The East Park gasped its scanty green between the loom of the streets
of men and the black tumult of the river. Here he, sitting upon a
bench....
Before his eyes first, two boys playing tether-ball. One of them
strong and with fresh eyes swung his racket well: it rose from a
clear forearm, muscle moulded, mazed with faint gold sleeping hair.
His mouth shut firm as he stroked. Against him, a boy, shorter, dark,
older. He lunged with mouth slant open, and dull feet. One of his
eyes stared wide, the other was half shut. He lost swiftly.
The victor stood bored, easefully; looking beyond for a comrade who
did not come. Saliva wet the chin of the other, whose effort had been
great. His hand hung, palm forward, near his knee.
“Let’s try again,” he said. “You give me your side where the sun’s
not in my eyes. That’s fair.” They exchanged places. The battle went
on, the same.
Karl was very tired. He leaned back in his bench.
In three straight strokes came to his passive eyes sky, river, park.
The sky was steadfast and still. The river was dense and still, boats
and waves moving upon the river were like the shiver of sun-motes
upon a steadfast sky. The park swayed under the stillness of sky
and water. Its swaying was a word that came from moveless lips;
its swaying was a word issued from moveless lips. Three horizontal
strokes in the eyes of Karl, of a world that did not move.
Stillness came within him.
He turned his head from side to side, as within steadfastness, not
stirring it. He saw no more, no less, by turning his head. He was
within a focus where all was steadfast and where stillness was all.
He moved his hands, and felt how he was wrapped in movelessness. He
was not prisoned. He felt free, fluent, felt the accessibility of
flight within stillness, within changelessness as within air.
He sat upright on his bench and was not tired.
He swung his left arm slowly under his face; he felt how the world
swung with him so that naught had moved.
Upon the cuff of his left sleeve a spot caught him and made him
focus his eyes.... A cockroach moved on his cuff. It moved. It moved
against the world. It lied.
It flowed into the mass of his right hand. It was crushed. It was
killed.
He said aloud: “I am sorry, life. But I cannot have you around.” He
was not surprised at his words.
But his words were another stroke, perpendicular to the three-fold
stroke of park and river and sky. A stroke cutting along and lifting
a veil before his eyes. The movelessness of life won by this fourth
stroke of his words another dimension still. So it was that things
seemed to happen. Within his immobile vision, he watched things
happen ... people move, sun slant farther beneath the green fingers
of trees ... as if this fourth stroke of his words saying, “Things
happen,” were a knife cutting a cord, unfolding a magic parchment.
Men sat upon benches as he sat upon a bench. Men had feet on a
pavement as he had feet on a pavement. Men had faces written with
thought as he had a written face. All this he saw as if it were
happening just now. There was ease in his soul which took each
happening and put it away and knew that all was one.
A man with a black, thick, filthy beard, black, bushed eyebrows
beneath which glistened black eyes, a man with a nose inordinately
long, falling sheer from his sooty brow, moved upon legs that carried
him circularly, level, as if they were wheels ... moved about. He
dipped his talonous hand into a refuse can: his shoulders swung like
the walking-beam of a boat. He dipped the other hand. There was
refuse in his hand. He put it in his mouth. He dove under benches; he
ransacked the scanty grass; he sought refuse. He put it in his mouth.
As he ate, his black eyes looked at Karl; they gleamed with a joy so
full that Karl breathed against the glisten of his eyes sparking the
air.
A little man with a face ghostly white, lips red like a gash of
blood soaking through chalk, a little man with up-pointed shoulders
and sleeves that were tatters to the elbow, moved, isolate, intent;
picking up scraps of paper. Each scrap his fingers feverishly
smoothed, his lean eyes bent and read what was there to read. Then
his fingers tossed the paper from his eyes behind his back ... eyes
roaming, roaming to another scrap.
As he read each message, his lips moved; as his lips moved they bled.
A man wide as a hogshead, short as a boy, wider than long, black as
black earth, a negro dwarf with a huge head sat with legs dangling
from a bench and looked at Karl. Karl saw him. The dwarf raised a
hand to his head and doffed his derby hat. Courteously he smiled,
swinging his hat and his arm. He had white separate teeth and no
lips. Beneath the frowze of his muddy trousers were patent leather
boots. And they dangled.
As he bowed, Karl knew that within the patent leather boots his toes
were twitching.
Karl sat easefully and still, and was not surprised to find beside
him on the bench the bearded tramp whom he had seen so often, here
and elsewhere, on his walks.
The tramp had always interested him; he had always wondered what
could be his story. But a terrible reticence, savage or divine,
fended this shambling blond man who with great tender eyes, long
beard and skin transparent, blue-veined, now sat beside him. This
man, he felt, speaks to no one. There is an embryon word, yet dumb,
sheathed by his presence. They had sat before in this park on a
single bench; it had been impossible to touch his eyes.
Slight and frail man beside him. Karl did not turn his head to look
at him. By virtue of the four-stroked vision within which he dwelt,
he saw him clear with his eyes beyond.
He saw between the straight, blond beard and the arching forehead
touched with delicate hair, a face young and worn. Sunken cheeks with
blue shadows; blue eyes gleaming in red sick lids; a hidden mouth; a
nose straight and fine and singularly sharp. He saw, lost within the
aged suit of brown, a tenuous body, and at the hip beside him a huge
excrescence ... a sort of tumor ... swelling the trouser leg which
elsewhere hung in folds.
Karl sat and let the world play and was aware of himself and was
aware sharply that he was at ease as he had never been before. Yet
it was ease, for he knew it so, and somehow he remembered.
