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.