would ponder over them before they apply the term art to 736 pages
devoted to rumination of what Ellis calls “marginal elements” of life.
And what a life! In what respect does the life of Witla, the “genius,”
deserve so much elaboration and painstaking analysis? The hero’s only
distinction is his sexual looseness. But he is not a Sanin who gratifies
his animalistic instincts with contempt for motivation or justification.
Witla, and Dreiser, and Scavenger, are reformed Puritans. When Witla
falls in “love” with the round arm of a laundress, or with the golden
hair of a country girl, or with the black eyes of an art-model, or with
the perfect form of a gambler’s wife, or with the innocence of a mama’s
girl; when in each case the lover swears and damns and lyricizes in bad
English and strives to win and possess the object d’art, Mr. Dreiser
appears from behind the sinner, pats him on the shoulder, and flings
defiantly into the faces of the terrified philistines: “Witla is
all-right. He is an artist. He loves beautiful things. See, God damn
you?!” Is he? Throughout the long book we are told time and again that
he is an _artist_. Unless we take the author’s word for it we are
inclined to doubt it very much. True, an artist loves beauty; but does
he necessarily desire to possess the object of his admiration? Does not
the contemplation of a beautiful arm or sunset or flower or vase or rug
bring the artist complete satisfaction and possession? I do not condemn
Witla; although I dislike him, for he is a loud mediocrity. There is a
Witla in every one of us men; but we take our Witla as our animalistic
self, not as the artistic.
Ah, dear Scavenger, I do love rugs. But there are rugs and rugs.
The Scavenger’s Swan Song
What a remarkable fellow my friend the Incurable is! I talk to him about
rugs, quite casually, as we wait for a car, and what does this devil of
a psychologist do but walk deep into my soul on one of them. I read him
a Huneker article on Huysmans which he remarks is excellent at the time,
only to find (almost too late) that I should have read Havelock
Ellis....
How I envy him this distinction of having read Havelock Ellis instead of
James Huneker, of being subtle enough to prefer the deep, metaphysical
didactics concerning Life (with a capital L, Miss Editor) to the
contemplation of that most seductive of literary signposts—Huneker. But
it is so foolish to quibble about books.... If I had anything else to do
I wouldn’t read them....
Puritan, indeed! That is too much. I suspect it is only a withering
retort, a ferocious counter to the “academic charges.” But what of
Dreiser—poor, little, smug, banal, and illiterate Dreiser? You should
have spared him. You remember on the elevated going home one night how I
pleaded with you to spare him, how I argued, defended, fought? Ah, I am
shamed. I feel somehow responsible for this annihilation of a man, aye a
good writer, who was fast becoming one of the great men of America....
When you speak of music everything becomes clear to me. Here am I who
like music well enough to have studied it for ten years, who can
improvise as well on the violin as on the typewriter, but who
nevertheless have been denied the capacity for experiencing the critical
disorganization of the soul at the sound of bad music, and nervous
exaltations at the sound of good. I suffer and gloat—but subjectively.
To me music is a background.... It is not my natural form of
self-expression. Neither are rugs.
And I haven’t time to be a connoisseur. Later—perhaps. But now I reduce
all such differences of attitude as yours and mine to the everlasting
wrangle between the connoisseur and the improviser. Yes?
Puritan! That is nothing. Later you will call me charlatan because I
sometimes compose paradoxes and even epigrams. Culture abhors an
epigram.
Ho! ho! the devil take you and all critics. We ride the crests—Miss
Editor and I. Once my friend the Incurable rode the crests and they
washed him up on a foreign shore, and now he calls the crests “foam” or
“emotion for emotion’s sake” or a lot of other rather true things. To
ride on the crests as long as you can—that’s the life (a small “l,” Miss
Editor); to think one thing today and another tomorrow, to have lots of
fun, to yell while you’re young, to believe Havelock Ellis a bearded old
lady—in short, “klushnik,” to follow the care-free, tortuous path of
improvisation, self-expression, instead of pursuing the lugubrious
catacombs of criticism and connoisseurship.
As for my article, “The Dionysian Dreiser,” I will not defend that. Your
abuse of that writing coupled with your smug praise of Ben Hecht’s
atrocious poetry (concerning which I agree with my friend “Bubble”
Bodenheim, who told me it was so bad on the whole that he couldn’t get
it out of his mind) is inconsistent.
Ah, friend, may my death and Dreiser’s be forever on your conscience.
“THE SCAVENGER.”
