides so let’s forget about it.”
-
-“Mister Felman, you’re such a perfect gen’lman,” said Katie, blithely.
-
-Carl looked at Lucy and saw that a wistfully surprised expression was
-liking his words and trying to explain them to her mind. It was the
-look of a baby flirting with an incongruous sophistication and striving
-to create a fusion between ingenuousness and a certain sensual wisdom
-learned in the alleys of life.
-
-“Ah, these starved dwarfs, how little it takes to please them,” Carl
-sighed to himself.
-
-After the wiry, tawdry spectacle of the vaudeville show, with its
-weary acrobats and falsetto singers, the four visited a grimly gaudy
-Chinese restaurant, where the Orient becomes an awkward prostitute
-for Occidental dollars, and while Petersen and Katie gossiped about
-their friends Carl and Lucy traded hesitant sentences and threw little
-sensual appeals from the steady gaze of their eyes. Lucy, with her look
-of a stunned infant, made him feel vaguely troubled--the ghost of a
-fatherly impulse. After the meal the group separated, since the girls
-lived in different parts of the city, and as Carl and Lucy rode in the
-trolley car they tried to make their anticipations more at ease, with
-the veils of conversation.
-
-“Why do you live?” asked Carl, abruptly, to see whether one or two
-words in her answer might be different from what he expected.
-
-“What a funny question!” cried Lucy. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s because
-I wanta be happy. I never am mosta the time, but then I’m always hopin’
-that things’ll change. Why’d you ask me that funny question?”
-
-The fumbling bewilderment of her words irritated and saddened Carl,
-simultaneously, and in an effort to slay the reaction he simulated a
-compassion.
-
-“Happiness doesn’t always speak the truth,” he said, struggling to
-mould his words so that they could reach her understanding. “It’s
-sometimes a beautiful lie. You understand? A beautiful, soft, desperate
-lie. And we say the lie because we want to change ourselves and
-somebody else to something that can make us forget our smallness. You
-see, we are not very large, either in our bodies or in our thoughts,
-and we try to make ourselves several feet taller, tall enough to put
-our heads on a level with the trees, tall enough to imagine that the
-wind respects us. Beautiful, desperate lies. Do you understand?”
-
-“I don’t quite understand you,” said Lucy. “You speak so different from
-all the men I know, so different, and yet I like the way you speak. Do
-you mean it’s not good for anyone to be happy?”
-
-“If your happiness doesn’t put you to sleep it’s good for you. When
-people try to be happy for more than a little while it makes them
-sleepy. And, you see, it’s much better to be very much alive, or very
-dead.”
-
-“Honest, I’d like to get what you’re sayin’,” said Lucy, perplexed and
-softly candid. “Maybe you mean that we oughta keep movin’ all the time,
-hearin’ and seein’ different things, an’ maybe you’re right about that.
-I get tired of goin’ down to work every mornin’ and coming back to the
-same room every night. I’d like to travel around, an’ see different
-people an’ places, an’ find out what everything’s like. But I guess I
-never will.”
-
-“It’s much easier than you imagine,” said Carl. “Just pack up your grip
-some morning and ride away to another city and see what happens there.
-After you’ve done it you’ll wonder what held you back.”
-
-“Oh I just couldn’t do that. I’d make my mother so unhappy if I did,
-an’ besides, I’d be afraid of goin’ somewhere all alone. I might not
-find any work in the place where I went, an’ then I’d be up against it.
-I’d like to travel around with plenty of money, an’ nothin’ to worry
-me, an’----”
-
-Her words trailed off into a revealing silence, and Carl smiled sadly
-at the little, pitifully obvious hint within her faltering. Perhaps it
-might be best to marry this simple, mildly wistful, ignorant girl and
-surrender himself to monotonous toil and sensual warmth, forgetting the
-schemes that were torturing his heart and mind. The reaction captured
-him for a time and then died. No, he was gripped by a snarling, nimble
-blackguard who was determined to lead him to destruction or victory.
-And in the meantime, here was sensual forgetfulness--an interlude with
-a girl to whom happiness was merely physical desire captivated by filmy
-and soothing disguises.
-
-They reached her home, a grey cottage in the suburbs, with a little
-yard of dusty grass and a modest porch. It bore an aspect of abject
-simplicity, and that meditative leer possessed by the fronts of all
-cottages. They sat in a hammock on the porch, and Carl suddenly
-kissed her with the theatrical intensity of one who is trying to
-shake off a deliberate role. The gasping expostulations of her voice
-were contradicted by the limpness of her body, and sighing at this
-prearranged incongruity, Carl kissed her again, still feeling like a
-skillful charlatan and still hoping to lure himself into a tumultuous
-spontaneity. This time she was silent but gripped his shoulders with
-both hands, while little shades of fright and desire gambled for her
-face. Suddenly, a meek candor came to her eyes and the seriousness of a
-child lost in an overwhelming forest moulded her lips.
-
-“Will you be good to me if I let you?” she whispered.
-
-The pathetic, cringing frankness of her words made a stabbing lunge at
-his deliberateness and a feeling of troubled tenderness mastered his
-heart. He wept inaudibly, as though he himself had become a begging
-child, and the illusion of rare experience, cheated and twisted out of
-his life, returned to betray him. His head struck her shoulder like the
-death of regret.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER VII.
-
-
-From that night on his life fell into a regular stride--days of
-wrenching labor and nights of rebellious weariness, broken by intervals
-in which he crept, like a swindled, dirty child, to the arms of Lucy,
-washed into a dreamless rest by the simple flow of her desire for him
-and her sightless worship. To her he was an enigmatic, statuesque
-prince delighting her with queer words which she could finger as though
-they were new toys and bringing her an eager compression of grief and
-joy which she had never known before. She realized, dimly, that he was
-fundamentally alien to her, and she often said to herself: “Some day
-he’ll meet a child who c’n understand all of his funny words and then
-he’ll forget about me,” but this fear only increased the stubbornness
-of her grasp. And so his life wavered between toil, and sensual peace,
-and little mildly stunted poems until one morning in late autumn when,
-at the main office of the telephone company, he was discharged with the
-information that his job had been merely a temporary one.
-
-“Thanks, old boy,” he said loudly in the face of the astonished
-cashier. “If you knew what a relief this is to me you’d take a drink
-with me to celebrate the occasion.”
-
-“Now what in the devil’s the matter with you?”--the man voiced his
-peevish perplexity as he fished for Carl’s pay envelope.
-
-“I was getting accustomed to the chains, but now that you’ve benignly
-removed them I’ll make another effort to escape,” he answered, in the
-grip of a gay and aimless relief.
-
-The clerk tapped his forehead, with a scowl, and contemptuously tossed
-over the envelope. Carl carelessly stuffed the sixteen dollars into a
-pocket and walked out upon the crowded down-town streets. The streets
-were touched with the middle of forenoon, that hour when the business
-section of an American city is most leisurely and nondescript in its
-make-up. The wagons and trucks were not yet bombarding time with
-the full climax of their inane roar and the flatly hideous elevated
-railroad trains were firing at longer intervals. Noise had not yet
-become the confused and staggering slave of an ill-tempered avarice.
-The nomads and idlers of the city’s populace were flitting in and out
-among housewives on an early shopping-tour and those sleekly bloated
-men who stroll belatedly to their offices. A sleepy young vaudeville
-actress, painted and satiated, hurried to some booking-agency; a
-middle-aged pickpocket emphasized his grey and white checked suit with
-sturdy limbs and examined passersby, with the face of a shaved fox; an
-undertaker, tall and old, paced along with that air of worried dignity
-which his calling affects; a fairly young housewife pounded the sedate
-roundness of her body over the pavement and held the hand of a small,
-oppressed boy; a stock-raiser from the west slid his bulky ruddiness
-along the street, while beneath his broad-brimmed hat his face held
-an expression of awe-stricken delight; a college-girl, slender and
-carefully hidden by silk, strove with every mincing twist of her body
-to remind you that she was pretty; a youth, trimly effeminate and
-attended by an inexpensive perfume, trotted along, eyeing the scene
-with an affected air of disapproval.
-
-The streets were cluttered with a ludicrous, artificial union of
-people--people who were close together and yet essentially unaware
-of each other’s presence, and the invisible, purposeless walls of
-civilization crossed each other everywhere. If he swerved two inches
-to the right the chained trance of this lonely farm-hand might strike
-the shoulder of this dully wounded chambermaid from the Rialto Hotel,
-and with this happening their lives might become an inch less burdened
-and struggling. Their sidelong glances cross for a moment, like tensely
-held spears, but they pass each other from cautious habit, striding
-to more prearranged and empty contacts. Civilization has raised
-wall-making to a fine art, striving to hide its dreamlessness beneath
-an aspect of complex reticence, and keeping its human atoms feeble and
-solitary, since pressed together they might break it into ruins. During
-the rush-hours of a city you can see those streams of people who are
-busily making and repairing the walls, but during the lulls in the
-fever upon city streets you may observe the stragglers, wanderers, and
-grown-up children who are not quite connected with this task and who
-humbly or viciously hurdle the barriers that separate them.
-
-These thoughts and emotions formed themselves in Carl’s mood as he
-strolled through the clattering, mercenary sounds of a midwestern
-city. The joy of not being compelled to cope with undesired physical
-movements brought its lightness to his legs, and he hurriedly fished
-for secrets from the thousands of faces gliding past him. This shrouded
-girl with a scowling face--was she meditating upon the possibility of
-suicide, or wondering why her sweetheart had failed to purchase a more
-expensive box of candy? Each face curved its flesh over a triviality or
-an important affair and swiftly taunted his imagination, challenging it
-to remove the masks that confronted it.
-
-“Life holds a measure of anticipation and mystery because people for
-the most part pass each other in silence. If they stopped to talk to
-each other they would become transparent and wearisome.”
-
-As Carl walked along hope began to sing its juvenile ballade within
-his contorted heart. He planned to send his poems to the magazines
-and he felt strengthened by the unexpected lull of this late autumn
-morning. He hurried to his favorite bench in the public square, one
-that he always occupied if it happened to be vacant when he passed.
-He had a shyly whimsical fancy--a last remnant of youth asserting
-itself within him--that his touch upon this bench stayed there while
-he was absent and gave a sense of invisible, prodding communion to
-other pilgrim-acrobats who occupied this seat at times--an abashed
-bit of sentimentality evading itself with an image. Filled with the
-alert meeting of hope and bitterness he wrote with a degree of fluid
-ease that had never visited him before, and for the first time his
-lyrics grazed a phrase or two that rumored recalcitrantly of a proud
-story known as beauty. In one attempted poem he asserted that an old,
-blind, Greek huckster on the side street of an American city had
-suddenly towered above the barrenly angular buildings, in a massive
-reincarnation of Homer, and he wrote in part:
-
-    A purplish pallor stole
-    Over your antique face--
-    The warning of a soul
-    Rising with tireless grace.
-    Rising above your cart
-    Of apples, figs, and plums,
-    And with its swelling art
-    Deriding the city’s drums.
-
-With a quivering immersion he bent over his paper, lost to the keen
-realities of a city day. Sidling vagrants and transients from small
-towns glanced at him with morose disfavor and sometimes stopped to
-stare at this shabby young man whose head was never raised from his
-writing. His abstraction was an insult to their sense of idle release.
-He wrote for hours and only paused when hunger of a different kind
-began irresistibly to whisper within him, for he had not eaten since
-morning. It was six o’clock when he hastened from the park. He joined
-the homeward bound masses, feeling satiated and apart, and dreading the
-evening contact with his sagging, verbose parents. They were sitting
-and standing in two of the few postures that life still absentmindedly
-allowed them--bending over newspaper and frying-pan.
-
-“Well, I’ve lost my job,” he said to his father.
-
-His father dropped the newspaper and his mother shuffled in from the
-kitchen.
-
-“Lost your job--what do you mean?” said his mother with slow
-incredulity, as though she had just escaped being crushed by a falling
-wall.
-
-“They told me this morning that it had only been a temporary one and
-they paid me off. I thanked the clerk for his news but he didn’t seem
-to take it in the right spirit.”
-
-“Ach, I knew it would happen, I knew it,” said Mrs. Felman. “Here’s
-what you get from your ma-anooal labor! What kind of work is that for
-an educated boy like you? With your brains, now, you could go out on
-the road and sell goods. You should have more get-up about you. Mrs.
-Feinsthal was telling me at my whist-club today that her son Harry
-is making piles of money with Liebman and Company. Sells notions and
-knick-knacks. You could easy do the same if you had any sense in your
-head.”
-
-“Carrie’s right, this slavery is no work for a smart man,” said Mr.
-Felman. “Any fool, you know, can work with his hands, but it takes real
-intelligence to make a man buy something. I want you to be able to
-laugh at people, and feel independent, and not be a poor schlemiel all
-your life.”
-
-“Well, you’ve been a travelling salesman for twenty years,” said Carl,
-with a weary smile, “and before that you tried a general merchandise
-store, but it doesn’t seem to have brought you much money or happiness.
-You recommend a treacherous wine. The thing that you’ve fought for has
-always scarred and eluded you. What’s the reason?”
-
-Mr. Felman lowered his head while the round fatness of his face
-revealed a huddled confusion of emotions in which shame and annoyance
-predominated. He sat, tormenting his greyish red moustache, as though
-it were a fraudulent badge, and gazing with still eyes at a newspaper
-which he was not reading.
-
-“Perhaps I’ve inherited nothing from you save your curious inability
-at making money,” said Carl, trying to feel a ghost of compassion for
-this petrified, minor soldier lost in the uproar of a battle but still
-worshipping his glittering general. “You’ve spent all of your life
-in chasing a frigid will-o’-the-wisp, made out of the lining of your
-heart, and you want me to stumble after the same mutilated futility.
-You’re not unintelligent, as far as business ability goes, and yet,
-you’ve always been doomed to a kind of respectable poverty. Something
-else within you must have constantly fought with another delusion to
-produce such a result. You can’t simply blame it on luck--that’s an
-overworked excuse. Perhaps you failed to win your god because you’ve
-never been able to teach efficiency and strength to the spirit of
-cruelty within you. You have not been remorselessly shrewd, my father,
-and now you are paying the penalty.”
-
-“Well, because I’ve been a fool that’s no sign that you should be
-one, too,” answered Mr. Felman in a voice of reluctant and secretly
-tortured self-reproach. “Yes, I’ve been too kind-hearted for my own
-good, dammit, but I want that you should be different. It’s been too
-easy for people to swindle me. Yes, I want you to show them something
-that your poor old father couldn’t. Yes. And as for your talk about
-chasing money, tell me, how can a man live decent without plenty of
-money? How can he?”
-
-“We would have our nice store this very minute if your father had
-listened to me,” said Mrs. Felman, mournfully. “He never would let me
-handle the reins. I know how to be firm with people, believe me, but
-your father would always give credit to every Tom-Dick-and-Harry that
-walked into the store. And whenever he did have money he always gambled
-it away. Gambling has been the ruination of his life! All of your
-wildness, Carl, has come from your father’s side and not from mine!”
-
-Mr. Felman looked at his son with an embarrassed admission of secret
-sins, while for a moment he became a faun lamenting his awkwardness,
-and his uneasy smile quivered as it tried to say: “Alas, I am not so
-much better than you are, my crazy, foolish son.” Carl grinned in
-return and for the first time in his life was on the verge of feeling
-a slight communion with his shamefaced father. As the mother went on
-with her endless story of the father’s crimes and incapacities the
-rubbing of her words produced a glimmer of ill-temper.
-
-“Noo, don’t you ever stop?” he cried. “Always nagging about the past!
-I might be a rich man now if you hadn’t driven me crazy with your
-endless complaints and hollering. Never a moment of peace from the day
-I married you.”
-
-“I’ll have to give both of you something else to complain about,” said
-Carl. “I’m going to stop working for a while and write poetry, and send
-it away to magazines.”
-
-“Ach, I thought those writing notions were out of your head,” cried
-Mrs. Felman. “Who will buy your good-for-nothing stuff? I can’t
-understand a word of it myself! Writing again! Will my miseries never
-end?”
-
-Mr. Felman glared at his son and the old hostility fell opaquely
-between them.
-
-“Between you and your mother I’ll be in the grave soon!” he shouted.
-“I’m done with you!”