A voice very thin, articulate like the faint etch of acid on a copper
plate, from his side:
“I shall call you what you like as we sit here. My name is Peter
Dawes. What shall I call you?”
Karl answered: “I have no name.”
“You call me Dawes, then,” said the bearded tramp, “and I shall call
you Peter.”
Karl-Peter nodded within himself, to himself he nodded.
The tramp went on: “Across the city the sun goes down. It will soon
go down to the Palisades. They are high there, that makes the sun
low. Do you see?” He was looking eastward.
Karl-Peter nodded within himself, to himself he nodded.
“Look at the little park,” said the bearded tramp.
From the park’s straight plane, the sun was away. The hands of the
westward trees were empty. But beyond his shoulder, above the wall
of tenements stood a flame: it leapt into the sky and fell upon
the park. The park was thick now with stillness. It was low and
leaden-green: it was thickly still under the leaping glow of the sun
that was not there.
Within it, moving ... steadfast in Karl’s eyes ... were busy men.
They pressed to and fro, furtive, intent, secret from one another.
The two boys at tether-ball kept exchanging places: the game was
forever the same.
Under Karl’s eyes was the black face of the long-nosed man. All of it
that was not under hair was under grime of coal, save the huge nose
that was white and the eyes that were clean and hard like a clear,
black sky.
He spoke: “My name is Theophilus Larch. Thank you, Theophilus.”
His quick hand delved into the cuff of Theophilus-Karl’s trouser. It
held up the dead cockroach. The long-nosed man had teeth very white;
they closed on the cockroach with a joyous crack.
The little man of the red mouth was in Karl’s eyes.
“My name is Martin Lounton. Call me Lounton, Martin.... And permit
me....”
He seized Martin-Karl’s hand. He smoothed it with feverish fingers.
His lean eyes sought the palm of it and read. He tossed it from him,
and was gone, feverishly peering under bench, in grass, for scraps of
paper.
The black dwarf bowed under Karl’s eyes.
“My name is Cæsar Dott. Call me Dott, Cæsar. And allow me to
congratulate you upon your wedding. Your bride gave me a favor, from
her own hands she gave it. Look, Cæsar....” He raised his trouser leg
and there against the obscene mass of blackish flesh was an iron bar,
toothed and clamped in the flesh.
“It makes my foot go to sleep. I have to wriggle my toes.”...
Karl sat still.
The strong boy and the idiot who played tether-ball for ever, for
ever; the eater of dirt, the dwarf, the picker and reader of scraps
... joined hands. They were unknown to one another. But they knew
Karl. They joined hands. They danced.
A heavy shattering measure. It made the glow of the gone sun tremble,
bounce up, join in. It shook the trees until their branches with
little leaves like bells reached down into the park and the trees
danced also. It broke into the sheerness of the house walls and they
rose stiffly and danced. All danced ... moveless in Karl sitting upon
the bench beside the bearded tramp.
He breathed in measure. A row of houses swung into the park and the
park swung into the river; and the river suddenly straightened up and
thrust like a lance, quivering white, to the sky. The sky came down
in a great gust of wind and lifted the beating feet and garlanded
the trees among the dancing legs of men, and stuck branches into the
windows of the rollicking houses. Karl breathed in measure.
The stillness was very thick like a night without clouds and with
neither moon nor stars.
Now, in the dancing stillness like a single star, a voice:
“Think!”
The tramp was moveless beside him. His voice: “Think! for the time is
not yet.”
The star-voice neared, no longer the moveless tramp’s. It pierced, it
was a shriek.... “Think! Think!”
Karl jumped up from the bench. “Think, think!” he echoed.
He thought. He beat with his thought against the dancing world. He
lunged and thrust: he hewed with his thought and beat. He beat the
sky up. He beat the houses back. He thrust the trees down. The strong
boy and the idiot boy, the eater of dirt, the dwarf, the picker and
reader of scraps he hewed and beat apart from their thick dance. He
trampled with his thought the park into the ground....
Then all was as it should be.... And it was as if he had fallen an
unfathomable distance.
* * * * *
He sat upon his bench under the darkling sky, alone, beside the
bearded man whom he had seen so often.
He turned to him and nodded.
The tramp’s reticent blue eyes nodded and turned away.
“It’s getting late,” said Karl.
He was tingling, as from a mighty fall that had not killed him, that
had made him drunk. It was as if an infinitude of space coursed
through his veins, as he had coursed through an infinitude of space.
He was daring as never before.
“Would you mind,” he turned again, very courteous, very quiet,
towards the tramp, “would you mind, sir, telling me who you are?”
The look of the frail man was steady and far beyond him. His words
came very still, very far away through the straight gold beard.
“You have seen me often,” he said, “and asked me nothing. You have
thought. What did it seem to you, I was?”
Karl was light with the abandon of his infinite flight, sitting so
commonly upon a bench. He was brave and clear, for his mind held one
memory--what this strange man, the first time, had seemed to him to
be. The words came unhindered.
“It seemed,” he stopped ... he began again, “the first time that I
saw you, I said to myself: ‘He looks like a ridiculous Jesus.’”
The bearded man gazed on beyond him. His head moved dreaming. His
hands floated underneath his beard.
“You were right in what you said to yourself,” he spoke. “For I am
John the Baptist.”
[11] Copyright, 1922, by The Dial Publishing Company, Inc.
Copyright, 1922, by Waldo Frank.
MENDEL MARANTZ--
HOUSEWIFE[12]