Dregs
BEN HECHT
Life
The sun was shining in the dirty street.
Old women with shapeless bodies waddled along on their way to market.
Bearded old men who looked like the fathers of Jerusalem walked
flatfooted, nodding back and forth.
“The tread of the processional surviving in Halsted street,” thought
Moisse, the young dramatist who was moving with the crowd.
Children sprawled in the refuse-laden alleys. One of them ragged and
clotted with dirt stood half-dressed on the curbing and urinated into
the street.
Wagons rumbled, filled with fruits and iron and rags and vegetables.
Human voices babbled above the noises of the traffic. Moisse watched the
lively scene.
“Every day it’s the same,” he thought; “the same smells, the same noise
and people swarming over the pavements. I am the only one in the street
whose soul is awake. There’s a pretty girl looking at me. She suspects
the condition of my soul. Her fingers are dirty. Why doesn’t she buy
different shoes? She thinks I am lost. In five years she will be fat. In
ten years she will waddle with a shawl over her head.”
The young dramatist smiled.
“Good God,” he thought, “where do they come from. Where are they going?
No place to no place. But always moving, shuffling, waddling, crying
out. The sun shines on them. The rain pours on them. It burns. It
freezes. Today they are bright with color. Tomorrow they are grey with
gloom. But they are always the same, always in motion.”
The young dramatist stopped on the corner and looking around him spied a
figure sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against the wall of a building.
The figure was an old man.
He had a long white beard.
He had his legs tucked under him and an upturned tattered hat rested in
his lap.
His thin face was raised and the sun beat down on it, but his eyes were
closed.
“Asleep,” mused Moisse.
He moved closer to him.
The man’s head was covered with long silky white hair that hung down to
his neck and hid his ears. It was uncombed. His face in the sun looked
like the face of an ascetic, thin, finely veined.
He had a long nose and almost colorless lips and the skin on his cheeks
was white. It was drawn tight over his bones, leaving few wrinkles.
An expression of peace rested over him—peace and detachment. Of the
noise and babble he heard nothing. His eyes were closed to the crowded
frantic street.
He sat, his head back, his face bathed in the sun, smileless and
dreaming.
“A beggar,” thought Moisse, “asleep, oblivious. Dead. All day he sits in
the sun like a saint, immobile. Like one of the old Alexandrian
ascetics, like a delicately carved image. He is awake in himself but
dead to others. The waves cannot touch him. His thoughts, oh to know his
thoughts and his dreams?”
Suddenly the eyes of the young dramatist widened. He was looking at the
beggar’s long hair that hung to his neck.
“It’s moving,” he whispered half aloud. He came closer and stood over
the old man and gazed intently at the top of his head.
The hair was swaying faintly, each separate fiber moving alone....
It shifted, rose imperceptibly and fell. It quivered and glided....
“Lice,” murmured Moisse.
He watched.
Silent and asleep the old man sat with his thin face to the sun and his
hair moved.
Vermin swarmed through it creeping, crawling, tiny and infinitesimal.
Every strand was palpitating, shuddering under their mysterious energy.
At first Moisse could hardly make them out but his eyes gradually grew
accustomed to the sight. And as he watched he saw the hair swell like
waves riding over the water, saw it drop and flutter, coil and uncoil of
its own accord.
Vermin raised it up, pulled it out, streaming up and down tirelessly in
vast armies.
They crawled furiously like dust specks blown thick through the white
beard.
They streamed and shifted and were never still.
They moved in and out, from no place to no place, but always moving,
frantic, and frenzied.
An old woman passed and with a shake of her head dropped two pennies
into the upturned hat. Moisse hardly saw her. He saw only the
palpitating swarms that were now racing, easily visible, through the
grey white hair.
Some ventured down over the white ascetic face, crawling in every
direction, traveling around the lips and over the closed eyes, emerging
suddenly in thick streams from behind the covered ears and losing
themselves under the ever moving beard.
And Moisse, his senses strained, thought he heard a noise—a faint
crunching noise.
He listened.
The noise seemed to grow louder. He began to itch but he remained
bending over the head. He could hear them, like a faraway murmur, a
purring, uncertain sound.
“They’re shouting and groaning, crying out, weeping and laughing,” he
mused. “It is life ... life....”
He looked up and down the crowded burning street with its frantic crowd,
and smiled.
“Life,” he repeated....
He walked away. Before him floated the hair of the beggar moving as if
stirred by a slow wind, and he itched.
“But who was the old man?” he thought.