-
-He arose and stalked out of the apartment, muttering and producing a
-loud period of sound as he closed the door.
-
-Al Levy strolled into the dining-room, triumphantly tinkering with one
-of the points of his small black moustache; lightly whistling a tune
-from some latest musical comedy; and bearing upon his face the look of
-bored patience which he assumed when in the presence of an inferior
-being. After he and Carl had exchanged constrained “helloes” he sat
-at the table and nervously interested himself in his cigar, as though
-silently signaling for future words.
-
-“See here, Carl, I don’t want to butt in, and of course, it’s none of
-my business, but I couldn’t help hearing some of the argument that
-you’ve just had with your parents and I want to give you a little
-advice, purely for your own good. You’re on the wrong track, old boy.
-You’re living in a world that wasn’t made to order for you and you
-can’t change it. If you don’t bow to the world the old steam-roller
-will get you, and what satisfaction is that going to bring you? This
-poetry of yours is all very well as a side-line, something to fill in
-the time when you’re not working, and of course it’s very pretty stuff.
-I like to read poetry myself sometimes. But really you shouldn’t take
-it more seriously than that. I’m telling you all this because you’ve
-really got a fairly good head on you and I hate to see you go wrong.”
-
-The sleekly loquacious man in front of him, offering his shop-worn
-little adulterations of worldly wisdom, aroused Carl to a lightly
-vicious mood.
-
-“You’ve wandered away from your natural field, Levy,” he said. “Talk
-about the cheap jewelry that you sell, or the physical merits of a
-woman, or the next candidate for mayor, or the latest prize-fight, but
-don’t speak about something that’s simply an irritating mystery to you.
-You know as much about poetry as I do about credits and discounts,
-but you’re a swaggering, muddy fool who imagines that the wisdom of
-the world has kissed his head. I’m not interested in you or your
-words--you’re simply five crude senses dressed in a blue serge suit and
-trying to scoop in as much drooling pleasure as they can before they
-decay. Go out to your poolroom or down-town theater and leave me in
-peace!”
-
-Levy gasped blankly for a moment and then frowned with an enormous
-hatred.
-
-“Why, you stupid fool, this is the thanks I get for giving you a little
-sensible advice!” he cried. “You think that you’re better than everyone
-else with all the rot you write about roses and love, but let me tell
-you something, a common bricklayer is more important than you are, any
-day in the year! A man like that is helping the progress of the world
-while you’re nothing but a puffed-up little idler! And even you have
-got to do manual labor because you’re not fit for anything else. You’re
-just a bag of easy words. If it wasn’t for your parents I’d punch you
-in the face and teach you a lesson!”
-
-Mrs. Felman, who had been knitting on the rear porch, rushed into the
-room.
-
-“Boys, boys, stop it!” she cried, in anguish. “Are you out of your
-minds--fighting in the house! Don’t pay any attention to what Carl
-says, Al. You know he’s crazy and not responsible.”
-
-“Well, after all, you’re right, I shouldn’t pay any attention to him,”
-said Levy with a sulky loftiness. “I only spoke to him for your sake,
-you know, but I’ll leave him alone after this.”
-
-Carl grimaced with the aid of his eyebrows and suppressed the easy
-words with which he could have clubbed the man in front of him. After
-Levy departed Carl fled to the street to escape his mother’s enraged
-words concerning the possible loss of a valuable roomer.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER VIII.
-
-
-During the next two weeks Carl sat in his drably dark room, slowly
-copying his poems with a stiff, perfect handwriting and mailing them to
-magazines and newspapers, but rejection-slips, fresh from the printer,
-began to reach him with each return mail. Many of his uncertain,
-mystical poems were equal to the quality of verse maintained by certain
-American publications, but editors scarcely ever trouble themselves
-to read verse that is copied in pen and ink and bears the spirals of
-deceptively boyish handwriting. Under the blow of each returned poem
-Carl receded inch by inch to his old cell of faltering insignificance.
-He went back to the tame routines of physical labor, finding work as
-a plumber’s assistant, and still consoled himself by creeping, like a
-soiled and weeping child, to Lucy’s blind and half-motherly worship.
-
-One evening, after he had stepped into the brightly dismal sitting-room
-of Lucy’s home, he noticed an uneasy politeness in the greeting of her
-parents--the usual well-smeared cordiality was absent. At first he
-felt that he might have made a mistake, but one glance at the nervous
-distress upon Lucy’s transparent little face indicated that some
-change had taken place in her family’s regard for him. Lucy was never
-successful in her efforts at evasion, and each one of the pitifully
-comical masks that she wore merely snugly revealed the outline of
-the emotion which they were attempting to conceal. With a strained
-gaiety she suggested a walk and after they had reached the street he
-questioned her.
-
-“Well, what’s the trouble, Luce? The graceful, January note in your
-parent’s voices was not quite expected. Tell me what it’s all about.”
-
-“Oh, it’s nothing, nothing, Carl dear.”
-
-“I’m quite sure that it’s nothing in reality, since your parents are
-almost incapable of thought, but at any rate, you might explain the
-empty gesture to me.”
-
-“Carl, you’re talking so funny again. I adore you when you say things
-that I can’t understand. But, oh Carl, I’ve forgotten, I mustn’t say
-that to you any more. I mustn’t. You don’t know what’s happened.”
-
-“No, I don’t. What is it?”
-
-“Why, my father says that he’s convinced by now that your intentions
-to me aren’t serious an’ he says that he doesn’t want me to go with
-you any more. He says that you’re only triflin’ with my affections
-else you’d have asked me to marry you long ago, an’ my mother says I
-shouldn’t go with you ’cause you don’t seem to have any ambition to
-rise in the world an’ ’cause you haven’t enough money to support a
-wife.... Gee, if you knew the jawin’ they’ve been givin’ me for the
-last two nights!”
-
-“Yes, but why has all this come so suddenly?” asked Carl.
-
-“I don’t want to tell you, Carl.”
-
-“You might as well, Luce. I can see part of it on your face now,
-because you always talk best when you’re silent. Tell me.”
-
-“Well, you know my second cousin Fred has always been runnin’ after me,
-only I’ve always been cool to him because I don’t love him, of course,
-but a couple of nights ago he came to my father an’ said that he wanted
-to marry me an’ that I wouldn’t have him. An’ ever since then they’ve
-all been on top of me! He’s got a store on the north side, a gents’
-furnishing store, an’ he makes piles of money, an’ all my family are
-just crazy for me to marry him. They say I’m just wastin’ my time with
-you an’ they’ve forbidden me to see you after tonight.”
-
-Carl felt the incongruous embrace of amusement and compassion as he
-listened to her simple, broken, troubled words. This thinly yearning,
-stifled girl who had folded him in the arms of her puzzled adoration,
-was life really on the verge of wounding the diminutive misty mendicant
-that was her heart? He felt helpless, and a little guilty because he
-was not as troubled as he should have been.
-
-“Do you want to give me up?” he asked.
-
-“Carl, you know I don’t! You know it. But, Carl, you wouldn’t ever
-marry me, would you?”
-
-“No, I’m not the kind of a person that you ought to marry, Luce.”
-
-She was silent for a time and he watched her with a pitying question.
-Had he been unfair to this poignantly cringing child? Yes, but
-unfairness was inevitable when people from those different planets
-contained within an earth yield to a surface emotional attraction.
-
-“Carl, I’ve always known that we’d hafta part sometime,” she said,
-“only I tried to make believe that I didn’t know it. But I did. We’re
-too different from each other, Carl, an’ you know so much more than
-I do an’ you’re so much better than I am. I wanted to hold on to you
-’cause I wanted to make you happy, but all the time I knew that we
-wasn’t meant for each other. O I knew it so well!”
-
-“I’m not in any way better than you are,” said Carl. “It’s just that we
-each want different things from the world. You want to settle down in a
-home, and polish your kettles, and sing to your children, and blithely
-wait for your tired husband every night, while I want to write foolish
-words on slips of paper and escape from the world around me.”
-
-“But, Carl, it’ll be so hard for me to leave you,” she said, in the
-mournful, dazed voice of one who turns away from a stone wall of whose
-existence he is not quite certain.
-
-A tumult of frail inquiries found the corners of her face and lips. Her
-breasts heaving beneath the blue muslin waist suggested the movements
-of loosely despairing hands. She sat with Carl on the grass of a park
-and wept in a barely audible manner as though she were intent upon
-giving firmer outlines to a blurred and elusive grief. Carl felt a
-softly potent disgust with himself and life. Human beings--what did
-they ever bring each other except pain cunningly disguised or reaching
-for a phantom ecstasy? Now he would be alone again; the slender thread
-binding him to animated life would snap; while this child, who held a
-cloud where a brain should have resided, would hide her glimpse of a
-grotesquely forbidden heaven and plod back to the soothing subterfuges
-of her world. Flitting lies seducing a black void into an attitude
-of false friendship. A stumbling urge, mistaking its own drops of
-perspiring ardor for permanent, actual jewels.
-
-As they stood upon the porch of her home she looked at the darkened
-windows and then clutched the lapels of his coat.
-
-“They’re all in bed now,” she whispered. “Carl, I’ve got to have you
-once more before you go. I’ve got to. Maybe I’m a bad girl, maybe, I
-don’t know, but I want to hold you again.”
-
-“This will be the least thing that I can give you,” said Carl inaudibly
-as they sat upon the hammock. With great care he tried to form within
-himself the intensity of a despairing father, drawing the swift incense
-of motion into a farewell to his child, in the hope that she might be
-idiotic enough to preserve it afterwards as a tangible comfort.
-
-He closed his eyes as he kissed her, a little afraid to look into her
-face.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER IX.
-
-
-One Sunday morning, Carl sat at home, lightly wandering through
-a newspaper. On the previous night he had met Petersen and had
-yielded to an invitation to accompany “two swell brunettes who don’t
-object to a gay time,” and the recollection of his violent, drunken
-contortions came to him like a weirdly teasing dream of no particular
-significance but leaving the temptation of nausea behind it. He had
-released a desecrating ghost of himself from the sneering recesses of
-his self-despair. Yes, you could burn away the sensual rubbish, with
-derisive gestures, but your emptiness and weariness always returned
-for their slow revenge. He sought to put his thoughts to sleep with
-the hasty versions of loves, catastrophes, and law-suits that winked
-maliciously at him from the newspaper.
-
-In the middle of one page he came upon a rectangle of gossip concerning
-a poetry magazine of whose existence he had never known, and darting
-from his insensitive trance he lingered greedily over the news. Through
-the efforts of an elderly poetess several society people had agreed
-to endow a small magazine that would be entirely devoted to verse, and
-the newspaper item was heralding the fact that one of these people
-had contributed a sonnet to a recent issue of the magazine. “Mr.
-Robert Endicott, the well-known clubman and member of fashionable
-sets, appears with a delicate contribution in this month’s issue of
-The Poetry Review, our aristocratic little magazine of the muse. This
-will be a surprise to those who know Mr. Endicott only in his role of
-business-man and society leader.” Carl strove to be properly impressed
-by the surprise, decorating it with the Order of the Nasty Chuckle.
-
-He felt that it might be consoling to receive a rejection slip from
-an upper-world magazine of this kind--a dab of caviar on the empty
-plate--and so he sent them three poems. The paper oblong came, but
-its blank side held the following note: “Dear Mr. Felman: Your
-work interests me. Won’t you drop into the office some time? Clara
-Messenger.”
-
-What men call triumph is a fanciful exaltation that may fall alike
-upon atoms and temples--a grandiose child of hope, whose mother is
-egoism and whose father is pain. Men, whose life is but a sensitive
-or oblivious second--a fleeting stampede within mist--seek the absurd
-consolation of believing that their work will become immortal, and this
-phantom lie has induced many a soldier to writhe upon some trivial
-battlefield and many a minor poet to fight with threats of the gutter.
-Carl Felman, obscure, gasping struggler, communing with the marks left
-by endless whips, felt foolishly thrilled at this first glimpse of
-personal attention from a magazine and became like a swain to whom a
-glove has been thrown from an enticingly high balcony. He stood peering
-up with a timid excitement.
-
-On the following afternoon he managed to leave the plumbing shop, with
-a plea of illness, and raced to the office of the magazine. A feathery
-swirl of quickly purchased emotions--fragments of a youth that had
-been shattered--revolved within his heart. As he closed the door of
-the large office he saw two women seated at different desks and poised
-over the rustle of papers. One was elderly and sedate, and her sober
-clothes were reprimanding a substantial body. Beneath a survival of
-greyish-brown hair, plainly gathered, the narrow oval of her face
-looked at life with a politely questioning air. It was the mellowly
-distorted expression of one who has arrived at final convictions
-regarding the major parts of life, and is patiently and inflexibly
-regarding the lesser perceptions surrounding her. Her slightly wrinkled
-face was dominated by a long, thin nose and thin, tightly expectant
-lips, and it seemed that her tired emotions had gone to sleep and were
-staring out from a dream of suave wakefulness. The other woman was
-hovering near the last climax of her youth, and her slender body rose
-unobtrusively to the pale repressions of her face. Small and round, her
-face carried a well-trimmed self-satisfaction--the reward of one whose
-dreams have lived inwardly, with only an occasional sip of forbidden
-cordials. Her loosely parted lips guarded a receding chin and her
-barely curved nose ascended to large brown eyes and a high forehead.
-
-Carl walked to her desk and stood for a moment like a child in a
-cumbersome robe who is waiting for some inevitable rebuke. The harshly
-weary assurance which he was able to display to other people vanished
-in this imagined shrine of an unattained art. The young woman looked up
-with courteous blankness.
-
-“My name is Carl Felman. You wrote me a note last week,” said Carl,
-delicately groping for the inconsequential words.
-
-“Oh, yes, I remember”--her face attained a careful smile, tempered by a
-modest curiosity. “I’m so glad that you came down.”
-
-She turned to the other woman.
-
-“Mary, this is Mr. Felman, the gentleman that I spoke to you about. He
-sent us a rather interesting group of poems, you know.”
-
-Carl winced at the word “rather”--it was associated to him with “more
-or less,” “somewhat,” “somehow,” and “to some extent,” those words
-and phrases with which cultured people manage to say nothing and yet
-preserve the faint appearance of saying something. His breathless
-attention disappeared and was replaced by the old morose aloofness.
-If this woman had asserted that his poems were trivial or stifled, he
-would have respected her, but now he spat contemptuously at the smooth
-veil of her words.
-
-Mary Aldridge, editor of The Poetry Review, moved her lips into an
-attitude that came within a hair’s breadth of being a smile--an
-expression of slightly amused and restrained condescension. She lifted
-a pencil as though it were an age-old scepter held by practiced
-fingers.
-
-“How do you do, Mr. Felman,” she said.
-
-Some people are able to say “how do you do” in a way that makes it
-sound like “why are you here?” and Carl inwardly complimented her on
-this minor ability and said his repetition in a voice that made it
-mean “slip down, fathead.” After this exchange of vocal inflections,
-part of the general vacuity with which human beings greet each other
-for the first or last time, he seated himself and clutched a roll of
-manuscripts in the manner of a father who is frantically shielding his
-child from some invisible danger.
-
-“I sent you some poems which were returned, but I have some others
-here,” he said. “Perhaps you will do me the favor of reading them. I
-am, of course, anxious to know what may be wrong with my work, and also
-what faint virtues it may hold. Sometimes I feel sure that I am not a
-poet and I allow myself the luxury of becoming angry at the persistent
-longing that makes me run after futilities. Will you read some of these
-poems and tell me whether I am a fool, or a faltering pilgrim, or
-anything definite?”
-
-The abashed and yet softly incisive candor would have unloosened or
-entertained the emotions of anyone except Mary Aldridge. She regarded
-him with a coldly amused impatience.
-
-“We-ell, I’m very busy just now,” she said, “but I’ll glance through
-some of your things. As I recall, your work had a rather promising line
-here and there.”
-
-He handed her his roll and she scanned the poems, thrusting each one
-aside with a quick frown. She lingered a bit over the last one, in
-which he had extracted a sleeping Homer from the soiled and cowering
-figure of a blind Greek peddler.
-
-“M-m, this one isn’t so bad,” she said, “though I think that the last
-lines are a little forced.”
-
-“If I decide to alter them, will you take the poem?” asked Carl,
-bluntly.
