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Title: Blackguard

Author: Maxwell Bodenheim

Illustrator: Wallace Smith

Release date: September 5, 2021 [eBook #66224]

Language: English

Credits: 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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