A young woman, plump and smiling, jostled him. He felt her soft hip
pressing against him for a moment.
A child running barefoot through the street brushed against his legs. He
felt its sticky fingers seize him for an instant and then the child was
gone. On he walked.
Three young men confronted him for a second time. He passed between two
of them, squeezed by their shoulders.
A shapeless old woman bumped him with her back as she shuffled past.
Two children dodged in and out screaming and seized his arm to turn on.
The young dramatist stopped and remained standing still, looking about
him.
Then he laughed.
“Life,” he murmured again; and
“I am the old man,” he added, “I ... I....”
Depths
Crowds began to come out of the buildings.
They came in streams and broad waves, breaking in a black sweep over the
pavements and spreading into a thick long mass that moved forward. The
glassy lights cut the twilight drizzel with their yellow fire. The
tumult grew until up and down the street an unceasing din sounded,
shrieking, roaring, clanging noises.
Moisse, the young dramatist, stood against one of the office buildings
as the throngs spilled past him on their ways home. His eyes were fixed
on the distant gloom of the sky which hung beyond the drizzel and the
fuzzy glare of light like a vast black froth.
“It is so silent,” mused Moisse. “Millions of miles without a sound. Man
and his accomplishments are infinitesimal,” went on the young dramatist
as the swelling throng brushed and buffeted against him, “but his ego is
infinite. Only by thought can he reach the stars.”
He was thoughtless for a moment, holding his position with difficulty as
the crowds pressed past. Then he resumed:
“None of them looks at me. None of them imagines I am thinking of the
stars. How startled these fat evil-smelling men and women would be if
they could see my thought for a moment as they crashed along their tiny
ways. But nevertheless I don’t eat tonight,” he murmured suddenly, as if
awakening. And the idea plunged him into a series of reflections from
which he emerged with a frown and looked about him.
A short thick man with an unshaven face was shuffling past. His skin was
broken under his growth of beard with red and purple sores. His mouth
hung open, his eyes stared ahead of him and his head was bent forward.
Moisse thought of the body concealed by the layers of caked rags which
covered the man, and shuddered.
“He never bathes,” mused the young dramatist. “I wonder what a creature
like that does.” And he followed him slowly.
At the corner the man stopped and blew his nose violently with his
fingers. Another block and he stopped again, bending over in the midst
of the crowd and straightening with a cigar butt in his hand. He eyed
the thing critically. It was flattened at the end where feet had passed
over it. The man thrust it between his lips and shuffled on.
In a vestibule he extracted a blackened match from his pocket and with
shaking fingers lighted the butt. When it burned he blew a cloud of
smoke, and taking it out of his mouth regarded it with satisfaction.
Several in the throng noticed him, their eyes resting with disapproval
and sometimes hate upon the figure. Once a crossing policeman spied him
and followed him with his gaze until he was lost to view.
Moisse kept abreast of him and together they turned into an alley that
led behind a hotel. The man’s eyes never wavered, but remained fixed in
the direction he was moving.
The alley was dark. In the court that ran behind the hotel were several
large, battered cans that shone dully against the black wall. Debris
littered the ground. Looking furtively at the closed doors the man made
his way to one of the cans.
He lifted the cover cautiously and thrust his arm into its depths. For
several minutes he remained with his arm lost inside the refuse can.
“He’s found something,” whispered Moisse.
The man straightened. In his hand he held an object on which sparks
seemed to race up and down like blue insects.
He raised his find to his face and then thrust it into his pocket and
resumed his shuffle down the alley.
“To think,” mused Moisse, “of a man eating out of a garbage can. Either
he is inordinately hungry or careless to a point of ... of....”
He searched for a word that refused to appear and he followed slowly
after the man. In the dim light of a side street the man paused and took
out his booty. It was evidently the back of a fowl.
Standing still the man thrust it into his mouth, gnawing and tearing at
its bones. After he had eaten for several minutes he held it up to the
light and started picking at shreds of meat with his fingers. These he
licked off his hand.
The meal was at length finished. The man threw the gleaned bones away,
blew his nose and walked on.
Through the dark tumbled streets Moisse followed. The shuffling figure
fascinated him. He noted the gradually increasing degradation of the
neighborhood, the hovels that seemed like torn, blackened rags, the
broken streets piled with refuse and mud.
In front of a lighted house the man stopped. The curtains which hung
over the two front windows of the house were torn. One of them was half
destroyed and Moisse saw into the room in which a gas jet flickered and
which was empty.