-
-“Oh, no, no, Mr. Felman; your work is by no means good enough for
-publication,” she answered. “I merely meant that this poem in
-particular had an element of interest.”
-
-Accustomed to blows of all kinds, Carl felt relieved that her frigid
-shroud had been finally lifted, and with a smile he reached for his
-cap. Conversation is merely a tenuous or sturdy protection given to
-an instinctive like or dislike, and with their first words people
-unconsciously reveal the attitude toward each other which they will
-afterward try to excuse and defend with great deliberation. Carl hated
-the woman in front of him, not because she had slighted his work, but
-because she held to him an attenuated and brightly burnished hypocrisy
-that was like a shriveled mask incessantly polished by her words. He
-could have imagined her stamping upon a hyacinth as though she were
-conferring a careful favor upon the petals and calyx. Mary Aldridge, on
-her part, disliked the straight lines of intent which she could sense
-beneath his terse questions and missed the bland insincerities of those
-smoothly adjusted postures known as good manners. Life to her was a
-series of stiffly draped and modulated curves, violated only by rare
-moments of guarded exasperation and anger.
-
-“Would you advise me to stop writing?” asked Carl.
-
-“No, indeed,” she answered, with her first small smile. “Your work is
-rather promising and you seem to be quite young. Some of it reminds me
-of Arthur Symons. Of course, I don’t think that you will ever become
-a great poet, but we need lesser voices as well as greater ones, you
-know.”
-
-“Would you mind if I asked you to stop using that word ra-ather and try
-a little spontaneous directness?” asked Carl, blithely.
-
-She rose suddenly and addressed the other woman, ignoring his words as
-though they had been a trivial insult.
-
-“I’ve just remembered that I must meet Mr. Seeman at three,” she
-said. “I’m afraid that I shall have to leave you with this impulsive
-gentleman.”
-
-Carl stood up, but the other woman revealed with an unrestrained smile
-that she was actually aware of his presence.
-
-“Won’t you stay awhile?” she asked. “We can talk a bit over your work,
-if you care.”
-
-Carl looked at her with suspicion and interest--a trace of gracious
-attention in this place. He resolved to explore the seeming phenomenon
-and settled back in his chair, while Mary Aldridge, with a barely
-audible farewell, walked out of the office.
-
-“Don’t you think you were a little crudely sarcastic in your last
-remark to Miss Aldridge?” asked Clara Messenger.
-
-“I like an axe sometimes,” said Carl, “although I don’t worship it
-monotonously. For certain purposes it works far better than the swifter
-exuberance of a stiletto. Unless a person is unassumingly frank to me I
-don’t feel that he has earned a delicate retort.”
-
-“Why, it’s impossible to live in the world with a code like that. One
-would have to become a hermit.”
-
-“No, even hermits are never absolutely isolated. Living on another
-planet would be the only remedy, I guess.”
-
-“What a curious, lunging person you are! But you shouldn’t have
-minded Miss Aldridge so much. She’s always afraid that if she openly
-encourages a young poet he’ll imagine that he’s a genius.”
-
-“That’s a harmless trick of imagination and it doesn’t need any
-encouragement or censure. It’s a shade better, perhaps, than imagining
-that you are a fool.”
-
-“What an old-young person you are. When you talk I feel that I’m
-listening to an insolent essay. I’m not so sure that a poet doesn’t
-need praise. It’s part of his task to change the polite praise around
-him to an understanding appreciation, and that can be very necessary
-and exciting.”
-
-“To a poet the appreciation of other people must be like a glass of
-lukewarm wine taken after work,” said Carl.
-
-“Well, I know that it means a great deal to me,” said Clara Messenger.
-“It reassures me that I’m speaking to the hearts and minds of the
-people around me and I’d feel very unimportant if at least a few people
-didn’t like my work. One can’t live in a vacuum, after all.”
-
-“No? I’ve done it for five years or so. I think that all of us secretly
-live in vacuums, but we use our imaginations to conceal that fact.
-Words were really invented to hide this essential emptiness.”
-
-“You’re a massive pessimist! The strangest man of twenty-three that
-I’ve ever seen! If things are so utterly hollow to you, why do you
-live?”
-
-“In order to persuade myself that I have a reason for living--a defiant
-entertainment in the presence of an empty theater.... But it’s always
-futile to defend your reason for living. Tell me, instead, what do you
-think of your associate, Miss Aldridge?”
-
-“I really think that she treated you a little heartlessly, but at the
-same time I don’t think that she meant to,” said Clara. “Mary is a
-woman who grew into the habit of hiding herself from people because
-so many of those who looked at her youth, at one time, failed to
-understand it.”
-
-“I can understand that process, though I don’t believe that it
-applies in her case. It’s a slow and sullen withdrawing from the
-jibing strangers around you--a wounded desire to meet their walls of
-misunderstanding with even harder walls of your own. As you grow older,
-I suppose, the sullenness may change to a well-mannered and hopeless
-aloofness. Age softens the attitude and, still self-immersed, it seeks
-the distraction of words.”
-
-“What has happened to make you say this?” asked Clara, with a mistily
-maternal impulse.
-
-“Just now I’m working in a plumber’s shop, helping the sewers with
-their sluggish germs of future turbulence,” said Carl, “and that, of
-course, can play its part in the making of a pessimist.... But tell me
-what you think of my work?”
-
-“Plumbing or poetry?”
-
-“Both of them are interwoven.”
-
-“Your poems are stiff and dimly tinted, like a row of plaster-of-paris
-dolls standing on a dusty and venerated shelf. Don’t you see? You
-talk about twenty times better than you write, and I can’t understand
-this peculiar incongruity. Perhaps you’ve been taught that poetry is
-something that must be ethereal and noble at all costs, and perhaps
-you’ve been inarticulate because the rest of you has been at war with
-this one illusion. I don’t feel that you’ve looked upon poetry as a
-place where you could express your actual thoughts and feelings.”
-
-When a man has been intangibly blind for a long time, he usually
-stumbles at last, accidentally, upon an incident or challenge that
-makes him totter on the edge of vision, and in that moment it is
-revealed whether this blindness has been innate or not. If he wavers,
-then his lack of sight has been an artificial ailment, and if his
-first reaction after the stumble is one of stubborn irritation his
-tightly-shut eyes are not apt to open. Carl felt, without quite being
-able to shape the picture, that he was walking out of a sublime
-bric-a-brac shop, and yet the contact of him, left behind in the
-shop, continued to speak with his words. As he discussed poetry with
-Clara he began slowly to feel that he had been a minute and prisoned
-fool, although his words writhed in an effort to escape an absolute
-admission. She gave him practical scoldings, also, concerning the
-exact way in which manuscripts should be submitted to editors, and he
-listened with the amusement that a man feels when he suddenly sees
-that he has been walking along a street with his shoes unlaced. She
-gave him, again and again, her hazily maternal smile in which sensual
-desires selfishly clothed themselves in an ancient and soothing dress
-known as kindness.
-
-“I do hope that I’ve helped you,” she said. “I’d like to feel that I’ve
-aided someone to discover his real self.”
-
-When he returned to his room he applied a match to everything that he
-had ever written and watched the flaming pile of papers with an emotion
-in which dread, tenderness, and elation were oddly contending against
-each other. These bits of paper, with their symbols of shimmering
-confusion, had been decorated by the sweat of his body, the brittle
-despair of his heart, and the anger of his soul, and their death
-brought him a helpless and jumbled sadness; but gradually another
-reaction began to possess him. The naked quivers of a fighter, crouched
-in the plan of his first blow, centered around his heart, and all of
-the thoughts within his mind gave one shout in unison--a meaningless
-hurrah just before the first leap of a creative battle. During the next
-two months he wrote with an insane speed, and all of his thoughts and
-emotions rushed out in an irresistible, nondescript mob scene--a French
-Revolution swinging its torches and howls against every repression
-and constraint within him. Good, bad, and mediocre, they rain in the
-circles of a celebrated revenge, and his main purpose was expressed in
-these first four lines of one of his poems:
-
-    You have escaped the comedy
-      Of swift, pretentious praise and blame,
-    And smashed a tavern where they sell
-      The harlot’s wine that men call fame.
-
-
-
-
-PART II
-
-THE KNIFE
-
-
-
-
-The Knife
-
-CHAPTER X.
-
-
-With Clara Messenger as his guide, Carl began to discover that another
-world nestled between the dull apartment houses, raucous markets, and
-underworld saloons which had confined his body--a world of smoother
-parlors and studios, in which stood “poets,” painters, sculptors,
-novelists, critics, Little Theater actors, art patrons, students of the
-arts, all leading their little squads of camp followers or plodding
-methodically in the ranks. This world was swaggering and overheated,
-and within it hosts of minor people were raising their faltering or
-blissfully insincere prayers to a god with a thousand faces, whom they
-called Artistic Expression--a god of astigmatic egoism dressed in
-cautious shades of emotion and thought, and obsessed with a fear of
-irony and originality.
-
-Carl felt like an emancipated hermit suddenly thrown as a sacrifice
-to an uproar of contending philosophies and artistic creeds. His
-mind, accustomed to solitary decisions, became bewildered amidst the
-bloodless, tin-sword battle around him and he wondered how he could
-possibly make his own voice heard in the egoistic din. Each man assured
-him that the other man was a fool or a charlatan, and he listened to
-their conflicting assumptions of wisdom with a naive dismay.
-
-“What has lured these people into their attitudes of isolated and weary
-superiority?” he asked himself, “and if the attitudes are genuine, why
-do these people make a garrulous religion of attacking each other? If
-they actually believed that their convictions were mountain ranges,
-with some snow of immortality soft beneath their feet, they would dwell
-with a more pensive calmness upon these substantial protests, instead
-of assiduously pelting each other with flecks of mud in the valleys.”
-
-With the melancholy idealism of his youth Carl had made an emotional
-sketch in which artists and writers were a band of profoundly
-misunderstood martyrs, clinging to each other as they accepted the
-indifference and ridicule of a practical world, and he was amazed to
-find that almost all of them were far too easy to understand, and
-thronged with shudders of words at the idea of clinging to one another.
-Like an array of famished and animated housewives, they traded gaiety
-and friendly argument while in each other’s presence, while in secret
-they carved each other with gossiping exaggerations, three-penny
-sneers, and every hair’s-breadth edge of derision. Even among their
-different “schools” and cliques he found little fusion--the members
-of each group were plotting to unseat their leader because they had
-commenced to fear that he was merely using them as a step-ladder.
-
-This trivial drama, with malice performing menial duties in the service
-of the old, egoistic dream of immortal expression and emotional
-tallness, was a new reality to Carl and he surveyed it with an alert
-contempt.
-
-“Why all of this clownish, papier-mache melodrama, with words playing
-the part of overworked murderers?” he asked himself. “Is it possible
-that faint voices whisper within these people that they are not as
-important and all-seeing as they would like to be? Most ludicrous
-tragedy! The noise, alas, must ever continue, since their doubts and
-fears require a constant pounding. Poor, astounding people! ... The
-critic, stroking his suave patter above a tea-table: ‘Oh, yes, Mr. X.
-is a very sound man, very sound.’ ‘Mr. C. is indeed a great poet, for
-there’s a certain simplicity and sincerity in everything he does.’
-‘Mr. E. is amazingly clever and erudite--a most important man.’ ‘Mr.
-B.? I’m afraid that he’s only a minor Baudelaire, you know, the old
-morbid straining after originality’--this critic is merely allowing
-his thoughts and emotions to perform their private functions upon the
-publicity of a fanciful pedestal, to retch, relieve themselves of
-fluids and rubbishes, and scratch their smarts. It is, in truth, a
-weird, prolonged indecency.”
-
-He meditated upon his own relation to this explanation of the
-belligerent waste of energy around him.
-
-“I am a better egoist than the people around me,” he said. “I will
-not be forced to display my private organs as often as they. Only an
-absolute egoist can afford to be calm and more obscurely naked. If I
-indulge, at rare intervals, a secret grin will gain its reward.”
-
-His thoughts had mounted these conclusions as he sat one night in
-Clara’s studio, with his legs tucked in above a scarlet cushion. She
-looked at him with a petulant question on her face.
-
-“Carl, why are you forever arousing the enmity of people?” she asked.
-
-“Because I detest most of them; because I like straight lines and
-angles in conduct while they prefer curves and circles; and for a
-variety of reasons.”
-
-“But, Carl, you don’t need to be so deliberate about antagonizing
-people.”
-
-“I’m not. I’m simply myself most of the time--a difficult task, but it
-can be achieved.”
-
-“Well, everybody is sneering at your latest stunt. Why, oh why, did
-you have to parade down Scott street smoking that long Chinese pipe of
-yours, with a red ribbon tied to the stem? Carl, sometimes I almost
-believe that you love to pose!”
-
-“I ain’t guilty, I swear it. When that group of my poems came out in
-the big eastern magazine I simply felt that the event demanded an
-unashamed celebration. It was like the christening of a healthy child
-and I wanted something stronger than whiskey or wine. An odd longing
-that comes to me sometimes. I decided to commit the inexplicable
-crime of becoming immersed in a new toy of motion. I fitted a rubber
-mouthpiece over the tip of the pipe and used it half of the time as a
-cane. I’ve been told that a crowd followed me but I didn’t turn my head
-to investigate.”
-
-“Well, everyone has heard about it and they’re all calling you a cheap
-little poseur. And, really, I don’t know that they’re wrong. I never
-felt so angry in my life. You love to attract the attention of other
-people and you’ll make every kind of excuse rather than admit this
-fact!”
-
-He showed an outburst of surface anger.
-
-“You can act more impulsively in a camp of lumber-jacks than before a
-crowd of so-called artists and writers,” he said. “The lumber-jacks
-might regard you with a simple amazement, or an unrestrained laughter,
-but at least they’d grant you the sincerity of insanity! Since I must
-choose between stupid people I prefer the more roughly natural ones.”
-
-“I’m tired of hearing you call everybody a hypocrite,” said Clara.
-“It’s just a nice way that you have of defending your own actions!”
-
-He arose and reached for his cap.
-
-“I’ll leave you to this weariness,” he said angrily. “It may be
-possible that, as I walk down the street, no one will believe that I’m
-striding along in a highly deliberate manner. The thought is pleasant.”
-
-“Carl, don’t be foolish,” she said, half-repentantly, but without
-answering he walked out of the studio.
-
-This had not been his first quarrel with Clara, and the frequency
-of their collisions, always followed by a skirmish of nervous
-laughter, made him believe that they were both stupidly postponing
-a sure separation. Clara was, in her entire essence, a deft Puritan
-industriously beating the back of a frightened Pagan. At certain
-intervals the Pagan arose and knocked the Puritan unconscious but the
-latter always gradually revived and resumed its dulcet mastership,
-and Clara liked or disliked Carl whenever her inner situation shifted
-in these ways. Carl had grown weary of being alternately punched and
-caressed by her moods. He had long since realized that his relations
-with her were merely the playthings of a fluctuating emotional response
-and that neither he nor she had the slightest respect for each other’s
-habits and minds, and on this evening, as he walked down the street
-after leaving her studio he knew that the uncertain pretence of drama
-had ended.
-
-He had slowly discovered that almost all of the people around him, with
-their different versions of culture and art--those two realities hidden
-by mincing courtezans of egoism--were distrustful of bluntness and
-gay impulse in conduct and had made a word known as “unconventional,”
-in order to defend the ordinary fright that governed their actions. A
-venerable contradiction among these minor people but one that had held
-new outlines for him. He had also learned that most of these people
-were so accustomed to masquerades that they could not believe in the
-reality of a carelessly naked attitude and usually mistook it for a
-dazzling and ingenious pose.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XI.
-
-
-Filled with these gloomy realities he walked down a roughly bright
-street where the underworld tiptoed furtively between the ranks of
-semi-respectable working-people--a street of gaping, sleekly sinister
-saloons, cabarets, small, thickly tawdry shops, and cheap, coffin-like
-hotels and apartment houses. The hour was early--nine p.m.--and he
-walked slowly, engaged in his favorite pastime of watching the shrouded
-haste of crowds. As he passed a moving-picture theater, dotted with
-greasy electric lights and plastered with inanely gaudy posters, he
-felt a light hand on his shoulder. He turned and saw Lucy standing
-before him. The sight gave him a friendly shock, for on this evening he
-was tired of clever hypocrisies and longed for anything that would be
-crude and unassuming.
-
-“Lucy, have you fallen down from some sky?” he asked.
-
-“No, I just came out of the theater here an’ saw you walkin’ by. Gee,
-but I’m glad I did! It’s been a year now since we’ve seen each other,
-hasn’t it? An’ I never, never thought I’d meet you again.”
-
-“Well, what has happened to you, Luce?” he asked as they walked down
-the street together.
-
-“I’m married to Fred now. I didn’t see anything else to do after you
-left, and all of my folks just pushed me into it. ’Nen besides I was
-tired of workin’ in that darn store. Tired.”
-
-“Are you less tired now? Happy?”
-
-“Mm, Fred’s an awful nice man in his way an’ I s’pose I oughta be
-happy. He really loves me, Fred does, an’ he don’t seem to lose his
-temper the way some men do. ’Course, he’s a little stingy with money
-but then I s’pose he’s tryin’ to look out for the future.”
-
-“Do you love him now, Luce?”
-
-Her head drooped a little and she was silent for a time.
-
-“I guess it’s terrible of me not to love him, after all he’s done for
-me, but I just don’t. I always keep rememberin’ all of your funny ways
-an’ all the time we was together an’ I feel ashamed of it too ’cause
-it’s kinda like not bein’ true to Fred, but I can’t help it. There’s
-been times when I’ve managed to forget about you but they don’t last
-long enough.”
-
-He tried to make himself feel like a helpless knave as he listened to
-this simple child of earth who longed for the palely inexplicable god
-before whom she had once grovelled in rhythmic speechlessness. He had
-taken all of her eager silences, pardoned by the damp understanding
-of flesh, and bestowed upon her in return nothing save the blurred
-vision of thoughts and emotions which it would have been useless for
-her to understand, and the tantalizing fantasy of his embraces. If
-he had stayed with her he would have mutilated, kicked, and evaded
-every longing and purpose of his life while she would have revelled in
-happiness. Walking down this street were thousands of people, trying
-to embalm a softly sensual hour with the fluids and devices of bravely
-stupid lies, and inventing words--“honor,” “respectability”--to conceal
-the grotesquely snickering effect of their lives. Life was, indeed, an
-insipid mountebank!
-
-“Luce, I ought to feel like a selfish dog, for if I did, then at least
-I could give you a belated shoulder to cry upon,” he said. “We’re
-different persons, that doesn’t need to be said, but still I’m sorry at
-times that we parted. I need your stupidity.”
-
-“Do you still care for me, Carl?”
-
-“There are times when I want you again. You brought me a delicate
-dumbness which I could change into any kind of speech, with my fingers
-and words. Your simplicity doesn’t swagger, or point admiringly to
-itself, and I like that. Just now I am surrounded by people who are
-not different from you except that they have memorized three or four
-thousand words more, and use them with a moderate degree of cunning.
-Your silences are much better.”
-
-“I’m not always silent ’cause I don’t understand what you say.
-Sometimes I do understand, but I keep quiet ’cause I don’t know how to
-tell you about it.”
-
-They turned down a side-street and he looked questioningly at her.
-
-“Aren’t you afraid that Fred may see us together?” he asked.
-
-“I forgot to tell you. He left this afternoon for Pittsburg, to see his
-mother, an’ he’ll be gone for two weeks. I’m all alone now.”
-
-That conversing silence, in which a suggestion is so strongly felt that
-it need not be heard, was released from both of them and remained until
-they reached the apartment building in which she lived, and stood in
-the dark hallway.
-
-“I don’t want to leave you now”--her whisper was frightened but
-stubbornly tender. “I don’t want to. For all I know I may never see
-you again and if I don’t I’ve got to have somethin’ that I can hold
-on to. Somethin’ that’s not as foolish as just talkin’ words.... I’m
-a dreadful girl, I s’pose. I must be very wicked. I must be.... But I
-don’t care. Please don’t go away.”
-
-They stood in the hallway like two dizzy, burdened children feeling
-the advancing shadow of an irresistible action and yet waiting for the
-exact moment when all deliberate words would vanish. Until their minds
-were quite free of words their limbs could not move. Suddenly they
-both mounted the stairway, hand in hand, as though a kindly demon had
-decided to make playthings of their legs.
-
-When Carl left the apartment building early on the following morning
-and hurried to the suburban cigar-store where he now worked half of
-the day as a clerk, his old self-disgust was absent and a cleanly wild
-lightness took his limbs, as if he had slept upon the plain sturdiness
-of a hillside and was pacing away with the borrowed vigor.
-
-“The only time that I dislike earth is when it is dressed in urgent
-mud, adulterated perfumes, strained lies, and repentant fears,” he
-told himself as he walked through the bustling shallowness of each city
-street.
-
-Before leaving Lucy he had promised to return on the following night,
-and when she had wept and begged him “not to think that she was a
-terribly bad girl,” he had laughed softly and dropped his lips upon her
-tears.
-
-“You have been yourself, Luce, and since the world is always conspiring
-against such an arbitrary occurrence, you can give yourself a
-bewildered congratulation,” he told her, gayly.
-
-Without understanding his words she had felt the presence of defiant
-sounds which had cheered her. During the next two weeks, as he remained
-with her each night, he reflected upon the possible melodrama that
-lurked just outside of his visits.
-
-“If her husband suddenly returns and finds me with her he’ll want to
-kill me,” he said to himself once, as though he welcomed the idea.
-“He’ll feel that only my death could heal his injured vanity--vermilion
-medicine!--but, of course, instead of admitting that to himself
-he’ll find an accommodating phrase to hide the actual motive, such
-as ‘avenging his honor,’ ‘killing a treacherous hound,’ ‘defending
-the family,’ etc. The newspapers are full of such charming episodes,
-well fortified by words, for without words to obliterate his motives
-man would perish in a day. Melodrama is the only real sincerity that
-life holds--the one surprising directness in a world of false and
-prearranged contortions. Perhaps I could ravish my fears and welcome
-it. I don’t know, and no one can until it actually arrives.”
-
-But the two weeks died without the blundering interruption of drama,
-and Lucy and Carl parted on the last morning with a chuckling
-stoicism--tears and the syllables of laughter are always similar--the
-madcap protest of a last kiss--lips and tongues intent upon a future
-compensation--and a final flitting of hands. They had slapped in the
-face a violent shadow known as life and now it would take a fancifully
-piercing revenge. They had attained a quality known as bravery--a
-quality that is only fear rising to a moment and effectively sneering
-at itself.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XII.
-
-
-Carl returned to the minor, suavely gesturing groups of hypocrites
-in the city in which he lived, and in going back to this “art and
-literary world” he had the feeling of one who had deserted a strong
-valley of desire to enter a stilted room filled with imitation orchids,
-valiantly empty words, and malice dressed in clumsy, velvet costumes.
-This reaction was still dominating him as he sat, one afternoon, in the
-office of a magazine called “Art and Life,” perched upon a window-sill
-and looking down at the black and dwarfed confusion of a street.
-
-This office was a gathering place for several young writers, each of
-whom fondled his pet rebellion against conservative standards, and
-they clustered around the anxiously seraphic face of Martha Apperson,
-the young editor, and seriously fought for the treason of her smiles.
-She was a tall, sturdily slender woman with a blithely symmetrical
-swerve to her body, and the natural pinkness of her face parted into
-the curves of a lightly distressed and virginal doll. Her blue-gray
-eyes were looking at life with a startled incredulity--the gaze of
-one who has been tempted to regard a sometimes merry, but more often
-vaguely sorrowful picture-puzzle. Life to her was a rapidly taunting
-mixture of glints, hints, undertones, surface blooms, fleeting tints,
-portentous shadows with little shape to them, broken images, and misty
-heights, and she was forever trying to lure them all into a cohesive
-whole by striding from one philosophy and creed to another, adding
-another stride every three or four months. At such times she would
-appear at her office and enthusiastically assure her audience that she
-had finally accomplished the almost obscene miracle of penetrating
-the depths of human existence. She had started her magazine as a
-strident protest against “the people who live conventionally, steeped
-in a vicious comfort that binds their imaginations and ruins their
-legs and arms,” and its pages made an awkwardly weird combination of
-sophomoric revolts, longings for “beauty and splendor”--those easily
-bought thrones for the importance of youth--and enraged yelps against
-traditions and conventions, with here and there a more satirically
-detached note from Carl and two other men. Carl knew that he wanted her
-body because it was the only mystery that she seemed to possess and
-because he wondered whether it might not be able to make her thoughts
-less obvious. Her mind was a stumbling jest to him and her jerkily
-volatile pretences of emotion failed to cleave him.
-
-He began to turn his eyes impatiently toward the office door. Martha
-had left him in charge, promising to return in an hour, but he knew
-that her hours were frequently afternoons as she cavorted around the
-city, throwing out miniature whirlwinds of appeals for money and
-attention. In a corner of the office stood a huge photograph of her
-latest god--a middle-aged, hawk-faced lecturer from England--that
-fertile land from whence all lecturers flow--a man who had recently
-startled the city by speaking on Oscar Wilde, dressed in a black robe
-and standing in a chamber dimly disgraced by candles, incense, and
-muslin poppies. The theatrically savage features of this man rested
-beneath a framed letter from a prominent writer--one of those abortions
-in which the great man tells a small magazine that he earnestly hopes
-that it will amount to something and believes that it can accomplish
-a great purpose if it pursues the ideals which have illuminated his
-work. Carl’s eyes sought this framed joke for the hundredth time,
-since his mood needed such artificial humor to make it less aware of
-itself, and at this moment Martha came with the rapid gait of one who
-is returning to vast and uncompleted tasks, although her day’s labors
-were at an end. This was not a pose but merely a bouncing overabundance
-of energy. With her was Helen Wilber, a young disciple who scarcely
-ever left her side. Helen had fled from a wealthy family in another
-city and traded her debutante’s excuse for the more fanciful robe of an
-ecstatic pilgrim starting to ascend from the base of veiled mountains
-of expression. She darted about on errands and interviews and felt the
-humble fervors of a novice--a tall, heavy girl with a long, soberly
-undeveloped face and abruptly turned features that were garlanded with
-freckles. She had made a fine art of her determination to persuade
-herself that she was masculine, giving it the intense paraphernalia of
-stolen words and gestures, but beneath her dubiously mannish attire and
-desperately swinging limbs the desires of an average woman were feebly
-questioning the validity of her days. She greeted Carl with her usual
-ringing assumption of boyishness.
-
-“Hello, old top! Been waiting long?”
-
-“Not as long as I expected to wait, considering Martha’s superb
-indifference to the impudence of time. Well, Martha, how have you been
-insulting actualities--with your usual crescendoes of insanity?”
-
-Martha reached for the device of quickly sliding the tip of her tongue
-over her upper lip, a movement that always gave its opiate to her
-embarrassment or dismay, and then smiled with a softly tragic aloofness.
-
-“Oh, people weary me so!” she said. “They’re so impossible most of the
-time and so sublimely unaware of that fact! I’ve just come from seeing
-an elderly woman who said that she might be interested in helping us.
-She was fat and expensively gowned and she wanted to know whether we
-wouldn’t print a story about the historical old families of this city
-and how they had founded a great, commercial and romantic fabric. I
-told her that we were concerned with the restless and flaming present,
-with the artists and thinkers of our own time, and not with respectable
-tradespeople of the past. Of course I put it as nicely as I could but
-she flew into a temper and said I was insulting the people who had
-built up a great and mighty city.... O people are so impossible!”
-
-Carl envied the excited flow of her words and wished that he could also
-feverishly felicitate his emptiness at that particular moment.
-
-“I felt like telling her that men who’ve made money and put up ugly
-buildings aren’t necessarily important enough to talk about,” said
-Helen, with a hollow seriousness, “but of course I didn’t for fear of
-hurting Mart’s chances.”
-
-“I get so tired of wasting words on people who lead monotonous lives
-and can’t see the variety and beauty within life,” said Martha.
-“When you talk to them they treat you as though you were a little,
-misbehaving girl who would soon be spanked and put to bed. ‘O you’ll
-soon get over all of this artistic nonsense,’ they say.”
-
-“Ah, they can’t see that a defiance like yours, Mart, is a fire that
-only grows stronger when someone tries to put it out,” said Helen with
-a spontaneously rhetorical worship.
-
-Carl grinned at the dramatic sincerity with which these two women
-lunged at colossal targets.
-
-“What’s all of this endless stuff about beauty?” he asked. “Beauty,
-beauty, I’m tired of the label. No specific description but just
-a nice, sonorous word. You might exalt your loves and punish your
-aversions with a little more clarity.”
-
-“O you can’t diagram it as though it were a problem in mathematics!”
-cried Martha. “It’s too big and mysterious for that. You simply know
-it when you see it. It quickens your breath and drops like music upon
-your soul. It’s the thing that makes you know that you have a soul--the
-radiant weariness that springs from everything that is strong, and
-lonely, and delicate, and elusive, and tortured.”
-
-“The adjectives are stirring and the fact that they happen to be
-meaningless is of little importance,” said Carl. “I like the way in
-which you make love to your emotions.”
-
-Martha gave a grimace of exasperation.
-
-“You’re the most insincere man I know,” she said. “Some day I’ll fall
-in love with a man who can be sincerely brilliant and beautiful and
-who doesn’t put his words together carefully, as though they were
-unimportant toys.”
-
-“Such a fate may be exactly what you deserve,” said Carl, still
-grinning.
-
-“Here we’ve been tramping around all day, seeing stupid people, and you
-waste Mart’s time with your old arguments about beauty and words,” said
-Helen with a jocose disgust. “I’m getting famished. Let’s go home.”
-
-“I forgot to tell you, Carl--I’m having a party at the apartment this
-evening,” said Martha. “That strange, interesting Russian you met
-yesterday is coming--Alfred Kone. And Jarvin who runs the literary page
-on the Dispatch. You’ll come with us now, won’t you?”
-
-“Yes, I’m interested in Kone. He carries a certain revolving
-electricity around with him. His words and gestures are abruptly
-flashing like showers of sparks. I’m almost tempted to find out where
-the sparks come from.”
-
-“He’s a natural pagan,” said Martha with an admiring sigh. “Don’t you
-love that European air about him! It’s something that you wouldn’t like
-if you could put your finger on it--something elusive and graceful, and
-sophisticated.”
-
-“Is it possible that you mean that Kone is intricately redundant?” said
-Carl, carelessly.
-
-“Carl, you always talk in such a careful, unearthly way,” said Helen,
-with a combat of irritation and wonder in her voice.
-
-“With most people talk is a weak, thin wine,” said Carl. “They drink
-endless cups of it and at last they become mildly intoxicated. I prefer
-to achieve drunkenness with less effort.”
-
-The incongruous love-song of the conversation continued as they
-departed for the Apperson apartment. Carl became morbidly jovial as
-though striving to goad himself into a mood, but underneath his words
-he was sad as he side-stepped Helen’s heavy lunges. “I have never
-actually had youth--that glistening mixture of blunders, sighs, cruel
-laughters, and a pleasant sadness that does not cut too deeply,” he
-said to himself as he listened to the obviously proud youth of the two
-women.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XIII.
-
-
-Kone had already arrived at the apartment and was waiting on the front
-porch. His heavy body, of medium height, held the arrogant bulge of
-muscles beneath his light grey suit and his pale brown face cradled a
-wraith of bitter alertness--a sneer attempting to break through the
-concealing flesh. He had a short flattened nose, thick lips, and the
-eyes of a forced and sprightly demon, and the dark abundance of his
-eyebrows receded into a low forehead, which in turn ended in a mass
-of black hair brushed backward. He had come to America some six years
-before this late Autumn evening; had first worked as a porter in a
-department store; had mastered English with a miraculous speed; and
-was now studying at a neighboring university and earning a living by
-teaching Russian to classes of children. In place of that violently
-disguised boredom commonly known as a heart he seemed to have an
-over-perfect dynamo that made him a mechanical wild-man--there was a
-sharp, strained persistency in all of his movements and the fact that
-he never deigned to falter in his words and gestures gave him an
-aspect of well-maintained artificiality. He threw his vivid grin to
-Carl.
-
-“Hah, poet who seems to sleep but is always awake--greetings,” he
-called out, in the crisply dramatic way in which he usually spoke.