The man walked up the steps and knocked at the door. It was opened.
“A woman,” whispered Moisse.
She vanished, and the man followed her. The two appeared in a moment in
the room with the gas light.
The woman was tall and thin, her hair hung down her back in two scimpy
braids. Her face was coated with paint and great hollows loomed under
her eyes.
The man walked to her, his open mouth widened in a grin.
“They’re talking,” murmured the young dramatist as he watched their
haggard faces move strangely. He noted the woman was dressed in a
wrapper, colorless and streaked.
“I wonder—” he began, but the scene captured his attention. He watched
absorbed. The woman was shaking her head and backing away from the man
who finally halted in the center of the room.
He lifted a foot from the floor and removed its shoe. Standing with the
shoe in his hand his eyes glistened at the woman who watched him with
her neck stretched forward and a sneer on her lips.
The man put his hand in the shoe and brought out a coin.
“A twenty-five cent piece,” muttered Moisse.
The man held it up in his fingers and laughed. His face distorted itself
into strange wrinkles when he laughed. Moisse who could not hear the
laugh saw only an imbecilic grimace. The woman took the coin, and left
the room.
She returned in a moment holding out her arms to the man.
He seized her, crushing her body against him until she was bent
backward. He pressed his face over her, his mouth still open, his eyes
staring.
The woman stared back and laughed, fastening her lips suddenly to his.
Losing his balance, the man staggered and the woman broke from his
grasp. He pounced on her, seizing her hand and jerking her against him.
As she held back he raised his fist and struck her fiercely in the face.
She swayed for an instant and then stood quiet.
Her lips began to smile and move in speech. The man shook his head
rapturously, rubbing his nose with a finger and panting.
Moisse turned away and walked slowly toward the town.
“Good God,” he murmured, “he’ll take his clothes off and she....”
His emotions began to trouble him. An unrest stirred his body.
“I should have gone in there and taken her away from him,” he mused, and
then with a shudder he walked on—smiling.
Gratitude
The avenue bubbled brightly under the grey rain.
The afternoon crowd had melted from the sidewalk, washed into hallways
and under awnings by the downpour.
It began to look like evening. A refreshing gloom settled over the
street.
The wind leaped out of alley courts and byways and raced over the
pavement accompanied by spattering arpeggios of rain.
Moisse, the young dramatist, turned into the avenue. His voluminous
black raincoat, reaching from his ears to his shoe tops, flapped in
front of him.
By exercising the most diligent effort, however, he managed rather to
saunter than walk, and he kept his eyes raptly fixed upon the deserted
stretch of shining cement.
As he moved peacefully along he repeated to himself:
“The rain leaps and pirouettes like a chorus of Russian elves. It jumps.
It bounces. It hops, skips, and runs. Flocks of little excited silver
birds are continually alighting around my feet and chattering in a
thousand voices. I should have been a poet.”
Removing his gaze from the ground he looked at the faces which lined the
buildings and floated like pale lamps in the darkened vestibules.
“Everyone is watching me,” he thought, “for in my attitude there is the
careless courage of an unconscious heroism. I stroll along indifferent
to the rain. It splashes down my neck. It takes the crease out of my
trousers. It trickles off the brim of my hat.
“And all this stamps me momentarily in these afflicted minds as an
unusual human.
“That one with the monogomistic side-whiskers is wondering what a queer
fellow I am.
“What can it be that engrosses my attention to the point of making me so
oblivious to the rain?
“And that fat woman with the face like a toy balloon is certain I will
catch my death of cold.
“The little girl with the wide eyes thinks I am in love.
“There is an infinite source of speculation in my simple conduct.”
The water was making headway down the back of his neck, but Moisse
hesitated and then abstained from adjusting his collar more firmly.
“They will notice it,” he thought, “and immediately I will lose the
distinctive aloofness which characterizes me now.”
So moving leisurely down the avenue Moisse, the young dramatist,
progressed, his eyes apparently unconscious of the scene before him, his
soul oblivious to the saturated world, and his mind occupied with
distant and mysterious thoughts.
The downpour began to assume the proportions of a torrent. Moisse
persisted in his tracks.
Someone touched his elbow.
He turned and found a little old man with faded eyes and threadbare,
dripping clothes smiling earnestly at his side.
The little old man was bent in the shoulders. His shirt had no collar.
His brown coat was buttoned to his neck.
His face screwed up by a sensitiveness to the cataract of drops beating
against it, was round and full of wrinkles.