-“‘Demons lurk in your dimples’--you should have written that line about
-yourself.”
-
-“Portraits are merely pretexts--secret portraits of oneself tortuously
-extracted from the blankness of other people,” said Carl.
-
-“You would like to believe that. The involved egoism of youth!”
-
-“It might be proving your case to answer you,” said Carl, laughing.
-
-Kone was one of the few men who could make him laugh, since he had the
-odd habit of laughing only in praise and scarcely ever in derision--a
-custom born in the loneliness of his former years. Kone greeted
-Martha, who came in later, with words in which an adroitly raised
-respect and daring sensuality were carefully mixed, but, although
-her surface was flattered by his obeisance, his attentions failed to
-penetrate her radiant self-immersion. That would have been a feat
-worthy of century-old preservation. She listened, like a convinced
-and mysterious referee, while Kone and Carl indulged in the precise
-uselessness of argument--a discussion on whether Dostoevsky was an
-insane mystic, drunk with the details of reality, or an emotional
-search-light stopping at the edge of the world. The talk led to a
-question of the exact value of originality.
-
-“So, you are looking for originality,” said Kone with a metallic
-mockery in his voice. “A man may stand on his head without in any way
-disturbing the universe. Has it not occurred to you that life is only a
-series of reiterations beneath the transparent gowns of egoism?”
-
-“I prefer the gowns when they are a little less transparent. I might
-also have to know why a man was standing on his head before I could
-make any conjecture concerning the agitation of the universe”--an
-amused respect was in Carl’s voice. He liked the stilted lunges of Kone.
-
-Helen appeared in the doorway.
-
-“Put your daggers aside for a while and come to dinner,” she said, with
-the most benign of tolerances.
-
-After the meal Arthur Jarvin, the critic, arrived with a woman named
-Edith Colson. Jarvin was almost tall--one of many “almosts” composing
-his entirety--and the plump old rose oval of his face showed its
-immense self-satisfaction beneath a fluffy mat of dark brown hair. He
-wore spectacles and his features bore the petulant satisfaction of
-one who has eaten too much for breakfast and has not quite decided
-whether to regret that fact or not. Since he held a contempt for the
-mad limitations of time he always fondly lengthened the utterance of
-his many “howevers” and “notwithstandings.” His friend, Edith Colson,
-was a tall, slender woman who freed a satirical vivacity with each
-of her words, thus making one regret the fact that she had nothing
-to say. One felt that to herself she was intrenched upon modest but
-well-guarded hill-tops of emotion; that, being thinly perverse, she
-had purchased her castles in Norway and scorned the more treacherous
-animations of a warmer climate. Her icy effervescences--whirls of
-powdered snows--sometimes subsided to a softer note which told you
-that the dab of warmth left within her was reserved for a select two
-or three beings, and that her conversation was an elaborate form of
-repentance. Outwardly she offered the effect of a carefully ornamented
-self-protection. The greenish brown length of her face accepted the
-problems of a long straight nose, loosely thin lips, and large black
-eyes, and was topped by a disciplined wealth of brownish black hair.
-
-They sat in a circle on the porch and the conversation skipped with
-too much ease between recent books, plays, and local celebrities among
-writers and artists. Jarvin, full of the books that had come to him
-for reviewing purposes, compared and dissected them with the air of a
-professor who boredly but genially lectures to his special class. “This
-book was passable: of course it couldn’t come up to so-and-so’s book.
-This other one--well, not quite as good as his last novel. A little too
-much of one style, you know. That new Frenchman? Yes, they’re raising
-quite a fuss over him. Grim, cruel stuff, but well done. Those books
-lose a lot in the translations, though. That new poet? Mm, he’s lyrical
-enough but he just misses inspiration. The new crop will have to go a
-long way before they can approach Shelley or Wordsworth. Have you seen
-the new Shaw play at the Olympic? After all, Shaw is one of the few men
-who can make you laugh without being vulgar or obvious,” etc.
-
-Carl sat in silence and rearranged, in his head, the difficult line
-of a new poem, and to his immersion the conversation had become a
-slightly irritating and well-memorized murmur. Endlessly he muttered to
-himself: “your face is stencilled with a pensiveness ... pensiveness
-... but I need another adjective.”
-
-Kone ruffled the dulcet informations of the others now and then with
-a polite but ironical jest that was never too obviously at their
-expense; Martha preserved her eagerly listening silence; and Helen sat
-like a dazed woman at a verbal banquet, scarcely daring to touch the
-glittering food in front of her. Finally Jarvin found Carl’s direction
-with a question that jerked him back to the gathering although the
-exact words eluded him.
-
-“What were you saying? I haven’t been listening,” said Carl.
-
-“That’s an insulting confession”--Edith Colson’s voice snapped like a
-succession of breaking wires. “Aren’t you interested in books?”
-
-“Well, not in the broad and detailed way in which they seem to interest
-the rest of you,” said Carl, with the sleepily candid smile which
-usually made another person long to investigate the resiliency of his
-throat. “Once every five months I read one that should be spoken of
-with great vehemence and then gradually forgotten, but that’s a rare
-occurrence.”
-
-“O come, that’s an easy, superior attitude,” said Jarvin. “Come down to
-the valley and join us, Mr. Poet!”
-
-“All right, I’m down. I’ve passed your hills of judicial comment and
-reached the moonlight on the street pavement outside. It suggests a
-contest. Suppose we all make up a line describing the moonlight on the
-street--the moonlight that falls like a quiet silver derision on all
-philosophies--and we’ll see which of us is best acquainted with the
-penitent promise of words. I’ll begin. ‘The moonlight repressed the
-grey street, like a phantom virtue.’ Only original lines--nothing from
-books.”
-
-“Here I am in the midst of a talk on Bergson, and this young poet asks
-me to make up some pretty lines about the moon,” said Jarvin, in a
-voice of poised scorn. “I read enough about the moon in the flood of
-mushy poetry that pours into my office.”
-
-“You might try to describe it yourself,” said Carl. “In that way you
-could provide an excellent antidote for your disgust. It is, I assure
-you, an important task to rescue the moon from the rape of trite words.”
-
-“No, I’ll leave that to minor poets,” said Jarvin.
-
-Carl gave him the malicious grin of one who is enjoying a sham battle.
-
-“If the moon doesn’t satisfy you, Mr. Jarvin, let’s try that whispering
-prison of trees just outside of this window, or the people who place
-their unsearching feet upon streets every day. Anything except voluble
-shop-talk about the latest mediocrities with now and then a philosopher
-or scientist thrown in for purposes of repentance and caution.”
-
-“Well, our young iconoclast even scorns philosophy,” said Jarvin.
-“Perhaps it speaks with too much thought and authority to suit your
-fancy. It’s much easier to let your emotions juggle words.”
-
-“Philosophy is a bottle-faced dwarf drowning with imposing howls in
-an ocean that does not see him,” said Carl, with a languid lack of
-interest. “But philosophy should be read, if only with a careful
-indifference.”
-
-Jarvin threw another rock, with haste, and Carl gave him another
-epigram. Kone, always a restive audience, interposed.
-
-“The anarchist, Pearlman, has just come to town,” he said. “Perhaps all
-of you know that he served twenty years in prison for attempting to
-kill a millionaire. A cruel penance!”
-
-“I become rather tired of these anarchists who are forever trying
-and plotting to blow up the city-hall,” said Edith. “They’re neither
-artists nor dull, useful citizens and they serve no purpose that I can
-see. If they imagine that they can change the present system of things
-by shrieking and murdering people they ought to be sent to a school for
-the feeble-minded.”
-
-“I’m not so sure that I’d want to see things radically changed,”
-said Jarvin. “Of course I know that there’s a great deal of graft
-and injustice everywhere but I’m not sure that I’d care to live in a
-Utopia--wickedness and cruelty are far more interesting.”
-
-“The trouble with these anarchists and socialists is that they miss
-all the beauty in life,” said Martha. “If you show them a painting or
-a poem they think that you’re trying to waste their time, unless it
-contains a social message.”
-
-“I think that it’s cruel and useless to try to take another man’s
-life,” said Helen, earnestly. “I hate this fellow, Pearlman!”
-
-Kone listened to this stagnant symposium of viewpoints, with a patient
-sneer.
-
-“In Russia we are more accustomed to murder,” he said. “We have not
-attained the--what shall I say?--the genial and practical compromises
-of your American democracy. In our country, alas, oppression takes
-off its mask and swings a red sword! If you will realize that death
-does not hold for us the mysterious terror that it holds for you
-it may help you to understand Pearlman. He came to this country--a
-young Russian--sentimental, idealistic, crowded with naive longings
-for martyrdom. He wanted to die for the people--that grand, massive,
-mysterious, and yet near and real people! When he tried to kill a
-millionaire, who was stubbornly refusing to arbitrate with his striking
-men, Pearlman was choked with a poem of liberation that could not be
-denied. Then the icy reality of his next twenty years--condemned by
-both society and the strikers whom he had tried to help, surrounded by
-the rigid leer of iron bars; and squeezed into a niche of futility....
-This crucified Russian does not need your sarcasm, my friends.”
-
-The conversation staggered and scampered for another hour, with
-everyone save Carl animatedly endeavoring to conceal the fact that he
-was in no way interested in anyone’s opinions except his own, and at
-last the party packed away its comedies, irritations, and convictions,
-and arose from the chairs. There were farewells, with just the right
-compound of gaiety and caution, and the gathering separated.
-
-Carl and Alfred Kone went to the latter’s room in a dormitory at the
-university and sat until an early hour of the morning, arguing with
-an intensity that made their tobacco smoke seem a cloud of gunpowder.
-Kone was that tense incongruity--an ironical sentimentalist. Within
-him, emotion cajoled thought to a softer brutality and thought intruded
-its staccato, exploring note upon the limpid abandon of emotion. A
-deliberate friendship rose between these men, like a translucent wall
-through which men can see each other without touching, for each one
-knew that the other held a baffling insincerity of imagination and was
-afraid that he might be deftly ridiculed if he failed to measure his
-words. Kone admired the nimble restlessness of Carl, a quality which he
-was compelled mechanically to imitate, while Carl liked the explosive
-way in which Kone evaded himself. Kone was now almost thirty years old
-but his machine-like capering made him seem much younger and he bounded
-through life like a sophisticated street-urchin, swindling himself with
-fiercely endurable makeshifts in place of dead dreams. His tragedy
-rested in the fact that he was not a creator and the knowledge of this
-was to him a secret poison from which he had to escape with many a gale
-of make-believe laughter.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XIV.
-
-
-One afternoon, four months after the Apperson party, Carl, Kone, and
-Jenesco, a Roumanian painter, sat in the latter’s little blending
-of studio and bedroom and looked at a landscape which he had just
-finished. Jenesco’s eyes lazily flirted with triumph and his small,
-ruddy face displayed the expression of a child throwing a few last,
-unnecessary grains upon a sand-hill.
-
-“Boys, what do you think of it?” he asked in a tone of confident
-fatherhood.
-
-Kone and Carl scanned the painting. It was a mother-goose
-transfiguration, too quick in its acceptance of violent colors and
-bearing a blandly forced simplicity. Red, indigo, and orange trees
-were lining both sides of a road, and the trees were painted in such a
-manner that they seemed to be kneeling at the roadside. In the distance
-white mountains, resembling the suggestion of upturned cups, refused
-the blue wine of sky, and in front of them were fields that looked like
-wrinkled, green tablecloths spread out to dry. In the sky one large
-pink cloud forlornly squandered its innocence.
-
-“Pleasant--pleasant,” said Kone. “Not realistic, and not fantastic. It
-deceives both of its mistresses.”
-
-“You don’t see what I’m trying to get at,” answered Jenesco. “I’m
-trying to make reality turn an amiable somersault, as Carl would say. I
-want to avoid the two extremes of painting the usual photograph on the
-one hand and making something that no one can understand on the other.”
-
-Carl listened to the seething argument that followed, with the
-feelings of one who hears an exquisitely worthless routine of sound.
-He was always amazed at the fact that people could argue about art--a
-word pilfered from that last desperate undulation with which an ego
-decorates the slavery of mud. Arguments on art to him were like the
-antics of a sign-painter defending the precious label which he has
-painted upon certain of the more indiscreet and impossible longings
-within him--a piece of inflexible nonsense. He felt that works of art
-so-called could be described and admired with a novel and independently
-creative bow of words, but never defended and explained. Books on art
-were to him a futile and microscopical attempt to inject logic into
-a decorative curiosity. As he listened to the wrestling sounds of the
-present argument, words within him began to flatter his indifference.
-
-“While Kone is talking, Jenesco sits, trying to frame his reply and
-paying little heed to Kone’s words,” he said to himself. “If Jenesco
-hears a point that he has not previously considered he will make
-a hasty attempt to shift his answer--a quick sword-thrust at the
-new opponent--and then proceed to forget about the matter. Serious
-arguments might be of value if they were not windy and elaborate. If
-men could decide to condense their views into neat typewritten sheets,
-carried in a coat pocket and distributed among people, they could save
-a great deal of cheated energy.”
-
-“The poet has been sitting here like an amused statue,” said Kone,
-after the argument had collapsed to the usual stand still. “Come, we
-are waiting for you to flay us.”
-
-“Splendid. Another tense battle. Haven’t you had enough?” said Carl. “I
-would suggest that we hold a debate on whether that spider on the wall
-will crawl into the sunlight near the window, or whether it will remain
-in the shade. In this way we can speculate upon how much the laws of
-chance may alter the spider’s conception of the universe.”
-
-“Get away with that satirical pose!” cried Jenesco.
-
-Carl smiled without answering, while the others derided his
-self-immersion. Jenesco knew no other weapon save an emotional club. He
-was a machinist who had taken up painting two years before this late
-winter afternoon and he still kept a little shop where he occasionally
-sold and repaired machines. This combination of rough mechanic and
-art-desiring man had given its surface lure to Carl’s imagination and
-he had commenced to spend most of his time at Jenesco’s home. Short,
-and with the body of a subdued, light-weight prize-fighter, Jenesco was
-a small hurricane of physical elations. He had the face of a corrupted
-cherub that had sold its innocence to mental inanities, and his mind
-was a conceited confusion of naive ideas. He had been attracted to
-painting because it brought his hands into motion, thus encouraging
-the habit which they could not forget after their working hours, and
-because it taught color and flexibility to the hard greys, browns, and
-blacks of his daily toil. He belonged to that band of men who spend a
-lifetime in stubbornly walking down a road of artistic effort which
-does not lead them to any distinct surrender. Their imaginations are
-not weak enough to kneel before the drab regularities of life and
-not strong enough to escape from the instinctive push of dead men’s
-realities.
-
-From that afternoon on, Carl began to see more of Jenesco and less
-of Kone. Kone was not a creator but merely transposed, with a hungry
-fire, the sentences of other men, and after you solved the snapping
-tricks with which he did this, his ironies became thin and lamely
-transparent. Carl preferred the wolfish wit with which Jenesco, an
-ogling Proletarian, tore silk and satin from the shrinking flesh of
-obvious hypocrisies in life. It was at least a lurching circus of
-words--a pulsating buffoonery. He scarcely ever saw Martha now, since
-their self-immersions tended to create a sterile restraint between
-them, with words and hands playing the part of irrelevant intruders.
-Each of them secretly despised life and its people, while giving a
-pretended attention, but they used different methods. Martha fluttered
-her emotional veils, with a breathless coercion, while Carl dodged
-beneath a carnival of grotesquely mated words.
-
-To amuse the secret loneliness which often became a boring acid he
-formed, with Jenesco, that hollow melee known as a debating club;
-called it “The Questioners”--prodded by a ghost of humor--and exhibited
-his words in the formal vaudeville-show. The performances occurred at
-the studio of a man named Fyodor Murovitch, a young Polish sculptor
-with a softly melodramatic abundance of dark brown hair and the
-face of a strangely waspish saint--a saint who was tempting himself
-with malices in order to conquer them. One evening Carl sat in this
-place, drained by the empty ritual of responding to noisy and firmly
-convinced people and ogling his nerves with the rhythm of pipe smoke.
-He looked up and saw a woman--Olga Ramely--standing beside him.
-His eyes experimented with the eyes of this stranger and suddenly
-contracted. Her eyes seemed to be two drops of quivering sweat left
-behind by an emotional crucifixion. They were sensitive with essences.
-Greyish-green, larger than a dwindled sky, lost in a perilous dream of
-wakefulness, holding the phantom glow of incredible tortures, friendly
-to mental recklessness, they were like a ludicrously clever imitation
-of his own eyes and he trembled in the presence of an inexplicable
-deception. His imagination was becoming a detached devil much in need
-of correction. Olga Ramely spoke to him.
-
-“I’ve been watching you all evening. The light from the candles over
-your head fell upon your yellow hair and put shadows on your face. The
-shadows gave your face a soft excuse and you looked half like a sprite
-and half like a martyr. There was an indelicately impish weariness on
-your face. Your hair was like light, and in one glistening attempt it
-tried to reach the weariness, but couldn’t. I told myself that you were
-not the man that people say you are.”
-
-He made his peace with her eyes, moved by a profound embarrassment,
-and discovered the rest of her face, with an abject and yet faintly
-skeptical desire. The surface flattery of her words had been almost
-without meaning to him, but her voice had given him a problem--deep
-with an alto scheme, like a trailing memory of pain, and quivering
-rebelliously under the disciplines of thought. He examined her face for
-an affirmation of the voice. Short, dark brown curls encumbered her
-head, like a wig of lost thoughts undulating in an effort to capture
-reality, and her skin was the smoothly troubled fusion of white and
-brown. Her nose was of moderate length and curved slightly outward,
-in a subdued question of flesh; her lips were small and thin--pliant
-devices of doubt--and a tight survival of plumpness upon her face told
-of a lucidly cherubic effect that had existed before life dropped its
-hands heavily upon her. Her body, verging on tallness, was immersed in
-a last skirmish with youth.
-
-“What have you heard them say about me?” he asked, craving the evasion
-of words that would conceal a unique tumult within him.
-
-“I’ve heard people say that you were a thief, and a rascal, and a
-disagreeable idiot, and a poseur, and a liar, and an overwhelming
-egoist.”
-
-“What did you think of this dime-novel version of iniquity?”
-
-“I have been, at times, partial to crude monsters, but your work was a
-curious contradiction. Why do they hate you?”
-
-“Hatred is, of course, fear--fear wildly attempting to justify its
-presence. With most people this fear skulks within a harmless parade of
-adjectives, while others are compelled to fall back upon their hands.
-And so people commit actual murders while others slay their opponents
-in conversation. The former is apt to be a little more convincing than
-the latter, though.”
-
-Carl spoke slowly, still correcting the turbulence of his mind with
-a plausible display of words, and almost unconscious of what he was
-saying.
-
-“You’ve left out a hatred for hypocrisy,” said Olga, with the same
-abstracted indifference to words and the same instinctive cunning
-at piecing them together. “Some of the people who have been flaying
-you alive walked up to you to-night with outstretched hands and
-congratulations. And I felt the emotion of one too tired to have more
-than a twinge of disgust.”
-
-“It requires no effort to be stoical to this joke,” said Carl. “The
-masks are too exquisitely futile to become interesting unless, indeed,
-they attain a moment of dextrous humor.”
-
-Jenesco and Murovitch, who had been disputing in a corner of the
-studio, walked over and offered a belated introduction.
-
-“Sorry to interrupt love scene, but maybe you do not know names of each
-other,” said Murovitch in his deliberate, shattered English. “Names
-tell people how much like nothing they are. But maybe both of you want
-to be somebody, in which case it is wise to pity you.”
-
-“You have a crudely spontaneous imagination--it spies love scenes and
-vacuums with a truly lumbering swiftness,” said Carl, annoyed at the
-interruption.
-
-Murovitch laughed--he had made a religion of giving and receiving heavy
-blows and it made an excellent screen for his inner timidities.
-
-“I like your frankness. It reminds me of a heavy negro. It’s black and
-excited,” said Olga.
-
-“Felman’s complexion is a little dirty itself,” said Murovitch,
-defiling his saint-like face with a prearranged grin.
-
-As Carl and Olga walked to the studio where she was living with a woman
-friend, she told him some of the immediate facts of her life, as though
-clearing away an opaquely intruding rubbish.
-
-“I’m working now as a waitress in a little cafeteria on Winthrop
-street. Eight in the morning to three in the afternoon. Two afternoons
-a week off. These burns on my hands come from the hot coffee. On the
-two afternoons I write poetry. My body, you see, passes into a less
-visible conduct, and thoughts rattle more effectively than china cups.
-Then, on the next morning, I am forced to recollect that life is in a
-continual conspiracy to prevent this transformation of manners. The
-plates are once more held up. Beans and roast beef refuse to betray the
-secret.”
-
-They had reached the studio and were seated opposite to each other.
-
-“And I work every morning in a tobacco shop,” said Carl. “Since
-life works with ravishing incongruities, everything there should be
-burned except the cigars. Meditating on this, I am able to wait more
-peacefully on the customers. Cringing sounds slip from my lips. ‘Yes,
-MacLane will win the next fight and the weather is terrible.’ Strange,
-twisted little payments of sound. Life clinks them in his empty purse.”
-
-“Be romantic--make it the brave bow to an indelicate dream,” said Olga.
-
-“A background of colored compensations? They, too, are endurable if you
-don’t turn your head too often.”
-
-The adventure of stealing from a cautious world to an alcove of
-unguarded expression changed their physical desires into brightly
-unheeded guests lurking just outside of their longing to talk to each
-other. When their hands touched at last, they laughed at the minute
-surprise tendered by their flesh. They became two secret isolations
-examining a velvet hallucination of fusion. Their bodies touched while
-investigating this enticing dream.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XV.
-
-
-The winter bickered with spring; days gave their imaginary separation
-of time; Olga and Carl stooped to the task of conjuring myriads of
-fancifully plausible tongues from their dream of perished identities
-lost in one search. Then Olga left with a theater company that was
-about to tour the middle west, having managed to secure the small part
-of a garrulous chambermaid, and Carl glided into a riot of writing,
-waiting for the telegram that would send him to join her in a far
-western city where her company would stage its last performances. In
-the meantime, he resolved to visit a wealthy uncle who lived in the
-south and wanted to see this “queer nephew of mine, who scribbles
-poetry and doesn’t care about making money.”
-
-As he sat one morning in an elevated railroad coach, with valises at
-his side, commencing the journey to the city in which his uncle lived,
-his mood was glittering and aimless. He danced with outlines of Olga’s
-words; hummed briskly saccharine tunes; and trifled with the contours
-of people seated near him. Across the aisle a fatly rosy man was
-reading a newspaper and Carl’s gaze idly struck the front page and
-absorbed the headlines. In a corner of the page he came to the words:
-“Actress Dies in M----.”
-
-His intuition, springing from that complaint vaguely known as
-metaphysical, changed his skin to a subtle frost and laid its squeezing
-pressure upon his eyes. The quick and heavy beat of his heart became
-frantically audible to his ears, like a gauntly terrifying horseman
-riding over him, and his mind changed to a loud confusion. He jumped
-across the aisle, tore the paper from the gaping man, and read that
-the woman whom he loved had instantly died after an accident. Assailed
-by an oblique rain of black claws, he tottered from the car, leaving
-his valises in the aisle. The black claws vanished; his heart and mind
-became extinct; and nothing remained save a body turned to ice and
-guided by instinct. Slowly, and with a brittle indecision in each step,
-he walked through the bickering brightness of one street after another,
-hearing and seeing nothing. He reached the bold flatness of the stone
-apartment building; read the delayed telegram held out by his mother,
-with the barest shiver of returning life, and dropped upon his bed.
-
-Sunlight stood within the small room, like an emaciated patriarch
-entering through grey shades. Sunlight ignored the glossy chastities
-of furniture and dull yellow walls, and looked intently at the bed
-standing in one corner of the room. A long human collapse in black
-clothes stuck to the white bedspread. A blotch of blonde hair rested
-stilly in the weak light and hinted of a face. The body shook now and
-then as though an inquisitively alien hand were investigating its
-lifelessness. Then sobs pushed their way from the hidden face--an
-irregular orgy of distorted lyricism. It was as though a martyr were
-licking up the blood on his wounds and spitting it out in long gurgles
-of lunatic delight. The sobs were separated by rattling pauses that
-reminded one of a still living skeleton endlessly wrestling with death.
-The skeleton and the martyr sometimes felicitated each other upon their
-endurance, and short silences, like uneasy lies, glided from the hidden
-face. Then the bleeding turmoil once more streamed upon the air of the
-room, almost extinguishing the dim sunlight.
-
-A peculiar species of happiness lurked beneath the weeping. Grief,
-hating itself, found a revengeful pleasure in attempting to tear and
-exhaust itself into death. Sometimes the turmoil subsided to a light
-and sibilant fight for breath. The animal noise departed then and a
-small soul, much lighter than a phantom sin, plucked unavailingly at
-the mysterious spear that had suddenly coerced its breast.... The
-dark words of twilight finally entered the room, making an opera of
-the marred lyricism that escaped from the hidden face on the bed.
-Then night pardoned the deficiencies of the room and corrected them
-with moonlight, creating a tragic and chaste boudoir. Carl Felman
-felt emptied of all sound, and a mad craving for motion stabbed his
-limbs. He wanted to rush endlessly into space, barely supported by the
-breathless consolation of running after something that could never be
-caught. This would also be of great value to his heart, which was a
-stiffly smirking acrobat who has broken his legs but still strives to
-continue the act.
-
-He leaped from the bed and seized his cap. His mother, who had been
-entering his room at intervals and vainly questioning him, stopped him
-at the outer doorway.
-
-“Carl, where are you going?” she cried, in a sharply fearful voice.
-
-With a hugely mechanical effort he managed to twist low sounds from his
-useless lips.
-
-“Just--for a--walk--back--soon.”
-
-Without heeding her protests and questions, he fled down to the
-street. Human beings had disappeared, but he could see faces indented
-on the fronts of houses. One had a look of mangled suffering; another
-was studiously wicked, like a learned burglar; and a third bore the
-pathetic leer of a venturesome housemaid. He picked up these details,
-glanced at them a moment, and then threw them aside as though they were
-scandals from another planet. He passed into a region of three-story
-rooming-houses--flat wretches holding an air of patient cowardice.
-People surreptitiously filtered from the houses and walked down the
-street with Carl--chorus girls with plump, sneaky faces, underworld
-hoodlums with an air of wanly etched bravado, ponderously rollicking
-servant girls, clerks with the faces of genial mice, and meekly dazed
-old men stumping to their dish-washing jobs. To Carl they were also
-hurrying after something that had vanished and cajoling their mingled
-emptiness and pain with swift motion. Now and then he waved an arm to
-them in greeting, while an unearthly smile dug into his face. His
-gesture, when observed, was taken for an intended blow and he left
-attitudes of fear and pugnacity behind him.
-
-He crossed a bridge above a narrowly turbid river. The oily lights and
-toiling tug-boats were to him an inexplicable affront. Their stillness
-and slow motion insulted his passion for speed and with the spite of a
-child he looked down at his feet for a stone to throw at them. Finding
-a pavement block, he cast it into the river and rushed along, feeling
-for a second an exquisite relief. He passed into a crowded theater
-and business section. The strained melee of lights and noises became
-an intensely sympathetic audience, urging on his race, and the faces
-and forms of human beings met in an applauding confusion. With the
-cunning of a blind animal, he darted through their ranks and avoided
-collisions. Finally he reached another apartment-house region--large
-brick boxes without a vestige of expression. “The faces are gone!” he
-cried, with a gasping incredulity, as though inanimate things had alone
-become real to him. Moonlight, unable to fathom their petty baldness,
-clung to them with an attitude of limpid disgust. Thickly contented
-families, mild and tightly garnished, issued from the doorways,
-trundling to some moving-picture show or ice-cream palace. An aspect of
-well-washed and hollow serenity protested against Carl’s direct flight.
-Wrapped by this time in a warmly merciful daze, he did not detect the
-drably swaying counterfeit of happiness that would have awakened within
-him a maniacal response.
-
-He sped down street after street like an inhuman hunter, and came
-to rows of wooden houses separated by large fields and blackguarded
-by the smoke of nearby factories and mills. An attitude of mildewed
-supplication--a beggar rising from ferns and mud--lifted itself over
-the scene. Rushing along, he plunged into the open country, where wild
-flowers, ditches, and fields of corn pungently conversed with moonlight
-in a language too simple and formless for human ears to catch. But
-Carl’s ears had become inhuman, and he started a loud talk with the
-growing objects around him, revelling in their sympathy and advice. By
-this time his long, half-running walk had weakened him and he began
-to lurch over the soft earth of the road like a crushed and fantastic
-drunkard.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-The ingenuous brilliance of a cloudless morning stood hugely over the
-green fields and yellowish brown roads and an air of alert innocence
-went exploring between the flowers and ditches. Harriet Radler walked
-slowly down the country road on her way to the schoolhouse where she
-ruled a little band of demons, drudges, minor poets, and clowns. She
-lingered along the roadside, sometimes stooping to tear a tiger lily
-from the shallow ditch. Slender and short, a pliant virginity twined
-itself around her body. Her young face, pink and barely whipped, had
-been marked by a tentative sorrow and was hungering for the actual
-battle. Her black and white clothes lazily flirted with imps of morning
-air and were encouraged by her eyes.
-
-Looking down at the ditch, she saw the half-concealed form of a man
-lying in the water, with his head and arms resting upon the bank. A
-tragedy of dry mud stamped its grey mosaic over his face. His blonde
-hair drooped with dirt like a trampled sunflower. The Pierrot-like
-hesitation of his features peeped beneath the dirt--a still and
-frightened ritual. With the horror of one who believes that she is
-beholding a dead man, Harriet knelt beside the figure and shook its
-head, her face turned away and her eyes tightly closed. Then she heard
-a mingled rustle and splash and saw that the man was rising to his
-feet. He stood with bent knees over the mud of the ditch, his black
-clothes garlanded with slime, his face twitching into life beneath its
-stiff mask of earth. With a squeal of fright she scrambled to her feet
-and ran down the road. The man in the ditch, Carl Felman, felt that
-something was still evading him and once more experienced the hunter’s
-frenzy that had tumbled him over the night. Gripped by a superhuman
-agility, he transcended his stiff joints and pursued her down the road.
-He caught her, his hands dropping upon her shoulders and whirling her
-around. She faced him with uplifted arms, a turbulence of fright and
-curiosity swiftly toying with her eyes and mouth. He lowered his hands
-and stood limply before her.
-
-“Do you know what grief is?” he asked, in an almost indistinct voice.
-
-She stared and did not answer.
-
-“Do you know what grief is?” he asked, in a softly clear voice.
-
-A look of loose wonder came to her face.
-
-“Do you know what grief is?” he asked, in an almost loud voice.
-
-A darkly smiling contemplation revised the lines of her face.
-
-“Yes,” she whispered.
-
-Without another word they both walked down the country road together.
-
-
-
-
-PART III
-
-INSTIGATION
-
-
-
-
-Instigation
-
-CHAPTER XVI.
-
-
-The train in which Carl was riding rolled slowly through the outskirts
-of a southern city and he looked out at the rows of negro cottages
-and hovels that plaintively cringed underneath the wide foliage of
-willow and magnolia trees. Most of the cottages were unpainted and
-grey with the impersonally chaste kiss of time, while the hovels were
-mere flimsy boxes covered with black tar paper. Sunflowers and morning
-glories stood amid the weeds and twined about the slanting fences
-like gaudy virgins dismayed at their sight of a lewdly disordered
-room and appealing to the sunlight for protection. Negro women in
-faded sunbonnets and wrappers could sometimes be seen shuffling down
-the thickly dusty roads and negro children, in weird incoherences of
-tattered clothes, tumbled around the humble doorsteps. The children
-were little black madmen unconsciously dodging a huge fist that was
-concealed beneath the scene. The dust of a late August morning had
-dropped upon all things, sifting its listless sadness into every
-crevice and crack, and even the fierce sun could not dispel this
-invasion.