It had the quizzical, goodnatured look of a fuzzy little dog.
His wet eyes that seemed to be swimming in a red moisture peered at
Moisse who was frowning.
“I’m hungry,” began the little old man, “I ain’t had anything to eat—”
“How much do you want?” inquired Moisse.
“Anything,” said the beggar.
The young dramatist felt in his pocket. A single half-dollar encountered
his fingers.
“I’ve only got a half-dollar,” he said, “I’ll get it changed. Come on.”
The two of them walked in silence, Moisse still sauntering, the little
old man bent over and looking as if he wanted to speak but was afraid of
dissipating a dream.
“Wait here,” Moisse said suddenly, “I’ll go in and get change.”
He stepped into the box office of one of the large moving-picture
theaters on the avenue and secured change.
The little old man had followed him inside the building, his eyes
watching him with an eager curiosity.
Moisse turned with the change to find the beggar at his elbow.
He handed him fifteen cents.
“What’s the matter?” he inquired. “Been drinking?”
“No, no,” said the beggar.
“Why haven’t you?” persisted Moisse frowning; “don’t you know there’s
nothing for you but drink. That’s what drink is for. Men like you.”
The faded eyes livened.
“Now you go and get yourself three good shots of booze,” went on Moisse,
“and you’ll be a new man for the rest of the day.”
The beggar had become excited.
His lips moved in a nervous delight but he uttered no sound. With the
fingers of his right hand he picked at the blackened and roughly-bitten
nails of his other. He cleared his throat and then as if suddenly
inspired, removed his drenched hat and raised his eyebrows.
Touched by the sincerity of the little old man’s emotions the young
dramatist reached into his pocket and brought forth another ten cent
piece.
“Here,” he said, “buy two more drinks.”
The little man seemed about to break into a dance. His face became
tinged with the pink of an old woman’s cheek.
The red moisture ran out of his eyes in two white tears. Moisse regarded
him, frowning.
“Once you were young as I am today,” said Moisse aloud, fastening his
eyes upon the top of the little old man’s head which seemed dirty and
bald despite the pale hair, and alive.
“Perhaps you had ambitions and then some commonplace occurred and you
lost them. And now you float around begging nickles. That’s interesting.
A little old man begging nickles in the rain.”
The beggar smiled eagerly and then ventured a slight laugh.
He came closer to Moisse and stood trembling.
“Asking for crumbs,” went on Moisse with a deepening frown, “cursed at
night when alone by memories that will not die. Eh?” He looked suddenly
into the faded eyes and smiled.
The little old man nodded his head vigorously. He caught his breath and
stood looking at Moisse with his mouth open and his cheeks wrinkled as
if he were about to cry.
His breath struck the young dramatist and he averted his nose.
“Strange,” resumed he, “now you have a quarter and I have a quarter and
still we remain so different. Isn’t it strange, old fellow? Yet it is
the inevitable inequality of men that makes us brothers.”
The beggar was about to speak. Moisse paused and looked with interest at
the round face, the quivering nostrils and the lips that were twitching
into speech.
“No one has talked to me like you,” he said, “no one.”
And he caught his breath and stared with a strange expression at his
benefactor.
He bit at a finger nail and lowered his head. He seemed suddenly in the
throes of a great mental struggle for his face had become earnest.
It endured for a moment and then he looked at Moisse.
“You—you want me to come along with you,” he said and he scratched at
the back of his ear.
“I’ll come along if you want me to,” he repeated.
“Come along? Where?” Moisse asked, his eyes awakening.
“Oh, anyplace,” said the little old man. “I ain’t particular, if you
ain’t.”
He was breathing quickly and he reached for the palm of his patron.
A deep light had come into his face. His faded eyes had grown stronger.
Their quizzical look was gone and they were burning in their wet depths.
They looked now with a maternal intensity into the eyes of Moisse and
their smile staggered the sophistication of the young dramatist.
The little old man continued to breathe hard until he began to quiver.
He suddenly assumed command.
“Come,” he said, seizing Moisse by the palm and squeezing it. “I know a
place we can go and get a room cheap and where we won’t be disturbed. It
ain’t so nice a place but come.”
He squeezed the palm he held for the second time.
The deep light that had come into his little dog’s face softened and two
tears rolled again out of his eyes.
He caught his breath in a sob.
“I—I don’t drink,” he said; “I’m hungry—but I can wait ... until we get
through.”
He was beaming coquettishly through his tears and fondling the young
dramatist’s hand.