-
-Every shade of this scene was an accurately friendly answer to Carl’s
-mood and he squandered the brooding light of his eyes upon all of
-the visual details outside of the train window. The mask of careless
-bitterness upon his face said its hello to the cowering and sinister
-apathy of the houses and people, and viciously he longed to leap out
-of the window and join the unashamed animal rites which these hovels
-and human beings were parading. Here an alien race was standing amid
-clouds of evil-smelling squalor and staring at its broken longings and
-dreams--staring with a wild hopelessness. This race had lost its own
-civilization and was clumsily imitating that of the white man, not
-because of any innate desire, but because it had been forced to blend
-into its surroundings or perish, and Carl felt that all of his life
-had also been an animated lie of flesh and speech, devised to aid him
-in escaping from the contemptuous eyes that vastly hemmed him in.
-And now, with the feelings of a man who had neatly murdered himself,
-he was planning to turn the knives of his thoughts and emotions upon
-other people, not for revenge, but because the marred ghost of himself
-harshly desired to convince itself that it was still alive. If this
-ghost had yielded to the subterfuges of kindness and gentleness it
-would have become too much aware of its own thin remoteness from life,
-and cruelty alone could induce it to believe that it was still welded
-to the actualities of existence.
-
-As Carl sat at the window he could often hear the grotesquely
-quavering, boldly mellow laughter of negro men trudging to their work,
-but these sounds did not express humor to him. They held the strong
-effort of men to flee from tormenting longings and the numbly vicious
-rebuke of poverty, and the sounds which these men released merely
-symbolized the long strides of their fancied escape. Laughter can be
-merely the explosive sound with which human beings seek to demolish
-each other--the indirect weapon of self-hatred. Carl laughed with a
-strained loudness, throwing a magnified echo to the negroes on the
-dusty roads outside, and a drowsily plump, middle-aged woman in an
-opposite seat opened her mouth widely and huddled into a corner,
-fearing that she might be attacked by a maniac. He gave her a glance
-and feasted upon her fear, for her shrinking attitude was falsely
-and deliciously persuading the ghost of himself that it still held a
-potency over other people.
-
-Sometimes a song crazily drifted to Carl’s ears from one of the negro
-cottages--a song that was weighted with loosely undulating sadness--and
-he listened with a stern greediness. Music is a huge, treacherous
-sound made by thoughts and emotions to console them for their feeling
-of minute mortality, and after it has given them its dream of
-permanent size it disappears, slaying the illusion with silence. Now
-it brought a delusion of substantiality to the ghost within the mould
-of Carl’s flesh and he listened in a trance of gratitude. Lost in the
-obliterations of his grief, he felt infinitely nearer to these abject,
-musical negroes outside than to the artificially silent, stiffly
-satisfied white people with whom he was riding. Grief, which is an
-insane tyrant among emotions, has an effortless way of crossing all
-boundaries and walls, but it does not reveal any hidden oneness between
-human beings. Grief places men and women in a vacuum of renunciation,
-or shows them that they have little connection with the people around
-them and that they have been enduring an alien camp. Ruled by this
-latter discovery, Carl looked with an undisguised hatred at the formal,
-complacent white people in the railway coach and felt that he was
-deeply related to the negroes outside.
-
-Almost three months had passed since the invisible knife had swung
-into the middle of his being, and since he had staggered across the
-agitated sincerity of night to the peaceful compassion of the young
-school teacher. Now and then he remembered their silent walk down the
-sturdy brightness of the country road--a silence which had been a soft
-wreath ironically thrown upon the weakness of words--and the troubled
-way in which she had helped him brush his clothes and wash his face,
-and the stumbling simplicity of the words with which she had tried to
-comfort him. Although he had been a stranger to her, she had thrown
-aside that distrust which is born of sensual pride and a cheaply
-purchased worldly wisdom, influenced by the helpless directness of
-his demeanor and by the supple humility which a grief of her own had
-once left within her. The force of her fearlessness had fallen upon
-him like the sweeping touch of another world, and in his daze he had
-actually believed that she had been sent by the woman whom he had lost
-as an alert messenger striving to teach him how to hold his ghostlike
-shoulders up beneath a future burden. If she had held a human aspect
-to him he would have hated and reviled her, for then she would have
-been merely an atom in the vast, turbid reality that had slowly lured
-him to an imbecilic torture. He accepted the curves of her body as
-an unearthly visitation and possessed them as one who passes through
-a fragile ritual. But after his departure from her, as he once more
-walked down the shaggy, solid country road, she had tiptoed away from
-him with a spectral quickness, and the clamor of a world had once more
-attacked him, like the scattered falsehoods of an idiot. The rustle of
-trees had become an insignificant whisper of defeat; the songs of birds
-had changed to the shrill vacuities with which a monster entertained
-himself; the colored groups of flowers had become the pitiful remains
-of a violated carnival; the earth beneath his feet had altered to the
-stolid aloofness of a giant moron; and the sunlight had seemed to be a
-theatrical accident.
-
-When he had reached the city, with its orderly ranks of houses and
-factories and its dully precise pavements, the scene had been to him
-a cunning mirage made by dying people to suppress their realization
-of the advancing destruction. The people on the streets had held the
-complicated glee and perplexity of an insane slave trying to extract an
-imaginary importance from his bondage. He had longed to jump at their
-throats and silence the feverish lie that was reviling the truthful
-stare of his eyes and only his physical exhaustion had prevented him
-from doing this. Grief is a spontaneous welcome sent to the insanity
-that lurks within all human beings, and its invitation greets a
-responsive strength or a frightened weakness of imagination, according
-to the man or woman who receives it.
-
-And so he had plodded back to his home, carrying within him a numb
-confusion that was sometimes disrupted by vicious impulses, and forcing
-the ghost of himself into a motion which it could not understand. He
-had tried to answer the angry and uneasy questions of his parents
-with plausible lies at his own expense. Yes, he had met someone who
-had given him bad news and in a fit of temper he had rushed from the
-railroad station and deserted his valises. What was in the telegram?
-Oh, just a message from a friend. Where had he been for the past two
-days? Why, he had gone on a spree and had slept off his drunkenness
-at the house of a friend. Shouldn’t he be locked in an insane asylum?
-Yes, but life had already granted him that favor. With a glib tongue
-he tried to serenade the barren comedy of improbabilities to which he
-had returned, but he scarcely heard the words that he was uttering, and
-as he wrung them from the empty ghost that was within him he longed
-to strike his parents in the face and feed greedily upon their rage
-and astonishment, in an effort to convince himself that he was still
-substantially powerful, still able to assert his reality by injuring
-the people around him. With an act of this kind he could destroy the
-indifferent fantasy of life and change it to a tangible and active
-opponent. The man standing before him--his father--was merely an
-irritating puppet whose lack of understanding moved jerkily, governed
-by the hands of an ignorant dream.
-
-With a cry of hatred, Carl struck his father in the face and watched
-him reel back against the wall of the dining-room with a feeling of
-warm triumph. He struck him again and revelled in the blood that
-decorated the man’s lips. His mother shrieked with fear; his father
-returned the blows; and the two men fought around the room, overturning
-chairs and vases. Several neighbors, brought by the cries of his
-mother, rushed in and overpowered him. Together with his father,
-they held him down while someone summoned a patrol wagon, and he was
-taken to a cell in a police station. As he sat in the flatly smelling
-semi-gloom of the cell he caressed, with an overpowering fondness,
-the blood that had stiffened upon parts of his face, for it mutely
-testified that he had conquered the remote lie around him and altered
-it to a satisfying enemy. He had persuaded himself that he was still
-alive, and the blows which he had given his father had been the first
-proof of this illusory emancipation. Throughout the night, as he
-shifted upon the iron shelf that was his bed, he muttered to himself at
-regular intervals, “I am alive, I am still alive,” as though he were
-trying to preserve a triumphant dream that would soon disappear, and
-the grief within him rocked to and fro upon the words, using them as a
-cradle.
-
-But when the morning dodged shamefacedly into his cell, bringing with
-it a faint retinue of city sounds, the annoying fantasy returned with
-full vigor, and the ghost within him stealthily assumed possession
-of his flesh. Once more he was a thinly wounded spectator, filled
-with an impotent hatred at the melee about him and longing for the
-lusty release of physical motion. Two small boys, lying upon their
-stomachs, peered through the grating of his cell window, which stood
-on a level with the sidewalk outside, and jibed at him. He cursed
-them incessantly, with an anger that was not directed at them, but at
-the meaningless tensions of their voices, and with the tumult of his
-own voice he vainly strove to shake the wraith within him to firmer
-outlines.
-
-As he stood before the magistrate a few hours later, an incredulous
-sneer was on his face, as though the man at the desk above him were a
-pompous, talkative scarecrow, and with a stubborn silence he confronted
-the questions that were thrown at him. In a low, hesitating voice his
-father declared that he feared that his son had become insane, and the
-judge ordered an examination by one of the city physicians. Carl was
-returned to his cell, after his parents had pelted him with half-angry
-and half-bewildered sentences in an ante-room of the court, and as he
-sat again in his cell, surveying the rigid jeer of the iron bars, his
-hatred began to listen to the advice of cunning--a cunning pilfered
-from the wilted depths of his despair. He began to see that physical
-blows and silence were crude and ineffective weapons in his attack upon
-the insulting commotion of life and that, if he desired to injure human
-beings so that both he and they might become real for a moment, he must
-use more indirect and ingenious methods.
-
-When the city physician, a tall, briskly-balanced man with no
-imagination, questioned him in his cell, he became a blandly appealing
-and submissive actor.
-
-“Yes, doctor, I had a nervous breakdown from overstudy, you know,
-and for a time I’m afraid that I lost my reason. They tell me that I
-struck my father and this has horrified me, as I haven’t the slightest
-recollection of what I did. But I’ve gathered myself together now and
-I can promise you that I’ll never lose control of myself again--never!
-And I’m awfully sorry for what I did. I can assure you of the sincerity
-of my repentance.”
-
-The physician was putty in Carl’s adroit hands--this composed young man
-with an intelligent, contrite speech must, of course, be quite sane.
-Carl, as he spoke to this man, slowly formed an evil grin beneath the
-cool mask of his face, and he relished the task of showering upon this
-man earnest platitudes, smooth imitations of that limited sleep known
-as “common sense,” and words of self-reproach, because this trickery
-brought back to him his old sense of power over his surroundings and
-offered a subtle outlet for his hatred of life. The physician ended by
-shaking his hand with a genial respect and when evening came he was
-given his freedom.
-
-He returned to his home, repeating the soft treachery of his words
-while his fists still longed to lunge out at the faces in front of
-him, but the shrewdness of a ghost determined to regain a semblance of
-life by cleverly deceiving and punishing the people around it came to
-his rescue and controlled his body. His parents had felt wrathful at
-the presence of something which they could only dimly see and which he
-made no effort to clarify, but life had taught them to make a god of
-submission, and a heavy tenderness mingled with an alert fear crept
-into their posture toward him. He trudged back to the loquacious,
-coarse emptiness of his clerkship at the tobacco shop and shunned the
-world that he had previously inhabited, for he feared that if he met
-anyone whom he knew he would feel again the irresistible inclination to
-interrogate their throats, and he knew that these impulses would only
-lead to his own destruction. When he accidentally met some acquaintance
-on the street, he would hurry on like a nervous criminal, ignoring the
-other’s greetings.
-
-He prowled about the city, still in search of a violent dream that
-could offer its delusion of reckless strength to the mutilated spirit
-whose complaints drove him on. He ran to the soiled raptures of
-prostitutes and sensually oppressed, adventurous girls who could be
-picked up on the streets, and gave them a twisted symphony of blows,
-curses, whispered insinuations, lies, while he revelled in the illusion
-of cruelty that was lending a false reality to the thin futilities
-of his mind and flesh. With a mixture of brutality and delicately
-simulated caresses, he overawed these women and they felt themselves
-in the presence of a charming, abstracted fiend, whose kaleidoscopic
-insincerity only made them long to change it to a gesture of actual
-love. He sought the company of thieves and hoodlums, and at first they
-distrusted him because his restrained manners and gently removed look
-were not proper credentials, but when they saw how eager he was for the
-impact of fists, and how he could take a blow and rise with a grin of
-stunned delight, they accepted him as an eccentric brother. They did
-not know that these actions were not born of courage, but were caused
-by a gigantic longing for physical pain--pain that could shock his numb
-spirit into a feeling of sharply hideous communion with an actual world.
-
-But finally this life began to weary him because it could not reach
-the flimsy loneliness that stood within him. He carried within him
-at all times an audience of ghostly thoughts and emotions, and they
-were at last becoming bored with the stolen melodrama. He determined
-to practice an economy in movements and words, and he walked alone
-at night and on streets where the possibility of meeting someone who
-knew him would be distant. He watched the syncopated gliding of people
-with the irritation of a stranger. The men and women who drifted or
-bobbed along were cardboard mannikins to him and he vainly tried to
-give life to their flatness and lack of color. Sometimes he would
-pause and touch his arm and face, wondering at the odd inadequateness
-of their presence. Olga had become a living but invisible being who
-was constantly groping for him, with eyes unused to the outlines of
-earth, and sometimes finding his shoulder in a fleeting and accidental
-way. When this happened, he would turn around abruptly and berate his
-inability to extract her form from the concealing air. At such times
-he would often speak to her. “Olga ... Olga ... what is this unsought
-blindness that has come to both of us?” he would cry into the night
-air of a street. “A cruel chicanery ... a blurred and simple pause ...
-a little fantasy within a huge one? Am I a coward rolling in the mud
-that stretches before a vast gate? Life seems a fantastic conspiracy,
-panting and rattling in its efforts to hide the emptiness beneath
-it.... Olga ... take me to your burnished hermitage ... I am tired.”
-
-He would walk on, trying to imagine what her answer had been, and
-winning an elusive and deliberately wrought consolation that stayed
-for an hour and then gradually departed. His life had settled into the
-recurrence of these reactions, when a second invitation arrived from
-his wealthy uncle in the southern city, and he had accepted merely
-because he wanted a new arena for his struggle with a discredited
-reality--fresher targets and a change in the illusion’s surface.
-
-And now he was seated in the train that slowly rolled through the
-outskirts of a southern city and giving his eyes to the squalid negro
-section that unfurled before him....
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XVII.
-
-
-He turned from the window and strove to place an expression of
-close-lipped serenity on his face, for the train had almost reached
-the station. He had not seen his uncle for years and he played with
-dim memories of the man’s appearance. When he walked down the station
-platform he found that his uncle, Doctor Max Edleman, was waiting just
-outside of the iron gates. Doctor Edleman was a man of sixty years,
-sturdily rotund, with a tall body that was beginning to be disgraced by
-its expanding paunch. His head was unusually large and ruled by small
-blue eyes and the sharply turned breadth of a nose. His great, thick
-lips were tightly withdrawn to an outline of benign patience and his
-florid face ridiculed the trace of wrinkles that had flicked it. His
-greyish blonde hair was still fairly abundant, and all of him suggested
-a man who was uniquely intact because he had scarcely ever allowed life
-to clutch him familiarly. Since he was an Alsatian Jew, he kissed Carl
-carefully on both cheeks, and this annoyed Carl, not from the usual
-masculine reasons, but because he felt that this was a jocose insult
-from a fantasy that despised him, but he submitted with a flitting
-grimace.
-
-He took Carl to an automobile and after they had been driven away he
-smothered him with questions.
-
-“Your dear mother tells me that you have been acting queerly of late,”
-he said, in the heavily-measured way of speaking he had. “You have been
-refusing to speak to anyone and staying away from home--bringing worry
-to your dear mother. It seems to me that you have given enough care and
-trouble to your parents, and that it’s about time that you acted like a
-normal man. I understand that you have been dissipating and going with
-dissolute people. You are twenty-five now and there is no longer any
-excuse for this wildness. What have you to say for yourself?”
-
-“Don’t ask me to explain things that you couldn’t understand,” said
-Carl, returning to act in the falsely unpleasant play. “I have had a
-great grief and I’m trying in my own way to make it a friend of mine.
-If I tell you that your questions bring back wounds, I am sure that you
-will not desire to hurt me.”
-
-He gave his uncle words that would appease and disarm him, while at
-the same time evading his queries, and this game gave him a smooth
-semblance of life.
-
-“So-o, so-o, I have no desire to penetrate your secrets,” said Dr.
-Edleman, in a kindly voice that feebly strove to comprehend. “I am
-simply advising you to pull yourself together. Show some consideration
-for the people around you.”
-
-He continued to offer the benevolent adulterations of his advice, and
-as Carl listened he suddenly thought of a high-school teacher who had
-once rebuked him for bringing to class a theme entitled “Women Who Walk
-the Streets,” and with a vaporously swinging amusement in his heart he
-almost felt human again. This fantasy could hold a blustering smirk
-now and then--its only extenuation. But the nearness vanished as his
-uncle’s voice became a swindling monotone, angering him with its formal
-pretense of life. Carefully, and with a ghostlike insincerity that
-bribed his voice with lightness, he gave words that could hold this man
-at arm’s length. The strain of adapting his words to the intelligence
-of the man beside him brought him a closer relation to the bickering
-phantasmagoria of men and their motives without in any way summoning
-his own thoughts and emotions. Dr. Edleman felt that his nephew was
-skillfully attempting to defend a selfish past and bringing into the
-service of this motive a graceful keenness of mind, but beyond this
-point Carl’s words were unable to affect him.
-
-“I have always admired your brilliancy,” he said, “and I only wish that
-you would use it in the right way. A young man must pay some attention
-to the desires and opinions of older people. It will be a glad day for
-me when I see that you are using your talents to bring happiness to
-other people. A glad day.”
-
-Carl gave a sigh to the grave dullness that marched forth in his
-uncle’s voice and meditated upon the curious differences in sound
-with which people petted their limitations and discretions. These
-differences were known as words, and when they pleased a great number
-of people they were hailed as symbols of genius or power, but Carl
-could see no distinction between any of them. Like a horde of tired
-servants, they pranced to the prides and hatreds of men and then
-returned to their common grave, and only their exact arrangement gave
-them a flitting assumption of life. “What is the difference between
-this old man and myself? Several keys to false doors of thought and
-emotion, misplaced or lost in his youth and found in mine.” Through
-reiterating these plausibilities he tried to give bulk and texture to
-the fantasy of existence.
-
-The automobile stopped before the Edleman home, which was a large
-two-story structure--a partial reproduction of the Colonial period
-modified to conform to the more exuberant inclinations of an Alsatian
-Jew. Four broad, high wooden pillars, painted white, rose over a wide
-veranda and ended in a slanting roof of black slate, and the walls were
-of red brick courted by an abundance of vines. A large garden, with
-tons of fruit trees and brilliant episodes of flowers, surrounded the
-house and was enclosed by a level hedge of shrubs and a low iron fence.
-An impression of dreamlessly cluttered luxury, verging in spots upon
-bland somnolence, proclaimed the empty heart of the place, but it was
-almost a distinct flattery to Carl, who had grown tired of aggressive
-angles and plain surfaces. Here, at least, the mirage held a sleek
-flirtation with bunches of color and burdened curves.
-
-His aunt Bertha, a short, stout woman in a gown of brown taffeta and
-white lace, welcomed him in a babbling and languid fashion and showed
-him to his room. She was a softly shallow woman whose major interests
-were card parties and the lingering intricacies of gossip. The flabby
-roundness of her face was in the last grip of middle age and her mind
-was as scanty and precisely glistening as the greyish-brown hair that
-slanted back from her low forehead. After the dinner, she hurried off
-to the mildly mercenary rites of a bridge whist party and Carl was
-left to wander idly around the garden. He sat on the grass beneath a
-persimmon tree and played with lazy, cruel thoughts in which he slapped
-a man’s face or tortured a woman’s cheek, still moved by his old mania
-to profane the empty dream which life had become to him, forcing it
-into a vigorous duplicate of reality.
-
-The bright afternoon, with its myriads of shrilly clear and hissing
-sounds, was like a troubled falsetto rapture and he weakly fought to
-bring it nearer to his senses. As he sat beneath the tree he resolved
-to give his mind some labor with which it could transform the vision to
-a more solid picture, and he thought of the people who would soon be
-embarrassing him with their mouths and eyes. They were Jews of a kind
-that had rapidly spread over the south. The older people among them had
-migrated to the south some forty years previously and had gradually won
-large or comfortable fortunes by means of their thriftiness and trading
-abilities. They were now contented grand-and great-grand-parents,
-surrounded by two generations of their offspring, and all of them were
-strangely indifferent to the austere mysticism for which the Jewish
-race is so verbosely noted. Dreamless, voluble, self-assured, they
-angled with their religion in a half-hearted way and blackmailed, with
-money, the occasional flutters of mental curiosity. They had picked up
-several mannerisms of the south--softly drawling voices and unhurried
-movements--and the only things that distinguished them as Jews were
-the curved gusto of their faces and the fact that they mingled only
-with each other--a last, lukewarm trace of loyalty left by the surge of
-centuries of past incidents.
-
-Carl went into the house and returned, with paper and pencil, to his
-station beneath the persimmon tree. He strove to write a poem to the
-woman whom he had lost. It was a torture that, like a starved monster,
-devoured the softer spaces within his heart. It was as though he were
-endeavoring to compress the ruins of an entire world, making them
-narrower and narrower, more and more alive, until at last they formed
-the body of a woman. The effort brought him an actual physical pain;
-drops of sweat were born on his forehead, and his spirit reeled like a
-mesmerized, beaten drunkard. “All of life is a lie unless I make her
-appear on this paper,” he cried aloud to the persimmon-tree leaves,
-for the lack of better gods. He detested his own futility and sought
-to avenge himself upon it. When the poem was finished he fell into
-a troubled, plundered sleep in which his consciousness busily made
-reports that were unheeded. He could still see the trees and flowers,
-but they were like the edge of the universe miraculously brought near
-to his eyes. Finally, with an effort like a straight line thrusting
-aside several worlds, he roused himself and read the poem. It failed
-to satisfy him; it was a tangle of treacherous promises and pleading
-fragments--the line of one of her arms, with an ashen delicateness;
-the nervously boyish rebuke of her eyes; the tenuous defiance of her
-heart; the curled merriments of her hair--fragments fastened to a slip
-of white paper and lacking the great surge of breath that could have
-whirled them into a speaking whole. He had written other poems to her
-and they had produced the same result; but still, huddled under the
-tree, he continued to write, much like a dying man who has no choice
-save to gasp for breath, only in his case it was a ghost that struggled
-to avoid a second death. The ghost was seeking to escape a final
-extinction. He wrote until the lengthened shadow of the tree told him
-that he must return to the house; but it took him at least ten minutes
-before he could censure his face and control his breath. At last, with
-the thinly passive mask once more adjusted and held by the slenderest
-of threads, he walked from the garden.
-
-At supper he met his cousin, Dr. Joseph Rosenstein, who was living at
-the Edleman home and who treated him with a suspecting affability. The
-presence of a poet is always a vague challenge to those people who feel
-that he is somehow at variance with the complacent finalities of their
-lives, but who cannot draw the difference into a clearer antagonism.
-For this reason they try to cover their distrust with a nervous and
-questioning amiability. After jovially advising Carl to write a sonnet
-to a doctor, protesting to a great admiration for the prettiness
-of poetry, and asking Carl whether he didn’t think that practical
-people were also of some use in the world, Rosenstein deserted the
-farce and began to discuss the technical details of an operation with
-Dr. Edleman. Bertha Edleman uttered some placid remarks concerning
-the possibility of Carl’s writing short stories that would bring
-him a great deal of money; inquired after his parents in a detailed
-but listless way; and then, with more vigor, commenced to speak of
-engagements, marriages and divorces within her immediate circle. Dr.
-Edleman, by turns waggish and blunt, presided over the groups of
-corrupted words. Since Carl was anxious not to provoke these people, he
-stooped to the task of uttering pleasantly obvious remarks in a timid
-and deliberate fashion, and since they secretly felt that his work gave
-him a rank lower than theirs, they liked the subdued and abashed manner
-in which he spoke.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XVIII.
-
-
-After that evening he managed to protect his loneliness with clever
-words. He told the Edlemans that he was looking for material for short
-stories and that he intended to roam about the city; and, elated at
-his purpose, they did not object. Since most of his relatives were
-still displaying their dignity, jewelry, and card-playing abilities at
-northern summer resorts, he found it easy to be alone.
-
-In the midst of his restless, empty wanderings he often sat for a
-while in a little park that rustled and nodded upon the top of a bluff
-overlooking a broad river. There he would stare out at the wide,
-yellowish-brown flat of water, and the dull green convolutions of the
-distant shore, and the water would become an ethereal canvas where
-he painted fugitive salutes to the woman who had fled from life’s
-semblances. Under the spell of a melting daze he would sit for hours,
-almost unconscious of the fact that he held a body of slowly breathing
-flesh. At one end of the park the line of benches turned sharply in
-toward the city, and this shaded place, guarded by bushes and trees,
-was known as “Rounder’s Corner.” It was frequented by thieves, drug
-peddlers, sly, lacquered women and an occasional vagrant, and they
-gathered there from twilight on and drained the fierce insincerities
-of conversation and whiskey, with sometimes the lucid edge of cocaine.
-Since Carl came to this spot only during the afternoons, he did not see
-these people until, one evening, he managed to absent himself from the
-Edleman home on the pretense of desiring a trip on a river steamboat,
-and strolled into the park.
-
-He sat on a bench and looked around him, trying to become interested
-in the immediate contortions of the fantasy. One glance told him the
-identity of the social circle into which he had dropped and he felt
-a jerk of attention, for the more openly rough and cruel people in
-life were to him reflections of his ghostly self, spied in a coarsely
-exaggerated mirror but none the less valid. Fresh from the lazy
-inanities of the Edleman house, he felt a little baffled vigor--the
-ghost lamenting its lack of exercise--and he longed to roll once
-more in that plastic phenomenon which men insist on calling mud. It
-was only through plastering himself with the concentrated moistness
-of earth that he could force himself to believe, for a time, in the
-reality of life, and he welcomed his chance to repeat this process. He
-scanned the whispering, laughing, loose-faced people around him and
-turned over in his mind different ways of approaching them, since he
-knew how easy it was to heap fuel upon their suspicions.
-
-A woman dropped down beside him on the bench. She was young in actual
-years--not more than twenty-three--but her body had been slashed
-by a premature herald of middle age and her rounded face was too
-softly plump and wrinkled a little under the eyes and below the chin.
-Youth and age were stiffly twined about her in lines that protested
-against each other. Her body was short and held a slenderness that
-was unnaturally puffed a bit here and there, giving an impression of
-incongruous inflation rather than of solid flesh. Her black hair was
-a plentiful mass of artificial curls and pressed against a wide straw
-hat, festooned with tulips made of gaudy cloth, and she was clad in
-loosely white muslin with a crimson sash around her waist. The effect
-was that of a school girl playing the part of a street walker in
-an amateur theatrical and, if you looked at her clothes alone, the
-illusion remained. It was only destroyed by a glance at her face, for
-the outward costumes of reality are often unconsciously amateurish, as
-though they were striving to obliterate the professional aspect held
-by the faces of human beings--a psychic confession. Men and women can
-never quite memorize their parts in life and their clothes sometimes
-express this absent-mindedness.
-
-As he looked at this woman Carl noticed that her eyes were not those
-of the usual flesh trader--shifting and infantile--but were filled
-with a tense distraction. The mere sullen aftermath of whiskey, or
-the departure of a man? No, it almost seemed that she was actually
-brooding over emotions that had removed her leagues from the bench
-against which her body was pressed. Eyes are often unwitting traitors
-and they tell the truth more readily than the rest of the face, or
-words, since human beings are not so conscious of what their eyes are
-announcing. The two holes in the mask of the face are often transparent
-or careless admissions, while the remainder of the face is immersed
-in a more successful deception. Carl was interested by the fact that
-this woman seemed to ignore his presence and was staring straight ahead
-of her. He began to believe that her indifference was genuine and he
-watched her more closely. Finally she tossed her head, with a gesture
-that expressed the defiant return of consciousness, and glanced at
-him. Then she threw him the usual “Hello, honey,” and with a disgusted
-grimace he dismissed a certain ghostly audience within him, telling it
-that the play would not begin. For a while he spoke to her, throwing
-slang pebbles at her with an oppressed exactitude and brushing aside
-her lustreless insinuations, a little weary of the unconvincing comedy.
-Suddenly the stunt nauseated him and he fled back to his own metaphoric
-tongue.
-
-“Do you see that woman passing by?” he asked. “She has a face half like
-a twitching mouse and half like a poised cat. I have known such women.
-They are continually robbing certain men of emotions in order meekly to
-hand back their thefts to other men. With a mixture of cruelty and weak
-submission they entertain their own emptiness.”
-
-He looked away from her, expecting a silence or the affront of cracked
-laughter and preparing to leave. Her answer swung his head toward her.
-
-“You may be speaking to such a woman. Life has undressed me to all
-people except myself, and I don’t know what I am. I think that I was
-born to be a nun, but something kicked me down a dirty hallway and when
-I woke up there were many hands reaching for me and it didn’t seem
-important to me whether they took me or not. But I think that I was
-born to be a nun.... Does that interest you?”
-
-He stared at her with his mouth almost describing a perfect O and his
-eyes opened to a wild uncertainty. For a moment he felt that they were
-both quite dead and that her spirit had been ravished by waiting words.
-
-“In God’s name, what have you been doing?” he cried.
-
-“Playing a part, with the assistance of your indifferent slang,” she
-said.
-
-“Why?”
-
-“I started out by talking to you as I do to most men. You broke into
-a rough speech and I parried as usual. The evening was commencing in
-its usual convincing manner. Then I began to see that you were acting.
-There was a strain on your face, and sometimes you stopped in the
-middle of a delicate simile.... I knew that I might be wrong, so I kept
-on talking as you expected me to talk.”
-
-On her face was the smile of a beggar whose tinselled metaphors have
-been pummeled and disheveled by surface realities. The plump curves of
-her face seemed to fit less snugly beneath the flat deceit of rouge.
-
-“I am a fool,” he said. “Your eyes told me something, but I spat upon
-it. I think that you had better leave me.”
-
-“I have no intention of leaving you,” she said.
-
-They sat and stared at each other.
-
-“Do you give yourself to different men every night?” he asked, as
-though his sophistication, in an instant curve, had retreated to an
-anxious child long concealed within him.
-
-“I give them what they are able to take, and that is little. They want
-to clutch me for a time, but I don’t feel them unless they stop my
-breathing. A man walks into a house, wipes his feet on the mat, spits
-into one of the cuspidors, and leaves with a vacant smile on his face.”
-
-“Why do you want them to come in?”
-
-“They give me money for whiskey and leisure time in which I can read.
-I’ve never been able to find a simpler way of getting these things.”
-
-The explanation was clear and delicate to him.
-
-“Of course, the whiskey makes you sneer like a queen, and the books
-bring you affairs with better men,” he said.
-
-“All that I want to do is to pray to my thoughts with appropriate
-words, and every night until two in the morning I pay for the granting
-of this wish.... But I think that I was born to be a nun.”
-
-“I think that I was born to be a monk, covering the walls of his cell
-with little images, all of them contorting his bright hatred for a
-world,” he said. “I think that something also kicked me into a mob of
-prattling marionettes, leaving me exposed to the shower of unintended
-blows. I have often looked behind me and vainly tried to see who this
-first enemy was, but I am afraid that he does not return until you die.”
-
-With their silence they continued the dialogue for a time.
-
-“Have you a man who takes your money and kicks you?” he asked.
-
-“No. Every now and then some dope peddler pays me a visit, but I have a
-gun and I know how to use it. I sent one of them to a hospital once.
-They call me Crazy Georgie May and they’re always afraid of something
-that they can’t understand.”
-
-“I have a proposition to make to you,” he said. “We’ll live together
-without touching each other and each of us will be the monk and nun
-that he should have been. I am a ghost who wants to return to life
-and you are a living person who wants to go back to the ghost that
-was kicked into an insincere ritual of flesh. We’ll erect a unique
-monastery of thought and emotion, and pay for it with the slavery of
-your hands or mine.... Will you live with me in this fashion?”
-
-“Yes, if only to see whether it can be done,” she answered instantly.
-
-They rose from the bench and walked away together--a noble rascal and
-an ascetic prostitute.
-
-
-
-
- _Typography and Printing by Printing Service Company, Chicago._
-
- _Electrotyped by Simpson-Bevans Company, Chicago._
-
-
-
-
- Transcriber’s Notes
-
-
- A number of typographical errors were corrected silently.
-
- Cover image is in the public domain.
-
- Table of contents was augmented with chapter references.
-
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